Design Fiction

[00:00:00] Julian: This week on The Futurists, Julian Bleecker. It would be encouraging, like, if we found a way to sort of, like, look at, you know, all the developments in AI, which are expansive and challenging, as looking at AI is like, oh man, this is like, we just, we invented a new kind of hammer. This is actually going to be an amazing tool.

[00:00:21] DK: And I think

[00:00:22] Julian: the more we have stories about the AI kind of breaking loose and then, you know, kind of making our toasters start kitchen fires, the harder it is to sort of imagine the opportunities.

[00:00:37] Robert: Hey, welcome back to the futurists. I’m Rob Tercik with Brett King and the co host chair. Hi, Brett. Hey, how you doing? Awesome. Thanks. The future keeps getting more and more bright. Although here in LA, the future is really, really wet, unusually rainy week here.

[00:00:52] Ted: You needed the rain though. Like it was like a thousand year drought or something, right?

[00:00:55] Ted: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Now we’re complaining about it. Right.

[00:00:58] Robert: It’s so typically Los Angeles, like for seven years we’re begging for rain, then we get seven years worth of the photos

[00:01:03] Ted: of the L. A. River and, you know, it going crazy and trees getting, you know, you know, drawn downstream and stuff. It’s, uh, um, you know, of course a lot of that’s going to get dumped in the ocean, which is not great for L.

[00:01:15] Ted: A. Oceanfront if you’re a surfer or whatever, but anyway. Yeah, that’s probably been the case. Yeah, and also we had snow,

[00:01:21] Robert: uh, weirdly in Los Angeles. Snow is not a very frequent thing. It’s sort of a once in a century thing. And, and we had snow on the beach. Uh, so that was fun. And, um, and, and speaking of Los Angeles this week, we have a guest coming to us straight from LA and old acquaintance of mine, Julian Bleecker, uh, Julian, welcome to the show.

[00:01:38] Julian: Hey, thanks you guys. Super fun to be here.

[00:01:40] Robert: A little bio intro, uh, the little introductory bio bit. So Julian is the co founder of the Near Future Laboratory. We’re going to talk for sure about that. And he’s a founding practitioner of design fiction, which is really the focus of this show. And he’s the coauthor of the book, the manual of design fiction, which I have been reading and Julian, I’ve enjoyed your book immensely.

[00:02:02] Robert: I get a lot of books, but I have to tell you this one, I really enjoyed every minute of it. I was looking through it again last night. I keep underlining little, little lines and I’ll probably refer to a few of them. It’s such, it’s so packed full of interesting insights about the way we think about the future.

[00:02:16] Julian: Yeah. Thanks for saying that. It’s a, it was definitely a, a fun project to do, um, over a long period of time, working with like four. Four authors, and then an editor who is invested in the subject matter anyway, so knows it. And, um, there are, so four authors, four PhDs, so you’re really not going to get a lot of work done very quickly.

[00:02:40] Julian: And one of them has two PhDs. Wow.

[00:02:46] Robert: Twice as much pain.

[00:02:47] Julian: Yeah.

[00:02:48] Robert: Now, you’re all in different places as well, right? So you’re, you’re geographically dispersed, as they say.

[00:02:53] Julian: That’s right. Yeah. Sort of a distributed collective of, uh, of, of people.

[00:02:57] Robert: Is that what the near future laboratory is? Is it like a collective of people who think about the future?

[00:03:02] Julian: Yeah. So it’s, it’s gone through, um, I, I refer to it as we’re now in our third evolution. Um, And, and I like that it’s able to, to change in these different ways quite organically. So it literally started out probably around the time that you and I met Robert, uh, when I first moved to LA and was teaching at USC, it was, it was literally in my blog.

[00:03:20] Julian: So I was like, that’s a cool URL, nearfuturelaboratory. com. And that was back when that’s what, that’s what you did. You blogged. Um, and I was using it as a, as a kind of platform. It was a way to, you know, prior to like there being, you know, more robust kind of teaching online kind of systems and platforms and stuff, so forth, I would just write up lessons on the blog and do it as a blog entry and just tell the students, Hey, look here, um, here’s some ideas about, you know, what we’re going to be working on and here’s some notes and a lot of, uh, sort of technical stuff.

[00:03:49] Julian: Like here’s some code to try. It was like

[00:03:51] Robert: 2006 or so there about, yeah,

[00:03:53] Julian: so 2000, 2000, 2005, 6, 7, 8, 9, around then. And then, um, As, as, as you mentioned, then I ended up at, at Nokia. Yeah. And it, it kind of continued in a way, but then I started doing a little bit more, uh, going out into the, you know, conferences and that kind of thing and, and traveling and it sort of draw in other people around the topic.

[00:04:14] Julian: And so then that’s when Nicholas Nova and Fabian, uh, Giden just kind of came up with me’s like, man, I love what you guys, what you do. And, and we had done some conferences together like, can we, you know, can we join the band kind of thing. Was was the way, was, was. And that was sort of like the second evolution.

[00:04:27] Julian: And then Nick Foster joined. As well with this kind of just, Hey, let’s just call ourselves a band, you know? And, and, and, and we’ll do what we do. That’s cool. And it was never really focused as a, as a, um, as people might assume. It was never the intent to have it be like an agency or a company. Right. It was always like, let’s just, let’s, it’s a dad band.

[00:04:47] Julian: You know? We hang out on Wednesday evening. Play in the garage. Maybe we get a gig for the, for the Wednesday lunchtime crowd at the corner, at the corner bar or something. But

[00:04:56] Robert: it’s not a, it’s not a band. It’s a design. It is a design organization, right? You got, you’re a professional designer and you solve problems, you solve design problems for companies.

[00:05:04] Julian: Yeah. That’s right. And so that was the intent. The, the, the, the purpose was, you know, essentially using the ideas, um, in and around design and technology and futures to, uh, as we say, make the world a more habitable place. That was our kind of little, kind of undergirding strap line as it were. Yeah.

[00:05:20] Robert: It’s a nice strap line.

[00:05:22] Ted: I like the near future, um, thinking, but of course, you know, um, uh, obviously the question is how do you operate a lab in the near future?

[00:05:32] Julian: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:05:33] Ted: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:34] Julian: Yes. Um, I can answer that. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. So it’s the, the, the intent both with that and with the, um, the, the, the work in and around design fiction, which kind of came out of, you know, in a, in a very organic way around some of the things that, that was, that were going on, both at USC and at Nokia.

[00:05:54] Julian: Was to find the way to essentially spend time in the future, which I think is something that’s sort of absolutely essential that we all do, um, a certain kind of commitment as well as, uh, sort of intellectual investment in what’s next and beyond just the kind of what’s next. That’s what this

[00:06:11] Ted: show’s about actually.

[00:06:13] Julian: Yeah. So it’s not like, what am I going to have for dinner? Um, although that is interesting. It’s also like, what can we do in order to create the future kind of futures that we want to occupy? And so it’s, it’s a bit of a, it’s a provocation deliberately. So to say like, Hey, we make things from the future and people like, Oh, that sounds cool.

