The Next 30: A Brief History of our Future Unveiled

My name's Alan Henry,

I'm a special projects editor here at Wired.

This is all about the next 30 years.

And what a great trailer that was, right?

This is the first time it was seen anywhere

except in a very few select offices.

I'd like to bring everybody up on stage.

Let's see, let's start with,

well, we had a VOG or something for them,

I don't know, anyway,

let's go with Bjarke Engels, come on down,

the founder of Bjarke Engels Group.

[Audience applauds]

Yeah, give it up guys, come on.

And then, Catherine Murdoch,

executive producer of this show that you just saw

of the Brief History of the Future,

and co-founder of Futurific.

As well as Ari Wallach, [Audience applauds]

who's the host of our show,

and also co-founder of Futurific.

So yeah, let's,

oh, I should probably sit down,

'cause you guys are comfortable. [chuckles]

So first of all, tell me a little bit

about how the show came together, right?

It's so interesting, because, you know, I work in media,

a lot of people here work in media,

we know that a lot of the most popular stories are the ones

that reveal to people

exactly how awful things are right now, you know?

A wildfire just destroyed a town, or something like that.

And you guys said, you know what,

we wanna do something different,

we wanna showcase the human ingenuity

that is confronting our existential challenges.

How did you guys come up with that idea?

How did you sell it?

Yeah, well, thank you so much for having us.

I mean, I've been working in climate change

for over 15 years, and democracy reform for over six,

and so I'm really very familiar

with the narratives of what could go wrong.

And it's understandable, it's very high consequence terrain

that we're playing in right now,

there are a lot of things that can go wrong,

and it's worth thinking about those worst case scenarios

so that we can make sure they don't happen.

But what I noticed was that there was really nothing

about what happens if things go right,

and there's only so much fear and anger that you can push

before people start to turn off.

We need to have, not just a Pollyanna hope,

but really a path forward to a better future.

And all the things that we're working on, you know,

through philanthropy, and through many of the people I know,

including Bjarke,

there are people out there that are making better futures,

but they're just not highlighted in the media

or in popular culture.

And so, we really wanted to just go out there

and say, this is worth doing.

So Bjarke, one of the people

that they went out to talk to was you,

and you know, I don't think we got to see it in the trailer,

but I got a little sneak peek

of some of the episodes coming next year on PBS.

And some of that

is some of the incredible work that you're doing

to transform the way that we build structures

and think about communities, to make them more,

not just environmentally friendly, but more people friendly.

Can you tell me a little bit

about what goes into that design process of like,

making a different kind of future

than the steel and concrete future that we have today?

Yeah, I mean, I think,

actually, the first project we ever did,

like more than 20 years ago,

was the Copenhagen Harbor Bath,

and that's because the water in the Port of Copenhagen

had become so clean that you could swim in it.

And then on opening day, you see suddenly

all these Copenhageners jumping in the port, and you realize

that a clean port is not only nice for the fish,

it's actually amazing for the people that live there,

because they don't have to, you know,

like drive for hours to get to the beaches,

they can jump in the port in the middle of the city.

And we thought, maybe this is part of a bigger idea,

and we called it hedonistic sustainability,

the idea that the sustainable city,

or the sustainable building,

not only is better for the environment,

but it's also much more enjoyable to live in and to work in.

And that's essentially

what we've been trying to do ever since,

is to try to find examples

where the extra effort that goes

into making a building sort of higher performing

vis-a-vis the environment, or more sustainable,

also makes it more enjoyable and more desirable.

And I think that's the only way

that the sustainable future will win,

if it's actually more exciting and more alluring

than the opposite.

Yeah.

I mean, I live at Harlem, and I can only imagine,

like, I remember when I saw that, and I said,

what an amazing thing that would be, to be able to just,

I mean, this sounds terrible, but,

what an amazing thing it would be

to be able to just jump in the East River,

just go for a swim.

