Claire Marshall has a love for stories, technology and social good. An award-winning creative her work melds story-telling, futures thinking and experience design to hack the way our brains think about the future, so that we can take action on climate change.
Claire is an experiential futurist. Her award-winning Museum of Futures project was created with the City of Sydney. The Future of Work exhibition in 2019 explored our different work futures under climate change. Pandemic Pivots exhibition of 2020 explored how Sydney might pivot for the better due to the pandemic. Her other work includes an audio tour of the future for the World Wildlife Fund and the Human Robot Friendship Ball for the Vivid festival.
Interviewed by: Amanda Reeves
More about Claire
LinkedIn: Claire Marshall
Transcript
Amanda Reeves: Hello and welcome to FuturePod. I'm Amanda Reeves. FuturePod gathers voices from the international field of futures and foresight. Through a series of interviews, the founders of the field and emerging leaders share their stories, tools, and experiences. Please visit futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series.
Today our guest is Claire Marshall. Claire has a love for stories, technology, and social good. An award-winning creative, her work melds storytelling, futures thinking, and experience design to hack the way our brains think about the future so that we can take action on climate change.
Claire is an experiential futurist. Her award-winning Museum of Futures project was created with the City of Sydney. The Future of Work exhibition in 2019 explored our different work futures on the climate change. The Pandemic Pivots exhibition of 2020 explored how Sydney might pivot for the better due to the pandemic.
Welcome to FuturePod, Claire.
Claire Marshall: Hi Amanda, how are you?
Amanda Reeves: I'm living the dream Claire, great to have you with us.
Claire Marshall: Great to be here.
Amanda Reeves: To get us started, can you tell me the Claire Marshall story?
[00:01:23] Claire Marshall: Well, firstly, I want to apologize because I was listening to you read that and I just realized that, if I was going to describe myself, I might say "academic, activist, artist, alliterator", because realized I've got like Pandemic Pivots and like all of these terrible things to say, so, apologies for that. I will remember in the future when I name something that people are going to have to say it.
It's a really interesting question, and I love that you framed it in, what is the story of Claire? Because, it's funny, I've just been writing lectures for a unit that I'm designing.
And in it, I say that we are just a collection of stories. We are the stories that our parents have told us about how the world works. We are the stories of the places that we're in, we are the stories that have come to us through the media or through other people that we know and through the experiences that we've had.
I think we can use the word story to mean something small or in a book, but really if we think about what a story is, it's just the ability to share an experience that somebody else has had. Like there was this huge evolutionary advantage to us being able to love and understand stories because we can learn from experiences that other people have had without having to go through them.
I guess now that we're talking about stories, I should probably share with you some stories.
Amanda Reeves: Yes please!
[00:02:46] Claire Marshall: When I was a kid, maybe this is quite revealing of me, I think I was in like year one, so I would have been five turning six.
A whole group of my friends, we used to talk incessantly about Fairyland. And we would pretend that at night we would go to sleep and we'd go to Fairyland, but I was the person who would draw maps, I would come to school, with like a map, this is a map of Fairyland that I share with friends. There's something you can tell that I was always interested in taking these imaginative things and pulling them into something that's more concrete that we can play with and feel.
I've always been interested in doing that, I was always interested in telling stories through physical ways. I was a ballerina. I was a dancer for a very long time before my career was ended by an injury. I then got into TV and I directed a whole bunch of TV, especially kids TV, which was perhaps one of the most fun jobs that someone can have in this world. And when I was directing TV, it was a really interesting period because it was this time when My Space, oh my God.
Suddenly people were able to connect with each other. I worked on this one TV show called Lochie Leonard. I'm not sure if anyone is of the age where they would remember Tim Winton's Lochie Leonard. I was a really young director, so they gave me little side bits to direct, but what I got to direct was this fun stuff where we got to speak to the audience.
A sheep had gone missing in the series and I directed this, it was called MSI Missing Sheep Investigation, done like CSI with lots of people taking sunglasses off and stuff like that.
And the show was so interactive to the point where we would shoot scenes with a green screen plate in a frame, and then kids would send their photo in and we'd put them on the wall of the house. And I think this is just such a lovely way of suddenly instead of just broadcasting out to people, you were bringing them in.
That got me really interested in how we engage with stories, and how stories give us agency in who we are.
So, after winning one of the biggest awards in TV development at Cannes -
Amanda Reeves: Which award?
[00:05:04] Claire Marshall: It's called the MIPFormats International Prize. It was meant to be the pinnacle of my career in TV development, but then everything crashed and burned, and BBC came out with a show that was very similar to ours and we lost our development deal with Warner Brothers.
