FUTUREPROOF.

Send us a text

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a supply chain crisis that has disrupted peoples’ lives in every corner of the globe and continues to unfold. But the current crisis is just the tip of the iceberg of a much broader, pernicious, and long-term problem: the dark side of the “middleman economy.”

In her new book DIRECT: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source, on sale now! financial expert and Columbia Law professor Kathryn Judge reveals the surprising and insidious ways that middlemen rule our economy and our lives. While Amazon and Walmart are probably the most vivid examples of all-powerful middlemen, there are middlemen in domains beyond retail, like real estate, food, cars, cbanking, and even philanthropy. Obviously middlemen have gained their power for a reason – they have given consumers unprecedented choice, convenience, and lower costs—but as Kathryn discusses in her work, the benefits come at a steep cost to people, the economy, and our planet, so I’m excited to discuss her work with her now.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play - and make sure to follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn!

Send us a text

Encore presentation!

I don’t know how much time you spend thinking about things like how people move around cities and how inefficient urban mobility can be, but it’s admittedly something I’ve been thinking about since I developed the logo and branding for autonomous driving startup Mobileye, now part of Intel. How people get around, and even how we park, is an essential part of the future we live in. To that end, I wanted to speak to Alex Israel. He’s the CEO co-founder of Metropolis, the autonomous commerce platform disrupting the traditional real estate industry to make way for urban mobility - starting with the dirty underbelly of parking. I wanted to talk to Alex about his computer vision-based solution and autonomous vehicles in general, so I’m looking forward to this chat.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play - and make sure to follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn!

Send us a text

Encore presentation! Alec Ross is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Industries of the Future as well as The Raging 2020s, which came out this past September. During the Obama administration, he served as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State, and he’s appeared on CNN Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNBC “Squawk Box”, Bloomberg TV, among many other programs.  

I wanted to talk to Alec since I know he has well-informed perspectives on issues ranging from privacy to sustainability to diversity and workers’ rights, and I feel like we’re at an inflection point, as the world rages amidst pandemic, rising inequality and increasingly frequent climate disasters, Alec has some interesting ideas about how we move forward.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play - and make sure to follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn!

Send us a text

Future Forum is a consortium launched by Slack focused on building a way of working that is flexible, inclusive, and connected. They conduct research and convene executives to design a people-centered and digital-first workplace. You might be familiar with their quarterly Future Forum Pulse survey of 10,000+ knowledge workers around the globe. They also produce playbooks to help decision-makers tackle real-world challenges like how to measure the success of digital-first teams, how to make hybrid work work, and how to build for diversity, equity, and inclusion

Today we have the Future Forum’s leadership in the house: Brian Elliott, Sheela Subramanian, and Helen Kupp.  They’re here to discuss, among other things, their new book: “How the Future Works” —which was such an audacious title, it intrigued the heck out of me, and having read an advance copy, I’m happy to say it delivers. 

Send us a text

Saatchi Art is the world’s largest online art gallery. The platform has over 100,000 artists from 100 countries and sells more than $50 million per year in art. Recently they announced their moving into the world of NFTs, and I wanted to speak to the person responsible for leading the company's efforts, Wayne Chang.

On this episode we discuss what an NFT is, what are some of the benefits of NFTs, what it means to 'mint' an NFT, how they're stored, their relationship to crypto, and more.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play - and make sure to follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn!

Send us a text

The term “purpose” has been hijacked. The vast majority of companies today deploy corporate purpose superficially as a promotional vehicle to makes themselves appear virtuous to the outside world or to rally employees. But purpose—if used correctly—can be a transformative way of doing business. In his book, distinguished Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati argues that companies must embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, treating it as a radically new operating system for the enterprise.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play - and make sure to follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn!

Send us a text

Barry J. Nalebuff is the Milton Steinbach Professor at the Yale School of Management. Nalebuff applies game theory to business strategy and is the co-founder of one of America's fastest-growing companies, Honest Tea. He’s also the author of quite a few books, including his latest book, Split the Pie: a radical new way to negotiate, which just hit shelves. 

"You'll never think of negotiations the same way again," writes FUTUREPROOF. alum Zoe Chance about Barry's book—enough said. 

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play - and make sure to follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn!

Send us a text

Cathy O'Neil is a mathematician, data scientist, and author. She’s written books on data science, including the New York Times best-seller Weapons of Math Destruction, which is an influential source for the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence community—and where I first started following her work. 

She’s now the author of The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation, which just came out a week or two back, and I’m excited to talk to her all about it, including what exactly a shame machine is, what’s the difference between punching up and punching down, and even if shame can be a good think and lead to societal growth. 

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play - and make sure to follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn!

Send us a text

One of the things we discuss on this show often is what the future will look like. Another key theme we keep coming back to is how individuals and companies can increase their impact so they can build the future they’re looking to create.

To that end, there was a book that came out right at the beginning of the year you might’ve missed, and I sure hope you didn’t. The book is SMART GROWTH: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company, and it’s by Whitney Johnson, who’s CEO of Disruption Advisors, #8 on the Thinkers50 list of leading business thinkers in the world, and host of the popular Disrupt Yourself podcast. I talk to her about the concept of Smart Growth, how individuals and companies take stock of where they are now in order to help figure out where they ought to go next, how the Great Resignation is tied into the ideas she discusses in her book, and much more. 

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play - and make sure to follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn!

Send us a text

What if we could imagine the future and even plan for it? What if there was a way to feel secure while still bracing for the next “unthinkable” event? What if we could still feel hope for the future while squarely facing its challenges? Jane McGonigal believes we can imagine the “unimaginable.” Why is she so confident? In 2008 and 2010, McGonigal and her team at the Institute of the Future ran simulations that predicted human behavior in the face of a hypothetical global respiratory pandemic in precise detail, from social distancing to masking to wildfires and even the spread of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and the unbridgeable political divide. Cut to 2020/2021, and not only were McGonigal’s predictions proven correct, but her findings have also shown that the participants in the simulation found themselves less shell shocked when COVID-19 hit. And I thought we could all stand to learn from her. 

Jane is a future forecaster and a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems— andin her spare time, she’s the New York Times bestselling author of Reality Is Broken and SuperBetter, and her TED talks have more than 15 million views. I talk to her today about IMAGINABLE: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, which came out this week.

I talk to her about getting better at imagining the unimaginable, why facial recognition technologies and climate change stand to have an impact on the years ahead, and the concept of urgent optimism. This is one of my favorites in recent memory, and I think it’ll be one of yours as well—so let’s jump right in!

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play - and make sure to follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn!