Episodes

Legendary sci fi author, astrophysicist, and NASA advisor David Brin rejoins the Futurists for a special first anniversary show. Topics include: Wall Street’s insatiable AIs, Karl Marx and capitalism, the magic of competition, Hollywood tropes, self-preventing prophecies, the flaw in Asimov’s laws of robotics and hope for a positive sum game.

This week The Futurists speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America. Jennifer served in Barack Obama’s White House as the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer where she launched the US Digital Service. In this episode, Jennifer reveals the tactics to surmount the myriad obstacles that thwart government agencies when they seek to deploy digital technology to improve the delivery of services to citizens.

Society has grown more complex and more polarized. That increases the likelihood of complicated disputes. How is the legal industry evolving to deal with hyperconnected society? Dr. Cain Elliott tells the Futurists how the legal profession is digitizing to move faster and operate more efficiently. But the motivation to change is coming from clients, not from attorneys. Topics: the broken business model of legal services, the political and regulatory barriers to change, the transformative potenti...

Theo Priestley is a Futurist based in Scotland and he’s mentored Silicon Valley startups, has written hundreds of articles on AI, IoT, Web3, Metaverse, Fintech and he’s the author of “The Future Starts Now” . He has a habit of making some big bets on the future, but also he’s not afraid to put out his thoughts on the future as they develop. Priestley is a contrarian at heart though, and his futurist lens comes from the conflict between technological advancements, policy development and human nat...

This week on the Futurists, Dan Jeffries, Managing Director of the AI Infrastructure Alliance and CIO at Stability.AI talks the doomsayers attacking ChatGPT, and the overblown fear over AI. Jeffries argues there are historical precedents for human adaptation to the disruptive technology of AI, but that learning to live with another intelligence might be a bit more challenging.

This week on the Futurists we catch up with Fox/CNBC tech commentator Shelly Palmer as we dive into the implications of ever pervasive technology in our lives. Shelly, has been following consumer trends for 2 decades and is a mainstay at events like CES, but he says AI is a different sort of beast. We dive into how technology will augment and change our lives moving forward.

This week on The Futurists we get into the future of cybercrime and personal security in the smart world with renowned “security guru” Bruce Schneier. The author of over a dozen books (his latest bestseller being “A Hacker’s Mind”), Lecturer on Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, Congressional advisor and Media personality. Will AI and Quantum kill passwords? How secure will your DNA records be? The answers might surprise you. https://www.schneier.com/blog/about/

Julian Bleecker of the Near Future Laboratory has developed a novel way to forecast: he constructs prototypes, products and artifacts from future scenarios. Then he designs the marketing material, including ad campaigns and brochures and catalogs, to interrogate the wider impact on consumer society and human behavior. These techniques are set forth in Julian’s book, The Manual of Design Fiction: A Practical Guide to Exploring The Near Future. https://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/

Chief Futurist for one of the largest consulting practices on the planet, Kasey Lobaugh joins the futurists this week to talk about the building blocks for the worlds of tomorrow. While at Deloitte, Kasey has spearheaded research into the next level of disruptive innovations and technologies that are reshaping business. When talking AI Kasey maintains that this is unlike any other innovation wave we’ve ever faced and that large scale technounemployment is a real possibility.

What happens when society is subject to accelerated change? Now we know: uncertainty and widespread panic. March 2023 was the month when the old systems began to collapse and entirely new systems were launched. In one month we experienced a viral run on banks, the launch of AI superpowers, and the exposure of systematic deceit at a major news publisher. In this special edition of The Futurists, co-hosts Brett King and Robert Tercek review current events through the lens of the future. Who profit...

In this weeks episode of The Futurists we talk to author Gunjan Bagla, a leading figure in India-US trade relationships and commerce. Bagla argues that while China is seen as a massive threat to the US, India is a natural ally of the west having supported outsourcing over the last 4 decades, and being more aligned on policy. But like China, India has big ambitions and will overtake China as the most populous nation this decade. Will that translate into economic growth or does India need infrastr...

Co-hosts Brett King and Robert Tercek interview journalist Dean Takahashi, who has been covering innovation in the game industry for three decades. Dean gives The Futurists a post-CES roundup of new trends and genres that span a dizzying array of evolving technologies. Games have expanded beyond a niche category of entertainment to dominate mainstream media. Games now foster new story franchises that attract tens of millions of fans daily. Dean explains how game tech is blurring the boundaries ...

