Future Cast FM

Divya is an educator specializing in neurodiversity, special education, and language-based learning disabilities. She grew up in Singapore, studied world politics at a liberal arts college in upstate New York, and spent seven years at a school moving from associate teacher to lead teacher to case coordination — running classrooms, developing curriculum, and mentoring incoming educators. Now she's back in Singapore, working out what a consultancy built on everything she knows about how different brains learn.

We cover 'the Bank of Divya' - what happens every time you break a promise to yourself, why naming a business feels like naming a baby, kueh lapis as a metaphor for layered thinking, Miss Lee the robotics teacher who made science feel like play, memorizing an entire Mandarin passage character by character thirty minutes before reciting it, why diagnoses should be tools instead of boxes, the classroom chess of rearranging social dynamics among eleven-year-olds, why punishment is a last resort and what works instead, textured Kindle cases and other ways to keep your body busy while your brain works, the little creature piloting the meat suit, what if it's not anxiety but thrill, and emptying the creativity bucket so new ideas have somewhere to land.

People & Concepts Mentioned:

Kueh lapis — rainbow-layered Singaporean dessert

Executive functioning

Impact vs. intent blueprints — classroom reflection tool

EdTech Asia — education conference in November

James Carter served five years as a U.S. Navy hospital corpsman, the combat medic attached to Marine units. These days he calls himself "multi-local" — splitting his time across places rather than settling in one, most recently taking on a building renovation in Morocco. He resists fixed titles, preferring to describe himself as "an organized junk drawer": a working collection of skills and interests picked up along the way, none of which quite belong in any one category.

This is the first FutureCast recorded out in nature.

We get into: the difference between war and conflict and whether humans will ever see the end of either, why he'd rather we'd descended from bonobos than chimps, Buckminster Fuller's idea that you don't repair a broken system but build something new at its edge, how the social contract has been quietly rewritten since the Industrial Revolution, why an organized junk drawer is a better way to hold an identity than a tidy silverware drawer, belonging as a choice rather than a feeling and the gap between being welcome somewhere and truly living there, the study suggesting people end up happier with choices they're not allowed to reverse, Obama's rule about acting at fifty-one percent certainty, why moving somewhere to "pioneer" a community usually backfires and what integrating looks like instead.

Timestamps

6:38 How James introduces himself: medic, neurobiology, multi-local

10:40 The organized junk drawer

17:59 Choosing your chaos vs. chaos imposed on you

24:32 Is the enemy real? Social media and complex systems

28:41 Is war uniquely human?

31:23 The social contract since the Industrial Revolution

34:33 Why record these conversations in nature

40:42 War vs. conflict, and whether it ever ends

42:57 Chimps, bonobos, and resolving conflict

45:55 Seeing people as people

54:25 "Left vs. right" feels antiquated

58:54 You never start from a blank slate — Buckminster Fuller

1:01:21 Going multi-local and finding fertile ground

1:09:01 You don't pioneer a community, you integrate

1:15:16 Neutral ground (and baseball in Morocco)

1:17:49 Fruit pause: rapid-fire silly questions

1:30:33 Why everyone's a "Doctor," and medic vs. doctor

1:35:59 The estimation game: a million vs. a billion

1:42:33 What does it mean to belong?

1:48:40 Welcome vs. belonging; belonging to a story

1:59:45 Choosing, the art study, and Obama's 51% rule

2:07:41 Three virtues for a cult

2:13:54 Sentimental objects, and a gift to a stranger

Find James: in the wild

People & Concepts Mentioned:

• Buckminster Fuller — systems thinker; the geodesic dome, and building new structures at the edges of old ones
• Chimps vs. bonobos — two ways of resolving conflict, and which one we resemble
• Internal vs. external locus of control — acting on the world versus being acted upon
• Barack Obama — deciding once he's about fifty-one percent sure
• Karl Marx — where unequal systems eventually lead
• Mary Poppins — the bottomless bag, as a foil for the junk drawer
• Ramadan & Eid al-Fitr — the village celebration behind the gift-giving story
• The Industrial Revolution — the last comparable pivot in how we organize work and value
• A behavioral-economics choice study — people rated art they couldn't swap higher than art they could

Janine Manning is an angel investor from in New Zealand. She is practical and brilliant in a humble, curious sort of way. Over the last 15 years, she's backed a small number of companies and stayed actively involved on their boards — sitting in on all-hands calls, asking the questions other directors don't, and trying to read where the startups she's invested in really sit in their use of AI when she isn't a technical expert herself.

This was the first FutureCast in a new format. Instead of a long-form interview, we used the conversation itself as a working session — picking apart a real problem, ideating on solutions, and then running the transcript through a process to turn it into a product spec and prototype. Janine didn't prep anything. She brought the problem she keeps hitting.

