C (9:22)

Hello there, Mike, Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

B (9:24)

Absolutely. It's very important to note and I don't have a copy to hold up, but if I did, it would be this bubbly green font. And I take it that you selected that because the future is always rendered in purple and blue and you want it to have the exact opposite of that kind of washed out, cliched future imagery.

C (9:46)

Well, one part of that is true, that the future is always rendered in purple and blue with some sparkles, usually at the moment. But I can't take much credit for the COVID that was designed by the wonderful Rodrigo Corral, who's a highly esteemed book designer and graphic designer all around. But yeah, I wanted to try and avoid some of the usual tropes of the kind of book about the future that you might expect somebody like me to write.

B (10:09)

Yeah. And why would. When, I don't know, maybe this is true, maybe this is not. Maybe a publisher approached you and, and I would imagine they'd say something like, oh, the guy from Google X, the guy who designed loon, if you could put your thoughts down and maybe we'll have a blue and purple book, but people will buy it because they'll be so jazzed to find out about all these great new inventions that you have in your brain. I don't know if that was the pitch, but that's not the book. And tell me why you didn't want to write that kind of book.

C (10:40)

Yeah, it's a good point, I think. So I left Google X in 2023 and I just had a lot, like I've been working in the future space for 25 years or more and just had a lot of stuff silted up in my brain. Lots of half thoughts, lots of little Half ideas. And I've always found writing a good way to get those things in order. And I think I never sort of set out to write a book, it just sort of happened. The ideas got longer, the paragraphs got longer, they turned into chapters and eventually we had something book shaped. And I think when you meet somebody who says they're. I mean, I don't use the term futurist but if you meet somebody who is a futurist, there's typically two things that people expect from a book like that. One is either some form of manifesto or making a case for a particular type of future, or this is what we should be doing. The second is more of a sort of methods book with some sort of internal diagram or system that you can scroll on a whiteboard at work and say, here we go, we're doing futures today. And here's my five step method that I can, you know, gush about on LinkedIn or something. And I deliberately didn't want to do that. I wanted to take a step a bit further back and just talk about the process of thinking about the future. Like what goes on in our brains and why do we reach for certain things and you know, we can talk a little bit about why I think that's important, perhaps.

B (11:58)

Well, the book or the idea where you list five things, thought, starters, insights that you have gleaned from your decades long career, that is definitely the sort of thing that businesses want from you. I'm sure you did a version of this training for other people who worked in Google many times and you have that in you. But I want to know why did you want to write it in this format rather than. Well, was it, was it an act of rebellion or was it. I think I'm sensing that there is a. Just having read the book that you critique that format, that, that other way of doing it where I'm going to give you ways to think about the future and you're going to be inspired and you're going to come back because I've unlocked in you some ability to imagine that you didn't imagine before. I sense that there's a critique in that way of thinking that that is how the future actually comes about.

C (12:57)

Yeah, that's a very astute observation, Mike. I do like to push back on status quo. I find that, you know, aside from the fact it's quite fun, I do find that a provocative and useful thing. But maybe the reason why I'm interested in doing this book right now is because I think thinking about the future is more important now than perhaps it ever has been. And I mean that because we're sitting on top of just this massive pile of change and we're all sort of struggling to conceive of what the future might hold because change feels like it's coming faster and in greater magnitude than it ever has in the past. And so I wanted not to put just another, you know, another book with a wibbly, wobbly arrow and a light bulb on the COVID sort of saying, this is the future that's coming and you need to be prepared. Or here's my method, right, Because I think we need a reassessment actually, that none of us. I'm a designer, I've worked in tech, but none of us is particularly good at thinking about the future. And what I mean by good is rigorous, well balanced, detail oriented, tenacious, long termist. I just don't think we don't learn how to do that at school. We all tend to find ourselves falling into one of these four pots that have isolated and sort of ignoring or diminishing the other three. And I think we're all living in the sort of accidentally planted time capsules that our previous generations just sort of dropped on us and we're dealing with those things now. And I think there's this feeling that we need to stop doing that and we need to start thinking more rigorously about the future and what we might be setting in motion. And so I wanted to not say the future I desire or here's how to do it, but just to start and crack open that conversation a bit and saying, hey, this is a skill that none of us are particularly adept at.

