Jerome C. Glenn on the Future of Futurists

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/04

Jerome Clayton Glenn is co-founder and CEO of The Millennium Project, a leading global participatory think tank with 71 Nodes around the world, and three regional networks which produces the State of the Future reports for over 25 years. 

He was contracted by the EC to write the AGI paper for input to their Horizon program 2025-2027, is a Member of the IEEE SA organizational governance of artificial intelligence working group P2863, lead the international assessment of foresight elements of the UN Secretary-General’s Our Common Agenda. He is currently working on the initial conditions, rules, and guardrails for artificial general intelligence (AGI) and governance possibilities, synergetic relations among nations of South Asia, and the next State of the Future report.

Jerome Glenn has managed over 60 futures research projects, lead author for 19 State of the Future reports, and co-editor for Futures Research Methodology 1.0 to 3.0

He invented the Futures Wheel, Synergy Matrix, and concepts such as conscious-technology, transInstitutions, tele-nations, management by understanding, self-actualization economy, feminine brain drain, and definitions of environmental security and collective Intelligence. He wrote about information warfare in the late 1980s, sent his first email in 1973, and in the mid-1980s he was instrumental in getting x.25 packet switching in 29 developing countries which was key to low-cost access to the Internet. 

A few years ago, he led the design and implementation of the Global Futures Intelligence System, wrote Work/Technology 2050: Scenarios and Actions, and lead the American Red Cross Covid-19 Scenarios. He was instrumental in naming the first Space Shuttle the Enterprise and banning the first space weapon (FOBS) in SALT II. He has published over 250 future-oriented articles, spoken to over 800 organizations, and wrote Future Mind: Artificial Intelligence, Linking the Future, and co-author of Space Trek: The Endless Migration).

He shares the 2022 Lifeboat Guardian Award with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, received the Donella Meadows Metal, Kondratieff Metal, Emerald Citation of Excellence, honorary professorship from Universidad Miguel de Cervantes, and honorary doctor’s degrees from Universidad Ricardo Palma and Universidad Franz Tamayo, and is a leading boomerang stunt man.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, the first question I want to ask is something we already covered: to correct my mistakes and misconceptions. What’s the difference between “futurism” and “futurist”? Why is the latter acceptable, and probably something you might want to stop using as a term?

Jerome Glenn: Because I’m not completely consistent. I don’t want to bury the word “futurism” among futurists. Even though an -ism tends to be an ideology, futurists should open their minds to possibilities. The idea of alternative thinking is one of the contributions of contemporary futurists. Futurism was a school of art in Milan, Italy, about 125 years ago. It used a robotized style and worshiped machines. It became a bit of the foundation for fascism. So I was in Milan by pure accident, walking down the street 100 years to the anniversary day. There’s this big 100th anniversary of futurism. I met with some of the futurists that evening. I was like, “Here’s the deal: Let’s do it again, folks, but let’s not do it with fascism, okay?” So that’s one of the reasons why we’re going to get rid of the futurism part: people tend to think that we’re an ideology if we use the word -ism or the phrase -ism.

Jacobsen: It was largely founded in the ’90s. Is it still connected to the United Nations, a university around that? Is that connection still active with that university or the United Nations?

Glenn: Yes, well, we still do stuff with the U.N. We’re a bit involved in the U.N., with some coming up in the future. We’ve done stuff with UNESCO, FAO, and other parts of the U.N. We started the feasibility study under the United Nations University in 1992. We did a three-year feasibility study, believe it or not. Because there are controversies in future studies and future research in the academic world, there are controversies. Also, since I was in Washington, D.C., the United States, that’s only sometimes considered a place people want to follow in many parts of the world. 

So, we ended up under the American Council of the U.N. University. Officially, we were U.N. before U.N. University. Still, we went under the American Council for U.N. University for many years, giving us U.N. access and all the rest. It was a statement about values, U.N. values. But then there were all kinds of; some people said it was much jealousy, some thought it was different things, and it became an annoyance. So, we finally became independent. But it was good that we were born under the U.N. University because it allowed us to include places like Iran, which we still have involved to this day that publishes our stuff in Persian and Farsi.

And relations with China are good, and so forth. Over the years, people have trusted the Millennium Project that it is a global futures research system, not looking on behalf of one country, ideology, or issue. Still, the whole system became acceptable over the years. It’s 100% independent, but we still do much stuff with different parts of the U.N., but we’re independent.

Jacobsen: What do you consider the more controversial subject matter within the realm of futurists? Those things people either don’t want to touch or B can make wild speculation without sufficient empirical evidence.

Glenn: Yes, well, one is synthetic biology. When I say synthetic biology, I’m not talking about taking DNA, cutting part of it, and putting something else in, where you take a rose and it glows at night. It’s still a rose. I’m talking about synthesizing different genetic parts, genes from different species, to make a new species that’s never existed before. That’s synthetic biology, synthesizing synthetic biology. That is in place today. There are no international regulations. We could create all kinds of species, but we have yet to determine how to determine what they will necessarily adapt to in the wild.

On the one hand, it is a tremendous boom because you should consider all the things nature can do that you can’t. Imagine that you could do some of that. It’s a bigger revolution than the industrial revolution. During the Industrial Revolution, we changed matter and energy relationships.

In the synthetic revolution, you’re changing the basis of life across the board. That’s a big deal. It’s not people not touching that one too much. It needs global regulations. We should have a U.N. convention on it, all that stuff. In the year 2000, I was asked to write a technology paper. We have a secretary general at that time. We had a bunch of stuff in there about it. It was in the early draft, and the secretary general was in 2000, but it was taken out. This is a weak point in the U.N. system, which is technology. They’re very good at all kinds of other stuff, but it’s not too hot regarding advanced technology, which is pretty cool. So that’s one. 

Another one, of course, is future forms of artificial intelligence. So we’re working mostly on that right now. That’s much of our focus right now. The world is oblivious to AI 2.0. They’ve got the U.N. to pass a resolution on the artificial narrow intelligence we have today.

The Bletchley Declaration in the U.K. also did one on narrow intelligence. They talked about frontier and futures, but it was all narrow intelligence as soon as they entered the substance. The same thing happened with the U.N. Security Council meeting last July. It was, they mentioned, but only China mentioned it briefly: super intelligence. But we must understand that A.I. can evolve beyond what we think today. It can go from a tool to an agent. It can go from a single purpose to inventing purposes. It can do; it’ll eventually solve problems with novel strategies and evolve beyond our control and understanding. The only way we can manage how that turns out well is to transition from narrow to general. Right now, we have a three-year window to deal with that.

The trouble is that we return to narrow intelligence whenever we push people. They say generative intelligence. Generative intelligence is still narrow. All of that stuff is still narrow. It’s good stuff. It’s important, and it should be regulated also. I’m in favour of all that, but millions of people are working on this. I’m very pleased with that. That’s being done. The values are there. UNESCO is there. OECD is there. It’s great stuff. However, they need to deal with the emergence of the Big Apple. That’s one of the issues. Another one needs to be dealt with.

Jacobsen: How will these impact considerations that have been in science fiction or reality in terms of ethical development? So, things like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and the Asilomar Guidelines are these things. As you note, how will this change considerations around 2.0 with the agency? Will things like human rights have to be generalized even further than simply getting a member of homo sapiens to something like sentience and then coming up with some generic metrics of those to manage how new agents will be dealing with humans that are already in?

Glenn: Yes, I don’t have a strong position on sentience, consciousness, et cetera, with A.I., in the sense that whether it has or has not, to me, is not the question. It will act as if it does. We, therefore, have to act accordingly. An airplane flies, and a bird flies. It’s not the same thing, but they both fly. Will artificial general intelligence be able to act as if it was insulted? Yes. Will it act as if it understands the world? Yes. Will it act as if it can get around many rules as if it was conscious of those? Yes.

Does that mean it’s sentient in the same sense? As they say, I’m not in their mind to know. But we have to act as if it is. A woman in Germany has created a constitution for artificial general intelligence. What are the rights and privileges of artificial intelligence? How do humans ought to relate to it? That’s a very wise move.

We need to begin to work on this right now. Because the forecast on artificial general intelligence, when it arrives, keeps getting closer and closer and closer. We discussed a 50-50 chance by 2045 a few years ago. Now, nobody says that. Now you’ve got a variety of experts averaging estimates together of a 10% chance of losing control. Would you get on an airplane with a 10% chance of crashing? Probably not. But if you knew that and had a chance to repair that plane before it took off, you could do it. So that’s where we are with the narrowing out—treating it as if it was sentient, and bingo. 

Jacobsen: So what if we shift the perspective from A.I. ethics to something potentially a bit past A.I. ethics with A.I.’s? These agents, if autonomous, could develop their own highly sophisticated ethical systems and guidelines. How might those develop and interrelate with ones already in place?

Glenn: That’s a legitimate question. I wouldn’t know. That would be beyond my understanding if it goes beyond our ethical systems. But I sit on the IEEE AI governance organizations’ body and am struck by the first day. Here, you have people worldwide who precisely define ethical definitions so the auditors can use them. 

So what hit me in these IEEE meetings was that if it’s the case, we will have artificial intelligence and the advanced versions involved in the infrastructure of civilization as a whole deciding all kinds of things on our behalf. If humans sometimes make ethical decisions and don’t, but if A.I. makes decisions based on audited ethical systems that the world has agreed to, civilization should become more ethical. Now, will A.I.s evolve beyond our understanding? I believe yes. Will they have their own rules and so forth? I guess so. But by definition, I would need help understanding what they are.

I’m writing a scenario on this where, in phase three, we’re doing a study on artificial general intelligence. We finished Phase One and Phase Two and are now in Phase Three. Phase three is scenarios. One of our scenarios is working on the protocols between AGIs when they interact. What are the rules for their interaction? And when the rules can’t be held, how does an automatic meeting of the various producers of the A.I. have an online meeting to resolve what it is? But the idea of your question is basically beyond me. Will they evolve their own ethics rules and procedures? Yes. Will I understand them? Probably not. Sorry, that’s not a very satisfactory answer.

Jacobsen: No, it’s a fair response because of the development of those ethics, which I would differ slightly. In the long term, these systems will develop ethics that are simply incomprehensible to us. They will be a black box to some degree, but the outcomes will make some sense.

Glenn: Yes. We always know what the outcomes are. Imagine so many interactions and decisions in the infrastructure. At the end of my scenario, I put in the possibility that some of the new bases in orbit that require energy and save energy, the air conditioning and cooling, and so on, are starting to get assembled without our understanding of how it was done.  That’s when you get into superintelligence. When things start happening that you don’t understand, in a sense, you can’t judge the outcome because does the orbital thing work or not? So you can judge from that point of view, yes.

Jacobsen: Here’s another controversial topic that might be relevant to you; it doesn’t happen often in many communities, but I’ve interviewed many people, like you, depending on the area. I remember I interviewed Gordon Guyatt, a distinguished professor at McMaster University. He founded or co-founded evidence-based medicine in the early ’90s. A very well-cited person, probably the most cited living or dead academic in Canadian history. He knew bad behaviour happened at that level in the medical community. In the academic community, it happens, but it’s rare. You’ve been in this field for a long time, concerning more evidence-based extrapolations or speculative industries, futures industries, and philosophies. Are there cases where people take advantage of that for fraudulent behaviour? Have some cases arisen during your work?

Glenn: I’m reminded of Herman Kahn, the inventor of scenarios and escalation in international affairs. He was also the head of the Hudson Institute on the U.S. side in the Cold War. He felt very guilty when he bought some stocks toward the end of his life because he thought he would be tempted to say things favouring those stocks. And he was unsure whether it was ethical for a futurist to buy stocks because of that. That was an interesting question. On ethics, yes, it’s very easy to manipulate people on future stuff because that’s the basis of advertising. “Buy my car, and you get this good-looking blonde. Buy my product, and you get this thing.” So, they’re all future image-based.

One pushes one direction; one of the ethics, I guess, is if you’re pushing one direction, one ideology, then that would be an abuse of power. Many of us think that you should always make it clear to people that you don’t know the future, and you can. Still, you can learn about various possibilities and alternatives. What’s not being dealt with, that ought to be dealt with.

The comment about synthetic biology and future A.I. Some people use the phrase “use the future,” but when you use history, you usually use history to justify your ideology. That somebody can quote “use the future” to justify their preconceived notions ahead of time. I consider that unethical behaviour.

Jacobsen: Who did you admire when you started this work?

Glenn: Well, one, of course, would be Bucky Fuller, Buckminster Fuller, who gave us the concept of synergy and design science and various other key insights. Another would be Herman Kahn himself. I would also throw in Timothy Leary. I had the pleasure of having a panel with Herman Kahn and Timothy Leary, once about as different as possible. Isaac Asimov, he was a great master. I had the pleasure of meeting him a bit. Those would be some of the key people. I would go back in American history to Benjamin Franklin because Benjamin Franklin was the first American futurist.

