ARI WALLACH: The future is not a noun. It’s not this thing out there that we’re heading towards that’s going to kind of wash over us. The future is very much a verb. It’s something that we do consistently and constantly as humans, as parents, as partners, as professionals. We have to envision what a thriving, flourishing homosapien global planetary civilization looks like in order to get there.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Ari Wallach, host of the new series A Brief History of the Future, which premiered last night on PBS. Ari is a futurist and the founder of Longpath Labs — an initiative striving to help build a better tomorrow. As global conflict and evolving tech dominates our here and now, I wanted to talk to someone who passionately believes in a long-term focus. Ari’s research helps us understand why we struggle to empathize with our future selves, and why CEOs everywhere must reconnect and refine the moral imperative of their business. Ari’s an old friend, so I was also eager to hear the story behind his recent collaboration with soccer star Kylian Mbappé and musician Drake. So let’s dive in. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. 

SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian, and I’m here with Ari Wallach, futurist and host of the new PBS series, A Brief History of the Future. Ari, good to see you.

WALLACH: Good to see you too. It’s been too long, but it’s great to see you.

How Ari Wallach became a futurist?

SAFIAN: It is great to see you. You know, I was thinking that when we first met, you did not call yourself a futurist. You worked in policy, in media, as an innovation strategist, right? When did you become a futurist? How do you become a futurist? What is a futurist?

WALLACH: So many great questions. You know, I never called myself a futurist. But what a futurist does, and there’s different kinds of many ways is, well, let’s talk about what they don’t do. What they don’t do, or at least what they shouldn’t do is predict the future and tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow. 

What futures do is they look at the major trends, the megatrends, the macro trends that are occurring. So at the organization that I run Longpath, we track 21 megatrends from climate to science to psychology, to even spirituality. And these mega trends are often at the minimum, five, ten years in the making, but they can go decades back, and they’re going to go decades forward, and they kind of shape, if you will, almost like an ice cream cone on its side, what’s possible. And so what we do as futurists is we develop multiple scenarios of what could happen.

It’s not worst case, it’s not best case, it’s four stories. And then whoever it is that we’re working with, be it governments or organizations or even political movements, we say, what has to be true for these stories to manifest to be true? And then we back cast. And that’s a way of kind of preparing yourself, then there’s a smaller slice of futurists like myself who say, “okay, these are different stories of how things may unfold and we’re starting to see those signals occur.”

We’re separating the signals obviously from the noise and then the question is the question that we ask in A Brief History of the Future is now: which ones of these do we actually want to see become true? And so that’s what I spend six episodes doing is meeting people around the world who are working on building better futures and sometimes It’s seemingly at a micro scale, but then we ask, “what does this actually look like if this happens in a broader way?” So that’s how you become one. That’s how I became one. And that’s kind of what we do.

SAFIAN: Part of what makes the way you look at it different than some other futurists then is because you’re not just looking at the trends, but you’re looking at where you want the trends to move to.

WALLACH: Yes. So this is, this is the big separation. And some people say, “Oh, you’re putting your, you know, your thumb on the scale of future history.” No, no, no, no. What we’re asking ourselves and what I’m asking the folks that I work with and to recognize one key thing, the future is not a noun. It’s not this thing out there that we’re heading towards that’s going to kind of wash over us. The future is very much a verb. It’s something that we do consistently and constantly as humans, as parents, as partners, as professionals. 

I kind of had my come to Moses moment in 2016 because I realized I was in these rooms at the U.N. and Fortune 10 companies and what a lot of folks were asking me to do, you know, maybe not in so many words was “help us win the future” and by winning the future by setting it up as a kind of a dynamic in almost a prisoner’s dilemma way what they were asking me and my organization do is help them win the future vis a vis someone else and in 2016 it became very apparent to me that that’s not the way I want to go about doing this.

I didn’t want to work for, you know, this consumer electronic company and help them beat the other consumer electronic company. There’s a place for that and no judgment, but the work that I wanted to do was to extend much further out than the next quarterly earnings report and you know the next five years and ten years, I wanted to kind of nest things in the homosapien project.

