May 6, 2026 • 43 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 change 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.
Also on the show: Alex Thier, the CEO of Lapis, discusses Lalah, an AI-powered chatbot built to help Afghan students learn beyond the classroom, a place girls can’t access past the sixth grade.
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 (00:15):
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Oz Valoschin. 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 Wallock, would like to change that. He calls himself
a futurist and social systems strategist, and he believes that
(00:36):
at this moment of technological revolution, we need to be
thinking positively about our future.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
His Ari, if Sam was here, Altman or Mark or
other like to 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 (01:00):
This is not pollyannerish or wilfully 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'll live on. Ari hosted and produced a docu series
(01:23):
called A Brief History of the Future for PBS He
consults for clients including Volkswagen and the US State Department,
and his latest project is a collection of graphic novels
called The Protopia's Collection. Ari welcome, thanks for having me.
What is a protopia?
Speaker 2 (01:41):
So, look, we've been sold a bad bill of goods, right.
We have 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 is that placed about better tomorrows.
It's about thinking about future that you actually want to
live in, as opposed to ones that you want to
(02:03):
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 interests,
(02:24):
so even one percent, and that could be from the
micro decision layer to the macro decision layer, one percent
every day a little bit better eventually we're getting into
a gosh, you know, pretty great place.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Do you count with the name protopias?
Speaker 2 (02:39):
So Protopia was coined by a features Kevin Kelly, who
helps start Wired magazine.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Kevin Kelly was a true kind of techno optimist I think, yeah,
but also very spiritual religious man.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yes, I mean, look, the reality is when we think
about technology today, it's just kind of overriding all encompassing
way that we think about a reality. But the fact
of 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
(03:11):
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 thirty to forty percent 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
(03:33):
about protobia. I'll speak for how I think about it.
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 nature
to it. Doesn't mean you to believe in a God
or a theological component, but very much it's in the
(03:56):
realm of morals, which we kind of connect to kind
of our spiritual or religious side.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah, I want to talk more about the protopious 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 in English literature major and Dickens, Charles
Dickens was was He said famously that people must recreate themselves,
(04:24):
but it was a pun or recreation recreatation. Yeah, And
to talk about recreation, recreation, rehearsal.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
So contrary to my physical stature right now, I was
an athlete in high school and I was a pole vaulter,
which is what kind of esoteria. And also 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 filling ourselves up into the air. And what
my coach had us do from day one was to
visualize what success is, to kind of create the muscle
(04:55):
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 these horrific collapse narratives. So in going back
(05:18):
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 you can see bits of better tomorrows
(05:42):
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 us actually going to returned back to Apple, and
he talked about not just what Apple was back in
the past and what it was in the present, but
what it would be and what would it help people do,
(06:04):
which is to create better versions of themselves in the world.
So that's great for Apple on the micro level and
certain technologies allowed to do this, but now we need
stories that help us do that, both for as individuals,
as societies, and as a planetary civilization.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
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. That's your clip I want to play of
Mark Andrison talking recently on a podcast. I won't get
your take on you don't have any levels of introspection? Yes, zero,
as little as possible? Why move forward?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Go?
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
I've just have fund people who dwell in the past
get stuck in the past. It's just it's a real problem.
And so it's a problem at work and it's a
problem at home. And you probably not if you go
back be four hundred years ago. It never it never
would have hurd anybody to be introspective. Like it's the
whole idea of I mean, just that all of the
modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things
that kind of result from that are you know, kind
of a manufactory of nineteen ten, nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
I'm curious you'll take here. Not to put you on
the spot, but yeah, it's an interesting moment in the
technology world where you know, Mark Anderson, one of the
most influential people in the whole Slicon Valley deploying the
capital which is being used to build the future, is
saying that he aspies to a zero introspection life. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
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
better people? Right again, Let's go back to pole vaulting,
(07:41):
which I love to do because the last time I
did anything remotely athletic. We would have meats, we'd go
as high as we could and the 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 you don't have an introspection, especially in the
(08:03):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
So, as a future, as 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.
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
(08:34):
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? How
do we iterate? How do we look back on what
we got right? And how we got wrong and 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,
(08:55):
is that when you're talking about the nineteen twenties and
thirties in that clip, he's talking about Freud, and a
lot of what Freud kind of thought was our emotions
are and our anxiety and our depression is all about
the past without drawing in the past. What Market's right
is that was that the fallacy of Freud. Our emotions,
our anxiety, and our depression are actually about the future.
(09:16):
We may look back and say, oh, when I had
that breakup or all these terrible things happen, but emotions,
according to most evolutionary biologists that I've studied or worked with,
emotions are are really meant to help guide us into
the future, to have prospection, to think about the tomorrows
that we want. So year is right at that point.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
It's interesting and I think a lot about as the
host of tech stuff. You know, we're living in this
moment where kind of the dreams of science and technology
becoming true, right like you know, nuclear fusion, maybe around
the corner, quantum computing editing that you know, the code
of life for better or for was baby kJ healed
in the womb from a regenetic disease before he was born.
(09:57):
And yet most people have never been more despairing. And
as you talk, one of the reasons that occurs to
me is why this may be is because the tech
overlords don't talk in a way that looks beyond the
next six, nine, twelve months. Right the discourse is always,
no matter the consequences, we have to do this now,
(10:17):
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 we be read by.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
The future, 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 Steward Brand
has said. This moment right now, what I call the
intertitle is 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
(10:49):
no longer working for the world that we're in. The
issue is the new ones haven't come up. The new
rules haven't been written, and if you know the rest
of the gram she quote, now is the time of monsters.
And I'm not saying the tech over lords 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. We can talk about AI, but
(11:12):
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 what China is building. But at
(11:35):
the end of the day, it's 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 with tech leaders.
These are the conversations I have. I said, I say, look,
it's important what you are doing. I understand this is
kind of a space race moment. But at the same time,
(11:57):
you have to think about the guardrails because there are
certain things you're going to do, like Pandora's box that
once once they're out, you can't bring them back in.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
When you talk about yourself as a futurist, do you
mean like a prognosticator or do you mean like somebody
who lays a mark of for what the future could be.
It's more like laying down a challenge. Almost uh, neither.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
So here's the things when I whenever I go to
a gener party, I always get three questions, especially lately.
The first question is how bad is it going to get?
H 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 ten to fifteen minutes saying, look,
there's two kinds of futurists. A vast majority of them
(12:39):
who are like on stage or screen or whatever, are
gonna are predictive. Here's what's gonna happen. 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 in trade,
these are scenarios. It's not best case it's not worst case,
(12:59):
it's just likely has based on things that are both
locked in right now and that are variable. And then
it's my role is to whoever I'm talking to you say,
of these stories, which one would you like to see
actually happen? And then how do we backcast and figure
out what has to be true to make that story happen. Now,
these stories are not meant to be, you know, rainbows
(13:20):
and unicorns, Pollyannis. It's not like, oh my god, everything
is solved in ten or fifteen years. Again, I'm a
pro toopian futures. I want a better tomorrow, and my
job is to be directional in my council and in
my questions. You know, I was raised in a home
where what mattered was the questions that you asked, not
(13:40):
the knowledge that you knew. So that's kind of a
very Talmudic way of thinking about knowledge generation and creation.
So when I go into rooms, whether it's in Washington
or New York, or la or Brussels, I'm asking very
difficult questions more than I am making kind of grandiose
statements about tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
What's the hardest question of us recently, it's.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
The hardest question I've asked fifty I was speaking to
a room of older folk, and I said, fifty years
from now, when either your children or grandchildren or descendants,
they 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
(14:21):
going to thank you? And are they going to see
you as a neutral passive ancestor or worse, a negative ancestor,
or a 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
(14:41):
of lineage, or do you want to be a great one?
And what does it mean to be a great one?
And they are trade offs, and the biggest trade off
is short term verse long term. Do you want an easy,
quick win right now so you can get re elected,
you can make your quarterly results, you can get the
shiny metal, or do you want to actually make really
difficult decisions that make may not be popular in the
short term, but are in the best interest of those
(15:04):
people fifty years from now looking back.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Have we lost our ability to do that? And if so,
wid like because I think about that a lot. I
think about if I look back at the last one
hundred years of history, it seemed like there are many
points in the twentieth century where it felt like politicians
and societies were aligned around making decisions for future benefit.
It seems like that framework, at least in Western democracies,
(15:29):
does not pertain anymore.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
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 you know, I visited icon
which does three D printed homes. They can put up
a home in like three weeks, right, so before there
(15:51):
are three D printing of homes and you want to
actually build like a cathedral like Abbey's in England, these
projects took fifty to one hundred and fifty two hundred years.
And 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 actor feed, the ability to do that as actor feed.
(16:14):
For for example, Dearita Gabe, we now have to report quarterly.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Look.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
I met with the CEO a few years ago and
I was like, well, look, the real problem is quarterly earning.
He's like quarterly earning. He's like, I'm looking at our
stock price every few hours, and I have members of
the board calling me up. And I have pension. Crazy
thing he told me. He goes, I have a pension
system for teachers, and if I make a bad decision,
they'll call me up. Even though it's teachers whose job
(16:39):
it is is to think long term chain 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, and then in
politics we have people who are running for office a
day after they win. It's it's the external environment more
than it is the the individual brain. The hardware system
(17:02):
can think long term. We have that ability. We do
that as parents, we do that as individuals. When we
think about I'm gonna get an education, I'm going to
thirty year mortgage. What we need to do is rethink
those larger systems.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
But you're saying the value maybe the which arose in
the eighties is the kind of the concept derrigoph for
corporation the health of their So part of.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
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 I havingt been doing this for twenty plus years,
there's a lot of different vectors for that. I have
chosen to focus on storytelling, media and narrative because culture,
(17:47):
at the end of the day, culture drives our expectations,
expectations drives our behavior, behavior drives and change systems. So
with what the 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 need to get back to to be able
(18:08):
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 (18:20):
After the break, what a better tomorrow could actually look
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The link is in the podcast episode description box. How
(19:49):
practically did you build your place of influence? I mean,
the brief issue of the Future documentary was incredible and
it was co produced with Drake and Killian Emba and
Katherin Murdoch too and Katri Murder. Because you a partner
on Futurific, I mean you mentioned some of these names
like Samuel Manino Moscanadas. I have a feeling that you
do spend time with some of these people. How have
(20:10):
you as a as a I mean I guess as
a modern philosopher as it were, how have you kind
of penetrated these worlds and god people to listen to you?
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Well, I don't know. It's one thing to hear, it's
that I think to listen and to integrate it, so
I can't.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
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 means I do the research and I and I
and I know what they've been up to. And I
know what they're thinking because I read and I know
(20:44):
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 nineteen twenties, lost his entire family
in the Holocaust, fought with the Jewish underground, was a
Nazi hunter after the war, was antifab before it was
(21:06):
a thing. And on the other hand, my mom was
an artist and was a Steven of Buckminster Fuller, kind
of one of the original architects, and what I would
consider pragmatic protopian futurists. And so balancing those two things,
kind of the mental with the emotional spiritual, and if
you can hold that from a place of integrity, folks
are gonna want to be with someone who can speak
(21:28):
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
need more. I just need folks to be able to
listen to difficult questions, have a dialogue and think about
(21:52):
where's 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 they it's difficult
for them to find folks to have that conversation with them,
because most folks want something from them.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
My grandfather was born in around nineteen twenty in western
Ukraine and so experienced the horrors of the Second World
War and ended up as a refugee in Britain, and
I often think about his story, particularly when I'm feeling
overwhelmed or down or other other things. I think my
goodness could be a lot worse. So I kind of
bring his brasilience with me. But I also frankly think
(22:29):
my father had a very traumatic childhood at his hands,
and that was also something to carry with me. For you,
it's not your grandfather's your father my father.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
So my father passed away when I was younger, because
he was fifty 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
(23:01):
the world like we often think of ourselves as from
you know, from our birth to our deaths. That's one way.
