From Dystopia to Liberation: Lee Schneider's Utopia Engine Trilogy

Today on Earthbound, I'm talking with Lee Schneider. Lee is a novelist, screenwriter, futurist and podcast producer.His latest book, Liberation, is the final installment in his Utopia Engine trilogy, which began with Surrender and Resist.Together they paint a picture of a world battered by climate breakdown, hijacked by an authoritarian artificial intelligence, and struggling, always struggling, towards something like stability and freedom. What if? Speculative fiction, as Schneider will tell you, begins with that question. What if?What if, after centuries, millennia of abuse, the Earth pushed back? What would happen then? What if the collision of climate chaos, wholly invasive technology creeping into our bodies and our brains.Pernicious misinformation making reality almost unknowable and entrenched in different wealth.What if all that pushed the world toward a state change, an unmistakable chaotic shift from what we once knew to something much more dangerous, dark and unsettled. Can we find liberation in such a world?

Asking what if?

Allows us to see the world we live in through the frame of the future, the path we're on, and what might lie ahead.Every day it seems we edge haltingly, or more accurately, with reckless abandon, headlong toward a yawning gap between a world that was and any sense of balance on an unrecognizable planet. Once we step over that edge, there's no going back. Welcome, my friends, to the fracture. For now, we cling to the side that we still call home.But Lee Schneider's Utopia Engine helps us see how it all might transpire not that far into the future.A world battered by climate change and controlled by an authoritarian, disembodied artificial intelligence devoid of human empathy, compassion or agency.An angry climate triggering further intrusions from an all seeing, soulless mind network, surveilling, controlling and misinforming, tearing at the human social fabric. And out in the ocean, orca whales, intelligent creatures that they are, have had enough.They've begun a direct assault on humans, even as they desperately try to communicate with us, to warn us that our time of dominance must end if we are to survive together on this planet.The future of humanity rests between two alien intelligences, one built from silicon and domination, the other seeking survival and connection from the rogue species, destroying their world. In liberation, it all comes to a head when the Earth pushes back.And yet Schneider is an optimist, and he'll tell you so himself, invoking Winston Churchill. There's no point in being anything else. It's not naivety, but a choice made deliberately and fold view of the darkness.Because what liberation ultimately offers, after the fracture, after the surveillance and the heat and the misinformation is something rarer than a happy ending. It offers agency. Schneider's characters don't save the world by defeating a villain.They save it by questioning, by asking, do I need this technology? How do I get my energy? How do I live in a way that doesn't cost the planet everything it has left? By asking, what if?The role of climate fiction, as Schneider sees it, isn't propaganda, it's behavior modeling. We watch imperfect people navigate an imperfect world and find their way through. Or not.Either way, we learn something on the wall of a building in the world of liberation someone has painted Utopia will always be far off, but it's always worthwhile walking toward. I was thinking about all this recently, out on a whale watching boat from Moss Landing, just up the coast from here.For the first couple of hours, the ocean was quiet, nothing but seabirds swirling above and floating idly on the swells.Then, just as the captain was about to call it, she spotted something to the northwest, right at the edge of Monterey Canyon in the open Pacific, the ocean came alive. Rizzos and northern right whale dolphins, hundreds of them. A humpback in the distance.And weaving alongside the dolphins, four gray whales lollygagging playfully on their way north to their Alaskan feeding grounds. Our captain kept for distance, but for a brief, suspended moment, we were all just out there together.Sea creatures and humans, curious for our own reasons, sharing the same piece of ocean. We were watching them. They were without question, watching us. I thought about what it means to enter their world, even briefly.What a privilege and what a responsibility. And I wondered if they knew what we were doing to their ocean, to their home. What would they say? Maybe Lee Schneider has some idea. Let's find out.My conversation with Lee Schneider, author of Liberation and the utopia engine trilogy.

Mr.

Schneider, thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate it. So I finished the last book of your trilogy, Utopian Engine, last night actually, and it was a very compelling work.But let's back up a little bit. And you've had a long career as a screenwriter, playwright, television and film. What led you to writing novels, particularly climate fiction?

Well, interestingly, the novels. I've had a few tries of writing novels before.Like most writers, I have a few novels in the drawer and they and I've sent a few around that didn't quite catch. The reason though this worked, is that it really got started for me when the fires came to the northern part of.You know, I live in Southern California and we had some fires. We've had several rounds of fire. Some were up north and we got the smoke and that was in around 20, 20 or so.And it, that moment really brought home for me that this is happening. It was a bit abstract at first and I cared, believe me, I've cared about what's happening to the planet.But I, it was like, well, you know, it's someone else. Someone else will deal with it.Where we live in California is high enough up, so it's raining torrentially today, but it'd be surprising if we were washed away. Like it can happen in other places. But smoke and fire, that became very real.Yeah, so that was a real motivating factor for me when I'm a runner and I couldn't go out running, I couldn't go outside my wife and child either. And we bought air filters which were still running all the time, and we bought air monitors.And when it happened again, just this year, early this year, there was actually an arson fire in an area near us and we actually had to leave. We evacuated ourselves. We were one block away from the mandatory evacuation zone.So we just got out of, you know, I mean, you can go into more detail there, but we literally packed the cat in the crate and loaded up the car.And I looked out at the horizon, which you couldn't see, and I turned to my wife and said, who do you know that's good friend that we could go to right now?

Wow. Yeah. I'm up in Northern California and I can relate.I remember waking up, I think it was early September of 2020, and I can't remember which fire it was up there, but one of the big fire. And we'd had years of fires and smoke and just what you described, you know, wearing. We were wearing masks before it became mandatory.But there's this one morning I woke up and the sky was orange, dark orange. And it stayed that way until like the day never started. And I've been writing about climate change for, geez, 20 years.And it does become a little abstract when you're just in it every day. But when you wake up and the world has changed, that's kind of a wake up call. It becomes personal at that point.

Exactly. You know, it came at me in a way that I wasn't expecting. Like I thought, okay, fire, you know, there's gonna, you know, the place could burn down.And that was a reality for us certainly earlier this year because we were in an evacuation zone or a block away. But smoke, I'd never thought about prevailing winds and smoke. It just didn't seem real.It didn't seem real that, you know, we've had air pollution here for, and serious air pollution in waves for a long time.I used to work for NBC and I went up to Burbank every day and they had in Burbank at the time, a big sign when you drove into town that said air pollution level hazardous or good. And I, I thought, wow, I, I've never seen that before in my life. Like it's okay to breathe today or not. And I, yeah, I was just stunned at that.And all my childhood allergies came back and I went back on various allergy medications and I thought, well, that's just Burbank, you know, that's just bad air. And when the rules changed here so the cars had to be not as polluting, the air got better.And there was a long period of, you can see farther and everything's pretty okay.But I never thought that smoke from fires and winds, just to be looking at those, the maps that, you know, the live updating maps that the state puts out and watching those like a weather report and looking for smoke reports in my weather reports, that was a mind blowing thing for me. I had no idea that that could be a reality for me.

Yeah. And I assume that that was the impetus for your Utopia Engine trilogy.

It exactly.One of the reasons that I'm writing near future science fiction is I think that it can show us how to deal with our world in a way that's perhaps entertaining or slightly weird. You know, it's a little, it's a different than our world deliberately.But when you put characters through their paces trying to understand things that they haven't encountered before, in the case of the book AI and talking whales and, you know, things that are unusual, it gives us the opportunity as readers to say, well, how would I deal with that situation, you know, if my house were about to burn down or if someone were manipulating the weather? These are not spoilers, but there's some, you know, bizarre made up things that happen that could be real soon.Some of the things I wrote about in the books are becoming real faster than I imagined.But the reason I wrote all of that is so we can watch these characters go through these challenges, maybe fail sometimes, maybe succeed at other times. And it gives us kind of a rehearsal for what it would be like when we eventually have to face these things.

I thought it was interesting. As you say, the world you create is near future. And it's, it's. There are some things you go, that's Kind of imaginative.But I also felt that with the way that I don't want to give it away either. But there's a company that, an AI company that disseminates misinformation and is able to wreak climate havoc if you don't join the club.For instance, how much of that world that you created is actually coming to fruition faster than you thought it might?

Well, when you get into AI, for example, AI at the moment is concentrated. The power of it and certainly the ability to created is concentrated in the hands of a few.

Yes.

So technology is running our lives right now.That's not a bold statement, but it becomes bold when connected with AI because the idea of someone using AI to blackmail us or mess around with us, I don't think that's that. Unfortunately, I don't think that's that much of a stretch. I come up with the idea that there are climate controls.This is in all three books of the trilogy that we've arrived with our technological prowess, arrived at a way to kind of control the climate. It's imperfect, it doesn't always work, but it's enough to make our cities livable.That hasn't come about yet, but there are companies that are interested in trying to get it to rain or trying to get change the prevailing direction of winds. People are working on these things pretty actively right now.And the idea that someone, since all this power is in the hands of a few, someone might say, you know, we're going to take away your AI for a month unless you sign up for this plan. Kind of like the nightmare version of cable or satellite tv.And I could readily see there being a kind of a threat where if you don't do what we say, we'll. We're going to make it rain, you know. Yeah.

And it all seems like even today we're not to the point where the Elon Musk of the world or whoever can control the weather.But with the misinformation and the, I guess we'd have to say the rapid lurch toward authoritarianism in the US that these kind of things are in the book, it seems like it's in the future, but you place the, you know, it's not that far in the future.

That's right.

That we're kind of lurching toward these things that you describe already. The other technology that was interesting to me is the modding of human. Yes, you mentioned that there actually is work toward that sort of thing.Can you talk about that some?

Sure. People are thinking about implanting Silicon in people's heads to make us smarter, better.You could look at it for, like Google Glass and virtual reality glasses and even the ipods that someone might wear that can mute the sound around you, can make you hear better. There's a movement toward a cyborg reality for people.And there's no proof yet that sticking some plastic or sticking a silicon chip in your head is going to make you a better person. In fact, it would, as it is in the book, probably mess people up, because we're not really made for that.And there could probably be some pretty serious side effects.But there is no doubt that there's a tremendous interest in the research community to making, quote, unquote, a better human, a better person, Whether that person would live forever, whether that person would be smarter or have a better memory, and certainly whether people could be enhanced by the computer that we use with a keyboard and with a screen, could be implanted in, at the very least, in a bit of clothing. You could wear it. You could go into rooms where there are Alexas there all the time for you.And the computer as this box that we're looking at that the two of us are looking at right now, that's probably going to go away. That computer is going to be either in our bodies or in a way that's just there, that becomes part of our environment.People are working on that kind of thing really actively.And some of the most outlandish things, like the tracking business and surveillance, that you think, oh, that could never, you know, no one's going to know what my face looks like. Well, they do already. I mean, you go to any airport and that facial recognition thing is happening now. It's not just a fingerprint and voice print.Kind of things are happening now right now, and we're already seeing what are called deep fakes, where what looks real isn't so real anymore. And it's created, I think, a crisis in the trust of media and the trust of what we see online.And I think that that's one of the reasons why I have my lead character, Cat Keeper, who is a. She's a kind of a reluctant revolutionary. She's kind of dragged into trying to fix the world.But one thing that she recognizes right away, that human contact, where you can see the person, person to person, is going to become even more valuable than it is now that the ability to fake something on a screen is becoming so commonplace that we won't really believe things that we see on screens. Maybe we'll be entertained by them and maybe we'll be if it's of low value to us, like some kind of customer service interaction.If we're talking to some AI, we probably won't care.But it's going to be disturbing when someone deploys an AI of themselves and you're semi fooled and you realize, you know, I really gotta see that person face to face to trust that it is that person. I think all that is coming fast.

I agree. The surveillance state, I do believe is here already.

Yeah, it's here.

And in your book the themes are ecological collapse and misinformation. How do those two in your mind interact or what do you see as the most? It's hard to. I would say both of them are pretty critical.But is there an interaction between the two misinformation and our ecological predicament that we're in, do you think?

I think so. Because it has to do again with power and control. And in our world, technology runs things.So the group, the person that controls the technology, controls the world. It sounds a bit blunt, but those who control the information flowing at us control how we react.So if you get down to the title of this podcast, Global Warming is Real, if someone wanted to try to convince you that it wasn't real or it wasn't going to happen right away, that's a lot easier than it used to be because you could create compelling media and distribute it widely. And that's not a problem. You know that you could buy that software for ridiculously low price and everyone has access to it.And everyone can fake the voice of an authoritative person making an announcement that global warming is or is not real. Easy, unfortunately, easy to do.So when you combine that with the voice and picture capabilities, and if you hook it up to a chatbot and that person could riff compellingly in a press conference on screen, they could.You could do that right now, where you could have a fake person giving a press conference and you know for a minute or two, the clip that went out on social media would look pretty good. And that sounds like wild eyed conspiracy theory nonsense, but I think it's all quite possible. Now.We don't buy the misinform, the beauty, I guess, the saving grace, let's put it that way. Misinformation works best in small bites.It works best as a explosive social media post, or it works best as a short piece of video that gets passed around in a viral way. It takes a real campaign to make misinformation stick.And when you have people who are willing to read and willing to look at longer form ways of conveying information that's harder for misinformation to get across.So kudos and heads and hats off to all the people who are still reading and still looking at long form stuff and still examining things instead of just bang, reacting to whatever they see on the latest social media feed. Because the social media feed is. That is where misinformation excels.

