A Brief History of the Future

We're in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest,

just over 11,000 feet, home to some of the oldest

trees on planet Earth.

The trees in this forest that are surrounding me right now

are older than the pyramids in Egypt.

They were alive when Jesus Christ was born.

Some of these trees were already 4,000 years old

when the United States was born.

They go back further than almost all recorded history.

When you're at a place like this,

it changes your perspective

because these trees are truly the great

ancestors of life on Earth.

They have been here for so long

and will more than likely be here long after I'm gone.

And it's very rare to be in a place

where you have that sense of time.

It changes your perspective on not only where we are

and what we've done as a species on this planet,

but where we might be able to go.

Set one Ari, take one.

Name and describe yourself. What are you? Who are you?

Ha ha! My name is Ari Wallach.

I am a father, a husband, and during the day,

when I'm not doing those two probably most important

things, I am a futurist.

Growing up, I remember feeling

so excited about the future,

impatient, actually because I couldn't

wait for it to arrive.

Beam me aboard.

I watched movies and TV shows

that told stories of what felt like

inevitable human progress,

filling me with a sense of hope and possibility.

And it wasn't just on TV.

We were launching rockets.

Markets were booming.

And the Internet was coming online.

Hope is back in America.

We are on the right track to the 21st century.

3, 2, 1.

Happy 2000!

The next generation

and the generations that follow will live in a world

far better than the one we have today.

I went to work as a futurist,

helping governments and major companies

around the world better think about and plan

for the future,

not working to predict the future,

but looking at long-term trends

and the impacts they were

go ing to have across society.

It was an exciting time.

And it really did feel like we were on the brink

of something extraordinary.

New technology was poised to bring about

unprecedented prosperity and connection.

Less poverty, more peace, and shorter work weeks

were all right around the corner.

But then something happened, or didn't happen.

And that future never really showed up.

We are now working more, not less.

We have become more technologically connected

and yet more deeply divided.

The consequences of long-overlooked

environmental destruction are showing up in terrifying ways.

And the stories we tell ourselves

about tomorrow are now stories of dystopia

where everything falls apart.

Our feelings about tomorrow have shifted

from excitement to dread.

And the future has become something

to avoid rather than to build.

But over the years, my work has convinced me

the future is not set in stone.

We have the power to shape it.

That's what's led me here to making this show.

I'm looking for the people

wh o are building better futures

for themselves, for their kids,

and for the world around them.

Because the truth is, we have choices to make right now.

And these choices are going to have

major, long-lasting effects.

So I'm headed out on a journey to meet the brilliant minds

and brave pioneers changing our world

and reinventing tomorrow,

people who believe that we have everything we need

to create better futures--

not perfect, but better--

and something each generation can build on,

those challenging the status quo,

expanding our ideas of what's at stake

and what's still possible, from food to education,

from the cities we live in

to the ways in which we organize our societies,

people using new tools and ancient wisdom

to restore our relationship with each other,

to ourselves, and to this

be autiful place we call home,

a journey to rediscover how far we've come,

and where we could take this whole thing moving forward.

What I'm really

mo st interested in doing here

is trying to find the people

and the ideas that are going to kind of

show us what futures could be and from there

figure out which ones we want.

So this is great.

So let's talk a little bit about the science

of motivation.

What do we think--

As my journey begins, I'm interested in why,

even with all these tools and technologies

available, so many of us find it difficult to think

about the future.

That's brought me here to sit down

with a behavioral psychologist named Hal Hershfield.

Our future selves often feel like strangers to us.

They feel like sort of different people altogether.

One of the big findings in the early days

of what's called "social neuroscience"

is that the brain can tell

what's me and what's not me,

which makes sense in a way.

If I'm sitting in a scanner, and I think about myself,

I see more activity in what's called

my medial prefrontal cortex

and certain parts of the brain there

than if I, say, think about you.

I was more interested because I thought

that that finding held the clue

for maybe why we start thinking

about our future selves as different, other people.

In other words, if I can distinguish between me

and you in my brain, would I see

a same sort of disconnect between me

and my future self in my brain?

So here's what we did.

We had our research participants

go into the scanner.

They see a little screen in front of them.

It's a really boring, basic screen.

And they see a word at the top.

And the word represents a person

they need to think about.

So they say, "OK.

Think about current self or think about your future self."

And what we saw was that the brain activity from thinking

about your future self was more similar

to the brain activity when people thought

about another person.

What are the implications of that?

It suggests that on some deeper level,

we really do think about our future selves

as if they are other people.

When you take that perspective,

if our future self is some other person,

then the consequences of my decisions right now

are going to befall some other person.

All right.

So why don't you look at me?

All right. That's good.

All right. Now keep that face.

All right. And let's try this one more time.

We're going to do something funny here.

All right. So let's pull these up here.

And then here's the... Oh!

older ver-- Wow. All right.

So what do you think when you see that?

I mean, I'm sure people have

a somewhat similar reaction.

That looks shockingly like my dad.

Yeah.

It seems like I don't totally know who that is.

Right. Right. Right.

But it also doesn't seem that far from now.

Right.

Which is, in a way, true to form, right?

Like, when we think about our future selves,

you know, they may not be that far from now.

We don't totally know who they are, but--

When I first see that, like, it's jarring.

And then now you think, "OK."

Once you get over the initial kind of shock

of where things could go, you think, like, "OK.

"Well, like, if these are still the same individual,

"like, how does this one now,

"like, befriend and best-friend this one.

And what would you do for a best friend?"

I think that's, like,

the exact right perspective there.

Because they're not the same.

Yeah.

But it is that same sort of relationship

of a best friend.

In some ways, the work that you're doing,

it's like a wormhole, right?