FUTUREPROOF.

Send us a text

Women have made strides in the workplace over the last few decades, but there’s still plenty of progress yet to be made. In particular, women are underrepresented within executive leadership of many organizations. Is that going to change in our lifetime? What progress are we making at championing gender diversity and allowing women to get ahead?

To answer that question, we turned to Lindsay Kaplan, who’s been a leader in the marketing & communications field for some time now. She first came to my attention when she joined Casper’s founding team to lead communications and brand engagement. In 2019, she co-founded Chief, the private network dedicated to connecting and supporting women in executive leadership.

On this episode we discuss Chief's mission, the company's COVID pivot, how the pandemic has hit working mothers especially hard, why Taylor Swift's "The Man" is a real thing, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg: her legacy and fear of what's to come next.

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

Send us a text

The New York Times has called Peter Shankman “a rockstar who knows everything about social media and then some.” He is a 5x best selling author, entrepreneur and corporate in-person and digital keynote speaker, focusing on customer service and the new and emerging customer and neuroatypical economy.  With three startup launches and exits under his belt, Peter is recognized worldwide for radically new ways of thinking about the customer experience, social media, PR, marketing, advertising, ADHD, and the new Neurodiverse Economy.

Peter’s Customer Service and Social Media clients have included American Express, Sprint, SAP, The US Department of Defense, Walt Disney World, and many others, so when we wanted to cover customer service and what the customer experience of tomorrow might look like, I knew Peter was the one we had to speak with.

On this episode we discuss what stellar customer service is these days, how a company figures out the ROI on a strong customer experience, and whether or not companies can still deliver those powerful customer experiences in the COVID era.

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

Send us a text

When we’re thinking about the future, one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle is this: how will our economy grow? Over the past few years, cannabis has been one of the most interesting industries to watch in that regard. It has had a rapid growth curve, and it’s more intriguing to many because of its complex legal situation. The best way to get a better understanding of the future of any industry is to enlist an expert, which is why we sought out Cy Scott.

Scott is the co-founder and CEO of Headset, the leading real-time cannabis consumer trends & market intelligence company. We talk to Cy about how he identified a need for a cannabis-specific analytics company, the thorny and unpredictable topic of legalization and how Headset prepares for an uncertain future, and much more - and it all starts now.

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

Send us a text

Matthew Yglesias co-founded Vox.com with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell in 2014. He's now a senior correspondent focused on politics and economic policy, and co-hosts "The Weeds" podcast twice a week. Yglesias is the author of three books, including his most recent, One Billion Americans, which is hitting stores as we speak, and makes a case for how Americans need to think bigger - not just in terms of population growth, but across the board. We discuss Yglesias's new book, the decline of the US on the world stage, and even that now-infamous Harper's letter.

Praise for One Billion Americans:
"One of those rare, sparkling books that sets out to argue a point that you are likely not to have a deeply settled opinion on, and then forces you to work through a whole series of interconnected views and assumptions you may not realize you had. Persuasive and fresh, even where it may fail to convince you, it succeeds in making you think. Really think."

—Chris Hayes, host of "All In" on MSNBC and the "Why is this Happening?" podcast and author of A Colony in a Nation

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

Send us a text

In this episode, we talk to Erich Joachimsthaler, a recovering academic and founder & CEO of Vivaldi Group, a digital transformation firm that has worked with the likes of American Express, Disney, Airbnb, Lego...you name it. He’s also the author of The Interaction Field, which is being released as this episode goes live, so be sure to pick it up. It’s a really interesting work which discusses the companies who will be winning in the marketplace of tomorrow. They’ll be generating, facilitating, and benefiting from data exchanges --from customers and stakeholders, but also from those you wouldn't expect to be in the mix, like suppliers, regulators, and even competitors.

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

Send us a text

What does a futuristic do on a day to day basis? On this episode, we talk to noted futurist Christian Kromme on how he became known as a futurist, how to study history to better predict the future, how to effectively forecast using pattern recognition, whether or not it’s better to be a generalist or a specialist, what’s the ideal time horizon to employ when making a prediction, and how to account for black swan events that throw off all of your previous estimates. 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.

Send us a text

I think 2020 has taught us all the importance of infrastructure. That, and face masks. Anyhow, Jeremy came across CALA recently, and I thought it was a startup that’s very of the moment. They’re a New York-based marketplace that provides a total retail infrastructure for influencers and existing fashion brands to design and launch their own fashion brands. Think of it as taking your idea from a napkin sketch to the product being delivered to a warehouse.

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

Send us a text

It’s a crazy world right now, and COVID has exposed quite a few problems with capitalism as it’s currently constructed. In Accountable: The Rise of Citizen Capitalism, Warren Valdmanis and Michael O’Leary take us inside the fight to save capitalism from itself. Corporations are broken, reflecting no purpose deeper than profit. But the tools we are relying on to fix them—corporate social responsibility, divestment, impact investing, and government control—risk making our problems worse. Instead, they propose a new economic model they call citizen capitalism that will generate prosperity for all, not just those who sit atop the earning chart, and will demand, above all else, accountability. 

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

Send us a text

Let’s face it: it’s not hard to list companies that have been big losers in 2020, right? And yet, there have been some bright spots. Zoom has been one of the darlings of 2020, with its live video platform taking off in the early days of the pandemic. And yet, often live video is not the right solution for you at a given moment - just like sometimes it’s better to text than to make a phone call.

Michael Litt is the Co-Founder and CEO of Vidyard, which helps with asynchronous video communication (as opposed to requiring you to be available on video in real-time like Zoom). Jeremy spoke to Michael on a wide range of topics, from the value of asynchronous video to growing during a pandemic to the downside of adding yet another tech tool to our arsenals.

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

Send us a text

How’d you subscribe to this podcast in the first place? Was it Apple Podcasts? Or, how’d you discover FUTUREPROOF. In the first place? Was it through a Facebook post, or a Google ad? Or maybe you’ve been following my work since you bought one of my books on Amazon. These companies are part of Big Tech: the companies every competitor seems to fear, and yet they’re also the ones us consumers are most beholden to. That’s part of why some of these companies’ leaders were on Capitol Hill for hearings recently. 

One of the journalists who knows these companies the best is Alex Kantrowitz, who was most recently a senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News and based in San Francisco. He’s now the author of Always Day One from Penguin Portfolio, where he discusses how Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have encouraged moving fast and challenging the status quo - and how we can all learn something from how these companies innovate.

To subscribe to Alex's Big Technology newsletter: https://bigtechnology.substack.com/
To subscribe to Alex's Big Technology podcast: https://redcircle.com/shows/big-technology-podcast

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