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In light of the events at the US Capitol, we wanted to reshare a conversation we had with historian Allan Lichtman in October. Professor Lichtman has taught at American University since 1973; famously, he created the The Keys to the White House model, which he created with a Russian seismologist (really!) in 1981. 

Lichtman's model uses 13 True/False criteria to predict whether the candidate of an incumbent party will win or lose the next election for the U.S. president, and he's been right in every election since, including Trump's 2016 win.

We spoke about Lichtman's predictions for 2020 right before Election Day, as well as how to factor new unexpected variables (say, a pandemic) into your model, and how to get better at forecasting on an ongoing basis.

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It's the end of the year - thank goodness! We thought we would celebrate by bringing you some of our favorite conversations of the past year that center on the future of diversity and inclusion.

Today's guests:

• Former diversity chief at Apple, Christie Smith (full episode here)
• Dartmouth Tuck School of Business professor Dr. Ella Bell Smith (full episode here)
• Big Think founder and CEO  Victoria Montgomery Brown (full episode here)
• Chief co-founder Lindsay Kaplan (full episode here)

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Andy Zimmerman is president of frog, a leading global design and strategy firm, and part of the Capgemini Group. Prior to joining frog, he was the managing director of Accenture New Businesses, where he launched the majority of what is now Accenture Digital. Previously, he was a managing director at idealab, one of the first and most successful incubators, and the global managing partner for ebusiness at PwC.  

On this episode we cover human-centered design and why it's so critical, how augmented reality and virtual reality will inform customer experience over the next few years, how the pandemic might change the types of experiences that consumers crave, and how to walk the fine line between being too ahead of the curve and too behind.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.

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One of the things Jeremy has encountered in his research is that people with diverse life experiences are actually more likely to be more reliable in forecasting what’s to come. That’s why we wanted to speak to Vinit Bharara. He’s worn quite a few hats. Now he’s the Founder & CEO of Some Spider Studios, the folks behind Scary Mommy, Fatherly & The Dad - and along with his brother Preet Bharara, he’s also the brains behind CAFE, which covers news, politics and law. He was also the co-founder of and COO of Quidsi, which sold to Amazon in 2011 for over $500 million. Since he’s had a pretty good track record to date of picking winners, I wanted us to have him on to discuss his past successes, becoming customer-centric, the silver linings of COVID, how to identify opportunities - and how to know when it’s time to move on. So let’s jump right in!

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Paco Underhill is an environmental psychologist, author, and the founder of a behavioral research and consulting company Envirosell. He’s the best-selling author of Why We Buy, Call of the Mall and What Women Want, and his reach has been massive: his books have been translated into over 26 languages. We wanted to have Paco on since it’s an incredibly disruptive time for retail, and I figured there aren’t many better people to predict where retail goes from here. 

On this episode we cover:

• How pessimistic should we be about the future of retail?
• What innovations will be the most impactful to the retail landscape?
• Will aging consumers ever cross over to online retail?

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. 

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We don’t know about you, but we’ve been spending more time at home this year, which has made us highly cognizant of how reliant we are on physical spaces that are in need of being serviced on an ongoing basis. One company trying to disrupt the home services these days is HomeX, which is leveraging technology to create a quantifiably better experience for homeowners - whether it’s virtually diagnosing home issues, providing step-by-step guidance to fix the problem, or helping to schedule a repair with a trusted local professional.

The company’s co-founder and CTO, Simon Weaver, has spent the last 20+ years working with some of the world’s biggest companies - such as Microsoft and Salesforce - to build distributed autonomous systems, such as the tech behind Amazon’s Alexa. 

On this episode: 

• What are the home services industry's biggest problems?
• Is it harder to use science and technology to disrupt a traditionally analog industry?
• How has the home services industry been broken specifically for consumers and providers?
• What should entrepreneurs starting out do to find new opportunities for disruption and innovation? 

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. 

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Victoria Montgomery-Brown is CEO and co-founder of Big Think, the knowledge company that makes people and companies smarter and faster through short-form video with the world’s best thinkers and doers. Since founding Big Think in 2007, Victoria has built the company from a fledgling thought-leadership media platform to the leading knowledge company for ideas and soft skills.

We had Victoria on to discuss her new book, DIGITAL GODDESS: The Unfiltered Lessons of a Female Entrepreneur, the future representation of women among Fortune 500 CEOs, whether female entrepreneurs are getting funded and the impact the pandemic is having on them, and how leaders and innovators have to think differently heading into 2021. 

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. 

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As you know, we geek out getting to speak to guests we can learn from, so it’s extra special when we can track down two people to learn from in the same week.

Po Bronson is a former finance and tech journalist covering Silicon Valley for Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and an op ed contributor for The Wall Street Journal who’s now the Managing Director of IndieBio, the world’s #1 biotechnology accelerator, founded by Arvind Gupta, who now co-leads global VC firm Mayfield’s engineering biology practice.

In their new book, Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner, Bronson and Gupta offer a vision of the future that uses cutting-edge biotech to explore the deepest mysteries of the 21st century. In the book, they use their first-hand experience funding technologies that solve the world's most complex problems—like how to counteract climate change, dwindling bee populations, cloning human organs, and much  more— often involving genetic engineering.

 As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.

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For our 100th episode, we wanted to try something a little different. You’re going to hear what the team behind this show has found most interesting from the conversations we’ve had with futurists and leaders from across a wide variety of disciplines. We’re going to bring you some of our favorite clips from our archive, narrated by Jeremy and his team of motley producers. If you've never listened to an episode before, you're in for a treat.

This episode features:

• Author Nir Eyal
• Washington Post CMO Miki Toliver King
• Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Jason Feifer
• Toronto mayor John Tory
• Advertising icon Cindy Gallop
• Vox Co-founder Matthew Yglesias
• Chief co-founder Lindsay Kaplan
• Journalist & author Alex Kantrowitz

 As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.

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If there’s anything we’ve noticed from our work on this show, it’s that sometimes society focuses on the bright, shiny object instead of the quote-unquote unsexy technologies and products we as humans need to survive. One of those unsexy topics is the fact that we all have something in common: we’re all aging, every single one of us, and we don’t talk enough about meeting the needs of consumers as they age. Mia Abbruzzese and Alexandra Fennell launched Attn: Grace, the first cleaner, greener personal care brand for women 40+, starting with the $2.5B bladder leakage market. They’re on a mission to destigmatize aging, and we wanted to have them on to discuss how they’re trying to launch a disruptive product in such a challenging year.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.