We've Been Sold a Bad Bill of Goods About the Future
TechStuff
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2026
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What would it mean to be a "great ancestor"? Futurist Ari Wallach believes that's the question everyone, including our tech leaders, should be asking right now.
Ari joins Oz to explain why the systems we're building today are laying rails for centuries to come. And he argues that shifting culture through storytelling is the fastest way to change the systems that govern our lives. He also introduces The Protopias Collection, six graphic novels imagining worlds that are messy and human, but unmistakably better.
Also on the show: Alex Thier, the CEO of Lapis, discusses Lalah, an AI-powered chatbot built to help Afghan students learn beyond the classroom, a place girls can’t access past the sixth grade.
Additional Reading:
- Ari Wallach: 3 ways to plan for the (very) long term | TED Talk
- The Protopias Collection: Various: 9781953165787: Amazon.com: Books
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.3 | Hey, this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. |
| 0:07.7 | Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fan, so we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand |
| 0:11.8 | new week of fun, thought-provoking Star Wars-related episodes. |
| 0:15.5 | Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far, far away, such as the |
| 0:20.3 | biology of taunons and wampas |
| 0:22.2 | on the ice planet hot, or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith rule of two. |
| 0:28.3 | Listen to Stuff to Bo Your Mind on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your |
| 0:33.5 | podcasts. |
| 0:50.3 | Music your podcasts. Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvaloshin. You've probably heard the term dystopia before. |
| 0:55.8 | You've seen a dystopian movie or read a dystopian novel. It's a popular genre. |
| 1:01.3 | But today's guest, Ari Wallach, would like to change that. He calls himself a futurist and social systems strategist. |
| 1:09.5 | And he believes that at this moment of technological revolution, |
| 1:14.1 | we need to be thinking positively about our future. |
| 1:17.7 | Here's Ari. |
| 1:18.3 | If Sam was here, Altman or Mark or others, I'd say, |
| 1:22.2 | look, what you are building are in many ways the rails for the next several centuries. |
| 1:28.3 | What is it that we want to build towards? And in many ways, at least in the West, we have lost a vision of what we want |
| 1:34.1 | that world to look like. This is not polyanarish or willfully naive, but it is about opening up a |
| 1:40.2 | space for conversation about what future we actually want to live in. And Ari spends his life |
| 1:46.4 | encouraging people to interrogate their own visions of the future, including the tech titans, |
... |
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