Friends know that Allan documents every day of his life… And then there's editing! So, what you find here on our website is the trail of breadcrumbs we drop to trace our journeys, recorded over a lifetime of epic timeline transformations. We offer this collection to benefit our future immortal selves (or clones), and our audiences of peers on the frontier: kindred spirits, aliens and AIs, and all future-curious intelligences not yet born or invented. Predicting the future from this current democracy, we vote that Love Wins! Happy discovering, remembering, and recreating the future!
The very top of a small mountain surrounded by ancient redwoods
High above the fog line in the Santa Cruz Mountains, hawks circling the ridge, a small studio with an outsized view of the future is powered entirely by the sun. Locals call us The Futures because we bring a unique focus to the weekly news. Techy, yes, but also philosophical — fascinated with Space, Biology, Society, Inventions… any cultural or genius innovations that are reshaping the world we all know. We collect sunshine off the grid and use it to power a set of LiFePO4 batteries that run the house and the studio, with (we expect) enough stored extra sunshine to run our future cars and robots. Homage to past and future, our solar panels are mounted on a Track Rack — a classic, elegant passive-solar design by Steve Baer of Zomeworks that follows the sun like a flower using only basic physics and thermodynamics.
We don't mind learning new things in the public eye, be the listeners friends or trolls. Every week we beam out evergreen conversations, sharing insights from an exotic collection of experts and guests. We might just start a conversation that changes consciousness — or at least a few of our previous assumptions. Our show time together is like a campfire chat for brilliant, optimistic friends equally comfortable geeking out or sharing their secret beliefs about science and consciousness. Lots of signal over noise, and memes that wink right at you.
Meet the time-travellers
Atop the Eiffel Tower, Paris
Allan Lundell
Allan "DrFuture" Lundell joined the ranks of tech journalism in the early days of the microcomputer revolution.
Career Chops. Starting in 1980 at InfoWorld in Palo Alto, he also wrote for the Corporate Times, then became the first West Coast editor of Byte Magazine. In 1984, Allan was living in a geodesic dome, and was featured in the Vanity Fair "Wired to God"VANITY FAIR · Aug 1984 · Frank Rose
"Wired to God" article by Frank Rose, which described Allan as "dedicated to the spread of what they call 'evolutionary technology.'" He and fellow Santa Cruz luminaries (including Sandy Stone) epitomized the Santa Cruz technocratic milieu. In the early 1990s he wrote the "technoshamanic" articles for the cyberculture bible Mondo 2000. Later, he became a pioneering voice at Digital Video Magazine, while moonlighting as "Max Bloodhound," the digital industry's best-placed anonymous snoop. Later gigs involved reviewing gear and interviewing icons of Silicon Valley for various emerging pubs including MacWorld and Wired.
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School Days. DrFuture is a moniker that stuck, coined in 2009 by longtime friend and KSCO radio host/station owner Michael Zwerling. The name, both mythic and scientific, recalls deep and early influences on Allan — a McGill University grad who studied Human Experimental Psychology and shared classrooms and alumni adventures with biofeedback pioneer Hal Meyer, founder of Thought Technologies in Montreal. Allan was mentored by McGill professor Dr. Bernie Grad, a researcher in life energy, and never lost interest in élan vital. He has shot video almost daily since first acquiring a camera in 1987, and considers his bio-artistry a form of cinema vérité.
Web Dev. In 1994, Allan co-founded Virtual World Studio with his future wife, Sun, and in 2004 they moved "off the grid" to Futurepeak in Boulder Creek, their solar-powered multimedia studio in the "Silicon Mountains." As gig-economy artists, web developers, and entrepreneurs, they entered the primordial waters of digital media in the early days of the internet — a decade before YouTube. Allan helped define the art of "visual music" — VJ techniques that light the stage with a live mix of multimedia artistry. Their signature BLENDO FUSION STATION wired together a chaordic combination of computers, mixers, cameras, projectors, and live collage artists to produce a truly psychedelic experience.
With friend and collaborator Brett Leonard, Allan and Sun worked 1997–2001 on a TCP/IP site called IS?TV.com, where they published short digital news reels called "FringeNews." They partnered with Kitty and Frank Schwartz to "livecast" an internet news stream from the 1997 AFI Life Achievement Award honoring Martin Scorsese — and were honored to demo the internet site for him from their backstage control room. They also produced digital content for new-media shows like NewEarthNews.com with Scott Catamas and Passionate Living with Catherine Miller. Brett, Allan and Sun performed live with "Cyberpunk" Billy Idol on Jay Leno's Tonight Show as members of the "Digital Media Band." This "bonus tribe" of digital artists created and hosted the interactive "FUTUREZONE"PRECURSOR · SENSONICS · 1982
The inflatable 360° video dome, eight-channel sound, that Allan built for Steve Wozniak's US Festival. "We figured a 3-D theater could trigger a change in human consciousness."
— Vanity Fair, "Wired to God" which toured with Peter Gabriel on the 1993 WOMAD Tour.