Yeah, that gets me thinking. All this technology, that we're the AI.I mean, just in the past couple of years, for me, what I do when I'm writing something, usually it's in Google Docs and I don't know who it is. It's Google or it's Grammarly or something suggesting that it could help me write.And then it suggests that it could determine if AI wrote what it suggested it could write. It's like the circular thing. And it seems to me like we're just adopting this technology without thinking about.Just because we can doesn't mean that we should.

Precisely, yes. I'm really glad you said that. That is the purpose in another deep purpose of the books, this liberation. The first book is called Surrender.The second's called Resist. The third is Liberation. There was a movement called the Luddites and they've gotten some bad press deliberately.If you Google Luddites, you'll find out in a negative way that they're kind of a bunch of dummies who didn't believe in technology and didn't want technology. But what the Luddites believed, and this is their 18th century English textile artesians, and that's who they were.And they sound like that has nothing to do with our world. But what's fascinating about it is it has a lot to do with our world because they saw their technology changing quickly.The technology they used to make cloth and hosiery and socks and things like that.And this technology that they used was being forced upon them by a power elite, which is now starting to sound a bit more familiar to what's happening to us.

Yeah.

So we do have a choice about what technology we use. And we should ask, especially with AI, who owns this thing, who benefits from it? Do I really need it to take up your example of say, Google Docs?I try not to use Google Docs at all because it bothers me that it has those suggestions. I have even tried not to use Microsoft Word too much.But I did figure out how to turn off Copilot it because these things are tragically tempting to take over for you. They're helpful in air quotes. You can't see my air quotes right now, but they're helpful.Now, what's happening there is your writing is getting faster and maybe easier, but it's also getting homogenized and it's introducing soulless elements.The wonderful thing about writing is that it's damn hard and it makes you dig into yourself and it makes you pull things out of your soul, let's say out of your imagination, that are sometimes hard to access. But that's good. That's what writing is for.In my opinion, writing is to make you a better person and to make you think about yourself and think about the world. If you use AI for all that, you're just robbing yourself of the chance to become a better person.So I do use AI, which we can talk about how I use it, but I certainly keep it away from any creative work. I do not let it anywhere near, say, writing a novel.

Yeah. How do you use. What's your use of AI?

Well, my everyday use is I use something called kadgi K-A-I.com and it's a search engine. And what it does is you can ask a question and it will answer using ChatGPT.It hooks up to ChatGPT and it will give you a prose answer with footnotes. The key thing is with footnotes so you can check its work. So if you ask, when was the last big fire that affected Southern California?It'll talk about the Palisades fire and it'll give footnotes. And so I use that a million times a day. Yeah, I pay for it.I also, I have used ChatGPT to help me plan, for example, the publicity campaign for the book I would say I'm writing coming out with a new book. It publishes on October 15th. What kind of lead time should I have for my publicity campaign?And what's the most effective way to publicize a book like that? And it gave me some ideas, some of which were terrible rabbit holes that went down and some of which were useful.And it was up to me to decide, you know, whether that was good or not, useful or not. But I would say to respond directly.The most effective use of AI for me is basically cataloging stuff, looking at databases I have, and saying, when did I last write about fires in California?Give me the list of articles, you know, in my database, and then, okay, create a synopsis of those four articles that I can post to LinkedIn or send to an editor and I don't have to struggle over that kind of thing. Basically remixing my work, not creating new Work.

Yeah.The thing about AI, it's very useful as you just described, but it takes a conscious effort not to get sucked into everything because everybody, every, everywhere I go, even when it just doesn't even make any sense, they go, you want try this AI thing?

And I go, no, I don't.

Yeah, right.

It's kind of crazy.

Well, it's not crazy if you're a startup founder or if you're Microsoft or if you're Gemini Meta, because the goal, like let's look at it wide angle for a minute.When Meta came out with the vision, you know, and Apple has come out with Vision 3D glass, you know, a goggle, the first thing I thought about was now wait a minute, I'm on the computer most of the day anyway. So now they want me to strap this thing to my face and walk around with a computer on my face all day. No, thank you. Yeah, but that's their job.Their job is to get me to strap a computer to my face. And the people who are making AI, their job is to get you to use it all the time in every aspect of your life.I was reading a research paper and it was cited in a Psychology Today article. I was looking at where the people who make chatbots are making them interactive to not actually answer your question completely.So you have to ask another question and then another one after that and another one after that. And if this sounds familiar, it's how social media platforms are built. It's the same thing.

Right?

You know, creating a chatbot, a kind of human esque personality for this machine is brilliant and addictive. And yes, it requires a mindset to say, I'm not going to talk to a chatbot all day.That's, I don't want to spend my time like that, even if it is entertaining.

Right. Well, let's move on to another very interesting aspect of liberation was, and I thought this was really compelling.It was fanciful perhaps, but when one of the characters was communicating with orcas, and what I found compelling about that was that I think you were presenting the idea that humans, the whole idea of domination, it goes back to the Bible, I guess, you know, domination over the Earth, how that is a completely misguided attitude to take that there are other very intelligent creatures that we are sharing the planet with that we seem to disregard or exploit or kill indiscriminately. Talk to me how you came about that aspect of the story of the transmissions. I guess with the orcas, I started.

To think about what if, you know, so Much of speculative fiction, science fiction is a what if, what if the Earth started to push back what if we as apex predators and kind of top of the heap mentality, what if animals just kind of got sick of that and weren't going to buy it anymore? And I started poking around in my research and saw that the orcas were attacking boats, mostly off the coast of Spain.It didn't happen here, but there were these repeated incidents that orcas were learning.The mother orcas were teaching their sons and children how to track a boat, come up behind a boat and knock the propeller off the boat and sometimes even capsize the boat. And scientists were pretty baffled.And people thought they had all kinds of theories, like, oh, well, maybe there was trauma, you know, orca was hit by a boat and they're retaliating. Or maybe it's a form of play, because orcas do play. And orcas exhibit some pretty strange behaviors sometime that are.So when they mourn their dead, they will do some very strange things sometimes and do very strange games that people can't figure out. You know, we don't understand it.And so I did some wide reading into animal intelligence, orc intelligence, cetacean intelligence, wide Earth, even octopuses and squid. And I realized we are sharing the planet with some pretty smart beings.Their minds work quite differently than ours and they've been quite tolerant of us for a long time. And here's another rather strange part of the orca saga. And humpback whales, too. They've at times have been very nice to humans. There are whales.There's story.There's a story happened in Australia where a whale actually befriended a whaler and helped him find other, not the whale species, but helped him find other whales, like became a team member of this whaler. And when that whale finally died of old age, that whale was mourned by this whale hunter. I mean, it's, there's.What I'm getting at is there's actual relationships between people and whales and they're. There are individuals. This becomes a kind of a strange thing to think about, is whales are individuals. They can be tracked and seen as individuals.And they have individual personalities. And so dolphins, and so do octopuses, by the way. They have personalities.So when you get into that level of things, first of all, I'll never order calamari again because I can't eat something that's smarter than I am. And you start to think about if animals can be individuals, well, then we really don't have the right to be so abusive.In our use of planetary resources just seems crazy to me.

Yeah, it's interesting, the idea of interspecies relationships.When you talk about the orcas attacking the boats off of the coast of Spain, I sometimes wonder if all the noise that we're making because they have sensitive hearing and all the noise, all the engines and sonar and that must drive them crazy. That might make them mad, you know?

Yeah, yeah. That it's been proven that the Navy, our US Navy has long refused to say stop using that sonar.And it has been proven to be very upsetting and very damaging to whales because they are affected by that.During World War II and other wars where submarines were used and depth charges and underwater explosions that had a deep bad effect on the whale population as well, just because of the sonic disturbances under the water. So when you start thinking about all those things, there's a good reason for whales to be pretty mad at us. Yeah, pretty good reasons.And of course, pollution and collecting them for theme parks and turning them into performers. And it's pretty remarkable that there hasn't been an animal rebellion on a broad scale yet.

