We've Been Sold a Bad Bill of Goods About the Future

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May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks, and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase, out of my skin, and I just really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Joey Dordano, and on my new podcast, Hope from a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions. Psych! I'm a comedian! I'm not qualified to give good advice! Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant, and recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to me. This is Help From a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help From a Hypocrite Wednesdays on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvaloshian. you've probably heard the term dystopia before. You've seen a dystopian movie or read a dystopian novel. It's a popular genre. But today's guest, Ari Wallach, would like to change that. He calls himself a futurist and social systems strategist. And he believes that at this moment of technological revolution, we need to be thinking positively about our future. Here's Ari. If Sam was here, Altman or Mark or others, I'd say, look, what you are building are in many ways the rails for the next several centuries. What is it that we want to build towards? And in many ways, at least in the West, we have lost a vision of what we want that world to look like. This is not Pollyanna-ish or willfully naive, but it is about opening up a space for conversation about what future we actually want to live in. And Ari spends his life encouraging people to interrogate their own visions of the future, including the tech titans, whose products, like it or not, we all live on. Ari hosted and produced a docuseries 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? So look, we've been sold a bad bill of goods, right? On the one side, we have dystopia, which is a story about collapse. And on the other side, we have these stories about utopia, which are impossible. And so protopia is that place about better tomorrows. It's about thinking about futures that you actually want to live in, as opposed to ones that you want to run from, or ones that you're always worried about collapsing because they're so perfect. So it's really this idea that we think about tomorrow not so much as a destination. The future isn't this noun out there. But Protopia is really kind of directional. It's a verb. It's about making tomorrow just a little bit better than today. But if you remember 7th or 8th grade economics, it's about compounding interest. So even 1%, and that could be from the micro decision layer to the macro decision layer, 1% every day, a little bit better. Eventually, we get into a, gosh, you know, pretty great place. Do you count with the name Protopias? So Protopia was coined by a futurist, Kevin Kelly, who helped start Wired magazine. Kevin Kelly was a true kind of techno optimist, I think. But also a very spiritual, religious man. Yes. I mean, look, the reality is when we think about technology today, it's this kind of overriding, all-encompassing way that we think about a reality. But the fact of the matter is most people are made up of kind of multiple domains. So there's obviously technology is a mega trend. I'm a futurist, so I study megatrends, these big colossal forces that kind of shape how we got to this point and kind of where we're going over the next several decades. But technology in and of itself is probably only about 30 to 40 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 protopies, I won't speak for how Kevin talks about protopies, 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. It doesn't mean you have to believe in a God or a theological component, but very much it's in the realm of morals, which we kind of connect to kind of our spiritual religious side. 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 an english literature major and dickens charles dickens was was he said famously the people must recreate themselves but it was a pun yeah recreation recreation yeah and So talk about recreation, recreation, rehearsal. So contrary to my physical stature right now, I was an athlete in high school and I was a pole vaulter, which is kind of esoteric. So you know what it is. So we're the crazy ones who run down a runway, plant a stick in the ground and throw our, fling ourselves up into the air. And what my coach had us do from day one was to visualize what success is, to kind of create the muscle memory before we actually do it of what success looks like, in this case, not landing on your neck, but actually going over the bar and clearing it. That's the goal of pole vaulting. More often than not, our media, our narratives, when they lean into kind of dystopian depictions of tomorrow are creating these horrific collapse narratives. So going back to pole vaulting, imagine if I sat there and always visualized myself crashing in the bar. That's more than likely what I would do. And so what Protopia allows us to do is rehearse the futures that we want. So in the collection, and we'll talk about it, we go through multiple worlds that aren't perfect. There's friction. There's human messiness. There's drama. But you can see bits of better tomorrows, and we're creating that. And I always try not to use the M word here, which is manifesting, because it has kind of Celestine prophecy. But look, even look at some of the kind of earlier talks that Steve Jobs gave, especially when he returned back to Apple. And he talked about not just what Apple was back in the past and what it was in the present, but what it would be and what would it help people do, which is to create better versions of themselves in the world. So