Co-hosts Brett King and Rob Tercek speak with medical futurist Dr. Daniel Kraft on the topic of exponential health care. Kraft reports that we’ve entered a decade-long era of rapid innovation that began with the pandemic. Covid-19 accelerated progress in health care from incremental to exponential, including: vaccines derived from messenger RNA, consumerized health care and home diagnostic kits, loosening of regulation to allow telemedicine, and innovation in payments. What’s next: hybrid care, ...

Anders Sorman-Nilsson is a Swedish futurist living in Australia, but he believes that humanity is on the cusp of a new renaissance where humanity finds purpose beyond consumption and market profit. He calls out human systems that are coming to a natural conclusion due to this emerging thinking, including the damage that fossil fuel companies and others have done to our ecosystem in the name of profits. Ultimately, Anders is an optimist but he thinks that human behavior and technological leaps an...

In this episode, creative technologist Roger Holzberg recounts his personal career journey from the Imagineering studio at the Walt Disney Company, where he devised and built original theme park rides, to his second career as where he applies immersive technology to health care and healing, first at the National Cancer Institute and now as a med tech innovator at Reimagine Well. Roger explains the subtle art of balancing new technologies with real world events and the ever-evolving customer expe...

In the past, innovation in agriculture lagged behind consumer electronics and telecoms. Today, that’s changing. As food futurist Tony Hunter explains, food is technology. In this episode, Hunter shares his view of tech-fueled advances in food production and distribution around the world. Topics include: supply chain disruption, new tech for farming, strategies for waste reduction, changes to food supply caused by the pandemic, the distinction between food security and food sovereignty, alternati...

This week Brian Solis joins Brett in the hosting chair as Srujana Kaddevarmuth from Walmart labs joins the Futurists to delve into the future of in store and online interactions for the retail giant. From future store design, warehouse robotics through to data science and AI, we cover the gamut of possibilities of 21st century commerce.

This week on The Futurists our hosts interview Charlie Melcher, the founder of The Future of Storytelling. Charlie recounts the many ways that the ancient practice of storytelling is evolving in an era of immersive and interactive media. He is also a book publisher who uses innovations in printing technology to reinvent the 5000-year-old medium for contemporary audiences and he speculates about the future evolution of the craft of meaning-making. Web site: Www.thefutureofstorytelling.Org

In this episode, David Mattin, creator of New World Same Humans, talks to the Futurists about his simple but phenomenally powerful technique for forecasting: he uses fundamental human needs as the lens that brings emerging technology and behavior trends into crisp focus. Our discussion topics include: generative AI, the value of human creativity, virtual humans, digital companions, large language models, Meta’s struggle to control Galactica, storytelling and trend forecasting, the four big story...

In this episode we ask one of the OG’s of crypto, Bill Barhydt, to join us on The Futurists to talk the 2022 crypto collapse, the merits of crypto and blockchain for the future-world, and how crypto, stablecoins, tokens, NFTs and CBDCs will ba battle it out for the emerging monetary rails of the 21st century. We also debate who Satoshi Nakomoto was, why ‘he’ created bitcoin, and what the collapse of FTX and other exchanges mean for the principles of decentralization that the crypto community hol...

This week we interview the phenomenal Aubrey De Grey, the world’s foremost authority on longevity and developing strategies to slow or eliminate aging altogether. The author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and Ending Aging (2007), De Grey is probably best known for the concept of Longevity Escape Velocity, a view that soon medical technology will enable human beings to prevent age-related deterioration, and eventually eliminated aging entirely.

A look at the trends that will shape the workplace of the future: flexibility, the expanding 1099 workforce, the Great Resignation, the gig economy, telework, remote collaboration, placeless employment, automation, robotics, the rebound in union membership, breaking social contract. Wither the American Dream? According to Future of Work expert Sophie Wade, humans need more autonomy and empathy in the workplace order to achieve their best. In this episode we explore how technology might make that...

In this week’s episode we talk to Dave Birch, the author of “Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin”, The Currency Cold War, and Identity is the New Money about all things identity, digital assets and the future of Crypto. Dave is one of the world’s preeminent experts on payments tech globally as well. But when we get into how AIs will make payments and hold bank accounts, it gets very interesting indeed.

The future of healthcare and machine intelligence, featuring Dr Phillip Alvelda, the founder and chairman of Medio Labs. The pandemic accelerated the introduction of direct-to-consumer healthcare with clinical grade accuracy. Phillip explains how AI will amplify this process by reducing cost to scale. But the prospect of constant surveillance raises other concerns, and that leads to a lively Futurists debate about China’s advances in AI and a new round of US export controls.