Now, I don't recommend anyone jump in the East River.

If you're in New York City, please don't.

But like, imagine-

But actually, you'd be surprised,

just to contradict you,

is that we're actually working on a project

called the River Ring

at the end of Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg,

right next to Domino Park,

where we're actually creating this kind of loop

with a kayak launch and a beach and a tidal pool.

So- There's a tidal pool.

Even though it sounds like science fiction,

eventually it will be reality, even in the East River.

Oh my God, I'm gonna go swimming the East River.

So in five years please do jump in the East River.

[laughs] I very well may go swimming in the East River.

Ari, talk to me about hosting the show.

Like, you get to meet all of these incredible people,

these brilliant minds

who are trying to make a better world for all of us,

like, it must be inspiring.

I mean, just before we walked on stage,

just listening to that trailer again,

I'm like, oh, well, first of all,

hats off to all of you for making such an empowering trailer

because I mean, you know,

it's hard being on stage up here, guys,

I mean, I'm nervous,

I hear that, and I'm just like, ooh, I'm ready to go.

Like, what's it like working with these people?

Well, first of all, let's go back a little bit

to actually the founding of Wired, right?

We're 30 years into it.

It is our 30th birthday, you know.

30th birthday, so I look,

I went to UC Berkeley, I grew up on Wired,

I was here in the '90s,

and kind of cut my teeth as a budding futurist

going to talks at Global Business Network

across the bay at Emeryville

with Stewart Brand and Peter Schwartz and Kevin Kelly,

and a lot of the folks

who were kind of thinking about what tomorrow could be.

And what I realized over the past 20-plus years

of kind of doing this futuring work around the world

for the UN, White House and other folks,

was more and more I was being asked, not to imagine what if,

what if it went right, like Catherine was saying,

but it was more around risk mitigation,

how do we make sure we are in the right position

if something goes wrong?

And that started off small in the 2010s, and only increased.

And so when I met up with Catherine

and we started talking about the show,

we realized two things.

One, we're missing these visions and these stories

of the tomorrows that we want,

not just the ones that we want to avoid.

And two, we're missing them

because like you said in the intro, more often than not,

we're not just telling those stories,

if it bleeds, it leads.

And so for me it was, yes, I've been doing this work,

I'm kind of an eternal optimist

and very hopeful as a futurist,

but to be honest,

I was starting to lose a little bit of that faith.

And so what this journey did for me personally,

and then hopefully we share it with all the viewers,

is, no, no, no, no, no,

there are lots of folks out in the world

thinking about better tomorrows.

And in many ways,

and this goes back to kind of the founding of Wired,

and what I was doing here in the Bay Area 30-plus years ago,

is, it's in technology, but it's not just in technology.

So one of the things that you'll see in the show

is we don't have episodes like the Future of Food,

or the Future of Housing,

in many ways what the show centers on

is these almost eternal questions of,

what do we want the future of food to be?

What do we want the future of housing to be?

This is what it was like

when I was at GBN in the '90s, right?

Going to these talks.

And so, meeting these folks around the world,

be it in Japan, or India or Morocco,

who are saying, no, no, no, this is what we want clean,

sustainable energy to look like,

here's how we want to share it,

here's what it looks like in a global grid,

like Buckminster Fuller first thought of decades ago,

was empowering, right?

It brings back both for the work that I do,

and also hopefully for the viewers,

a sense of agency and hope for the future,

especially right now

when so many of the stories that we hear and see

and read about the future is one of doom.

Yeah.

That's a really interesting thing, 'cause I want to segue

into this concept of the protopia, right?

With something that came up

in the course of producing the show.

We all know about utopias, we all know about dystopias,

but talk to me about what a protopia is.

Like, I mean,

I imagine a lot of people here get it from context, right?

But I would love to hear what you guys describe,

what that means to you.

So let's bring it back to Wired.

Why not? We're on your stage.

You don't almost think we planned this.

