As the founder of The Future of Storytelling, Charles Melcher curates a collection of the world’s most provocative and vivid immersive experiences. To Charlie, future stories won’t be linear or confined to the pages of a book: they will be participatory and responsive. Charlie tells The Futurists what makes this type of drama so effective and memorable. In our modern media landscape, where books and TV shows have become commoditized and formulaic, the most successful stories tend to work harder by engaging all of the senses and the imagination fully. After you hear Charlie’s account of his amazing adventures, you’ll never look at storytelling the same way again.  

Global economist Peter Middlebrook has advised governments in many nations on modernization and economic policy, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, Rwanda, Afghanistan, India, and the UK as well as the United Nations, the EU and the World Bank. He joins the Futurists to share his perspective about the current and future trajectory of capitalist economies and geopolitics. Topics include: the fate of 250 million displaced people; how governments drive up the cost of housing and other assets when they inflate away debt;  what happens when Western nations attempt to combine capitalist economies with socialist policies; why Asia represents the greatest growth opportunity of the future; why the United States seeks to consolidate South America; why the BRIC nations are de-dollarizing trade; why the future economy is both hyperlocal and hyper global;  the illusion of the free market and the growing significance of industrial policy; why multimillionaires are fleeing from the UK; why Western nations need strategic plans. 

The Futurists starts 2026 with a stimulating conversation with serial entrepreneur Matt Miesnieks, a true pioneer of AR/XR and spatial computing. In his new startup venture, Primate AI, Matt is focused on a novel approach to artificial intelligence. He intends to construct spatial and dimensional concepts that replicate the way humans develop a mental model of the real world. Topics in this episode: how the limitations of LLMs create opportunities for new approaches, such as Yann LeCun’s JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture); the distinction between trying to understand the real world and trying to generate new worlds; why it is so hard to get a robot to cross a busy street safely; why 3D world models are needed; what happens when the real world is machine-readable.

Technology innovator Akshay Chopra joins the Futurists to discuss his new book: “After Us: A Tale of Life Beyond Superintelligent AI.”  In this work of speculative fiction, Chopra posits scenarios of a world dominated by a benevolent superintelligence.  Topics include: the challenge of envisioning a positive outcome in a world organized by AI; the perils of AI-induced delusions;  AI as an evolution of mankind, not a substitute for humanity;  the Dataism philosophy and the Panspermia hypothesis; the appeal and relevance of magical realism;  how AI denialism is a form of grief processing as we mourn the loss of our status as a species;  the struggle to think exponentially instead of linearly;  the threats that Akshay thinks we should be concerned about. 

http://mybook.to/afterus/opt/1

This week, The Futurists offers a human interest story from Brett’s conference travels. Listen as Brett connects with Arwa Damon, former CNN reporter based in Istanbul, and current President and Founder of INARA, an NGO working in Palestine.
INARA, International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance, is a humanitarian organization providing rapid response and treatment to refugee children, its mission to ensure every child has the agency to create a dignified life.
Arwa provides a first-hand look at the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and discusses how it impacts the basic needs and access to financial services for people living there.

Industry strategist John Sviokla is the co-founder of GAI Insights and an Executive Fellow at the Harvard Business School. He tells the Futurists about the real challenges and opportunities in the process of reorganizing businesses around unlimited intelligence.  Topics include: The existential threat to the big strategic advisory firms. Why talking to machines is such a significant change.  The remarkably rapid rise of machine IQ and the power of emergent capabilities.  John’s forecast for the evolution of new AI models. How proprietary data, especially intent, will fuel the transition from search engines to answer engines.  The logic behind the partnership between Walmart and OpenAI.  What happens to a company’s organization when you can buy expertise on demand.  How every human worker will become a platoon of experts.  The two populations in most organizations that use AI. The net present value of AI projects.  GAI Insight’s four-step process for fostering new corporate capabilities based on AI. 

Shelly Palmer returns to the Futurists to share fresh insight about how AI agents will rearrange the way entertainment and news are published, distributed and monetized. Today, many of the biggest media companies are still reeling from the previous two rounds of digital disruption (web and mobile). This leaves Big Media unprepared for the biggest disruption of them all, because AI agents will soon  reconfigure their core asset: video distribution channels. This interview provides a preview of how autonomous agents will work in unison to handle tasks that previously were managed by networks of human professionals, such as media buyers, advertising managers, retail marketers, and TV programming executives.  Likely impact: a further round of unbundling as agents personalize video distribution and advertising. Timeline: this transformation begins in 2026 and will iterate rapidly during the next five years. 20th century mass media is about to go through the Big Tech blender. 

Mike Pell is an author, an artist and the director of the Microsoft Garage, the worldwide innovation program where he applies “fast design” principles to bring ideas to prototypes quickly. Mike’s hackathons scale to include 10,000 participants.  Mike tells the Futurists how artificial intelligence systems accelerate ideation during the innovation process.  The challenge: managing a team of AI agents will require human workers to adapt to entirely new processes and discard some outdated practices. Visualization is one of the key elements in Mike’s approach to this process, as conveyed in his recent book, “Visualizing Business”.  

This week Brett is joined by guest host Kevin J. Anderson as the futurists have a conversation with science fiction documentary filmmaker Jeffrey Morris on his new documentary reviewing world of Space 1999. We also discuss coming Mars and Moon plans.

The future of computing is 3D, according to Avi Bar Zeev. For three decades, this creative technologist  has played a part in the creation of every major advance in spatial computing, immersive media, and XR. This week, Avi joins the Futurists to explain how previous breakthroughs will make the next wave of 3D computing possible. Avi shares what he has learned from 30 years of designing theme park rides, new headsets, virtual worlds and planetary-scale maps.