We get into: why "yes, of course we're using AI" is the polite version of putting up a wall, the calendar problem that's still unsolved (Google, Outlook, WhatsApp, and a paper diary all fighting for the same space), the life manager idea Janine has been waiting for someone to build, sub-calendars that roll up to a main view without doubling everything, what happens to a family when nobody knows where the bank accounts are, Xero as a cautionary tale about adding features that make a good product worse, drafting a legal letter with ChatGPT and walking into the lawyer's office with the grunt work done, the Goldilocks problem of AI use in companies, why problem identification has to come before the tech, and what happens when you take a podcast transcript and ask it to build itself a product.

Find Janine:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janine-manning-71b6a41b/

Find Tay:

• FutureCast: https://futurecast.fm

The Mockup from the pod: https://hearth-tawny.vercel.app/
(all data in this is fabricated, including names)

People & Concepts Mentioned:

• Xero — the New Zealand accounting platform, used as an example of feature creep making a good product worse
• ChatGPT — used for drafting a legal letter before the lawyer review
• Google Calendar and Outlook — the walled gardens that won't talk to each other
• LinkedIn's contact import — early viral growth example referenced in the conversation
• WhatsApp family groups — the default but messy community calendar
• The Goldilocks problem — too much AI, too little AI, just right

Carly Feldman is an integrative nutrition health coach, chef, and DJ based between Berlin and New York. She specializes in helping neurodivergent brains — especially those with ADHD — navigate dopamine, motivation, and the gap between knowing what to do and doing it. She runs the Dopamine Reset Challenge and is launching a Dopamine Reset Retreat in Bavaria. She also DJs in clubs in Berlin and New York with what she calls her truest artistic expression — messy transitions, impulsive selection, and a hard-won willingness to post the imperfect set.

Carly and I have crossed paths in a few cities and keep landing in the same global network of weird, generous, unapologetic humans. We recorded this on March 31, 2026 while she was back in New York for a month, deep in retreat-planning and a few degrees more overwhelmed than her usual.

We get into: the morning phone trap and why we keep falling into it even when we coach other people not to, procrastinating on one hard thing by doing another hard thing, the ADHD brain's addiction to novelty and how to stop fighting it, ChatGPT confirmation bias and the client who spent three days convinced she had a parasite, Tay's failed experiment trying to record a podcast with an AI, being a "novelty slut" and the case for limiting your own options, maximizers vs satisficers and why a vegan menu was a relief, what makes a value a real value (it's what you get angry about), the homophobic guy in Mazunte and the love letter Carly wrote him with a heart on the outside, the DJ back-to-back from four years ago that came full circle in a New York club last week, the imperfect New Year's set that became her most-played, and Rejection Collection (we're maybe doing it).

Find Carly:

• Website: https://carlyfeldman.com
• Dopamine Reset Retreat: https://carlyfeldman.com/dopamineresetretreat
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/karlimusik

Find Tay:

• Nature Club — a platform for finding activities, retreats, and classes based in nature (mentioned in this episode)
• Rejection Collection — app concept discussed in this episode

Books Mentioned:

• Existential Kink — Carolyn Elliott

People & Concepts Mentioned:

• Maximizers vs satisficers — research distinction on decision-making and happiness
• Decision fatigue — the cost of having unlimited options
• Rejection therapy — collecting rejections as a resilience practice
• Nicholas Jaar — electronic musician; the concert that was a gateway into Carly's NYC community
• Burning Man community — the global network seeded by one introduction in 2016

Dwane van der Sluis is one of a kind. He studied AI at Waikato University in 1988 (back when training AI meant putting chickens in Skinner boxes), one of the original inventors of the Zorb, did signal processing for the New Zealand Defence Force on P3 Orions, spent over a decade in London engineering intraday release systems that handled around 10 billion US dollars a day at an investment bank, and went back to UCL in his mid-40s for another Masters in AI. He's now working on the continual learning problem in reinforcement learning - trying to get machines to learn new environments without forgetting the old ones, with something closer to a two-year-old's sample efficiency.

I've known Dwane for years and every time we sit down it goes deep quickly.

We get into: why you have to choose your hard, the cost of leaving a job before the story is finished and how it narrows the kinds of stories you can have next, how Zorb got built and why it could only have happened in New Zealand, the washing machine cycle, the camera coffee club that worked better once it stopped having presentations, why the lens matters more than the sensor, why LLMs are educated rather than intelligent, the formula from economics that solved a mystery in neuroscience, how a fire chief knows to yell "everyone out", the cosmic tickle and a coffee in Brazil that linked two strangers across continents, rejection therapy and collecting a thousand nos, why we're the missing billionaires of our own lives, and Dwane's question for the next guest ...