So that's the way we kind of think about it
in the West, but really we have going to see
ourselves as part of a much larger transgenerational chain. We've
talked about it earlier. I realized in my twenties that
the kind of that trauma and the pain that my
dad had, that in some ways he didn't work with.
(23:23):
It's on me to also to see that, work with
it and and do my best not to pass it
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 gonna 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
(23:44):
out what's the right code to move forward. This is
before claud code, right, This is like literally have to
do it on your own. Over the therapist or on
a rock somewhere.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
With the respect to mok Anderson, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
You're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna debug, but
realize there's still some good foundational code.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Look, we are, we are, we are.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
We're forty eight 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 are you going to carry forward?
And you know, God willing one day there are grandkids
and great great grandkids that will look back and hopefully
a I was a great ancestor in the work that
(24:21):
I did. Eat from the small things of the big things,
but maybe more importantly because of some of the intersection
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. You don't sit
back passively and let the future wash over you. You
(24:42):
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 (24:56):
Yeah, you were on Andrew Hubman not too long ago,
and one of the things that 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 also as
they can also be at all.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Sometimes right now we are bombarded by algorithms that want
to not only separate us from each other, but to
be honest separators 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
(25:35):
we 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 the 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 be creating
better selves?
Speaker 1 (25:56):
So it's a good moment, I think to talk about
the Protopious collection. There is six graphic novels in the collection.
What was the motivating spirit behind this project? On what
is it?
Speaker 2 (26:09):
So we realized, Katherine Murdock and myself we run Futurific,
which is kind of all encompassing pro topian studios. So
whether it's in graphic novel or on TV or film,
we wanted to give people the ability to experience better
Tomorrow's not perfect, but better and recognizing that better futures
(26:31):
are still gonna be messy. There's still gonna be tension,
there's still gonna be drama, Terrible things are gonna happen,
but the world can be more protoping, they can be
better 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 got coming back to really one example, which
was Star Trek, and Star Trek is amazing. It's a
(26:53):
multi billion dollar, multi decade franchise, but we can't rest
the hopes and dreams of homotape on one piece of IP,
so we wanted to create more stories. You didn't nessarily
want to create whole worlds and whole stories. And working
with AWA, which is the kind of this amazing graphic
novel company who works with artists and writers and artisans
(27:13):
and really kind of puts great stories out there, we
developed six what we call kind of one Shocks. They're
short novellas, short graphic novels. Each one tells a slightly
different story with a tension point about what we're wrestling
with tomorrow. The goal in this collection was to give
people a taste of futures that allow them to kind
of see themselves in it and rehearse it, going back
(27:34):
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 right, always amazing, But what we
are showing is that behaviors have consequences regards of the
world that we're in. Polost 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,
(27:55):
these are all out now and they're coming out in
a collection May twenty six, and you can pre order
Amazon or whatever you want. People say, wow, you know,
I love the floating city, I love the technology we have,
choral create and all these really cool things. But what
they say is what 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
(28:18):
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 when 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,
(28:38):
and then one is about kind of empathic AI. Another
is about I don't give anything away about a female
scientist who through mushrooms basically it was able to tap
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
(28:59):
about right and also to other creatives, because we have
met with dozens of writers in Europe and New York
and Hollywood. You're like, well, I don't understand that it
is a protopia perfect world. No, no, no, it's just one
slightly better where we've been working. And that almost becomes
the background. But the behavior is also protopian, so that
the project is allowing people to kind of rehearse better
(29:21):
tomorrows without it being these perfect tomorrows.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Let's talk about briefly about the purpose project. You or
I know you don't have any favorite amounts your children.
But on the cover of this one, there's a there's
a graphic with unemployment rate, you know, twenty twenty five
five percent, thirty twenty percent, and then it goes up
to plus one hundred percent in twenty fifty, which is
obviously quite a dystopian thought. Maybe Andrew Yang wrote the forward,
(29:46):
and he's a big proponent of the universal Basic income.
He's said that, you know, quote from him as someone
who's spent years advocating for UBI. I wanted to encounter
the assumption that without traditional work people would lose that drive, ambition,
and sense of meaning. But I believe the opposite is true.
What do you believe? I believe what Andrew believes.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
I think.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Look, the 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, we
just want to like 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 in climate work or political work,
(30:28):
whether it's pole watching or logging, and finding that there's
something more important than just the leisure life that gives
them a sense of fulfillment.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
They built throughout their lives the ability to work and
be active in the world, and now they're harvesting in
their tirement. 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 in 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
(30:59):
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 thirty seconds at this dinner party, people ask me
what do you do?
Speaker 2 (31:19):
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, almost sapiens,
to find how we can contribute to a larger project
of being that isn't totally derived from what we get
(31:40):
into our bank account and our title CEO, vice president, whatnot.
It sounds impossible, but the one thing that I've learned
as as a student of history is humans are unbelievably
adaptable and we will adapt.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
It's funny. I'm a you know, brit I guess I
like to think of myself as a European, or like
as technicae Im not anymore. But in growing up in England,
it was a sort of taboo to ask somebody what
do you do? Sort of just a question you can't
asker rude And here's the first question everyone ask you.
And I have real ambivalents. There are times when I think, man,
(32:16):
I missed avating, and I missed the fact that you
could have a whole dinner party with twelve 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 (32:35):
Look, sorry, I was another I go to a lot
of dinner parties right now, so I don't that much
of the sagarn of my wife.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
I went.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I was 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 that think about
how do we rebuild bridges in this moment, a bunch
of us around the table. We went two and a
half hours. I had no idea what anyone did. I mean,
you know what Van did because I se him on
TV all the time, but I knew they were fascinating
people and I knew what drove them. And the first
(33:02):
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 in the future,
honoring the past, but then honoring what does it mean
to be an ancestor and think about the future. And
at no time do we talk about what we actually
(33:24):
do or 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 is the where
I just made up. And so that is a place
that that kind of humanistic meeting people as humans as
opposed to a kind of a LinkedIn card like well
(33:46):
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 (33:56):
The Protopia collection is vayable twenty six. But also in
your work with AWA, part of what AWA does is
they make graphic novels that become TV series or film films. Yep,
you gave a talk in Hollywood in twenty twenty four
to a few hundred creatives about basically encouraging them to
(34:17):
put out few dystopian films. Is there an ambition that
some of these stories when you mentioned the workplace comedy
will end up on screen?
