Interview Notes – Future Human

Interview Notes: Dr. David Sinclair, on Age Reversal

Dr. David Sinclair is one of the world’s leading researchers on aging. A biologist at Harvard, he is pioneering research that’s showing dramatic reversals in the symptoms of aging among mice and more recently, humans. I approached him to participate in Future You as we prepared to pivot from brain-machine interfaces and neurotech into the “superhuman” possibilities for longevity and life extension.

Loose notes from our call:

We’re at a turning point like the Wright Bros in 1907, when flying was considered something only for the rich and crazy. Age reversal and living to 150 is considered still something for the rich and crazy but we are at the moment, the moment is now, where extending mouse lives by 30 percent is easy.

There’s a race among scientists now in the field: Is it possible to make a medicine to treat aging as a disease?

If aging is treated as a disease, you are treating the myriad diseases that kill us, that flow downstream from aging.

Sinclair is in trial with his NAD-boosting molecule, his patients are “boosting” right now to extend their lives. He personally tried his own molecule and within four months reduced his biological age from 58 down to 31.

Two scenarios he thinks through (which are in his upcoming book): What if we are successful in extending human lifespans by 50 years, and what if we’re not?

We already spend 17 percent of our GDP on healthcare/treating diseases at the end of people’s lives. We’ve reached a ‘dead end” in treating diseased one at a time — like if you cure your cancer, your risk for everything else, stroke, heart disease, etc go up. The only way to make real progress is to slow down the likelihood of ALL of those diseases, which is to slow down aging.

There are relatively simple means to delay aging now, by boosting your body’s defenses to disease. THE FUTURE is in trying to nudge humanity toward this. You could eventually have a $5 trillion savings in healthcare to then go to the social safety net, saving species, boosting education spending, etc.

DRAWBACKS: You’d have less turnover of politicians, you’d have them into their eighties not relinquishing their roles, the retirement age couldnt be 65 anymore, but I have proposals like skillbaticals, where you have two or THREE careers over the course of your super long life.

HOW COULD I TRY THIS, for FUTURE YOU?

I can’t try the molecule since it’s in controlled research trials. But a diabetes drug that requires a prescription has a similar effect. That, combined with a protocol he will give me, can help delay my aging.

Measure my biological age with a blood test (blood sugar is a predictor of longevity), take an age meter test at Harvard that measures hearing, memory and breathing to take a physical/mental measurement of my body’s age that way, and finally test my DNA against a DNA clock. Three metrics to start to see how “old” I am and whether we can reverse it/make me younger.
Protocol. Includes a pill, intermittent fasting, exercise, and cryotherapy, which involves going from a sauna and then into a cold bath. All of these non-pill tasks involve the idea of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” so you are supposed to give your body some adversity like hunger, running, making it colder.

HIS THEORY

Aging is a loss of information between cells. As we age, our cells lose their identity and don’t read one another as well when they replicate. The DNA info in there is still in tact. So if we can polish the cells, like CDs that get scratched and then are polished to work better, then we are reversing aging.

“I didn’t expect this would be doable in my life time.” There’s a $50 mil trial now to replicate my findings in older people. If you want an idea of how close are we, we are JUST around the corner. We are not UNDERSTANDING aging after testing testing testing, and now we’re testing in humans.

Background call with Dr. Vincent Clark

We are cooking up an episode frame around “Super Memory” or just boosting our memories and our ability to remember, in general. I spoke with Dr. Vincent Clark, who along with Dr. Pilly Praveen have authored several papers on their research in stimulation to improve memory formation.

Loose notes from our call:

Our tech is related to TDCS. It’s multi-channel instead of two electrodes. Can do 32 channels and a variety of different methods. The one that worked best is we train subjects on a task — we can present the task using VR or on a computer screen. The goal is for the subject to see complex images and cues and potential threats (bombs, snipers) and test how much you learned. Then they sleep in lab and either stimulate or not, depending on condition, and wake up and test again.

Does stimulation help with learning to detect threats? This closed loop stimulation that zaps you with the part of your brain that does memory consolidation.

Underlying principle of TDCS is the same as Halo headsets, but with diff brain areas.

In some studies it double peoples ability to learn/remember.