What are we doing here, right? We’ve, you know, 200,000 years, 300,000 years, and really we can go back 10, 12 thousand years, hunter gatherer agricultural revolution. We’ve been doing something interesting here. It’s been pretty haphazard, but for the first time, I think in a planetary way, the decisions we make or don’t make will impact our species and this planet.

And so how we go about doing that, be it from AI to bioengineering, to obviously climate to, to nation states and big power struggles actually matters. Not just in the lifespan of Bob and Ari, but in the lifespan and how our descendants are on this planet.

Ari Wallach breaks down his series, A Brief History of the Future

SAFIAN: The series of A Brief History of the Future, part of the premise seems to be that as humans, we’re biologically wired to focus on the now, that our future selves are viewed in our minds differently than folks who are most important to us now.

WALLACH: In the first episode, actually the first interview of the show. So it was, it was very telling. It was with a friend of mine, Hal Hirschfield at UCLA. And some of the work that he’s done and others have done is, you know, they’ll put some folks in fMRI to see what parts of their brain light up right with, you know, how oxygen flows and they’ll put people into an fMRI machine and they’ll say, “okay, think of your current self right now” and a certain part of the brain will light up and they’ll say, “okay, think of this famous actor,” you know, whatever they’ll say, Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, and another part of the brain will light up.

And then they’ll say, “okay, think about yourself 10 years from now.” And the same part of the brain that lit up for the famous actor lights up for their future self 10 years from now. So they have a vague connection and understanding of this other person, even though it’s them, it’s still them. Still the person at the end of MRI tube, there’ll be that quote-unquote disconnected.

And then they’ve shown with very minor interventions, looking daily at a photo of yourself aged 10 years, writing a letter to your future self. These are not huge interventions, they’ll put them back into the machine and you know exactly what happens when they ask them to think about themselves 10 years from now. Now, there’s much more overlap with their current self. Now, what does that do? That leads to healthier personal health outcomes. They’ll save more money for retirement and ostensibly, they’ll start taking actions obviously that benefit their future self, but ultimately, and this is the work that we’re doing at Longpath and with the show, ultimately will benefit humanity writ large.

SAFIAN: So this genetic wiring that we have, it leads us to make poor decisions or short sighted decisions?

WALLACH: No, I mean, look. Ari and Bob are now talking via the internet so we can say it helps us make poor decisions. But the fact of the matter is, we’re still here, right? We are now using a technology that even 100 years ago would be magic. So it can’t be that poor of decisions because because we made it right.

What it does is it helps us survive. And so if Ari and Bob are being chased by a very large animal, 15,000 years ago, we’re going to think very short term. We’re going to think, how do we get away from this? How do we fight? How do we run from it? Or, you know, maybe how do we pause and play dead from it? So that wiring for survivability is there and it has helped us to a great point. Now, the biggest early pivot in this, if you will, about 10 to 12 thousand years ago.

When we go from hunting and gathering and just kind of chasing things to actually being in one place, developing civilization and having to actually plan for the winter. Having to actually get seeds, if it’s such a metaphor, right? Take the seeds, store the seeds over the winter and then plant them again.

The key, key, key aspect, towards the bottom of our brainstem at the hippocampus level, is that we have to be able to envision what success looks like. So it allows you and I to communicate, hunting this very large animal is us being able to tell a story of us eating a lot of meat over the fire, right?

Now, fast forward now to 2024, we have to envision what a thriving, flourishing homosapien global planetary civilization looks like in order to get there. And most of our stories about the future. The visions of what we want to see are almost 100 percent dystopian.

From the movies, to the young adults, to the comics, to the TV shows, we’re always, we’re always failing. And there’s a reason for that, because that’s the part of us that’s hardwired to see the negative things, our negativity bias that could kill us. So that’s why we go into a meeting and we’re like, “here are all the things that are not going to work” because that’s what we’re wired for, is to think about the things that are going to end us.

