August 26, 2026 • 39 mins
What would it mean to be a "great ancestor"? Futurist Ari Wallach believes that's the question everyone, including our tech leaders, should be asking right now.
Ari joins Oz to explain why the systems we're building today are laying rails for centuries to come. And he argues that shifting culture through storytelling is the fastest way to shift the systems that govern our lives. He also introduces The Protopias Collection, six graphic novels imagining worlds that are messy and human, but unmistakably better.
Additional Reading:
- Ari Wallach: 3 ways to plan for the (very) long term | TED Talk
- The Protopias Collection: Various: 9781953165787: Amazon.com: Books
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Hey, it's Oz here. Tech Stuff is taking a week off,
but we'll be back on September 3rd with new episodes.
In the meantime, I wanted to share an episode from
earlier this year that had me rethinking how we talk
about our collective future. Hope you enjoy. Welcome to Tech Stuff.
(00:31):
I'm Oz Veloshin. You've probably heard the term dystopia before.
You've seen a dystopian movie or read a dystopian novel.
It's a popular genre. But today's guest, Ari Wallach, would
like to change that. He calls himself a futurist and
social systems strategist. And he believes that at this moment
(00:52):
of technological revolution, we need to be thinking positively about
our future. Here's Ari.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
If Sam was here, Altman or Mark or others, I'd say, look,
what you are building are in many ways the rails
for the next several centuries. What is it that we
want to build towards? And in many ways, at least
in the West, we have lost a vision of what
we want that world to look like.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
This is not Pollyanna-ish or willfully naive, but it is
about opening up a space for conversation about what future
we actually want to live in. And Ari spends his
life encouraging people to interrogate their own visions of the future,
including the tech titans, whose products, like it or not,
we all live on. Ari hosted and produced a docuseries
(01:37):
called A Brief History of the Future for PBS. He
consults for clients, including Volkswagen and the U.S. State Department.
And his latest project is a collection of graphic novels
called The Protopius Collection. Ari, welcome.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
What is a protopia?
Speaker 2 (01:56):
So look, we've been sold a bad bill of goods, right?
On the one side, we have dystopia, which is a
story about collapse. And on the other side, we have
these stories about utopia, which are impossible. And so protopia
is that place about better tomorrows. It's about thinking about
futures that you actually want to live in as opposed
(02:17):
to ones that you want to run from or ones
that you're always worried about collapsing because they're so perfect.
So it's really this idea that We think about tomorrow
not so much as a destination. The future isn't this
noun out there. But protopia is really kind of directional.
It's a verb. It's about making tomorrow just a little
bit better than today. But if you remember seventh or
eighth grade economics, it's about compounding interest. So even 1%,
(02:41):
and that could be from the micro decision layer to
the macro decision layer, 1% every day, a little bit better,
eventually we get into a, gosh, you know, pretty great place.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Do you count with the name Protopias?
Speaker 2 (02:54):
So Protopia was coined by a futurist, Kevin Kelly, who
helped start Wired Magazine.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Kevin Kelly was a true kind of techno-optimist, I think,
but also a very spiritual, religious man.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
I mean, look, the reality is when we think about
technology today, it's this kind of overriding, all-encompassing way that
we think about our reality. But The fact of the
matter is most people are made up of kind of
multiple domains. So there's obviously technology is a mega trend.
I'm a futurist, so I study mega trends, these big
(03:26):
colossal forces that kind of shape how we got to
this point and kind of where we're going over the
next several decades. But technology in and of itself is
probably only about 30 to 40% of kind of who
we are in the world that we live in. We
have psychological, we have sociological, and we have the emotional
and the spiritual way of being. So when Kevin talks
about protopia, I won't speak for how Kevin talks about protopia,
(03:48):
I'll speak for how.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
I think about it.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
There is definitely a spiritual dimension to how we think
about what it is that we want to do with
our time here on earth in terms of making it better,
not just for ourselves, but for the generations to come,
which when you step back has a quasi-spiritual.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Nature to it.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
It doesn't mean you have to believe in a God
or a theological component, but very much it's in the
realm of morals. which we kind of connect to kind
of our spiritual religious side.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yeah, I want to talk more about the Protopius collection itself.
But before we get to that, I mean, you've said
that reading Protopian fiction is more than entertainment. It's a
form of rehearsal. I was pretty interested in that. I mean,
I was an English literature major and Dickens, Charles Dickens,
he said famously, the people must recreate themselves. But it
(04:39):
was a pun. Recreation, recreation. And so talk about recreation, recreation, rehearsal.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
So contrary to my physical stature right now, I was
an athlete in high school and I was a pole vaulter,
which is kind of esoteric. So you know what it is.
So we're the crazy ones who run down a runway,
plant a stick in the ground and throw our, fling
ourselves up into the air. And what my coach had
us do from day one was to visualize what success is,
(05:08):
to kind of create. The muscle memory, before we actually
do it, of what success looks like, in this case,
not landing on your neck, but actually going over the
bar and clearing it. That's the goal of pole vaulting.
More often than not, our media, our narratives, when they
lean into kind of dystopian depictions of tomorrow, are creating...
(05:30):
these horrific collapse narratives. So going back to pole vaulting,
imagine if I sat there and always visualized myself crashing
in the bar. That's more than likely what I would do.
And so what Protopia allows us to do is rehearse
the futures that we want. So in the collection, and
we'll talk about it, we go through multiple worlds that
aren't perfect. There's friction, there's human messiness, there's drama, but
(05:54):
you can see bits of better tomorrows. And we're creating that.
And I always try not to use the M word here,
which is manifesting, because it has kind of Celestine prophecy.
But look, even look at some of the kind of
earlier talks that Steve Jobs gave, especially when he returned
back to Apple. And he talked about not just what
Apple was back in the past and what it was
(06:15):
in the present, but what it would be and what
would it help people do, which is to create better
versions of themselves in the world. So That's great for
Apple on the micro level, and certain technologies are allowed
to do this, but now we need stories that help
us do that both as individuals, as societies, and as
a planetary civilization.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
I think what you're saying is very interesting, and it's
also a little bit more controversial than it sounds, or
at least out of the mainstream, especially in the technology
industry today. There's actually a clip I want to play
of Mark Andreessen talking recently on a podcast. I want
to get your take on it. You don't have any
levels of introspection?
Speaker 3 (06:52):
Yes, zero.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
As little as possible.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Why?
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Move forward.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Go. Yeah, I don't know. I've just found people who
dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's
a real problem, and it's a problem at work, and
it's a problem at home. And you probably know if
you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would
have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like, it's the
whole idea of, I mean, just all of the modern
conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that
kind of result from that are, you know, kind of
manufactured in the 1910s, 1920s.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Curious your take. Not to put you on the spot,
but it's an interesting moment in the technology world where
Mark Anderson, one of the most influential people in the
whole Silicon Valley, deploying the capital which is being used
to build the future, is saying that he aspires to
a zero introspection life.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah. I mean, look, Mark has built many amazing things
and will build many amazing things. I think for me personally,
start there, a life with zero introspection isn't a life
where you actually truly move forward. You may move forward
in a temporal sense that you will, yes, you'll be
there tomorrow. But the question is, how do we become
(07:53):
better people, right? Again, let's go back to pole vaulting,
which I love to do because the last time I
did anything remotely athletic, we would have meets, we'd go
as high as we could and we would tape them.
And we would look at where we had faults and
we would try and get better. We would try to iterate.
We would try to become better vaulters by having a
level of introspection. I think what ends up happening when
(08:16):
you don't have an introspection, especially in the realm of technology,
and we can take social media as an example and
just say, we're just going to move forward. We're not
going to look backwards. You will repeat the same mistakes, right?
So as a futurist, people always think I live somewhere...
In the future, I'm thinking about decades from now. Yes,
that's part of what I do. But a really large part,
(08:36):
I read a lot of history. I see where we've
come from, where we got things right, where we got
things not so right. And you want to learn from that.
The story of Homo sapiens moving forward from coming down
to trees to you and I being able to talk
across technology like this is we were able to have
two things. Introspection. How do we get it better?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
How do we iterate?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
How do we look back on what we got right
and how we got wrong? How do we leave the
wrong things behind and move forward? And what we call prospection,
the ability to think about the future. The one thing
he does get right, though, is that when he's talking
about the 1920s and 30s in that clip, he's talking
about Freud. And a lot of what Freud kind of
thought was our emotions and our anxiety and our depression
(09:20):
is all about the past, about dwelling in the past.