I turned away from working in TV development to looking at how stories and how technology shape how we see ourselves. And I started running these really fun experimental workshops for UTS, and we did stuff in like blockchain for social good and artificial intelligence and the future of journalism.
And this is back in 2016, so quite a while ago. And it was during this work that I was pregnant with my first child now five, and I think futures hit me when he was born. Maybe not even when he was born. I think probably for a lot of women, the moment that your life changes, so considerably is in a bathroom, a little stick going oh my God. For me it definitely did, because I think like a lot of people, the future had just been this abstract thing that I'd never really thought about and suddenly. It was everything that I thought about and the life of this little person that I hadn't even met yet seemed more important to me than anything.
My entrance into futures is having a child and suddenly climate change didn't feel so abstract anymore.
Amanda Reeves: I imagine that it takes that idea of being a good ancestor or even the concept of being an ancestor. This is now no longer, just an abstract idea of what sort of world do we leave for our children. There is this little person that I care very much about and what am I doing to protect them?
[00:06:49] Claire Marshall: Yeah. And just to give you another kind of story, like I have this moment that I can remember so clearly in my life of reading the IPCC report while breastfeeding my tiny baby and just going, doing the math in my head and going, oh my God, he's going to be my age in 2050. And the thing that hit me was will he have children?
Yeah. Would you want to bring a child into this world in 2050? And I think that was a pivotal moment, and now I think that's basically all I do is just try to get people to think about that question. Not in such a dramatic way.
Amanda Reeves: It's a good question to be thinking about.
Claire Marshall: I do tend to talk in stories a lot. I think they're my theory of change.
Look, I think everyone has a different theory of change of how they think the world works. And I think it works through stories.
Amanda Reeves: I like that. I feel like there's an amazing question to ask about that. And I can't, I don't know what it is. I want to hear more about it though.
[00:07:46] Claire Marshall: I can elaborate a bit. where do I start? So humans are hard wired for stories. Our brains are just designed to store them, designed to enjoy them designed to like them. And it's really interesting because, in stories, it allows us to experience something through somebody else's experience.
We don't actually have that experience. But in a way we do, because this is the wild thing about stories is that, if you're listening to someone's story, your brain actually starts to mirror their brain, the pattern of neurons firing in your brain starts to mirror there. So in a way you do.
I think we've all had that experience of being lost in a good book. The academic term is called narrative transportation. The reason that we can do this is because our human brains are so cool that we have this thing called dual ipsaity, which is this ability to be completely lost in this world, to have complete empathy for the characters in this, but also know that we're totally safe.
These stories that we're ingesting and inhaling and everything all the time, they fundamentally influence how we see the world. So if we've grown up in a family where we're taught to be fearful of other people, that is how we're going to see the world.
And that works, both on a small level, like in a little family, but then on a kind of a bigger level, what are the stories that your peers are telling? I sometimes watch TikTok and I'm like, oh, wow. Okay. So this is the stories that this generation or that these group of people are starting to tell.
It's really interesting. And then you can think about it on even a bigger level. What is the dominant cultural paradigm, like how we see nature as a Western white person is quite different from First Nations and Indigenous knowledges, in fact, all over the world, how they see nature. There's something really interesting in examining the stories that we have in our head.
My greatest love is unpicking the stories that we're having and saying, not even is it true, but is it useful?
Amanda Reeves: How are those stories serving us?
[00:10:00] Claire Marshall: How are those stories serving us? I've been reading Braiding Sweetgrass again. I love that book so much. She writes so beautifully and tells these stories of nature. So beautiful. I've actually just read the Overstory as well. They do it the same. There's stories of trees, you stories of plants working together, I find it so intriguing, but she asks in Braiding Sweetgrass,
It's great that we say we love nature, but have we thought about how nature loves us? And that's a really interesting story, isn't it?
Amanda Reeves: It’s about being in relationship with, rather than that very Western approach that nature is an object that must be tamed.
[00:10:42] Claire Marshall: Yeah. And that's a story. That's a story that capitalism requires us to believe in because in order to exploit something, you must first make it a thing.
It cannot be you, it cannot be part of you. You can not be dependent on it. You have to make it a thing that is over there, that you can own, and you can do things to.
And I think that is one of the most damaging narrative of our time, of all time.
Amanda Reeves: Can you tell us a bit about your practice? What are some of the methods that you use?