Jacobsen: In what sense, in terms of the prediction that he was making about technology?

Glenn: In the sense that he didn’t simply accept what… this is oral history if it’s written down, but supposedly when they were writing the Declaration of Independence, the idea was they were going to quote Locke or Montesquieu or somebody, and Ben Franklin said, “Wait a minute, we’re creating a new game here. We won’t quote some former philosophers; we will create our own thing.” So, the idea of inventing the future and inventing what was possible was very much what he was about. He invented the U.S. post office. He invented the Pony Express. He was extremely creative in thinking anew. He was one of the driving forces of American thinking of creating something different and an alternative. Futures make an alternative to the British model.

Jacobsen: And what was Timothy Leary like?

Glenn: He was brilliant. When people say their brain is fried, they don’t know what they are discussing. They didn’t know him. He was brilliant. He processed more content in less time than anybody I ever met. Herman was the second-best right to that. So, Timothy was one of the… a lot of these people are highly misunderstood, unfortunately. Sandoz’s was a drug company in Switzerland that wanted to test out an I.Q. pill, which was later called LSD25. They wanted an independent evaluation by the most respected person they could get their hands on, Timothy Leary, at Harvard. So when they talked about I.Q. pills, the word got out, the A.P. and the rest of the press came in, and they weren’t ready. They weren’t readyyet, so everything got out of hand. But he could conceive the sweeps of history and get into the content of many histories and thoughts as best as anybody. He presented alternative modes of thought to the United States.

He spent time with songwriters in the sixties. Much of the American cultural revolution during that time came out of music, and he had a hand in that. So he was a brilliant guy to talk with. I had the pleasure to be around. But the trouble with him is he’s always been called the extra 10%, which would get him in trouble. He loved pushing systems. He couldn’t help himself. So if he could see somebody going a certain way, he’d push them an extra 10%. It would annoy people sometimes. Not everybody likes to have their view of reality threatened all the time.

Jacobsen: When it comes to science, technology, and envisioning new forms of governance, social organization, and health systems, we have these systems in place and in development that can be seen as accelerators toward a more expansive future. If using that metaphor, what still exists as the brakes on that car?

Glenn: I’ve learned about momentum over the years. Whatever you look at is more complex than possible at the time, and breakthroughs occur sooner than people think. However, its application and usage take much longer than seems reasonable. The Internet’s capabilities were in the late ’60s and early ’70s, but people thought it started around the 1990s. It’s a long time lag.

Right now, I’m up for putting some breaks in the transition from narrow to general artificial intelligence. We’re working with the U.N. and parliaments in different countries to say, “Hey, let’s have some rules here, folks. Let’s ease in getting in fast.” How often breaks can work? We have to ride the wild horse as best we can. I remember. Was it the ’70s? We did stop some biology research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it continued in France and Japan. We’ve got this largeinterconnected mass of humans around the planet. Even if half the world says, “All right, put the brakes on X, the other half may not.” Another big player in the game that people also prefer to avoid talking about is organized crime. Organized crime makes more money than all the military budgets combined.

And there’s cybercrime. You look up how much money they make and how much money businesses lose on cybercrime. It’s more than the military budgets combined, that one category, let alone all the rest of the organized crime. So, as a result, they’ve got some of the best software talent money can buy. So the ability to say we’re going to put brakes on X, organized crime might say, “Whoa, a new business opportunity.”.

So if brakes are possible, maybe the best thing is to get on the horse and ride as best as possible—a way around that. As Max Tegmark and the Future of Life Institute offered to say, “Hey, let’s pause for six months.” Some people say, “Well, that’s a dumb idea.” I’m going, “Well, that wasn’t a dumb idea.” Because what did it do? It got the world to acknowledge or begin to acknowledge that there’s a big deal coming up here, and we should consider it. So, the pause furthered the conversation on what would save, what the responsible evolution of A.I. would be, and what the rules would be. We’re not there yet, but the conversation is further down the road due to the request for a pause. So, brakes are good to think about, but I would only rely on something other than them. You can only stop much stuff.

Jacobsen: And what if a workaround artificially adds time in this sense? Even though the transition is rapidly happening, you use your current tools to determine what regulations can be made for those upcoming tools. So, the advanced narrow A.I., say GenAI, that we now use to help us ask prompts about what would be reasonable for developing those adaptations without halting technology development.

Glenn: Absolutely. That’s one of the things I’ve tested out in various places worldwide. It seems acceptable to metaphorically imagine AGI, the future stuff, as a sphere. Let’s say there are 20 rules. You have a narrow A.I. for each one of those 20 rules. So there are 20 narrow A.I.s inside, embedded inside the AGI, that monitor 24 hours, seven days a week. It’s different than you audit once and you pass. It’s not like a financial audit. It’s like a governor in the old physics and engineering sense. That you’re, it’s a constant, constant monitoring. So you’re using narrow A.I.s to monitor and cause a pause in the AGI should they go off the rules.

Jacobsen: Why do you think most of our futurist media is apocalyptic, dystopian, rather than something more optimistic? So, things like Game of Thrones and fantasy. There’s lots of sex and dragons. The futuristic stuff is more technology but doom.

Glenn: Yes, it’s… We’re geared this way. When you stub your toe walking down the street, you don’t notice that your heart is beating fine. Your breathing is doing fine, etc. But your toe is killing you. So, your total attention goes to the pain. The majority of the world is being polite with each other, like you and me right now. We are the vast majority of the world. But what do you get in the news?

The worst things humans do to each other every day. We are attracted, and our attention goes to pain. Growing up in the Savannah with a saber-tooth tiger, your radar is for the danger. That’s normal. That’s one part of it. In the second part, we studied how you better integrate future research and decision-making. One of the conclusions I don’t like, but I have to go with the conclusion, is that you get the decision-maker’s attention by demonstrating a potential disaster. Because if everything is going right, there’s no purpose in changing policy.

The whole purpose of policy is to change the future. So, if everything’s going relatively well, the decision-maker doesn’t have to worry about anything. He doesn’t have to do anything. Here’s this wonderful thing from 1970 called the Internet. Eh, it wasn’t exciting yet. But if you present to a decision maker, “Hey, if you don’t do something, we’re going to go down the tubes.”

It’s in the effectiveness of future research and futurists to demonstrate a crisis to get attention. I like something other than that because we only spend a little time with the opportunities. We could have done so much more with the Internet years ahead of time worldwide if people had paid attention to the positive things, which they didn’t. People turned that into a negative, saying you’re a nice young man. Still, I got into international affairs because I wanted to travel. You’re going to stop my travel. I go, no, I’m going to make your travel smarter. You’re not going to; it’s not going to eliminate travel. But they didn’t want to; they were resistant to it. I felt like Padua with Galileo on the telescope at this State Department guy’s desk saying, “Take a look at this computer communications.”

He says, “It’s okay, explain it to me.” He wouldn’t even participate. “Look at the machine.” But it’s unfortunate; it is a serious problem because we have opportunities not being taken advantage of because we’re concentrating on the problems. We look at the possibilities less. Many years ago, a futurist named Robert Theobald said that news should be put into a format of problem-possibility. Today, this house burned down. A breakthrough in making houses so they won’t burn was created by X. Next story, problem, possibility, problem, possibility. We even suggested this to the cable news network years ago when they were on paper as their unique news format. They said, “Yes.” But it turned out it was harderthan they thought because of the pressure of the time of the problem; they needed more time to research where the solutions were.

But if we can get this idea of problem-possibility in our thinking better, we’d be better off. Because it’s right, there was a project, maybe you heard about it, of science fiction writers who do positive futures five, ten years ago. Karl Schroeder was part of this thing in Canada. He’s a fellow Canadian; he’s up in Toronto. He’s also a good guy for you to interview—award-winning Canadian sci-fi. You should know this guy. Let’s see. 1962, paying a science fiction author, a traditional futurist, far future speculations, nanotech terraforming, organic reality.

Now, the third part of your answer, or the third answer to your question, is that solutions are harder than problem descriptions. It’s a lot easier to say there’s a war in Gaza. Let me tell you about it. How do we make peace in Gaza? Well, we’re not too good at that. It’s hard to come up with solutions. It’s much easier to say, “Here’s a problem, and then walk away.” That’s easy. A third answer to your question is that I wrote an article some years ago on the ethics of future research in teaching future research. One of the ethics I put in there is giving equal time to problems and possibilities. You can’t just say, “Here’s what’s wrong,” because then you’re poisoning the unconscious mind because then people think there’s no point in trying if it’s all going down.

Jacobsen: That’s a very good point. How you describe this aligns with my reading and image of Timothy Leary’s work for your early reference. He was hyper-optimistic, and Robert Anton Wilson critiqued him as such. 

Glenn: He was a hope fiend. Somebody called him a hope fiend.

Jacobsen: Yes. 

Glenn: That’s right. To play off dope fiend.

Jacobsen: Yes. Nothing is necessarily wrong with that, but if it comes with that extra 10% you’re mentioning, you can get the attention of certain bureaucrats who want to shut down things like the Milbrook experiments.

Glenn: Yes, he was almost an experimental human being. It’s not like I will take a lab over here and do a test. It’s like he was the test. He was an experiment. I wish he were around to answer this question. But he would accept the idea that he was an experimental human being. He was experimenting with himself. How is it to be a human being? What is the future of consciousness? The future of consciousness is that he was exploring all of that possibilities.

Jacobsen: Well, that’s also in line with Bucky Fuller. A few people around that time were in that frame of mind. 

Glenn: But Bucky should have challenged your view of reality. No, Bucky challenged your efficiency. “Here’s a better way of doing it.” He didn’t pull the rug out from underneath you and then say, “Hey, invent yourself now.”

Jacobsen: That’s right. 

Glenn: Bucky was close to suicide for much of his life, by the way, because people were not listening to him. To this day, some people are now coming up with a three-wheeled car, realizing that he’s pretty smart. But Bucky’s problem was that he wasn’t accepted as much as he would like to have been accepted.

Jacobsen: Who do you think was in their class of intellectuals and futurists in a positive sense but has yet to be discovered? Either they had personal issues or psychological issues, or they were ignored.

Glenn: Now, we’re getting into dangerous territory. This is curious. There are casualties in the field. One of the greatcasualties is a guy named Billy Rojas. For some time, the brain behind Alvin Toffler. Al was one of the greats; he was a slick New York writer. We were all jealous because his stuff sold, and he was a good writer. He’s lovely, but he was the hotshot New York writer. But as far as the guts, deep thinking, new ideas, and so forth, a lot of that came from other people and, to a large extent, was funnelled in and developed by Billy Rojas. Now, Billy Rojas taught one of the first futures courses in the United States, in Tennessee or Kentucky somewhere.

Back in the early or the middle 60s. He and Chris Dede created the first doctoral program in futures research at the University of Massachusetts. Billy, I, and another guy were creating a little think tank called the Future Options Room back in 1975. Billy was attacked in the middle of the night. Someone took a cane, which is unusual and ran across, knocking a bunch of teeth out and then stealing his attaché case. When’s the last time you heard somebody stealing somebody’s attaché case?

Jacobsen: Never.

Glenn: Yes, neither have I. So, he immediately got paranoid. So he was in a hospital, and I wondered why someone would steal that. And then, and a cane? First of all, how many people attack you with a cane across the jaw? So that was a triggering event. He was a little bizarre and far out. He was on the edge of that stuff, to begin with, but this one drove him over the edge, and he went underground for a while. Then he surfaced, working on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier teaching stuff. He’s still around.

But he is one of the unknown stories. Many people don’t want to talk about him because he’s crazy. He’s accused me of having an affair with Barbara Hubbard and all kinds of things that were not true, so he’s a little crazy. If you did a chemical test, the needle would go over to tilt, but he was very creative—no question about it. He had all kinds of creativity. There wasn’t a far-out idea you couldn’t discuss with him.

And obviously, Alvin Toffler took advantage of that. So, he was one of the casualties. One of the ones who ducked the radar was Chris Dede. Chris Dede got the first doctorate in future research at the University of Massachusetts. He was the other guy there. He started the doctoral and master’s programs at the University of Houston.

Then he went to George Mason University, and Harvard picked him up. At that point, he had to be respectable, so he stopped using the term futurist. He stopped at his Harvard page, the faculty page. It doesn’t mention where he got his PhD or doctorate and the subject. I agree that he turned his back on future stuff because there’s so much snake oil. But there are other reasons to leave the farm. You plant a better crop.

That’s another important thing. Yes, there’s a lot of B.S. Yes, it’s cool to be a futurist these days now. Years ago, it was like you got some disease; you had to take two aspirin, get a good night’s sleep, and forget this future stuff. But now, you look at Facebook and LinkedIn, everybody’s a futurist.

Jacobsen: What do you think are valid criticisms of the futurist project?