With sleep stimulation, the larger effect is with stimuli that’s novel from the original scenario during training. The effect is larger to stimulate with different contexts. The cognitive task is the same. But one stimulation is, TDCS during training (stimulation focused on the right frontal lobe) and we enhance people’s abilities to detect threats and learn to respond to them. Then later, when TDCS wears off, they’re still better at detecting and responding to threats.

With that same protocol on right frontal lobe, we have had subjects do a different task which doesn’t have anything to do with threats. You have to classify photos of maps from diff parts of the world. We quadrupled people’s performance with TDCS over the right frontal lobe. The results give us clues to how TDCS is working. It makes people more tenacious. They don’t give up as easily. They’re more persistent. It could generalize to a lot of diff things in the future!

“Everyone wants to be my research subject.”

To repeat this protocol we need equipment that’s off site. Could arrive by 24th.

For demo purposes we could do a nap. We may not seem the same effects for a whole night study, but we have the subject come sleep in the lab without stimulation just to get used to it, and the next night is when we apply stimulation. For demo, we’d put a neoprene electrode cap on your head, but with electrodes in it, and then we record EEG while you sleep and the algorithm will wait until you’re in a deep stage of sleep and then stimulate. We might have to turn the threshold down during a nap. Then you could record EEG screen, record me sleeping in the lab.

There are a few other things we could show you — besides electrical stimulation, we also have magnetic stimulation, ultrasound to modulate brain activity, and infared light to modulate memories. After our success with electrical stimulation, we branched out. We don’t have a lot of cool successful data but we can show if you’re interested.

ORDER:

test

an hour of training

test again

sleep with stim (all night long)

test again (next morning)

(Naps would abbreviate the whole schedule.)

Center for Humane Tech/Ethics Guru scheduling

We are trying to schedule Tristan Harris, who is a leading voice on the effects of technology on society and humanity. His comms aide, Lynn, says they may have a tie-in event in April that would allow us to do one-on-one with Tristan but also give us an extra element that could fit into the series. I told them on/before April 23 is what we’re aiming for for Tristan.

Bryan Johnson (Kernel founder) was behind The OS Fund — funding only tech that would rewrite operating systems of life, the world. Tech that might be operable just by thinking about it, essentially changing human interfaces completely. This led to the birth of Kernel and investing in other things in the brain space.

The BrainNet … Potential Applications

We asked the team at the UW Neurotech center to prep us for our upcoming visit to try their brain network and specifically to describe how it will be potentially used:

“Regarding real-world applications, BrainNet is meant to be a proof-of-concept of multiple human brains collaborating to solve a task that none of the brains individually could. Extrapolating this into the future, one can imagine networks of brains overcoming the evolutionary limitations of single brains by solving difficult scientific and social problems facing humanity that no single brain can solve on its own. Other possible applications include a new mode of communication between humans that can be viewed as computer-assisted telepathy, a way to communicate directly with patients who are locked-in, and potentially, a new way to transfer knowledge or skills directly between brains.”

“Cognitive Evolution” and are we okay with that?

Some notes from an not-yet-released film on this topic:

Scientists are now developing technologies that could radically alter the way we are as human beings
Linking biological brains directly to machines
What is unnatural, what is inhuman?
We are transforming into a technological species, we don’t know what the outcome will be
If we start tinkering with the brain, we start changing it … are we about to fundamentally change what it means to be human?

Bill — bicycle accident, now tetraplegic treated at the VA
“I always want to do more … and I can’t do anything for myself. People in my situation, they just never move again. I want to move from this point to that point, without help.”
Paralysis cuts off the communication between brain and the body parts … if we can figure out what exactly is connected to what from the brain…
The attempt to understand what part of the brain does what it does, that’s the idea. It’s the most complex system we’ve ever seen in the universe.
The brain is so unbelievably complicated and yet somehow it is us. “If we could crack the code of the brain, you could solve mental illness, cure people who are sick, restore capabilities that disease has taken away…”

Ann — artist with Parkinsons, so her brain and hands are no longer communicating
Exhausted and disorganized mentally, blocking the way she can be with people the way that she used to
“So far we have no way to slow down the progression or stop the illness”
So much brain related disease around the world, a “massive epidemic” because we have no ways of stopping or preventing these illnesses
Doctors implanted electrodes in her brain … to provide around the clock electric stimulation to the parts of her brain that were atrophying.