[00:06:29] Julian: Like, how can I get a job there? And then they’re like, wait a minute. So how do you do that? Like what’s the story? And so that’s what we’re going to

[00:06:35] Robert: talk about on this show today. You’re going to get into it before we jump into that though. Let’s, let’s just pay homage to Nokia because there was a period of time right around the time you’re talking about the mid two thousands where Nokia was really at the forefront of imagining the future and designing the future in ways that I think today, maybe Apple is a company that does that.

[00:06:55] Robert: But boy, at the time there was no one else doing that. Motorola. Yeah, I know

[00:06:59] Ted: 10 years ago when I was doing my futurist keynotes, I would always have Nokia futuristic concepts up on the page. Yeah, yeah. They were really big on that, my presentations and stuff. Yeah.

[00:07:10] Robert: And you did you, what would, what did you do at Nokia?

[00:07:12] Robert: Did you lead that process? Do you contribute to that, that future vision process?

[00:07:15] Julian: Yeah. I was, I was, I was a contributor. I was in and around it. Um, I, I wouldn’t say, uh, I, I led it, um, with, with the. in this advanced design team, uh, here in Los Angeles. It was over in Calabasas. Right. That was, it was, it was always, it was sort of a shifting remit, um, as Nokia was going through, you know, it was getting a little bit more chaotic and people were tripping over themselves, but the, the undergirding, uh, perspective that I would, I would say that I brought to it was like, okay, you know, it was questions of like, what, what are the interesting things that we could do that are either going to prompt and poke and provide, uh, prod people into thinking about new ways of interacting, new ways of communicating, new ways of sharing.

[00:07:56] Julian: And so we would just do these experiments, you know, they’re, they were, they were like prototypical kinds of, uh, design fictions, things from the future. And we would use all kinds of means and mechanisms to represent those and express them, everything from actually making functional prototypes of things with this exquisite, um, uh, model shop where we could actually fabricate material objects in an electronics bay.

[00:08:18] Julian: Uh, to just using film, you know, just telling stories, uh, visual stories through film to just sort of explain and represent new forms of interaction. Some of which we just felt were like, this is, you know, it’s just that in a beautiful way, like, wow, that’s cool. Like in a very kind of almost like adolescent way and not, not a dismissive way, but you can say like, I’m feeling something about what we’re talking about and what we’re describing in terms of maybe it’s something that indicates a new kind of interaction.

[00:08:43] Julian: As I recall, I

[00:08:44] Ted: mean, that’s more common today to have that type of function, you know, Apple has its XPG, the experimental products group, um, you know, you have the moonshot programs at Google, um, you know, it’s more common to see sort of, um, a part of the business dedicated to experimentation and pushing the boundaries, but, um,

[00:09:05] Robert: well, there’s a real big difference though.

[00:09:06] Robert: Actually, this is a really good point you’re raising Brett, because, um, You know, the moonshot program is Google trying to find another a hundred billion dollar a year business to, to supplement search, right? That’s a, they’re betting on industries and they’re trying to figure out which industries they can reinvent and blow up and change and reconfigure to their, to their liking.

[00:09:24] Robert: But I think what Julian’s saying, at least the way I saw it or the way I experienced it as an outsider working with Nokia at the time, Nokia was worried or thinking about, they were, they were preoccupied with the humanity. In the technology and they were thinking about, like, how does this affect humans?

[00:09:39] Robert: What do humans care about? Like, you know, they would do research like, you know, what are the, what are the 10 things everybody leaves their house with that they will never leave behind? And keys are one of them, of course, wallets and ID and so forth. And they were really focused on like, well, how can we represent that in digital?

[00:09:54] Robert: They were at the forefront of figuring out. What the concept of a smartphone was way before the components were available. You know, they, they’re like, we have this thing in our pocket. What more can we do with it? And then it would be, and how does that change society? You know, things like voting and paying for your parking and so on.

[00:10:10] Robert: Um, Julian has a good, I remember those future videos. Yes. That’s right. It came out

[00:10:14] Ted: with that, that sort of demonstrated some of those. It was about serving society, right? It

[00:10:19] Robert: wasn’t so much about how do we profit or how do we, you know, how do we dig the next oil gusher? Um, it was more about how did we, uh, how does this affect society for the better?

[00:10:29] Robert: At least that’s the way I interpreted it. Now I’m not going to try to, maybe I’m being a little too naive here. Maybe I’m looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Julian, please correct me if I got that wrong.

[00:10:39] Julian: I’m feeling what you’re saying. I, again, like I wasn’t, I wasn’t situated well enough to know if there was really like a kind of dark sith lord behind it all.

[00:10:47] Julian: But I, my, my sense, my sense was that the, you know, it was, it’s a, it was a huge finish company. You know, it was like some major percentage of their, of their gross national product. And the, the, the, the, the, the, the, If, you know, if you know any Finns or spend time there, you, there, there’s a certain kind of, um, you know, it’s the Scandinavian socialist sensibilities, not to use the S word and turn people up, but, but they, they felt good, you know, they, they want to do things for the, for the betterment of society.

[00:11:14] Julian: But we need that. Of course we do. Yeah, absolutely. We need that. Right. And, and, and I, and I would say, you know, part of, if there were an element to, um, to the. Futurists should have an Hippocratic Oath. There should be like some undergirding principle which says like, I’m doing this because I want to create a more habitable world.

[00:11:33] Julian: Yeah, a future that does no harm, do no harm. And I don’t think that’s necessarily always obeyed. Whether, you know, within the Futurist tribe, whatever that means, um, or the, I’m not saying you should, I’m saying like the people who call themselves Futurists, obviously. Or, or within, um, within, you know, the ranks of the kinds of teams that you’re sort of describing, so, you know, um, Google or Alphabet or whatever it is, they’re, they’re X, you know, I think you’re on, on, on point there, Robert, and they wouldn’t deny it.

[00:12:00] Julian: It’s like, yeah, we’re looking for, you know, we have a responsibility to find plan B. Because, you know, we know that at some point, just like, you know, Sears, uh, we’ll, we’ll get, we’ll get run over by someone else.

[00:12:12] Robert: Yeah.

[00:12:13] Julian: And, um.

[00:12:14] Robert: Demand it. So their, their, their futurism is in the service of investors and, you know, returning, uh, returning value to investors.

[00:12:21] Robert: You know, you, you mentioned an interesting thing that actually you talk about in the book as well, which is this bias that futurists, some futurists have, uh, you, you say, uh, They tend to focus on the optimistic scenarios. And they tend not to focus on the pessimistic or the negative consequences. And, um, I noticed that as well.

[00:12:42] Robert: And on this show, I’m always the one who’s kind of like, you know, Cassandra saying like, Hang on a second before you rush off in that direction. Make twice, right? And, um, and, and, and sometimes that’s a bad look, right? Cause this is supposed to be an optimistic show about the future. But what I find is that it’s very easy to get corporations excited about the positive aspects.

[00:13:01] Robert: And it’s very difficult to get them to focus or even think about, um, the negative consequences of what they’re proposing to do.

[00:13:08] Ted: Right. Especially, and especially if the behavior they’re already exhibiting is negative.

[00:13:13] Robert: That’s exactly right. You know, like the five big tech companies that so dominate the U.

[00:13:17] Robert: S. and most of the world, uh, these companies, They’re not altruistic, uh, they make the right noises, of course they’ll say things, they’ll, they’ll talk about being carbon neutral and so forth. Um, but these are very much for profit enterprises and they’ll do every, every possible thing they can to protect their, their turf.