Glenn: Only sometimes anchored in methodologies. Now, immediately, Timothy Leary came over on my shoulder and said, “Wait a minute, you’re not going to include LSD as a methodology, are you?” Ah, Stanford Research Institute did. SRI did a study called “Changing Images of Man” study. It was in the seventies, a very famous study. One of their people came to my office.

They gave me the report, and I asked what your method was. And he said, “LSD.” I’m nodding to Timothy, but serious data needs more grounding. I’m being objective because many people have various axes to grind. They think that everything is Silicon Valley. We don’t have to study the future. We’re inventing it. I’m serious. That’s the attitude there. So we were inventing it, man. You’ll find out what’s happening next when we develop it.

Jacobsen: Futurist ideology via contemporarism.

Glenn: Yes. There’s a quote. You can quote yourself there. Yes, we have a compendium of 37 different methods. So when someone says I’m a futurist, I do scenarios. Oh, that’s another thing. While we’re complaining about methods, the original reason for scenarios was to find out what you didn’t know, that you didn’t know you didn’t know, but you had to know if you would look at that future. In other words, as you write a story, you get to a point where you say, “I have no idea what happens next.” Stop writing, research, talk to people, etc., until you find the next plausible step.

It was invented at the RAND Corporation. Their job was to prevent World War III. Everything else was entertainment. World War III was the issue. They couldn’t use normal military historians because the risk of war in the past was not absolute.

Meanwhile, the risk was absolute with the thermonuclear war. Bingo, the whole game was gone. So, the way of thinking had to change.

Hence, alternative thinking, alternative futures, and so forth, at RAND. But how do you know what is plausible? How do you? So, the idea was to write stories. And when you get to something that’s not plausible, that’s the gold. You found out what you didn’t know, that you didn’t know you didn’t know, but you got to figure it out. For example, Herman told me this… An interesting story that was unknown at the time but is so unknown to a large degree now is that let’s say, there’s been no thermonuclear war ostensible crisis for 30 years.

That means you don’t know who’s in the Kremlin, you don’t know the geopolitical situation, and you don’t necessarily know the weapons of the day. So, with all that unknown, how will you use deterrence? How are you going to deter the unknown? How do you convince the unknown that you’re crazy enough to press the button? That was the question. How do you do that? So, as they’re writing this scenario, they can’t figure out how to convince the unknown that you’re crazy.

So they stopped and discussed it until finally, who came up with it first? The idea was traffic jams. You create a fallout shelter program and civil defence program with fallout shelters all over the United States so that 30 years from now, you’ve got enough of that stuff built and have real programs with real people.

If the Cuban Missile Crisis had gone on further, the next step would be to go to fallout shelters. So what would the Kremlin see 30 years in the future? They would see traffic jams in New York, traffic jams in Chicago, traffic jams in Miami, all across the United States, and people rushing out to fallout shelters. What’s the logical conclusion? Those Americans are crazy. They’re going to go to war. Spot the ships, right?

That was the purpose of the Civil Defense Program. It was a fallback position of a future scenario to prevent World War III. But you couldn’t say it during the Cold War because it would destroy the strategy. So, as a result, Herman and other people had to go, did, but when the press was saying, how are you going to live underground for several thousand years? That wasn’t the point. The point was to convince the opponent that you’re crazy enough to press the button. That was the point. So we wouldn’t have gotten to that idea if we did scenarios the way the futurists are doing it today. What futurists do today, as they’ll say, gives me two uncertainties. High, low on this one, high, low on that one. You got four little boxes. And then, they describe the future in those four boxes and say, “What strategy works in them?” But you miss the entire point.

That’s not a scenario; it’s a description of the future. Perfectly fine to do. But the value is from the present to that future, cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect, decisions, decisions. Because then you find out what’s real, what’s possible. Herman would comment that you can’t write me a scenario to show you that’s possible. That’s right, but you don’t start with the endpoint. Because that’s easy; again, you return to the negative future stuff. Describing the problem is easy. Describing the answer is hard. Writing a real scenario from the present to the future is hard work. Almost all futurists don’t do that. All they do is describe an endpoint. We are in the year 3000, and the extraterrestrials are playing pinball with us. That’s easy.

Jacobsen: Who do you think has carried on Leary’s hyperoptimism?

Glenn: See, I didn’t know him before the LSD stuff. So what he was “normal,” I heard him from a distance saying, “I was never normal. God damn it. I was born strange.”

Jacobsen: As we both know, he described his four years at Harvard and his time at the military academy as artificial.

Glenn: Right. So obviously, based on that statement, there was a before that period.

Jacobsen: Part of it is that I’m inventing this because I have yet to discuss it with him. Is that by having an alternative spiritual awakening? Is that a positive future? You see all these roadblocks, his positive future, all these momentums, and stuffy nonsense in the way. You’re like, “Boy, if we could get to that state of consciousness, my God, what a potential future we could have.” That may have been it, but I don’t commune with ghosts. So, I don’t have direct contact with them anymore.

Jacobsen: On that point, do you have any spiritual beliefs that guide you? These can also be natural versions of those.

Glenn: Oh, sure. No, the evolution of the mind is inevitable if we don’t mess things up along the way. Please think of how much we have discussed in the interview. We could return to Ben Franklin, and he would have been jealous. He lived a few years. So the awareness of awareness, our awareness of what we’re aware of, is gigantically different today than it was 200, 300 years ago. So, the evolution of the mind is empirically verifiable—secondly, the idea of the species.

When you were in the Inca’s consolidating power, you knew nothing about the dynasties in China. The idea of global awareness and global consciousness is evolving. I was lucky to be brought up in a house that thought mystics were okay. That meditation was a reasonable thing. I’m still trying to figure out your original question again. 

Jacobsen: You got lost in the positive future there. I know it’s any “spiritual” foundation. Those could be naturalists as well. They don’t have to imply anything supernatural or extra-material. Then, you mentioned and developed the idea of the evolution of the mind. In terms of how you can compare the influence in this time, we’re more aware.

Glenn: I’m trying to remember your original question: What is my spiritual orientation? 

Jacobsen: Yes, orientation or foundation guiding the work that you’re doing.

Glenn: Our family had a friend from Egypt who claimed he was trained in the same school as Jesus. In the Catholic church, you’ve got the bureaucratic structure, but then you also have your monastic mystics and so forth. Every religion has “Yes, Sufi and Islam,” and all the religions have that. So did the Copts. The Copts didn’t mean Egyptian Christian; it meant Egyptian.

