welcome to moral politics produced by bill of i'm host valerie to read what the future holds and what we do to be in the best position to prepare for it that's what our military does and they rely on people people like we have for our g today sarah robinson who is a futurist he is currently a fellow at the human foundation and was previously a fellow at the campaign for america's future a progressive think tank thank you for joining us good to be here valerie so have colleagues at i b m at kimberly clark at pitney bowes a lot of the major corporations in america have either have futurists in house on staff or consult with with the future in firms like you like institute for the future or social social technologies in washington are several major future in firms that provide this service to many many organizations you have to tell our audience what is a futurist in the future and firm that sounds so scary it does sound strange doesn't it the futures field is an old one it's been around since at least for at least the last century it's there all kinds of planning technologies that have alt as society has gotten more complex the soviets famously took four years to develop their first five year plan because they had to figure out how to do five year planning the nazis unfortunately made huge inroads but sort of the u s during world war two when general hap arnold realized that the united states had the resources to fight a two front war but only if we were very strategic about how we deploy those resources and the group that he brought together in the techniques that they pioneered became the foundation for the rand the rand institute after the war what was the rand rand is still when we think of a think tank and especially if you choose think tank rand is the primary example and they do a lot  strategic planning and foresight work for the u s government for the military for intelligence sitting around trying to think not in a science you know what exactly and that's what you do that's what i do that's what i do i'm a little different future futurist come in many different flavors the future is a very big place where all scanning the horizon and everybody's got our little slice of the horizon that we're looking at so as a group are very collegial which we'll trade a lot of information because i have colleagues who are looking at the future of travel in the hotel industry who are looking at the future of schools things like this so everybody's got their ballot and a lot of a lot of futurists are oriented science and technology and perhaps the great triumph of the future is movement was with nasa when john f kennedy stood up in one nine hundred sixty and said we're going to the moon in ten years and yet there was a lot of technology that didn't even exist yet that we knew that we would need to go there and so nasa was used a lot of futures futures planning technique and it takes techniques and a lot of futurists to get to where they were going there what kind of critic you me i don't make predictions do not make predictions but you're talking about the future right now we can't know anybody who can tell you that they're going to predict the future is selling you snake  ball no crystal ball i'm so sorry no but what we do have are other tools we have systems thinking we get to look at the big the big ways that human systems work that the world systems work that ecology works that organizations work and we look at the at these systems and we feel if you study the whole system and there is a theory for how systems work that was pioneered at mit if you understand those systems you can understand a lot about was likely to come next or how the system is likely to change in the future so systems thinking is a piece of it scenario planning is a big piece of it so we look at alternative futures we find the key drivers in any given situation they're usually only a few questions it would this yes or no this will happen or that will happen and if  they one way or the other the future changes so within it within any system you can find those leverage points those big questions and so we're looking for those and once you do find those you can get a pretty good sense of the various scenarios that you need to be planning for and also possible though piece of how the future unfolds and one of the things that futurists are trained to do as we look at the horizon it's think it think of it as being in the crow's nest of a ship and so you know we're not the captain of the ship and we're not on the crew were up on the cross fast looking out and saying there's something coming i don't know if it's a log whale or a submarine but there's something out there and i'm going to keep an eye on it to see if it crosses our path to see if it passes behind us and to see what it is as it grows closer so i am part part of the business is looking out for making sure that the nails the nails are all fastened down and that that things don't go away arrive because we missed some detail so what part of the future are you focused on my i'm a social futurist i'm very very interested in the question of why people change except change resist change fight it the ways they fight it i came to it through a study of a really radical change resistance movements like fundamentalism in fascism there really extreme extremes that people will go to to not to change and you give us an example of one of those extremes of the religious right today in america and the way and the tea party and the way that they're trying to hold on to a vision of america the axioms of futurists is that that the most likely future isn't and that the future will not be like the past so there are things that there are ways in which we will carry things forward there are good things about the past that we will pack up and carry with us that we need to bear in mind there are things that we know about human nature and about our  spirit about who we are as americans that will definitely carry forward with us i hope you know the best of the best of us but there's also but there's also you know there were there were things that created that world in the fifty's who were conditions that no longer obtain and were and i'm also reminded said income equality yes because they were there were structural racism their housing laws that made it impossible for for a black family to enter the middle class by buying a house which is how post where american white families entered the middle class we bought houses  and the f h a laws and the covenant laws and all of that made it very very hard the redlining there were all kinds of structural things in place to make sure that is the white middle class was rising up black middle class did not and so you know the person in that room was absolutely right you know the were there were doors closed to black people that are only now really opening up to the third generation so we can't go back to the future how do we get there we just move forward we get into it one step at a time one decision at a time  there's that old metaphor of frogs in pots you know had the temperature gets turned up and of course we know that doesn't really happen to frogs i mean really frogs will jump out of the pot sometimes we're not that smart and certainly we have a climate crisis for instance that is warming up on companies in this that that study has been done again and again and again in the last ten years and the primary people who are speaking out to deny climate science always trace back they're always funded by people who have a strong vested interest in not having us deal with this problem so one of the things that we as a society need to do is look beyond that the interests of the powerful interests and figure out what is our larger interest global global climate change is actually happening there's not a state in the union where you can go and not find clear evidence of it already happening there are plants that don't grow where they used to grow their animals that no longer are in or their own habitat there are planting farmers are having problems with seasons coming too early or too late freezes that are too hard to stay where we are with this belief and not move on to this in the next thing that we need to embrace that change is hard and change especially in the context of the deep comfort that we have known in this post world world that has been skin please supported our entire economy is based on oil and all the technology our biggest industries that oil industry the automobile industry the construction industries that build highways we have a tremendous amount of infrastructure investment over the last seventy years we have everything in our society has been geared to run on cheap oil and it's and we know intuitively in the back of our minds that the condition of cheap oil changes all this other stuff has to change to it is a fundamental threat to the way america is they would talk about the american way of life oil feeds every piece of that so when we let go of oil and move to the next thing that is a naturally terrifying thing people are going to resist and the way the way you get past it i think the piece of the way you get past it is simply  time people have to be can they have to be convinced with their own if they have to live through the tornadoes which came forty five miles from my mother's house in oklahoma earlier this week which had been through joplin missouri twice in the last week that's climate change it's absolutely about climate change these are we saw storms like this in the fifty's and again in the twenty's so these things do come but they're going to come with more ferocity the fact that new york city last summer had its call its hottest summer on record followed by the coldest winter on record and these things are happening and is scientifically it's very hard to say that any that any one storm any one event is connected to overall climate change is systems don't work that way and yet this is the same logic that the cars that the cigarette companies used to keep  denial of cigarette smoking the link between cigarette smoking and cancer at bay for forty years saying the cigarette smoking by a large population does not explain any one case of cancer and they use that they can for forty years they were able to keep it at bay and many of those same people are using the same what's fascinating is the same people isn't it is actually have read that they took lessons from the playbook they did many design firm history they did hired some of the same consultants right and some of the same you know scientist for hire who are willing to say what they want and being is like money and being a futurist i take a larger position which as i look at what this kind of discourse does to our understanding of science they're undermining not only our you know the our ability to make connections in these one or two cases but in our understanding of the validity of science and what science tells us about what is happening which is so frustrating because i think what most people don't understand is that science never proves things right science is about just like the law it's about the preponderance of evidence and anybody who has watched you know a lot show on television understands that in a court of law it's not about proving it it's about the preponderance of the evidence on actually  but it's an ongoing conversation just as watching the future is an ongoing conversation because as that log or whatever it is gets closer to the ship you get to see better and better oh no no really it's a whale or it's or it's a submarine and the end is going to cross in front of us it's going to cross behind us and so part of what a futurist does in addition to identifying that speck in the ocean out there is to figure out how when will we know what are the milestones how close will it have to be before we know will be will we be in any danger before we get there so do those early markers and when does an early warning become a kind of middling warning become a late morning and if so when are we going to trip those those points and why when should we know and that's important that that kind of scheduling of when the knowledge is going to come in is a piece of it as well van jones has said that we will be judged over the course of the next ten years on how we deal with the economic crisis and we will be judged for the next thing that in the next hundred years based on how we feel the logical choices would you agree with him on that i don't agree with him because i think they're one in the same crisis i think the economic crisis is springs from our vulnerability on the issue of oil because we are bound in oil and because oil is we have reached our peak all over the world most of the major fields are on the downhill slope recovery and extraction costs are getting higher and higher that is immutable fact of our economics it will not change the only way we can respond to it is by getting ourselves off of those fuels and on to the next energy regime  the other sad truth about this new says thomas homer dixon of the university of toronto with the peer to zero peace and justice center has written some wonderful books on this wonderful futurist in his own right that all empires rise on an end because they control an energy regime the dominant one of their time the romans controlled sunlight via the roads and the aqueducts and they were able to generate enough calories to build a coliseum and it had to field an army and to do the things that they did the dutch dominated the world because they mastered empire is built on oil and that is now passing and so that has profound implications for us not just ecologically but also economically and socially and technologically and the next empire is rising and it will be wind and it will be solar it will be maybe next generation you know we're coming out of what's been called the american century we would like to be out in front leading the world thirty years from now what would you as a prophet say that we were in it we're going to pick apart political battle right now a struggle for who's going to control the terms of this future everybody in the country understands what some kind of important nexus point that we can't go on as we have that that old era is crumbling and a new one is being born whose ideas will prevail historically michael x has written a wonderful book about this my friend historically whenever americans have come to those kinds of nexus points they've always turned to their progressive side because why i'm a progressive as well as a futurist is because progressives are the ones who are who are the foresighted one who look ahead and not behind who are unafraid of risk unafraid to take chances and fail and who therefore are more likely to walk out and seize the future and i think we're at a moment where that progress as are going to come forward and do that in a big way and i think the millennial generation is going to be  the leading edge of that and because because we are busily imagining these new ideas and all kinds of friends you can see the little sprouts of a future yet to come that are coming up you know economically we have we have the slow money movement and we have worker co ops like them under guns in spain and you have all these different little models that work playing with for how to run a business that is not a corporate large you know we're looking forward looking at relocalization we're looking at the transition movements the resilience movements  across the board new educational movements new ways of doing justice you know all these things that are being experimented with on the progressive side and all of these are like little small specks off on the horizon that are going to come some of them will come and be an important piece of our future so those things are present in our reality now william gibson once said the future is already here it's just not widely distributed yet and so and i think this is what we're going to all of those things are out there being experimented with mostly by progressive people some conservative people i mean the mormon the mormon model for instance of community resilience is really interesting to me and they've been doing that for a long time what is the moment i grew up in a heavily mormon hometown and they mormon families all store enough food for two years they don't carry debt they buy their houses outright mormon congregations buy their church buildings out they have with they call the bishop stories which is a large community food bank that any family that it's in need in the congregation can come and  at his discretion can open it up to any if there's a disaster for instance and the community needs those stories they can feed thousands of people like that they've got it and this is this is a resilience model that all of us should be looking at a time of crisis why we're doing  now you mentioned the word relocalization can you tell us more about that sure i mean it's an interesting trend actually the economist in the financial times had written about this this is an unknown trend where this is the nation states are breaking down and becoming cities states again and yet these cities states are much more connected by the internet and by trade so it's a cellular structure all over the world and governance may come back down to regional levels and this is happening and it's happening in china it's happening to some degree in the united states has happening very strongly in africa and what this does what this means is you get local economies relocalization it brings government decision making it brings transit it brings food supplies so the local food movement is a piece of this  so it's a bit of a disintegration of these big highly complex corporate and national structures and bringing things back down to a more manageable level that allows yet more complexity it's the next level of complexity because an interesting quote interesting quote one of the big issues we have with government right now is an issue of trust nobody trusts the government to solve our problems not even progressives who are usually the political champion of using government to solve our and we also have very strong issues with the way government and this is part of the breakdown talking about a part of why relocalization is happening because nobody on the level trusts the national government to do what's in the best interests of the people is corrupted it's gridlocked there are problems there are big problems that we all have that need to be fixed at the local level people do trust yes far more trust is far higher at local the local level and in fact the more one of the most interesting things i've seen wit for instance in the slow food movement when you get local farmers very often who tend to be more conservative often evangelical tea parties bigger rural america who are out in the countryside serving food to people who live in town who are very often more liberal  you find that there's a partnership that because the people in town are providing a market and encouragement and resources to the people in the in the countryside who want to keep farming my grampa who don't want to join up with a d m or cargill who want to keep their cows and keep what they're doing  and they form a partnership and it turns out there are no politics when dinner's on the table when you're working together this way and the trust that gets more and becomes the basis for we reform in other parts of the economy from doing transit from the planning schools for all the other local tasks and this their food shut so there are all kinds of dynamics that come into play when people's people become aware that their food is coming from somewhere and it might be five thousand miles away or it might be five hundred it might be fifty it changes the scale of the way we do our political thinking and it changes the trust that we have been in the people around us to be able to deliver the things we need what is your greatest hope for this i just hope is that we will and i don't think it's probably not a well placed what is that we will get through this transition off of oil onto the next thing away from our polarity in to the next the next american dream as van jones calls it without with a minimum of bloodshed without a civil war without invoking war with other countries usually these transitions are extremely painful you know there were the revolutionary war was the product of one the civil war the product of another world war two product of a third we don't have a good record of getting through these things without a whole lot of violence and i'm my fondest hope is that we will find a way through foresight through planning through having these conversations and building these infrastructures of moving through this transition in a much more graceful way presentation for congress a lot i believe hinges on this millennial generation that's rising up these are the people right now they were born between about one thousand nine hundred two and about two thousand so right now they are anywhere from about ten twelve years old to the early thirt s and this generation is far more networked it's more international forty four percent of them identify as nonwhite so they're the most they're the most multi ethnic multi racial most multicultural multi lingual globally connected generation america has ever know they are extremely progressive because they are communal list in their outlook even progress even the ones who identify as conservative have this idea that they are their brother's keeper that their set their prosperity their own individual prosperity and wealth depends on the prosperity of the whole is a very progressive ideas and so my hope is you know my positive future going forward thirty years is it thirty years these people will be in midlife they will be in their forty's fifty's sixty's they will be leading the country they will be at the heads of our corporations they will be the ones making policy decisions that govern everybody's lives and my hope is that they will keep those collective values and they probably will and carry them right on through remake our institutions and lead us into the next era of prosperity based on some very different things but they have the vision to do that they have the drive to do that they have right now the shared generational understanding that there is no choice but to do that because they know the future that they have right now is bankrupt so that is my fondest hope my the negative side the other scenario if you will is that because they are so collectivist they are also ripe for fascism ever excluding others and they you know it's possible that their generation could be hijacked and taken that way especially if the corporations make one last bid to take over things through through a banding net neutrality which i think i think is a key hinge point a neutral net is absolutely necessary like person was until this week talking about yes right  yeah yeah and this is the this is the other side of the web at all the things that we're not seeing in the web because google is helpfully screening things out for us it makes it very difficult so th know these are the challenges these are the kinds of things that the money has are going to have to deal with and there's a lot there's a lot of potential tyranny out there i'm it's a very dangerous time in that and it just depends on how well equipped they are with our guidance the guidance of the older generations the practicality of misunderstandings and if we get hijacked by by the big powers that be then we could have a very different future and all those dystopias become far more possible so the challenge can work together and can we make sure that we all have access to the full range of information so that we know what we're what we're what we're dealing with that's right that's right so that we can make decisions that actually are based on the realities of our world the real world that are governing our life now  and are going to govern our future and then we get the full democratic range of information they will for siloing often are a little hives there are good ideas on the conservative side there are good ideas in religious groups like the mormons who people don't pay a lot of attention to all of us part of one of the core beliefs of democracy as we all have something valuable and important to contribute to this conversation and if our technologies are filtering out each other's voices we're not going to come to the same kind of good decisions right and not have  towns in new england and still have them because you get that priest a multiplicity of perspectives of everybody in town and then the internet had the possibility still has the possibility of becoming our national or global town hall but not if we're  way that sounds like a fascinating challenge it is i think it is thank you very much for joining us today and for talking about your welcome was a pleasure to be here what an incredible conversation