Speaker 2 (34:24):
So what I can say as of today is there's
a director already attached to polists, there's a show runner
for a feature, the Person 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 aforementioned AWA film actually starts filming, that the fra
(34:47):
Apple TV starts shooting in New 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 dot com website to kind of
not say don't don't just do dystopias, because so sopias
are our warnings and there's there's a purpose for them,
(35:08):
but to also think about how do we tell stories
about futures and worlds and behaviors that we want to
see manifest in the world. 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 going to Futurific and this
I can talk about this now because there's just an
article and Vanity Fair is we're going to be doing
(35:29):
what's basically a world's fair in Basil, Switzerland in twenty
twenty eight. And what's gonna make this very very different
than your traditional world's fair with your country pavilions, is
we're going to have kind of experiences and zones, if
you will, where you basically get to actually experience tomorrow,
you know, the twenty thirties and the twenty forties. So
we want to bring together possible multiple futures and visions
(35:51):
of tomorrow and in Basil, Switzerland. But we're gonna be
doing citizens assemblies around the 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 that will work with the technologists to figure out
(36:13):
what do those flourishing tomorrows look like.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
You was your dad still with us when he saw
you become a futurist something? Did you talk to me
about your work?
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Now?
Speaker 2 (36:21):
It's you know, my father passed away when I was
eighteen years old, and you know, he was considered this
big kind of Holocaust hero, right because he fought back.
He's an not center aft 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 a certain person,
a big character, you want to follow in their footsteps.
(36:41):
And what I realized on his passing, with you know,
some therapy sessions and just kind 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
(37:03):
in my work life to think about not you know,
how do we prevent or what would I do in
nineteen forties Europe? But what would I do in nineteen
twenties Europe right to prevent that? And that's what led
me to be kind of thinking about being a futures
that would ask these difficult questions and very interesting rooms
to steer us towards the angels of our of our
(37:24):
better nature. Look, we're we're in this intertitle moment. But
for the first time, 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
(37:46):
room at the eye house, your decisions matter not just
for the moment, not just 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
(38:08):
off planet Earth.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
All Right, Wallock, thank you so much that it's the
protopious collection. It's in stores on May twenty sixth, but
you can pre order it now on Amazon. Congratulations on
the project and thank you for joining us. Thank you.
After the break, how cutting edge tech is creating a
(38:30):
better future for school age girls in Afghanistan. Stay with us,
Welcome back. We'll bring you something extra today, a real
life example of how people are reimagining the future. One
of those people is Alex Theear. He's the CEO of
(38:52):
an organization called Lapis, and for twenty two years, Lapis
has provided high quality educational materials for kids in Afghanshanistan
in very innovative ways under challenging circumstances. Recently they developed
a new tool.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
We created an AI chat bot this year called La
La for Afghanistan. We thought that it would be great
to try and create a chat bot tutor that could
use all of the content that we've created, content on
science and math and other subjects and help Afghan kids
(39:31):
to advance their learning, particularly if they don't have regular
access to in person schooling or teachers or tutors, particularly
Afghan girls who are banned from.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
School since twenty twenty one, when the Taliban took over
the Afghan government. Does in Afghanistan have been banned from
getting an education be on sixth grade. The chat boot
was created in response to this vacuum.
Speaker 4 (39:55):
So many kids don't have access to schools or high
quality teachers. Having a chatbot that really knows the material
and knows the content is really invaluable.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
LAFE set up a studio in Comble where they film
lessons with real teachers and those lessons then go out
of a satellite or they can be accessed online via
the Internet or on the phone. And La La is
meant to be a tutor, someone who can help answer
questions in real time.
Speaker 4 (40:22):
It's not always encouraged to ask questions or to be
seen making mistakes as an Afghan student, and so to
be able to ask the chatbot, it kind of lowers
the bar and lets them explore a little bit more.
The other thing which is really exciting about what we've
done with this chatbot is that it is available over
What's App.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
WhatsApp is quite popular in Afghanistan, and Alex said since
launching in July twenty twenty five, Lala has been very successful,
with over two hundred thousand users and seventeen million messages
exchanged in support of real learning.
Speaker 4 (40:56):
So if you were to ask it a simple question
like what is two X plus four equal? How do
I solve for X? Instead of giving you the answer,
it's going to take you step by step through a
learning process to help you figure out the answer yourself.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Obviously, safety is also a top priority, so Alex and
his team puts several safeguards in place.
Speaker 4 (41:19):
You can imagine kids in Afghanistan are like kids anywhere.
They'll ask it anything about religion, sex, you name it.
They will try to break it, and so we wanted
to make sure that it was only staying on appropriate topics.
We had a huge group red teaming the model to
(41:39):
make sure that it wouldn't veer into inappropriate areas. We
also do something which is really important for the afghan context,
which is that we really safely protect any information that
comes in to make sure that individuals aren't traceable and
so on.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Now you won't be asking yourself how does Lapis navigate
the time in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
We definitely look at what the rules are that are
promulgated by the government, We look at the content that
we put out, and we follow those rules. But the
great thing is that nobody has required us to get
advanced approval for the content or anything like that, and
so I think we've been able to walk a careful
(42:23):
line between not trying to offend people, whether it's the
government or people in traditional culture, while at the same
time really sticking with an evidence based, well designed curriculum
that is really meant to advance learning and particularly to
support girls in their learning journey.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Of course, none of this is a replacement for real
in school education, but I do think it's fair to
say Alex and his team are on the path to
being considered a good ancestor that by future generations. I'm
os Valosian. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and
(43:06):
Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by me Julian Nutter
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Norvel for iHeart Podcasts.
The engineer is Bihid Fraser and Jack Insley mixed this episode.
Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Please do rate and
review the show wherever you listen, and reach out to
us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com with thoughts, ideas, suggestions, etc.
(43:28):
We love hearing from you.
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Oz Valoschin. 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 Wallock, would like to change that. He calls himself
a futurist and social systems strategist, and he believes that
(00:36):
at this moment of technological revolution, we need to be
thinking positively about our future.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
His Ari, if Sam was here, Altman or Mark or
other like to 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 (01:00):
This is not pollyannerish or wilfully 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'll live on. Ari hosted and produced a docu series
(01:23):
called A Brief History of the Future for PBS He
consults for clients including Volkswagen and the US State Department,
and his latest project is a collection of graphic novels
called The Protopia's Collection. Ari welcome, thanks for having me.
What is a protopia?
Speaker 2 (01:41):
So, look, we've been sold a bad bill of goods, right.
We have 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 is that placed about better tomorrows.
It's about thinking about future that you actually want to
live in, as opposed to ones that you want to
(02:03):
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 interests,
(02:24):
so even one percent, and that could be from the
micro decision layer to the macro decision layer, one percent
every day a little bit better eventually we're getting into
a gosh, you know, pretty great place.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Do you count with the name protopias?
Speaker 2 (02:39):
So Protopia was coined by a features Kevin Kelly, who
helps start Wired magazine.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Kevin Kelly was a true kind of techno optimist I think, yeah,
but also very spiritual religious man.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yes, I mean, look, the reality is when we think
about technology today, it's just kind of overriding all encompassing
way that we think about a reality. But the fact
of 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
(03:11):
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 thirty to forty percent 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
(03:33):
about protobia. I'll speak for how I think about it.
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 nature
to it. Doesn't mean you to believe in a God
or a theological component, but very much it's in the
(03:56):
realm of morals, which we kind of connect to kind
of our spiritual or religious side.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah, I want to talk more about the protopious 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 in English literature major and Dickens, Charles
Dickens was was He said famously that people must recreate themselves,
(04:24):
but it was a pun or recreation recreatation. Yeah, And
to talk about recreation, recreation, rehearsal.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
So contrary to my physical stature right now, I was
an athlete in high school and I was a pole vaulter,
which is what kind of esoteria. And also 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 filling ourselves up into the air. And what
my coach had us do from day one was to
visualize what success is, to kind of create the muscle
(04:55):
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 these horrific collapse narratives. So in going back
(05:18):
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 you can see bits of better tomorrows
(05:42):
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 us actually going to returned back to Apple, and
he talked about not just what Apple was back in
the past and what it was in the present, but
what it would be and what would it help people do,
(06:04):
which is to create better versions of themselves in the world.
So that's great for Apple on the micro level and
certain technologies allowed to do this, but now we need
stories that help us do that, both for as individuals,
as societies, and as a planetary civilization.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
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. That's your clip I want to play of
Mark Andrison talking recently on a podcast. I won't get
your take on you don't have any levels of introspection? Yes, zero,
as little as possible? Why move forward?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Go?
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
I've just have fund people who dwell in the past
get stuck in the past. It's just it's a real problem.
And so it's a problem at work and it's a
problem at home. And you probably not if you go
back be four hundred years ago. It never it never
would have hurd anybody to be introspective. Like it's the
whole idea of I mean, just that all of the
modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things
that kind of result from that are you know, kind
of a manufactory of nineteen ten, nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
I'm curious you'll take here. Not to put you on
the spot, but yeah, it's an interesting moment in the
technology world where you know, Mark Anderson, one of the
most influential people in the whole Slicon Valley deploying the
capital which is being used to build the future, is
saying that he aspies to a zero introspection life. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
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
better people? Right again, Let's go back to pole vaulting,
(07:41):
which I love to do because the last time I
did anything remotely athletic. We would have meats, we'd go
as high as we could and the 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 you don't have an introspection, especially in the
(08:03):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
So, as a future, as 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.
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
(08:34):
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? How
do we iterate? How do we look back on what
we got right? And how we got wrong and 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,
(08:55):
is that when you're talking about the nineteen twenties and
thirties in that clip, he's talking about Freud, and a
lot of what Freud kind of thought was our emotions
are and our anxiety and our depression is all about
the past without drawing in the past. What Market's right
is that was that the fallacy of Freud. Our emotions,
our anxiety, and our depression are actually about the future.
(09:16):
We may look back and say, oh, when I had
that breakup or all these terrible things happen, but emotions,
according to most evolutionary biologists that I've studied or worked with,
emotions are are really meant to help guide us into
the future, to have prospection, to think about the tomorrows
that we want. So year is right at that point.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
It's interesting and I think a lot about as the
host of tech stuff. You know, we're living in this
moment where kind of the dreams of science and technology
becoming true, right like you know, nuclear fusion, maybe around
the corner, quantum computing editing that you know, the code
of life for better or for was baby kJ healed
in the womb from a regenetic disease before he was born.
(09:57):
And yet most people have never been more despairing. And
as you talk, one of the reasons that occurs to
me is why this may be is because the tech
overlords don't talk in a way that looks beyond the
next six, nine, twelve months. Right the discourse is always,
no matter the consequences, we have to do this now,
(10:17):
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 we be read by.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
The future, 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 Steward Brand
has said. This moment right now, what I call the
intertitle is 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
(10:49):
no longer working for the world that we're in. The
issue is the new ones haven't come up. The new
rules haven't been written, and if you know the rest
of the gram she quote, now is the time of monsters.
And I'm not saying the tech over lords 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. We can talk about AI, but
(11:12):
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 what China is building. But at
(11:35):
the end of the day, it's 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 with tech leaders.
These are the conversations I have. I said, I say, look,
it's important what you are doing. I understand this is
kind of a space race moment. But at the same time,
(11:57):
you have to think about the guardrails because there are
certain things you're going to do, like Pandora's box that
once once they're out, you can't bring them back in.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
When you talk about yourself as a futurist, do you
mean like a prognosticator or do you mean like somebody
who lays a mark of for what the future could be.