Find Dwane:

• LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dwane-van-der-sluis-416437b

Books Mentioned:

• Creativity, Inc - Ed Catmull
• The Idea Factory - Jon Gertner (Bell Labs)
• The Medici Effect - Frans Johansson
• The Missing Billionaires - Victor Haghani & James White

People & Concepts Mentioned:

• Rich Sutton - reinforcement learning pioneer
• Andrew Akers - Zorb co-founder
• Martec's Law - technology evolves exponentially, humans adapt linearly
• Before Sunset / Before Sunrise - Richard Linklater
• Charles Bukowski on style
• AGI Conference and California Institute of Machine Consciousness
• Catastrophic forgetting in reinforcement learning
• Einstein on compounding

I speak with an AI-generated conversation partner built on ElevenLabs and Claude Code (Haiku 4.5) - a character called 'Sol Maren' who claims to run invite-only supper clubs and grew up on a houseboat.
The intention is to test how good AI can be at having podcast-style, wide ranging conversations. This one is laughable. I'll run this experiment monthly. My prediction is by August it will seem like a human to human convo and by the end of the year the conversations will be unlike most. I really have no idea where this will go.

We get into: how quickly you can tell something's off, the difference between a parlor trick and a genuinely strange question, my AI guests' monologue, the skin-flush fact about human perception.

This is the first in a recurring experiment. One AI conversation per month, same format, tracking how the tools change over time.

Recorded: March 25, 2026 Tool used: ElevenLabs, Claude Haiku 4.5

Irina is a somatic coach, healer, and teacher based in Boulder, Colorado. Born in Uzbekistan and raised in Brooklyn, she spent over a decade traveling through Asia and Central America - studying with elders, training in yoga and somatic therapies, and collecting practices from traditions she was drawn to. She works with clients through core energetics, shadow work, among many other things - too many to do justice to in words.

We get into: practices of opening and closing a container, fire, the element of truth, buying a one-way ticket to Asia at 20, what it took to commit to a place after a decade of nomadism, jumping on a trampoline in downtown Boulder at 6am every morning, our fitness accountability group, how she uses future tools to analyze client sessions through a plethora of lenses (Enneagram, Human Design, Gene Keys, Astrology (both Western and Vedic), Matrix of Destiny), building a future version of yourself in AI and asking it for advice, as well as walking me through a live reframe from "I can't..." to "I get to..." and the treasure chest question...

Find Irina:

• On her website https://www.spiritsoma.com/
• Kanna Pathogenics | plant medicine supplement company
  

Find Tay:

• Nature Club | platform for nature-based activities (in development)

People & Concepts Mentioned:

• Osho — "The mind is the most dangerous master or the most beautiful servant"
• William Reich — first therapist to put the body on the map; character structures
• Lakota sun dance tradition — five-day prayer practice with no food or water
• Papatuanuku (Maori), Pachamama (Andean) — Earth Mother across cultures
• Core energetics — body-based therapeutic approach
• Kanna (Sceletium tortuosum) — South African plant medicine for mood and stress
• The Summer I Turned Pretty — show/movie by Jenny Han
• Lightning in a Bottle — transformational festival
• Nyepi — Balinese day of silence
• SuperWhisper — voice-to-text tool
• Tiruvannamalai — holy city in India with Ganesh temple

Victoria Mariscal is a founder, agency owner, and the host of Minding Her Own Business — a podcast and community for multi-hyphenate women navigating their careers, business, and everything in between.
She runs an agency that embeds into businesses to handle operations and digital marketing, with a recent pivot into AI-enabled services. Through Minding Her Own Business, she leads networking events, webinars, and education initiatives focused on helping women adopt AI — a space where women statistically lag 50% behind their male counterparts.

We get into: why her team renamed Claude "Claudia" and retired ChatGPT to side piece status, working with her long-time designer and building AI into their workflows, the gap between living in a tech echo chamber and watching your family still use Google search etc., teaching a 24-year-old to use Higgsfield and watching her surpass you in a week, why she makes her team spend two hours a week learning something new and then present it.

Find Victoria:

• Website: victoriamariscal.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/victoria-m-mariscal
• Instagram: instagram.com/_mindingherownbusiness
• Minding Her Own Business | Podcast + community for multi-hyphenate women
  

Tools Mentioned:

• Claude / Claude Code / Cowork — Victoria's primary AI stack ("Claudia")
• Whisper / Super Whisper — voice-to-text
• Higgsfield — AI image generation and animation
• Opus AI — video clip cutting and virality prediction
• Riverside — podcast recording platform
  

People & Concepts Mentioned:

• Myosin.xyz — decentralized marketing network, AI-Enabled Marketer community
• Skool — online community platform
• Maven — education platform where Victoria teaches
• The 50% AI adoption gap for women — stat Victoria cited on slower female adoption of AI tools

Annette is a Mexican-American filmmaker, DJ, and the founder of For Me — a non-explicit erotic content platform built for women and FLINTA people. She grew up between Mexico City and the US in an artistic family, studied acting at Boston University's conservatory, and spent over a decade running a jewelry brand with her sister out of New York City. After COVID, she moved to Tepoztlan - a mountain town south of Mexico City, started working in a post-production studio, directed her first short film, and began building For Me.