[00:11:20] Claire Marshall: The funny thing about how I came to futures was, I was just doing cool, fun stuff. I'd met Reece Proudfoot from WWF. He wanted something designed that would help hackathon participants get an understanding of some of the big mega trends and big issues in the sustainability space, but also inspire them. And we talked about lots of different ideas that were pretty unusual.
And I think one thing about me is that I just, I love playing with form. Oh, why do something the way it's always been done, let's go do something different. And so I did this audio tour of the future around the area where the hackathon participants would be. One was a utopian future, one was a dystopian future, but you didn't know. And in fact, I was a bit naughty and I tricked people. So people often thought they were going on the utopian that ended dystopian or the dystopian that ended utopian. And so I designed that and I didn't really realize that what I was doing was experiential futures.
But it was, and I've got a funny story about that because, I was waiting back at the stop point, which was actually also the end point. And there were these women who were doing the tour who were crying and I'm like, oh my God, what have I done? And I race up to them and "I'm so sorry, you know, are you guys okay?" and the woman turns to me, I'll never forget this. And she said, "It's so amazing to hear about a beautiful future." And that really hit me, that we spend so much time and we inhale so many stories about robots are taking our jobs and climate change and recessions, and like all of this stuff that we spend so little time thinking about what it could be like, what would be amazing, what would be a beautiful world to live in.
That was a great project, and from that I started teaching at UTS in this unit on experiential futures. And when I came into this unit, I was teaching this going, oh my God, this is amazing. Like, how is this a thing?
Amanda Reeves: And it's a thing I get to do
[00:13:32] Claire Marshall: And it was great. Cause I also got to tell people like, oh, I do experiential futures. Like before I just been making like weird bits of content and weird experiences that happen to be based around the future, Human Robot Friendship Ball as well. I never really thought that was an experiential future, that was just a critique of that narrative of robots taking our jobs. And I was like, what if they didn't take our jobs? What if we decided that we wanted to work with them and be friends and like dance and play together and do all of these things. So experiential futures is where I found myself.
And then obviously through teaching at a university, I discovered there's this huge- well, not huge because it's still pretty new, but there is this big community of experiential futures. I found the work of Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan and this whole big community of people doing experiential futures and it was all very exciting and amazing. And at the same time, I got this call from the City of Sydney sustainability team saying, "Hey Claire, we're doing this big program to try and get buildings in the city to be more sustainable and to get on board, this big program that we're going to launch and we need something cool. You do cool things. What are we going to do that's cool?" It was called the Better Buildings Cup and it was based on, this big national program called City Switch. And they're like, "So what are you going to do?" And I was like, "You know what, like maybe we could have a Museum of Futures.
We could have these objects on display in the lobbies and they could be future objects and they could tell these different stories. They're like, yeah, great. Here you go. Here's the money, let's do it.
So that was my first real experiential futures work, again, not really knowing what experiential futures were. Now I'm going to get into a little bit of my methodology here, because I want to talk about how it's changed with that. So in that first one, the city of Sydney had these themes, transport, water, carbon offsetting, green power, regenerative buildings or living buildings. And I went and scanned and looked at what are all the trends in these areas?
What are some weak signals? And I came up with these narratives, both if we took action on climate change and if we didn't take action on climate change, so we had this utopia, dystopia binary again. We wanted to put quite a lot of information in there and interesting things so we could change the narrative. I really wanted to make sure that we also took narratives that people were really comfortable with and tied them to other things. So like, bridging narratives, I'll give you an example- for transport, one of the object was a communal autonomous vehicle.
So everybody knows about autonomous vehicles. Everybody's talking about them. But individual autonomous vehicles that is not going to solve the climate crisis. So I took that autonomous vehicles and then wrapped it in with what if it was a communal autonomous vehicle and how fun would that be?
That you would meet these people every day, you chat, you could have a coffee machine, it could be library. And so it was trying to really, shift your perspective on communal autonomous vehicles. There will always unexpected consequences that were kind of funny, maybe not funny, maybe irreverent is the right phrase.
And I love that idea of irreverence being powerful because I think that, It's only when you can play with things that you can discuss them. And so each one of them had an interesting kind of something. So the cabbie one was that people started actually having different relationships with the people that they they rode on the cabbies with.
Other ones were, because of the air pollution, Australia is no longer in the Olympics. Their last Olympics gold that they won was for rhythmic gymnastics, or we had one- oh my God, this is so funny.
So I'd written about a living building where the inside of the building, there was lots of planting and lots of vegetables, and instead of having your morning meeting in the boardroom, you'd go and have it in the garden. And it would be called a low hanging fruit meeting because you would cut the low-hanging fruit while you also were like, okay what can we get done today?
So we had these objects and we had these narratives and people really enjoy it and we get a really good response of it. But I started to think what if the output didn't matter as much as the input. So the input into the futures story was from me and from the City of Sydney.
And we were just giving these new narratives to people. But what if we based the narratives on what they had to say? My next exhibition for the Museum of Futures ended up being Pandemic Pivots. And what we did with Pandemic Pivots was we went out to these different communities from artists with a disability to First Nations people in from NCIE, which is the National Centre for Indigenous Excellence.
Where else did we go? Rainbow Families, so LGBTQ family. And we went and asked them and we said what does a thriving future look like for you? What would you like to see in the future? And then we worked with an artist that came from that community. The artists then came up with these artifacts, these sculptures that represented this story, the future that the community wanted.
And then we also like I'm talking about Mel Rumble, my creator and co-curator, on this one and myself with the artists would come up with a narrative that would tell the story of the artifact the artists created through the narrative of what all of the people in that community said.
Now that was a great project. And I think it's really interesting to see what kind of futures people imagine, and they're not crazy. They're not out there. They're not selfish. I think when you go through the exhibition and you go look at them all as a group you really see that people care about each other and they care about nature.
That exhibition was going to be at New South Wales Parliament House last October but COVID ah, COVID. And so it will be there in January 2023. And the reason for that choice is really a practical one, because as much as I believe experiential futures are really important from a narrative standpoint and changes people thinking, I also want action.
So part of this was being able to take politicians, elected representatives through the gallery and say, you want to know what kind of future people want? Here. We asked them and we made objects for you. So tell me is whatever policy you're debating, whatever you were planning, does it make this future? Because this is what people want.
I've now got a methodology for Museum of Futures where we get together, we talk about the futures that we want and what we don't want. What we think is probable. I'm almost using Testa's ethnographic futures, and then just having fun and playing with it, and at the end bringing in artists and storytellers to turn that into something experiential.
We've really got two ways of processing information, analytically and experientially. So when we experience something, we will prioritize that knowledge, that lived experience that we've had over any analytics. A story beats facts all the time.
Jason Hickel in his book Less Is More which talks about de-growth. He has a whole section, which is super interesting on how all of these climate change facts have almost numbed us. We're just like, oh, that's climate change, that's over there. I think one of the powers of experiential futures is bringing it in here. So it's all of the objects in the Museum of Futures are things that you can connect with on a personal level. They hit your heart, not your head.
Amanda Reeves: I think that's beautiful.
Claire Marshall: We're all over the place
Amanda Reeves: It's just the day. It's alright. It's Editing Amanda's problem, she'll deal with it.
Claire Marshall: That's interesting that you say that's Editing Amanda's problem. That's a really great -
Amanda Reeves: I've separated her out.
[00:21:47] Claire Marshall: You've separated her out, but also that's future Amanda. And I think this is a really interesting thing as well, while we're talking about experiential futures and all of this is that we lack empathy with our future selves.
And there's been some really fascinating studies that have really showed that when we think about ourselves, our our medial prefrontal cortex of our brain lights up. When we think about a stranger, it doesn't. This is the area where we think about ourself, our understanding of self.
And when people think into the future at a certain point, I think it's about five to 10 years. I'm not sure. The activity stops. So when you get to future self, I would say that even it's like even, Editing Amanda, which might even be tomorrow.
Amanda Reeves: She's not five to 10 years in the future. Don't worry. We'll get this out.
Claire Marshall: So when we so studies have shown that when we think about us, those in the future, this activity in our medial prefrontal cortex just disappears at a certain point. And so what we can really draw from this is that when we're thinking about ourselves in the future, we're not thinking about it from a position of self, of empathy with ourselves.
We're thinking about our future self as a stranger. Now just think about the implications of that. That's really, that is why we can engage in temporal discounting. It's why we can say we will prioritize our needs in the present over really big consequences that are going to happen to those future people.
And I think that's one thing where experiential futures can really help. And I think, we also just need to spend more time getting empathy with our future selves.
So after having learned all of this stuff with Museum of Futures I had this amazing meeting. It was just after the bushfires and it was with Reece Proudfoot who I'd already worked with at WWF and Damon Gameau and Anna Kaplan who did 2040, which I hope everybody in this community has watched that film. So we were in this meeting and Reece was saying he was hearing these rumblings of this narrative shift of going, oh well, so much of the land is burnt. We should just clear it. That's the safest thing to do. And he's like, what are we going to do? How are we going to counter this narrative? How do we get people to think of this as regeneration? Not as, building back better, knock it down.
And we were all throwing ideas around, do we focus on solutions? Do we try to highlight the different technologies and different areas? And because I had just been in, I just started doing my PhD. It's all on experiential futures and storytelling.
I was like, I just think you need to do another film guys. Like what if this film was in between now and 2040? What if it was set in 2030? And what if it was just half a film or part of a film? And the idea was that the people in the audience they were going to make it. They were going to make the rest of the film, which was the journey of how we got there
In the end, this sort of idea with lots of other, massaging and revising became this short film Regenerating Australia, which is like 2040, but is a 17 minute news report from 2030, that same exact format as Museum of Futures, which- it's basically a backcast guys.
That's all we're doing. It's just a backcast. But a beautiful backcast of starting from this point of what does a regenerative future look like? What does a regenerative 2030 look like? How do we get that? So part of my work in this is that I got the task of designing what's the bit that people do to make this happen.
I shouldn't say that there's a lot of people involved in it, but what I worked on with Alice Howard-Vyse is a community workshop that people do in the two hours following the film where they start thinking about what is a regenerative future in their place look like, and how can they take steps to get there? So it's the bit that I wanted to do in Museum of Futures, of bringing people together and now I'm getting to do it on this big scale around Australia. Of course, WWF and Regen Studios are also offering people heaps of support in all different ways from individual action suggestions to WWF is running bootcamps and they've got funding available.
There's a whole strategy of ways people can make these futures practical, but really I think that's the interesting and exciting bit for me is just getting people to spend time together thinking about the future. How often do we get to do that?
One more project that I'm working on, which I think is maybe the next iteration of this is called the Regen Ring. It was inspired by the iron ring that Canadian engineers receive at the end of their studies.
The story of this iron ring is really interesting.
So it was almost a hundred, I think it was over a hundred years ago, they were building a bridge in Quebec across this big river between these two mountains. And there were engineers working on it, who kept questioning whether this was going to be safe, they were doing their calculations and they kept saying, I don't know if this is safe and their bosses kept dismissing them.
And lo and behold, the bridge collapses and 85 people die- I think it's 85. There's a lot of soul searching that goes on, but they keep building the bridge. Engineers are still saying, come on guys. Something is not quite right here. The bridge collapses again.
Amanda Reeves: A second time?
Claire Marshall: Second time. And this time it becomes an industry wide question. Why are engineers not being listened to, why is this happening? And so they brought in Rudyard Kipling-
Amanda Reeves: Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling?
Claire Marshall: Who had written this already, this great poem about being an engineer. And he wrote these words which are the Calling of the Engineer. And they phrase it as an obligation, not as an oath. Your obligation as an engineer, to the people who will use your work. When they do this ceremony where the engineers all stand there and recite the Calling of the Engineer, they get given an iron ring that they wear on the pinky finger of their dominant hand. Now the pinky finger of our dominant hand has always been tied to identity.
And the idea is that whenever they sign a contract, that ring will hit the table and remind them of their obligation to the people who will use their work. And I think this is super powerful. And I think that in the world where we are today, we need a ring that reminds us of the future generations that are going to come and our obligation to do right by them.
And so that's the latest thing that I'm working on, which it's a ritual, I guess.
Amanda Reeves: It's got ritual. It's got metaphor, it's that physical reminder. It's almost like a memento Mori. It's the, this is a thing that is now with you that anchors you to purpose.
Claire Marshall: So my PhD is really on how can experiential futures help us to challenge dominant narratives about the future and empower us to imagine and act on regenerative futures. So I really, that's what all of my projects are building towards and really, I put in there counter dominant narratives, but really I'm just countering one dominant narrative and that's capitalism.
Amanda Reeves: And that brings us nicely to question three. Claire, what emerging futures are capturing your attention?
[00:29:25] Claire Marshall: Yeah, I love this question. What an amazing question. What I'm seeing change and I'm feeling really heartened by it. There's a show. I'm not sure anyone watches it called Billions. It's about billionaires and New York and the market just being their play thing as they just try to get more money and more power and everything.
And I've watched it maybe out of like morbid fascination. I have quite a lot to say on the concept of a billionaire and why that should not exist. But what I've seen recently in the last series is this turn of narrative to be a critique of billionaires, to be a critique of capitalism. And I'm like, that's amazing.
I'm also starting to see narratives shift around trauma and the impacts of trauma. I'm starting to see narratives shift in a lot of places. And I think the thing is it's really hard to see transformation. And I think it's hard to see transformation because it's hard to realize that we change and the beliefs that we had 10 years ago, we'd be embarrassed by them now. I've been married by a lot of outfits. I wore 10 years ago as well. We change and we transform, and sometimes we don't want to be reminded about how racist or misogynistic or anything that we were in the past. So sometime we don't tend to look at that transformation that much.
And I think the other thing about transformation that's interesting is when we think about how are we going to transform, and this notion of empowerment is that through the stories that we have heard, we are very exposed to the hero narrative.
Look, I love the hero's journey.
I studied it intensively while I was working in TV. And and if anyone doesn't know the TV industry, I think it was in the early eighties, a writer read Joseph Campbell's read the hero's journey. He condensed it into a two pager and sent it around to all the script. It went nuts through Hollywood, viral in 98 with a fax machine, and studios across Hollywood, which let's be honest, really do control narratives across the world, instituted this story structure.
Now there's nothing inherently wrong with the hero's journey, but that's not the only way to tell a story. There are collaborative heroes, there are collective journeys. There's the heroine's journey, which is to do about finding balance between things.
We're living in an age where we're really bombarded artificially with this hero narrative and in the hero narrative it's important to note that change comes from a great leader and whether that great leader is a billionaire in power or someone who's come, we love the comes from nothing story and becomes a great leader.
The problem is that it's a leader. Nature, change doesn't work like that. Like in autumn, there's not one autumn leaf that suddenly goes "Everybody! It is autumn! I have decided!" Like that doesn't, nature doesn't work like that because it's context in place and condition specific. So sometimes I think we don't see change that's happening cause we don't see a great leader, but you can see change happening in your community and in your area. Know that it is happening in millions of other communities and areas.
And soon, at a certain point we're going to meet up and then it's going to be autumn and then changes upon us. And I think that is how we need to think about change is that we don't need to impact everybody, we just need to impact where we are in our communities. So I'm really seeing a change in narrative, and people questioning the core mentality of that capitalist narrative.
Now, if we want to go into well, what is that? I have this argument a lot when I start talking about capitalism, because people get really defensive. It's like, when you talk about economics, I just find people get really defensive.
I think it's because it's so wrapped up in identity and self and how we believe the world works. But when I say questioning the capitalist narrative, that's really that accumulation and growth is the goal. So in capitalism, in order for capitalism to thrive, you have to keep growing. The company has to keep growing. You're not focused on the use value or of any object you're focused on the exchange value. How much can you exchange this for so that you can keep growing?
An example that I use sometimes with my students is, your cafe down the road, while they engage in elements of capitalism, they're not necessarily capitalists. Because they're not growing, they're just a cafe. Sure they might earn a little bit of money over the years, inflation, or maybe they get better or whatever, but, they're not growing, they're not buying other companies.
They're not increasing demand by huge amounts. They're not buying way more apples, because they don't need to grow. They're perfect, exactly the size that they are. And so I think what I'm seeing now, is people starting to go, yeah. Like, why do we need bigger houses? Why do we need bigger incomes?
In fact, in my life, I've just really gone. I don't want to work a full week because I want to be in my garden. I want to go walk in a forest. I want to be with my kids and watch them grow up. I want to go and volunteer in my community. Like why would I want to spend all of my time earning money?
And that has consequences. I think this capitalist narrative has taught us the value of artificial scarcity. And it's got into our brains where we think of everything as being scarce, especially time. We are always worried about losing time. I don't have much time, we're always busy and yeah, look, we don't have endless amounts of time because we're all going to die at a certain point, but we don't know where that is, but our attitude of coming to it, like it's something scarce, I think does something really weird in our brains.
I'm trying to use that old adage of the way you spend your days is the way you spend your life, so do what you want to do. And don't get sucked into that scarcity. There is enough time. And in fact, I'm not sure whether I see this, but I'm learning this so much now, which is, if you want to hurry up on taking climate action, you've got to slow down because this is not a problem that can be solved with a quick solution.
This is a problem that comes from being able to listen and understand and know a system, and then try many different interventions and experiments to see what works. And if you are going a mile a minute, like flood water, running across the thing, you're just going to miss it. You need to slow down. So you can soak into that and actually listen to what's happening in that system.
Yeah, that's what I want to see. I want to see people slowing down. Maybe they are. I think there's also something, there's another story here. I live up in the Northern Rivers and we just had two crazy floods and my area was just we were fine. Our house was fine.
We were an island because we're on top of a hill. But my community was shattered and we didn't have any internet. We didn't have any communication. It was really quite crazy. And after, the floodwaters receded, so many people just gave up everything and went and volunteered, me as well.
I phoned up the Uni and said I'm not working for the next week or so, my community needs me more than you guys, so sorry. And they're like, cool. Yeah, fine. Of course. And there was a lot of people who did that and, I don't know, I got this real sense of this is what life should be like, where we're helping people where, we're connected to each other, and I was telling Amanda before all day, I've been editing this interview with Tyson Yunkaporta which has been fun.
In the interview, he made the point that in his experience, some people in a disaster zone, they actually miss the disaster, when everything has moved on, because they miss that connection to each other and to place, because you are connected to place you suddenly are aware of where all the hills are, where the drains are.
I don't think we're particularly happy in this capitalist narrative of time is scarce and time is money and all of these things.
Amanda Reeves: Well, crisis is one of those great disruptors. It forces us to pay attention to our assumptions, it forces us to pay attention to what we take for granted. And it becomes a very unifying experience around purpose. It's a real clarifying experience of what matters. It matters that we're safe, that we have a home that we have food and that if we have problems with any of these things, we have people who will help us.
[00:38:28] Claire Marshall: That's exactly right. And I think that's a, that's another key to remember is that, a lone tree has less chance of surviving some natural disaster than trees in a forest.
We need each other. That's where we belong. We belong on place and with people, and I think we can, you know, metaverses and all of this stuff. Yeah, sure. Okay. But that's not what is going to get us out of, my children having children, it's going to be us remembering that we are nature. We are animals on a blue marble floating in space, and that most of this stuff doesn't matter. What matters is each other and what matters is where we are
Amanda Reeves: Claire, I know you get this question, we all do. When you meet someone new, how is it that you explain what it is that you do when they're not someone who necessarily understands what it is that you do?
[00:39:30] Claire Marshall: It's such a great question because I just want to hear everybody else's answer. I sometimes call myself an experiential futurist because I think that's really what I do, that's really my focus rather than doing big trend analysis or horizon scans or anything, this is really my niche.
And so it's easy because I say, oh, I just help people feel the future. And then they're like, what does that mean? And then I'm like, oh no, nuts, now I've got to explain it all. The other way I explain it is quite simply, which is the future that we imagine, the story that we have about the future in our minds influences the decisions that we make and the decisions that we make influence the future that will eventuate.
So we need to be quite conscious of what is the story of the future that we have in our mind. Now, I say the story of the future, because I think the future is a story. The future doesn't exist. It can never exist. It's always in front of us, but it is our perception, expectation, prediction, all of those stories that we've got swirling around, that determine what we think will happen.
And we don't tend to examine that very much. And I think a lot of the futures community, which you're on the business side of this, I think they could make a lot of money out of telling people all these different narratives. But I say to people if the future that you imagine shapes your decisions and your decisions shape what will happen, obviously it's a complex system, but your role in influencing what will happen, shouldn't you really know what kind of future you want or what is the preferred future.
And I think when people start thinking about that, they start to realize that they haven't really thought that deeply about it. And then, it can be really lovely. I just did a job for the Opera House.
I wrote them four different futures. I write lots of feature stories really. And it's comforting to me because even though I know that the reality is not going to unfold in the way that I imagine in my future story, I see elements of my feature story in places and it gives me hope and it makes me go, maybe it's possible. Maybe we won't get all the way there, but it's possible. And I guess for me having two little boys, that's really important. I have to manage my hope and my despair, because I think climate despair and eco anxiety are huge issues. And if you think about something like eco anxiety any kind of anxiety is a worry about the future. So it is our problem as futures professionals to really examine why people are having this anxiety. I guess that's quite clear, I guess we know that, but what, how can we help?
And I guess that's in the end, that sort of the question that I want to answer for people in general, for my friends, for my students, but perhaps most importantly for myself, I still don't know.
Amanda Reeves: The further along we go with this process and the more information and the more data we have, the more stories we have about horrible despairing futures. And it's becoming harder to imagine futures that are hopeful, futures that we want to live in, futures that keep us excited and engaged.
And I think it's so powerful to keep finding ways to tell those stories without denying the path that we're on.
Claire Marshall: Agreed. And I think I hear a lot of discourse around cascading problems and tipping points and stuff. And that's really important, we need to understand that, but we also need to couple that with a conversation around cascading solutions and what happens when you solve one big part of the puzzle.
Before I couldn't really figure out how is Indigenous rights connected to climate change. And now I'm like, because of course it is, because cascading solutions, you change one story and the other stories have to change down the line. I think we need to really work on our narratives.
The New York Times did a survey a few years back that looked at all the stories about the future out there, and 80% of them were negative. So, you know, It's an uphill battle, isn't it?
Amanda Reeves: Yeah.
Claire Marshall: And if you think about Dator's four futures, right? Growth, not going to work. Collapse, don't want it, didn't really work.
The only option that we have is transformation and look, constraint comes into that because I think it's transforming the way we see ourselves in a finite system. I think those are the narratives that we just have to push. And funnily enough, to reflect back on our conversation, I started my work doing utopias and dystopias.
I don't do that now, everything is transformation with different metaphors. So sometimes I use mycelial networks as a metaphor. Sometimes I use tides as a metaphor, but just, talking about transformation, using different dynamics of change.
Amanda Reeves: Claire, we've made it to the open question and I want to know, how do we get capitalism out of our brains?
Claire Marshall: Such a good question.
Amanda Reeves: I borrowed it.
[00:44:43] Claire Marshall: I don't know the answer entirely, but I am very intrigued with this question. And I think for me it really comes to two things. So the first one is if we think about other people in general, what do we feel? What do we think of, and research has shown, this is great research by Common Cause that generally we think other people are less principled, do not hold the same values as us, that we recycle more. We basically think that other people are a less good version of ourselves. So we lack empathy, I think maybe with other people as well. And I think this is really interesting if you take this and you think about it in terms of plants and other things, I think you could take this line further.
And I think that's because capitalism has got into our brain and got us to think about other people as less than us, because you don't want to compete, exploit, or do anything bad with someone who's part of you. I don't want to exploit the father of my children, my partner.
Like, he's intimately connected with my happiness and the happiness of our family, but so is everybody else if you think about it. I can see that person on the street who's wearing a mask, not wearing a mask, in my area, it's the other way around where people were staring at you, if you did wear a mask.
But like our lives are connected to each other, even if we can't see that and our lives are connected to the planet. So I think that's the first interesting thing about questioning is capitalism in your brain. And I think the second question is, if you think about what you want out of life and what you're aiming for, is it more, is it growth?
Bigger house, more money, better staff or whatever, because capitalism breeds in us this idea of we always need more, we're competing with other people, our entity is wrapped up in consumption of things. And so we need to keep buying. But no it's not. identity, as Tyson was talking, our identity is based on where you going? Where are you, and what's your intention and what are you going to do? And who own you, as he says, which is in his language, it's not about anyone actually owning, but like, who do you belong to? What's your family? Who do you know? And if you think about it, that's what we do with stories. We share stories to try and find who links us or what links us.
So our identity shouldn't be wrapped up in what we have or what we do. It should be wrapped up in who we belong to and where we belong in the world. So I think that by questioning these two things, we can start to go, wow, there's this narrative in our brain that is really weird and twisted, and you can see that it's good for some people.
And you can see that it's perpetuated by a lot of advertising and they have a lot of money. They have an incentive to keep perpetuating this myth that you will be better if you have this product, this service, this whatever. You're not. You're just who you are.
When we think about a lettuce or when we think about a plant in my garden, I don't think, oh my God, that plant is not that good because it doesn't own whatever. Or if that plant is not thriving, I don't blame the plant. I don't say "You need to do some self-care plant." I look at the plant and I go, what's the system doing?
What does this system need? What's my role in this system as a caretaker of these plants, does it need more water? Does it need more sun? Are there ants? What are the ants need? Can I feed the ants so they don't eat my plants? We don't blame the plant. And I think that, we've got to start seeing ourselves as the way to get capitalism out of our head, to start seeing that so many structures around us, put it in there that we are part of a system.
And we are hearing these stories. And just as much as you can stop listening. I know we need to read the news, I know we need to do all of these things, but also just try to give yourself a break, to be a non-capitalist entity, just go in a garden, be a lettuce, just be in your place.
Count the ways that nature loves you. Whether it's the sun, the sun hitting our faces from 153 or however long million kilometers away releases serotonin in our brains. That makes us feel good.
You know, When we put our bare feet on the ground, the exchange of electrons with the electrical charge between us and the earth makes us feel good. When we breathe in fresh air, it makes us feel good. That's what we need more of, I think, to counteract all of this capitalism that's in our brains.
Amanda Reeves: Claire, thank you so much for joining me today. On behalf of the FuturePod community. I really appreciate how open and expansive you've been. We've been on such a journey. I've loved every moment of it. And so glad you've made the time to spend with us.
Claire Marshall: Thanks Amanda. It was a pleasure!
Amanda Reeves: This has been another production from FuturePod. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you'd like to support FuturePod, please visit the Patreon link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This is Amanda Reeves saying goodbye for now.