What Mark gets right is that was the fallacy of Freud.
Our emotions, our anxiety and our depression are actually about
the future. We may look back and say, oh, when
I had that breakup or all these terrible things happened,
but emotions, according to most evolutionary biologists that I've studied
or worked with, emotions are really meant to help guide
(09:42):
us into the future, to have prospection, to think about
the tomorrows that we want. So he is right at
that point.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
It's interesting. I mean, I think a lot about as
the host of tech stuff, you know we're living in
this moment where kind of dreams of science and technology
becoming true yeah like you know nuclear fusion maybe around
the corner quantum computing editing the you know the code
of life for better or for worse baby kj you
know healed in the womb from a from a rare
(10:10):
genetic disease before he was born and yet most people
have never been more despairing and as you as you
talk one of the reasons that occurs to me as
to why this may be is because the tech overlords
don't talk in a way that looks beyond the next six, nine,
12 months. The discourse is always, no matter the consequences,
(10:30):
we have to do this now because if we don't,
China will, or if we don't, our competitors will, rather
than what is our place in history and how will
we be read by the future?
Speaker 2 (10:42):
We are as gods now. We should figure out how
to act like it in a very ethical, moral way,
kind of taking some of what Stuart Brand has said.
This moment right now, what I call the intertidal, it's
kind of the in-between, kind of the interregnum. You know,
the old institutions are breaking. They're dying. The ways we
think that have been around with us really since the Enlightenment,
at least in the West, those are no longer working
(11:05):
for the world that we're in. The issue is the
new ones haven't come up. The new rules haven't been
written yet. And if you know the rest of the
Gramsci quote, now is the time of monsters. And I'm
not saying the tech overlords are the monsters, but when
I say monsters, I mean the worst angels of our nature.
It's imperative now that we realize that what we are building,
(11:25):
we can talk about AI, but we can talk about
a whole host of technological platforms and processes, aren't just
about this current moment, but are literally creating path dependencies
for decades, if not centuries, for our species. Yes, there's
a lot. There's almost trillions of dollars now in CapEx
building server farms. And I understand there's a race against
(11:48):
what China is building. But at the end of the day,
we have to think about decades from now, what are
the systems that we want in place that will maximize
human flourishing? That is what I'm focused on. When I
meet with tech leaders, these are the conversations I have.
I said, I say, look, it's important what you are doing.
(12:08):
I understand this is kind of a space race moment,
but at the same time, you have to think about
the guardrails because there are certain things that you're going
to do, like Pandora's box, that once they're out, you
can't bring them back in.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
When you talk about yourself as a futurist, do you
mean like a prognosticator or do you mean like somebody
who Laser marker for what the future could be. It's
more like laying down a challenge almost.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Neither. So here's the thing. Whenever I go to a
dinner party, I always get three questions, especially lately. The
first question is, how bad is it going to get?
The second question is, where should I buy land? Which
is going to do the second one. And the third
one is, what should my kids study in college? Then
I said the next 10, 15 minutes saying, look, there's
two kinds of futurists. A vast majority of them who
(12:54):
are on stage or screen or whatever are predictive.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Here's what's going to happen.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I do not predict. My job is really almost closer
to a storyteller and saying these are different stories of
what might happen. These are what we call scenarios in
the future. These are scenarios. It's not best case. It's
not worst case. It's just likely paths based on things
that are both locked in right now and that are variable.
(13:19):
And then it's my role is to whoever I'm talking
to say of these stories, which one would you like
to see actually happen? And then how do we back
cast and figure out what has to be true to
make that story happen? Now, these stories are not meant
to be, you know, rainbows and unicorns, Pollyannish. It's not like,
oh my God, everything is solved in 10 or 15 years. Again,
(13:39):
I'm a pro-topian futures. I want a better tomorrow. And
my job is to be directional in my counsel and
And in my question, you know, I was raised in
a home where what mattered was the questions that you asked,
not the knowledge that you knew. So that's kind of
a very Talmudic way of thinking about knowledge generation and creation.
(14:02):
So when I go into rooms, whether it's in Washington
or New York or L.A. or Brussels, I'm asking very
difficult questions more than I am making kind of grandiose
statements about tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
What's the hardest question you've asked recently?
Speaker 2 (14:15):
What's the hardest question I've asked? I was speaking to
a room of older folk and I said, 50 years
from now, when either your children or grandchildren or descendants,
if you want to make an assumption that everyone had children,
look back on the decisions that you're making in this room.
And I won't say what the room was. Are they
(14:35):
going to thank you? And are they going to see
you as a neutral passive ancestor or worse, a negative ancestor?
Or are they going to see you as a great ancestor?
That's a very difficult question for folks who are in
a room where they have to kind of make a
Sophie's choice. But that's always the most difficult question. Do
you want to be, you know, an ancestor just because
(14:56):
of lineage? Or do you want to be a great one?
And what does it mean to be a great one?
And there are trade-offs. And the biggest trade-off is short-term
versus long-term. Do you want an easy, quick win right
now So you can get reelected, you can make your
quarterly results, you can get the shiny medal, or do
you want to actually make really difficult decisions that may
not be popular in the short term, but are in
(15:17):
the best interest of those people 50 years from now
looking back?
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Have we lost our ability to do that? And if so, why?
Because I think about that a lot. I think about,
if I look back at the last 100 years of history,
it seemed like there are many points in the 20th
century where it felt like Politicians and societies were aligned
around making decisions for future benefit. It seems like that framework,
(15:41):
at least in Western democracies, does not pertain anymore.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
So look, eradication, well, mostly the eradication of polio, the
Manhattan Project, the Panama Canal, the interstate highway system, all
of these were examples of long-term thinking, really what we
call cathedral thinking. And I visited Icon, which does 3D
printed homes. They can put up a home in like
three weeks, right? So before there was 3D printing of
(16:07):
homes and you wanted to actually build like a cathedral,
like abbeys in England, these projects took 50 to 150,
200 years. Cathedral thinking means you're actually putting down, as
an architect, the cornerstone of a building that you will
not be around to see the roof put on. And
so it's not so much that we have lost that,
it's that it's atrophied. The ability to do that is atrophied,
(16:29):
for examples I already gave. We now have to report quarterly. Look,
I met with a CEO a few years ago, and
I was like, well, look, the real problem is quarterly earnings.
He's like, quarterly earnings? He's like, I'm looking at our
stock price every few hours. And I have members of
the board calling me up, and we have, I have pension...
The crazy thing he told me, he goes, I have
a pension system for teachers. And if I make a
(16:49):
bad decision, they'll call me up. Even though it's teachers
whose job it is to think long-term, train the next education.
But the person overseeing their retirement accounts was telling the CEO,
that's a bad decision. It's going to mess up your
short-term results. So we have that. Then in politics, we
have people who are running for office the day after
they win. It's the external environment more than it is
(17:14):
the individual brain. The hardware system can think long term.
We have that ability. We do that as parents. We
do that as individuals when we think about, I'm going
to get an education. I'm going to get a 30-year mortgage.
What we need to do is rethink those larger systems.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
But you're saying shareholder value, maybe, which arose in the
80s as the kind of the The concept derriere for
corporations versus the health of their employees.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So part of it is rethinking from shareholder to stakeholder.
And my argument is the stakeholders in your decisions are
future unborn generations as much as they are the current shareholders.
That is a collective systems level belief that we have
to shift, which is having been doing this for 20
plus years, there's a lot of different vectors for that.
I have chosen to focus on storytelling, media, and narrative
(18:00):
because culture, at the end of the day, Culture drives
our expectations. Expectations drives our behavior. Behavior drives and change systems.
So with what we're doing now and all the work
that we're doing around Futurific, it's like how do we
shift the culture to shift that external environment that we
(18:21):
need to get back to to be able to do
the kind of thinking that you said and I agree
we were doing decades ago that we no longer really do.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
After the break, what a better tomorrow could actually look like.