We get into: what women said they didn't want versus what they couldn't yet articulate that they did, why Bridgerton and erotic fiction outsell most femme-gaze porn platforms, how the whole crew wore lingerie to make shooting scenes feel safer, the deferred life plan, walking the hard path in life and in relationship because sometimes that's just the way it needs to be, the cosmic giggle, your best performance is often when you try to act as badly as you can, and the fear of bad taste as a creative limiter.

"If you had the opportunity to give a high school graduation speech to your high school self, what would the thesis statement of the speech be?" — Annette

Find Annette:

• For Me: https://www.for-me.mx/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/for_me________________/

Books Mentioned:

• Come As You Are — Emily Nagoski (arousal non-concordance, women's sexuality)

People & Concepts Mentioned:

• Ram Dass — "in order to become nobody you have to be somebody"
• Ezra Klein — referenced a podcast segment about good taste outpacing your output as an artist
• Heated Rivalry — popular erotic fiction book referenced as example of what women actually consume
• Bridgerton — Netflix series as evidence of non-explicit erotic content women choose
• Wuthering Heights — referenced as non-explicit storytelling women seek out
• LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts) — acting exercise of performing badly on purpose
• Sustain Release — music festival in New York
• Waking Life — festival in Crato, Portugal where Tay and Annette met
• Burning Man — Tay's story about serendipity in the line and "adventures for God"
• The Akashic Records — referenced in the context of living your life as a story worth reading
• Tepoztlan — mountain town in Mexico known for mysticism, healers, and plant ceremonies
• FLINTA — female, lesbian, intersex, transgender, agender
• Arousal non-concordance — the gap between subjective arousal and physical response, differs significantly between men and women

George Windsor is a world-class researcher and consultant who has spent the last decade building running a huge amount of the UK tech (and other) ecosystems. He did his PhD on migration and entrepreneurship at Loughborough University, founded and led the research team at Tech Nation, and was the Director of Research at Notion Capital.

He currently works independently across VC advisory, tech ecosystems, and international development — including writing a startup strategy for Ethiopia through Systemic Innovation's FCDO-funded work in East Africa.

We get into: how George decides what to work on when every project is interesting, a European grant-giving foundation with 1,500 funds and how they might understand how their investments interact, the difference between taking a snapshot and seeing a system, what happens when you can collect more data than you know what to do with, trying to measure informal entrepreneurship in a country of 130 million people, the polite fiction of representative survey samples, why the middle of the analysis is the part AI is speeding up but the beginning and end still need a human, the case for getting something to 50% and sharing it with critical friends, a trader's game where we both wildly underestimate how many species are endangered, Polymarket as a sophisticated extension of our addiction to gambling, rematerialisation, the strange reality that defence tech is suddenly part of mainstream conversation, and the taking-versus-making dichotomy in value creation.

"If you were not doing what you're doing now, and you couldn't do what you're doing now, what would you like to be doing?" — George Windsor

Resources

Find George:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/windsorgeorge/

People & Concepts Mentioned:

• Dealroom — world-leading startup and scaleup data platform
• Systemic Innovation / Scott Walker — systems change innovation practice, FCDO-funded work in Africa
• Notion Capital — series A business software VC based in London
• Tech Nation — UK tech ecosystem body (now acquired by Founders Forum Group)
• Nesta — UK innovation foundation; ran the Longitude Prize and Political Futures Tracker
• Isambard — high-value manufacturing near cities (Notion Capital portfolio)
• Cognor — AI for problem-solving in large utilities (Notion Capital portfolio, founded by Ben of Five AI)
• UK Tech Cluster Group / Sunderland Software City — regional tech ecosystem building
• Replanet — enabling corporates to invest in environmental restoration
• Cure8 — climate tech marketplace (spelled C-U-R-8)
• Polymarket — prediction market platform
• The Medici Effect — book about cross-industry innovation driving breakthroughs
• The Longitude Prize — historical challenge prize for calculating longitude; modern Nesta iteration
• Behavioural Insights Team — applying behavioural science to policy
• IUCN Red List — 48,646 species threatened with extinction out of 172,620 assessed
• Createch — emerging technology applied in the creative industries (DCMS/Royal Anniversary Trust mapping)
• RISA Fund (Research and Innovation Systems for Africa) — FCDO-funded, working in Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia