Ari Wallach

- A futurist, and a quest to lay the foundation for a better tomorrow, this week on "Firing Line."

- I'm trying to get folks to think about the future, not as the thing that we hurtle towards, not a wave that's gonna crash over us, but a thing that we make consciously through the decisions that we make.

- [Margaret] Is the future bleak or hopeful?

Renowned futurist Ari Wallach is out with a new PBS series, "A Brief History of the Future," which invites viewers to see some of the key ideas and technologies that could shape our future.

- [Nat] We have 192 laser beams.

- [Margaret] From how we get our energy.

- Fusion is really the Holy Grail of energy.

- [Margaret] To our food.

- [Speaker] We can make it delicious.

There's so much creativity in the food sector.

- [Margaret] To where we live.

- 3-D printing is a leading contender in in-space construction.

- [Margaret] And even how humans connect with one another.

- The sustainable city is not only better for the environment, it's much more enjoyable for the people that live in it.

- [Margaret] But can we really solve our most profound problems?

- I know how bad things can get.

Right now, things are pretty bad.

But the fact of the matter is, we are making progress.

I'd rather be alive now, anywhere on the planet, in any gender, in any race, than even, you know, 200 years ago.

- [Margaret] What does futurist Ari Wallach say now?

- [Narrator] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Asness Family Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, The McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab, The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. and by Pfizer Inc. - Ari Wallach, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Thank you for having me.

- You're an author, a futurist, the founder of Long Path Labs, which is an initiative that focuses on the future of humanity.

What is a futurist?

- So there's kind of a common misconception, which is a futurist is someone who predicts tomorrow, what's going to happen.

Look, people have been futuring for centuries, right, and in some ways trying to think about tomorrow.

But a professional working futurist like myself, we don't predict the future.

What we do is we study megatrends.

We're almost like anthropologists from tomorrow looking backwards.

So a megatrend is something like demographics, obviously population or climate change, things that have been happening for decades and that will unfurl for decades.

And then we look to see how those megatrends will impact us in the years to come.

And then from that, we start to develop stories, scenarios of what could happen.

And from that, we help people, organizations, countries, governments make better decisions about tomorrow.

- What's an example of a megatrend?

- So we'll look at something very specific, like climate-based migration.

As we look forward, we're seeing hundreds of millions of people over the coming decades who will be moving specifically because of climate-based reasons.

So that's a megatrend we look at.

- You use the verb "futuring."

Why do you make it a verb?

- So more often than not, we think of the future as a noun, as this thing that's out there that we're kind of heading toward.

I think of the future very much as a verb.

It's something that we do.

It's something that we're doing right now.

It's how you say goodbye to your children in the morning, and it's also where you invest your billions of dollars if you're the head of a government.

It's something that we constantly make.

And I'm trying to get folks to think about the future, not as the thing that we hurtle towards, not a wave that's gonna crash over us, but a thing that we make consciously through the decisions that we make.

- You also use the term "long pathing," right?

It's almost as though, by making it an active verb, you're connecting our lives as they currently are to the future rather than as an abstraction.

- So the reason I use the term long path is because, yes, I wanna make it where we are right now and how that connects to the future.

But it's also about connecting to the past, right?

You and I are here because of the decisions that were made by our ancestors.

And so for me, the most important question we can be asking ourselves as individuals, as citizens, as members of society, heck, as homo sapiens is, how do we become the great ancestors our future needs, right?

More often than not, we make decisions through what I call the lens of our lifespan.

We have a lifespan bias.

I'm thinking about what's best for Ari from my birth to my death.

That makes sense.

In Long Path, I'm asking people to kind of step back and step up and think, well, how did I get here and where are we going?

So you no longer see yourself just within the self-contained unit of your own life span, which is, which you need to do day in and day out.

But to actually think about, how am I connected to something bigger that came before me and how am I connecting to something bigger that's going to come long after I'm gone?

- You're the host of a new PBS series, "A Brief History of the Future," which has debuted this week.

