Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, it's me Joshuam. For this week's select I've
Speaker 1: chosen our January twenty sixteen episode on futurology. It's one
Speaker 1: of those topics that has a name that makes it
Speaker 1: sound way cooler and far out than it actually is.
Speaker 1: But happily we found that when you dig into it,
Speaker 1: even the blandest parts of futurology are super interesting. Still,
Speaker 1: I hope you like this one.
Speaker 2: Guys, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
Speaker 1: There's Charles w Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here, and it's
Speaker 1: stuff you should know from the future, but not really.
Speaker 3: How you doing, I'm fine, Well, good, that's good. I
Speaker 3: enjoyed this topic. I thought it was kind of neat. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it was. It was funny.
Speaker 1: When you're reading about futurology and futurelogists aka futurists, you
Speaker 1: tend to want to make it like more than it
Speaker 1: actually is, and when you look into the topic it
Speaker 1: keeps having to be beaten down just because of the
Speaker 1: name alone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you sound like a little bit like a wackad
Speaker 3: do A whack could do, say you're a futurist, a seer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, sometimes they're thinking about they're using
Speaker 1: these these really neat techniques to predict the future. They're
Speaker 1: talking about some really mundane stuff, Yeah, boring stuff, economic forecasts,
Speaker 1: things like that, how much oil will be left in
Speaker 1: thirty years, that kind of thing. But then on the
Speaker 1: other hand, if you're a futurerologist, you may also be
Speaker 1: tasked with figuring out what technology we're going to be
Speaker 1: using in thirty years, or you know, what color the
Speaker 1: shiny jumpsuits we're all going to wear will be.
Speaker 3: That kind of stuff. Yeah. I think one of my
Speaker 3: favorite things is to look at past future predictions. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's fun. Yeah, there's nothing that'll make someone look less
Speaker 3: knowledgeable than going back to what they thought the future
Speaker 3: would look like in the year two thousand, right, like
Speaker 3: back in the nineteen thirties or forties or sometimes some
Speaker 3: of those things happen. Yeah, and then it's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's like wow, you know, because something to this.
Speaker 1: These guys are like really really dead on. And I
Speaker 1: was reading an article I think it was in Harvard
Speaker 1: Business Review, and it was a post by Paul Sappho,
Speaker 1: who runs a venture capital firm I believe called discern. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Paul Sefa was saying like he was trying to
Speaker 1: get across that sci fi authors and future ologists their
Speaker 1: paths overlap quite a bit, but really there's pretty big distinctions.
Speaker 1: And even in this article they got lumped in together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because sci fi writers do definitely use futurology techniques. But
Speaker 1: Paul Cefo was saying like, yeah, but a real futureologist
Speaker 1: you have to use logic.
Speaker 3: If you're a sci fi.
Speaker 1: Writer, you can just use your imagination, you don't have
Speaker 1: to back it up with anything. Yes, you're a creature ologist.
Speaker 1: You have to use logic that makes sense to whoever's
Speaker 1: hearing your prediction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think that's one reason why some sci
Speaker 3: fi writers have been right on the nose with some
Speaker 3: future predictions, because they're not hampered by logic and they
Speaker 3: can just free form, you know. Yeah, but then it's
Speaker 3: just a lucky guess. No, I don't think so. I
Speaker 3: think they're still applying a lot of the same rules
Speaker 3: of future ology. Yeah, but they're just not bound by
Speaker 3: you know, the laws of well not the laws, but
Speaker 3: you know, the laws of logic. Yeah, exactly. I'm with you.
Speaker 1: But that's the best science fiction though, I think, is
Speaker 1: something that logically makes sense. Yeah, because then it's just fantasy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true.
Speaker 3: So futurology is recognizing and assessing potential future events. I
Speaker 3: could have sworn Jonathan Strickland wrote this, by the way,
Speaker 3: it ready, but it was not. No, it's very Strickland esk.
Speaker 3: Nicholas Gerbis. Yeah, that's Strickland's alter ego. I wonder if
Speaker 3: it is. I've never met this, Nicholas Gerbis. But the
Speaker 3: point Gerbus makes, which I think is good as it's
Speaker 3: a product of our times in many cases, like depending
Speaker 3: on where we are as a society, and like he
Speaker 3: makes a great point. During the Civil War there probably
Speaker 3: weren't a lot of like rosy predictions for the future
Speaker 3: American Civil War, sure, but in the Gilded Age people
Speaker 3: a lot more optimistic, optimistic, so they may have you know,
Speaker 3: it's a whole different deal like during the Cold War,
Speaker 3: for instance, right, a lot of paranoia, a lot of cynicism.
Speaker 3: Probably not going to be a rosy outlook for the future, right,
Speaker 3: like during the Gilded Age when it was rosier. Yeah,
Speaker 3: way more optimistic than the Cold.