[00:13:34] Robert: You know, every move that Apple makes is to protect the iPhone. Every move that Google makes is to protect search. These are the, that’s where they get paid, um, and they’re going to defend it and they’ll do whatever is necessary to, to protect that business.

[00:13:47] Ted: Well, maybe that’s part of why Nokia. Is not still number one today is because they weren’t prepared to do that.

[00:13:54] Ted: And I think, um, you know, I mean, I’m not trying to put words in Nokia’s mouth or yours, Julian, but, um, I do think that we are reaching an age where we’re not talking, I’m not talking about ESG programs or corporate social responsibility programs. I’m talking about the fact that culturally, if your organization is not committed to making the planet a better place.

[00:14:19] Ted: I think you’re going to find it very difficult to do business in the future, because I think the younger generation are going to look at corporations in a very different way from the way we do today.

[00:14:31] Julian: Hmm. It’s interesting. I mean, I think the generational aspect of the things we’re talking about is, is, is fascinating.

[00:14:39] Julian: partly because I think there is hope because that represents in some sense, you know, a generation coming up is going to be respond to the generation that is growing up within, you know, or the, the, the, you know, their parents, they’re going to look at it in a particular way. And, uh, I think that that is a source of, of hope, you know, to the, you know, kind of the big existential issues that I think we’re all very much aware of nowadays and just trying to find a way to respond to it.

[00:15:06] Julian: Um, I think that.

[00:15:13] Julian: One of the challenges is that the, the, you know, the overall like ideologies that surround us that kind of effervesce by the, by Silicon Valley, let’s say, because we’re bringing up a lot of examples from, from that, from that site are, it’s difficult to see outside of them as it is when you’re kind Inside any particular kind of ideologies, you know, like the fish and water thing, like someone says, like, let’s go check out the bar on the, on the beach.

[00:15:37] Julian: And they’re like, what’s a beach. Um, so trying to find the ways that you can see outside of it and is, is, uh, it hurts. It’s really, really hard because you’re going to start talking about things that may be run counter to the thing that you’ve always grown up with, which is like, uh, No, this is great. Like, look at that.

[00:15:53] Julian: It’s like 7 percent year on year growth. Like, why would we stop that? I just, I can’t even talk to anyone about, about stopping that. If I talk to someone about stopping that, I’m probably going to get fired. So I better not say anything at all. Uh, and, and so an outsider

[00:16:07] Robert: for sure. Right. If you’re an outsider and you’re coming in and saying, okay, you got to think, think differently.

[00:16:12] Robert: Okay, they’ll invite you in to do a talk, but they’re not going to engage you as a consultant for long, long haul, because they don’t really want to change. That’s really true. You know, what you’re saying, Julian, reminds me of a conversation I had with, uh, Taro Ojampera, uh, who was a pretty big deal at Nokia.

[00:16:26] Robert: He’s on the board at one point and, um, toward the end of their reign, he was the senior guy dealing with all the media and entertainment and so forth. And I asked him what went wrong. I said, what happened to Nokia? Like, what went wrong? And he said, it’s very simple. We persisted in doing business in the old way, even as the world was changing.

[00:16:45] Robert: And, you know, if you think about Nokia, they were very much a creature of telecom, right? So was Motorola. So was Ericsson. So were all the other handset companies. So one thing, the rule there was you never challenged the network operator, you know, in the U S that would be AT& T and Verizon and Sprint. You just, you, whatever they wanted, you serve them.

[00:17:01] Robert: You never challenged their dominance. And Apple came along and Steve Jobs, you know, controversial guy, but boy, you got to give him credit for this move. He took a look at that and said, no way, we’re not, we’re not going through an orifice in order to get to our customer. We’re going to do it.

[00:17:14] Julian: He did the Jedi mind trick thing.

[00:17:15] Robert: He totally did. And he, he managed to convince AT& T to let him sell direct to the consumer. And that’s really what broke that model. And ultimately, unfortunately broke Nokia as well, probably for the better, you know, probably for the better because the world that we have now is, um, the carriers were not really focused on customers at all in the mobile operators.

[00:17:35] Robert: So then, you know, they kind of broke that stranglehold. Those companies still make plenty of money. Thanks to Apple and Android. Um, but, but they don’t have the same measure of control over their customer. Now that that model has been broken. On the other hand, all it meant was that Apple and Google were able to build globe spanning information empires on top of the telco network and really just push those telcos down into infrastructure.

[00:17:57] Robert: And they’re going to put an upper limit on a upper bound on how much they can,

[00:18:00] Ted: you know, I mean, this is not. Unusual to see industries go through this, where they resist this sort of change. And then, you know, a first principles player comes in, changes the rules and, you know, comes over the top. We’re seeing it in banking and, you know, with FinTech right now.

[00:18:17] Robert: And the banks have a lot of levers to like prevent disruption, right? The regulation. They’re

[00:18:22] Ted: trying everything they can, but it hasn’t worked. You know, if you look at the FinTech market share, I mean, some of the bigger banks are retaining market share and in fact have taken market share from community banks, for example, in the States.

[00:18:37] Ted: But they’ve done so because they’re playing catch up on digital versus say the fintechs, right? But all of the fastest growing financial institutions are all fintech companies today, digital companies.

[00:18:51] Robert: Oh, that’s interesting. You see it also in automotive right now, the big shift that’s happening. People think, Oh, it’s about electric vehicles or, or it’s about robotic vehicles or something.

[00:19:00] Robert: It’s really about software. It’s about hardware versus software. And the car companies are gradually turning into software companies because with EVs. The components, it’s just like a PC or a television set. The components are cheap and you can anywhere and anybody can build it. You know, we’re going to have a hundred electric vehicles coming from China in the near future.

[00:19:17] Robert: Uh, so that’ll, that’ll erode profit margins on just building and manufacturing. Not every car company sees themselves as a software company. really hard for hardware companies to turn into software companies. There’s very, very few examples of hardware companies that make good software. Apple is the exception.

[00:19:33] Robert: And, um, and, and I don’t know if Ford, I don’t know if the lesson sank in, I worked with Ford in 2014 and I made this point. And of course, in 2014 it was full resistance. You know, they, they were like, no way, you don’t understand. We’re the best in the world at engineering and building autobodies and motors.

[00:19:49] Robert: And I’m like, none of that stuff matters anymore. It didn’t really either. They went on about safety requirements. Uh, it’s back to the banks. It’s like the regulations are what these big industries always

[00:19:59] Ted: What’s the regulator going to do about this? Well, the regulators aren’t moving fast enough to change it, to prevent the change either.

[00:20:06] Ted: Even in the states where you’ve had, you know, a regulator fiercely supporting incumbents, right? You don’t have a fintech charter or so forth, you know, um, still. you know, mobile wallet adoption, uh, you know, the, the pressure on real time payments, all of that is coming because if you look offshore, the U. S.

[00:20:25] Ted: is like 10 years behind China now. So it’s not sustainable.

[00:20:31] Robert: Julian, how much of your work is international and how much of your work is the kind of work we’re talking about working with, you know, old incumbent companies to help them reinvent or recantalize themselves?

[00:20:41] Julian: Um, It’s, uh, largely it’ll be a, you know, a newer company, um, but also maybe feeling a little bit incumbent, like, like Google.

[00:20:53] Julian: Um, there’s the, the engagements are, I’m, I’m a really bad salesperson. They’re just like these organic kind of people, which I said, interesting, weird stuff going on there. Like let’s talk. Um, and the nature of the, the engagements is often, uh, it, it starts in a beautiful way. So it’s like, we’re not sure what we want.

[00:21:16] Julian: We’re not looking for a, you know, like a report. Could you do a survey of, uh, of, of, of the state of play of our sector? Often it starts, uh, very much with this, I call it general seminar. It’s kind of a platform that, that I built up over the last few years to really almost like unpack the, the kind of collective consciousness of, of an organization or of a team and, and essentially take them into.

[00:21:42] Julian: The, the future in a way, but doing it, doing it in a way that allows them to express their, both their hopes and their fears. And in that translation, we start to really sort of almost like set a stage of what that world might look like. And my, my goal is to help them feel into their future rather than just kind of go there as an all knowing kind of predictive oriented futurist kind of person and be like, well, this is what you should be looking at.

[00:22:07] Julian: And this is what you should be looking at,

[00:22:08] Robert: but it’s about organization. Organizational psychology, what you’re saying, and, and we’ve futurists talk about that. Uh, Rohit Alwar came on and, and talked to us about, um, uh, non nonviolent con conversations, orvi nonviolent communication. And Peter Hinson, who’s a futurist in Belgium, also talked about the psychology of change and working with the psychology of the individual people in the organization to help them embrace that.

[00:22:32] Robert: So, so what’s cool about what you just said is that the companies that come to you realize they need to do something different. And they’re open to it. Uh, you don’t have to sell that cause it’s hard to sell that as a proposition if they’re not willing to do it.

[00:22:43] Julian: And I think, I think it’s the kind of thing where the organization has to recognize or the team or the, or the executive has to recognize like, look, I just need another way of feeling into what’s, what’s coming because these up into the right graphs, uh, are not really helping.

[00:22:57] Ted: Yeah, absolutely. Well, at this point, uh, in the show, we like to do what we call a quick fire round. Uh, we’ll ask you a few, uh, Rapid fire questions. You up for it? Yeah, let’s do it. Here is the lightning round. What was the first science fiction you remember being exposed to on TV or books or film?

[00:23:21] Julian: Yeah, it’d be a toss up between, uh, Star Trek definitely, but then my parents also had a copy of Jerome Agel’s, uh, Kubrick’s 2001.

[00:23:29] Julian: So it was like the classic book that unpacked 2001. And I just, I was enthralled by that. Absolutely enthralled by it.

[00:23:37] Ted: Very interesting. Um, is there a technology, um, what, what technology do you think has most changed humanity in the past or present? Can I say fire?

[00:23:51] Julian: Sure. I think it would be, I think it’s pretty cool.

[00:23:57] Julian: Well, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s like, well, you know, and it’s kind of still a big

[00:24:02] Ted: deal. Yeah, true. Yeah. Okay. Um, is there a particular futurist that set you down the path of becoming a futurist yourself or an entrepreneur that’s influenced you in some way?

[00:24:16] Julian: Yeah. Okay. So the caveat is that I find that the title calling oneself a futurist problematic.

[00:24:22] Julian: Um, and, uh, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s just, it’s an area I’m not super bothered by it, but I think that bringing. Um, bring, you know, bringing the future to, to people as, as kind of performance is in a way what I see future is doing. And I also see the, to the, to the question, um, if there were a futurist that I would refer to that I’m, I’m fascinated by for a whole bunch of different reasons, I would say, um, Neil Stevenson.

[00:24:49] Julian: And the reason I would say that is, is because I think he’s, he’s managed to, um, kind of insert himself, uh, into the circuits of, you know, idea circulation. Um, which is to say that, you know, I don’t know if I can see him, like people, like, Elon Musk would invite him over for dinner. I don’t know if they actually do like, Hey, I’m taking a, I’m taking a flight to, uh, to, uh, to, to Istanbul.

[00:25:16] Julian: Can you want to jump on the plane? I’ll have the plane fly you back when we’re done. Just want to hang out for a bit. And I think it’s, it’s that circuit of like kind of idea. flow that I think is where we can start saying like, okay, how, where are these futures coming from? And are they the ones that we want?

[00:25:32] Julian: Or are they the ones that, you know, in those conversations that, you know, Neil will just kind of like riff on for like 600 pages to where we’re like, see, look, this is the future. Because he said it, and it’ll happen to be this, the future that also, you know, a person X, Y, and Z in the position of power within Silicon Valley, whether it’s Mark Andreessen or, or, or, you know, or, or, uh, or, um, Zach or whatever are like are talking about and that they want for their reasons that, that they are absolutely probably convinced are the ones that we should, the futures we should occupy.

[00:26:05] Julian: They’re like neural implants, flying cars, and, uh, and, and no, and no government. There isn’t an

[00:26:12] Ted: evangelism aspect to it.

[00:26:14] Julian: Totally. I think, I think it’s what undergirds it. And I think the, and the interesting point for those of us who maybe feel like, Oh yeah, I like futurists. I’ll call myself a futurist is to consider that, that you might actually just be a shill for those conversations because you’re going to want to say what everyone else is saying and do it and have like a flashy kind of keynote presentation around it.

[00:26:38] Julian: And, and, and then you’re sort of, you’re an operator for those particular features as opposed to Well, that’s why

[00:26:43] Ted: we, that’s why we wanted to do this show, actually. We wanted to sort of take back The, uh, the moniker of the futurist and define that by having really smart people that are actually building the future come on the show.

[00:26:56] Ted: So we’re glad you’re, you’re on. One final quick question and then we’re going to go to break. Um, is there a science fiction story that’s most representative of the future you hope for? Um,

[00:27:13] Julian: I don’t think it’s been written. I think, I think there, I think there, there’s a, the, the solar punk genre has been absolutely fascinating for me once I kind of stumbled across it, um, uh, a year or two ago and been having lots of, lots of really fascinating conversations within the near future laboratory community about, about that.

[00:27:32] Julian: So it’s, you know, it’s got this utopian bent to it in the, in the generalist case, but then, then are there elements of that you can draw, draw from to help? feel into possible futures. And there’s some, you know, like really pragmatic aspects of it. It’s like, okay, so, you know, photovoltaic power. Okay, cool.

[00:27:49] Julian: Like let’s, let’s, uh, let’s explore that and kind of like giant sand batteries.

[00:27:53] Robert: Sorry? For our listeners, are there any particular book titles in the Silverpunk genre that you’d recommend?

[00:27:57] Julian: Uh, I would recommend, um, it’s Andrew Dana Hudson’s, um, because I screwed up the title at a dinner party conversation, um, he did a book, that was, uh, he refers to it as, as, as, uh, cli fi, climate fiction.

[00:28:16] Julian: Um, and it is called Our Shared Storm, a novel of five climate futures. He almost said four climate futures. And it’s just, it’s a beautiful kind of like, um, it, it, it, it creates a world, but the world is, takes place, um, entirely at, uh, at a, at a cop session. So the, the, um, What is it called? The, uh, whatever, where everyone gets together to essentially.

[00:28:41] Julian: Yeah, COP, like a climate

[00:28:43] Robert: summit. Yeah.

[00:28:43] Julian: Yeah. And, and it’s, it’s, it’s that it’s the same summit, but where each of the characters slightly changes in, in each one of the, in each one of the futures. So you get these different points of view about, about climate change, about the world that he’s kind of imagining into, and about the future.

[00:28:58] Julian: The challenges of it that I found just really compelling, both as for its structure as well as for the content.

[00:29:03] Ted: Yeah. I find, uh, Kim Stanley Robinson’s work in climate fiction similarly powerful in that respect. But, uh, I’m a bit of a, um, culture. Um, you know, series in banks, a fan, um, just purely in terms of the augmentation of humans.

[00:29:21] Ted: But anyway. All right. Well, that’s great. Um, thank you very much, Julian. Let’s go for a quick break. You’re listening to the Futurists. We’ll be right back after these words from our sponsors.

[00:29:33] Ted: Provoke Media is proud to sponsor, produce, and support the Futurist podcast. Provoke. fm is a global podcast network and content creation company with the world’s leading fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. And of course, it’s spinoff podcasts, Breaking Banks Europe, Breaking Banks Asia Pacific, and the FinTech Five.

[00:29:54] Ted: But we also produce the official Finnovate podcast, Tech on Reg, Emerge Everywhere, the podcast of the Financial Health Network, and Next Gen Banker. For information about all our podcasts, go to Provoke. fm or check out Breaking Banks, the world’s number one FinTech podcast and radio show.

[00:30:16] Robert: Welcome back to the Futurist. I’m Rob Turk with my co-host, Brett King, and this week we’re talking to Julian Bleecker, who is the author of the Manual of Design Fiction. And that makes me wonder, Julian, what the heck is design fiction?

[00:30:33] Julian: Yeah. So design fiction is a way of approaching, uh, or sort of occupying the future through the kind of creative processes and kind of material making processes of design by actually.

[00:30:47] Julian: in summary, sort of like going to the future, sort of behaving like as if you were an archaeologist, but rather than digging into the past, you’re actually kind of digging into the future, if you can imagine what that would be. And it’s a way of essentially applying your imagination to try to find the artifacts that you might see in a particular futures world.

[00:31:05] Julian: So in some respects, it’s like the inverse of what a, uh, what we typically think of doing futures work, where you sort of start with the kind of global macro scale world building, This is the nature of the world. This is the kind of environment it exists in. This is the political system and all these kinds of things.

[00:31:21] Julian: With design fiction, you really are a very humble, modest witness to the world. Like you don’t have the all seeing, kind of God’s eye point of view. And you, and you just sort of imagine yourself going to, a corner store or going into, uh, stumbling into someone’s living room and just gaze, looking about like, what do we see here?

[00:31:39] Julian: And what are the objects? And so it takes a, it takes a lot of force of imagination, uh, to, to go there. And oftentimes that comes with like the setup and also a little bit of focus. So if you were to say like, I wonder what the, I wonder what the chat GPT future is. And the oftentimes when that question is asked, people say, well, it’s going to change the nature of, you know, everything from, you know, PR to like book writing, that kind of stuff, which to me, I get, but also feels a little bit vague.

[00:32:05] Julian: Like I want to know in the chapter GPT future, what’s on someone’s bedside table. What is, what is, what are the things that they are, uh, that, that, that, uh, how do they order breakfast? What are they, if they’re going to have a conversation with someone at a dinner party conversation, what is the nature of that?

[00:32:25] Julian: Is there, is ChatGPT also there, chiming in? And so these are the, finding those kind of everyday, ordinary kinds of experiences is where design fiction is sort of situated. Very humble, very modest, not expecting to explain the whole world. only expecting to find, as the archaeologist does, if you think what an archaeologist does, a fragment of the world that they use in order to kind of, asking that object, like, tell me where you came from.

[00:32:52] Julian: What did you do? What was your function? And you know, might be a shard of pottery. So this shard of pottery isn’t going to say like, well, the nature of our political system was this. And these are the kinds of issues that we had as a society. It’s going to say, I held soup. And that was a staple of, of this world.

[00:33:08] Julian: And so we’re looking for those kinds of things and those kinds of, those kinds of elements, those little elemental aspects of the world are, in my mind, they really, they’re really what build it out and they allow the person who is trying to go to this world or the group or the team to almost like occupy it as if they were kind of walking around a film set and they didn’t know what the film was about.

[00:33:28] Julian: Yeah. You just see props.

[00:33:30] Robert: Yeah. Yeah. I get it. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s an imaginative process. It’s very much like a film, right? If you, if you think about what filmmakers do, they imagine worlds. Sometimes they’re various worlds that are very similar to where we’re in. Sometimes they’re very strange worlds in the future, but they imagine them from the point of view of the people in the world.

[00:33:46] Robert: And so it’s, what’s different, you know, world building is this kind of grandiose undertaking where you’re designing the whole world and all the systems. And, and you actually believe when you’re in that process, you believe you can understand those systems that are so big and uncomprehensive. They’re incomprehensible to people.

[00:34:01] Robert: You know, for instance, the real world today, if you think about our, our financial system, or if you think about, uh, our supply chain, these are things that exceed human capacity for imagination. And yet when we design worlds, when we design stories, We assume that we can actually design those systems, right?

[00:34:17] Robert: We, we have, it’s, it’s kind of grandiose. And what you’re saying is you can take a different approach as a humbler approach, where it’s almost like that first person camera, um, where you’re just taking snapshots of the world and seeing how people live and you might not ever get to the whole system, but you’ll see the implications of it and how it’s, how it touches people’s lives.

[00:34:35] Robert: Uh, and one of the things that you do is you actually design the products, right? You design the stuff that inhabits that world for those users. And you’ll go all the way through to, uh, to making the product and even making the TV commercial for it. Is that right?

[00:34:49] Julian: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s another way of, uh, almost, you know, the lessons that I learned, I guess, when I was, when I was at USC and just the experiences I had, um, through life is that if you can kind of bring something into existence, like summon it in some way, and, and, and even just doing it so that it’s a, it’s an, it’s a, It’s a, it’s almost like a, a flanking maneuver.

[00:35:10] Julian: So you don’t have to actually, you know, you don’t have to create it. Uh, you create it as if you were going to manufacture it, but you, you stay at the, as if, so I’m not saying like, you know, you create the thing and then actually try to start a company around it, that kind of thing, but you create the material that would effervesce out of the thing.

[00:35:25] Julian: If it were in the world, a quick start guide for a product, a manual. That might go along with it. Uh, yeah, like the bus side advertisement for service. And you do that in a, you do that in a way that, uh, the process of getting to creating that, that, uh, that, that element that represents the, the idea or the concept, the thing that kind of fell out of your conversation about this future world.

[00:35:50] Julian: You do that because in that process of creating the advertisement or the unboxing video, whatever it might be, you’re learning more about that world. You have to ask yourself questions like, Well, is it going to be, is it going to be a nine by 16 video, for example? Uh, is there still going to be a YouTube or is it going to be something else?