Stay with us. How practically did you build your place
(18:59):
of influence? I mean, the brief history of the future
documentary was was incredible, and it was co-produced with Drake
and Cillian Mbappe.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
And Catherine Murdoch, too.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
And Catherine Murdoch, who's your partner on Futurific. I mean,
you mentioned some of these names, like Sam Altman, Elon Musk,
and others. I have a feeling that you do spend
time with some of these people. How have you, I mean,
I guess as a modern philosopher, as it were, how
have you kind of penetrated these worlds and got people
to listen to you? Well, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
It's one thing to hear, it's another thing to listen
and to integrate it. So I can't, I don't know.
I've never done like post-facto interviews and say like, do
you believe this? Or you listen to it? Look, the
way I see it, it's my role to come into
any conversation with two things aligned. My head, so that
(19:45):
means I do the research and I know what they've
been up to and I know what they're thinking. because
I read and I know the state of the art.
And also like your heart has to be into it.
You have to believe it. You have to want a
better tomorrow. And a lot of this came about in
my upbringing. Look, my father was born in the 1920s
(20:06):
lost his entire family in the Holocaust, fought with the
Jewish underground, was a Nazi hunter after the war, was
Antifa before it was a thing. And on the other hand,
my mom was an artist and was a student of
Buckminster Fuller, kind of one of the original architects in
what I would consider pragmatic protopian futurist. And so balancing
those two things, kind of the mental with the emotional spiritual,
(20:29):
and if you can hold that from a place of integrity,
folks are going to want to be with someone who
can speak to them in that way, but not in
a way where they want something out of them. So
in every room that I walk into, I'd like to
think whether or not they listen to me, like I
don't need anything from this room. Like I was an entrepreneur.
I'm not self-made. I can't retire, but I also don't
(20:52):
need more. I just need folks to be able to
listen to to difficult questions, have a dialogue, and think
about where is it that we want to go and
to wrestle at that level. And surprisingly or not, a
lot of folks want to have that conversation, but it's
difficult for them to find folks to have that conversation
with them because most folks want something from them.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
My grandfather was born around 1920 in Western Ukraine and
experienced the horrors of the Second World War and ended
up as a refugee in Britain. I often think about
his story, particularly when I'm feeling you know, overwhelmed or
down or other things, I think, my goodness, like, could
be a lot worse. So I kind of bring his
(21:32):
resilience with me. But I also, frankly, think my, you know,
father had a very traumatic childhood at his hands. And
that was also something I carry with me. For you,
it's not your grandfather, it's your father.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
My father.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
So.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
My father, who passed away when I was younger, because
he was 50 when he had me, was of a
generation where you didn't talk about traumas and difficult things.
You just kind of pushed it down inside. My daddy
smoked cigarettes and ate a lot of ice cream. That's
the way he dealt with it. The reality is we
cannot see ourselves as kind of a singular entity in
(22:08):
the world. We often think of ourselves as from our
birth to our deaths. That's one way. That's the way
we kind of think about it in the West. But really,
we need to see ourselves as part of a much
larger transgenerational chain. We talked about it earlier. I realized
in my 20s that kind of that trauma and the
pain that my dad had that in some ways he
(22:29):
didn't work with, it's on me to also to see that,
work with it, and do my best not to pass
that on to my kids or to the people that
I work with. That's the work. The work isn't just,
you know, woe is me and I'm going to just
throw crap out there it's like whoa i got some
stuff from the past i'm gonna i'm gonna as we
say debug it figure out what's the right code to
(22:52):
move forward this is before clod code right this is
like literally you have to do it on your own
or with a therapist or on a rock somewhere.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
With all due respect to mark anderson yeah you're gonna.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
You're gonna you're gonna you're gonna debug but realize there's
still some good foundational code look we are we are
We are, we're 48 hours from my son's bar mitzvah
on Saturday. And so I've been thinking a lot about
what is it that he's inheriting? And what am I
passing on to him? And what is he going to
carry forward? And, you know, God willing, one day there
(23:22):
are grandkids and great, great grandkids that will look back.
And hopefully, A, I was a great ancestor in the
work that I did from the small things to the
big things. But maybe more importantly, because of some of
the introspection I did and I'm teaching my son how
to do and how to work through those emotions, but
also think cognitively, intellectually, won't pass on the bad code
to those future generations. That's how you become a real futurist.
(23:45):
You don't sit back passively and let the future wash
over you. You actually design it. And you design it
from the micro, from your individual interactions, the kind that
we're having right now, the kind that I'll have with
the receptionist on the way out, to the big rooms
that I'm in, to the situation room, to fancy rooms
and conference rooms, that's how we design it.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah, you were on Andrew Huberman not too long ago,
and one of the things which you obviously focused on
is how do we live a better life collectively and intergenerationally,
but also how do I live a better life myself?
And sometimes those things can be complementary, but they can
also be at odds sometimes.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Right now, we are bombarded by algorithms that want to
not only separate us from each other, but to be honest,
separate us from ourselves. And so... We need to be
able to take the time out and kind of, it's
almost like a dopamine cleanse, right? We need to think,
who am I? Why am I here? And then the
next most powerful question behind that is, who are we
(24:42):
and why are we here? And I don't mean that
in a religious or theological way. I mean that in
terms of a larger mission and a vision for what
this species could be. It could be on other planets. Sure,
I want us to go to Mars and eventually Jupiter
and leave the solar system. But I'm more concerned about
what we are when we do go out there and
how are we better humans? How do we create better selves?
Speaker 1 (25:03):
So it's a good moment, I think, to talk about
the Protopius collection. There are six graphic novels in the collection.
What was the motivating spirit behind this project and what
is it?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
So we realized... Catherine Murdoch and myself, we run Futurific,
which is this kind of all-encompassing protopian studio. So whether
it's in graphic novel or on TV or film, we
want to give people the ability to experience better tomorrows.
Not perfect, but better. And recognizing that better futures are
(25:38):
still going to be messy. There's still going to be tension.
There's still going to be drama. Terrible things are going
to happen. But the worlds can be more protopian.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
They can be better.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
And the behaviors can be more protopian in them as well.
And when we were looking for examples of what we
kind of wanted to see out in the world, we
just kept coming back to really one example, which was
Star Trek. And Star Trek is amazing. It's a multi-billion dollar,
multi-decade franchise. But we can't rest the hopes and dreams
of Homo sapiens on one piece of IP. So we
(26:09):
wanted to create more stories. We didn't necessarily want to
create whole worlds and whole stories. And working with AWA,
which is kind of this amazing graphic novel company who
works with artists and writers and artisans and really kind
of puts great stories out there, we developed six what
we call kind of one-shots. They're short novellas, short graphic novels.
Each one tells a slightly different story with a tension
(26:31):
point about what we're wrestling with tomorrow. The goal in
this collection was to give people a taste of future's
that allow them to kind of see themselves in it
and rehearse it? Going back to pole vaulting, kind of
what does it mean to clear the bar? Now, in
all of these stories, the outcome isn't always perfect. It's
not always amazing. But what we are showing is that
behaviors have consequences regardless of the world that we're in.
(26:54):
Polis takes place in a floating city many decades from now.
And this floating city is amazing. It's kind of, it's
basically like the Star Trek Enterprise, but on the water.
But when people have read it, these are all out
now and they're coming out in a collection, May 26th,
and you can pre-order on Amazon or wherever you want.
People say, wow, you know, I love the floating city.
I love the technology. We have Coral Crete and all
these really cool things. But what they say is what
(27:14):
I really loved was the dynamics of the characters, how
they talk to each other, how they were, that that's
the Protopian component. And we have one on basically universal
basic income, the purpose project, which is, which is you know,
it's like, I love all my children the same, but
the purpose project I love because it really gets to
the core of the conundrum of this moment is when
(27:34):
AI takes over all of our tasks, which it will
take over a lot of our tasks, what's left? It
will never take over purpose, who we are and who
we want to be. This gets at that. And then
one is about kind of empathic AI. Another is about
I don't want to give anything away, but a female
scientist who threw mushrooms, basically, it was able to tap
(27:55):
into other powers. And so what all of them do
is they give examples to two different cohorts, both people
who are just readers, who are consuming them, like, these
are great stories. This is a different way of thinking
about tomorrow. And also to other creatives, because we have
met with dozens of writers in Europe and New York
and Hollywood, They're like, well, I don't understand. Is a
protopia a perfect world?
Speaker 1 (28:17):
I'm like, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
It's just one slightly better where we've been working, and
that almost becomes the background, but the behavior is also protopian.
So the project is allowing people to kind of rehearse
better tomorrows without it being these perfect tomorrows.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Let's talk briefly about the Purpose Project. I know you
don't have any favorite amounts, your children.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
On the cover of this one, there's a graphic with
unemployment rate, you know, 2025, 5%, 2030, 20%. And then
it goes up to close to 100% in 2050, which
is obviously quite a dystopian thought, maybe. Andrew Yang wrote
the foreword, and he's a big proponent of the universal
basic income. He said that, you know, a quote from him,
(29:00):
as someone who's spent years advocating for UBI, I often
encountered the assumption that without traditional work, people would lose
their drive, ambition, and sense of meaning. But I believe
the opposite is true. What do you believe?
Speaker 2 (29:11):
I believe what Andrew believes. I think, look, I've caught
glimpses of this. The glimpse is when I look at
what's happening right now among retired Americans who are deciding,
unlike the generation before them, who just want to move
somewhere warmer and play golf, I'm looking at retired Americans
who are going back to schools to help teach or
to take care of the next generation or getting involved
(29:34):
in climate work or political work, whether it's poll watching
or lobbying, and finding there's something more important than just
the leisure life that gives them a sense of of fulfillment.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
It was they built throughout their lives the ability to
work and be active in the world and now they're
harvesting in their retirement. If you never, never had that experience,
how do you build a muscle? So that is what
we get at in this graphic novel. We show that
there are going to be ways, and this, it's a
little bit, look, this will end up being a TV show.
That's like a workplace comedy, right? Because we came at
(30:06):
this one somewhat through humor. We are going to have
to figure out as a society, how do we find
our purpose in a world where purpose is mostly derived
from the Protestant work ethic? I am based on what
I do and who I am, you know, I was
out the other night here in New York City, and
within 30 seconds at this dinner party, people asked me, well,
what do you do?
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Not like, who are you? How do you find enjoyment?
How do you find purpose? But like, it's definitional. I
don't fault them for that because sometimes I do that.
We are going to have to find a way, Homo sapiens,
to find... how we can contribute to a larger project
of being that isn't totally derived from what we get
(30:47):
into our bank account and our title, CEO, vice president, whatnot.
It sounds impossible, but the one thing that I've learned
as a student of history is humans are unbelievably adaptable,
and we will adapt.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
It's funny, I'm a Brit, I guess. I like to
think of myself as a European, although I guess technically
I'm not anymore. But growing up in England... It was
a sort of taboo to ask somebody, what do you do?
It's a question you can't ask. Rude. And here is
the first question anybody ever asks you. And I have
real ambivalence. There are times when I think, man, I
(31:23):
miss living in England. I miss the fact that you
could have a whole dinner party with 12 strangers and
you would leave at the end of the evening having
no idea what any of them did for work. And
then sometimes I think, well, there's a reason why Europe
is on the floor and.
Maybe, in fact, it's quite healthy to be a bit
more identified with what you do.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
Look, I go to a lot of dinner parties right now,
so I wasn't much of the chagrin of my wife.
I was at another dinner party with an old friend
of mine, Van Jones, who's doing this thing called the
Exodus Project, which is bringing together blacks and Jews to
think about how do we rebuild bridges in this moment.
There's a bunch of us around the table. We went
two and a half hours together. I had no idea
what anyone did. I mean, I knew what Van did
(32:04):
because I see him on TV all the time. But
I knew they were fascinating people and I knew what
drove them. And the first thing that we did when
we went around the table was everyone spend one minute
talking about an ancestor who helped them get to where
they are today. And then we talked about where are
you today? What are you wrestling with? And what is
it that you want for the future? Again, this kind
of past, present, and future. Honoring the past, but then
(32:24):
honoring what does it mean to be an ancestor and
think about the future. And at no time did we
talk about what we actually do. Or the coded question
in New York is where do you live? Because where
you live is kind of a semi kind of like, oh,
do you live there or there? And people kind of
know the rent, so they kind of immediately hierarchize you.
The word I just made up. And so... That is
(32:46):
a place that that kind of humanistic meeting people as humans,
as opposed to a kind of a LinkedIn card, like, well,
can this person help me or not? At that level,
that's a shift that we're going to have to fundamentally
go through. It will be difficult at first, but we
will get there.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
The Protopia collection is available May 26th. But also in
your work with AWA, part of what AWA does is
they make graphic novels that become TV series or films.
In fact, you gave a talk in Hollywood in 2024
to a few hundred creatives about basically encouraging them to
(33:24):
put out fewer dystopian films. Is there an ambition that
some of these stories, when you mentioned workplace comedy, will
end up on screen? What I can say as.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Of today is there's a director already attached to Polis.
There's a showrunner for a feature. The Purpose Project already
has a showrunner attached. And we are in conversations with
all of them, with either actors or showrunners or directors
to do all of them. That A4 mentioned, AWA Films.
actually starts filming for Apple TV, starts shooting in New
(33:56):
York City on Monday. And they brought me on as
a kind of futurist in residence to help them think
about this. But I believe one of the reasons I
was brought into that room was that talk that I
gave that you can see on the Futurific.com website to
kind of not say, don't just do dystopias, because dystopias
are warnings and there's a purpose for them. But to
also think about how do we tell stories about futures
(34:18):
and worlds and behavior's that we want to see manifest.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
In the world.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
And those can make a lot of money. Those can
win a lot of awards. Those can extend onto multiple
platforms and experiences. Look, one of the things that we're
doing at Futurific, and this, I can talk about this
now because there's just an article in Vanity Fair, is
we are going to be doing what's basically a World's
Fair in Basel, Switzerland in 2028. And what's going to
make this very, very different than your traditional World's Fair
(34:43):
with your country pavilions is we are going to have
kind of experiences and zones, if you will, where you
basically get to actually experience tomorrow, you know, the 2030s
and the 2040s. So we want to bring together the
possible multiple futures and visions of tomorrow in Basel, Switzerland.
But we're going to be doing citizen assemblies around the
(35:04):
world and bringing people together to talk about what is
it that you want to see happen in the world. Look,
we don't expect everyone to be an expert on education
or transportation or food or different systems. But we want
people to consider the kind of lived experience that they
want for their ancestors. And then we'll work with the
technologists to figure out what do those flourishing tomorrows look like.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Was your dad still with us when he saw you
become a futurist? Did you talk to him about your work? No.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
My father passed away when I was 18 years old.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
And.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
You know, he was considered this big kind of Holocaust hero, right?
Because he fought back. He's a Nazi hunter after the war.
Right up until he was about to pass away, I
was very focused on going to West Point into the
military academy. Well, because when you live under the shadow
of a certain person, a big character, you want to
follow in their footsteps. And what I realized on his
passing with, you know, some therapy sessions and just kind
(35:53):
of introspection was what my father really would have wanted
was for me to think about not how do you
become reactive in terrible situations, which is usually when you
need the military, but how do I use my education,
the wisdom that I got from my ancestors and in
my schooling and in my work life to think about not,
(36:14):
you know, how do we prevent, or what would I
do in 1940s Europe, but what would I do in
1920s Europe to prevent that? And that's what led me
to be kind of thinking about being a futurist. I
would ask these difficult questions in very interesting rooms to
steer us towards the The angels of our better nature. Look,
we're in this intertidal moment, but for the first time,
(36:36):
I think, in human history, we can actually step back
and say, like, we're in it right now. We're not
historians looking back and saying, well, why didn't they do
things differently? We're in it right now. So... Whether you're
at your kitchen table or in a project room at
an AI company or in the situation room at the iHouse,
your decisions matter, not just for the moment, not just
(36:57):
for the next quarterly return or the next kind of
electoral cycle. But these are actual path dependency rails. Not
that we can't make changes because I believe in agency
and human and social agency, but these are things that
will dictate potentially the next several decades, if not centuries,
of Homo sapiens on and off planet Earth.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Ari Wallach, thank you so much. It's the Protopias Collection.
