What does it mean to build for a future you may never personally benefit from? In this episode of Wealth Office, Michael Macfarlane is joined by Nicolas De Santis - a dot-com pioneer who helped shape the early internet, co-founding Opodo, one of Europe’s first large-scale online travel platforms, and later creating one of the world’s earliest digital currencies - long before crypto entered the mainstream.

After decades spent inside the machinery of technology, capital and growth, Nicolas’s focus has shifted from building companies to understanding something far bigger: how technology, entrepreneurship and private capital will determine the future of humanity itself.

At the centre of this conversation is Nicolas’s concept of visioneering - the discipline of imagining possible futures and actively building towards them, rather than remaining trapped in short-term cycles of optimisation and profit.

Drawing on philosophy, science fiction, systems thinking and real-world experience, he argues that the future is not something we predict, but something we choose to create. Together, Michael and Nicolas explore:

• What the dot-com era teaches us about today’s AI boom
• Why every major technological cycle produces both progress and bubbles
• The three possible planetary futures facing humanity — progress, stagnation, or self-destruction
• Why governance, not technology, is the decisive factor in which future emerges
• How private and family-controlled capital may be better positioned than governments or institutions to fund long-term human progress
• Why value creation, not capital accumulation, is the real responsibility of the next generation
• The growing role of Asia in shaping the technological and economic future of the world

This is not a conversation about trends, markets or tactics. It is a deep, reflective discussion about purpose, responsibility and the long-term direction of civilisation - and what it means to build businesses, technologies and institutions that genuinely improve the human condition.

For founders, investors, next-generation family members and anyone thinking seriously about the future, this episode offers a rare opportunity to step back from the noise and consider the bigger picture.

Watch the full episode of Wealth Office to explore how the future is being imagined - and who is shaping it.