As the Arabs came in with Islam, they said all those Copts. So it’s now changed its meaning. But the idea was that it was fun when Jesus’ parents went to Egypt. It was a good question to ask people: Where did Jesus go to elementary school? Where did he go to high school? Any of that stuff, he goes off as a baby, wetting his pants. He comes back with this hot shot. Who’s the teacher? Where was the school?

This one monastic or not monastic, but mystic part of the Copts, because they were pre-Christian because Jesus was there. They were already there before Jesus came in, supposedly. But anyway, whether or not all that stuff is true, a lot of the influence of that guy in the family was such that I was interested in more than Christianity and Buddhism.

Or Judaism and Islam, but also Hinduism and all the rest of the other isms around the world. So, I grew up thinking it’s okay to learn other views of spiritual reality. That’s a good thing.

Jacobsen: What Millennium Project project has been the most successful?

Glenn: I would say two. One would be environmental security. We did the first definitional work on it back in 1996. We even brought together a bunch of different embassies and military attachés in Washington at the World Bank. They all said, “Well, we’re going to work on it.” But we’re not there yet. So that’s how I knew we were early. Today, environmental security worldwide is, of course; we even helped the U.N. add in what they call a status of forces agreement. So when the U.N. goes into peacekeeping, they must have the status of forces agreement. In there, before us, the word environment was never mentioned otherwise, other than the military environment, but in the sense of nature.

Protecting nature is part of your job, and the thing didn’t exist before us. We did, for over ten years, every month, the environmental security report, emerging issues, and environmental security around the world. The U.S. military then funded it, but it was also sent to all the other militaries. That was one of the best impacts we’ve had as we moved.

Environment and security are part of a global system. That exists. The other one, which is even better but more difficult to prove or more abstract, was before the Millennium Project when the idea of global future research did not exist. You would have somebody at Harvard saying, “We got a guy from India and a guy from China who got their PhD at Stanford. Now, we’re researching global futures.” I’m talking about having people worldwide collaborate to research global futures. That’s unique. It’s still unique even today. Occasionally, I get an email from someone who’s created a global network on something or another. So, the idea of future global research is

When we did, I told you we had the three-year feasibility study. During that three-year feasibility study, most futurists said, “Forget it. You can’t do that because you’ll end up with generalizations that are pablum.” There’s no guts. You can’t do it because once you get into detail. It gets too much. You can’t do the globe. So, and probably underneath it was, who the hell do you think you are to do this? Probably also part of it. The big deal is that we made global futures research a thing. Now, do we do it well? That’s another question. Are other people doing it well? Another question. But ought it to be done? It’s not argued anymore.

Jacobsen: And the United Nations is the most bureaucratic organization globally.

Glenn: Yes. That’s a fair statement.

Jacobsen: I’ve done 16 model United Nations for myself. So I have some experience either as a delegate or on the secretariat.

Glenn: Sorry about that.

Jacobsen: The Harvard ones were the funniest because they’re five days, and they’re in different cities every year. One thing that stands out in some of those experiences is that it is less about the bureaucratic side and segmenting of things and the delegate experience, which are two things. One is the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals—these grand visions of individuated subject matter for development towards a more positive outcome over a medium period. While having them all interrelated, even though they are individuated, is some of the stuff you’re mentioning about the Millennium Project bringing that to the fore in line with some of that work?

Glenn: Well, there is an indirect straight line. We had these 15 global challenges. Are you aware of that? 

Jacobsen: No. 

Glenn: There are 15 global challenges. They were in place before 2000, when they had the first Millennium Summit. A State of the World Forum asked if we could reprint our 15 global challenges into a special document, which we did. And that was given to all U.N. missions and other countries through the embassies in Washington, DC, and other places. So, it got distributed. So, saying global challenges that the Millennium Summit should address was a thing, everybody did not discuss it, but the conversation discussed it a bit. Goals are murky. All the details of it. It’s murky.

We helped that along the way. Of course, their goals are not descriptions, actions, or regional considerations. So that’s a different approach. Because if we talk about the changing role of women in improving the human condition, that’s not a goal. That’s a direction. That’s ongoing. All these things are ongoing. We tend to think of the 15 global challenges as a set of systems to understand global change in a similar way that in biology, you understand your respiratory system, skeletal system, etc., and how they all fit together to make you a biological entity. So, how do you wrap your mind around global change? The 15 global challenges are as good as anybody else, whereas the U.N. sustainability SDGs need to give you a global understanding. It gives you a global agenda. But then, how do you understand all that together? That’s a different thing. That’s the part we work on.

Jacobsen: To what degree do you see developments? As you’re mentioning Benjamin Franklin, we noticed it in several countries worldwide. This was documented in one short paper, at least in 2023, by Human Rights Watch as a regression or a decline in gender equality or egalitarian efforts, primarily through restricting women’s access to education.

Glenn: Yes.

Jacobsen: And this is happening in many places in the United States. So, how do you see some of these various elements that are either being given a platform or given more and more oil to the engine? These pseudoscience movements, these pseudomedicine movements, fundamentalist ideologies, secular and religious, and then those above around the regression of women’s equality. How are these impacting the realization of some of these? Let’s call them brighter futures.

Glenn: Okay. First, we have indicators to measure future change. We call it a state of the future index. We’ve been doing the State of the Future Index since 2000. So that’s 20-plus years of updating data. So, when you talk about infant mortality or all that stuff, we got to go in there. What was it 20 years ago? What was it ten years ago? What is it now? What’s the projection for 10? What’s the best possible and worst possible so that we can create an index of moving to the good? All right. Now, most of that is moving in the right direction. So, from the state of the future index, data-driven, empirical people are running worldwide, double-checking everything.

We are winning more than we’re losing. But where we’re losing is deadly serious. So, we have no right to be pessimistic. We have no right to go to sleep, either. Now, that’s one part of the answer. The second part of the answer is that a dog taught me about this. One time, my sister’s dog was supposed to go outside to urinate, and it was cold outside.

This is in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where it is cold in the wintertime. The dog wrapped his leg around the table so he couldn’t go out. I said, “Ah, negative future. The dog saw a negative future. Outside is cold. The inside is warm. Outside is a future. No thanks. I’m stopping change.” So if you have people, this goes back to Timothy’s stuff; you pull the carpet out from people’s security, and then they get upset. If you have so much change, people fear where it’s going. Where is it going? And if they’re  unsure where it’s going, they say, “Well, let’s pull back.” It’s normal for a human being or any entity when it is confronted with something that they’re not sure about to turn around and look back; you look over your shoulder. What? Where?