It's in stores on May 26th, but you can pre-order
it now on Amazon. Congratulations on the project and thank
you for joining us.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Now, a quick break, switching topics to one of our
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(37:55):
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Try the new Vital Proteins Collagen and Protein Shake for yourself.
Thank you again to our sponsor. vital proteins. For Tech Stuff,
I'm Oz Veloshin. This episode was produced by Liza Dennis
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(38:57):
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Please rate, review and reach out to us at techstuffpodcast.gmail.com.
We love hearing from you.
Hey, it's Oz here. Tech Stuff is taking a week off,
but we'll be back on September 3rd with new episodes.
In the meantime, I wanted to share an episode from
earlier this year that had me rethinking how we talk
about our collective future. Hope you enjoy. Welcome to Tech Stuff.
(00:31):
I'm Oz Veloshin. You've probably heard the term dystopia before.
You've seen a dystopian movie or read a dystopian novel.
It's a popular genre. But today's guest, Ari Wallach, would
like to change that. He calls himself a futurist and
social systems strategist. And he believes that at this moment
(00:52):
of technological revolution, we need to be thinking positively about
our future. Here's Ari.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
If Sam was here, Altman or Mark or others, I'd say, look,
what you are building are in many ways the rails
for the next several centuries. What is it that we
want to build towards? And in many ways, at least
in the West, we have lost a vision of what
we want that world to look like.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
This is not Pollyanna-ish or willfully naive, but it is
about opening up a space for conversation about what future
we actually want to live in. And Ari spends his
life encouraging people to interrogate their own visions of the future,
including the tech titans, whose products, like it or not,
we all live on. Ari hosted and produced a docuseries
(01:37):
called A Brief History of the Future for PBS. He
consults for clients, including Volkswagen and the U.S. State Department.
And his latest project is a collection of graphic novels
called The Protopius Collection. Ari, welcome.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
What is a protopia?
Speaker 2 (01:56):
So look, we've been sold a bad bill of goods, right?
On the one side, we have dystopia, which is a
story about collapse. And on the other side, we have
these stories about utopia, which are impossible. And so protopia
is that place about better tomorrows. It's about thinking about
futures that you actually want to live in as opposed
(02:17):
to ones that you want to run from or ones
that you're always worried about collapsing because they're so perfect.
So it's really this idea that We think about tomorrow
not so much as a destination. The future isn't this
noun out there. But protopia is really kind of directional.
It's a verb. It's about making tomorrow just a little
bit better than today. But if you remember seventh or
eighth grade economics, it's about compounding interest. So even 1%,
(02:41):
and that could be from the micro decision layer to
the macro decision layer, 1% every day, a little bit better,
eventually we get into a, gosh, you know, pretty great place.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Do you count with the name Protopias?
Speaker 2 (02:54):
So Protopia was coined by a futurist, Kevin Kelly, who
helped start Wired Magazine.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Kevin Kelly was a true kind of techno-optimist, I think,
but also a very spiritual, religious man.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
I mean, look, the reality is when we think about
technology today, it's this kind of overriding, all-encompassing way that
we think about our reality. But The fact of the
matter is most people are made up of kind of
multiple domains. So there's obviously technology is a mega trend.
I'm a futurist, so I study mega trends, these big
(03:26):
colossal forces that kind of shape how we got to
this point and kind of where we're going over the
next several decades. But technology in and of itself is
probably only about 30 to 40% of kind of who
we are in the world that we live in. We
have psychological, we have sociological, and we have the emotional
and the spiritual way of being. So when Kevin talks
about protopia, I won't speak for how Kevin talks about protopia,
(03:48):
I'll speak for how.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
I think about it.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
There is definitely a spiritual dimension to how we think
about what it is that we want to do with
our time here on earth in terms of making it better,
not just for ourselves, but for the generations to come,
which when you step back has a quasi-spiritual.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Nature to it.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
It doesn't mean you have to believe in a God
or a theological component, but very much it's in the
realm of morals. which we kind of connect to kind
of our spiritual religious side.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yeah, I want to talk more about the Protopius collection itself.
But before we get to that, I mean, you've said
that reading Protopian fiction is more than entertainment. It's a
form of rehearsal. I was pretty interested in that. I mean,
I was an English literature major and Dickens, Charles Dickens,
he said famously, the people must recreate themselves. But it
(04:39):
was a pun. Recreation, recreation. And so talk about recreation, recreation, rehearsal.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
So contrary to my physical stature right now, I was
an athlete in high school and I was a pole vaulter,
which is kind of esoteric. So you know what it is.
So we're the crazy ones who run down a runway,
plant a stick in the ground and throw our, fling
ourselves up into the air. And what my coach had
us do from day one was to visualize what success is,
(05:08):
to kind of create. The muscle memory, before we actually
do it, of what success looks like, in this case,
not landing on your neck, but actually going over the
bar and clearing it. That's the goal of pole vaulting.
More often than not, our media, our narratives, when they
lean into kind of dystopian depictions of tomorrow, are creating...
(05:30):
these horrific collapse narratives. So going back to pole vaulting,
imagine if I sat there and always visualized myself crashing
in the bar. That's more than likely what I would do.
And so what Protopia allows us to do is rehearse
the futures that we want. So in the collection, and
we'll talk about it, we go through multiple worlds that
aren't perfect. There's friction, there's human messiness, there's drama, but
(05:54):
you can see bits of better tomorrows. And we're creating that.
And I always try not to use the M word here,
which is manifesting, because it has kind of Celestine prophecy.
But look, even look at some of the kind of
earlier talks that Steve Jobs gave, especially when he returned
back to Apple. And he talked about not just what
Apple was back in the past and what it was
(06:15):
in the present, but what it would be and what
would it help people do, which is to create better
versions of themselves in the world. So That's great for
Apple on the micro level, and certain technologies are allowed
to do this, but now we need stories that help
us do that both as individuals, as societies, and as
a planetary civilization.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
I think what you're saying is very interesting, and it's
also a little bit more controversial than it sounds, or
at least out of the mainstream, especially in the technology
industry today. There's actually a clip I want to play
of Mark Andreessen talking recently on a podcast. I want
to get your take on it. You don't have any
levels of introspection?
Speaker 3 (06:52):
Yes, zero.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
As little as possible.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Why?
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Move forward.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Go. Yeah, I don't know. I've just found people who
dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's
a real problem, and it's a problem at work, and
it's a problem at home. And you probably know if
you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would
have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like, it's the
whole idea of, I mean, just all of the modern
conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that
kind of result from that are, you know, kind of
manufactured in the 1910s, 1920s.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Curious your take. Not to put you on the spot,
but it's an interesting moment in the technology world where
Mark Anderson, one of the most influential people in the
whole Silicon Valley, deploying the capital which is being used
to build the future, is saying that he aspires to
a zero introspection life.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah. I mean, look, Mark has built many amazing things
and will build many amazing things. I think for me personally,
start there, a life with zero introspection isn't a life
where you actually truly move forward. You may move forward
in a temporal sense that you will, yes, you'll be
there tomorrow. But the question is, how do we become
(07:53):
better people, right? Again, let's go back to pole vaulting,
which I love to do because the last time I
did anything remotely athletic, we would have meets, we'd go
as high as we could and we would tape them.
And we would look at where we had faults and
we would try and get better. We would try to iterate.
We would try to become better vaulters by having a
level of introspection. I think what ends up happening when
(08:16):
you don't have an introspection, especially in the realm of technology,
and we can take social media as an example and
just say, we're just going to move forward. We're not
going to look backwards. You will repeat the same mistakes, right?
So as a futurist, people always think I live somewhere...
In the future, I'm thinking about decades from now. Yes,
that's part of what I do. But a really large part,
(08:36):
I read a lot of history. I see where we've
come from, where we got things right, where we got
things not so right. And you want to learn from that.
The story of Homo sapiens moving forward from coming down
to trees to you and I being able to talk
across technology like this is we were able to have
two things. Introspection. How do we get it better?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
How do we iterate?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
How do we look back on what we got right
and how we got wrong? How do we leave the
wrong things behind and move forward? And what we call prospection,
the ability to think about the future. The one thing
he does get right, though, is that when he's talking
about the 1920s and 30s in that clip, he's talking
about Freud. And a lot of what Freud kind of
thought was our emotions and our anxiety and our depression
(09:20):
is all about the past, about dwelling in the past.