It's more like laying down a challenge. Almost uh, neither.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
So here's the things when I whenever I go to
a gener party, I always get three questions, especially lately.
The first question is how bad is it going to get?
H 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 ten to fifteen minutes saying, look,
there's two kinds of futurists. A vast majority of them
(12:39):
who are like on stage or screen or whatever, are
gonna are predictive. Here's what's gonna happen. 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 in trade,
these are scenarios. It's not best case it's not worst case,
(12:59):
it's just likely has based on things that are both
locked in right now and that are variable. And then
it's my role is to whoever I'm talking to you say,
of these stories, which one would you like to see
actually happen? And then how do we backcast and figure
out what has to be true to make that story happen. Now,
these stories are not meant to be, you know, rainbows
(13:20):
and unicorns, Pollyannis. It's not like, oh my god, everything
is solved in ten or fifteen years. Again, I'm a
pro toopian futures. I want a better tomorrow, and my
job is to be directional in my council and in
my questions. You know, I was raised in a home
where what mattered was the questions that you asked, not
(13:40):
the knowledge that you knew. So that's kind of a
very Talmudic way of thinking about knowledge generation and creation.
So when I go into rooms, whether it's in Washington
or New York, or la or Brussels, I'm asking very
difficult questions more than I am making kind of grandiose
statements about tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
What's the hardest question of us recently, it's.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
The hardest question I've asked fifty I was speaking to
a room of older folk, and I said, fifty years
from now, when either your children or grandchildren or descendants,
they 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
(14:21):
going to thank you? And are they going to see
you as a neutral passive ancestor or worse, a negative ancestor,
or a 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
(14:41):
of lineage, or do you want to be a great one?
And what does it mean to be a great one?
And they are trade offs, and the biggest trade off
is short term verse long term. Do you want an easy,
quick win right now so you can get re elected,
you can make your quarterly results, you can get the
shiny metal, or do you want to actually make really
difficult decisions that make may not be popular in the
short term, but are in the best interest of those
(15:04):
people fifty years from now looking back.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Have we lost our ability to do that? And if so,
wid like because I think about that a lot. I
think about if I look back at the last one
hundred years of history, it seemed like there are many
points in the twentieth century where it felt like politicians
and societies were aligned around making decisions for future benefit.
It seems like that framework, at least in Western democracies,
(15:29):
does not pertain anymore.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
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 you know, I visited icon
which does three D printed homes. They can put up
a home in like three weeks, right, so before there
(15:51):
are three D printing of homes and you want to
actually build like a cathedral like Abbey's in England, these
projects took fifty to one hundred and fifty two hundred years.
And 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 actor feed, the ability to do that as actor feed.
(16:14):
For for example, Dearita Gabe, we now have to report quarterly.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Look.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
I met with the CEO a few years ago and
I was like, well, look, the real problem is quarterly earning.
He's like quarterly earning. He's like, I'm looking at our
stock price every few hours, and I have members of
the board calling me up. And I have pension. Crazy
thing he told me. He goes, I have a pension
system for teachers, and if I make a bad decision,
they'll call me up. Even though it's teachers whose job
(16:39):
it is is to think long term chain 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, and then in
politics we have people who are running for office a
day after they win. It's it's the external environment more
than it is the the individual brain. The hardware system
(17:02):
can think long term. We have that ability. We do
that as parents, we do that as individuals. When we
think about I'm gonna get an education, I'm going to
thirty year mortgage. What we need to do is rethink
those larger systems.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
But you're saying the value maybe the which arose in
the eighties is the kind of the concept derrigoph for
corporation the health of their So part of.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
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 I havingt been doing this for twenty plus years,
there's a lot of different vectors for that. I have
chosen to focus on storytelling, media and narrative because culture,
(17:47):
at the end of the day, culture drives our expectations,
expectations drives our behavior, behavior drives and change systems. So
with what the 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 need to get back to to be able
(18:08):
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 (18:20):
After the break, what a better tomorrow could actually look
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The link is in the podcast episode description box. How
(19:49):
practically did you build your place of influence? I mean,
the brief issue of the Future documentary was incredible and
it was co produced with Drake and Killian Emba and
Katherin Murdoch too and Katri Murder. Because you a partner
on Futurific, I mean you mentioned some of these names
like Samuel Manino Moscanadas. I have a feeling that you
do spend time with some of these people. How have
(20:10):
you as a as a I mean I guess as
a modern philosopher as it were, how have you kind
of penetrated these worlds and god people to listen to you?
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Well, I don't know. It's one thing to hear, it's
that I think to listen and to integrate it, so
I can't.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
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 means I do the research and I and I
and I know what they've been up to. And I
know what they're thinking because I read and I know
(20:44):
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 nineteen twenties, lost his entire family
in the Holocaust, fought with the Jewish underground, was a
Nazi hunter after the war, was antifab before it was
(21:06):
a thing. And on the other hand, my mom was
an artist and was a Steven of Buckminster Fuller, kind
of one of the original architects, and what I would
consider pragmatic protopian futurists. And so balancing those two things,
kind of the mental with the emotional spiritual, and if
you can hold that from a place of integrity, folks
are gonna want to be with someone who can speak
(21:28):
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
need more. I just need folks to be able to
listen to difficult questions, have a dialogue and think about
(21:52):
where's 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 they it's difficult
for them to find folks to have that conversation with them,
because most folks want something from them.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
My grandfather was born in around nineteen twenty in western
Ukraine and so experienced the horrors of the Second World
War and ended up as a refugee in Britain, and
I often think about his story, particularly when I'm feeling
overwhelmed or down or other other things. I think my
goodness could be a lot worse. So I kind of
bring his brasilience with me. But I also frankly think
(22:29):
my father had a very traumatic childhood at his hands,
and that was also something to carry with me. For you,
it's not your grandfather's your father my father.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
So my father passed away when I was younger, because
he was fifty 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
(23:01):
the world like we often think of ourselves as from
you know, from our birth to our deaths. That's one way.