Stephen — lost his vision later in life
“everything’s white … it’s like the whole world basically collapsed”
Got prosthetic eyes — could they be MORE advanced? Crank up the magnification? Add infared eyes? They are camera-eyes so why not get eyes as good as a cats? etc.

Technology is taking off in understanding the brain. In the near future we’re going to see ways of fixing problems and ENHANCING humans. Capacity to define a left turn in evolutionary history. Questions about the future, the risks, the potential. So far, this is off the radar.

Bryan Johnson/neurotech entrepreneur
Started Braintree. In 2013, it was acquired by EBay. Then he could use his own money to solve larger problems. Venture Fund invests in hard science. And the company Kernel, which is based in Venice.
“We can overcome our biological limitations”
We can reject the things that stop us from moving forward.
Predicts advanced brain hacks to merge human brains with tech will be on our doorsteps in 15-20 years.

The Wyss Center, Switzerland
John Donoghue, founder
Trying to interpret the code of signals coming out of the brain.
The brain consists of billions of neurons that all speak together. You can hear the crowd of neurons but not the details. You need more accurate information. Need to go inside. Pass the barrier of the scalp and skull and go in contact with the brain. Developing a brain electrode, avoiding dust, biologic and bionic contamination. These powered electrodes get worn, by implanting the electrode into or onto the brain. By implanting the electrodes you can activity of SINGLE neurons. The electrical impulses of the neurons and convert them into a signal scientists can understand, a digital piece of data, but then you can do with it anything you do with data. WHAT DOES THE CODE MEAN can be broken down.

Brain Computer Interfaces give us the ability to understand the brain’s electrical signals to replace lost function. Brain science is showing us how to understand ourselves at the level of the machine. What happens when we fully understand the brain?

“We are linking biological brains DIRECTLY to machines.” The human is fragile but it’s creative and smart and can push beyond. Now we’re bringing them together to use the human and advantages of the machine in a symbiosis.

The upside of restoring brain activity is enormous.

NEUROETHICS
Breakthroughs happening faster than we imagined. As we unlock secrets of the brain, will something change fundamentally about what it means to be human?
YOU is in your brain.
If you start implanting electrodes in it, at what point is it problematic?
To what extent do we want to integrate tech into mainstream society?
Where’s the line between healing and enhancing, when you can tap into the brain?

Should we proactively improve the brain we have?

Kernel — mainstream tools to solve problems and improve what works
Trying to make a brain interface that shows you all your brain activity.
The QUANTIFIED BRAIN
Can we help you push away an unproductive thought? If we have tools to nudge our behavior, can we re-think the things that have always held us back?
Then does it become a matter of choice — what we want to become?
Where are the edges? Could we communicate the emotion you’re feeling to a loved one? Could we teach a new skill more easily?

UW lab:
Speaking without words
brain signals from one to another, you could understand my memories and emotions without me talking about them
increasing empathy? or terrifying
they can read your brain… couldnt they manipulate and control it?

TALK TO TRISTAN HARRIS
DARPA is super involved in brain machine tech, what if it’s used as weapons?
China has a huge brain mapping effort, ditto South Korea, Japan
China is going to be the biggest investor in science in the world by 2020
This then becomes a race for power
Who gets the tech? What do we use it for? Under what conditions do we use it?

The companies who control these tech have societal impacts. Cannot predict the consequences but some are thinking about it.

Kernel: Commercializing Hacking of the Human Brain

Kernel is one of the two companies (the other being Elon Musk’s Neuralink) that’s working with researchers on brain-computer interfaces. We had an intro call this morning so I could learn what they’re up to. Loose notes:

Speaking with Alanna & Shayna, the communications team at Kernel. They run all of Brian’s comms and marketing for Kernel and for the VC he runs and for his thought leadership.

Foundational insight — everything the world looks like frlows from the capabilities and limitations of the human brains. how we understand each other, how we understand the world, the awesomeness that is the human brain and the evolutionary limitations that are there.

Kernel is somewhat unique in the space in that we’re not starting from a “how to tackle disease” or “move their bodies again” but starting from a place of “how do we expand cognition” with the understanding that once we understand how to do that then we can understand how to tackle problems. We’re starting from the other side, which is there’s so much potential here. How do we build on potential. Solutions will come from that.

Organizing principle is build on understanding. We have very little understanding of how the brain works right now. How do all elements come together to make us who we are? Think about it like FitBit when we learned that we could measure biometric data like heart health and sleep. We’re not at that place in the brain, and that’s partly because we don’t understand how it all works. Right now the tools for measuring and reading it are rudimentary. Anything we do have is enormous and have to be institutionalized, like fMRI.

FOCUSES

is it possible to have non-invasive (wearable) for our brains? What are the tools for read out, the neuroscience of readout, with the physics of miniaturization?
Once you figure out how to read, then it’s can you write? Can you deliver nudges to the brain? Is there a way to know, based on something you’re wearing, when you’re dwelling on something unsuccessfully? Would it be possible to nudge your thinking inside your brain? What are most useful and enhancing modes?

KERNEL offices and labs are in LA, in Venice.

Smaller operation in Boston

Hire researchers … Hired the pre-eminent neurophysicist to come in-house and partners and advisers from mostly from

TIMING

Right now what’s going on is entirely proprietary … off record or would have to hold. Kernel and Neuralink are in a race. Whoever gets the first thing that can go to market. Embargoes are necessary. Hooman the CTO can do the explaining on video. He’s lovely. Really wonderful way of understanding complex things. Center of all kinds of modalities. Can do that in February.

Documentary is being produced … called I Am Human, a doc about this journey to forge man and machine. Focused on the existing things to market around solving problems. Follows three patients, one with Parkinson’s, one blind and one with paralysis. Then to Brian and what he is doing to enhance himself. Releasing in April in Tribeca. Sending a preview.
Presently working with the Future of Everything team at WSJ to do a deep dive on a narrower focus on what’s coming to market. What’s the process of coming to market?

Biohacker Eric Espinoza, Panel Notes

Eric Espinoza, a scientist, researcher and biohacker at Esper Therapeutics, spoke in a pre-lunch session which was heavily focused on CRISPR, which is a fairly new gene-editing technique that even amateurs can experiment with because it’s relatively low cost. The idea that sticks with me from this conversation was his example of home pregnancy tests and how they used to not be available to consumers; only doctors offices confirmed pregnancies. But maybe by 2050 we can diagnose disease — and design our own treatments/therapies — with advancements in biohacking.

Loose notes…

The focus on biologicals right now are on antibodies, i.e. Which ones will kill cancer cells?
He’s part of the group Biocurious— biohacking — a place to try biological things
Personalized cancer and viral therapy
Crispr kit you take an organism and edit its genome.
The enzyme functionally edits dna. 159 bucks. DIY crispr kit

CRISPR
Crispr has a protein to find RNA, and once it finds the gene it cuts the RNA.
Everyone has cells and trying to get protein inside the cells isn’t easy. Eric tried to get CRISPR inside of cells. The goal was to find a cancer therapy. Worked really well for integrated viruses.

TWIST Biosciences. A DNA synthesis company which has “changed the landscape for DNA synthesis”

CRISPR is 2000 base pairs. TWIST makes genes at five cents per base pair. DNA is going to be super cheap in ten years, maybe sub-penny or less.

You buy all these DNA pairs, and then you buy bacteria, and you force the protein that’s made out of the DNA code into the bacteria. We take these vials and we force the proteins to be made from it, then we kill off the bacteria and then harvest the protein from it.

The synthesis process is pretty good overall, there are sometimes errors, but if there are problems the fixit pair IDs errors.

HOW TO FUND?
NIH grant. Need data to support the grant. Too risky for govt to fund without. Alternative is to support money from VC. They take a lot of equity and control and you no longer have as much. We wanted to show some proof of principle first. Can we get any reasonable data that suggests we are moving in there right direction?