What Mark gets right is that was the fallacy of Freud.
Our emotions, our anxiety and our depression are actually about
the future. We may look back and say, oh, when
I had that breakup or all these terrible things happened,
but emotions, according to most evolutionary biologists that I've studied
or worked with, emotions are really meant to help guide
(09:42):
us into the future, to have prospection, to think about
the tomorrows that we want. So he is right at
that point.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
It's interesting. I mean, I think a lot about as
the host of tech stuff, you know we're living in
this moment where kind of dreams of science and technology
becoming true yeah like you know nuclear fusion maybe around
the corner quantum computing editing the you know the code
of life for better or for worse baby kj you
know healed in the womb from a from a rare
(10:10):
genetic disease before he was born and yet most people
have never been more despairing and as you as you
talk one of the reasons that occurs to me as
to why this may be is because the tech overlords
don't talk in a way that looks beyond the next six, nine,
12 months. The discourse is always, no matter the consequences,
(10:30):
we have to do this now because if we don't,
China will, or if we don't, our competitors will, rather
than what is our place in history and how will
we be read by the future?
Speaker 2 (10:42):
We are as gods now. We should figure out how
to act like it in a very ethical, moral way,
kind of taking some of what Stuart Brand has said.
This moment right now, what I call the intertidal, it's
kind of the in-between, kind of the interregnum. You know,
the old institutions are breaking. They're dying. The ways we
think that have been around with us really since the Enlightenment,
at least in the West, those are no longer working
(11:05):
for the world that we're in. The issue is the
new ones haven't come up. The new rules haven't been
written yet. And if you know the rest of the
Gramsci quote, now is the time of monsters. And I'm
not saying the tech overlords are the monsters, but when
I say monsters, I mean the worst angels of our nature.
It's imperative now that we realize that what we are building,
(11:25):
we can talk about AI, but we can talk about
a whole host of technological platforms and processes, aren't just
about this current moment, but are literally creating path dependencies
for decades, if not centuries, for our species. Yes, there's
a lot. There's almost trillions of dollars now in CapEx
building server farms. And I understand there's a race against
(11:48):
what China is building. But at the end of the day,
we have to think about decades from now, what are
the systems that we want in place that will maximize
human flourishing? That is what I'm focused on. When I
meet with tech leaders, these are the conversations I have.
I said, I say, look, it's important what you are doing.
(12:08):
I understand this is kind of a space race moment,
but at the same time, you have to think about
the guardrails because there are certain things that you're going
to do, like Pandora's box, that once they're out, you
can't bring them back in.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
When you talk about yourself as a futurist, do you
mean like a prognosticator or do you mean like somebody
who Laser marker for what the future could be. It's
more like laying down a challenge almost.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Neither. So here's the thing. Whenever I go to a
dinner party, I always get three questions, especially lately. The
first question is, how bad is it going to get?
The second question is, where should I buy land? Which
is going to do the second one. And the third
one is, what should my kids study in college? Then
I said the next 10, 15 minutes saying, look, there's
two kinds of futurists. A vast majority of them who
(12:54):
are on stage or screen or whatever are predictive.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Here's what's going to happen.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I do not predict. My job is really almost closer
to a storyteller and saying these are different stories of
what might happen. These are what we call scenarios in
the future. These are scenarios. It's not best case. It's
not worst case. It's just likely paths based on things
that are both locked in right now and that are variable.
(13:19):
And then it's my role is to whoever I'm talking
to say of these stories, which one would you like
to see actually happen? And then how do we back
cast and figure out what has to be true to
make that story happen? Now, these stories are not meant
to be, you know, rainbows and unicorns, Pollyannish. It's not like,
oh my God, everything is solved in 10 or 15 years. Again,
(13:39):
I'm a pro-topian futures. I want a better tomorrow. And
my job is to be directional in my counsel and
And in my question, you know, I was raised in
a home where what mattered was the questions that you asked,
not the knowledge that you knew. So that's kind of
a very Talmudic way of thinking about knowledge generation and creation.
(14:02):
So when I go into rooms, whether it's in Washington
or New York or L.A. or Brussels, I'm asking very
difficult questions more than I am making kind of grandiose
statements about tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
What's the hardest question you've asked recently?
Speaker 2 (14:15):
What's the hardest question I've asked? I was speaking to
a room of older folk and I said, 50 years
from now, when either your children or grandchildren or descendants,
if you want to make an assumption that everyone had children,
look back on the decisions that you're making in this room.
And I won't say what the room was. Are they
(14:35):
going to thank you? And are they going to see
you as a neutral passive ancestor or worse, a negative ancestor?
Or are they going to see you as a great ancestor?
That's a very difficult question for folks who are in
a room where they have to kind of make a
Sophie's choice. But that's always the most difficult question. Do
you want to be, you know, an ancestor just because
(14:56):
of lineage? Or do you want to be a great one?
And what does it mean to be a great one?
And there are trade-offs. And the biggest trade-off is short-term
versus long-term. Do you want an easy, quick win right
now So you can get reelected, you can make your
quarterly results, you can get the shiny medal, or do
you want to actually make really difficult decisions that may
not be popular in the short term, but are in
(15:17):
the best interest of those people 50 years from now
looking back?
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Have we lost our ability to do that? And if so, why?
Because I think about that a lot. I think about,
if I look back at the last 100 years of history,
it seemed like there are many points in the 20th
century where it felt like Politicians and societies were aligned
around making decisions for future benefit. It seems like that framework,
(15:41):
at least in Western democracies, does not pertain anymore.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
So look, eradication, well, mostly the eradication of polio, the
Manhattan Project, the Panama Canal, the interstate highway system, all
of these were examples of long-term thinking, really what we
call cathedral thinking. And I visited Icon, which does 3D
printed homes. They can put up a home in like
three weeks, right? So before there was 3D printing of
(16:07):
homes and you wanted to actually build like a cathedral,
like abbeys in England, these projects took 50 to 150,
200 years. Cathedral thinking means you're actually putting down, as
an architect, the cornerstone of a building that you will
not be around to see the roof put on. And
so it's not so much that we have lost that,
it's that it's atrophied. The ability to do that is atrophied,
(16:29):
for examples I already gave. We now have to report quarterly. Look,
I met with a CEO a few years ago, and
I was like, well, look, the real problem is quarterly earnings.
He's like, quarterly earnings? He's like, I'm looking at our
stock price every few hours. And I have members of
the board calling me up, and we have, I have pension...
The crazy thing he told me, he goes, I have
a pension system for teachers. And if I make a
(16:49):
bad decision, they'll call me up. Even though it's teachers
whose job it is to think long-term, train the next education.
But the person overseeing their retirement accounts was telling the CEO,
that's a bad decision. It's going to mess up your
short-term results. So we have that. Then in politics, we
have people who are running for office the day after
they win. It's the external environment more than it is
(17:14):
the individual brain. The hardware system can think long term.
We have that ability. We do that as parents. We
do that as individuals when we think about, I'm going
to get an education. I'm going to get a 30-year mortgage.
What we need to do is rethink those larger systems.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
But you're saying shareholder value, maybe, which arose in the
80s as the kind of the The concept derriere for
corporations versus the health of their employees.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So part of it is rethinking from shareholder to stakeholder.
And my argument is the stakeholders in your decisions are
future unborn generations as much as they are the current shareholders.
That is a collective systems level belief that we have
to shift, which is having been doing this for 20
plus years, there's a lot of different vectors for that.
I have chosen to focus on storytelling, media, and narrative
(18:00):
because culture, at the end of the day, Culture drives
our expectations. Expectations drives our behavior. Behavior drives and change systems.
So with what we're doing now and all the work
that we're doing around Futurific, it's like how do we
shift the culture to shift that external environment that we
(18:21):
need to get back to to be able to do
the kind of thinking that you said and I agree
we were doing decades ago that we no longer really do.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
After the break, what a better tomorrow could actually look like.