What’s safe? And so, anxiety is the unsettled, unspecific fear of the future. Well, if it’s not a linear projection anymore like it used to be, or it was not a cycle under the agricultural age, nothing new under the sun if it’s not that, but something different. It’s normal to retreat to secure shores, and conservative fundamental religions are the secure blanket. The secure base for people to say, “Aha, I know what this is. I know what the religion is. I know I am safe here. Now, the historians will say I’m oversimplifying. I agree. But if you go back to the Renaissance, before the Italian Renaissance, everything great and glorious was not Italian; it was Greek. The official language was Latin, not Italian, right? Well, eventually, it dawned on people that we’re not Greek. Bingo, when they broke on from that security blanket of Greece, boom, everything possible was possible all of a sudden. Now, I would have thought by now we would have gotten over this hump yet, but we’ve never done it on a global basis. So, it’s hard to know because as one progresses, another may regress. However, they interact and affect each other because the global system is still interconnected.

When people come to grips with the idea that we’re not going to “make America great again,” that we’re not going to go back to security with what the Taliban is doing, and so forth, eventually, we’ll get over that and say, “Okay, now we move forward.” We’ll have a world renaissance. A world renaissance is a very likely thing. We can move our minds forward into a renaissance because we are interconnected with the A.I., the Internet, and everything. But we can only get to that Renaissance once the security is enough that they say, “Okay, I can now move forward. Right now, they’re not. You’ve got this conservative stuff in the United States saying all those people in Latin America. They’re going to change the United States.

Turks are going to change Germany, or all those Paki’s are going to change the U.K. There’s a fear of change because they don’t know what it’s going to be. It’s a logical conclusion, therefore, to resist change because change hits you to that negative future faster. So this goes back to the positive future stuff you’ve talked about before with science fiction. We got to chart out plausible science fiction stories, not these airy-fairy things. That’s why writing the scenario from here to there is important. Have you ever seen any of our scenarios? Maybe not.

I should send you one positive scenario, a detailed, 10-page positive scenario. Billy Rojas may not show up because this guy’s underneath the radar. He did create; you may remember that there’s a thing called the World Future Society. They had a publication called The Futurist. Billy came out with a magazine called The Future, which only had one issue but outsold The Futurist with its first issue.

Jacobsen: There have been some break-offs from some traditions because I know of someone, Douglas Rushkoff, who followed the tradition and looked up to counter-culturalist and writer Robert Anton Wilson. Now he’s writing more about the human, the winning back human, or something like that. Douglas Rushkoff books. This has been recent for the last few years. Team Human is one of his most recent books. 

This is from the book preview on his website. “Though created by humans, our technologies, markets, and institutions often contain an antihuman agenda. Douglas Rushkoff, digital theorist and host of the NPR-One podcast Team Human, reveals the dynamics of this antihuman machinery and invites us to remake these aspects of society in ways that foster our humanity.

In 100 aphoristic statements, his manifesto exposes how forces for human connection have turned into ones of isolation and repression: money, for example, has transformed from a means of exchange to a means of exploitation, and education has become an extension of occupational training. Digital-age technologies have only amplified these trends, presenting the greatest challenges yet to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media undermining our democracy. But all is not lost. It’s time for Team Human to take a stand, regenerate the social bonds that define us, and positively impact this earth together.” However, he’s written two newer books around the survival of the richest.

Glenn: And I hear several futurists saying you shouldn’t tell them about Billy Rojas; he’s nuts, right? Well, you ask about some of the irregulars, unknowns, etc. He’s one.

Jacobsen: What are other controversial areas that shouldn’t be should be discussed?

Glenn: Well, organized crime is one for sure. I need help to think of a single major futurist who talks about organized crime and how to address it globally. You have Interpol and the FBI, and the rest are doing that. But as far as the future is concerned, nobody else.

Jacobsen: What do you think the future religions will be? 

Glenn: One of these days, I will have to scratch my head and figure it out. I keep getting asked that. It was one of the first things I was asked about in the early 70s. I still don’t have a good answer because part of me wants to say, “You don’t need it.” On the other hand, the evidence is clear. Humans need some security. How the universe works is a basic hunt for security. Now, as I see it, the growth area of much of Europe and North America is spiritually oriented without necessarily the heavy metaphysics or metaphors of metaphysical bureaucracy. It’s much metaphysics, but the bureaucracy with it. Another part is that, for example, if you take Korea, you check it out.

There are more people in Korea without religion than with it. They’re the first country to go over the 50% mark, at least according to the sociological survey stuff. Christianity is only 50%, 40%. In other words, if you do Korea, you get over 50% saying no religion. But in the U.K., you still got, well, for example, would-be druids in England. You have the New Age community in Scotland, a New Age headquarters for many people. So we’ve got a lot of New Age quasi-religion, quasi-spiritual stuff going on in England as well. That’s a growing thing as well. A fourth would be the A.I. One can make a plausible argument and scenario for the evolution of worshiping A.I. in the future. 

Jacobsen: But are you envisioning a Futurama context where they’re doing human stuff with human minds and bodies?

Glenn: Well, no, not necessarily.  It’s everywhere when you think of many views of God. Well, if A.I. evolves into our infrastructure, then it’s everywhere. More advanced and more advanced moves into super. Would one division of super decide to be a god? 

Jacobsen: This would be Ray Kurzweil’s idea. When asked if God exists, he would say, “Not yet.” You could even extend that joke and say, “Well, this God, since it’s on a server but also the Internet, it’s everywhere and nowhere.”

Glenn: That’s right. 

Jacobsen: That’s fitting some classical theological concepts.

Glenn: But the idea, to me, was the evolution of social organization. First, it was religion that pulled people together. Then nation-states did, but religion is still there. So it did. So it’s not that A replaced B. It’s that B was built on top of A. Corporations are the new organizational structure to a large degree here, but you still have government and religion. And then, eventually, you get the individual. Eventually, each one is more flexible. Religion, we did a thousand-year scenario some years ago in 1999. And so I had to go back a thousand years to see what’s changed, what’s not changed, and religion hadn’t changed worth a damn. No pun intended there, but everything else changed.

Religion was a constant, so it could be more flexible. Nation-states changed, but they’re still geographically bound. Corporations are no longer bound by geography. They’re even more flexible. The individual can change loyalty to corporations from one credit card to the next. The future of religion will very well be individual self-actualization. You’re evolving yourself, and you don’t have to run around and find out where God is.

