Mushroom Leather? 3D-Printed Homes on Mars? “A Brief History of the Future”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, we now go back to the future. Ari Wallach hosts the new TV series “A Brief History of the Future.” Expanding what we might think is
possible for the next generations. And he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss how we can learn from history.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Ari Wallach, thanks so must for joining us.
First the title, “A Brief History of the Future,” how does that work?

ARI WALLACH, HOST, “A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUTURE:” So, look, most people think a show about the future is just going to be about the feature. But one of the things that became very clear to me, having been doing this for 20 years, is that the future doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The future doesn’t just happen as something that’s, you know, projecting out from the present. In fact, most — everything that’s going happen tomorrow, in many ways, started yesterday. So, it makes sense when we decided to create a show about the future, that we were going to talk about it, almost going to the future and then looking backwards and talking about how we got there. And, you know, there can go back, in many ways, 20 years, when we go back, sometimes we go back 200 years and sometimes in the show, we go back 200,000 years.

SREENIVASAN: You point out that oftentimes we have some structural impediments to thinking long-term. There are plenty of examples of that, that we see and we kind of live through. But what your program does, that’s interesting, is you point out places and people who not only have thought long-term as part of their culture, but even today, there are groups that are getting together and thinking beyond even their own lifetimes on how the policy decisions that they make are going to impact future generations.

WALLACH: Yes, one of the more kind of fascinating visits we did was about two hours north of Tokyo with Professor Sajo (ph). He’s basically developed this thing called future design. And what he does is he’ll bring a group of people together. It could be 30 people, it could be 300 people who are wrestling with a major decision at the, let’s say, the civic or organizational level. And then what he’ll do is he’ll cleave off maybe about a third of that group and he’ll have them don these golden ceremonial robes. And when you put on the robe, what actually happens is you transform into a citizen from the future. So, you might be in the 2050s or the 2060s. And what your role in that meeting now is to act as a proxy for those future generations. And so, what it means is if you’re thinking about where to build a highway or where to build a school or how to allocate your resources, it’s no longer just doing it for everyone in the room in the present tense, you actually now have people from the future in the room. So, there’s ways of actually designing how we think about the future and how we implement projects and endeavors in a way that will bring those who don’t have a voice into the room.

SREENIVASAN: Well, one of your guests is Department of Transportation Cabinet Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is in charge of infrastructure. And right now, you know, we are having this conversation in the wake of a tragic bridge accident that happened just a little while ago. And I wonder, you know, in your conversations, I mean, is there a place where he’s thinking about our investments, in bridges and highways and everything else, kind of in a different time scale than let’s just fix this now because we need to get cars across this channel?

WALLACH: Yes. I mean, I’ll be honest, I interview people all over the world, and Pete Buttigieg are one of the more special ones because if you haven’t seen him on TV before you can basically throw any question at him and the answer will always start sometime in the Athenian democracy. And so, I asked — I still call him Mayor Pete, I know it’s Secretary Pete. So, I asked Mayor Pete, I said, listen, I know you work on infrastructure, but there’s probably different infrastructures that you think about, you know, speak to me about that. And one of the things he talked about, and this goes back to the title of the show, is when he thinks about long-term infrastructure, bridges, tunnels, roads, he doesn’t just think about the ones that have been built and will be built, but he also thinks about what went into the ones that were made.

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PETE BUTTIGIEG, TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY: This is not just important because of some vague and romantic conception of neighborhoods and communities, it’s also about life and death consequences. There’s evidence, for example, that the survivability of tornadoes, all other things being equal, goes up in neighborhoods or communities where neighbors know each other. So, a simple principle or test, whether you’re designing a suburban subdivision or a dense city block, would be, does this design encourage or discourage people from knowing who their neighbors are?

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WALLACH: Well, one of the things that I’ve — and I’ve just saw him talking about this is the community is on either side. What is it doing to their social infrastructure when they’re taken away from their jobs and from their communities? So, when you think about how we build for tomorrow, yes, it’s steel, it’s cement, it’s pipes, but it’s also community. One of the things that came up in this show as I met with dozens of people around the world and I asked them about their visions of tomorrow, no one ever said, oh, I want more monorails. I want more jet packs. What they traditionally always said was, whatever the future is going to hold, I want to make sure there’s a room for community. The community is centered. And this is one of the things that Pete kept bringing up is our future infrastructure has to center community, not just the infrastructure.

SREENIVASAN: You know, when you look at the future, one of the kind of central sources of anxiety really for generations that are coming up now is how we are collectively going to solve for the climate crisis. I know you sat down with Katherine Hayhoe, who’s a fantastic climate scientist and science communicator. What were her tips on how to engage people in a discussion about climate and the future in a way that overcomes some of our immediate kind of tribal instincts to say, well, if you’re talking about the climate, then, you know, you must not be for the things that I stand for?

