Oh hey, it's just the podcast host that calls herself your internet dad, Alie Ward, back from the holidays, and my first work break in many years.

I have a cold right now, but my heart's burning, ready to deliver a year's worth of brand new episodes of allergies.

Hello again, y'all, it's 2020. We are no longer dabbling in the 2000s, like poking a gnarled toe in the waters of tomorrow.

We're shin deep in the century. The world is burning. New wars are a bloom. Drones deliver our lunches. We're in this bitch. It's officially the future.

So what better time to talk about futureology? The study of what happens next. It's a thing. But before we move forward, let's pause a quick second to thank every single patron who's ever supported the show and allowed me to do things like take the last two weeks off without sponsors.

Thanks to everyone who's wearing fresh oligee swag from oligeesmarch.com. Thanks to everyone who's telling friends about the show, keeping it in the top science podcast on iTunes. What?

Rating and subscribing and reviewing. You know, I tend to leak creepier reviews. It's true. So I can pull out a fresh one. Let's have at it. Okay, this week is from Kellen Kels, who said,

Ali is my dad, my mom, my weird classmate, who has really good points, and my best friend, all at one. The fantasy episode with Cole and Perry changed my life, and now I'm trying to open my own business helping people plan the last party of their life the way they want. Let's do end of life parties instead of featerals. Okay? Okay, cool. Anyways, give it a listen. Okay, bye. Dang, that's a good idea. There's no better situation in which to be the end of the life of the party. And I say, where a tiara? We're all gonna die. Okay, futureology.

Very much a thing in a scholarly sense. And it's also called future studies. Sometimes futurism, although we're gonna talk more with this week's guests about that, but it's a study of possible, probable, and preferable futures. So it's a social science like history, but the gear shift goes forward rather than in reverse. And this guest studied ecology, behavior, and evolution at UC San Diego has a masters in journalism science and has investigated

topics like bionic human exoskeletons and sex robots and tech progress, facial recognition, some uncanny valleys, and space travel for publications like the BBC and scientific American vice, vox, the Atlantic, motherboard, and more. And she's also produced hosted and edited over a hundred episodes of the very highly lauded podcast flash forward, which is just pure auditory futureology.

And in each episode she looks at possible future scenarios. And then she talks to these experts about the trajectory that we squishy humans may take just marching toward tomorrow. So she's also just a badass advocate and a creative soul. I am a fan lady.

She was leading a seminar at psychom camp in November. And so I nabbed her for an hour to ask all about her full-time job studying and examining and forecasting the future. And we talked about everything from crutches to the Jetsons, what scares her the most, what gives her hope, the many types of technology that she has buried in her own body, why some futurists don't want things to change. And if you're phonists buying on you. And also why amid all of this technology and chaos.

She considers herself an optimist. So quite a lot in your space blanket and have your cyborg butler brew you a goblet of the good stuff.

Bolster yourself for the friendliness and the forecasting of flash forward host and professional literal futurologist. The Rose Evelyn.

Now you are a futurologist. I am a futurologist.

What is that? Yes, okay. So the futureologist is not like a super common term, but it is the one that I like to use for what I do because I kind of sit in between a bunch of different things that have other terms. So futurist is something that people probably have heard of.

Futurists generally are people who are working in industry. So it's sort of like a vocation. There are degrees you can get in strategic foresight to become a futurist, which is very cool.

Strategic foresight. There are various programs that have these schools, have these programs. And those people tend to like kind of work as consultants.

They'll go into a company and be like, okay, let me help you project out five, 10, 15 years and kind of think about the future of like Coca-Cola or Nike or whatever.

There are like professional groups for those futurists. And that's one bucket. And then there's the sort of science fiction writers bucket. And then any of them sort of consider themselves futurists. And there are there's overlapped to all of these right like there are sci-fi writers who are also futurists.

But those folks are like imagining fictional futures and thinking about the future in that way. And then there are sort of like critical future studies people or like future studies people. And they're on the academic side of like what we talk about when we talk about futurism.

And I kind of like straddle all of those. Okay. And so I think of myself as someone who like sort of studies futurists and someone who like studies science fiction writers and someone who like thinks about these academic fields. And so I like futureologist because it kind of like is that nice umbrella term. And also people laugh when I say it.

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