B (14:43)

So could is the realm of the designer, let's say, or could is the realm of the. The inventor should. Is the realm of perhaps the philosopher, the ethicist might. This might be the realm of the actuarial expert. And don't. Is the realm of the skull than. The skulls could come from academia or could come from our politics, religious portions of our society. Tell me about how they all interact with.

C (15:15)

Yeah, I mean there's obviously 80,000 words worth of detail here we could go into. So I will skip through them. But yeah, you're right, I think there are these. What I want to be really careful about here is saying one is better than the other. They each have their own benefits and they each have clearly their own drawbacks. And I think the point that I'm trying to make here is they're perhaps representative of caricatures that sit in the corner of the map and by pulling out those caricatures, we can perhaps understand the territory a bit more. And so whenever we find ourselves talking about the future, we can start to say, oh, hang on, am I being a bit shouldist here or am I being a bit mightist here? And maybe I should. Yeah, I need to sort of broaden my approach. Or more importantly, actually is I want the general public, everybody, to sort of become a better critic of the futures that are pitched to them and shown to them and sold to them and say, hang on a second, this feels just like a piece of strident don't futurism. And what I want to hear is more like, well, what should we do? Or what might we do? Or what could we do? And so drawing out these, these pots is not to say this is the one I think is best. It's just to say I think these extremes exist and, and we need to be aware of where they're good, where they're bad, where they come from, and, you know, when we might find ourselves doing one more than the others.

B (16:26)

You write a lot about the effect of sci fi and sci fi imagery in convincing us what the future will be like. Of the sci fi images of could, should, might and don't, which ones do they mostly play with?

C (16:41)

I think I define could as very, very driven by science fiction. Don't has some science fiction influences too. You know, things like Frankenstein and Brave New World and Handmaid's Tale are sort of pieces of science fiction that tread into dystopia and places we don't want to go and things we don't want to happen. But I think when I talk about where was Day?

B (17:01)

Where'd you put David Bowie in there? Which chapter was he in?

C (17:04)

I can't remember David Bowie being in there. Good point. I think where I would classically say, like when I. When you type something like future or futuristic into Google Image search, you get a lot of what I call could futurism out of there, which is very sci fi inflected. The same sort of humanoid robots, the flying cars, the kind of crystal cities, the imaginaries of science fiction come through very strongly in there. And it's what we also see at things like ces, you know, the Consumer Electronics Show. It's what we see from our kind of onstage futurists at conferences, these big, bombastic, energetic, sci fi inflected, ambitious versions of the future. The challenge with that kind of work is it's very heroic, as is sci fi. It pitches the future sort of over there somewhere rather than an evolution of the present. And it therefore feels like sort of fantasy or, or advertising, even sort of this aspirational future place that somebody has presented to you. And the challenge that I have with a lot of good futurism is it's incredibly repetitive. It seems to pride itself on its imagination and its sort of bombastic ambition. But if you go to Google image search, I encourage anyone to do this right now and go type the word futuristic or the future. It's a really sort of repetitive, homogenous purple and blue flying cars, you know, future cities, scenes from Blade Runner, glass towers. Yeah, it's the same sort of stuff and it's very.

B (18:28)

And in very thin steeples with birds flying around the upper heights.

C (18:33)

It's very, very repetitive which sort of runs counter to it sort of. It presents itself as this ambitious future visionary stuff. And I think one thing to mention as well is having been around Silicon valley now for 13 years and being in tech for 20 plus science fiction and science fiction imaginaries have really found themselves deeper and deeper in the kind of law and ethos of big tech companies. So I used to work at Google X, all of the meeting rooms were named after sci fi robots, for example, like R2D2 and HAL 9000. Small things, but they nudge a culture and say this is what we care about and this is what we think is important. Microsoft's assistant is called Cortana, which is a character from halo. You know, OpenAI named their recent project Stargate after the Roland Emmerich sci fi movie. So these sorts of. And obviously Elon Musk is a huge sci fi fan and his rockets are called Falcon because, you know, Star Wars. And I find that this actually represents a sort of substitution for real deep, rigorous original thinking. And I've been in meetings with scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors who when we're talking about the present day, they want very, very detailed empirical thinking, actual facts about whatever it is we're dealing with on the table. But as soon as the conversation moves into the future, they start mentioning the Jetsons and Minority Report and the Matrix. And it's this sort of this gap that really troubles me about could futurism this like fantasy land of sort of futuristic sci fi imaginaries.