Experiment.com was the route for the reporting
Biocurious offers lab space as a community/sharing pooling resources to drive experiemnt/proof of principle costs down

Should we constrain this/limit access?
There’s lots of talk about the home pregnancy test. The gatekeepers didnt think people could handle the information. I never grew up in a world where a doctor had to test you for pregnancy. I think we saw a lot of similar things with HIV and now we have home HIV tests. All of those fears were unfounded. The fears about CRISPR are unfounded. There is no real way to take CRISPR and ruin everyone else, you can research on a small scale but modifying yourself is impossible. You have a lot of cells in you, and getting CRISPR into that cell is very, very challenging. We have to use electric jolts to force an organism to take a protein. There are some chemical ways to do it but you’d lose 40, 50 percent of your cells

A lot of countries are more cavalier about medical advances. FDA learned a lot about thalidomide in the 50s. But maybe we went too far in the other direction, so other countries are likely to pioneer a lot.

China Genomic Group are the biggest sequencers of all. They have done gene editing on human eggs. They must have gone though hundreds of thousands of eggs to get one edited. What’s the downstream effect? What will happen to this egg? I think they did pigs to knock out the growth hormone of crispr, and pigs were not as sensitive to crispr as humans.

Ethical question: Eugenics.
“Seems so far away, such a foreign, visceral no” that to think that was a regular eugenics exhibits in the 1930s is … if you had access to 100K, a million, the gene drive aspect might only work 5-7 generations. I’m not so confident that’s a real problem.

There are a few papers from Natl Academy of Sciences where they were using gene drive to try and see how long they could keep genes promoted in mosquitoes. After 7 generations, it doesn’t take over the long period.

Gates Foundation is spending a lot of money to eradicate malaria mosquitoes. One question is can we run a gene drive to eradicate a species? How many would you need to put out there? You’re still looking at 10K mosquitoes, if you have a million mosquitoes. You’re going to edit tens of thousands of mosquitoes for every one right now. That’s assuming natural selection doesn’t take over. We see it in antibiotic resistance.

NIH launches genome editing initiative — 190 million over the next few years. THere’s interest in accelerating the research and bringing collaborations and partnerships. Is the public even aware of what the conversation is? Are we too worried about designer babies or eugenics that we are missing unknown unknowns?

Direct to consumer genetic testing:
FDA authorized it in March of this year, to test for BRCA. 23 and Me stopped doing it four years ago but now FDA is allowing it.

DOD comes in once a year to Biocurious to think about making terrible biological weapons with this, but then they come out thinking, ok there are a lot of processes in place to prevent things like that. The DOD is all over this.

Genomic Medicine forecast: Emerging medical discipline involving using genomic info about an individual as part of their clinical care (for diagnostic, prevention, and therapeutic decision making)

We are going to be trying to figure out how to weigh cancer vs therapeutics. When CRISPR made waves the hope was that there was something that would modify the genome with an interchangeable part that’s cheap. Talon cost 100K dollars to make. CRISPR decreases that cost dramatically. There’s a lot of hope and energy and we can use these tools out of genetic problems and diseases. There’s a lot of worry about baby engineering but with those papers … so far it’s not promising for fixing a problem at this point. You’d have to start weighing the costs. Is it better, or not? How is the cost of a designer baby worthwhile?

The revolution will be diagnostic. You do your first test with next generation sequences, then your second pass with CRISPR to either confirm or deny.

We could find that diagnosing conditions are really cheap and easy (like pregnancy) but it doesn’t get into dropping cost of therapies and cures. The papers about the next 10 years put a big damper on the field for awhile.

Interview Notes: Jane McGonigal, IFTF

Jane is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games—or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. Jane is also a future forecaster. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future. Her research focuses on how games are transforming the way we lead our real lives, and how they can be used to increase our resilience and well-being.

Me: [Intros the project]. We’re gonna be starting with the human and the human body — the most basic needs like food and water to survive, then maybe move outward to love. And then community, and that’s where we can work in the urban question: how we’ll live going forward as communities. That’s also maybe where transportation will come in. Where surveillance might come in. Where connection with your neighbors comes in. So I wanted to talk with you! What do you imagine 2050 will be like? What kinds of things are you thinking about?