Speaker 1: War, which is kind of ironic because the Gilded Age
Speaker 1: didn't have anything to be optimistic about. They were just pretending,
Speaker 1: hence the name. Yeah, the thing is what you've just said, though,
Speaker 1: is is kind of an argument against futurology because one
Speaker 1: of the big critiques of it is that a futureologist,
Speaker 1: they're not doing anything. Even if you're commenting on the
Speaker 1: past or the future, you're still really commenting about your present,
Speaker 1: your contemporary time, because that's what you.
Speaker 3: Or recent past.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, that's what you what you've lived through and experienced.
Speaker 1: That's all you can really reflect on. And futurology seeks
Speaker 1: to go beyond that.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, that makes sense. So if you like, look
Speaker 3: at this thing that is happening now or just happened,
Speaker 3: then what is going to be happening in that thing
Speaker 3: in ten years? And it's a lot of times based
Speaker 3: on how the direction it's currently going. Yes, okay, so.
Speaker 1: Gerbis makes a pretty good It gives you a good
Speaker 1: example that the cell phone grew out of the telegraph,
Speaker 1: which ultimately is related further.
Speaker 3: Back to the smoke signal.
Speaker 1: Sure, right, yeah, but if you were a future all
Speaker 1: just hanging out around somebody who was sending smoke signals.
Speaker 3: Would you be able to predict the cell phone? Probably
Speaker 3: not or not? Could you predict the impact of the
Speaker 3: automobile or the highway system? Right? Maybe? But would you
Speaker 3: predict that people would have sex in the back seat
Speaker 3: of a car because it provides a little well, I
Speaker 3: don't think they did. Or urban sprawl? Yeah? Could you
Speaker 3: predict exurbs and edge cities just because the highways got built?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and not a lot of people did, even though
Speaker 1: a lot of people said there's going to be horseless
Speaker 1: carriages one day, and it's going they're going to change
Speaker 1: things big time. People are going to be able to
Speaker 1: move around a lot more. Yeah, But that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that everybody saw every result of the automobile. It was
Speaker 1: a game changer, yeah, is what you could agreed. So
Speaker 1: what we're saying here, And if it sounds a little
Speaker 1: weird that we're at once supporting and criticizing futurology, that's
Speaker 1: basically the fun thing to do when you talk about
Speaker 1: futurology is to criticize it and be awed by it
Speaker 1: because a lot of times they really are super right.
Speaker 3: That's right. Futurology has been around for a long time.
Speaker 3: I mean, since people were writing fiction, there were people
Speaker 3: predicting the future, right, but as far as things didn't
Speaker 3: really get going as far as being meaningful until after
Speaker 3: World War Two, when the US started developing technological forecasting. Basically,
Speaker 3: like it was really important to try and see where
Speaker 3: things were going militarily, right, because it was super expensive
Speaker 3: to develop new technologies. It could take a long time.
Speaker 3: So they started thinking, hey, we need to get some
Speaker 3: people on board that can kind of hopefully predict where
Speaker 3: we're headed here so we can make the right decisions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because if it takes a really long time, like
Speaker 1: you said, to develop a weapon, by the time you
Speaker 1: have that weapon in deployed in the field, you're going
Speaker 1: to need to know it's not already obsolete. The only
Speaker 1: way to do that is to predict what kind of
Speaker 1: warfare you're going to be engaged in. Because this is
Speaker 1: a time like at the end of World War two,
Speaker 1: so many inventions came out of World War one and
Speaker 1: two war machine inventions that things were changing so quickly
Speaker 1: that there was actually you can kind of put modern
Speaker 1: futureology into the lap of one guy, an Air Force
Speaker 1: general named hap Arnold, who saw that things were changing
Speaker 1: so fast that his Air Force needed to basically predict
Speaker 1: the future and see what direction it needed to go.
Speaker 1: So he looked around and he started tapping people to
Speaker 1: do that. One of the first people he tapped is
Speaker 1: a scientist anautical engineer named Theodore von Carmon.
Speaker 3: Yes, he was a super smart dude, and he led
Speaker 3: a team that did predict a lot of stuff like
Speaker 3: drones and as far as you know, the military using drones,
Speaker 3: not your uncle who flies it around the neighborhood, just
Speaker 3: a film stuff. He predicted the rise of Brookstone, target
Speaker 3: seeking missiles, supersonic aircraft, and even the atom bomb.
Speaker 1: All of this was in one report. Yeah, to hap
Speaker 1: Arnold like, this is like and this guy knocked it
Speaker 1: out of the park. But he and his group were
Speaker 1: very much limited to small academic and military circles. Like
Speaker 1: the general public wasn't aware that this was going on,
Speaker 1: but his group. Von Carmon's group so accurately foresaw the
Speaker 1: direction that modern warfare was going that you can also
Speaker 1: very easily make the case that no, he basically created
Speaker 1: a roadmap to the future that the Air Force follows.
Speaker 1: So is his prophecies were self fulfilling? Yeah, because he
Speaker 1: said go this way, and the Air Force went that way, yeah,
Speaker 1: and created all this stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then the military and well, the Brand Corporation specifically,
Speaker 3: it grew out of the US Air Force and Douglas Aircraft.