Congratulations.

- Thank you.

- Which explores all the topics that you've just described: how can we become great ancestors for future generations?

And you describe in the series how we're at an "intertidal" moment.

What is that?

- So if, you know, in the marine biology sense, an intertidal is that place that many of us have been to if we've been to the ocean's edge.

And it's that piece of land that sometimes is below water and sometimes is, you know, above water.

That's called the intertidal zone.

But as a species, as a global planetary civilization, it's my belief that we are in that in-between zone, right?

We are kind of coming at a point where we're at the tail end of enlightenment, rational, logos-based thinking.

And a lot of the institutions that were built over the past couple hundred years that have served us really well are no longer serving us as well.

At the same time, we're not exactly sure what's coming next.

So, the old world is kind of dying.

The new one is yet to be born.

That's an intertidal.

The intertidal, obviously, if you've been to the ocean edge, is a place of chaos.

It's also a place of mass creativity.

And so that's the point we find ourselves in in terms of technology, demographics, climate change, synthetic biology, world powers colliding.

We're in that in-between place.

- Give me some examples of what about the old world is failing us now.

- So, I mean, look, we'll take a very classic example of voting here in America.

You know, why do we vote on Tuesdays?

One of the reasons, actually, the main reason we vote on Tuesday is it took about two days for a landowning male to go from church on a Sunday to ride to the nearest town to vote on a Tuesday.

So how we vote and when we vote is based on how long it took us to get to the big town from horseback.

So our institutions, how we... Let's take education.

You know, I have three children.

Every hour, a bell rings and they move to a different subject.

Why?

Because education, as we moved from 97% of Americans being based in agriculture 120 years ago to deep urbanization, our entire education system was predicated on the assembly line, much how we built the Model T. And if you've ever looked at an assembly line, every few minutes, a bell rings and they move the car down the assembly line.

That's how we've actually built education as a system.

So from education to citizenship and voting, to even how we run our legislators, those are all based on kind of older ways of doing and thinking that don't make sense so much in this day and age.

- In the series, you say humanity is at a crossroads.

How do you describe that crossroads?

- Look, we have seen civilizations, empires, rise and fall, but it's always been kind of localized.

It might be Machu Picchu.

It might be the Mayan.

It may be dynasties in China.

But for the first time in human history, what we do or do not do over the next five to 10 years will not only impact future generations, but really, planetary future generations.

Let's take artificial intelligence as an example.

The coding that we're doing right now in AI in many ways is immortal, right?

So how we decide to build our AI machines, our immortal engines of creativity, will decide and dictate how we run our societies and civilizations for decades, if not centuries.

We can say the same thing about climate change.

We can say the same thing about genetic engineering, right?

Synthetic biology went from, you know, how do we kind of work with DNA at the individual level to now we're doing germline engineering.

So it's no longer about kind of fixing me and my disease right now, but that actually gets passed on, and can go on for centuries.

- How should we think about the implications of those decisions?

- So right now when we make decisions, it only affects me or me and my own life or me and my own life span.

When we're sitting down and we're thinking, "How are we going to build this large, "you know, language model, this AI system?"

or, "How are we gonna genetically manipulate "this cancer patient who may go on to have kids?"

it's no longer just about them, it's about the generations to come.

- But to your point about these new technologies and this crossroads, a lot of people are worried.

How should we be thinking, then, about these new technologies and their possible negative implications?

- Well, we should be thinking about new technologies both in terms of their negative implications and their positive implications.

And so what's really missing, and we get at this in the show, is we actually don't have a telos or an ultimate goal of what we want to get to.

In some ways, we're like a ship trying to navigate without any idea of what our destination is.

- You mean we as humanity?

- We as humanity.

When I say we, I mean homo sapiens.

The implications of these decisions that are right here in front of us that are being decided within a few miles of where we're sitting, or in Silicon Valley or down in Washington, D.C., or in Brussels, these are no longer temporally isolated just to this moment, right?