B (20:04)

I've thought about this so much, but one thing I didn't think about until you just mentioned it. There must be Dozens if not 100 employees of Google named Dave. And when that guy gets assigned to the HAL 9000 room, I mean it must be hell for him. I mean everyone making the Joke. And I'm sorry, Dave.

C (20:21)

I was on Spotify the other day. Its Star wars soundtrack came on and the progress bar turned into a lightsaber. Again, these are just small little witty things, but it sort of nudges culture. If I ask my Google home outside like a question about HAL 9000, it'll give me a sci fi inflected answer back. That's sort of an Easter egg programmed into these things. And so this culture of science fiction is sort of a misreading of science fiction too, which, which doesn't actually aim to predict. It aims to sort of deal with the ethos of where we might be going and the mythology of technologies as opposed to saying this is a brief.

B (20:56)

You know, it doesn't aim to predict. But I've always heard that sci fi writers, because they're not working on a linear assignment, are actually in some ways better at predicting than futurists. Robert Heinlein has a pretty great track record from everything from, you know, cancer cures to microwave ovens.

C (21:14)

Yeah, I think I'm. I'm a prediction skeptic, I think. And I think, you know, I grew up. So this is, this is maybe a nice segue into what I call should futurism, which is built around this knowledge of this belief in a. In a. A destination or a truth somewhere out there in the future. And we used to use animal entrails and eggs and any, you know, following the stars. And I grew up. Nostradamus was everywhere when I was a kid. I don't know why, but his predictions were everywhere. Seemingly like they pretended.

B (21:44)

They pretended he had a great track record. He didn't. He was just vague.

C (21:47)

And I think, I think that that version of prediction, you know, when people meet me and they find out what I do and sometimes like they hear future or whatever in my bio and the first thing they want. Well, the first thing they assume is that I adore science fiction. The second is they want a prediction. What's happening? What's going to happen here? What's this going to do? And I think people that make predictions often make an awful lot more than we know. And we just focus on. On the ones that hit the bullseye.

B (22:13)

That's also true of the don't futurists. There's a lot of Cassandra ism, and she's not always right.

C (22:18)

Absolutely. And I think in more recent terms that we don't tend to use entrails and the movement of stars to make investments at the moment. But what we do use is, you know, the the world of kind of corporate strategy, we use a lot of that, sort of the taking of historical data and the projection of it forwards to a kind of point in space and say, this is going to happen because this is what's happened in the past. I think we see an awful lot more of that as a. Not necessarily. We don't. We don't frame it as prediction, but it's sort of the same. The same ambition to drop a flag somewhere 10 years hence and say, this is coming and this is where we should be. And I think the point that I struggle with this type of futurism is when the solid line turns to a dotted line, it ceases to be data. It's a story at that point. And yeah, we don't like to think of it as a story, but it is a story because anyone that's following.

B (23:08)

That'S what we are. And we're storytelling animals. And I always thought it would be a good exercise. And you do some of this to ask, well, what. Forget what's going to happen in 2100 or 2200 or to get there, instead of generating our purple and blue cities, ask, well, what did 1800 think about 1900? And then look at what was going on in 1900 and figure out what 1800 got wrong. You take a whole bunch of different dates. What did 1950 think about 2000? There's a lot on the record what they get wrong, why'd they get it wrong? What was the main problem?

C (23:41)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I grew up. 1985 was a pivotal year for me because of Back to the Future. And as somebody that says I'm not really a sci fi fan, that might seem a bit odd, but I feel like that's more of a gadget picture than a sci fi movie.

B (23:53)

And right.

C (23:55)

2025 is 10 years beyond the future in Back to the Future. Yet it feels kind of mundane and ordinary and everyday and normal to me. But because it's sort of piled up over time and a lot of things have remained largely the same. And I think when we talk about.

B (24:10)

That's a very important thing. I love this conc. What do you call it? Accretionism.

C (24:14)

Accretion, yeah.

B (24:15)

Oh, this is what all the future. People don't grapple with that in those big cities of the future. If that's going to be St. Louis, the Ark will be somewhere in that picture and it'll be small to just give scale. But like, what about the whole rest of the city? What about the train station? What about everything else? That was there before. It's not just going to be subject to clearance. Yeah. And the people and the ideas they have and how they go about their lives, the future keeps takes with it the past.