[00:36:06] Julian: Some evolution of it? Is it going to be Nabisco YouTube? You know, all these kinds of ways in which you can tweak the future that gives people the sense of like, okay, there’s been a change in the world. It’s almost like the, you know, the intro to like a good Paul Verhoeven film where he’ll have a bunch of advertisements.

[00:36:21] Julian: You guys remember that from like Starship Troopers?

[00:36:24] Robert: Starship Troopers. Yeah.

[00:36:25] Julian: Yeah. And it’s that beautiful. You like it no more? Exactly. It’s that beautiful way of providing like almost this gateway into the world. And I think the, the, the beautiful aspect of it is that a, it’s, it’s just hella fun, right?

[00:36:38] Julian: Cause now you can, you’re feeling that kind of, that kind of effervescent enthusiasm and engagement. Right. with creativity, with your creative consciousness that we, that we, a lot of us forgot after we were like eight years old and we got scolded for not drawing something that looked like it was supposed to look.

[00:36:52] Julian: And we just sort of give up on bringing our creative consciousness to the hard work of imagining and imagining what the world could be. And part of what design fiction does is it allows us to have fun again with thinking about the kinds of worlds we’re going to occupy, as opposed to the anxiety that we have when we think about the future.

[00:37:08] Julian: We’re just like, Oh my God, climate change, man, this is going to be Bumpy ride, and you can bring a certain effervescent enthusiasm that is, I think, the opposite of the, the heavy load that we carry for the future. And it allows, it lightens that load just a little bit so that you can then do that hard work.

[00:37:26] Julian: And it’s, it’s almost like running them. Like we said, like, okay, we’re all going to put running shoes on. Now we’re going to run 10 kilometers. People like you’re crazy. That that’s going to hurt. It’s like, we’re trying to do the same thing with the future. It’s going to hurt. But we just got to get into it and we have to be happy and enthusiastic and cheer each other on and encourage each other for this journey of doing that work.

[00:37:46] Julian: And I think design fiction, because it brings an element, at least when I do it, there’s always an element of humor. Like, it was, there was, there was one piece I was working on, uh, uh, last night, which is for, and actually, you know, I heard it was, it was an episode of your podcast, where you’re talking about the AI for the lawyer.

[00:38:04] Julian: So we did a design fiction that this was, it appeared in a project for, for, for, for I want to get

[00:38:10] Ted: you out of traffic fines, right?

[00:38:12] Julian: Yes, yes. So, uh, we had done a little, little design fiction for, for a client. Uh, and it was, uh, it was called, it was called, uh, um, Ari Chat. And Ari Birnbaum is a recurring character in our design fiction.

[00:38:24] Julian: He’s just a funny guy who shows up. And this was essentially three hours. of associate level legal counsel. And it was just like a little SD card. It didn’t say where it goes or what happens, but it had the package design. It was like typical blister pack that you would see if you walked into a 7 Eleven, you might just grab one of these things.

[00:38:41] Julian: Like, yeah, I’m going to need this. Because I got a, I got a, you know, it’s a, I’ve got, I’m gonna have to argue with my wife’s divorce attorney. And it would just pop in. And so these ideas, you can represent that, that beautiful conversation you had with your guests about, you know, this thing is coming, of course it’s coming.

[00:38:58] Julian: You can represent that. Uh, in this way where it’s, it’s almost opens this portal to that world because it looks like a real thing. Like, oh my God. Yeah, it makes

[00:39:06] Robert: it really possible for other people to understand it and to imagine it.

[00:39:09] Julian: And to ask questions about it. Like it’s the conversation starter. People say like, wait, what is this?

[00:39:15] Julian: It’s really cool. And then, then you can engage that conversation. If you imagine, imagine, imagine you just saw it like on a counter, you walked into a 7 11 or a friend of yours, it spilled out of their bag and like, Whoa, what is this thing? And when they start asking the question, that’s where you want to get people that you don’t want to be told the future.

[00:39:34] Julian: You want to kind of feel into it in this kind of indirect way.

[00:39:37] Robert: It is true. Your, your, your, your visions are incredibly appealing and you, you want to touch them. You want to hold them. I’ve noticed on the, on Facebook, you’re posting images of, um, these sort of like futuristic, uh, uh, all terrain vehicles that you’re designing and it’s sort of Mad Max, but it’s also kind of Range Rover and, you know, like kind of Luxo in a way, what the heck is going on there?

[00:39:59] Robert: Right. So I want to know the story behind those pictures. I love the pictures.

[00:40:03] Julian: Yeah, so, uh, it started very organically. It was more just like a bunch of us in, in the New Future Laboratory discord have been playing with mid journey and doing it in a way where we’re, we’re doing projects and also just trying to feel what it’s like to have a robot collaborator, as if you were in, you know, your art studio and you’re working with this other collaborator.

[00:40:24] Julian: So we’re just trying to feel like, what would, what might this world be like? And as part of that, yeah, I just started, I started doing, uh, vehicles and was kind of generated.

[00:40:32] Robert: You’re not making the art. You’re generating those with Midjourney.

[00:40:34] Julian: Yeah. Midjourney and I are collaborating on it. I’m sort of like poking and prodding it and asking it to try different things and giving it, uh, models of, of, you know, so you’re an AI

[00:40:44] Ted: whisperer also.

[00:40:45] Ted: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:45] Julian: Yeah. So I’m just kind of like whispering today. I said, look, give me something. And then the, the interesting thing, Robert, to your question about design fiction, so it, it, it wasn’t, it wasn’t enough for me just to make the vehicles themselves and to, as, as easy it is to kind of fetishize the kinds of things that were popping out from the algorithm.

[00:41:06] Julian: Uh, I, the first time I posted one, I wasn’t really thinking about it as a project so much as like. What is this thing? And the, the, the note that I added this sort of, you know, the, the, the text that went along with the image, I wrote it as if this was something that existed and someone was trying to sell it or looking for a part.

[00:41:25] Julian: So I did it in the, in the vein of the. Uh, the auto trader, which was like something that I remember from my youth, like when I wanted to buy my first kind of, you know, beat up car, like a friend and I were looking for a, for a, for a 67 or 68 Mustang that was under 500 bucks that needed a lot of work.

[00:41:42] Julian: Cause we wanted to work on a car and thought it’d be fun. And so every week I would go to the Krauser’s kind of convenience store that was a few miles from the house and, and pick up this auto trader. And so you, you flip through it. It’s like a newspaper thing. I thought, man, like, Oh, it’d be beautiful.

[00:41:54] Julian: Like To, to create these cars from some particular world, um, and do it as if this was from an auto trader. I had gone to some future or some adjacent now, got this auto trader and that I could express the characteristics of this world almost like two layers down. So again, not doing the top down world building, but like, this is something that someone got out of corner convenience store from some world.

[00:42:17] Julian: Can I piece together like a, like a, like that archeologist from the future looking into the future? Can I piece together a sense of what this world is? at this level? Can I describe a kind of world that I might imagine? And for me, the impulse was go to a world where it’s like, yeah, you know, there’s climate change and there’ve been some challenges, but it seems like we’re getting along, like things are working out.

[00:42:40] Julian: It’s not what we expect. There’s no more, you know, that I can get my, my Brazilian coffee beans, you know, two continents away. And, and maybe there’s something going on in the, in the environment. So I express things like the, the, the vehicles come with special filtration systems. So maybe the air is not so great, but we’re, we’re still, we’re dealing like we’re, we’re getting on with things in the world and we’re, we, we, we’re not suffering through the zombie apocalypse.

