This part of what makes us human is the ability for us to be angry, to cry, and more than anything to have these prosocial emotions. That's what's contagious, right? So when I talk about the book, the reason I talk about awe having awe again is that's what actually gives us hope.

So for me, like numbers and how we're going to move into a future and escape certain things that could add demise is good and interesting, but it's actually get I think and based on research kind of get a lot of folks up in the morning is to be emotionally connected to the future.

It is my pleasure to welcome to forward futurist author of the great book Long Path becoming the great ancestors are future needs and antidote for short termism and TV host of the upcoming PBS series.

A brief history of the future are you all like welcome are you. Thanks for having me wow I gotta say all of us watching are listening to this right now are thinking I always wanted to be a futurist how do you become a futurist.

You want to know the start look I it's interesting you don't necessarily grow up and say I want to become a futurist you kind of grow up trying to figure out where kind of your passions meet the needs of the world right and I have a kind of a interesting background in the sense that like my life story starts in the 1920s.

My dad was born in Poland in a kind of small little kind of Jewish settle and very soon after the war that shuttle was made even smaller and the short version of the story is he ended up escaping the ghetto after his father and two brothers were killed by the noxies his mom and sister were sent to Auschwitz and he escaped and joined the Jewish underground and was kind of a commander in the Jewish underground after the war did noxie hunting a whole bunch of stuff through Cuba in Mexico.

Where he met my mom now my mom was a student of Buckminster Fuller who was an architect and engineer and a few years.

I hear of mine I take quotes from Buckminster Fuller all the live long day Buckminster Fuller it there's a lot to say one of the things about him is there's a lot of quotes right and so I grew up in this home where we would have dinners that the kind of the temporalness of dinners wasn't we were talking about the news of the day that's what we did five six nights a week we ate together as a thing.

But because of my father's kind of history going back really to the 1920s and my mom sitting under Buckminster Fuller the time frame of those conversations was always like a hundred and 150 years so my dad always kind of brought in the past so whatever we were saying he would say well you know if you want to understand that you have to go back a few generations now my mom would flip it and say well then where do we go with this and she would go forward a few generations so my dad was in the 1920s my mom was in the 21 20s.

And that was kind of high was raised so it kind of makes sense that I ended up kind of going into something that basically that that was exemplified that big range of time.

Well certainly your your family background is unique in compelling this the fact that you had a parent who worked for the legendary Buckminster Fuller.

But still it seems like a difficult field like how does one get into it mean in your case you studied you wound up running an innovation lab you did a TED talk that's been seen millions of times but like what what was that path like.

Well there's so in the in the I think it's interesting no one else may think in the 1990s I went to UC Berkeley and there was a small.

My parents met there go there my brothers named after the Lawrence Hall of science okay I'm in the right place so in the 1990s there's a small little kind of organization company in Emoryville kind of right next to Berkeley called the global business network and GPN was not really known by many people but those who knew it knew what it was and it was a company started by Peter Schwartz to a brand of the whole of catalog a bunch of other folks and what they basically did was kind of featuring for large organizations and they were kind of involved in everything.

From national security to political stuff to corporate stuff it just so happened that they were trying to kind of give these like salon talks while I was at Cal and I have no idea how I got invited to attend some of them so that's kind of my first taste of understanding like you can there are people who are focused on the long term so it's a very thing.

Well so it will get to an effect because they came at it I'll say at least in my kind of estimation very much kind of through a technological lens right GPN the folks that came at GPN actually Peter Schwartz came from the scenario planning group at Royal Dutch Shell so really there weren't a lot of kind of real working future us up until GPN really it was the people who were doing it were probably the intelligence community Herman Conn at Rand was doing it and GPN was doing it and it was really good.

And if you've seen minority report which most folks have what you don't what most folks don't know is a lot of what kind of happens in minority port the kind of projects after the future was actually put together by the folks at GPN Walter Parks brought them in and said okay here's kind of the plot for this movie is based off of Philip K dick like how do we expand this how do we create this world.

And so the GPN folks got together and created that now that's a manifestation of featuring work that everyone gets to see a lot of a GPN did no one got to see right and so I was going to these salons and really these folks that were talking about not just the future but really kind of what captivated me where these mega trends was this idea that there were these larger issues that went back decades if not centuries that we're playing out today.

And so you know, I think that's just a conflict studies major UC Berkeley studying major world conflict it kind of kind of drew me in and so over the years of like red more kind of practice more and learned about scenario playing these kind of classic featuring techniques.

I guess I became a futurist so you did and we're grateful for it.

I'm sure the founder and executive director of long path labs and obviously this book long path presents those ideas I enjoyed your book a lot I think that anyone who reads it will feel themselves striving to be more long term focused and you make it very personal.

But what was interesting to me was that that it had the zen spirituality feeling to it is like look whatever's bothering you right now.

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