Speaker 3: In the mid forties. They said, well, having one person
Speaker 3: to say these things is great, but what we need
Speaker 3: is a team and a consensus among this team. So
Speaker 3: they kind of, well, not kind of. They very much
Speaker 3: patented a technique they called the Delphi technique d E.
Speaker 3: L Phi, and that is basically a technique where they're
Speaker 3: trying to get agreed on consensus from a number of people.
Speaker 1: So there's this very famous story about how the Navy,
Speaker 1: I think lost a submarine, a nuclear submarine, or the
Speaker 1: Russians had lost a submarine something like that. There was
Speaker 1: a loss sub that they wanted to find and they
Speaker 1: had no idea where it was. So the Navy polled
Speaker 1: all these different different experts and all these different fields
Speaker 1: that might have something to do with nuclear submarines, whether aeronautics,
Speaker 1: people from Noah, all these people right, and ask them
Speaker 1: where do you think the sub is? And no one
Speaker 1: hit it on the nose. But why when they basically
Speaker 1: used statistical distribution of these various opinions guesses of professionals.
Speaker 1: It led them right to that sub And that's what
Speaker 1: the Delphi technique does too. It takes opinions of experts
Speaker 1: in various fields and says, what do you think of this?
Speaker 1: And everybody sends in a questionnaire and anonymously, and there's
Speaker 1: no group meeting, so the group doesn't bow to pressure,
Speaker 1: no leaders emerge. They're giving their unvarnished opinion. And then
Speaker 1: after those opinions come in, they take that information and
Speaker 1: send it out again. So it goes in rounds and
Speaker 1: rounds and rounds until they finally come to a group
Speaker 1: consensus that in the future, we're all going to be
Speaker 1: wearing metallic blue jumpsuits.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And what they're doing is generating what's known as
Speaker 3: a scenario. And a guy named Herman Khan Kahn worked
Speaker 3: with Rand in the nineteen fifties and he's the one
Speaker 3: that kind of coined the term scenario as it applies
Speaker 3: to futurology. A pretty good definition I found was a
Speaker 3: scenario is a detailed portrait of a plausible future world,
Speaker 3: one sufficiently vivid that a planner can clearly see and
Speaker 3: comprehend the problems, challenges, and opportunities that such an environment
Speaker 3: would present. So it's you know, it's saying, in the future,
Speaker 3: we're going to have a scenario where there are going
Speaker 3: to be robots in every house hold. Yeah. And one
Speaker 3: of the biggest ways that they work on scenarios is
Speaker 3: with something called back casting, which is starting at the end,
Speaker 3: which is you got a robot in every house, and
Speaker 3: then go backwards to how you got there? Yeah, how
Speaker 3: you got there? Really? Yeah makes sense?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a scenario that's a pretty cool scenario. They
Speaker 1: can also be as mundane as running a fire drill
Speaker 1: where you're envisioning the fire broke out in the high
Speaker 1: school gym, right, and so everybody needs to get out.
Speaker 1: That's a that's a scenario. It's as simple as that. Yeah. There.
Speaker 1: The weather forecasts are economic forecasts that are run through
Speaker 1: computer algorithms. The computer algorithms, the model, the process that
Speaker 1: it's going through is the scenario, and it spits out
Speaker 1: a possible prediction.
Speaker 3: It's almost like an effect then, cause right, yeah, you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: excellently put thank you. So Herman Kahn worked with rand
Speaker 3: and and he did you look him up at all? Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's one of the inspirations for Doctor Strangelove. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was described as a super genius.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was super smart, and he he kind of
Speaker 3: was a bit of a celebrity at the time. He
Speaker 3: wrote a book in nineteen sixty one called on Thermonuclear
Speaker 3: War and then went on to forum left ran to
Speaker 3: from the Hudson Institute, where he basically was like, we're
Speaker 3: a group that is going to forecast the future. So
Speaker 3: he became it was like super popular book. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: he spawned a lot of other books, similar books.
Speaker 1: We need to take a break, but we're getting We'll
Speaker 1: get right back to this in a second. So, Chuck,
Speaker 1: you were just talking about Herman Kahn being the super
Speaker 1: genius who is something of a celebrity. I read that
Speaker 1: Timothy Leary animated that he had taken acid with him.
Speaker 3: I believe it.
Speaker 1: He was a part of the inspiration for Doctor Strange Love.
Speaker 1: And this book that he wrote called the Year two
Speaker 1: thousand a Framework for Speculation on the next thirty three years.
Speaker 1: It basically established this outlook that America and capitalism could
Speaker 1: do anything thanks to basically technological inventiveness.
Speaker 3: Yeah, here's a let's hear some of these There was
Speaker 3: a list in that book, one hundred technical innovations very
Speaker 3: likely in the last third of the twentieth century, one
Speaker 3: hundred some of the first ten multiple applications of lasers, boom,
Speaker 3: high strength structural materials nailed it, wouldn't you think, Hellois
Speaker 3: new or improved materials for equipment and appliances. That's easy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: anyone can.