Jacobsen: This is the foundation there. One step back, I did check it up. The Czech Republic has 78.4% irreligious and atheists in the population—over 70%. So, in 2020, Estonia’s 50.2%, Hong Kong’s 50.4%, and China’s 51.8%. So that’s the 2020 numbers. Korea is in the top few but not the top. 

Glenn: Well, who’s the top?

Jacobsen: Czech Republic, wow. And it’s from Pew from 2020. So, all these numbers do not give trends, but up there with them are North Korea and China.

Glenn: Right, I believe Christopher Hitchens, but seeing North Korea and China is unfair because that’s where the government says. I’m talking about where you don’t have the government say.

Jacobsen: Yes, the top four are the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, and South Korea.

Glenn: Yes.

Jacobsen: For non-dictatorship, it would be the Czech Republic. Some years ago, it would be Hong Kong, South Korea, North Korea, and China. And even Prague, although that was always an irregular place.

Glenn: Yes, it looks like Europe and some parts of Asia. So, that’s another trend in future religion that you can also look at.

Jacobsen: Yes, I know there’s some. I’ve done a lot. I’ve interviewed a lot of non-religious people all over the world and people leaving religion, so the ex-Muslim community or the ex-Jehovah’s Witness community, others, particularly in North America, some in Europe. They have developed things called the Oasis Network and the Sunday Assembly. These perform the same functions, but they won’t have a holy figure or a holy text. They’ll talk about things like, “We’ll do a lecture on some science topic once a month or once a Sunday,” Sunday Assembly, or have a community once a week that they don’t believe in supernaturalism. They don’t care for God. They don’t care for the Bible or any other religious text, or any holy figure. They have a community and are organized and semi-structured.

Glenn: That’s nice, yes.

Jacobsen: So, but those are new. And I’ve interviewed some of them, but it’s evolving. But there are also conflicts within religion. Knowing the United Church of Canada, Reverend Greta Vosper went through several years of attempts to defrock her because she came out as an atheist as a minister within the United Church of Canada. She’s still around. She lost many congregation members at one point, but she’s doing well. She’s written a book or two.

So, diversification happens in ways you would only sometimes expect. Still, if you were to take a multidimensional bell curve or set of bell curves, these things would show up at the tail end of these developments.

Glenn: This goes back to my rule of thumb: Whatever you look at becomes more complex than you think, the future of religion will be more complex than we think.

Jacobsen: Right, yes. Humanists and ethical culturalists have roles. They’re very creative activists from the Satanic Temple, the non-theist Satanists. These people are quite funny. They don’t believe in Satan; it’s a metaphor, but they do some funny activism. So there are also areas around that. I remember interviewing the guy, not the guy who founded Discordianism, but the guy who founded the Church of the SubGenius. “Reverend Ivan Stang,” he had that around for 30 years. It was part of this parody religion phenomenon; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was part of that as well. The Invisible Pink Unicorn was also part of that. 

He quit after 30 years. I don’t know if it’s still around, but he grew out of that same phenomenon of your Learys and a parody take on much religion. But yes, it’s in the same vein as Paul Krassner or something like that. So yes, the future of religion is:  I’m seeing secular variants fulfilling what you know before of a similar need. 

Glenn: So give me a few minutes of your alternative futures in 10 years.

Jacobsen: Mine in 10 years? 

Glenn: You’re taking all this stuff in. Where are you going? What’s next?

Jacobsen: Okay, so I’ll take it this way. Everything you can take into account can be taken statistically. So there’s a functionally infinite, not an infinite, array of possible propositions. Those propositions can be brought together into a worldview. They can be actualized in person and into relations of people for communities. Then those communities…

Glenn: Give me the highest plausibility.

Jacobsen: Highest plausibility?

Glenn: Highest three plausibilities.

Jacobsen: Technology-wise, there’s going to be much integration.

Glenn: No, you. You as a person. You.

Jacobsen: Me as a person?

Glenn: Yes. Where are you going? You’re interviewing very interesting people, yourself. What are you going to do with the interviews?

Jacobsen: Well, I’ll take myself as a librarian of people. Quietly collecting voices from all different…

Glenn: What was it? Fahrenheit 451 or whatever the hell it was? That one. That was a library of people.

Jacobsen: There you go. So it’s… There is a library somewhere or some community somewhere. People can volunteer for an hour a week, potentially elders in the community. People go to the library, and an elder from a community, someone can come down and sit with them. They’ll tell their life story. Yes. So, for myself, certainly around publishing and journalism. However, the future of publishing and journalism is much different. It’s the same with writing. So, even if we take the phenomenon of books, electronic books, e-books have changed quite a bit. With that change, we still desire a book, a collection of printed sections, to deliver organized thought. So that’s still an efficient way to do it. There may be more efficient ways to do it in the future when you want to get a conflict subject matter. I like doing conversations and interviews because I like to have a space, whether I’m interviewing a fundamentalist Christian or a futurist or whoever else, for you to be authentic and honest; critical questions will be asked, but I’m not going censor you, at least on my platform.

On other platforms where I write for them, certainly within their mandate, they have a right and often don’t, but sometimes, they will decide ‘not to platform certain people,’ their words, not mine. So it depends. Journalism and writing are a way for me. The ways to monetize that can be difficult. So, for a lot of the time I’ve been doing this, I’d help everyone else. I’d have to pay my bills. You have to eat. So you have to do regular work. At one point, I worked in four restaurants seven days a week and then did janitorial at two during a night shift. I worked at an Olympic-level horse farm run by a former Olympian show jumper for Canada for about 27 months. 

In the morning, I did my writing and horse farm shift with gardening or mucking stalls, filling water buckets, feeding hay, doing night checks, driving the tractor or whatever else. Then, in the evenings, I’d also be doing my writing. I’m in a period now where I have more time, so I’m getting as much as possible. I’m trying to pick up old projects, so I’m emailing you or others again for further interviews. It’s all part of that. I’ve got multiple projects on the go right now. I’m trying to get as many political party leaders as possible to interview.

Yesterday, I interviewed the leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada, the Marijuana Party of Canada. Interviews are going to be right after this. I have a few more upcoming, but what we call journalism in the sense of organized conversation in a casual format for easy delivery and uptake is an efficient way to do it. That’s how we evolved. But it takes about ten years to get decent at it.

And that’s where things start to pick up, and that’s what I’ve noticed, at least in my career. I’m good. That doesn’t answer your question, but it’s an answer.

Glenn: That’s good. So I’ll enjoy watching your evolution then.

Jacobsen: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Glenn: Yes.

Jacobsen: Jerome, so thank you for the interview. I appreciate your time, especially going for an extended one.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.