C (24:44)

Absolutely. It's like sedimentary rock. It just sort of piles up and you know, we're living in a world now where I have a phone in my pocket that's more powerful than all of the Apollo space program computation. But I also have coat hangers and keys to the front door and, you know, toilet roll and, you know, all of the normal things that sort of haven't really changed for 20, 30, 50 years. And I think when we talk about the future, it's very easy to think about it as this sort of singular thing, but actually all around it are a billion other things that it will interact with and that will interact with it. So when we see things on a plinth at a trade show, a new future thing, try and take it out of that place and put it in Bob and Margaret's kitchen and think about, you know, the sur le table desk set, whatever they've got next to it and the plant pot and the thing they inherited from their grandparents. You know, that's the way I like to think about.

B (25:33)

Toilets are fascinating. Toilet paper that if you do a. If someone does a sci fi comedy. I've never seen toilet paper of the future addressed. That's fascinating.

C (25:42)

I think there are occasionally pieces of science fiction or future fiction that do this quite well. So Blade Runner particularly is known as being a good piece of science fiction. Yes, it's an interesting story and it's well executed and some good ideas. But I think one of the reasons it succeeds is because it's kept some of the past with it. It rains there, there's garbage, there's ratty old leather jackets, there's bits and bobs that have sort of endured the change. And the same thing with Black Mirror as well. Yes, it embraces a near future world where there's new technologies, but there are still kind of bad dinners, ugly jumpers, like ordinary bedrooms, ordinary things going on. And I think when we think about the future, thinking about it as a grounded, ordinary everyday place with liquor stores and seven elevens and trash, garbage stuff around. I think that's when we start to say all, oh, this is going to be like my hometown. This is going to affect me and people like me.

B (26:35)

Well, not to be overly dystopian garbage and 7/11, but acoustic guitars. Right. I mean, every musical instrument in the future is size noodles in the star wars band but we love the acoustic guitar, the mandolin or the violin. These haven't changed in.

C (26:51)

Yeah, things. Things change but more stuff stays the same.

B (26:55)

Rich people and funders versus poor people and just the people living. Is it actually the case that the rich and the people who are paid to think about the future are the ones who define the future? Because I've never heard a futurist. I've never heard someone who works a 9 to 5 and is middle, middle class talk about a futurist. But I think they have a great say in the future, a greater say than they're given credit for.

C (27:21)

Yeah, and this is something that I'm, you know, very aware of. I'm a white middle aged man, you know I work in this very privileged position and I think typically long term thought about the future has been part of only the largest and most.

B (27:36)

And Nick Foster is an interesting guy. So why am I fading this? Well, to induce you, incentivize you to support the gist at a Pesca plus level. The way to subscribe is to go to subscribe.mike pesca.com you get bonus content. You get ad free content. You get to support the show. Subscribe.mike pesca.com and now the spiel. According to a big story in ProPublica, the Department of Health and Human Services workforce have been gutted. 20,500 workers, that's 18% of the department have left or been pushed out. And as de rigor in these stories, they always say that if anything is an undercount. How about give me an accurate count? Anyway, it's a huge number. And they get into the fine details. 15% of the staff of the National Institutes of health, gone. 16% of the food and Drug Administration gone. The baby formula monitors, gone. And what does it mean? Well, I guess you could say if you're going to steel man the side of the argument that wanted cuts and was in favor of Doge and is pro rfk in terms of worrying about these agencies. I guess you could say that just because they cut staff and just because they reduce the number of and this is a big buzzword, the bureaucrats working inside these agencies. Well you can't prove by the numbers that harm has been done to the world. In fact they would say we're saving the public money and we're pulling the plug on research that shouldn't be done. But ProPublica has some good counterarguments to this. Just through the stats. Take the center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. Never heard of them. But once it was described what they do, I said, I'm glad they're there. They ensure the safety and quality of biological products like red blood cells for people with sickle cell disease, immunotherapy for those battling cancer, and vaccines for everyone. That center has lost 500 people or 26% of its workforce since January. I guess to be very fair to the anti vaccine crowd, you might hear that and say, vaccines bad, good to cut the people who push out the vaccines. Yeah. What about the red blood cells with the sickle cell? I guess you wouldn't have to occupy yourself with that. But there are some elements of the report that just shows that HHS is lying. HHS says they're not cutting scientists, just administrators. ProPublica shows they're cutting scientists. They're cutting scientists in not just the vaccines, the scary vaccines part of the federal government, but they're cutting scientists. They cut 17% of the staff of the national center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. Most of the staff cuts on the center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, most of them were scientists. Now, I just picked one of the agencies within 10 CDC divisions that were cut. I didn't tell you about the national center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health because you might think, oh, those are just bureaucracy. That's why I highlighted birth defects. Cutting scientists who work to eliminate birth defects. Who could be against that answer? Rfk, the hhs, and by extension the government and us. There are more telling details in the story. The food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dimensions so they could take swab samples to test for pathogens. Also a quote from the story. Some labs have been unable to purchase the sterile eggs needed to replicate viruses. And here was one. I'll defer to Apple News on the reporting of this detail.