Jane: The Institute for the Future is having our 10 year forecast next week and it’s in the Bay Area. It’s in Mountainview. I’d love to extend an invitation to you. That will answer a lot of your questions. I’m going to speak on behalf of the institute rather than myself personally. We have a number of different research programs. A big one is future of food. How tech is trying to increase the sustainability of the food supply chain — impact of climate change, lab-created meat, GMOs for different DNA types, biome modified foods to cure diseases and mental health issues, the whole body of work around that. That I’m happy to send you our forecasts. We have a new report we just launched at the climate innovation summit that happened last week — what levers we have to stop climate change? Not forecasting what the world will be like but what are the ways we might stop climate change?

Me: I didn’t bucket out climate change or migration as a specific topic because it’s a layer that will affect everything.

Jane: Displacement is a big research topic that we’re tackling. I think you’re right to lok at it iat a human level. How will we learn? How will we stay connected to our family and our cultures? We have a health program that looks at life extension to personalized medicine and augmentation — exoskeletons and neuro-rewrite technologies. And a big part of our research is around surveillance state, privacy and data issues. And a ton of research on the future of work. Which is the big issue that creates a lot of anxiety.

Me: Automation replacing humans?

Jane: That and one of the things I think about is — the number one job for migrant workers is in slaughterhouses in the United States. It’s traumatizing, it’s high turnover and super stressful and the rise of lab-curated meat is going to change the nature of meat labor in the future. Instead of a low skill job we would have a higher skill job that requires you to be a lab technician to work with sophisticated lab equipment. And it’s not automation! It’s a new skill set. It’s a different type of worker. On one hand it’s good because it’s less traumatizing. It costs too much from a planetary perspective to eat meat. When I think about the future, we try to come up with these sort of intersections where a lot of the dilemmas and innovations hit up against each other. And the anxieties we have hit up against innovations and we try to then ask what will be possible in the future, what should we worry about in the future. The surveillance in China is the best

Me: Oh yeah, Xinjiang province is a test bed for a highly wired police state.

Jane: Yeah. Most of the reporting is anxiety laden but many people in China like the programs of surveillance. They are testing a hundred different versions and they’re learning a lot about what surveillance states where people feel not paranoid or disempowered by but transparent enough. One criteria that’s not apocalyptic is if the number of things you can do to benefit you and increase your score by a magnitute of 100 to 1, so for every one negative thing you can get dinged for there is 100 things you can do to be judged favorably, that might feel like an environment where you have many avenues to improve your bad reputation. Versus a system you can be dinged for 100 different things. That’s toxic, punishing and anxiety-producing. The way I look at it is to really look at multiple futures. The technology trends is definitely headed this way — so we can steer it, not stop it. We are looking at different directions it can go. So we can articulate one possible future we’re not terrified by. Or one that sounds better than the present.

Even if it’s something like climate change, our new report is trying to figure out how this brings out the best in humanity and the types of solutions to create a brighter future instead of punishing people with dystopian possibilities.

I will send you some of our research and invite you to our conference. In terms of specific topics and ideas. We have a ton of researchers who would be happy to talk to you.

Brainstorm Notes: Colin Maclay of USC Innovation Lab

Me: When you think out to 2050 — how do you think about it? How do you organize your thoughts and inquiry and experimentation?

Colin: I’m going to free associate which may or may not have connections to this.

My pal and office mate Henry Jenkins is working on a civic imagination project. Workshops with people to imagine the future generally. They choose 2040 or 2050, and map out what they would like to see, what they would expect. And use narrative and popular culture mashups to create a tale of how we got from here to there. Part of the thinking being that we live in the tyranny of the possible and we see barriers and can only imagine modest change rather than imagine something more ambitious and positive that we would have to WORK to achieve. Let’s have this grand vision. What they find that’s interesting is that people regardless of politics, people have similar visions but don’t know how we’re going to get there when they think about near-term stuff.

Henry is a pop culture, science fiction junkie and just a neat person. He’s the digital culture historian at the Library of Congress right now. We’re doing an event with him in late January on podcasting and he became a huge podcast fan. Something neat there and opportunity around him and his network. Around civic and community and what that looks like, what our lives are like. One lens.

My immediate reaction to your “how to explore it” question is, we’re too siloed into disciplines. And the action is always at the intersection of the buckets and how they connect and interplay. That’s an obvious pushback. How do you make the buckets DIFFERENT from the way we normally think about, or set them up so we show an interdynamic system. Because clearly the environmental bucket would affect everything if you label that, it would be limiting.