that's great for Apple on the micro level and certain technologies allowed to do this. But now we need stories that help us do that both as individuals, as societies, and as a planetary civilization. I think what you're saying is is very interesting. And it's also a little bit more controversial than it sounds, or at least out of the mainstream, especially in the technology industry today. There's actually a clip I want to play of Mark Andreessen talking recently on a podcast. I want to get your take on. You don't have any levels of introspection? Yes, zero. As little as possible. Why? Move forward. Go. Yeah, I don't know. I've just found people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem. And it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. And you probably know if you go back, Like, before, 100 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like, it's the whole idea. I mean, just all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are, you know, kind of a manufacturer of the 1910s, 1920s. I'm curious your take. Not to put you on the spot, but it's an interesting moment in the technology world where, you know, Mark Anderton, one of the most influential people in the whole Silicon Valley, deploying the capital which is being used to build the future, is saying that he aspires to a zero introspection life. Yeah. I mean, look, Mark has built many amazing things and will build many amazing things. I think for me personally, start there, a life with zero introspection isn't a life where you actually truly move forward. You may move forward in a temporal sense that you will. Yes, you'll be there tomorrow. But the question is, how do we become better people? Right. Again, let's go back to pole vaulting, which I love to do because the last time I did anything remotely athletic, we would have meets. We'd go as high as we could and we would tape them. And we would look at where we had faults and we would try and get better. We would try to iterate. We would try to become better vaulters by having a level of introspection. I think what ends up happening when you don't have an introspection, especially in the realm of technology, and we can take social media as an example and just say, we're just going to move forward. We're not going to look backwards. You will repeat the same mistakes, right? So as a futurist, people always think I live somewhere in the future. I'm thinking about decades from now. Yes, that's part of what I do. But a really large part, I read a lot of history. I see where we've come from, where we got things right, where we got things not so right. And you want to learn from that. The story of Homo sapiens moving forward from coming down to trees to you and I being able to talk across technology like this is we were able to have two things. introspection. How do we get it better? How do we iterate? How do we look back on what we got right and how we got wrong? How do we leave the wrong things behind and move forward? And what we call prospection, the ability to think about the future. The one thing he does get right, though, is that when you talk about the 1920s and 30s in that clip, he's talking about Freud. And a lot of what Freud kind of thought was our emotions and our anxiety and our depression is all about the past, dwelling in the past. What Mark gets right is that was the fallacy of Freud. Our emotions, our anxiety and our depression are actually about the future. We may look back and say, oh, when I had that breakup or all these terrible things happen. But emotions, according to most evolutionary biologists that I've studied or worked with, emotions are really meant to help guide us into the future, to have prospection, to think about the tomorrows that we want. So years right at that point. It's interesting. I mean, I think a lot about as the host of tech stuff, you know, we're living in this moment where kind of the dreams of science and technology becoming true. Yeah. Like, you know, nuclear fusion, maybe around the corner, quantum computing, editing the, you know, the code of life for better or for worse. Baby KJ healed in the womb from a rare genetic disease before he was born. 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 6, 9, 12 months. The discourse is always no matter the consequences, we have to do this now because if we don't, China will or if we don't, our competitors will. Rather than what is our place in history and how will we be read by the future? 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 intertidal is kind of the in-between kind of the interregnum you know the old institutions are breaking they're dying the ways we we think that have been around with us really since the enlightenment at least in the west those are 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 gramsci quote now is the time of monsters. And I'm not saying the tech overlords are the monsters. 