Speaker 1: Say that, sure should be better material and predict that
Speaker 1: now for twenty fifty.
Speaker 3: Longer range, longer range weather forecasting, more reliable weather forecasting.
Speaker 3: I don't know about that one. I think that was
Speaker 3: a miss. How about this here here are a few
Speaker 3: of the other ones. New techniques for cheap and reliable
Speaker 3: birth control for sure. Yeah, the pill. I don't know
Speaker 3: if the pill is around, we should do A whole
Speaker 3: thing may have been the same year because it came
Speaker 3: out in sixty seven, was it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, this book came out in sixty seven, right, right?
Speaker 3: A widespread use of nuclear reactors for power duh. Improved
Speaker 3: capability to change sex of a children or adult gender reassignment,
Speaker 3: Pervasive business use of computers. Yeah, they're all over. Personal pagers. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they came and went, and then one of the other
Speaker 3: ones was home computers to run households and communicate with
Speaker 3: the outside world. Yeah, the Internet of Things. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They also predicted the rise of the credit economy. Oh
Speaker 1: really Yeah, that we currently are in interesting yeah. So,
Speaker 1: and that was just like a list, like a sidebar basically, yeah,
Speaker 1: in the book, in this book, but the whole idea
Speaker 1: that America and capitalism in the West could invent its
Speaker 1: way out of any problem. Will we possibly ran across
Speaker 1: in the future was the premise or the position of
Speaker 1: this book, and it caused an enormous furor in academic circles,
Speaker 1: and not just academic circles, because this book was one
Speaker 1: of the first to introduce to the public that there
Speaker 1: were such things as think tanks like Randy and that
Speaker 1: Club of Rome. Yeah, and that these people were sitting
Speaker 1: there thinking about the future and we're writing books about it,
Speaker 1: and it kind of became a hip thing. But the
Speaker 1: Club of Rome was basically diametrically opposed to the outlook
Speaker 1: that Herman Kahn had. And the Club of Rome was
Speaker 1: a business consortium that conspiracy theorists say is basically the seat.
Speaker 3: Of the new world order.
Speaker 1: They're still around, they are, And the Club of Rome
Speaker 1: basically said No, we are establishing the gloom and doom
Speaker 1: camp that there's such thing as resource depletion overpopulation and
Speaker 1: we are basically doomed.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean we've covered this a lot on the show.
Speaker 3: Different people that have made wild predictions about we're going
Speaker 3: to run out of this by this year. Thomas Malthus, Yeah,
Speaker 3: very Malthusian. One of the books that came out of
Speaker 3: the Club of Rome in nineteen seventy two was called
Speaker 3: Limits to Growth by Danella H. Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jurgen Randers,
Speaker 3: and William Barn's at MIT and they had a very
Speaker 3: dire apocalyptic outlook of the future, as did a lot
Speaker 3: of other people at the time, and a lot of
Speaker 3: these were way off base. A lot of these dire predictions, right,
Speaker 3: you know, which happened over and over again. Yeah, and so.
Speaker 1: On the Club of Rome's website they defend the Limits
Speaker 1: to Growth. No, not the Limits to Growth, the yeah,
Speaker 1: the Limits to Growth book, basically saying that it's often
Speaker 1: miscited as predicting the collapse of civilization due to renewable
Speaker 1: resource over use, right, and it doesn't do that. But
Speaker 1: they did use these same kind of techniques that Herman
Speaker 1: Kahn and some of his other colleagues. We're coming up
Speaker 1: with by by taking population information, food production data, industrial production, pollution,
Speaker 1: and non renewable resource consumption and then running scenarios through
Speaker 1: this model that they built using computers and coming up
Speaker 1: with the scenarios they came up with were kind of grim.
Speaker 1: The thing is is, even though they missed the mark,
Speaker 1: they still helped establish a very young idea that you
Speaker 1: can't just throw your McDonald's styrofoam on the ground, You
Speaker 1: can't drive a car that gets two miles per gallon, like,
Speaker 1: we can't live like everything is just forever abundant, that
Speaker 1: there's no such thing as scarcity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a double edged sword though, Like I totally agree.
Speaker 3: But then it also when you're wrong about these things,
Speaker 3: it gives Cynex something to point to to say, well, see,
Speaker 3: we didn't run out of oil in the early nineteen
Speaker 3: eighties like you said we would, and we don't do
Speaker 3: anything about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, man, that is a great point. It's a
Speaker 1: very great point. But at the same time, what you're
Speaker 1: seeing here between the limits to growth and the year
Speaker 1: two thousand, we still see this today with climate change.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like, let's do something about climate change.
Speaker 1: The other people say, no, we can invent our way
Speaker 1: out of it. And besides, if we do something about
Speaker 1: climate change, it's going to mess with the economy. And
Speaker 1: these people are saying, forget about the economy. We are
Speaker 1: all going to.
Speaker 3: Die, yeah, or not necessarily forget about the economy. But
Speaker 3: maybe you can do both, right, you know, yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: My whole deal with that has always been just like
Speaker 3: why take that risk?