So you know, Kevin Kelly in 2011

kind of put forth this idea of protopia,

and it was this idea of better tomorrows,

not perfect, but better, better than they are today.

And you know, there's a very long kind of philosophical way

of talking about it,

but I'll let Catherine give an an amazing kind of shorthand

that we use in the show for it.

But this is what we wanted folks to see and feel and hear,

at the end of the day,

a lot of the work that we do in futuring

is about possibilities.

And the way you really kind of anchor that conversation is,

if you can't see it, you can't be it.

I know that sounds cliche,

but more often than not, we're not showing people

what we could do in the positive.

And don't get me wrong, I love sci-fi, grew up on it,

but most of the sci-fi that we watch

are images and stories of worlds we do not want.

And so, worlds that we do want are protopias.

I'll let Catherine kind of give you her version of,

in the shorthand. [Alan chuckles]

The shorthand is, a protopia is somewhere

that you would want to actually live,

either you or someone you love,

it could be your children or other loved ones,

but you could envision you or those people in that world.

And, you know, again,

one of the reasons that we got involved in this

was that my daughter came to me

and said she didn't think there was any hope for the future.

I said, What are you talking about?,

you know, I've been doing all of these solutions,

you know about everything that we're working on,

there's so much progress.

And she said, Look at the books,

look at the films, look at the television,

everything about the future is dystopian, it's hopeless.

And that is really what got me thinking

about both what we're telling our young people,

and also, that we needed to change this narrative,

because I knew for a fact that that's not the case.

So we have to start highlighting those things

so that people can visualize a better future

that we can get to.

I would love to hear from you a little bit about like,

you were saying, you've worked on these solutions before,

you've seen proof, and talked to people

who are making actionable, measurable change.

Like, how did that prepare you for this project?

Like, I imagine,

I mean, ideas running through your head all the time,

but like, what stood out to you?

I mean, there's so much,

in a way, we still have too much,

we could do another season very easily.

[Alan chuckles]

And we will be. [Catherine chuckles]

Beautiful, I like that, I love it.

And that's what's so exciting about it though,

you know, I definitely drew on my background

on the climate stuff, on environment,

on circular economy, on democracy,

you know, citizens assemblies and things like that,

there's so much out there that people,

maybe they've heard a little bit about it,

but they don't really know it in depth.

But there's more,

and we learned a lot in the process as well,

and that's really what we wanted,

we wanted to share that with people,

and we wanted to just give that hope.

There's also other elements in there

that aren't just people, you know,

sort of doing philanthropy,

it's actually,

you know, one of the people that we approached for this

who's in it, is Kylian and Mbappe, and you think,

well, why would a soccer star be in a show about the future?

And it's actually really simple,

because when you're an athlete, you visualize success,

you don't have a coach sitting there saying,

you're gonna fail, you're gonna fail,

you're never gonna make it to the World Cup,

you're never gonna go to the Olympics,

that's not what they do, they help you visualize the goal,

and then you plot out a way to get there.

But as a society, we're not doing that,

we are only talking about failure,

and so to us, like, this was when,

and you know, he's so excited about this whole project.

he wants to be part of, not just the show,

but everything else we're doing

with Futurific the studio as well,

so people are really hungry for this type of thing.

That's fantastic.

Bjarke, tell me a little bit more about,

speaking of some of those projects

that exist already, right,

things that people have been working on already,

like some of the other things that you've been working on,

tell me a little bit more

about some of those exciting things,

'cause I think people need to hear

some of that good news, you know?

No, for sure.

Actually, it's funny, we've always been working

with the idea of pragmatic utopia,

which is essentially,

you could definitely compress it into protopia,

because I think, ultimately,

when you are designing something,

you are trying to sort of imagine and realize

the world that you would like to find yourself living in

in the future.

And I think very often,

our role is to try to look and listen

how the world is already evolving,

how certain technologies have already become available.

