The Futurists

This week Lisa Bodell, Top-50 ranked futurist, author, speaker and founder of FutureThink joins the Futurists. Bodell shares how she teaches structured scenario planning and why “real futurists use models, not guesses”. We discuss scenario planning at Pfizer, that eliminated thousands of hours through their “kill a stupid rule” initiative, and how AI will lead to more meaningful work and less of it. Brett hosts this one solo from Dubai with Lisa in Westchester, NY. 

Peter Hinsson is a best selling author and industry strategist focused on leadership and change management during turbulent times. His n ewest book is “The Uncertainty Principle”, arriving at the precise moment when business leaders must confront both massive geopolitical turmoil and runaway technological change. Don’t miss this lively discussion about the trends and management strategies that will shape the enterprise of the future.

What happens when we pass the point of technological change so profound that we can no longer predict or comprehend the future? Pay attention because it’s coming soon. For decades, futurists have theorized that the compound impact of converging, accelerating technologies will result in a singularity: that liminal moment when society is irreversibly transformed. This week David S Rose, New York City’s greatest angel investor and a prolific entrepreneur, joins The Futurists to share his perspectives about the experience of living through the knee of exponential change. Brace yourself.  

This week Brett and Rob take a check on the latest in AI news diving into the growing requirements for AI infrastructure, and the advances being made in Agentic-AI. We dive into Anthropic and Open AI’s latest announcements including the $6.5Bn acquisition by Open AI of Jony Ive’s revenue-less and customer-less startup, and we look at investments in the UAE in the world’s largest AI data center.

Doug Shapiro, a leading analyst in media trends and the writer behind the Mediator newsletter, discusses Hollywood's seismic shifts due to AI. He reveals how the creative landscape is evolving, with generative AI redefining content creation and storytelling. Shapiro emphasizes the migration of value in the media supply chain and the role of platforms like YouTube and TikTok in this transformation. He also examines the demise of traditional middlemen and the rise of new gatekeepers, ultimately predicting an era of infinite content for audiences.

Colin Megill joins the Futurists to describe a new model for finding consensus in a time of political chaos and intense partisan division. He is the inventor of Pol.is, a powerful open-source platform for coordinating the feedback, opinions, and preferences of large dispersed groups. Polis has been successfully deployed by governments in Asia and Europe to find pockets of agreement amid partisan rancor.  If you crave an alternative to political division and polarization, don’t miss this interview.

In this week’s episode of THE FUTURISTS, host Brett King sits down one on one with Dave Birch to talk about the future of AI based payments, money and the concepts around Agentic AI such as KYA (Know-your-Agent instead of KYC Know Your Customer) or how we’ll tell if specific agents have the authority to make payments, etc. And we get into the utility problem of money in a highly autonomous world. This is future of money, identity and payments all wrapped into one with two of the most future thinking people in the finance space today. 

This week, frequent guest and friend of The Futurists, Ross Dawson, takes over the hosting chair to speak with Joanna Lepore about Foresight and Vision(s) of the Future. Ross, founder of AHT Group (Advanced Human Technologies Group) and the futures think tank Future Exploration Network, introduces us to Joanna Lepore. In 2024, Joanna founded and now co-leads Foresight Inside Group (FIG), an invite-only network for corporate futurists. Previously, she established and led Foresight at McDonald’s global HQ and Mars Wrigley, helping to push the strategies of some of the world’s best-known brands into the future. Motivated by the power of diverse perspectives, she also created and hosts Looking Outside, a podcast to share those perspectives. This episode is packed with powerful and practical insights into the future, offering inspiration on how to seize today’s opportunities and drive change in a transforming world. 

In this week’s show Brett and Rob discuss why the Administration were happy to bring the world’s markets to the brink of global recession and why it’s happening now? Is this a massive, economy scale Pump and Dump or is it an existential threat of China surpassing the U.S. as the world’s largest economy? Will these tariffs put any dent in China’s meteoric rise? Let’s find out.

Lauren Ducrey is a poet who developed an authentic persona for Google’s automated assistant in France, Senegal and other Francophone nations. In the process she discovered insights about the intersection of art, linguistics, and human cognition in the age of AI.  She tells the Futurists about artistic integrity, what humans can do that machines cannot, and the benefits of collaborative creativity in the enterprise.