Now we’re at a point though, as a species, where it’s okay to have that hard wiring, 100%, and at the same time, push ourselves to think about what it is that we want, as opposed to what it is that we don’t want.

SAFIAN: And so with this show, who are you trying to influence or what outcome are you after? 

WALLACH: Really what it comes down to is we have to recognize two truisms. One is everyone’s a futurist in the actions that they take at the micro level. So how I say goodbye to my children in the morning is influencing the future. Because that at the serotonin dopamine level that’s teaching them human connection, which they will then take on to the 8,000 plus descendants of my wife and I in 300 years from now. So that’s at the micro level. 

At the macro level, obviously we get into issues of policy. We get into the kind of the ways we think about AI and biotech and climate and foreign affairs, you know, to the listeners of this podcast, the decisions that they make, it could be micro, it could be people in a boardroom saying, do we go with this LLM? Or do we go to this one? Do we know? Do we scrape Reddit for how we’re going to train our models, for instance, and scrape X, or are we going to scrape something else? These small decisions have long term impacts on our species. So, what we’re trying to do with this show is both get the general public, but also the folks who make decisions that at scale impact more of us in the present and more of us in the future.

So the KPIs, if you will, the indicators, are twofold. One in the near term are people making decisions differently about their lives, about the work they do, to are they actually in their workplace in their life changing behaviors in one way or another? 

We never in the show say this is the future of food. This is the future of housing. What we say is these are people who are working on these, what we currently call challenges and issues and problems and looking at them as opportunities on how to bend the curve of where we’re going. If we don’t make changes in certain areas, bend it towards better tomorrows. 

Whatever field you’re in, if you’re an artist, a teacher, a parent, a cook, a chef, think critically and differently about what impact you have on the far futures by your actions today. So we’re modeling a behavior set. 

Look past the short-term incentives

SAFIAN: Because it sounds like I mean, we’re all futuring whether we’re being conscious about it or not in the decisions we’re making. And I guess many of the listeners to this show are business people. And as you alluded to, the business world is plagued with short term incentives, quarterly earnings and current cash flow needs.

And in theory, business is created to generate long term. There’s a vision for what that business is going to do, but day to day, that isn’t necessarily what folks are thinking about or emphasizing enough when they’re making their decisions.

WALLACH: When you look at the companies that are the longest running companies on earth, A: A majority of them are in Japan. B: They’re over a thousand years old and they’re run in a very specific way.

They’re run like family businesses. They’re run as if though, and they are, that whoever is gonna be in the CEO seat or the VP seat that you’re currently in actually matters that you’re actually there to represent them and, and the future people in your position. That’s how we have to think. Unfortunately, the incentives aren’t there on an individual level. So we have found when we worked with organizations on how they think long term, this becomes much more of an ethical and moral challenge and imperative, right? This becomes a question of legacy. 

It used to be Bob up until a couple hundred years ago, no one even thought of the term the future, right? I mean, if they did, it was in a theological sense. It was what happens to future you after you die. Do you go up or do you go down? And the next generation the when I say next I mean people You know, they’re in their 30s and 20s and even 10s and teens they recognize they’re already living Into the future that we’re making, they’re seeing it because of dramatic changes, both on the tech side on the climate side, and they’re asking us to think and act in a way that even though we will be gone, what are we doing to ensure not just their survivability, but actually their ability to flourish like we did?

Why climate change is our “apex predator” today

SAFIAN: You’ve mentioned the word climate change a few times. How much of this discussion is kind of code for, like, we need to think about climate change?

WALLACH: I am very worried about climate change, it’s the apex predator in challenges that we face, but it is not the only one. 

We’ve already seen the curve bend towards the better. If current trends continue, the planet and the biosphere we’re on will be not amazing, but better than I thought even five years ago.

But I also look at synthetic biology and what we’re doing there and germline engineering and what we’re doing with CRISPR. And I’m also looking at these kind of immortal, immortal algorithms that we’re building right now in what we call AI and recognize, these are all part of the package of what is the future of humanity.

SAFIAN: The balance between sort of what’s the responsibility of government and policy versus what’s the responsibility of business and the impact of business. How do you think about those two lenses of it? 

WALLACH: I see them as lenses on top of one another, right? It’s not a left or a right lens. It’s really, they’re inextricably linked. Business and politics, and culture and even religion and governance interplay and intermix. 

I’ve yet to be with a Fortune 100 CEO where she or he hasn’t brought up the politics and the culture of the moment and what’s happening. And the responsibility for this is on all of us. 

Why business leaders must engage in social issues

SAFIAN: Many of the business leaders that I’ve talked to privately admit that they’re a little confused, like they’re confused about how assertive they should be, you know, sort of coming out of the pandemic and George Floyd. There was this imperative to, like, have open dialogue about all kinds of non business topics and what we want our future to look like. But in the last few months, it kind of feels like that’s turned around, and business people are increasingly uneasy about saying anything.

WALLACH: Yeah, I mean because look if you look at the Middle East right now, today, right?

I follow everyone on X and on social media, all quote unquote sides, and it’s like completely two different planets. Our media environment is saturated in one where you can develop a post fact or a post truthful narrative reality that as CEOs you don’t want to engage. That being said, now more than ever they have to engage and they have to say something. The question is, how do they do it and not cut half of their consumer or their audience off. This is going to be the challenge of the next few years, right? Is to reconnect and refine what they believe to be the moral imperative of their business, which is no longer just the shareholders, but obviously who the stakeholders are. 

And a big argument of the show is: The most marginalized in many ways are future generations. They don’t vote. They, we don’t, they don’t, they have given no one proxy. And so, you know, we go to a place, um, in Ya Haba in Japan with this professor who’s a thing called Future Design.

He has maybe a third of the people in the room don these, kind of, golden ceremonial robes. And when you put these robes on, you’re magically transformed to being a citizen of the year 2060 and you are now advocating from their perspective.

The entire tenor shifts in the room because they’re now advocating for their needs. Now, it doesn’t mean the future generations win over the present. It means it’s now more of a dialogue.

And so what, what we would ask of CEOs who are trying to figure out how to navigate this moment is to be in that dialogue. To be almost what we call a temporal incursion agent, right? It’s someone who kind of sees the timeline as it is and thinks, “where might this go differently? What’s not just in our best short term interest as toothbrush makers, in the present, but also into future generations. What are they going to need?” The decisions that we make right now over the next, gosh, 5, 10 years, even 5 months, which I know is very short term, but even at the algorithmic level, are going to dictate the course of our species, I think, for 2 to 300 years. 

SAFIAN: If Ari’s right, we’re living in one of the most significant years in human history. In some ways it’s daunting, but in others I have to say it’s inspiring. 

After the break, Ari and I discuss the crucial dialogue missing from mainstream politics. And what we can all learn about saving humanity by going to a Drake concert, and plenty more. We’ll be right back.

Before the break, futurist and PBS host Ari Wallach explored the impact of dystopian fiction on human progress, and why CEOs must be constantly mindful of their successor. Now, Ari reveals the potential impact of AI’s small group of powerbrokers, and the lessons we should learn from Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project. Let’s jump back in. 

How Drake and culture plays into the future

SAFIAN: So for the show, A Brief History of the Future, you worked with some celebrities — namely soccer star Kylian Mbappé and the musician Drake. What did you feel someone like Drake could contribute to the story you were trying to tell? 

WALLACH: You know, you go to a Drake show… If you haven’t gone to a Drake show, you should go; the North American tour is wrapping up so you have to go to Europe. One of the things that’s very obvious that hits you right away is not just the kind of the positivity of his messaging, which is really there, but it’s a way that everyone is actually in sync with him.