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 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 a race against what China is building But at the end of the day we have to think about decades from now what are the systems that we want in place that will maximize human flourishing? That is what I'm focused on. When I meet with tech leaders, these are the conversations I have. I say, look, it's important what you are doing. I understand this is kind of a space race moment. But at the same time, you have to think about the guardrails because there are certain things that you're going to do like pandora's box that once once they're out you can't bring them back in when you talk about yourself as a futurist do you mean like a prognosticator or do you mean like somebody who lays a marker for what the future could be it's more like laying down a challenge almost uh neither so the first so here's the thing is when i whenever i go to a dinner party i always get three questions especially lately uh the first question is how bad is it going to get yeah uh the second question is where should I buy land, which is going to the second one. And the third one is what should my kids study in college? Then I said the next 10, 15 minutes saying, look, there's two kinds of futurists. A vast majority of them who are on stage or screen or whatever are going to are predictive. Here's what's going to happen. I do not predict. My job is really almost closer to a storyteller and saying these are these are different stories of what might happen. These are what we call scenarios in the future. These are scenarios. It's not best case. It's not worst case, it's just likely passed 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 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 and unicorns, Pollyannish. It's not like, oh, my God, everything is solved in 10 or 15 years. again, I'm a protopian futures. I want a better tomorrow. And my job is to be directional in my counsel and in my questioning. You know, I was raised in a home where what mattered was the questions that you asked, not the knowledge that you knew. So that's kind of a very Talmudic way of thinking about knowledge generation and creation. 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. What's the hardest question you've asked recently? What's the hardest question I've asked? I was speaking to a room of older folk and I said, 50 years from now, when either your children or grandchildren or descendants, 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 going to thank you? And are they going to see you as a neutral, passive ancestor or worse, a negative ancestor? Or are they going to see you as a great ancestor? That's a very difficult question for folks who are in a room where they have to kind of make a Sophie's choice. But that's always the most difficult question. Do you want to be, you know, an ancestor just because of lineage? Or do you want to be a great one? And what does it mean to be a great one? And there are trade-offs. And the biggest trade-off is short-term versus long-term. Do you want an easy, quick win right now so you can get reelected, you can make your quarterly results, you can get the shiny medal? Or do you want to actually make really difficult decisions that may not be popular in the short term, but are in the best interest of those people 50 years from now looking back? Have we lost our ability to do that? And if so, why? Because I think about that a lot. I think about, if I look back at the last 100 years of history, it seemed like there are many points in the 20th century where it felt like politicians and societies were aligned around making decisions for future benefit. It seems like that framework, at least in Western democracies, does not pertain anymore. 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 3D printed homes. They can put up a home in like three weeks, right? So before there was 3D printing of homes, and you wanted to actually build like a cathedral, like abbeys in England, these projects took 50 to 150, 200 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 atrophied. The ability to do that as atrophied, for examples I already gave, we now have to report quarterly. Look, I met with a CEO a few years ago and I was like, well, look, the real problem is quarterly earnings, like quarterly earnings. He's like, I'm looking at our stock price every few hours and I have members of the board calling me up and we have, I have pension. 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 it is to think long term, change 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 the day after they win. It's the external environment more than it is the individual brain. The hardware system can think long term. We have that ability. We do that as parents. We do that as individuals when we think about, I'm going to get an education. I'm going to get a 30-year mortgage. What we need to do is rethink those larger systems. But you're saying shareholder value, maybe, which arose in the 80s as the concept de rigueur for corporations versus the health of their employees. So part of it is rethinking from shareholder to stakeholder. And my argument is the stakeholders in your decisions are future unborn generations as much as they are the current shareholders. That is a collective systems level belief that we have to shift, which is having been doing this for 20 plus years, there's a lot of different vectors for that. I have chosen to focus on storytelling, media narrative, because culture, at the end of the day, culture drives our expectations. Expectations drives our behavior. Behavior drives and changes systems. So with what we're doing now and all the work that we're doing around Futurific, it's like, how do we shift the culture to shift that external environment that we need to get back to to be able to do the kind of thinking that you said? And I agree, we were doing decades ago that we no longer really do. After the break, what a better tomorrow could actually look like? Stay with us. We talk a lot on this show about protecting your data, especially in the age of AI, and how scary it can be when it's breached. And I want to tell you today about NordVPN, which really covers all the bases when it comes to privacy. I travel a lot, and I use Wi-Fi when I'm flying all the time. And NordVPN makes me confident that no matter where I am in the world, or the sky for that matter, my private details like bank information, passwords and online identity are safe. And it's also possible to switch on virtual location, which allows you to save money by buying flights and hotels or subscriptions or even streaming soccer or football, as I like to call it, from other countries at a cheaper price. And NordVPN doesn't slow you down. It has super fast internet speed, no buffering or lagging while streaming. It is premium cybersecurity For the price of one cup of coffee per month. To get the best discount of your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash techstuff. Our link will also give you four extra months on the two-year plan. And there's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode description box. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-iHeart to get started. That's 844-844-iHeart. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. American soccer is about to explode. The World Cup is coming. Ramos sending on Ernie Stewart. The chip. Score! USA! I'm Ty Bramos. I'm Tom Boat. On our podcast, Inside American Soccer, you'll get the real storylines. I'm not worried about Pulisic. I'm not worried about Balogun. I'm not worried about McKinney. My only concern is what happens in the back. The biggest decisions. You're going to look at stats and numbers. He has no shot at making this World Cup team. and the truth about the U.S. national team. It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals. The World Cup is almost here. Experience it all with us. USA! USA! USA! Listen to Inside American Soccer with Tom Bogart and Tab Ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast. And for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill. and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Jud Brewer about anxiety and John Hirshfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How practically did you build your place of influence? I mean, the Brief History of the Future documentary was incredible, and it was co-produced with Drake and Kylian Mbappe. And Catherine Murdoch, too. And Catherine Murdoch, who's your partner on Futurific. I mean, you mentioned some of these names like Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others. I have a feeling that you do spend time with some of these people. How have you, as a, I mean, I guess as a modern philosopher, as it were, how have you kind of penetrated these worlds and got people to listen to you? Well, I don't know. It's one thing to hear. It's another thing to listen and to integrate it. So I can't, I don't know. I've never done like post facto interviews and say like, do you believe this? Or are you listening to it? look the way I see it it's my role to come into any conversation with with two things aligned um my head so that means I do the research and I 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 the state of the art and also like your heart has to be into it you have to believe it you have to want a better tomorrow and a lot of this came about in my upbringing. Look, my father was born in the 1920s, lost his entire family in the Holocaust, fought with the Jewish underground, was a Nazi hunter after the war, was anti-Fa before it was a thing. And on the other hand, my mom was an artist and was a student of Buckminster Fuller, kind of one of the original architects and what I would consider pragmatic protopian futurist. 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 going to want to be with someone who can speak to them in that way, but not in a way where they want something out of them. So in every room that I walk into, I'd like to think whether or not they listen to me, like I don't need anything from this room. Like I was an entrepreneur. I'm not self-made. I can't retire, but I also don't need more. I just need folks to be able to listen to difficult questions, have a dialogue and think about where is it that we want to go and to wrestle at that level And surprisingly or not a lot of folks want to have that conversation but it difficult for them to find folks to have that conversation with them because most folks want something from them. My grandfather was born in around 1920 in Western Ukraine and so experienced the horrors of the Second World War and ended up as a refugee in Britain. I often think about his story, particularly when I'm feeling overwhelmed or down or other things. I think, my goodness, it could be a lot worse. So I kind of bring his resilience with me. But I also, frankly, think my father had a very traumatic childhood at his hands. And that was also something I carry with me. For you, it's not your grandfather, it's your father. My father. So my father, who passed away when I was younger, because he was 50 when he had me, was of a generation where you didn't talk about traumas and difficult things. You just kind of pushed it down inside. My daddy smoked cigarettes and ate a lot of ice cream. That's the way he dealt with it. The reality is we cannot see ourselves as kind of a singular entity in the world. We often think of ourselves as from our birth to our death. That's the way we kind of think about it in the West. But really, we need to see ourselves as part of a much larger transgenerational chain. We talked about it earlier. I realized in my 20s that the kind of that trauma and the pain that my dad had that in some ways he didn't work with. 