Exactly, yeah. Interesting. I read yesterday the latest climate climate tipping report, I believe it's called.They report that they believe unless something drastic happens, which let's be realistic, it's not gonna happen in time, that the first climate tipping point may have already been reached and that would be the warming and acidifying oceans and the coral die off, that the corals global die off. And you know, they've died off and they've recovered, but at this point it might be too late. They always say unless we drastically reduce emissions.And I don't see any drastic reduction of emission happening right now. So I don't. I think we passed the first climate.

Tipping point and it's the oceans.

The oceans have been acidifying. They're absorbing most of the heat. I live in near the Monterey Bay and I look out of the bay and it's beautiful.And granted, the Monterey Bay is a protected marine sanctuary and so there's lots of wildlife and things. But you look at it, you know that there's a lot more going on than we see when we look out at the ocean.

Definitely.

Yeah.

I think the effects we're going to start seeing are migration effects, animal migration and human migration that in the say, pick the next 10, 15 years, certain parts of California might not be livable. Too hot.

Yeah.

And you know, people will just have to start, who can afford it, will start moving north and people in the southern part of the globe are Going to be in bigger and bigger trouble. And they may need to try to leave the southern part of the world or they may be just stuck trying to make it work.Same with whales have huge migration capabilities. And we've been seeing. Scientists have been seeing more humpbacks and more orcas in a more northern. You know, the heat is driving them north.They're being seen. There was. There have been. In San Francisco Bay, there have been sightings of whales that the people who research that say that's not supposed to be.You're not supposed to see a whale this far north. It's in a bay.

A couple of months ago, I interviewed authors that wrote a book about the golden toad of Costa Rica.And when it was discovered, it's vanishingly small habitat to begin with, and it was high up in the Costa Rican cloud forest, and they had nowhere to go. They couldn't migrate. They needed to go up and there was no up they could go to.And, well, the animals and then the human you mentioned the people in the global south trying to migrate. That gets us into the political climate that we're in, which is disturbing to say the least.Right now it seems like we're moving into this era of AI misinformation, environmental collapse, and yet we don't. We're either denying it or the actions.

We're taking are van.

It's just too small.

They're not enough.

And I think in your books, in Liberation, I need to read the first two, but I read Liberation you ended with the protagonists were able to meet the challenge. So talk to me about optimism. Are you an optimist?

Yes, I am. There's no, as Winston Churchill said, I'm an optimist because there's no point in being anything else.I think that the solutions are going to come when people begin to just question more, do I need this technology? I'm not talking we live in a tech world. I'm not saying this is the struggle that the main character goes through. For a thousand pages.You know, Cat Keeper is the main character. The struggle she goes through is, do we need this technology or not? Well, I live in a technical world. She works in tech.I can't get rid of technology. And that's true. We probably won't get rid of technology, but we can adjust our approach to it and the way we use it. And I think that connects up.You have to connect up with a lot of things like how we create energy and how that power is used and how we use the resources that we've got. And are we willing to make do with less or not or. It's a lot of questions, basically, is what I get down to. I mean, optimism.If I'm going to be an optimist, I think I have to ask a lot of questions. I have to be willing to make some changes about the assumptions, you know, the way that I've done things all these years. Maybe I gotta change that.Maybe I have to think about how I get around and what kind of car I drive and how my, how many of my clothes I use and throw out and, and how I eat. It's a questioning process.

Yeah, I think the consumer aspect of it and obviously consumers have responsibility. Like you just said, questioning do I need this or how much of this do I need? Or how do I get around or how do I get my energy?Then there's the supply side, the capitalism. It seems like just more growth, endless growth. Buy more. Like you said, the chat bots and the social media just keep going, keep.

More and more and more.

Do you think this kind of maybe a big question that capitalism is viable in the world that you would like to like you describe at the end of liberation, where people have actually met the challenge. What's capitalism's role in where we're at now? And how do you see capitalism as a solution?

Well, no, but it's fair to say that capitalism is the greatest prosperity driver in the history of humanity. You know, I mean, capitalism has brought more wealth to more people than any other system. That said, it's a system built on exploitation.

Yeah.