And the music and the emotion. And I wanted to do this, but the producers wouldn’t let me do this. I wanted to pull 20 people randomly out of the crowd and look at their people dilations, because my bet was, you’re going to see their heart rates were in sync, their pupils were dilated in the same way, and we were all kind of together in sync in this.

And so when we think about the role that culture plays and how we shape tomorrow, how humans actually work and want to work together and be in sync together to something bigger, to a higher purpose. 

“Most political arguments are about the past”

SAFIAN: I mean, as I’m listening to you and this, this may be a little bit of a leap, but in some ways, the groups with the most articulated, like fully fleshed out visions of the future are like fundamentalist religious groups that in some ways are trying to create some very confined view of that future, as opposed to one that’s got broader openness.

WALLACH: This is not a leap. We think most political arguments are about the past. I would argue most political arguments are about the future about what kind of future we want to live in. These terms don’t mean anything, but if you look at the far left, or you look at the far right, they often have very articulate views of what tomorrow should look like. More often than not, I find they lack logical consistency in a way that allows all humans to flourish in an open society. 

But what you just raised Is the battleground of this decade by battleground. I mean, a battleground of ideas about where we want to go as a species and as a people and you’ll notice this conversation we’re having is, like, way out.

This feels like, you know, we’re like freshmen in the dorms, like super high on some great weed. But the fact of the matter is, this overly simplistic way of thinking about what’s happening right now is as far from your reading in the horse race politics of how we cover the issues of the day, right?

We’ll talk about who’s up or down in Arkansas’ 9th congressional district and what that means for a house committee. Those are great things to measure, but it’s like looking at the dashboard of the car and how the engine is or isn’t revving without any conversation about where the car is actually heading. It could be going off a cliff. It could be going for a loop to loop. Who knows? Who cares? As long as we’re looking at the dashboard right in front of us at those KPIs of the very short term-istic moment.

Looking at AI through a futurist lens

SAFIAN: So we talked about climate change as one of the challenges we’re navigating today. How are you thinking about technology and AI through this futurist lens? 

WALLACH: If we think about technology as, and this is kind of what this is, obviously I’m quoting, I’m paraphrasing from Nietzsche, right? These are all extensions of man to become more godlike. I actually think it’s not so high falutin. I think a lot of technology is really just to make life easier or to replace our moms, right?

You know, folding your laundry, cooking for you and driving you everywhere. It’s like, a lot of the things that came out in the past 10 years are just doing what I’m doing with my 10 year old son right now.

If we’re building AI to help us find airplane tickets faster, right. Which is where a lot of money or help us sell more ads on a social, whatever. God, what a, what a just waste of brain power. But if we’re building AI, so we can think about where we can be as a species on this planet living in a regenerative, sustainable way on this garden of Eden that we have in this third rock from the sun, that’s very different.

Look, we can feed house clothes and educate. And basically care for every single homo sapien on this planet right now, but we don’t. So if the AI is going in that direction, I’m all for it. That does not seem to be the direction it’s going in, right? It seems to be optimizing for near term business interests within a small group of owners.

Would I like to see a public AI infrastructure like a Manhattan Project, but for flourishing futures? Yes. Would I advocate for that? 100%? Am I seeing that happening in the near term? No.

And unfortunately, we cover AI and I look at what happened with Sam and Open AI. We cover that just like horse race politics. We cover it like, well, who’s up or down in this election cycle? This election will be about democracy in the future of this country in many ways. AI should be taken in the same way in that same like, wow, we really have to focus. We really have to organize and get galvanized.

Again, I’m not saying it shouldn’t be Sam. It shouldn’t be Musk. It shouldn’t be Satya. What I’m saying is we have to have a real conversation about the power of these tools which is very much in the way that Oppenheimer thought about what he built.

This is the same level of power and the ability to both create and the ability to destroy that we’re dealing with and that’s what I took away from Oppenheimer. I was like, wow that much power with one individual one small set of individuals. That’s what we have right now and we’re living through an Oppenheimer like moment, but we treat it like who gets a board seat and which investor got, you know, liquidated from that or not.