Two things in this zone: Alex McDowell — production designer who teaches at USC who made a bunch of movies. Most famously Minority Report. Fight Club, and a bunch of other things. When he did Minority Report he faced the challenge you were in making it. They said, when you make a movie they give you a script with a plot and everything. The only thing he was given was, “Imagine if we could see five minutes into the future.” That was the whole thing. There was no story. So he brought together and interviewed all these people who were working on different aspects of the future. They did this practice called world building where he created an integrated view of what the future could look like. So it wasn’t like in one domain there were assumptions in one direction, and there were assumptions in another direction. So that you could see how all the aspects moved together to create a coherent world. So that if you saw this massive development in batteries, it would have a ripple effect in education and transportation and in the end it feels much more real. Many people have argued that Minority Report is a compelling and coherent as an experiential view of the future.

Ann Pendleton Julian. She leads world-building studios. And she’s in LA now and we would love for her to stay here.

NOTE TO SELF: World-building studios exist! Go see one. (For example they build a world after a scenario, for example the seas rise two feet by 2050 and do a whole studio around it, and design things for that future and explore problem solving to respond to that future.)

“We think this whole world building stuff is an interesting mashup of futurism and storytelling and creates an environment to do problem solving.” There could be a project where we really tap into heavy hitters. Just to put in perspective, JSB (writing partner/supporter of Ann) is just now stepping off board of Amazon.

There are a bunch of people who want to use world building to think about what’s happening but also to prepare challenges and opportunities.

Me: But I need limits! Because of what I’m making.

Even without the limits of what you’re making it’s still a really hard question to figure out how you want to organize. I’m unburdened by knowledge!

I believe in dog fooding. We need to be doing reflection and practice. We should thinkign about stuff and learning and trying shit out. How do you integrate the learning in a natural way so that it’s more real? Maybe the thing is, we need to create some buckets ultimately but we don’t knwo what the buckets are. So is there a way we can have conversations or activities to chunk it out into smaller pieces. You dont have to understand the grand organizing scheme but explore it in a way that listenrs can follow along and engage and get you to see how to then organize it. A phase that’s exploratory and unburdened but not try to be too smart by half when you havent even delved into it. Maybe X period of time, now we’re gonna come at it from another angle. Now we’ve learned and we’ll build it out. So that way it’s iterative. Between different data points. As opposed to assuming that before we start we know what stories.

What if I did it around humans? I start with a body, and then bodies in love, and then humans in community, and so on?

My immediate reaction is, that sounds good. If you start with say the future of work, there are assumptions baked into that. Like that we need to work. or the need to be educated, and those values are baked in. Maybe that might be functionally real. But I like the idea of what we really NEED? What we need to survive. It puts you in a position to build a world based on what we need and want rather than what we have. That way you’re not as burdened by the tyranny of the possible — how do we transition from late capitalism and democracy — and that might be real but this is more interesting, saying what do we want to achieve around live and love and shelter? If those are necessary or possible? How do we work back from that? What does that look like? The neat thing about live, love, connect, removes it from a US context and a global set of questions. The people who don’t live in our context can open up universes of possibilities of whats’ happening in other places or the values in other places. Other cities and communities are thinking about the future. Increases potential ideas and potential audience. That way we are lowering the barrier.

Some constraints are your friends. The constraints I like suggest a constraint but truly you could do a lot under it and yet are meaningful to the audience. Here’s are time immemorial questions. And these are the most fundamental questions of humanity. And of society. So let’s ask em. We have a blank slate.

Who should I talk to next?

The Berggreun Institute. This guy Nicholas Berggreun, used to be called the homeless billionaire is a think tank foundation something and as with any organization there are some uneveness there but there are some people there I really like, including the VP who runs most things. His name is Dawn Nakagawa. She’s leading the exploration of 21st century governance and what it looks like in the emerging world we’re entering into. She’s super sharp and creative and they’re trying to be anti-academic in a good way. Thinking about inquiry and action. I like her and trust her.

They have a program called future of the human, with a guy named Tobias Rees, who I like a lot. Who’s like a philosopher. His idea is that metaphors about being human are breaking down — what does it mean to be a human in the future?