And I think an example you saw in the trailer

was CopenHill, the waste-to-energy power plant

that we opened in 2019.

And essentially,

it turns the waste of the city of Copenhagen

into district heating and electricity, and it's so clean

that the steam coming out of the chimney is actually cleaner

than the air of Copenhagen, it's beautiful.

So we could turn the facade

into the tallest manmade climbing wall on earth,

it's 300 feet tall,

and we could turn the roof into an alpine ski slope,

which of course, again, sounds like.

Skiing on garbage.

No, exactly. It's like white trash, you know?

But it also sort of makes it so blatantly obvious

that clean technology is not only better

for the environment,

but it creates, in this case, a destination,

and I think one of the main landmarks of Copenhagen today

is a waste-to-energy power plant,

and you can actually alpine ski on its roof.

And what I love about it is, my son is five,

so he doesn't know that there was a time

when you couldn't ski on the roof of the power plant.

Oh, that's wonderful.

So imagine, his whole generation,

their baseline has just been lifted, so if they have to come

with like wild ideas for their future,

that's where they start.

That's where they start, right,

it's gotta be even wilder than that.

So I think in that sense that,

since technology and society is evolutionary,

that each new tool or technology enables

the discovery of even more new tools and technologies,

that there is this kind of almost like,

Kurtzweilian sort of acceleration in innovation

that actually gives us a lot of reasons

to be hopeful and optimistic,

because we are constantly getting cooler tools to play with.

That's fantastic,

and I wanna come back around a little bit

to this concept of empathetic technology,

or empathetic use of technology, right?

There is an episode that has to do with AI,

and you guys are gonna hear a lot about AI today,

I hope you're ready,

but also, like there's a human element here, right?

How can we make these technologies

in a way that services all of us, it lifts all of us,

it provides for all of us?

And like, I'd love to hear a little bit about your thoughts

about using technology in an empathetic, human-centric way,

like how do we drive towards that?

And I don't wanna necessarily say

away from like kind of the current model

of monetization and everything,

but I think there's room for both, right?

We can make technologies that are sustainable enough

to continue themselves, but also support people.

Yeah, and I think that's one of the things

we really wanted to focus on in the show is,

it's not just a show about new technology.

Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum,

you have to have the social systems

that support all of that.

Everything has to function, we have to have conversations

and be able to hear each other,

we have to understand and trust in government regulations

and things like that, and we're not there right now.

So that's part of why we talk about democracy,

none of these things are silos,

they all interrelate together,

and having that conversation is really, really important.

I mean, again, not to give away the show,

and not to inundate you with AI,

but part of it is like, what goes in is what comes out.

So part of what we talk about on this show is,

something that you'll hear a lot about today,

is kind of like training data, right?

And right now, the data that we are training our LLMs on

and whatnot, isn't necessarily the best data.

And so part of what we do,

because of where it's scraping from,

part of what we do in the show, in many ways,

is think about, and ask the question about,

how do we want to train and raise

the next super intelligence on this planet.

And as a parent, I can tell you,

there's a couple of different ways you can parent, right?

And if you want, you can stick your kid

in front of subreddits all day and say,

this is how you should behave when you grow up.

Oh, no. [chuckles]

Or, and we visit a lot of folks,

so there isn't just an AI episode,

but it kind of is a strain that runs throughout,

is how do we find the best places of where we're being human

and connecting as humans, and being humane,

give the visions of what that looks like,

and then have that actually be the training data

for the AIs now and to come.

I'm not giving anything away, that's how we look at it,

that's how come the folks that we choose in this show,

the conversations we have, how we have conversations.

In many ways, look, we recognize,

A Brief History of the Future Season 1

is itself training data.

So how we did the interviews, where we went, who we chose,

who we included, who we brought to the table,

was both important for us, the stories that we were telling,

but for the eventual training data that the show itself is.

Right.

Yeah, 'cause I mean, after all,

the show is eventually going to be part of training data

for something else, and then another project,

and things like that.

