This month we’re celebrating 10 years in business.

Milestones like this tend to make you look in two directions: at how far you’ve come and where you are going. It’s like checking the rear-view mirror and Google maps at the same time (and hopefully avoiding a crash).

Future Crunch first sparked in 2013 when our cofounders, Tane and Gus, were on a three-day bike ride and started chatting about how clean energy, AI and biotech could solve many of the world’s problems.

It struck them that although mind-blowing breakthroughs in science, technology and human progress happened all the time - these stories rarely made headlines. So, they created a platform to share good news and amplify the solutions that will help overcome our biggest global challenges.

We’ve grown a lot and our ability to stay in the game is thanks to our one-word business plan: ADAPTABILITY. It’s kept us sharp, curious and helped us navigate the things we never saw coming: the pandemic, politic whirlwinds and the inevitable rollercoaster of progress.

We may be a decade older, but we’re certainly not slowing down. With the launch of two new podcasts (Conscious Capital and Hope is a Verb) and the Forbes Growth Forum and SXSW coming up - 2023 is putting enough wind in our sails to keep us going for another 10 years!

Oh, and we opened TED 2023!

Over the past eight years we’ve shared thousands of stories of progress in our weekly ‘Good News’ newsletter and earlier this year, TED invited Future Crunch to open the conference in Vancouver with a news broadcast and to unpack why we’re so good at reporting bad news and so bad at reporting good news.

10 good news stories that shaped a decade

1. Let’s kick this off with the biggest good news story of the decade: mRNA vaccines saved the lives of an estimated 20 million people during the pandemic. In less than two years not only did we come up with a way to overcome a brand new disease but rolled it out to more than three quarters of humanity in the largest, most successful global health campaign of all time.

2. And while we’re on the subject of health, the arrival of two malaria vaccines portends a sea change for humanity's efforts to fight against one of our oldest and deadliest foes.

3. There’s also been steady progress in human rights with the number of governments legalising same-sex unions tripling over the past decade. Numerous countries have removed bans on homosexuality, outlawed conversion therapy and legalised gay marriage.

4. Nearly 415 million people in India were lifted out of what is known as multidimensional poverty, a measure that includes health, education and standard of living. Children saw the fastest reduction, with child poverty falling from 34.7% to 21.8%

5. Huge victories for life on Earth. After two decades of failed negotiations, nearly 200 countries reached a landmark deal in March 2023 to protect ocean life, and in another milestone the UN General Assembly declared access to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment to be a universal human right.

6. We also approached the beginning of the end of the fossil age. In 2023 the world will pass a critical turning point in renewable energy, with emissions from power, the largest source of global carbon pollution, expected to fall for the first time.

7. Despite the relentless barrage of bad news over the decade, the story largely missed by the world's media is that the climate fight is working.

8. AI has arrived and AlphaFold is probably our favorite and most powerful implementation. It can accurately predict 3D models of proteins - the molecular machinery that does most of the work inside our bodies - and is accelerating research in nearly every field of biology.

9. Humanity reached an extraordinary milestone in our quest for the holy grail of energy. We reached fusion, baby! The stuff that powers the sun. In November last year, for the first time ever, physicists managed to create a reaction that made more energy than they put in.

10. Halfway between the Earth and Sun, 18 gold-plated, beryllium hexagons have unfurled to gaze into the deepest reaches of the cosmos, giving us new insights into the creation of the universe. James Webb Space Telescope

Take a 4-minute ride in the Future Crunch Time Machine

Let us take you back to the early days before COVID and ChatGPT when mullets, choreography and eyeliner made everything better.

Still looking for ways to look busy?

1. LISTEN to our new podcasts! Conscious Capital explores the cutting edge of science, technology, and human progress to help individuals and organisations understand what is coming next as we move into the unknown. Hope Is A Verb dives into what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people who are making it happen.

2. READ one or two of our favourite books:

   “Active Hope” by Joanna Macy

   “Humankind” by Rutger Bregman

   “The Better Angels of our Nature" by Steven Pinker

   “Fooled by Randomness - The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets“ by Nassim Taleb

   “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari

3. QUOTE this the next time someone asks you why you want to Crunch the Future:

This month we delivered our 500th Future Crunch presentation!

It’s been a wild ride that has taken us to five different continents and connected us with some truly amazing people. We would not be here if it wasn’t for you - your support and enthusiasm is what keeps us going.

Speaking of which, we have some exciting content updates that we’re busy working on at HQ right now, and we promise to share more details over the next few months.

Until next edition, keep sharing the good news and hopefully we’ll see you in August at the Forbes Growth Forum in Sydney. We’re thrilled to be sharing the stage with an amazing line up of speakers and there are still some tickets available (click on the link) - so make sure you come up and say hi!

Take care and we hope the next 10 years treat you well,

FC HQ