We tend to cover politics and policy almost like a horse race.

Like, well, who's up or down?

Which is fine and understandable.

But really, for the first time, what we are doing or not doing, how we're thinking about how we use artificial intelligence, how we use technology, how we talk to one another, those have long-term ramifications.

So what we're asking people to do, what I'm asking people to do is step back and say, "Okay, I understand in the short term "what this technology might do "is it might improve the bottom line in the short term, "give me better quarterly earnings."

That's understandable.

But what we really have to ask ourselves and our leaders to do, is step back and say, "Now, how is this going to impact future generations?"

And you start making very different decisions when you see your decisions no longer just about impacting you or your lifespan, or your kind of shorter temporal horizon, but impacting the future of humanity.

- You talk about how humans have a negativity bias, that inherently we are always thinking about what's around the corner from a fearful perspective.

- Yeah, I mean, look, the negativity bias served us well.

So if Margaret and Ari were walking around 20,000 years ago on the Serengeti or, you know, the plains, what we were scanning for were bad things, 'cause bad things could hurt us and they could kill us.

That is built into our underlying homo sapien hardware.

That's our negativity bias.

That being said, in an intertidal moment, we have to ask ourselves to both recognize that that negativity bias is there, but then look for something different.

And what that different is, is a sense and an idea of what it means to flourish, what it means to get things right.

It's not that we don't know how to do it.

It's just that it doesn't come to us right away.

So what's so important in this very moment is when we're when we're reading the headlines, you know, we're watching the news, going about our daily life, sure, look at the, look and learn from the negative things.

But at the same time, figure out, what is it that we actually want?

We're so used to being negative, 'cause in some ways that's how we're wired.

But it's not the only way.

- When you look at some of the major challenges facing us in the moment: climate change, AI, there are those who worry that we are already past the point of no return.

What do you say to those people?

- Look, I grew up in the climate movement, the environmental movement.

And so for a long time, the images that resonated to me was a polar bear on a small piece of ice.

And I was like, "Oh, that's it, everything's over.

"You know, I'm going to prep for the coming apocalypse."

The fact of the matter is, and we do this over six episodes of this show, is we are finding people who are building better tomorrows.

Sure, things are not in the ideal state on this planet across a number of indices.

At the same time, if I was to be born any time in the homo sapien arc of history to this point, I would want to be born right now anywhere on the planet.

The fact of the matter is, there are more people trying to do well by this current moment than there are people fighting against it.

The headlines will say, oh, these people are against democracy, you know, fossil fuels.

Those things are all actually very true.

But what you'll see over six hours, 72 different interviews, our people are saying, "Yes, I get that.

"But here's how we can use technology.

"Here's how we can use new ways of thinking "about spirituality and psychology "and education and democracy "and governance and citizen participation "to get us to better tomorrows," as opposed to just accepting the doom and gloom narratives that are foisted upon us day in and day out.

- One of the images and metaphors that the series begins with is Cordoba, Spain, and the building of a mosque over many centuries that became a cathedral, continuing to be built on top of that mosque over many centuries.

Talk about that metaphor and how that applies to how we should think about the future now.

- So we call it cathedral thinking, which is biased towards a certain way of thinking about it.

We can call it mosque thinking or synagogue thinking, if you will.

But really, cathedrals, starting in the Middle Ages, often took 100, 150, 200 years to build.

So the people who were literally building these cathedrals and designing them and laying the cornerstone knew from the get-go they would not be around to see them finished.

We no longer have that way of thinking.

The core argument of the show is, how do we move to cathedral thinking in everything that we do?

How do we build for tomorrow in a way that recognizes that we may not be here to see that fully executed, but we're okay with that because we know we're actually building something better that will last beyond us?

- Where are we building cathedrals today?

- Where we're doing it right now...

So we visit a fusion laboratory in Livermore.

- And here the laser beams come into the chamber.

The laser beams are what drives our experiments.

- And what the scientist said to me is, look, the work that she's doing right now is based on the work of a scientist who's no longer with us, and she's continuing it.

