The Futurists

Protopian futurist Monika Bielskytė, now advising NATO on cognitive warfare, joins Rob Tercek and Brett King to explain how hybrid warfare works. Its goal is not to persuade anyone of anything. It amplifies the extremes on both sides of real grievances until people believe nothing and become passive. Monika argues that the answer is a constructive vision of the future, anchored in science, and Elon Musk serves as the case study for how paper wealth and science-fiction hype translate into real-wo

In this week’s pod international bestselling author Kevin J Anderson (Star Wars, Dune) returns. With more than 23 million books in print, Kevin has just embarked on his most ambitious personal project yet – creating the complete works of the Saga of Seven Suns epic. Kevin started this series in 2002 but is just launching his own Backerkit campaign. Along the journey Kevin explains how the business of publishing has been reshaped by technology and time.

Anand Chandrasekaran does not sit on the sidelines. He jumps into the game. He is the managing partner at Celesta Capital and co-founder of two AI companies, Crescendo and HiO. He explains why AI only transforms an industry when insiders drive the change, and why he expects the shift from scarcity to abundance to transform fields like customer care. He also describes how tokens have become the new capital, that is, the vital resource that CEOs must ration. Rob Tercek talks to Anand about what ha

In this week’s Futurist network we are joined live in the Dubai studio with two active AI architects, Jean-Baptiste Isnard (founder of Quantum Spirit) and Dr. Julia Michelin (founder of LumaBrush AI) a returning guest. The issue of whether AI is conscious continues to be debated at large but the question is perhaps not about if they are conscious but how the debate itself will change the view of human consciousness itself. In this very philosophical conversation Jean Baptiste and Julia present u

Alex Serdiuk is the co-founder and CEO of AI voice company Respeecher in Kiev. Alex and Rob Tercek discuss how synthetic voice generation will transform the motion picture industry, including some surprising reversals such as: how AI voices will change the global distribution strategy for feature films; how human actors can benefit from AI voice clones; why ethical approaches to AI yield optimal results; how the talent guilds have come to accept AI in film production; the business value of trust

Independent AI researcher Mark Pesce returns to the Futurists with an update on the latest advances in open source artificial intelligence. Mark talks to co-hosts Brett King and Rob Tercek about a wide range of topics: small open-source models that run on the desktop and the smartphone; AI agents that work the “night shift”; NVIDIA’s pivot to open source AI; the disruptive threat to the leading US AI labs; the rapid rise of AI-enabled intrusions and the threat to the smartphone; personal AI filt