[00:43:07] Julian: It’s just a little bit different. And I think that’s the kind of way of encouraging these futures.

[00:43:11] Robert: So when you do design fiction, you are, uh, you’re like an archeologist of the adjacent future, um, or, or of imagined worlds, right. Of, uh, of imagined possibilities. Uh, that’s a really fun idea. And the way you describe it, it’s like, Oh, I went to an adjacent world.

[00:43:26] Robert: And it’s like, as if you’re going to a Kinko’s or something to pick something up. Uh, I love that you can just dip in and out of these worlds. So, so easily and so fluidly.

[00:43:35] Julian: I think the, the, yeah, that that’s right. That’s, that’s a, that’s a wonderful way of putting it. For, for me, it, it provides, it, it makes the idea of, of kind of finding the way that, as I said before, it’s like, you know, absolutely essential that we all spend time in the future.

[00:43:50] Julian: It makes that prospect more accessible rather than having to, you know, go through reams and reams of data and make prediction, which is unnerving. For very many people, like, you know, tell me what’s next that people, most people would just sort of shrug. It’s like, I don’t know, whatever Elon said, I guess, or whatever I read.

[00:44:10] Julian: Forecasting

[00:44:10] Robert: methodology is also hard work and it requires sustained focus. And you do have to deal with a lot of data if you’re going to do it right. And many people can’t cope with that. So you’re quite right. Your approach is a lot more interesting, a lot more fun. It sort of awakens the curiosity, um, and, and it does that for people who aren’t that Naturally, uh, imaginative on their own, you know, it would, um, it would invite them to participate in your imagination, you give them a, uh, an object from the future or an object from an alternate world they can mess with, you know, for the audience here who is listening, let’s try to make this a little more concrete because what we’re talking about is super fun, but I’ve read the book and they haven’t necessarily, although they should, um, So tell me about the Ikea catalog and tell me about the TBD catalog, because these are kind of like the auto trader that you’re just sharing with us.

[00:44:57] Julian: Yeah, that’s right. So the Ikea catalog from the future, that was a, that was a project. Uh, the engagement was with, um, a place called the mobile life center in, uh, in Stockholm. Uh, so. academic, um, research oriented, uh, program. And they just, they just, they’re like, we love design fiction. We want to do it with some of our students.

[00:45:17] Julian: Could you facilitate something? And so we just settled on after, uh, after a bit of a conversation, settled on the idea of like, let’s just do a product catalog for Ikea from the future. I mean, it’s such a, such an iconic brand, nevermind that, you know, they’re, they’re based in Sweden. Um, sorry, the, the mobile life center, but just such an iconic brand that there’s, that you bring a lot of, um, Yeah, you just, you bring the natural assumption when you see something with the IKEA branding on the cover.

[00:45:42] Robert: What would be in that that we wouldn’t have in a regular IKEA catalog?

[00:45:45] Julian: Oh, there was all kinds of things. I mean, you know, at the time we did it, there was like, uh, drones were a big thing. So there was like, there were, there was like, uh, drone based delivery, uh, of your IKEA products. There was, um, there was, uh, the, well, this stuff was like on the edge, but we kind of took it to where it’s logical conclusion.

[00:46:02] Julian: So essentially using AR and VR, uh, as, as, you know, as an accessory to the home, just the way you might go to Ikea and get a lamp. You might get a, you know, an AR VR system for, you know, in home for your in home use. So there were all things that they, they need. They allow you

[00:46:16] Ted: to download 3D printed designs of their furniture and print them out at home.

[00:46:22] Julian: Yeah. So that, that’s an element of it. So finding the ways in which you can kind of, you, you, you don’t go so far, I know we’re going to go into like the far future, which makes me nervous, but you don’t go so far as to, as to make it be like, okay, obviously this is, this is some kind of futuristic. It’s still believable.

[00:46:37] Julian: It’s like adjacent. It’s like you’re rubbing up against the future, which is something that I think we, we experience all the time. You know, like when chat GPT dropped or just even just the, the large angle models became more publicly accessible. Yeah.

[00:46:49] Ted: Yeah, it’s interesting, I mean, um, often we, we comment about the fact that even though it’s so apparent what’s coming with AI, that you’ll still see people see chat GPT or say, Oh, it’s never going to replace a human’s job, you know, because they can’t extrapolate.

[00:47:07] Ted: Yeah. Where it’s going to go, which blows my mind, you know, because I mean, this is how we think all the time, of course, but, um, so this is a really elegant way of solving that problem. Sort of putting people in that world of the future. I like it.

[00:47:20] Robert: Yeah. It’s really cool. It helps fill in the blank. You know, they say, um, they say a movie producer is a person who looks at a glass This glass is half full that I’m holding up, uh, for those who can’t see what we’re talking about.

[00:47:30] Robert: I’m holding a glass, a half full glass of water. Um, and, uh, and they say, uh, you know, most people look at that and say, well, that glass is only half full. But a movie producer looks at the glass and says, oh, I know exactly how I’m going to fill that glass. And I know exactly where to get the water. It’s going to be the greatest water.

[00:47:46] Robert: And, and like their imagination fills in the blank. And in a way, you’re taking it a step further because you’re filling in the blank. So much that here’s the ad for the product. It’s not just the product and the benefits of the product and the usage and all that. But you’ve also anticipated how we’re going to sell the thing, how we’re going to convince people to part with their hard earned cash to do it.

[00:48:03] Robert: Have you been to the Meow Wolf shopping mall in Vegas?

[00:48:06] Julian: Totally, totally been there. And every, and I recommend everyone go check it out because it has that beautiful immersive experience of like now what world. And it was, it was beautiful for me because I only expected one level. And then I saw someone walk through a freezer.

[00:48:20] Julian: like the butcher freezer. And I was like, what? And I had that feeling, what the heck is going on here? And all of a sudden, like, I opened up to receiving the possibility that I, that, that there could be another world behind the butchers behind the butcher counter. And I think that’s what we’re trying to do with design fiction is give that people a sense of like, okay, it is possible to imagine the world otherwise.

[00:48:39] Julian: Yeah.

[00:48:39] Robert: And

[00:48:41] Julian: I can help create that.

[00:48:42] Robert: And with Meow Wolf, it’s actually like a physical world with different dimensions that you can go through. So, so you can actually experience transitioning into a different alternative, you know, dimension or another, another imagined, imaginary dimension, I’m loving this conversation because we’re talking about the imagination, which is a difficult topic for most people.

[00:49:02] Robert: But we’ve reached that point in the show now where we need to focus on the far distant future. So every time, everything you do, like literally every minute of your day is spent thinking about imaginary futures and possibilities for the future and alternate worlds, tell us what’s out there 10, 20, 30 years from now.

[00:49:18] Robert: And maybe it helps if you think about a particular field or a particular kind of client problem that you’re solving.

[00:49:26] Julian: Okay, so my mind immediately went to, um, because my focus lately has been on how, on understanding, to a certain degree, like how the mind works, and how we can find ways to really adapt the mind to the challenges that we have coming forward.

[00:49:42] Julian: And there’s been a lot of, uh, there’s been, a lot of interest and kind of research and exploration, well, for a long time, but particularly now with, with psychotropics. And so I’m fascinated about where these are going to go, um, as they, you know, in the optimistic case, help unlock all the blocks that we have to realizing our potential.

[00:50:02] Julian: And I’m not talking about like, you know, uploading the brain into, into a supercomputer. I’m talking about like our own individual ability to understand our behavior patterns and understand how we, how we exist and occupy, understand why we get angry, understand why, what makes, what are the beautiful things that make us feel happy or enthusiastic or excited.

[00:50:19] Julian: And, and also I think hopefully unlock and, and we’ve, help us understand what makes us, um, challenge each other in non productive ways, I’ll say. Where, where does argumentation and dispute come from? And where does a lack of acceptance of difference derive to where we actually are, you know, we’re willing to like, you know, go to war with each other.

[00:50:41] Julian: Where does that come from? And why is it in our nature to do that? And where do those, I guess, those, The, the dreams that create that sense of, you know, frustration or anger that lead people to say like, let’s spend, you know, $10 trillion on military stuff that, that doesn’t have to be, it seems to me, and I, and so I’m, I’m curious.

[00:51:00] Julian: Yeah. It is a choice, right? Yeah. You know, we sacrificing, I wanna swing

[00:51:03] Robert: back to the psychotropics because, uh, you, you raised an interesting possibility because a moment ago we were talking about chat, GPT and um, and large language learning models. And, you know, the advent of AI seems to suggest that. Parts of the way we think are going to get replicated by machines, right?

[00:51:18] Robert: That seems like a reasonable premise. And that creates a lot of fear in a lot of people. They’re worried about their job. You mentioned copywriters and advertising people and, you know, graphic designers and so forth. That’s a real concern. Okay. With the psychotropics, what you introduced is such an interesting idea there because to me, it’s like there’s now evolutionary pressure.

[00:51:36] Robert: We’ve created a competitor. And now we’ve created evolutionary pressure for us to change our minds. And so now we’re groping towards another technology, psychotropics, that’ll help us change the way we actually think or change our imagination so that we can stay one head at one step ahead of the machines.

[00:51:52] Robert: This is a super fascinating idea. We could do a whole, a whole additional conversation on just that idea.

[00:51:58] Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think, um, It would be encouraging, like, if we found a way to sort of like look at, you know, all the developments in AI, which are, which are expansive and, and challenging as looking at AI is like, Oh man, this is like, we just, we invented a new kind of hammer.

[00:52:17] Julian: This is actually going to be an amazing tool.

[00:52:19] DK: And I think

[00:52:19] Julian: the more we have stories about the AI kind of breaking loose and then, you know, kind of. Making our toasters start kitchen fires. Uh, the, the harder it is to sort of imagine the opportunities, and I think imagining the opportunities is, is part of it is saying like, okay, this isn’t a challenge to my job.

[00:52:35] Julian: This is actually an opportunity for me to evolve and develop, which I know is hard. Most people get it. They, they find their career path. And they don’t want to get off that rail. And so at some point over there, you know, the, the three or four generations that they’re going to be around and working anytime that challenge obtains, or they get laid off and because the industry has changed, it’s like people freak out.

[00:52:57] Julian: And I think that we can, we, once we realize that these beautiful folds in our, in, in this vascularized piece of meat on our shoulder are actually. It’s an amazing, amazing resource for considering like new ways of existing, new ways of living, new ways of creating value exchange, the quicker we’re going to get out of these challenges.

[00:53:16] Julian: It makes you optimistic as

[00:53:18] Ted: well. Is there, is there anything else like, is there any specific technology or something that you see coming that makes you optimistic?

[00:53:26] Julian: I think the, any technology that’s, that’s challenging the, uh, the. existing social formations, I think, in a way. Any, any technology that feels like there is, there’s gonna be like very clearly distributed power and influence.

[00:53:42] Julian: So I think, you know, I’m not sure where it’s going to go, to be honest, but it’s like, I am enthralled by like blockchain. I, you know, I, it, I, I don’t know if that’s a good or bad word at this point in time, but the, but what essentially like the, what, what undergirds it as a matter of principle, like the technology might be flawed.

[00:53:58] Julian: Well, yeah, but we

[00:53:58] Ted: need some better way of sharing data across, you know, um, Wide networks and having, um, you know, like persistence of that data that can’t be easily hacked as an example on blockchain is at least an attempt at that. So

[00:54:15] Julian: it represented something at the time when it became, when it, when it generated, you know, all the fascination or, you know, um, 24, 36 months ago and, and that, and there are very few technologies that I can point to that I can think of that.

[00:54:28] Julian: that generated optimism prior to, uh, let’s say the internet, you know,

[00:54:36] Robert: I’m sure your optimism, the blockchain gives birth to decentralized organizations. Decentralized organizations are the opposite of every organization on the planet. Every government, every company, every college and school is a top down hierarchy.

[00:54:48] Robert: And that’s a system we’ve had in place for 600 years. If you

[00:54:50] Ted: want smart contracts, you need decentralized and distributed organizations. The fact

[00:54:55] Julian: that it came along when, when there was incredible Kind of social and political strife or you know became became it gave people a place to go to to say like okay Maybe the world can be better and it’s a little bit problematic that it was like Maybe the world can be better because of a piece of technology or or white paper But we felt enthusiasm and I think that that that is that is maybe more important than anything

[00:55:16] Ted: Well, that’s a good way for us to wrap Julian Thank you for coming on the show this week.

[00:55:22] Ted: Super fun, thank you. How can people find out about the Manual of Design Fiction and about the work generally that you’re doing?

[00:55:30] Julian: Well, the Manual of Design Fiction, it’s, you can go to themanualofdesignfiction. com. Look at that, I know how to PR a book. And, uh, the near future laboratory is, is where we’re mostly, uh, situated.

[00:55:41] Julian: Um, and just, just say that the, the manual, it sold out super quick. Cause that’s where I’m not a good, I guess, maybe too good of a salesperson. Um, and we’re, the second printing is, is coming very soon.

[00:55:52] Ted: Fantastic. Well, thanks very much for, uh, for joining us. Uh, if you enjoyed the show, uh, make sure you give us a review on iTunes or, or Spotify Spotify or wherever it is, you download the show, uh, leave some comments.

[00:56:06] Ted: Uh, that feedback is always valued by us. And of course, tell your friends about the show. Um, that’s how we, uh, pick up audience. Um, all of that is valuable, but we will, you know, let’s first of all, thank the team at provoke who helps us put the show together each week, Kevin Hirsham, our, uh, audio engineer, Lisbeth Severins, our producer, and, um, you know, the team, um, uh, the team generally at Provoke that help us get the show out.

[00:56:32] Ted: But we will be back next week with another riveting Futurist focused guest. Until then, Robert and I will see you in the future. Well,

[00:56:47] Robert: that’s it for the Futurists this week. If you like the show, we sure hope you did. Please subscribe and share it with people in your community. And don’t forget to leave us a five star review that really helps other people find the show.

[00:57:01] Robert: And you can ping us anytime on Instagram and Twitter at at futurist podcast for the folks that you’d like to see on the show or the questions that you’d like us to ask. Thanks for joining. And as always, we’ll see you in the future.