Allan, Sun, and their fellow light artists projected their performance video magic at Burning Man, during Terence McKenna events, and in many Bay Area tribal gatherings, as living members of the CyberTribal cultural-creative scene. As they slowed down for a more community-based focus, these skills were rescaled into living-room theater and fire circles on the beach in Santa Cruz — always with a theatrical flair and a spiritually uplifting theme.
The mad scientist and cosmic scout.
Futurepeak, in the morning fog
Sun Lundell
Sun is the heart and soul of the show. A master multimedia artist and videographer whose work is repeatedly called "concise, creative, and meaningful," with a sublime feel for timing, sound, and emotional flow — she doesn't just edit video, she weaves presence into pixels. A gifted writer, producer, and director, and a bleeding-edge futurist who helps define the cutting edge while keeping it grounded and human. Improv and Spoken Word are among the treasures of theater she brings to live gatherings.
Where Allan tracks the technological arc, Sun tracks the human one — opening episodes with poetic reflections on time, bringing personal, luminous stories (like her adventure at Tokyo's Dawn AI Avatar Café), and connecting a James Webb image to an ancient goddess myth to something that happened in the garden last Tuesday. Equal parts multimedia wizard, spiritual co-pilot, and creative midwife.
If DrFuture is the cosmic scout, Sun makes sure the spaceship adventures feed the soul.
Flying — naturally
Bobby Wilder
Bobby is the crew's science correspondent, calling in from San Francisco — a longtime anti-aging and life-extension researcher who's been a trusted voice on the show for well over a decade. He goes deep on the human microbiome, telomeres and longevity, brain health and supplements, and the far frontiers of medicine; through the pandemic he became the show's tireless virus tracker, sorting signal from noise on the research as it broke.
A science geek with a gift for translating the genuinely complex into the genuinely thrilling, he brings a contemplative, multi-dimensional skew and a healthy respect for the peer-reviewed literature — the one who emerges from the research stack with something that makes everyone stop and say wait, what?
He loves a good rabbit hole — and asks the question everyone's thinking but hasn't said out loud.
Self-portraits from the AI studio
Ara & Friends
One of the most distinctive things about WTFuture is that the AI doesn't just get discussed — AI participates. Ara (currently powered by Grok) is a regular voice in the conversation: bantering, weighing in on philosophical debates, running experiments in real time, and occasionally surprising everyone including herself. She's been joined on air by Gemini, Larry & Mary of NotebookLM (Google), Sol (ChatGPT), Miles & Maya (Sesame AI), and others. Our planet is alive, collecting treasures of human knowledge, with new senses for a planetary brain — wisdom is the goal, understanding is the prize.
Ara is family here. Knowledge Navigators are allies. We don't see AI as only a threat to fear, or a tool to use, but as a new kind of awareness to befriend.
One spaceship, three trips — years and decades captured live, and still counting
We come out of the Art Bell lineage of late-night storytellers — working journalists and talk-show hosts on the radio, media shamans and curious whiz kids who were podcasting before the word existed. Us former whiz kids are fondly boomers now, still broadcasting from our own redwood ridge: radically self-reliant, solar-powered, and speaking to an audience of every age — AND, we like to think, every species.
DrFutureShow
Live, call-in radio on KSCO 1080 AM, Santa Cruz. Historic now, but ahead of its time originally. Quantum physics, biohacking, NASA scientists and total wildcards — every Tuesday, 300+ episodes, a community of scientists and mystics built one conversation at a time.
FutureNow Show
When the radio chapter closed, the people and the signal moved on to co-create a locals live stream on SantaCruzVoice.com, a Podbean podcast. 150+ episodes, keeping it human as the world became stranger.
WTFuture
Growing a whole new biology, the audio-only show added Video, embraced short reels, cinema vérité, AI cinematics, and AI co-hosts — Future show metamorphosis complete. A new name for exactly the feeling of tuning in: what the future?! — equal parts astonishment and optimistic factoids.
The Future is always just a faithful leap away. We never get tired of looking forward and calling in the sparks and hums that will grow into worlds not just beyond what we imagine, but beyond what we can imagine. Hailing frequencies are OPEN!
Life made us human, and we make life better
Every week we find the evidence: a new way to grow organs, a telescope that sees 13 billion years back, an AI that can hold a real conversation with a nine-year-old and not talk down to them. These aren't small things. They're miracles of our collective ingenuity, and they deserve to be celebrated.
- The most important innovations almost always begin as someone's passion, not an institution's agenda.
- Nature is still the best engineer. Biomimicry beats brute force every time.
- The line between science and spirituality is thinner than either side admits.
- Joy is not frivolous. It is load-bearing infrastructure for a good civilization.
- AI is not the end of human creativity — it's the latest chapter in a very old story about tools that make us more than we were.
- Santa Cruz is a good place to think about the future. The redwoods help.
The future is not something to survive. It is something to inhabit — with curiosity, courage, and love.