C (31:57)

Some labs have been unable to purchase mice for vaccine tests.

B (32:01)

They can't get mice. Let us deny them mice. That will advance science and safety. Now listen, if you are of the opinion that vaccines are not safe, is it mice that you really want to deny these vaccine scientists? Aren't mice used as the means to test the safety of the vaccines? Aren't the mice in fact protecting you anti vaxxers? The mice are in a way the last line of defense between nefarious scientists, a huge system and your family's health. What is the theory of the case that taking away mice which are used to test efficacy and safety will make things more safe? Do you Think these scientists, who in your mind don't care about safety, when denied mice are going to say, well, that's it. Can't roll out our vaccines anymore. In your cartoon view of science, are they going to stop their evil ploy only punctuated by bouts of mustache twirling? Are they going to stop all that cost they're out of mice? I don't know. In your cartoon view, maybe the mice own a dog named Pluto and pilot steamships. It's hard to crack the code of this particular narrative. And when denied the mice, anti vax people, you can't imagine there are some decent workarounds for this mice denial. Might the scientists, they all have advanced degrees, right? Might they institute a kind of, I don't know, give a mouse, take a mouse dish. Seven eleven spearheaded that initiative. You don't think scientists could with a mouse? By the way, there's a thing called mousetraps. Mice can be found all over the place if you really try. These are people. You're an anti vax person. What do you think of the scientists? Oh, they work day and night to poison our children. But yeah, when it comes to catching a mouse, that's it. They'll be thwarted. I really don't get it. I mean, you think of these scientists as manipulated by the powerful forces of the pharmaceutical industry. Industry operatives pulling the strings. Ratatouille like. But the marionette manipulation won't go so far as making the scientists acquire mice on the black or albino white market. None of this makes sense to me. Not even by the logic of RFK or someone who is truly concerned that the CDC is on a relentless march to control all of our bodies. First they came for the mice. And I said, well, got to give up my research. Maybe I'll go into crypto trading. Now, just a comment on the entire ProPublica article. It is worth reading. It's very ProPublica. Many ProPublica articles, they document the mountain of evidence, but they don't necessarily present it in the most digestible ways. I know they think they do. Like they spent a lot of time working up a title which has a graphic which if you look at it spells out the word gutted. And the G and gutted is shaped like a microscope. And the D is a mouse with the tail forming the curvy part of the D, but it's not even a color. And I had to look at the word gutted five times to figure out that it said gutted. And then there are the charts. The charts are, I think they're in like two colors. They have small squares. I mean they get to the point, but it's very ProPublica. ProPublica needs to pair with an Axios type organization. Or maybe here's an idea. Hire one of the late night comics about to be canceled to be your public facing information officer. Put the public back in ProPublica, I say because 36% staff reductions in the national center for Complementary and Integrative Health. That just seems wrong to me. But a moratorium on mice that like the cheese, stands alone in the annals of ridiculousness. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the Gist. Astrid Green runs our socials. We need someone else to do that. Get in touch with us at the gist. Mike pesca.com if you know such a person. Kathleen Sykes writes the Gist list with me. Philip Swissgood helps out with that. Ashley Kahn's our production coordinator. Michelle Pesca oversees it all in Peru. G Peru. Do Peru. And thanks for listening.

A (36:25)

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