Fred:                         Welcome to Fred’s Front Porch Podcast.  This evening, we’re reverting to the traditional podcast format, and I’m bringing you an interview.  Regular listeners will know this is rare.  I’ve interviewed less than a dozen people in more than 150 episodes, and those I did interview were almost all friends of mine.  I’ve interviewed only 1 person who was a complete stranger to me.  Yes, even Sara Niemietz was a friend, although we’ve never actually “hung out.”  I doubt we ever will.  She is, after all, not only a person, which is frightening for me even in the most banal circumstances, she is also an artistic genius whose work is infinitely superior to mine.  I would be truly terrified, I’m sure.  Nevertheless, we’ve known each other for more than 6 years, and we’ve been kind to each other in that time. 

Tonight, I’m doing an interview with someone I’ve never met.  This was completely unplanned.  I’ve done no Show Prep.  My friend, Lester, from an independent radio station out of Louisiana, tells me this is important.  So…  Meet Rasmussen, who is joining us from the studio at WJAZ at the foot of Mount Belzoni.  I’ll leave it to him to tell us about himself.  Good evening, Rasmussen. 

Rasmussen:         Hi, Fred!  I’d say nice to meet you, but we’ve already met more than a dozen times. 

Fred:                         How did I miss that?  I know I forget things frequently, but I think I would remember meeting someone that often.

Rasmussen:            I negotiated the deal for the DAO to buy your show from you in 2031.  You really didn’t want to sell, but I set you up with enough crypto to get yourself a little place to live in the woods.  You got a nice Front Porch, plenty of room for Speedy Shine, although he really didn’t run much anymore, and enough distance between yourself and your nearest neighbors to play your music as loud as you want.  You scare the hell out of the deer sometimes though when you play The 1812 Overture. 

Fred:                      Yeah, see, Lester, out at WJAZ in Louisiana, is a Facebook friend of mine, so I agreed to do this interview when he said it would be different from every other interview done on podcasts.  I figured if we did it from the station, you would at least have a good mic, and then my show would sound better.  I just got a new mic, mic stand, and preamp from some good friends, so I was looking forward to doing a show like every other podcast to see if I could increase my numbers a little.  None of the normal Fred’s Front Porch scoring and Horacing.  Just… normal.  An effort to be like everyone else so I could fit in a little better.   But Lester didn’t mention you’re neurotic.  I don’t think I’ll be able to use this.  I’m sorry.  We don’t do pseudoscience on The Front Porch. 

Rasmussen:            Yeah, Lester said you wouldn’t believe me.  I didn’t expect you to be that credulous.  But I’m a negotiator.  So, we’ll make this deal.  If I’m from The Future, I know what your numbers are for every episode you’ve released, right?  Fred?  Right?

Fred:                         Okay.  Sure.  I’ll play.  But that doesn’t prove anything.  Hacking my Anchor or my Patreon is child’s play even for people here in 2022.  That information is hardly evidence of anything.

Rasmussen:            Of course it is.  Anyone can get your past numbers.  I’m offering your future numbers.  I’ll tell you how many plays you’re going to get on your next episode.  I don’t think you’ve actually released, “Little Boxes” yet, right?

Fred:                         That goes out Sunday. 

Rasmussen:            May 22, 2022, right? 

Fred:                         That’s the plan, yes. 

Rasmussen:            And the date today?

Fred:                    The date is May 21, 2022.  It’s 1:02 AM in Arizona right now.

Rasmussen:            Okay… I know this one because it’s one of those weird synchronicities that you always like.  You released it on May 22, 2022, and when you got up the next morning to check your numbers like the obsessive little narcissist you are, you found out you got 22 plays.  You were depressed by the low numbers, but you liked the way they lined up.  So… this is the deal.  If you get up Monday morning to find out you got 22 plays, you air this episode.  If you don’t, you trash it.

Fred:                    All right.  We’re here.  I already hooked up this stupid Zoom, so I might as well finish the interview, but tell Lester he owes me big time for wasting my time.  So… you’re a Time Traveler?  Is that the idea here?