Stay with us. How practically did you build your place
(18:59):
of influence? I mean, the brief history of the future
documentary was was incredible, and it was co-produced with Drake
and Cillian Mbappe.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
And Catherine Murdoch, too.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
And Catherine Murdoch, who's your partner on Futurific. I mean,
you mentioned some of these names, like Sam Altman, Elon Musk,
and others. I have a feeling that you do spend
time with some of these people. How have you, I mean,
I guess as a modern philosopher, as it were, how
have you kind of penetrated these worlds and got people
to listen to you? Well, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
It's one thing to hear, it's another thing to listen
and to integrate it. So I can't, I don't know.
I've never done like post-facto interviews and say like, do
you believe this? Or you listen to it? Look, the
way I see it, it's my role to come into
any conversation with two things aligned. My head, so that
(19:45):
means I do the research and I know what they've
been up to and I know what they're thinking. because
I read and I know the state of the art.
And also like your heart has to be into it.
You have to believe it. You have to want a
better tomorrow. And a lot of this came about in
my upbringing. Look, my father was born in the 1920s
(20:06):
lost his entire family in the Holocaust, fought with the
Jewish underground, was a Nazi hunter after the war, was
Antifa before it was a thing. And on the other hand,
my mom was an artist and was a student of
Buckminster Fuller, kind of one of the original architects in
what I would consider pragmatic protopian futurist. And so balancing
those two things, kind of the mental with the emotional spiritual,
(20:29):
and if you can hold that from a place of integrity,
folks are going to want to be with someone who
can speak to them in that way, but not in
a way where they want something out of them. So
in every room that I walk into, I'd like to
think whether or not they listen to me, like I
don't need anything from this room. Like I was an entrepreneur.
I'm not self-made. I can't retire, but I also don't
(20:52):
need more. I just need folks to be able to
listen to to difficult questions, have a dialogue, and think
about where is it that we want to go and
to wrestle at that level. And surprisingly or not, a
lot of folks want to have that conversation, but it's
difficult for them to find folks to have that conversation
with them because most folks want something from them.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
My grandfather was born around 1920 in Western Ukraine and
experienced the horrors of the Second World War and ended
up as a refugee in Britain. I often think about
his story, particularly when I'm feeling you know, overwhelmed or
down or other things, I think, my goodness, like, could
be a lot worse. So I kind of bring his
(21:32):
resilience with me. But I also, frankly, think my, you know,
father had a very traumatic childhood at his hands. And
that was also something I carry with me. For you,
it's not your grandfather, it's your father.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
My father.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
So.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
My father, who passed away when I was younger, because
he was 50 when he had me, was of a
generation where you didn't talk about traumas and difficult things.
You just kind of pushed it down inside. My daddy
smoked cigarettes and ate a lot of ice cream. That's
the way he dealt with it. The reality is we
cannot see ourselves as kind of a singular entity in
(22:08):
the world. We often think of ourselves as from our
birth to our deaths. That's one way. That's the way
we kind of think about it in the West. But really,
we need to see ourselves as part of a much
larger transgenerational chain. We talked about it earlier. I realized
in my 20s that kind of that trauma and the
pain that my dad had that in some ways he
(22:29):
didn't work with, it's on me to also to see that,
work with it, and do my best not to pass
that on to my kids or to the people that
I work with. That's the work. The work isn't just,
you know, woe is me and I'm going to just
throw crap out there it's like whoa i got some
stuff from the past i'm gonna i'm gonna as we
say debug it figure out what's the right code to
(22:52):
move forward this is before clod code right this is
like literally you have to do it on your own
or with a therapist or on a rock somewhere.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
With all due respect to mark anderson yeah you're gonna.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
You're gonna you're gonna you're gonna debug but realize there's
still some good foundational code look we are we are
We are, we're 48 hours from my son's bar mitzvah
on Saturday. And so I've been thinking a lot about
what is it that he's inheriting? And what am I
passing on to him? And what is he going to
carry forward? And, you know, God willing, one day there
(23:22):
are grandkids and great, great grandkids that will look back.
And hopefully, A, I was a great ancestor in the
work that I did from the small things to the
big things. But maybe more importantly, because of some of
the introspection I did and I'm teaching my son how
to do and how to work through those emotions, but
also think cognitively, intellectually, won't pass on the bad code
to those future generations. That's how you become a real futurist.
(23:45):
You don't sit back passively and let the future wash
over you. You actually design it. And you design it
from the micro, from your individual interactions, the kind that
we're having right now, the kind that I'll have with
the receptionist on the way out, to the big rooms
that I'm in, to the situation room, to fancy rooms
and conference rooms, that's how we design it.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah, you were on Andrew Huberman not too long ago,
and one of the things which you obviously focused on
is how do we live a better life collectively and intergenerationally,
but also how do I live a better life myself?
And sometimes those things can be complementary, but they can
also be at odds sometimes.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Right now, we are bombarded by algorithms that want to
not only separate us from each other, but to be honest,
separate us from ourselves. And so... We need to be
able to take the time out and kind of, it's
almost like a dopamine cleanse, right? We need to think,
who am I? Why am I here? And then the
next most powerful question behind that is, who are we
(24:42):
and why are we here? And I don't mean that
in a religious or theological way. I mean that in
terms of a larger mission and a vision for what
this species could be. It could be on other planets. Sure,
I want us to go to Mars and eventually Jupiter
and leave the solar system. But I'm more concerned about
what we are when we do go out there and
how are we better humans? How do we create better selves?
Speaker 1 (25:03):
So it's a good moment, I think, to talk about
the Protopius collection. There are six graphic novels in the collection.
What was the motivating spirit behind this project and what
is it?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
So we realized... Catherine Murdoch and myself, we run Futurific,
which is this kind of all-encompassing protopian studio. So whether
it's in graphic novel or on TV or film, we
want to give people the ability to experience better tomorrows.
Not perfect, but better. And recognizing that better futures are
(25:38):
still going to be messy. There's still going to be tension.
There's still going to be drama. Terrible things are going
to happen. But the worlds can be more protopian.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
They can be better.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
And the behaviors can be more protopian in them as well.
And when we were looking for examples of what we
kind of wanted to see out in the world, we
just kept coming back to really one example, which was
Star Trek. And Star Trek is amazing. It's a multi-billion dollar,
multi-decade franchise. But we can't rest the hopes and dreams
of Homo sapiens on one piece of IP. So we
(26:09):
wanted to create more stories. We didn't necessarily want to
create whole worlds and whole stories. And working with AWA,
which is kind of this amazing graphic novel company who
works with artists and writers and artisans and really kind
of puts great stories out there, we developed six what
we call kind of one-shots. They're short novellas, short graphic novels.
Each one tells a slightly different story with a tension
(26:31):
point about what we're wrestling with tomorrow. The goal in
this collection was to give people a taste of future's
that allow them to kind of see themselves in it
and rehearse it? Going back to pole vaulting, kind of
what does it mean to clear the bar? Now, in
all of these stories, the outcome isn't always perfect. It's
not always amazing. But what we are showing is that
behaviors have consequences regardless of the world that we're in.
(26:54):
Polis takes place in a floating city many decades from now.
And this floating city is amazing. It's kind of, it's
basically like the Star Trek Enterprise, but on the water.
But when people have read it, these are all out
now and they're coming out in a collection, May 26th,
and you can pre-order on Amazon or wherever you want.
People say, wow, you know, I love the floating city.
I love the technology. We have Coral Crete and all
these really cool things. But what they say is what
(27:14):
I really loved was the dynamics of the characters, how
they talk to each other, how they were, that that's
the Protopian component. And we have one on basically universal
basic income, the purpose project, which is, which is you know,
it's like, I love all my children the same, but
the purpose project I love because it really gets to
the core of the conundrum of this moment is when
(27:34):
AI takes over all of our tasks, which it will
take over a lot of our tasks, what's left? It
will never take over purpose, who we are and who
we want to be. This gets at that. And then
one is about kind of empathic AI. Another is about
I don't want to give anything away, but a female
scientist who threw mushrooms, basically, it was able to tap
(27:55):
into other powers. And so what all of them do
is they give examples to two different cohorts, both people
who are just readers, who are consuming them, like, these
are great stories. This is a different way of thinking
about tomorrow. And also to other creatives, because we have
met with dozens of writers in Europe and New York
and Hollywood, They're like, well, I don't understand. Is a
protopia a perfect world?
Speaker 1 (28:17):
I'm like, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
It's just one slightly better where we've been working, and
that almost becomes the background, but the behavior is also protopian.