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 the people that I work with. That's the work. The work isn't just, you know, woe is me and I'm going to just throw crap out there. it's like, whoa, I got some stuff from the past. I'm going to, as we say, debug it, figure out what's the right code to move forward. This is before cloud code, right? This is like literally you have to do it on your own or with a therapist or on a rock somewhere. With all your respect to Mark Anderson. Yeah, you're going to debug, but realize there's still some good foundational code. Look, we're 48 hours from my son's bar mitzvah on Saturday. And so I've been thinking a lot about what is it that he's inheriting and what am I passing on to him and what he's 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 I did from the small things to the big things. But maybe more importantly, because of some of the introspection I did and I'm teaching my son how to do and how to work through those emotions, but also think cognitively, intellectually, won't pass on the bad code to those future generations. That's how you become a real futurist. You don't sit back passively and let the future wash over you. You actually design it. And you design it from the micro, from your individual interactions, the kind that we're having right now, the kind that I'll have with the receptionist on the way out, to the big rooms that I'm in, to the situation room, to fancy rooms and conference rooms. That's how we design it. Yeah, you were on Andrew Huberman not too long ago. And one of the things which you obviously focused on is how do we live a better life collectively and intergenerationally? But also how do I live a better life myself? And sometimes those things can be complementary, but they can also be at odds sometimes. Right now, we are bombarded by algorithms that want to not only separate us from each other, but to be honest, separate us from ourselves. And so we need to be able to take the time out and kind of, it's almost like a dopamine cleanse, right? We need to think, who am I? Why am I here? And then the next most powerful question behind that is, who are we and why are we here? And I don't mean that in a religious or a 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 create better selves? So it's a good moment, I think, to talk about the Protopius collection. there are six graphic novels in the collection. What was the motivating spirit behind this project? And what is it? So we realized, Catherine Murdoch and myself, we run Futurific, which is this kind of all-encompassing protopian studio. So whether it's in graphic novel or on TV or film, we want to give people the ability to experience better tomorrows, not perfect, but better, and recognizing that better futures are still going to be messy. There's still going to be tension. There's still going to be drama. Terrible things are going to happen. But the world can be more protopian. 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 kept coming back to really one example, which was Star Trek. And Star Trek is amazing. It's a multi-billion dollar, multi-decade franchise, but we can't rest the hopes and dreams of homo sapiens on one piece of ip so we wanted to create more story you didn't necessarily 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 and really kind of puts great stories out there we developed six what we call kind of one shots they're short novellas short graphic novels each one tells a slightly different story with a tension 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 to pole vaulting, kind of what does it mean to clear the bar? Now, in all of these stories, the outcome isn't always perfect. It's not always amazing. But what we are showing is that behaviors have consequences regardless of the world that we're in. Polis takes place in a floating city many decades from now. And this floating city is amazing. It's basically like the Star Trek Enterprise, but on the water. But when people have read it, these are all out now, and they're coming out in a collection May 26, and you can pre-order on Amazon or wherever you want. People say, wow, I love the floating city. I love the technology. We have Coral Crete and all these really cool things. But what they say is what I really loved was the dynamics of the characters, how they talk to each other, how they were. That's the protopian component. And we have one on basically universal basic income, the purpose project, which is, you know, it's like I love all my children the same. But the Purpose Project I love because it really gets to the core of the conundrum of this moment is when AI takes over all of our tasks, which it will take over a lot of our tasks, what's left? It will never take over purpose, who we are and who we want to be. This gets at that. And then one is about kind of empathic AI. Another is about, I don't give anything away, about a female scientist who through mushrooms basically 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 about tomorrow. Right. And also to other creatives, because we have met with dozens of writers in Europe and New York and Hollywood who are like, well, I don't understand. Is a protopia perfect world? I'm like, 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 the project is allowing people to kind of rehearse better tomorrows without it being these perfect tomorrows. Let's talk briefly about the Purpose Project. I know you don't have any favorite amounts of your children, but on the cover of this one, there's a graphic with unemployment rate, you know, 20-25, 5%, 20-30, 20%. And then it goes up to close to 100% in 2050, which is obviously quite a dystopian thought, maybe. Andrew Yang wrote the foreword, and he's a big proponent of the universal basic income. He said that, you know, a quote from him, as someone who's spent years advocating for UBI, I often encountered the assumption that without traditional work, people would lose their drive, ambition, and sense of meaning. But I believe the opposite is true. What do you believe? I believe what Andrew believes. I think, look, I've caught glimpses of this. The glimpse is when I look at what's happening right now among retired Americans who are deciding, unlike the generation