Now what becomes scary in our world now is that, you know, we all know the expression by now, if there's no advertising on the platform you're using, you're the product being sold. And capitalism has pivoted to being an exploiter of thought, an exploiter of human imagination, an exploiter of people, not just labor.I mean, capitalism has always exploited labor. That's the point of capitalism. But it's exploiting our inner mind in the form of using what we think about to sell us more stuff.And that's a pretty endless loop that serves capitalists, serves them great. But you know, look, I've profited from capitalism. Capitalism has been good to me. But I don't think that it's the solution.I don't think we're going to eliminate capitalism. I don't think it's realistic to say that, oh, suddenly we're going to come up with a new system. But a little socialism goes a long way.And if you're going to have cooperative communities that don't exploit people.That's not really a capitalist model, you know, that's some other model that has to do with helping people and not creating inequalities between people and sharing resources. And the way, without labeling it as anything, the way smaller communities often work anyway.You know, if you're in a group of people in a neighborhood or a community, there is that helping, connection, sharing of resources. It's kind of bad form if someone's dominating. I wouldn't say, however, that that's the natural state of human affairs right now.I think that we're getting into more of a lizard brain domination kind of movement without even attaching any political labels to this. Just from a human. I'm reading some CG Jung right now.And just from a human perspective, you know, the way the human psyche is moving is a bit more toward the strong man or strong woman, you know, great man theory of history and less toward a more communal of living. And I think we need the more communal side of things.

Why do you think that is that the psych is moving in this strong man?

Yeah, I wish I had CG Jung to here to answer, but I think it has to do with the force multiplier of technology, that one person who has an idea can spread that idea very rapidly and drown out other voices quickly. I think speed and first mover advantage is very powerful in that kind of thought. You know, let's dominate the way people think about the world.It's harder to be a little pocket where you think differently. And mass thinking is just much more accessible to people and much more of the instrument.And unfortunately it's become an instrument of even abuse, but certainly an instrument of control. Yeah, because it's easier to rule people that way. Doesn't mean though that there are people who are resisting.I mean, the middle book, Resist, is all about the resistance and it has a lot to do with intentional communities. I mean, I'm not a commune guy. I probably wouldn't get along very well as a commune fellow.But the model of the smaller community that serves the immediate people is more from a healthy human perspective and from an ecological perspective, but I think more viable than a massive top down kind of organization.

Yeah, it just flashed when you were.

Talking about top down.

COP 30, the climate conference is coming up. I was at, what was it? Cop 15 and cop 21. Cop 21 of course was probably the high mark of the whole UN process.I think in my opinion it's important that everybody gets into a room and talks about it, but the problem is we've been doing that for 30 years and what it's lacking is the bottom up approach, if that makes sense. Frankly, I think COP 30, the COP process has pretty much jumped the shark at this point.We need to find another way to approach how we tackle climate change. You talk about the intentional communities and granted fossil fuels capitalism, we've all benefited from it.The problem is we have to let go of what is obviously unsustainable at this point. And we're at this junction and I think you write about it in Liberation because it's near future, that, what is it?The, the fracture which happens 20, 30. And that doesn't seem so far fetched actually.

Not at all.

Yeah, you kind of see that coming. And as an individual, you know, a lot of people ask me how I maintain hope and sometimes frankly I feel a little hopeless.But you have to maintain as you do, you have to be an optimist because what's the choice otherwise? You're a doomer.

Right.

And that doesn't help anything anyway.So what is the role, do you think, in all the things that we're talking about here, all things I just mentioned about dealing with the climate crisis, what is the role of climate fiction in getting the message across?

Yeah, well, it has a role in that. It's behavior modeling. You get to see characters go through a crisis and either figure it out or not figure it out.And if they fail, that can be interesting too, because we get to see why they failed and how they failed. I think writing dystopian fiction exclusively, it's fun to watch that kind of a movie, you know, kind of a disaster movie.But when we start living that disaster movie, it's not as much fun.

Right.

And I think to show the role of climate fiction is to show the path forward with characters who sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. It's not propaganda, it's not making a perfect world.It's showing how imperfect people deal with their own imperfections, that because of the way we live on the planet become magnified, tremendously magnified, and affect far more than just us. They affect the animals we share the planet with.

Yeah.

For example.

So you've completed the trilogy. Do you have any other similar, like climate fiction projects on the books on the.