Ari, I wanna ask you,

before I kind of get to my last broad question,

I wanna ask you about what it means to, to you,

being a futurist, right?

Because the title being, like a futurist,

can mean so many different things

depending on who has that title.

And also, you know, when I followed you at Instagram,

I noticed one of the things that you say in your profiles,

that you're aspiring to be a great ancestor,

and that really hit me, right?

I mean, what does that mean to you?

What does it mean to like, leave those keys behind

and aspire to a better future?

Look, there's a couple of ways of futuring, right?

I won't bore you

with the long history of futuring in America,

but it actually came out of the US Air Force

and the Rand Institute.

And again, it's what I said earlier,

it's around risk mitigation, really was,

how do we beat the Russians?

It was a zero-sum binary game.

And even scenario planning, which is multiple futures,

was kind of set up in that way.

And so, there's a kind of next generation,

not that there's anything wrong

with the previous generation of futurists,

a next generation of us, who are coming along and saying,

our job isn't to predict,

our job is to give different examples of what futures

could be based on the decisions that we make today.

So in many ways, futuring today is as much about ethics

as it is as keeping up with the latest technology, right?

And being able to ask those questions.

So to me, when I come into a room, be it a room like this,

or in a board room, or a situation room, or a living room,

it's really saying, what is it

that we want to see manifest, and how do we get there,

but not being pollyannish about it?

So using mega trends, and quantitative futuring methods,

and means to help folks make those decisions.

In this show, we talk a little bit

about decolonizing futures, right?

What does that mean?

So in many ways we live,

and I'm taking this from Nils Gilman and Peter Schwartz,

and other great minds that came way before me,

we live in an official future.

Right now, the official future is one

that is very tech-centric, there's nothing wrong with that.

What we try to do on the show though,

is we try to push up against that and say,

the future isn't just technology, one,

and two, the futures, in the plural to come,

are made of different narratives.

And who we bring into the room,

and sometimes we can't bring everyone into the room,

but the job of the future today is to bring

as many different folks and points of view into the room.

One of those, we can think of that temporally

as everyone on the planet right now,

but to be a great ancestor means

you're bringing future generations into the room.

There's a segment that we do in Japan

with an amazing professor,

he does a thing called future design,

and so whenever they're kind of planning

and doing kind of local community policy planning

in Yahaba, but now it's gone global,

roughly 20% of the people in the room will dawn

these golden vests.

And when you're wearing the vests,

your job is no longer to advocate for policy

temporally for yourself today,

but for two generations out from now,

to bring them into the room.

So to be a great ancestor means to make decisions

that are not just in line with the needs of today,

but in lines of different generations to come,

and what will allow them to flourish

in a way that your activity today doesn't take away

from their ability to flourish in the future.

That's fantastic.

Catherine, I want to at least start

the last question with you,

what do you want people to take away from the show?

Like, what is the message?

I think the most important thing for me,

is for people to come away

feeling that they have agency to change the future.

We have this idea that the future is set,

and it's just coming at us fast,

and that's not the case, every decision that we make

changes what those futures possibilities are.

And instead of feeling depressed or doomerist

about the things that are going wrong right now,

I want people to say, oh look,

you know, there's a seaweed farmer,

there's, you know, a death doula,

there's someone doing mushroom packaging,

these are things that I've never thought about,

Maybe I could be a part of that.

And I really want

that if there's one thing we get across,

it's that you have agency to change the future.

Thank you all three of you, thank you so much for this.

Thank you for doing this, thank you for making this show

that I sincerely hope everyone in here will watch,

and also that like, you know, we'll be able to, yeah,

feed to the next super intelligent AI,

who will take care of us all benevolently, [chuckles]

whenever that happens to be.

So yes, thank you all so much.

Everybody. [Audience applauds]

Thank you, thank you Bjarke, thank you Catherine,

thank you Ari.

Much appreciated.