before them, who just want to 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, whether it's poll watching or lobbying. And finally, there's something more important than just the leisure life that gives them a sense of fulfillment. It was they built throughout their lives, the ability to work and be active in the world. And now they're harvesting in their retirement. If you never had that experience, how do you build a muscle? So that is what we get at in this graphic novel. We show that there are going to be ways, and 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 this one somewhat through humor. We are going to have to figure out as a society, how do we find our purpose in a world where purpose is mostly derived from the Protestant work ethic? I am based on what I do and who I am. You know, I was out the other night here in New York City and within 30 seconds at this dinner party, people ask me, well, what do you do? Not like, who are you? How do you find enjoyment? How do you find purpose? But like, it's definitional. I don't fault them for that because sometimes I do that. We are going to have to find a way, homo sapiens, to find how we can contribute to a larger project of being that isn't totally derived from what we get into our bank account and our titled CEO, vice president, whatnot. It sounds impossible, but the one thing that I've learned as a student of history is humans are unbelievably adaptable and we will adapt. It's funny, I'm a Brit. I like to think of myself as a European, although I guess technically I'm not anymore. But growing up in England, it was a sort of taboo to ask somebody, what do you do? Sort of it's a question you can't ask. Rude. And here it's the first question anybody ever asks you. And I have real ambivalence. There are times when I think, man, I miss the fact that you could have a whole dinner party with 12 strangers and you would leave at the end of the evening having no idea what any of them did for work. And then sometimes I think, well, there's a reason why Europe is on the floor and maybe in fact, it's quite healthy to be a bit more identified with what you do. Look, I was at another, I go to a lot of dinner parties right now, so I was at much of the chagrin of my wife. I was at another dinner party with an old friend of mine, Van Jones, who's doing this thing called the Exodus Project, which is bringing together Blacks and Jews to think about how do we rebuild bridges in this moment. There's a bunch of us around the table. We went two and a half hours. I had no idea what anyone did. I mean, I knew what Van did because I see him on TV all the time. But I knew they were fascinating people. I knew what drove them. And the first thing that we did when we went around the table was everyone spend one minute talking about an ancestor who helped them get to where they are today. And then we talked about where are you today? What are you wrestling with? And what is it that you want for the future? Again, this kind of past, present and future honoring the past, but then 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 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? People kind of know the rent, so they kind of immediately hierarchize you. The word 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, 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. The Protopia collection is available May 26th. But also in your work with AWA, part of what AWA does is they make graphic novels that become TV series or films. In fact, you gave a talk in Hollywood in 2024 to a few hundred creatives about basically encouraging them to put out fewer dystopian films. Is there an ambition that some of these stories, when you mentioned workplace comedy, will end up on screen? So what I can say as of today is there's a director already attached to Polis. There's a showrunner for a feature. The Purpose Project already has a showrunner attached, and we are in conversations with all of them, with either actors or showrunners or directors to do all of them. That aforementioned AWA film actually starts filming for Apple TV. It 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 futuristic.com website to kind of not say, don't just do dystopias because dystopias are warnings and there's a purpose for them. But to also think about how do we tell stories about futures 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 doing at Futurific and this, I can talk about this now because there just an article in Vanity Fair is we going to be doing what basically a World Fair in Basel Switzerland in 2028 And what going to make this very very different than your traditional world fair with your country pavilions is we are going to have kind of experiences and zones if you will, where you basically get to actually experience tomorrow, you know, the 2030s and the 2040s. So we want to bring together the possible multiple futures and visions of tomorrow and in Basel, Switzerland, but we're going to be doing citizen 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 then we'll work with the technologists to figure out what do those flourishing tomorrows look like. Was your dad still with us when he saw you become a futurist? I mean, did you talk about your work? No, it's, you know, my father passed away when I was 18 years old and, you know, he was considered this big kind of Holocaust hero, right? Because he fought back. He's a Nazi hunter after the war. Right up until he was about to pass away, I was very focused on going to West Point into the military academy. Well, because when you live under the shadow of a certain person, a big character, you want to follow in their footsteps. And what I realized on his passing with, you know, some therapy