And it’s no offense because we’re both in this world. It’s just that journalism is doing a disservice by covering one of the most consequential aspects of our reality today in that way. 

Ask yourself: Am I being a great ancestor in this moment?

SAFIAN: As the folks listening here who want to maybe look at the world in a more futuring way, are there practices that you would suggest that people should try to embrace to be more futuring?

WALLACH: When I went to go and work in Washington, DC, many centuries ago, back in the nineties, the guy I was working with and I was working on a presidential campaign said, “Look, you’re going to be exposed to a lot here in this town, but at the end of the day, can you look in the mirrors or brushing your teeth? And can you be okay with — not only okay with what you did, but but if this was before I had children, if your children saw how you conducted yourself today and modeled their lives off of what you were like today, would you be okay with that?” And when you can no longer say, yes, leave the town or leave whatever situation you’re in, that’s in many ways where this idea of… Am I being a great ancestor in this moment? 

You don’t have to step back and go on a five day retreat with a lot of post-it notes and build scenarios. Just in your questions, it might be a great answer.

And by the way, it’s never simple. I’m in Los Angeles right now. I live in New York. I got on a plane to get here. That’s not the best way of being a great ancestor was taken in an Airbus A321 here. I can tell you that right now. Am I offsetting it? Am I trying to do good things? Yeah. So it’s not, I don’t want to be, uh, holier than thou on this, but you have to ask those questions, right?

Am I being good to whoever’s going to take the CEO seat later? Am I being a great ancestor to them? So the first practice is just asking yourself that very simple question. 

The other one is write a letter to your future self. The research shows that it’s not about receiving that letter, but it’s actually about writing that letter that changes how you think about yourself and your role in future shaping. 

The third one, and this is a, this is, this one seems out there, Ernest Becker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book in the 1970s, The Denial of Death, said a lot of what we do is we deny our own mortality because it’s the scariest possible thing that there is. And in fact, he says, we develop religion and culture and capitalisms and all these isms to deny that very reality that one day will cease to exist.

So it got me thinking, “what role does death anxiety play on how we think about the future?” And it turns out quite a lot because when we did the kind of that we did the bench research on this, when people are forced to think about the world after they are no longer in it, they lock up. They refuse to do it. They refuse to future. What Ernest Becker would say, you can either be death anxious or death aware.

When you’re death anxious, you very much focus on the short term. You very much focus on the lifespan of Bob’s birth to death. Understandably, when you’re death aware, you open the aperture of the decisions that you make for future generations, and you’re not as connected to your own biological death, because now you see your actions within a much larger framework, what we in the West would call ‘legacy’.

But that’s one thing you can do is actually be like, “at some point, I’m not going to be here and that’s okay,” and maybe I’m of such wealth that I can get my name on the side of a building at a university. Great. But that’s not what people are going to remember. What they’re going to remember is how Ari and Bob and Tim and Shelly and Sharon, Rebecca, how you showed up for other people.

That’s probably the biggest thing that you can do, because you’re thinking about your actions as going beyond your own lifespan.

Once you can reconcile yourself to that, you will find that futuring outside of your own constraints of your life becomes much easier and in many ways much more comfortable and in many ways it just gets you more relaxed about where you are in the world because you no longer just connected to you, but to something much greater, much bigger than yourself.

SAFIAN: Well, Ari, this has been great. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this with me.

WALLACH: My pleasure. Thanks. As always great to be in conversation with you.

SAFIAN: Since talking to Ari, I’ve been thinking a lot about the business community’s distraction with short-term incentives. While it’s difficult to balance the everyday stresses of work, with the big picture outlook on future society, I’m inspired to try harder. If there’s ever been a time to pause and reflect on our impact and what we could be doing, however small, it’s right now. As I talk to more and more socially-conscious thinkers, I’m reminded of the massive role that business plays in shaping the future. We can’t solely rely on the government to lead us forward. We all play a part. And I deeply believe that the business world, in many ways, will lead the charge. 

I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.