Speaker 1: Well, who we humans aren't very good at like preparing
Speaker 1: for future risk, which is I think one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why future ologists are so revered and odd but
Speaker 1: also mocked and scorned, because they're doing something that's almost
Speaker 1: almost flies in the face of human nature.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're really putting yourself out there when you predict
Speaker 3: some of this stuff.
Speaker 1: One other episode that that just reminded me of the
Speaker 1: ten thousand year clock.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, that was a great one. Yeah. So
Speaker 3: the military, the United States military obviously has used it
Speaker 3: for years. Then beginning when was this in the sixties
Speaker 3: or seventies, that business got into it.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen seventy two, I think Royal Dutch Shell
Speaker 1: heard somebody at the top heard that there wasn't going
Speaker 1: to be any oil in by nineteen eighty five, and
Speaker 1: they went w Yeah.
Speaker 3: Businesses basically said, wait a minute, there are people that
Speaker 3: can actually use models to determine what the future might
Speaker 3: look like, right, how can we use that to make money? Well,
Speaker 3: let's throw money at them and find out exactly.
Speaker 1: A couple of other places too that were nascent think
Speaker 1: tanks like RAND was the Stanford Research Institute Futures Group
Speaker 1: in the California Institute of Technology early like kind of
Speaker 1: think tank breeding grounds of smart people walking around thinking
Speaker 1: about the future.
Speaker 3: But that wasn't enough.
Speaker 1: You can't just say this is what I think it's
Speaker 1: going to be like, you have to back it up
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about how they back it up right
Speaker 1: after this.
Speaker 3: How do they back it up?
Speaker 1: Well, they use different techniques. If you're a futurist or
Speaker 1: a future ologist, you're going to be using techniques that
Speaker 1: are pretty recognizable. But the way you put them together
Speaker 1: and the things you sort out is what's going to
Speaker 1: make you successful or not successful. Right, So you like
Speaker 1: brainstorm ideas.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's probably where you start. Yeah, it's just like
Speaker 3: blue Sky Territory as.
Speaker 1: They say, yeah, you imagine things using scenarios or games,
Speaker 1: apparently game theory.
Speaker 3: But we got to do that at some point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been avoiding it cano so like we's a
Speaker 1: mind bender. We could mess it up really bad, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but we'll do it. That changed the futurism feel tremendously
Speaker 1: when they came up with game theory, because it's a
Speaker 1: pretty good way of predicting how people will work. And
Speaker 1: that's one of the big confounding factors is you can
Speaker 1: predict something, follow every single one of these steps that
Speaker 1: we're talking about right now, and then people will just
Speaker 1: cut to the left all of a sudden, and your
Speaker 1: prediction just fell to the wayside because humanity went this
Speaker 1: way real quick.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Or somebody invented a game changer, a game changing
Speaker 3: product or innovation, Yeah, that nobody saw coming. Yeah. What's
Speaker 3: that called disruptive technology? Is it? Yeah? That's a good
Speaker 3: I like that, not a bad band name. Oh, I
Speaker 3: wonder if it's out there.
Speaker 1: If so, it's made of like Silicon Valley rich guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like my sideband. Right.
Speaker 1: Do you want to gather professional opinions using say the
Speaker 1: Delphi technique? Yeah, you want to do historical analysis current
Speaker 1: trends are very huge and can help you as well.
Speaker 1: And then like you were saying, I think you call
Speaker 1: it back masking.
Speaker 3: No, that's turn me on dead man right from the bets.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what they do. They listen to the beatles
Speaker 1: backwards where what it was it. It's not back masking,
Speaker 1: I know, but where they where you envision the future
Speaker 1: and then you work your way backward from it. When
Speaker 1: you do this, you do all this stuff together and
Speaker 1: again back casting, backcasting, and when you're when you're using
Speaker 1: this along with computer algorithms that can model like the
Speaker 1: economy or the weather, oil consumption or something like that,
Speaker 1: you can come up with something that you could rightly
Speaker 1: say is a prediction or a forecast for the future
Speaker 1: where we're going to be. That's right again, though, just
Speaker 1: things happen, Like for example, Herman Kahn did not predict
Speaker 1: the oil crisis that came the year after he wrote
Speaker 1: another famous book. Yeah, in nineteen seventy two, he wrote
Speaker 1: a response, I think to limits the growth and just
Speaker 1: totally missed the oil crisis.
Speaker 3: Man. But how could he predict that? Because the oil crisis.
Speaker 1: Came out of the OPEC oil embargo that was punishment
Speaker 1: for the US's being involved in the Yam Kipper War.
Speaker 3: So you couldn't see that coming. No, and that's the
Speaker 3: big problem with futurology. Yes, exactly, our own US government
Speaker 3: has been wrong. The US Department of Interior announced twice
Speaker 3: in nineteen thirty nine and then in nineteen fifty one
Speaker 3: that we only had thirteen years of oil left. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so weird that both times it was thirteen years.
