265 Kate O'Neill on Navigating the Future of Technology Without Losing Our Humanity

SUMMARY

Kate O'Neill is a strategist, futurist, and author who helps leaders navigate the intersection of technology and humanity. After building her career in Silicon Valley—including as one of Netflix's early employees—Kate has become one of the most thoughtful voices on how we can harness technological advancement to improve life and work without losing our humanity in the process.

In this conversation, we connect key ideas between technology's impact on the future of work, individual lives and careers, and innovation efforts inside companies.

Kate shares her journey from linguistics major to tech veteran, which informs her powerful frameworks like the "Now Next Continuum" for strategic decision-making. She explains why digital transformation and innovation are fundamentally different (and why conflating them causes so many companies to struggle).

We explore the speed of technological change, the real implications of AI adoption, and why leaders need to ask "what could go right?" as often as they ask what could go wrong.

Then we get personal and Kate opens up about losing both her father and first husband within a decade, and how grief clarified her understanding of meaning and mortality—lessons that now shape everything she does.

This is a conversation about building a future that serves humanity, making strategic decisions under uncertainty, and finding meaning in both our work and our lives.

Behind her brilliance: Curiosity about people and the world

TOPICS DISCUSSED

• Kate's early career at Netflix and what it was like inside during the company's pivot from DVDs to streaming
• Why "fake it till you make it" is the wrong framing for career ambition
• The art of the cold email and high-agency self-positioning (with important caveats about 1999 vs. 2025)
• How to tell better stories about your capabilities and make sense of your career trajectory
• The dangerous gap between what technology enables us to do vs. what we should do
• Amazon Go stores as a case study in unintended social consequences at scale
• Why the speed of AI isn't really about the technology—it's about decisions made by tech leaders
• Minimum viable skilling: why prompt engineering is the new literacy
• How Kate uses AI for travel planning (and what it does well vs. what humans still need to do)
• The Now Next Continuum framework for strategic decision-making
• Digital transformation vs. innovation: why these are different and why it matters
• Strategic optimism and why most meetings focus on what could go wrong instead of what could go right
• The linguistic roots of meaning: how communication works and why it matters for business
• Losing her father to cancer and her first husband to suicide—and what grief taught her about meaning
• Neil Gaiman's insight: "The difference between comedy and tragedy is where you stop telling the story"
• Why futurism is less about prediction and more about preparation
• Climate change, science fiction, and books that make the future feel urgent but not hopeless
• How Kate curates her information diet and digests what she reads

THINGS MENTIONED

• Kate O'Neill
• What Matters Next by Kate O'Neill
• A Future So Bright by Kate O'Neill
• Surviving Death by Kate O'Neill
• Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
• Minneapolis Institute of Art
• Readwise
• Cold email guide from Next Play
• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson – Kate's book pick
• The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells – Kate's book pick