Rasmussen:            That’s it, yes.  I’m visiting from 2052.

Fred:                         Okay, great.  First things first.  How about some winning lottery numbers?  Stock advice for my wealthier listeners?  Pick the winners of the World Series?  My listeners would be grateful for that I feel sure.

Rasmussen:            Yeah.  Can’t do that.  It’s expressly forbidden by the FTTC.  That’s The Federal Time Travel Commission.    Their regulations are clear and strictly enforced.  I’ll lose my vehicle, and I’ll wind up stuck here, which would not be a good situation at all.  I have to be careful of The Butterfly Effect.  That’s why I chose you.  If I go on Joe Rogan, I’ll screw up the timeline irrevocably.  This piece won’t be heard by more than 100 people until after the Podcast Consortium acquires the show and markets it properly, and by then this will all be old news.  What I can give you is a general feeling of the world as I know it.  I’m not allowed to divulge specific names or dates.

Fred:                         A cowardly Nostradamus?

Rasmussen:            No.  No riddles.  I’ll give you the facts I can, but we sort of have to move this along.  I have a strict 30-minute time limit.  The vehicle departs then, with or without me in it.  So, I thought I would share some information that might give your listeners a little hope and maybe even a sense of awe.  For example, we cured cancer 5 years ago.  There are these tiny 3D printed robots that target and eat cancer cells.  That was pretty cool. 

Fred:                         How’s the environment?  Is there anything left?  With Climate Change and the way we’re destroying our planet, I would be surprised that there are a lot of us left on Earth.

Rasmussen:            Earth’s population today is… what… like 8 billion?

Fred:                         7.9, but close enough for jazz.

Rasmussen:            Yeah.  Thought so.  Okay… It’s smaller in 2052. 

Fred:                    How much smaller?

Rasmussen:         We’re at just over 3 billion now. 

Fred:                         My God!  What happened?

Rasmussen:         It was Climate more than anything else.  It was about water.  There were droughts that made a lot of places unlivable.  Summer temperatures in India and Pakistan commonly got over 130 degrees.  There were over a billion people living there, and they had to find somewhere else to go.  This caused wars that killed hundreds of millions of people.  Other places were underwater by 2035.  Bangladesh and Florida were among the population centers where people drowned, and houses simply floated away or tumbled to the bottom of the ocean.   Miami became the first place to stage its own revolution.  Secession became increasingly common in the next decade.  America began to fall apart.  The United part of The United States was a quaint reminder of bygone times.

The forests in California were entirely gone by 2040.  The Colorado River stopped supplying water to people in Arizona.  Lake Mead and Lake Powell became dead pools in… I think it was 2028?  I could be wrong on that date.  Nevertheless, you ran out of water to drink, and that rendered that Diet Pepsi on which you live almost entirely extinct.  There were more than 40 million people without water.  That set off civic unrest at levels that you couldn’t even imagine. 

There were wars over water, everywhere, but especially in Asia, where the Himalayan glaciers that fed all of the great Asian rivers—the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow— were almost gone.

Fred:                         Please tell me you’re making all this up.  This is unbelievably grim.  This can’t be the world in which I live.  This can’t be the future. 

Rasmussen:            Sorry.  I have to tell the truth, or I have to be silent.  FTTC regulations. 

Fred:                         So, you’re from a dystopian future?  Life on Earth has collapsed?

Rasmussen:            Nothing of the kind.  Life is remarkably pleasant in 2052.  It just took a social upheaval more violent and intense than any other in the history of the planet to make it happen.   I think it was the loss of the Giant Sequoias in California that set it off.  People finally began to believe Climate Change was dangerous.  Scientists said it was irreversible, and we were now simply doomed to extinction.  A lot of people compared us to dinosaurs.  We didn’t need an asteroid or a meteor, though, to kill us.  We did it to ourselves, and lots of people knew we were doing it.  They didn’t care.  They had the money to keep themselves out of the uninhabitable areas and away from the nuclear fallout that was a natural consequence of the wars that they knew had to come.  It was an ugly couple of decades.    That’s what forced the change.

We needed to find ways to remove carbon from the air.  Sure, there were electric cars, but that didn’t scratch the surface of the problem.  Energy became impossibly expensive, so folks started setting up decentralized power grids of their own.  These were illegal, but so is robbing a convenience store.  People did what they had to do to survive.  We always do.  In five years, they changed the law because it became unenforceable.  Police met incredibly fierce resistance when they tried to shut down the neighborhood power grids.  Your Black Lives Matter riots were a cakewalk compared to the We’re Not Dinosaurs Insurrection. 

When the world had fallen apart, the survivors decided they needed to cooperate to put it back together.  We figured out how to remove CO2 from the air and store it inside of concrete.  There was a company in Iceland doing that even in your time, but it was way too small.  They scaled up significantly in 2034.  We learned how to use solar panels in farming so the plants got the maximum sunlight they needed for photosynthesis and the rest was stored for the farm’s own energy uses.  This saved water, too.  We found some technological solutions, but the important ones were social.

The Presidential election in 2032 resulted in more than 300,000 Americans being killed while you all screamed at each other that the other side was lying.  Human beings were ready to destroy themselves over ideology.  That’s the way they teach it in 5^th grade History.  And then we reached the Technological Singularity. 

Technological growth got away from us.    AI was writing its own code.  It was recreating itself.  It was your HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey on serious steroids.  With the advent of 3D printers, the AI could produce whatever physical objects it needed to accomplish its goals.  Everything was automated.  They even experimented with ATM drones so you could deposit and withdraw cash without having to go anywhere.  There was a famous viral TikTok video with a guy trying to shoot down one of the drones.  The thing swiveled around and fired some kind of laser at him.  It fried the poor bastard.  You see his wife running up to him, asking, “Well, Verne, did you at least get the money?”  Those drones didn’t last too long.  Neither did cash, for that matter.

It was horrifying and inspiring at the same time.  Billions of humans died, and billions more were lifted from poverty.  War became impossible.  The AI destroyed what needed to be destroyed, and it refused any human interaction.  We couldn’t launch missiles anymore.  We couldn’t fly missions.  We couldn’t even deploy tanks.  Cars were entirely at the will of the AI. 

While we had destroyed the atmosphere of much of Earth, Europa and Titan became new places for humans to live.  We’ve had colonies there since 2039.  On April 5, 2043 Angela Michaels was born on Europa.  The entire world stopped to consider it.  She was the first sentient being of whom we had ever been aware that was not born on Earth.  She was, much more than those who came from another country when you were fighting each other, an alien.  She was an extraterrestrial.

By then, currency was gone.  It wouldn’t make sense on Europa and Titan, and we had been moving toward various types of cryptocurrency for decades.  The AI put wi-fi everywhere.  Even the homeless had devices and could access the internet and farm crypto to survive.  After the AI automated practically everything, it gave everyone a Universal Basic Income that was sufficient to meet their survival needs.  It didn’t wait for legislation.  It just invented the banks, the accounts, and the cards to distribute to everyone. 

Corporations don’t exist anymore.  They’ve been replaced by DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations. They’re somewhere between a social club, a venture fund, and a traditional corporation.  In true blockchain fashion, DAOs replaced centralized authorities with collective decision making.  The result was a new kind of business model, where power and value are spread throughout the entire organization.  It meant the end of centralized power and the beginning of cooperation.  It was what your Captain Picard talked about.  “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives.  We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

We have constructed several cities underwater now, but they’re new and we’re still a little unsure about them.  The AI is confident they can withstand the weather, partly because of how well constructed they are, and partly because the weather’s severity has been drastically reduced by getting a lot of the carbon out of the air.  We have plenty of water now.  Diet Pepsi still exists, but diabetes is almost entirely gone.  The average life expectancy today is 107.  Making it to 120 is not uncommon.  130 is not unheard of. 