Speaker 1: They don't like to bother people, so they wait until
Speaker 1: there's thirteen years left, and they sound it's.
Speaker 3: Just such a specific number.
Speaker 2: It.
Speaker 3: What else, Well, we've talked about Moore's law before. That
Speaker 3: has aged a little better than some other futurology predictions
Speaker 3: because it has been revised over the years, which is
Speaker 3: sort of a cheat a little bit. But still, what
Speaker 3: I really meant was this right.
Speaker 1: I think he went from eighteen months to two years
Speaker 1: or something like that. But what's funny is Gerbis stakes
Speaker 1: his position in this article. He's saying, like the limits
Speaker 1: to Growth and the other Club of Rome stuff, they
Speaker 1: missed the mark because they predicted catastrophe, and Moore's law
Speaker 1: predicts technological innovation, so it's successful. So yeah, clearly Gerbis
Speaker 1: agrees with the Herman Khan group rather than the Club
Speaker 1: of Rome group.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's subtle.
Speaker 1: I think you can't just say, like the Gloom and
Speaker 1: Doom camp has just been completely eradicated or proven wrong.
Speaker 3: Agreed, you know, yeah, Moore's law. I don't eve think
Speaker 3: we said specifically. It predicts the number of transistors on
Speaker 3: integrated circuits and computers doubles every two years, right, And
Speaker 3: like we said, it's been updated and it's been pretty consistent.
Speaker 1: And so with Herman Khan's popularity, and then the big
Speaker 1: high profile book publishing argument that he got in with
Speaker 1: the Club of Rome that led to like a spade
Speaker 1: of other futureology books that I.
Speaker 3: Remember it being a big deal when I was a kid.
Speaker 3: I remember a lot of people talking about the near
Speaker 3: and far future.
Speaker 1: The one that I ran across in this article that
Speaker 1: I had heard of, but I didn't know anything about Alvin.
Speaker 3: Toffler's Future Shock. I remember that.
Speaker 1: I think, did you read it? N The cover I
Speaker 1: guarantee would just give you a nostalgia. I'm really but
Speaker 1: it came out in nineteen seventy and it predicts a
Speaker 1: future where too much rapid change technological change and advancement.
Speaker 1: It happens too quickly, and people get all sorts of
Speaker 1: stressed and just worn out and basically have all manner
Speaker 1: of terrible reactions to it. And I'm like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I predicted twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3: So like a person's emotions couldn't handle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're just overwhelmed, okay, through too much rapid technological
Speaker 1: innovation happens too quick.
Speaker 3: Do you think we're overwhelmed?
Speaker 1: Like I get stressed out by like say social media
Speaker 1: or something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I wonder if it's like people of a certain
Speaker 3: age maybe Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would guess if you're born into it, you're used
Speaker 1: to it, So it would probably more likely apply to
Speaker 1: a transition population, like.
Speaker 3: Right, a transitional generation? Is that what we are? Don't
Speaker 3: you get stressed by social media? Don't you get like
Speaker 3: just tense and uh yeah, I mean I kind of
Speaker 3: just hate.
Speaker 1: It or having like having information, all this information and
Speaker 1: all of it's just so thin ye, content wise or
Speaker 1: value wise, but there's tons of it. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: always coming at you.
Speaker 3: Ye. Always wears me out. It wears me out. I
Speaker 3: got the future, shock, chuck, you got the Jimmy legs yeah, no,
Speaker 3: I totally agree. I'm like that. I just want to
Speaker 3: shut it all down, just sh everybody. Not podcasts though, right, yes,
Speaker 3: that should live on. So we talked about science fiction
Speaker 3: writers and how they are easily off the hook because
Speaker 3: they're just writers, right, They're not supposed to predict the future,
Speaker 3: but they have been. You can't dismiss it because they've
Speaker 3: been on the money or close to it a lot
Speaker 3: over the years. Yeah, because, like we said, they're not
Speaker 3: hampered by the rational laws of today. They can just
Speaker 3: say whatever they want and if they're wrong, it's like, hey, dude,
Speaker 3: I'm just writing stuff. Yes, this is fiction, right, But
Speaker 3: a few of the highlights. Jules Verne mid nineteenth century
Speaker 3: predicted going to the Moon in a spacecraft.
Speaker 1: Not only that, so he predicted it would be shot
Speaker 1: out of a cannon basically yeah, but done. But the
Speaker 1: thing that he really got though, was that he placed
Speaker 1: the moon shot in Florida. Yeah, like one hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty seven miles from Cape Canaveral, where they do launch
Speaker 1: rockets to the Moon. Not bad now, and for the
Speaker 1: same reason too, Like that was it's close to the equator.
Speaker 3: Oh is that why? That's one of the reasons why.
Speaker 1: Plus Cape Canaveral is largely protected by the Gulf Stream
Speaker 1: from hurricanes. Like as a hurricane comes ashore right before
Speaker 1: it starts to get to Canaveral, it goes.