So I think in massive infrastructure projects around energy specifically, we're building those cathedrals.

But it's very difficult, more and more, to find cathedral thinking manifesting today.

- Is Elon Musk building cathedrals with his rockets and his exploration, his intention to get to Mars?

Is that an example of cathedral thinking?

- Look, whether or not someone agrees with everything that he's doing, the fact of the matter is, thinking about how we live over the coming centuries is cathedral thinking.

So whether you agree with it or not, building rockets that will eventually get us to Mars is a great example of cathedral thinking.

- Elon Musk wants to go to Mars as a contingency plan for Earth, right?

There are Bill Gates, Sam Altman, individuals who are concerned that we will self-destruct here.

What is your response to that thinking?

- Look, I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

I think it's great that people are building alternative plan Bs.

But the fact of the matter is, we can get things right here, and we should actually get them right here first.

So I'm all for us going to Mars.

But I think to myself, what are we exporting to Mars?

How do we export the best version of humanity to Mars?

So if we were to take a thousand people today and send them to Mars, that'd be cool.

But I'd like to think that, as a society, we can spend as much money on moral progress as we do on software and hardware progress, and we can do those at the same time.

- You set out to find people building a better future, but not utopias.

You use this term "protopias."

What is a protopia?

- So Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of "Wired Magazine" and kind of one of the greats of Silicon Valley, came up with this term many years ago, called protopia.

So we know dystopia, it's a place we don't want to be.

It's where everything falls apart.

Utopia is actually a dystopia in disguise.

Every utopian story eventually collapses in on itself.

Protopia is that idea of tomorrow where we're making progress, but not everything is perfect.

So we talk about protopian thinking throughout the show because we want people to recognize that we're not saying, "The future is gonna be perfect.

"Look at all these examples.

"This is how everything is, you know, "this idyllic Garden of Eden."

What we're seeing is, day in and day out, if we make things 1% better every day, every year, every decade, and we know, compounding interest, that actually adds up, that's protopian thinking.

Where we are today versus where we were 50 years ago, it's a sense of protopia.

And part of what we do in the show is we visit people who are building kind of microcosms of protopia.

We like to say protopia is already here.

It's just unevenly distributed, right?

So there are elements of projects that are happening right now that we visit around the world that are new ways of thinking and doing across a whole spectrum of activities that are better than we have today, but not perfect.

That's protopia.

- Who were some of your favorites?

- One of my favorites was just outside of Amsterdam.

We visited this community called Hogeweyk, which is called, basically, a dementia village.

And what they've done at Hogeweyk is they've decided that for elders of their community who are going through memory care issues and early onset dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases, instead of putting them in kind of locked hospital wards, how we do it here in the US, what they realized is they could actually build almost a safe and secure village that has a grocery store, a restaurant, and a cabaret.

And these people could live in communities together.

And what they found is there was a 80% reduction in the need for anti-anxiety or antidepressant drugs.

People were just happier.

So going to Hogeweyk gave me a glimpse of a future where we center humanity, where we center those who are the most vulnerable, right?

So I love the technology.

I love the things that we visited around the world.

But it was seeing how we can think differently that changed my conception of what is possible.

- Climate comes up a lot.

It also is one that has a lot of, one of some of the most innovative thinking, to my mind.

In 1997, William F. Buckley Jr., the original host of "Firing Line," hosted a debate about whether environmentalism had gone too far.

Listen to this back-and-forth between Governor Jerry Brown of California and Jerry Jasinowski, who is the head of the National Association of Manufacturers.

- When 170 nations in Rio in 1992 all agreed that the emission of greenhouse gases should be reduced to 1990 levels, that's not happening.

Neither Clinton nor the Republican Congress gives a damn, and are continuing this incredible creation of alteration in the natural environment, and we are part of life itself.

When we destroy part of that web, we are jeopardizing it.

- I would just say that the kind of things that the companies I represent do and private capitalism in the world is a big part of the answer if we use it sensibly.