So that's the way we kind of think about it
in the West, but really we have going to see
ourselves as part of a much larger transgenerational chain. We've
talked about it earlier. I realized in my twenties that
the kind of that trauma and the pain that my
dad had, that in some ways he didn't work with.
(23:23):
It's on me to also to see that, work with
it and and do my best not to pass it
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 gonna 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
(23:44):
out what's the right code to move forward. This is
before claud code, right, This is like literally have to
do it on your own. Over the therapist or on
a rock somewhere.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
With the respect to mok Anderson, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
You're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna debug, but
realize there's still some good foundational code.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Look, we are, we are, we are.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
We're forty eight 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 are you going to carry forward?
And you know, God willing one day there are grandkids
and great great grandkids that will look back and hopefully
a I was a great ancestor in the work that
(24:21):
I did. Eat from the small things of the big things,
but maybe more importantly because of some of the intersection
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. You don't sit
back passively and let the future wash over you. You
(24:42):
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 (24:56):
Yeah, you were on Andrew Hubman not too long ago,
and one of the things that 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 also as
they can also be at all.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Sometimes right now we are bombarded by algorithms that want
to not only separate us from each other, but to
be honest separators 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
(25:35):
we 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 the 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 be creating
better selves?
Speaker 1 (25:56):
So it's a good moment, I think to talk about
the Protopious collection. There is six graphic novels in the collection.
What was the motivating spirit behind this project? On what
is it?
Speaker 2 (26:09):
So we realized, Katherine Murdock and myself we run Futurific,
which is kind of all encompassing pro topian studios. So
whether it's in graphic novel or on TV or film,
we wanted to give people the ability to experience better
Tomorrow's not perfect, but better and recognizing that better futures
(26:31):
are still gonna be messy. There's still gonna be tension,
there's still gonna be drama, Terrible things are gonna happen,
but the world can be more protoping, they can be
better 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 got coming back to really one example, which
was Star Trek, and Star Trek is amazing. It's a
(26:53):
multi billion dollar, multi decade franchise, but we can't rest
the hopes and dreams of homotape on one piece of IP,
so we wanted to create more stories. You didn't nessarily
want to create whole worlds and whole stories. And working
with AWA, which is the kind of this amazing graphic
novel company who works with artists and writers and artisans
(27:13):
and really kind of puts great stories out there, we
developed six what we call kind of one Shocks. They're
short novellas, short graphic novels. Each one tells a slightly
different story with a tension point about what we're wrestling
with tomorrow. The goal in this collection was to give
people a taste of futures that allow them to kind
of see themselves in it and rehearse it, going back
(27:34):
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 right, always amazing, But what we
are showing is that behaviors have consequences regards of the
world that we're in. Polost 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,
(27:55):
these are all out now and they're coming out in
a collection May twenty six, and you can pre order
Amazon or whatever you want. People say, wow, you know,
I love the floating city, I love the technology we have,
choral create and all these really cool things. But what
they say is what 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
(28:18):
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 when 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,
(28:38):
and then one is about kind of empathic AI. Another
is about I don't give anything away about a female
scientist who through mushrooms basically it was able to tap
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
(28:59):
about right and also to other creatives, because we have
met with dozens of writers in Europe and New York
and Hollywood. You're like, well, I don't understand that it
is a protopia perfect world. No, no, no, it's just one
slightly better where we've been working. And that almost becomes
the background. But the behavior is also protopian, so that
the project is allowing people to kind of rehearse better
(29:21):
tomorrows without it being these perfect tomorrows.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Let's talk about briefly about the purpose project. You or
I know you don't have any favorite amounts your children.
But on the cover of this one, there's a there's
a graphic with unemployment rate, you know, twenty twenty five
five percent, thirty twenty percent, and then it goes up
to plus one hundred percent in twenty fifty, which is
obviously quite a dystopian thought. Maybe Andrew Yang wrote the forward,
(29:46):
and he's a big proponent of the universal Basic income.
He's said that, you know, quote from him as someone
who's spent years advocating for UBI. I wanted to encounter
the assumption that without traditional work people would lose that drive, ambition,
and sense of meaning. But I believe the opposite is true.
What do you believe? I believe what Andrew believes.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
I think.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Look, the 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, we
just want to like 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 in climate work or political work,
(30:28):
whether it's pole watching or logging, and finding that there's
something more important than just the leisure life that gives
them a sense of fulfillment.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
They built throughout their lives the ability to work and
be active in the world, and now they're harvesting in
their tirement. 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 in 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
(30:59):
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 thirty seconds at this dinner party, people ask me
what do you do?
Speaker 2 (31:19):
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, almost sapiens,
to find how we can contribute to a larger project
of being that isn't totally derived from what we get
(31:40):
into our bank account and our title CEO, vice president, whatnot.
It sounds impossible, but the one thing that I've learned
as as a student of history is humans are unbelievably
adaptable and we will adapt.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
It's funny. I'm a you know, brit I guess I
like to think of myself as a European, or like
as technicae Im not anymore. But in growing up in England,
it was a sort of taboo to ask somebody what
do you do? Sort of just a question you can't
asker rude And here's the first question everyone ask you.
And I have real ambivalents. There are times when I think, man,
(32:16):
I missed avating, and I missed the fact that you
could have a whole dinner party with twelve 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 (32:35):
Look, sorry, I was another I go to a lot
of dinner parties right now, so I don't that much
of the sagarn of my wife.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
I went.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I was 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 that think about
how do we rebuild bridges in this moment, a bunch
of us around the table. We went two and a
half hours. I had no idea what anyone did. I mean,
you know what Van did because I se him on
TV all the time, but I knew they were fascinating
people and I knew what drove them. And the first
(33:02):
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 in the future,
honoring the past, but then honoring what does it mean
to be an ancestor and think about the future. And
at no time do we talk about what we actually
(33:24):
do or 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 is the where
I just made up. And so that is a place
that that kind of humanistic meeting people as humans as
opposed to a kind of a LinkedIn card like well
(33:46):
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 (33:56):
The Protopia collection is vayable twenty six. But also in
your work with AWA, part of what AWA does is
they make graphic novels that become TV series or film films. Yep,
you gave a talk in Hollywood in twenty twenty four
to a few hundred creatives about basically encouraging them to
(34:17):
put out few dystopian films. Is there an ambition that
some of these stories when you mentioned the workplace comedy
will end up on screen?