WALLACH: Meeting with Katherine Hayhoe was an amazing experience because she comes at how we talk about climate change in the same way my wife is a social worker meets — will — you know, will meet with clients. You have to meet people where they are, not where you want them to be. And so, time and time again, when we have conversations about climate change or anything that’s kind of disruptive to our current reality, we come at people with the facts. We come at them with what we think they need to know. And if only they knew X, they would think Y. And with Katherine, it became very obvious as we went through our conversation that not only does she not think we should do that, but she wasn’t even doing that with me. It was very — it became very meta during our conversation where I realized, oh, I was asking her some certain questions, but she saw me for who I was or what I wanted as a host of this show, and she even started to speak to me — you know, to me in my terms. Well, yes, as her host in a show, you should think about it this way. And so, it’s really finding the stories within the lived reality of the people that you want to talk to and then finding the commonality in the intersection of what climate change will do to their stories and their life and how climate change will impede what they want from their life. And it’s not about driving less or eating less hamburgers. It’s about, again, ensuring that you’re taking actions that are both for the present and for future generations. One of the things that Katherine brought up and our own research has shown this is that people really care about their legacy. What kind of world are they leaving behind? So, sometimes it’s as simple as saying, hey, if you do this, there’s going to be less of that for future generations. And when people see that they’re not giving a fair shake to the future, they’re willing to take different actions.

SREENIVASAN: You went to a place, I think it’s called Dementia Village. What is so sort of distinct about that? What did that experience teach you about a different way to deal with something that millions of people, probably in our families, maybe even us, are going to experience?

WALLACH: So, outside of Amsterdam, there’s this place called Hogeweyk, which is, you know, known as the Dementia Village. And you’re right, over the next several decades, barring any major scientific advancement, one in three of us will have some sort of memory care neurodegenerative disease afflicting either us or those that we love.
In America, the way we deal with that right now, sadly, but in many ways, understandably, is we basically put people in locked hospital wards, and we find that they can be very anxious and very depressed, and we kind of have a common image of what someone going through this looks like. You know, they’re kind of lashing out and they’re yelling and whatnot. So, at Hogeweyk, they’ve done something fascinating. There’s not a lot of technology in Hogeweyk. So, remember, a lot of what we do in the show isn’t show examples of geewhiz (ph) technology. We do that. We show a lot of amazing technology. But sometimes, the “technology” is just a mindset shift. And so, the mindset shift at Hogeweyk was, instead of having people in locked wards, they actually built a safe and secure village. So, no one can kind of come in and out as they wish, but the residents in the village, they live in pods, they make their own food. There’s even a grocery store, a restaurant, a movie theater that the people that are living there can visit. Now, they don’t carry wallets, they don’t have to necessarily pay for the stuff in the grocery store. But what they found was when people were living in an environment, in a community that was not the kind of usual locked ward, and they were able to experience aspects of their life from the years before, so going to the grocery store, going to the restaurant, they required 80 to 85 percent less medication for anxiety or for depression. So, what Hogeweyk showed us is sometimes the way we think about the future in terms of the past dependency, well, one in three Americans will have a neurodegenerative cognitive disease, therefore we should build more hospitals with locked wards. That’s not locked in. There are different ways of doing things. And so, to me, visiting Hogeweyk was one of the most eye- opening experiences of the entire journey.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s talk a little bit about some of the tech. I mean, you showed people a company that is growing mushrooms to scale, you know, huge volumes. What were the technologies that most kind of surprised you? I mean, what made you say, wow, this has potential?

WALLACH: Well, look, you mentioned one of them already, which was we went to Ecovative, which is a company that’s literally growing mushrooms into — you know, currently it’s for packaging, and they’re also growing a kind of form of mushroom leather, and they’re even making bacon out of it. And what they’re doing is they’re growing mycelium, which is kind of the thicker part of — you know, it’s not the mushroom that you get on your pizza, which is what I saw going into it, but they grow these almost — it almost looks like plywood, four by eight slabs. And you’ll see it in this show, and it’s just amazing how it kind of rolls out of basically a mushroom oven, a growing facility. And they cut it into slabs. And one of the things that Eben Bayer, the founder, said to me, he goes, look, right now we’re doing relatively simple things with this, but you can imagine us creating basically bricks to create buildings out of. But inside of the bricks are tiny micro satchels of water. And in essence, the mushroom material itself is dehydrated but it’s not dead. So, if there was an earthquake or some sort of disturbance to the building, those micro satchels of water would break open and basically, the bricks would grow themselves back together again. So, this idea of using what the earth has been doing for hundreds of thousands of years to help us advance as a society, as a species in a way that has a dramatically less environmental impact and that is just kind of cool. I mean, some of these mushroom buildings will actually be able to clean air.

SREENIVASAN: You know, one of the technologies that you profiled, the 3D printed homes that are actually here on earth today, the same technology is something that we might end up using on the moon or on mars, somewhere in our lifetimes. And it’s also just stunning to me to watch an entire community go up in two to four weeks per home. That’s crazy.

WALLACH: Yes. So, I met with Melodie Yashar who’s part of ICON 3D home building outside of Austin where they’re the world’s largest community of 3D printed homes. Now, in some ways this is still kind of a beta project. But literally, if you’ve ever seen a 3D printer, you know, it’s small, you put it on your desk and you might make something really cool for your kids like a keychain. Now, imagine that at the size of a home. And literally, what you’ll see in the show is this derrick going back and forth and it basically looks like the thickest toothpaste you’ve ever seen, kind of the toothpaste you put on an elephant toothbrush. And what they are doing, over the course of several days, is printing a home. Now, on planet earth, we have several billion unhoused house people, many of them in ecosystems where they have to deal with the effects and impacts of climate change, where timber is hard to come by, where bricks are expensive. So, we look at 3D printing, yes, it’s super cool. At the same time, it could provide the ability to house basically the rest of humanity in a way that we’re not able to do right now. At the same time, they’re taking that work and that research and working with JPL and NASA to think and look, what would this look like on the moon or on mars?

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MELODIE YASHAR, DESIGNER AND RESEARCHER: 3D printing is a leading contender in in space construction. Because the premise for 3D printing in space is that we would use local and indigenous materials on the surface of the planet, rather than bringing anything with us from earth. That’s a really high impact concept because it is prohibitively expensive to launch heavy materials from earth to space, and it’s not going to enable us to create the kinds of infrastructure, small cities and settlements that we’ve seen in science fiction images for decades in the past. So, NASA’s really interested in, other aerospace companies are really interested in this idea of using the soil that is local to the moon and mars, and sending up a single 3D printing robot that can leverage that soil and those materials to 3D print really any kind of infrastructure, any kind of surface element that would be beneficial to the crew.

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SREENIVASAN: You know, not until late in the series that I realized you had access to one of the world’s greatest football soccer players, Kylian Mbappe, and I realized he’s an executive producer on the show. And then I realized Drake, like the singer, Drake is also an EP. I wasn’t surprised at Wendy Schmidt, who’s a philanthropist. How is this unlikely kind of trio involved? What’s their interest in the future or this program?

WALLACH: It’s more than trio, it’s a quad, right? So, we have Kathryn Murdoch, who’s been doing a lot of funding in the democracy climate change space. We have Wendy Schmidt, who’s an amazing philanthropist. And then we have Kylian and Drake. So, very early on when I was creating the show, it was important to me that the people that were around the kitchen table, if you will, kind of our kitchen cabinet, we’re bringing very different perspectives in terms of how we think about tomorrow. So, let’s start with Kylian Mbappe. First of all, what an amazing human being. I mean, I consider myself lucky to be alive right now because I get to see the technology and all the amazing things that are going to happen within our species. And I get to watch Kylian Mbappe play football and soccer, right? Like one of the reasons Kylian is in this show is because he talks about the role of vision. And this will sound very obvious, but let’s just have this conversation, which is when he lines up to take a penalty kick, he doesn’t envision himself missing the goal. It’s a very simple, ball, he kicks, it goes in the back of the net. That’s how he scores.

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KYLIAN MBAPPE, FRENCH PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALLER: You have to be able to say, like, now is the present. You know, you let the future come in your mind. But the most important thing in the penalty is to be in the moment. And you go with the confidence that you can score. There is no other option.

WALLACH: I assume you don’t visualize you missing the goal.

MBAPPE: No, never, never. That can happen, but never. If you visualize that you miss a goal before the shoot, you lose 50 percent of your confidence, and you need 100 percent of confidence to score a goal.

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WALLACH: And the reality is, as a society, as a species, we actually haven’t had the conversation for quite some time, if ever, about what is our goal? What is to the — you know, to what end? Because in many ways — and this is not, you know, globally, but in many ways, we’ve reached a certain level of progress as a species. But the question becomes, what do we envision for our far futures? So, I said earlier, I went into the show thinking we’re at the bottom of the eighth. Now, I think we’re at the top of the first. And if we’re at the top of the first, inning, you know, using a baseball metaphor, what do those nine innings look like? What could the next five, 10, 50,000 years look like? Those are decisions we have to make today. But what guides it is having a strong vision of what we want to see happen, right? This might sound kind of new age or wooly. It’s not. We have the greatest soccer player on earth telling us that if you want to actually succeed, you have to know what that looks like.

SREENIVASAN: The program is called “A Brief History of the Future. Host Ari Wallach, thanks so much for joining us.

WALLACH: Thank you for having me.