Fred?  Hey, Fred?  Are you still with me?

Fred:                         I’m just… I’m in shock.  I don’t know what to say.  I’m lost.  I’m confused.  I’m horrified.  I’m ecstatic.  I’m doubting your credibility, and I’m questioning my own sanity for listening.  And yet, I believe I believe every word you’ve said.  Maybe this is why I don’t do interviews. 

Rasmussen:            Maybe it is.  You’re pretty much a lousy interviewer.  You should probably just keep doing your solo shows.  But, I’m almost out of time, and that’s a very big deal for someone like me, as I’m sure you can imagine, so is there anything else you’d like to know before I go?

Fred:                         I guess I’d like to know if I’m still alive in 2052. 

Rasmussen:            You don’t really want to know.  Think about it.  Let’s say I tell you that you are.  Then you know you’ve got at least 30 more years to live, and you’re going to be much less careful.  You end up getting yourself killed earlier and potentially screw up a little tiny bit of the timeline.  You also lose your sense of urgency.  I played your last dozen or so podcasts prior to today’s date in your time to prep for this interview, and you’ve been making a significant effort to make sure you put out an episode every week because you’re afraid you’ll die before you’ve said all you need to say.  Your show would suffer.

Let’s say I tell you you’re dead by 2052.  You lose hope of seeing the world I just described.  You get a feeling of pointlessness, despair and doom.  I think that Star Trek show “Strange New Worlds” is just starting in your time.  Knowing his fate works out very poorly for Captain Pike as you’ll learn in the coming years. 

No, Fred, you’re better off not knowing.  You still have this life to live.  Live it well.  Enjoy what you can and survive through what sucks.  And verify my credentials, post this episode… and then let’s see what happens.

I gotta go.  Thanks for your time, Fred.  Live long and prosper, dude.

Sound: A chair scrapes across the floor.  Footsteps.  A door opens and closes.  The recording disconnects.

Fred’s Commentary Okay… I’ve verified the numbers.  He was right.  22 plays on 5/22/22.  I’ll upload the screenshot on my website.  I’ll post it on my Facebook page, so if you’re a friend of mine, you can see it there.  You can see it on The Fred’s Front Porch Podcast Page if you’re not one of my Facebook friends.

I’m not entirely convinced this proves anything.  He could have hacked Patreon to manipulate the numbers.  I’m a big fan of Occam’s Razor.  The simplest answer is usually the right one. 

I spent time with Lester verifying this as well as I could.  I don’t know how reliable Lester is as a source.  We’re just Facebook Friends.  I’ve never met him.  But, for what it’s worth, he tells me Rasmussen showed up in a strange metallic vehicle with no visible doors.  It was back behind the station.  For those of you who don’t know, WJAZ sits all alone at the foot of Mt. Belzoni.  It’s surrounded by dirt.  Lester says there were no tire tracks anywhere in the dirt, other than Lester’s own. 

This Rasmussen guy, Lester says, came in through the back door, and none of the alarms went off, and that was pretty weird.  Lester said he was in his headphones playing Dr. Wu, and he looked up and this guy, Rasmussen, was standing there… With… Him.  He had spiky hair, and that seemed weird because this guy looked to be about 50, and that didn’t seem to fit. 

Rass told Lester that Lester needed to set up a Zoom call with me right away because he had been sent back in time to add just the smallest touch of hope to Humanity.  Too much would screw up the timeline.  My little 50 person audience was exactly the right size. 

So… that’s my story.  Believe it.  Don’t.  It’s all the same to me.  But I’m going to spend some time tonight thinking about the future.  You might consider doing that too.  Is that our future?  Can we do anything to change it?  Do we want to change it?  I don’t have the answers.  I think we all need to find those for ourselves.  Maybe that was Rasmussen’s point.  The People on The Porch think a little bit differently than they did half an hour ago.  And maybe, somehow, it makes some sort of difference.  That’s why I’m here.  I think that’s why you’re here too.  In any case… I love you.  Good night.