Interview Notes: Ian Bremmer

Ian Bremmer is a big brain I got to know while covering North Korea as a foreign correspondent. He speaks really quickly and he is one of the sharpest riffers on any subject so he’s one of the first voices I reached out to as I begun this reporting. His official bio: He is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm. Once dubbed the “rising guru” in the field of political risk by The Economist, he teaches classes on risk as a professor at New York University. His latest book “Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism” is a New York Times bestseller.

I wanted to speak with Ian because I need a more specific frame for my exploration and I thought Ian might lay down some theses to help get me started. Boy, did he.

Atmospherics: Spoke by phone, Ian was in a car so he couldn’t record myself. My shipment from DC was getting delivered to my new house in LA so I was sitting on a cobwebby camping chair I found in a backyard shed to conduct this interview. As I was speaking with Ian, my friend Nick came over to give me cash to tip my movers, and my realtor came over to walk around and do the move-in inspection for my landlord. The movers were, meanwhile, moving. A lot was going on.

Loose Notes:

Me: I’m working on a vertical that I thought up, about the world in 2050. It will be expressed in various ways, namely my home platform, video, but many parts on audio too, and maybe I’ll write pieces or a book one day. I picked 2050 because it’s soon and yet far enough away — it’s when today’s babies will be 30.

Ian: 2050 is a long time in a world where technology is changing at an exponential rate. You know about Moore’s Law and singularity. Changes appear to happen slow but you have technological change happening exponentially, especially as they reach scale. So history doesn’t tell us anything about the future, because you have so many hockey sticks. “Weak signals become strong signals fast.”

The idea that capitalism works will be tested. Labor and capital may no longer have a relationship to one another, as we’re seeing artificial intelligence rise. “Yes the industrial revolution led to more jobs, but not for horses. Why couldn’t that happen to people?”

That might divide humanity. By 2050 you could take a subset of humanity and it might create intellectual capacity way beyond what humans are capable of now. I’m thinking memory recall, pattern recognition. As usual companies will own these ways to augment your capabilities, not everyone gets access. So then you could have one subset of intellectually capable superhumans, and one subset with today’s human capability. Human history would indicate we won’t treat the normal intellectually capable human beings as human beings.

Government, economic and socio-cultural models will be fundamentally tested. I‘d argue the issues around geopolitical developments are much more pressing than climate change because with climate change we have a little bit of time to adapt except for the poorest parts of the world, i.e. Syria, Yemen, sub-Saharan Africa, where that’s already the case. “The last twenty to 40 years were really hopeful for humanity and that seems to be continuing, and yet there are many signs the wheels are coming off.”

There are two places the future really plays out, or is playing out already: China and Silicon Valley. “So you’re in the right place to be in California.” Who are those people, who are setting up the future? What are those systems and models they’re working under? Where is there discontinuity?

Missing Ideology of 2050

The world today has no ideology. That will change, but not sure how. What brings people together and divides them in 2050? What spurs them to action? It’s not going to be capitalism, necessarily. Nor a protestant work ethic. Or liberal-democratic values, even.

Watch the techno-utopists in the Bay Area. “There really are a lot of people up there who believe technology will fix everything.” Understand those people. What do they care about? What is the world they see? What is the reaction to that? Who is disenfranchised by this kind of thinking? Are they just anti-state people? Anti-capitalist people? Who are the anti-tech people who will bring them down, besides negative actors like Russia, Iran.

The future Humans

Humanity will change through genetic modifications. How will technolgoy be used for good/bad here? Look at soldiers who get heightened mental/physical acuity right now, who can work without sleep, tweak their personalities with drugs, etc. Look at three areas:

Changes in emotional/mental capacity
Heightened ability to work/longer attention span
Functioning without sleep

“These will be tweakable changes that a lot of people don’t have access to.” Recommends the 9.9 percent piece in The Atlantic, as he believes these people will make sure they and their children are “on the right side of the gates.”

Societal changes

What is the next thing that keeps society held together, when technology has proven so divisive to society?

Then I had to get off the phone because too many people were over. And Ian is a busy dude who had a hard stop anyway. I’ll speak with his colleague Andrew, next.