So the project is allowing people to kind of rehearse
better tomorrows without it being these perfect tomorrows.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Let's talk briefly about the Purpose Project. I know you
don't have any favorite amounts, your children.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
On the cover of this one, there's a graphic with
unemployment rate, you know, 2025, 5%, 2030, 20%. And then
it goes up to close to 100% in 2050, which
is obviously quite a dystopian thought, maybe. Andrew Yang wrote
the foreword, and he's a big proponent of the universal
basic income. He said that, you know, a quote from him,
(29:00):
as someone who's spent years advocating for UBI, I often
encountered the assumption that without traditional work, people would lose
their drive, ambition, and sense of meaning. But I believe
the opposite is true. What do you believe?
Speaker 2 (29:11):
I believe what Andrew believes. I think, look, I've caught
glimpses of this. The glimpse is when I look at
what's happening right now among retired Americans who are deciding,
unlike the generation before them, who just want to move
somewhere warmer and play golf, I'm looking at retired Americans
who are going back to schools to help teach or
to take care of the next generation or getting involved
(29:34):
in climate work or political work, whether it's poll watching
or lobbying, and finding there's something more important than just
the leisure life that gives them a sense of of fulfillment.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
It was they built throughout their lives the ability to
work and be active in the world and now they're
harvesting in their retirement. If you never, never had that experience,
how do you build a muscle? So that is what
we get at in this graphic novel. We show that
there are going to be ways, and this, it's a
little bit, look, this will end up being a TV show.
That's like a workplace comedy, right? Because we came at
(30:06):
this one somewhat through humor. We are going to have
to figure out as a society, how do we find
our purpose in a world where purpose is mostly derived
from the Protestant work ethic? I am based on what
I do and who I am, you know, I was
out the other night here in New York City, and
within 30 seconds at this dinner party, people asked me, well,
what do you do?
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Not like, who are you? How do you find enjoyment?
How do you find purpose? But like, it's definitional. I
don't fault them for that because sometimes I do that.
We are going to have to find a way, Homo sapiens,
to find... how we can contribute to a larger project
of being that isn't totally derived from what we get
(30:47):
into our bank account and our title, CEO, vice president, whatnot.
It sounds impossible, but the one thing that I've learned
as a student of history is humans are unbelievably adaptable,
and we will adapt.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
It's funny, I'm a Brit, I guess. I like to
think of myself as a European, although I guess technically
I'm not anymore. But growing up in England... It was
a sort of taboo to ask somebody, what do you do?
It's a question you can't ask. Rude. And here is
the first question anybody ever asks you. And I have
real ambivalence. There are times when I think, man, I
(31:23):
miss living in England. I miss the fact that you
could have a whole dinner party with 12 strangers and
you would leave at the end of the evening having
no idea what any of them did for work. And
then sometimes I think, well, there's a reason why Europe
is on the floor and.
Maybe, in fact, it's quite healthy to be a bit
more identified with what you do.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
Look, I go to a lot of dinner parties right now,
so I wasn't much of the chagrin of my wife.
I was at another dinner party with an old friend
of mine, Van Jones, who's doing this thing called the
Exodus Project, which is bringing together blacks and Jews to
think about how do we rebuild bridges in this moment.
There's a bunch of us around the table. We went
two and a half hours together. I had no idea
what anyone did. I mean, I knew what Van did
(32:04):
because I see him on TV all the time. But
I knew they were fascinating people and I knew what
drove them. And the first thing that we did when
we went around the table was everyone spend one minute
talking about an ancestor who helped them get to where
they are today. And then we talked about where are
you today? What are you wrestling with? And what is
it that you want for the future? Again, this kind
of past, present, and future. Honoring the past, but then
(32:24):
honoring what does it mean to be an ancestor and
think about the future. And at no time did we
talk about what we actually do. Or the coded question
in New York is where do you live? Because where
you live is kind of a semi kind of like, oh,
do you live there or there? And people kind of
know the rent, so they kind of immediately hierarchize you.
The word I just made up. And so... That is
(32:46):
a place that that kind of humanistic meeting people as humans,
as opposed to a kind of a LinkedIn card, like, well,
can this person help me or not? At that level,
that's a shift that we're going to have to fundamentally
go through. It will be difficult at first, but we
will get there.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
The Protopia collection is available May 26th. But also in
your work with AWA, part of what AWA does is
they make graphic novels that become TV series or films.
In fact, you gave a talk in Hollywood in 2024
to a few hundred creatives about basically encouraging them to
(33:24):
put out fewer dystopian films. Is there an ambition that
some of these stories, when you mentioned workplace comedy, will
end up on screen? What I can say as.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Of today is there's a director already attached to Polis.
There's a showrunner for a feature. The Purpose Project already
has a showrunner attached. And we are in conversations with
all of them, with either actors or showrunners or directors
to do all of them. That A4 mentioned, AWA Films.
actually starts filming for Apple TV, starts shooting in New
(33:56):
York City on Monday. And they brought me on as
a kind of futurist in residence to help them think
about this. But I believe one of the reasons I
was brought into that room was that talk that I
gave that you can see on the Futurific.com website to
kind of not say, don't just do dystopias, because dystopias
are warnings and there's a purpose for them. But to
also think about how do we tell stories about futures
(34:18):
and worlds and behavior's that we want to see manifest.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
In the world.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
And those can make a lot of money. Those can
win a lot of awards. Those can extend onto multiple
platforms and experiences. Look, one of the things that we're
doing at Futurific, and this, I can talk about this
now because there's just an article in Vanity Fair, is
we are going to be doing what's basically a World's
Fair in Basel, Switzerland in 2028. And what's going to
make this very, very different than your traditional World's Fair
(34:43):
with your country pavilions is we are going to have
kind of experiences and zones, if you will, where you
basically get to actually experience tomorrow, you know, the 2030s
and the 2040s. So we want to bring together the
possible multiple futures and visions of tomorrow in Basel, Switzerland.
But we're going to be doing citizen assemblies around the
(35:04):
world and bringing people together to talk about what is
it that you want to see happen in the world. Look,
we don't expect everyone to be an expert on education
or transportation or food or different systems. But we want
people to consider the kind of lived experience that they
want for their ancestors. And then we'll work with the
technologists to figure out what do those flourishing tomorrows look like.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Was your dad still with us when he saw you
become a futurist? Did you talk to him about your work? No.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
My father passed away when I was 18 years old.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
And.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
You know, he was considered this big kind of Holocaust hero, right?
Because he fought back. He's a Nazi hunter after the war.
Right up until he was about to pass away, I
was very focused on going to West Point into the
military academy. Well, because when you live under the shadow
of a certain person, a big character, you want to
follow in their footsteps. And what I realized on his
passing with, you know, some therapy sessions and just kind
(35:53):
of introspection was what my father really would have wanted
was for me to think about not how do you
become reactive in terrible situations, which is usually when you
need the military, but how do I use my education,
the wisdom that I got from my ancestors and in
my schooling and in my work life to think about not,
(36:14):
you know, how do we prevent, or what would I
do in 1940s Europe, but what would I do in
1920s Europe to prevent that? And that's what led me
to be kind of thinking about being a futurist. I
would ask these difficult questions in very interesting rooms to
steer us towards the The angels of our better nature. Look,
we're in this intertidal moment, but for the first time,
(36:36):
I think, in human history, we can actually step back
and say, like, we're in it right now. We're not
historians looking back and saying, well, why didn't they do
things differently? We're in it right now. So... Whether you're
at your kitchen table or in a project room at
an AI company or in the situation room at the iHouse,
your decisions matter, not just for the moment, not just
(36:57):
for the next quarterly return or the next kind of
electoral cycle. But these are actual path dependency rails. Not
that we can't make changes because I believe in agency
and human and social agency, but these are things that
will dictate potentially the next several decades, if not centuries,
of Homo sapiens on and off planet Earth.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Ari Wallach, thank you so much. It's the Protopias Collection.
It's in stores on May 26th, but you can pre-order
it now on Amazon. Congratulations on the project and thank
you for joining us.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
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I'm Oz Veloshin. This episode was produced by Liza Dennis
and Tyler Hill. It was executive produced by me and
(38:57):
Julian Nutter for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts.
Jack Inslee mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our
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