The Futurists

For decades, we cursed at evil cable and satellite TV companies. Now TV has been “unbundled.” Streaming on-demand video is available on every device. Surprise, surprise, nobody is happy. The cost of television has skyrocketed, audiences are fragmented across hundreds of services, and it’s a pain to find what we want to watch. Veteran TV analyst Alan Wolk of TV REV tells The Futurists about the cha...

We’re back this week with the final part of the amazing interview with world-leading futurist and science fiction legend Kim Stanley Robinson. We delve into generational thinking around economics and why the Martians of KSR’s space opera series have largely abandoned capitalism and traditional 20th century industrial thinking. We return to the topic of climate adaptation, and generally...

This week The Futurists hosts Brett and Rob host a guest that NY Times calls “one of the world’s most acclaimed living science fiction writers” – Kim Stanley Robinson. We dive into the Mars Trilogy and interplanetary colonization and exploration, we tackle climate shift and the economics of the world of the future. We get some background on his early career in sci-fi, we de...

Dr. Markku Wilenius is the Unesco Chair in Learning Society and Futures Education. This week on The Futurists, Markku shares his global perspective on emerging trends and regional conflicts, including the fate of the EU, the newly-active BRICs, Chinese military projection, the end of US hegemony, the emergence of new trade blocks and what lies beyond the limits of global society.  Dr Markku W...

Capitalism is dead, according to Yanis Varoufakis, the author of Technofeudalism. This week on The Futurists you’ll learn about the dramatic reconfiguration of the global economy, whereby profit has been replaced by rents and a flood of central bank money, leading to bigger bubbles and worse crises than ever before. Yanis calls this new system Cloud Capitalism.  Find Yanis Varoufakis on the W...

In this weeks TF, Brett King interviews Swedish Biohacker and Futurist, Hannes Sjoblad. The two futurists get into the evolution of biohacking and longevity treatments, the merging of man and machine through implants, neural/brain control interfaces and advanced robotic prosthetics. This is advanced application of technology for the future of health and life span.

What’s next in robotics with Marc Theermann, the Chief Strategy Officer of Boston Dynamics. Known as “the Bell Labs of robotics”,  this firm is famous for its mechanical menagerie of legged robots that includes Spot, Atlas, Stretch.  These autonomous robots can go anywhere a human can go, and to many places humans cannot, including mine fields. And now they are equipped with artificial intel...

Mark Pesce returns to The Futurists with a report about weird and wonderful discoveries at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show. Every year, 200,000 people converge at CES in Las Vegas to get a glimpse of the near future. Mark pushes far beyond mainstream press coverage to tell us about bleeding-edge progress in memristor chips, brain-computer interfaces, long-range drones, olfactory sensors, and th...

2023 was the hottest year on record in terms of temperature. ESG, sustainability, clean tech / green tech and corporate responsibility have been hot topics. Are we at war with climate? This week we feature Brett King’s recent sit down in Bangkok, Thailand with former banker, fintech investor and now venture capitalist, Paul Ark, with The Radical Fund, an early-stage VC fund investing in founders w...

Are you certain that every attendee in your Zoom meeting is the person they claim to be? Deep fakes have improved. VFX expert Carl Bogan demonstrates to The Futurists how easy it is to fabricate a persuasive fake persona. Politics and remote work will never be the same again. 

Boaz Ashkenazy is the CEO and founder of Simply Augmented. He’s on a mission to equip small and medium sized companies with AI superpowers. Boaz talks to the Futurists about the prospect of fully automated corporations, digitally augmented workforce, and how every company can get started on the process of AI reinvention. 

Tech entrepreneur Byron Reese has a pragmatic approach to the future. He has launched several startup companies, exiting three via M&A and two via IPO. He’s also the author of several books, including his newest, Agora. Byron spoke to the Futurists about superintelligence, collective intelligence, super organisms, and emergence. What can human organizations learn from bee hives?  The conflict...

In this weeks episode we are joined by Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at John Hopkins – Dr Sabine Stanley – to talk planetary science and her new book. We take a tour though the solar system and then get into the numerous surprises that have unfolded with our recent discoveries of exoplanets outside our solar system. We explore what we might find in a stellar backyard, but more impo...

In this episode, journalist, technologist and entrepreneur Marshall Kirkpatrick joins hosts Brett and Brian to discuss the way AI might change our lives, thinking and philosophy as a species. Marshall dives deep into the way we are learning to integrate AI into our conscious processes, and where it might be useful, and where it might be contentious. In the midst of arguments about the safety of AI...

Tracey Follows, the author and podcaster of The Future of You, explains how your digital identity will evolve. Custodial or self-sovereign? Centralized or Web3? Big Brother-style surveillance capitalism or liberty? What do we mean by digital identity when there is no government-issued credential?  

The hosts of the #1 Futurist Podcast THE FUTURISTS are back to talk emerging Artificial Intelligence regulation from Biden’s latest executive order, the UK and EU positions, and China’s take on AI. We also discuss Marc Andreessen’s TechnoOptimist Manifesto and why the Tech Giants aren’t necessarily the best people to be defining AI regulation.

This week we talk to Alex Tapscott about his new book Web 3, then the hosting team (Rob, Brett and Katie) talk about some of the macro changes within the Web3 & Web3D/Spatial computing space with Meta’s new RayBan smart glasses. 

Former CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame exposes the future of espionage and spy craft. The advent of artificial intelligence, especially deep fakes and a flood of disinformation, has made the task of  gathering reliable intelligence exponentially more difficult, with big implications for democracies. Listen to this episode to learn about the 17 US intelligence agencies, how 9/11 changed spy...

In this week’s show, we’re joined by Nikolas Badminton, Chief Futurist at  Futurist.com  and author of Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth. We discuss what inspired Nik to become a futurist, what’s ahead for professional futurism, the backstory of  Futurist.com , protopia and futures thinking towards 2100 and beyond.

Cathy Hackl provides strategic insight about virtual fashion to major brands Nike, Louis Vuitton, Clinique, Walmart and more. She tells The Futurists about the latest trends in spatial computing, immersive 3D entertainment, virtual worlds and the digital style preferences of Gen Alpha. Digital fashion is way, way bigger than buying skins on Fortnite.

Brett and Rob on the latest moves against Big Tech. The Writers Guild strikes a blow against imposed AI. Organized labor versus EVs. The US government brings antitrust suits against Amazon and Google. And a look at what the infamous “Pause AI” petition did and didn’t accomplish. 

As AI continues to develop at an unprecedented rate, the laws and regulations surrounding the technology have seemingly fallen behind the times. But can governments be trusted to keep AI in check?

In this weeks show we visit with Eric Edmeades, a philosopher, student of evolutionary biology and a former top 10 ranked professional tennis player. We delve into the habits of tribes in Africa and the Amazon and why their dietary habits show good habits we’ve lost as a result of modern lifestyles, and we debate how tech and science might change human biology over the coming decades. 

This week Marc Buckley joins Brett for a fireside chat on the role regenerative techniques hold for the future of the planet. As a member of the World Economic Forum and the UN advisory panel,  trained by Al Gore on climate response, Marc has a big role globally in policy setting for the emerging future. But Marc also emphasizes the role that each of us has in creating a sustainable world.

This week journalist and bestselling author of The Guttenburg Parenthesis, What Would Google Do? and Geeks Bearing Gifts, Jeff Jarvis joins us to talk media and content in the AI age. Jarvis is considered one of the Top 100 most influential media leaders (WEF/Davos). He believes AI’s impact on our society will be as impactful as the printing press, and helps us understand how institutions and soci...