Don't you agree that there ought to be a partnership between those of us who are interested in growth in jobs and the environmental progress?

- "Don't you suppose there ought to be a partnership "between those who are interested in the growth of jobs "and environmental progress?"

That was the tension in 1997, right?

It was either or.

- Yep.

- How has that question evolved in the last 30 years?

And what do you see as examples in your series to how that question's been answered?

- Look, there's a kind of false binary is something that we deal with all the time, both in politics and in media.

And a lot of what we're trying to do in this series is move past that.

And so I visit Evan Baer at Ecovative, which is a company just up north here, from New York City.

They're working with mycelium and with mushrooms.

- Mushrooms are uniquely situated to save the world.

- [Ari] And what they're literally doing is they're using mycelium, which is kind of the bedrock of mushrooms, yes, to create packaging, but now also leather and furniture and eventually building materials.

- [Margaret] And bacon.

- [Ari] And bacon, and bacon.

In the episode, I tried the bacon and it was tough-- - [Margaret] You said it tastes like bacon.

Did it really?

- Well, yeah, but what you don't actually see on the show in the final cut that makes it to air is I go, "With all excuses to my rabbi, this tastes just like bacon."

So what he's showing is that there is room for jobs and growth.

And by the way, growth doesn't just mean more growth.

You know, we grow as individuals morally, philosophically.

And so it is important for people to understand that there is going to be a role for them in this kind of transition intertidal economy.

- For you, what is your goal and hope for the series?

- So many things.

So for me, my goal and hope is that people take the future seriously.

It's no longer just this thing that's out there.

But they realize that the decisions they make are going to impact us, right?

There's a term that we use in the show called the "official" future, which is, you know, it's gonna to be monorails or jetpacks or it's gonna be doom and gloom.

That's important.

It's important to have an idea of where you want to go.

But if you become totally constrained by that, you lose a sense of agency, the ability to think about different tomorrows.

So my goal and hope for the show is that people will have a renewed sense of agency, of hope and of awe for what tomorrow could bring.

- What gives Ari Wallach hope?

- Oh, what gives Ari Wallach hope are two things.

One, as a former kind of academic, it's history.

I know where we've come from.

And again, not everything is perfect.

- The futurist gets hope from history.

- 100%, 100%.

I read history.

I know how bad things can get.

Not that long ago.

Right now, things are pretty bad.

But the fact of the matter is, we are making progress.

Again, I'd rather be alive now, anywhere on the planet, in any gender, in any race, than even, you know, 200 years ago.

Look, 200 years ago, if you slipped and fell and you got a cut, you probably died.

Now I run to the drugstore and I can put some cream on it, and I don't die from that.

So we've actually made progress in multiple areas.

The other thing that gives me hope is my children, right?

In high school, I ran the 100, I was on the track team, shockingly, and I ran the 100 yard dash.

And I used to think, well, that's what life is all about.

You know, the starting gun goes off, you run, you break through the tape, and then you're done and you die.

And then I realized, when I had children, that that's actually not the case.

What it really is, it's a very long marathon where I'm actually holding a baton that I took from my parents, and that I will give to my children.

And I already see, as they're growing older, teenage daughter, a 10-year-old son, they're starting to reach back for that stick, and the way they're reaching back isn't through a fear of tomorrow, but it's with a hopeful lens of what they and their generation can do so that one day my great, great descendants, their children, and their great-great-descendants will look back on what we did, the decisions that we made to point us towards human flourishing as some of the most consequential decisions of our time.

And that's what gives me hope, 'cause I can see that they're already starting to think like that.

- Ari Wallach, congratulations on the new series.

- Thank you.

- We look forward to enjoying it.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

- Thank you for having me.

- [Narrator] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Asness Family Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, The McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab, The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. and by Pfizer Inc. [bright upbeat music] [bright upbeat music continues] [upbeat tune] [soft music] - [Announcer] You're watching PBS.