Speaker 3: Out again right and then hits North Carolina. Interesting that
Speaker 3: that'd be an interesting conversation to have been in on
Speaker 3: Like oh, when they were picking play, like where should
Speaker 3: we launch this? I mean, where should we put all
Speaker 3: of our money in? Right? HG. Wells He predicted tanks. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he was here three.
Speaker 1: Supposedly he was the first guy to really think of
Speaker 1: himself as a futurist.
Speaker 3: He predicted the Adam bomb in nineteen oh eight, aerial
Speaker 3: bombing in nineteen oh eight. What The name robot was
Speaker 3: actually coined by a science fiction writer, a check writer
Speaker 3: named Carl Kopek. In nineteen twenty one, he named robots.
Speaker 1: I think the all time winner, though, is Hugo Gernsbach.
Speaker 1: And Hugo Gernsbach. If you're into science fiction, you recognize
Speaker 1: his first name because he's who the Hugo Award is
Speaker 1: named after. You may also recognize his last name too,
Speaker 1: if you're a Hugo Gernsbach fan. But back in I
Speaker 1: think the nineteen tens.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was rinning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he wrote a book called Ralph one two four
Speaker 1: C forty one plus. He predicted everything in this.
Speaker 3: Yeah you know what that means. It's actually a play
Speaker 3: on words one two It means one two for C
Speaker 3: for one another. You get it. Wow. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3: One two four C for one and then another is
Speaker 3: the plus sign. Yeah. Yeah that alone, I was sold. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like, I love this guy.
Speaker 1: It's just like that Van Halen album. OHU eight one
Speaker 1: two exactly.
Speaker 3: So what is he predicted? He predict did solar power,
Speaker 3: like the realistic use of solar power? Uh huh. He
Speaker 3: predicted plastics, video phones, tape recorders, jukeboxes, loud.
Speaker 1: Speakers, tinfoil, rust, poof steel, synthetic fabrics, all in one book.
Speaker 1: And he's famous in the Hugo Awards named after him
Speaker 1: because he wanted to make science fiction more science based.
Speaker 1: Yeah you know, I'm using that same logic. So he
Speaker 1: would have been a very like almost a father of
Speaker 1: future ology.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, for sure. You know, here's a few other
Speaker 3: things from that book. This one, to me, I'm surprised
Speaker 3: no one's done this yet. The appetizer, which is at
Speaker 3: a restaurant in an advanced scientifically advanced restaurant will be
Speaker 3: a room that you wait in before you get your
Speaker 3: table that's flooded with gases that make you hungry. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: not bad. Yeah, just have a seat in the appetizer room, right,
Speaker 3: we'll be ready shortly.
Speaker 1: Just like bloody fingernails, a scratch send in the walls
Speaker 1: as people are trying to get to the other room
Speaker 1: where the food is.
Speaker 3: The telautograph, which is basically a fax machine, the telefat
Speaker 3: which was a picturephone, had a universal translator where they
Speaker 3: translate any language right there in your hand. Yeah, not bad.
Speaker 3: And then this one I love. The Vacation City was
Speaker 3: a suspended city and a domed suspended city twenty thousand
Speaker 3: feet in the air that used a device that nullified gravity.
Speaker 3: And in vacation City, no mechanical devices are permitted because
Speaker 3: it was supposed to be a true escape. That's awesome
Speaker 3: from the mechanized world. Waiting for that one. And this
Speaker 3: was in nineteen eleven. Yeah, he predicted just that there
Speaker 3: would be a need for that.
Speaker 1: That's like that town in West Virginia, Green something, West
Speaker 1: Virginia where the people who have electromagnetic sensitivity. Go because
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to have any electromagnetic stuff. Oh really,
Speaker 1: because there's like a radio telescope whe there's something there
Speaker 1: could be interfered with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you could be amish. Can you just be amish? No,
Speaker 3: like I want to be amish. If you're Harrison Ford,
Speaker 3: you could be yeah, or Woody Harrelson. Yeah, right, you
Speaker 3: got anything else? How about these predictions for the future.
Speaker 3: There's a couple in here there kind of funny. Ten
Speaker 3: predictions that missed the mark, and these are real predictions.
Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty seven, US News and World Report said
Speaker 3: that by the end of the century, we will launch
Speaker 3: our freight across the continent with missiles. Like you order
Speaker 3: something from Amazon in New York instead of having a
Speaker 3: fulfillment center nearby, Right, they just put it in a
Speaker 3: missile and shoot it to you. Yeah, didn't happen. No,
Speaker 3: but drones are coming? Are they really? Are they still
Speaker 3: on that? Probably? Okay.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty five, a guy named Alex Lewett predicted
Speaker 1: nuclear power vacuum cleaners.
Speaker 3: This one I think would be pretty great, dissolving dishes. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and asked what it would be like in the year
Speaker 3: two thousand, a science writer named Valdemire. Come, there's a
Speaker 3: lot of man one, two, three, four five. He's a
Speaker 3: fabulous science writer with the funny name Consonants in a row.