Well, perhaps not surprisingly, I'm taking a break from tech a little bit because I got deeply into it and I'll probably come back to it. But I'm.I decided the next trilogy I'm working on takes place in a forest world that does have some tech, but it's mostly about the inner life of the humans and how they work through their inner unconscious struggles and how that connects with the outer world. It's a young audiences book, so it's about a group of teens who have a power they don't quite understand over their. The adults around them.So it's a bit about human potential and human power. I'm about halfway through the first book, so I am learning more about it as I write. It tends to work like that, you know, the.You can write an outline for all three books if you choose, but the characters haven't lived that outline yet. So you have to write their worlds so they can start telling me more, you know, tell me more about what's going on. But it.It's definitely going to deal with the human impact on nature. But it's mostly about the interior life of the characters and how they cope with their shadow side.

Interesting.

Their. They're unknown parts of themselves.

It's interesting how our shadow side, our inner world, expresses itself in the outer world.

And. Yes.

So I'll be. I'll look forward to that. I'm also looking forward to reading the first two.

Excellent.

Yeah. Because Liberation was very compelling, I thought.

Excellent. Thank you.

And you have a podcast production company as well.

Yes, that's what I do for work. I do.I produce podcasts for others and I'm producing my own podcast called the Future Lab, which is me talking with authors about some of these things. It's called the Future Lab Lab with Lee Schneider. And I also give talks about storytelling and teach storytelling. I happen to be.This week I'm going to Detroit to talk to the aia, an association of architects, about storytelling. Oh.I found taking all that I've learned about writing novels and movies and all of that and putting it into these principles that help people tell their story better has been. It's really gratifying and fun to do and. Yeah, I just. I just love doing it. I love talking about how to build stories.And the podcast production has been wonderful. It's much more fun to produce a podcast than it is to produce a TV show for me. Much more fun.

Is it? Yeah, I would imagine. I've never produced a TV show. I imagine there's a lot more, maybe more rigid.

Yeah. First of all, we distribute these podcasts where and how we like. Yeah. And you may edit some of this. It could be any length you want.You often don't have that in it unless you're distributing to YouTube. But in the TV world, you got to hit times, and there are production values that you have to work with.There are many more people, many more distractions with a podcast. Most of the time, it's a wonderful conversation like we were having.You get to focus on the people and the conversation, and that's a big win to be able to do that.For all the podcasts I've produced, I did a long podcast series about yoga and the inner life, and it was like going to graduate school for a couple of years. You know, we did many episodes of that, and I've done many podcasts on tech and met a lot of interesting tech founders and scientists.The value of just producing a conversation and recording it and getting it out there, what you do, it's tremendous. It's great.

Yeah, it is. It is great. I. I did have a career as a sound engineer for quite a while, and. And as a writer and freelance journalist.And doing the podcast is like the amalgamation of all that. It brings it all together, and we have conversations like this, and it's great.What I really admire about your work is that I believe that we're a storytelling species, and stories is how we make sense of the world. And so we tell better stories or we tell more compelling stories or more insightful stories, and then that can illuminate a path forward.And I think that's what, in my mind, that's what liberation did.

And so, yeah, yeah, I. I believe that in fact, some of those very lines you said, I'm about to say on Thursday in Detroit in front of this meeting, that very sentiment that we connect with storytelling, we learn about ourselves with storytelling, and we're a storytelling species. We're a narrative species. We build on the most basic neurological level.We're building sequences all the time and scenarios, kind of the way the mind works, the way we think, and we can. You can scale that right up to understanding your fellow human. So storytelling is powerful.

It is powerful. And so I appreciate the work you do, and I appreciate this conversation we've just had, and thank you for your time.

Well, thanks so much. It was a pleasure to talk to you about all this.

Thank you, Lee. I appreciate it.

All right, you're welcome. Thanks so much.

Okay, thank you.

See you. Bye.

Asking what if? Gives us options for the stories we tell and the future we create for ourselves and the creatures with whom we share the planet.Lee Schneider's Utopia Engine Trilogy offers a powerful story arc, from surrender to resistance and finally to liberation. Check the show notes for more information about Utopia Engine Trilogy.The Future Laboratory podcast network and other topics discussed in our conversation. If you like what we're doing, please like and subscribe or leave us a review@earthboundpodcast.com and as always, if you can.

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Keep us going, we always appreciate any of that.Visit our website@earthboundpodcast.com or globalwarmingisreal.com and you can help us shape the future of Earthbound by filling out a brief listener Service. Go to earthboundpodcast.com survey and let us know what you think. That link will be in the show notes as well. Thank you, dear listener.I'll see you in a couple of weeks, and in the meantime, stay safe.

Sam, it.