Speaker 2 (34:24):
So what I can say as of today is there's
a director already attached to polists, there's a show runner
for a feature, the Person 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 aforementioned AWA film actually starts filming, that the fra
(34:47):
Apple TV starts shooting in New 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 dot com website to kind of
not say don't don't just do dystopias, because so sopias
are our warnings and there's there's a purpose for them,
(35:08):
but to also think about how do we tell stories
about futures and worlds and behaviors that we want to
see manifest in the world. 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 going to Futurific and this
I can talk about this now because there's just an
article and Vanity Fair is we're going to be doing
(35:29):
what's basically a world's fair in Basil, Switzerland in twenty
twenty eight. And what's gonna make this very very different
than your traditional world's fair with your country pavilions, is
we're going to have kind of experiences and zones, if
you will, where you basically get to actually experience tomorrow,
you know, the twenty thirties and the twenty forties. So
we want to bring together possible multiple futures and visions
(35:51):
of tomorrow and in Basil, Switzerland. But we're gonna be
doing citizens assemblies around the 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 that will work with the technologists to figure out
(36:13):
what do those flourishing tomorrows look like.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
You was your dad still with us when he saw
you become a futurist something? Did you talk to me
about your work?
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Now?
Speaker 2 (36:21):
It's you know, my father passed away when I was
eighteen years old, and you know, he was considered this
big kind of Holocaust hero, right because he fought back.
He's an not center aft 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 a certain person,
a big character, you want to follow in their footsteps.
(36:41):
And what I realized on his passing, with you know,
some therapy sessions and just kind 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
(37:03):
in my work life to think about not you know,
how do we prevent or what would I do in
nineteen forties Europe? But what would I do in nineteen
twenties Europe right to prevent that? And that's what led
me to be kind of thinking about being a futures
that would ask these difficult questions and very interesting rooms
to steer us towards the angels of our of our
(37:24):
better nature. Look, we're we're in this intertitle moment. But
for the first time, 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
(37:46):
room at the eye house, your decisions matter not just
for the moment, not just 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
(38:08):
off planet Earth.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
All Right, Wallock, thank you so much that it's the
protopious collection. It's in stores on May twenty sixth, but
you can pre order it now on Amazon. Congratulations on
the project and thank you for joining us. Thank you.
After the break, how cutting edge tech is creating a
(38:30):
better future for school age girls in Afghanistan. Stay with us,
Welcome back. We'll bring you something extra today, a real
life example of how people are reimagining the future. One
of those people is Alex Theear. He's the CEO of
(38:52):
an organization called Lapis, and for twenty two years, Lapis
has provided high quality educational materials for kids in Afghanshanistan
in very innovative ways under challenging circumstances. Recently they developed
a new tool.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
We created an AI chat bot this year called La
La for Afghanistan. We thought that it would be great
to try and create a chat bot tutor that could
use all of the content that we've created, content on
science and math and other subjects and help Afghan kids
(39:31):
to advance their learning, particularly if they don't have regular
access to in person schooling or teachers or tutors, particularly
Afghan girls who are banned from.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
School since twenty twenty one, when the Taliban took over
the Afghan government. Does in Afghanistan have been banned from
getting an education be on sixth grade. The chat boot
was created in response to this vacuum.
Speaker 4 (39:55):
So many kids don't have access to schools or high
quality teachers. Having a chatbot that really knows the material
and knows the content is really invaluable.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
LAFE set up a studio in Comble where they film
lessons with real teachers and those lessons then go out
of a satellite or they can be accessed online via
the Internet or on the phone. And La La is
meant to be a tutor, someone who can help answer
questions in real time.
Speaker 4 (40:22):
It's not always encouraged to ask questions or to be
seen making mistakes as an Afghan student, and so to
be able to ask the chatbot, it kind of lowers
the bar and lets them explore a little bit more.
The other thing which is really exciting about what we've
done with this chatbot is that it is available over
What's App.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
WhatsApp is quite popular in Afghanistan, and Alex said since
launching in July twenty twenty five, Lala has been very successful,
with over two hundred thousand users and seventeen million messages
exchanged in support of real learning.
Speaker 4 (40:56):
So if you were to ask it a simple question
like what is two X plus four equal? How do
I solve for X? Instead of giving you the answer,
it's going to take you step by step through a
learning process to help you figure out the answer yourself.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Obviously, safety is also a top priority, so Alex and
his team puts several safeguards in place.
Speaker 4 (41:19):
You can imagine kids in Afghanistan are like kids anywhere.
They'll ask it anything about religion, sex, you name it.
They will try to break it, and so we wanted
to make sure that it was only staying on appropriate topics.
We had a huge group red teaming the model to
(41:39):
make sure that it wouldn't veer into inappropriate areas. We
also do something which is really important for the afghan context,
which is that we really safely protect any information that
comes in to make sure that individuals aren't traceable and
so on.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Now you won't be asking yourself how does Lapis navigate
the time in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
We definitely look at what the rules are that are
promulgated by the government, We look at the content that
we put out, and we follow those rules. But the
great thing is that nobody has required us to get
advanced approval for the content or anything like that, and
so I think we've been able to walk a careful
(42:23):
line between not trying to offend people, whether it's the
government or people in traditional culture, while at the same
time really sticking with an evidence based, well designed curriculum
that is really meant to advance learning and particularly to
support girls in their learning journey.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Of course, none of this is a replacement for real
in school education, but I do think it's fair to
say Alex and his team are on the path to
being considered a good ancestor that by future generations. I'm
os Valosian. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and
(43:06):
Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by me Julian Nutter
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Norvel for iHeart Podcasts.
The engineer is Bihid Fraser and Jack Insley mixed this episode.
Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Please do rate and
review the show wherever you listen, and reach out to
us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com with thoughts, ideas, suggestions, etc.
(43:28):
We love hearing from you.
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