Speaker 3: He said, you would basically, uh, put your plate in
Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty degree water at the end and
Speaker 3: it will just dissolve it. No more dishwashing. Uh.
Speaker 1: Bucky Fuller predicted that Canada would be a subtropical climate
Speaker 1: because we build a dome over it.
Speaker 3: That didn't happen.
Speaker 1: No, it didn't, which is strange because Bucky Fuller was
Speaker 1: pretty sharp.
Speaker 3: Dude. Here's another one. Was he really? Yeah? Buckminster Fuller?
Speaker 3: Oh I didn't pick up on that.
Speaker 1: He's who bucky balls are named after. Really, why I don't.
Speaker 1: He may have invented him. I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: What's the bucky ball.
Speaker 1: It's the those little balls that are magnetic spheres that
Speaker 1: like you, Oh, they'll shape in bucket balls.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Here's one. A Scottish geneticist that said in
Speaker 3: the nineteen twenties that in the future, one third of
Speaker 3: the babies would not be born. Oh, only one third
Speaker 3: would be born as a result of pregnancy and the
Speaker 3: other babies would be born in a lab.
Speaker 1: Would they be grown basically exogenesis? Yeah, here's the last one.
Speaker 1: Check you ready. Nineteen seventy five, the Research Institute of America,
Speaker 1: which sounds pretty smart, said that by nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, this is several years before that, we would
Speaker 1: all be driving personal helicopters.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Did not pan out, Probably never will. I don't know
Speaker 1: if i'd want a personal helicopter.
Speaker 3: You know. I was for Emily's birthday. I rented a
Speaker 3: cabin in the North Georgia Mountains. Did you take a
Speaker 3: personal helicopter there? No? But I was sitting on the
Speaker 3: deck we all were, and way across the valley on
Speaker 3: the side of a mountain was this huge, huge house.
Speaker 3: And I heard a sound of a helicopter. I was like,
Speaker 3: and I saw a blinking light. I got out the
Speaker 3: binoculars and this dude had a helicopter. Wow. And he
Speaker 3: took it and he flew it down about two miles
Speaker 3: to the lake at the bottom of the valley. And
Speaker 3: I guess he has a lake house and a mountain house,
Speaker 3: and the easiest way to get there is to make
Speaker 3: the four minute helicopter flight. That's crazy. Yeah. Wow, it
Speaker 3: was pretty amazing. Wow, I want to know who that
Speaker 3: guy is? Nut guy could be a lady. Yeah, it
Speaker 3: could be what am I saying? It could be Carly Fiorina. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Is that she's the woman who's running for GOP president candidate?
Speaker 1: Oh right, Fiurina, that's right, gotcha?
Speaker 3: Go ahead? Oh oh sorry, let's see.
Speaker 1: Well, if you want to know more about futurology, you
Speaker 1: can type that word into the search bar at house
Speaker 1: to work dot com. And since Chuck had an anecdote
Speaker 1: about helicopters, it's time for listeners.
Speaker 3: It sort of looked like one of those Magnum p
Speaker 3: I ones too.
Speaker 1: Well, if I did have a personal helicopter, it would
Speaker 1: look an awful lot like that.
Speaker 3: I'm sure what Hey, guys, my name is Shelby. I'm
Speaker 3: honored for you to be reading this. My husband and
Speaker 3: I love your show, and you've solved our dilemma as
Speaker 3: to what to listen to in our car together. I
Speaker 3: want to let you know you did a great job
Speaker 3: on the HIV AIDS podcast. However, I think you missed
Speaker 3: telling a really important story about the AIDS crisis. Just
Speaker 3: before the AIDS crisis broke, a method for treating heemophilia,
Speaker 3: called a clotting factor concentrate was developed. I finally let
Speaker 3: those suffering from the disease live into adulthood and completely
Speaker 3: change the landscape of the disorder. By the time HIV
Speaker 3: was discovered to be a blood born virus, many of
Speaker 3: those suffering from hemophilia already had it, not to mention
Speaker 3: that many also contracted hepatitis. However, the pharmaceutical companies did
Speaker 3: not begin to pasteurize the drug in spite of their
Speaker 3: knowledge that it was spreading HIV until a strong public
Speaker 3: outcry prompted a government intervention. I think the story is
Speaker 3: not told often enough. In the injustice that these individuals
Speaker 3: suffered at the hands of big Pharma is undoubtedly one
Speaker 3: of the greatest our country has seen. Man. There's an
Speaker 3: extremely informative and sad documentary on the topic called Bad
Speaker 3: Blood Colon A cautionary tale. Anyway, that's about it, And
Speaker 3: I'm sorry if I bummed everyone out. That is from Shelby.
Speaker 1: Shelby thank you for not only that illuminating email, yeah,
Speaker 1: but also the documentary recommendation.
Speaker 3: We're always looking for those absolutely.
Speaker 1: If you want to get in touch with us, you
Speaker 1: can send us an email to Stuff podcast at houstuffworks
Speaker 1: dot com and has always tuned us at our home
Speaker 1: on the web. Stuff Youshould Know dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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