sessions and just kind of introspection was, what my father really would have wanted was for me to think about not how do you become reactive in terrible situations, which is usually when you need the military, but how do I use my education, the wisdom that I got from my ancestors and in my schooling and in my work life to think about not, you know, how do we prevent or what would I do in 1940s Europe, but what would I do in 1920s Europe to prevent that? And that's what led me to be kind of thinking about being a futurist that would ask these difficult questions and very interesting rooms to steer us towards the the angels of our of our better nature look we're we're in this intertidal 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 or in a in a project room at an ai company or in the situation room at the I-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 off planet Earth. All right, Wallach, thank you so much. It's the Protopias Collection. It's in stores on May 26th, but you can pre-order it now on Amazon. Congratulations on the project and thank you for joining us. Thank you. After the break, how cutting-edge tech is creating a better future for school-aged girls in Afghanistan. Stay with us. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. American soccer is about to explode. The World Cup is coming. Ramos sending on the Army. Score at the chip. Score! USA! I'm Ty Bramos. I'm Tom Boat. On our podcast, Inside American Soccer, you'll get the real storylines. I'm not worried about Pulisic. I'm not worried about Balogun. I'm not worried about McKinney. My only concern is what happens in the back. The biggest decisions. If you're going to look at stats and numbers, he has no shot at making this World Cup team. And the truth about the U.S. national team. It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals. The World Cup is almost here. Experience it all with us. USA! USA! Listen to Inside American Soccer with Tom Bogart and Tab Ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast. And for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirshfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. We're bringing you something extra today, a real-life example of how people are reimagining the future. One of those people is Alex Thea. He's the CEO of an organization called Lapis. And for 22 years, Lapis has provided high-quality educational materials for kids in Afghanistan in very innovative ways under challenging circumstances. Recently, they developed a new tool. We created an AI chatbot this year called Lala for Afghanistan. We thought that it would be great to try and create a chatbot tutor that could use all of the content that we've created, content on science and math and other subjects, and help Afghan kids 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 school. Since 2021, when the Taliban took over the Afghan government, girls in Afghanistan have been banned from getting education beyond sixth grade. The chatbot was created in response to this vacuum. 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. Lapis set up a studio in Kabul where they film lessons with real teachers. and those lessons then go out over satellite or they can be accessed online via the internet or on the phone. And Lala is meant to be a tutor, someone who can help answer questions in real time. 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 WhatsApp. WhatsApp is quite popular in Afghanistan. And Alex said since launching in July 2025, Lala has been very successful with over 200,000 users and 17 million messages exchanged in support of real learning. So if you were to ask it a simple question like, what is 2x plus 4 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. Obviously, safety is also a top priority. So Alex and his team put several safeguards in place. 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 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. Now, you might be asking yourself, how does Lapis navigate the Taliban in Afghanistan? 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 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. 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 by future generations. I'm Osvaldo Lushen. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by me, Julian Nutter and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrin Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is Behid Fraser and Jack Inslee 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 techstuffpodcasts at gmail.com with thoughts, ideas, suggestions, etc. We love hearing from you. I'll see you next time. podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80 hour weeks and just the first one in the last one out and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I like was just so wanting to like be out of that phase, out of my skin. And I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I told myself can then shape my behavior and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, Tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown if you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole. This podcast is for you. To hear more, listen to Deeply Well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Joey Dordano, and on my new podcast, Hope from a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions. psych I'm a comedian I'm not qualified to give good advice join me and my comedian friends as we riff rant and recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to me this is help from a hypocrite the worst advice from the dumbest people you know listen to help from hypocrite Wednesdays on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts this is an iHeart podcast guaranteed human