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The Futurists

Brett King, JP Nicols, Jason Henrichs

#1 Global Fintech Network

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24 episodes
weekly
Avg 54 min
English

Episodes 24

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October 2 · 59 min
The Voice of the Future
Alex Serdiuk is the co-founder and CEO of AI voice company Respeecher in Kiev. Alex and Rob Tercek discuss how synthetic voice generation will transform the motion picture industry, including some surprising reversals such as: how AI voices will change the global distribution strategy for feature films; how human actors can benefit from AI voice clones; why ethical approaches to AI yield optimal results; how the talent guilds have come to accept AI in film production; the business value of trust in times of rapid change; new legislation to prevent deep fakes.
September 21 · 1 hr 6 min
Open Source and Superintelligence
Independent AI researcher Mark Pesce returns to the Futurists with an update on the latest advances in open source artificial intelligence. Mark talks to co-hosts Brett King and Rob Tercek about a wide range of topics: small open-source models that run on the desktop and the smartphone; AI agents that work the “night shift”; NVIDIA’s pivot to open source AI; the disruptive threat to the leading US AI labs; the rapid rise of AI-enabled intrusions and the threat to the smartphone; personal AI filtering and assistants; AI agents to manage the smart home; faceless appliances as a precursor to liquid interfaces and the end of apps; fostering cognitive dependency and offloading cognitive work to companion apps; pacing the frontier; super intelligence; geopolitical rivalry.
September 8 · 49 min
Power is China’s AI Advantage
In this week’s episode hosts Rob Tercek and Brett King do a deep dive into the rapidly aging energy grid in the US and how this may be the biggest flaw in the US’ desire to win the race to AGI and a future smart economy. China today produces daily more solar energy than all the power plants in the US combined, and this year alone China will deploy more solar than the US has built in the last 70 years. How can the US hope to power the data centers required for AI dominance with an administration opposed to renewables and, as yet, no new nuclear plants or transmission lines even approved for construction? With the NIMBY crowd protesting local data centers, is big tech headed for a showdown with conservative politics?
August 31 · 1 hr 1 min
Finding Signal Amid the AI Noise
Mark Ghuneim is an American internet entrepreneur, activist, and art curator who has launched pioneering ventures in many fields including music, digital marketing, television, privacy advocacy, and fine art. Today he is co-founder of Narrative.New, which harnesses the power of AI for creative writers. Key to Mark’s career is curation, the process of making conscious choices among a wide range of alternatives. AI makes cognitive outputs cheap and abundant; that raises the value of human curation to critical importance amid a flood of fresh content. According to Mark, today the highest, rarest value is a distinctive point of view and taste.
August 22 · 57 min
Infinite Innovation
Can a company use AI to be capable of infinite adaptability? Brian Solis and Dave Wright believe that right approach to deploying AI in large enterprises is a two-model process, first to find efficiency and create savings, and second, to invest those savings into accelerated innovation. In their new book Infinite, Brian and Dave cite successful case studies to show AI can help business leaders accomplish things that were never previously possible. Rob Tercek interviewed Dave and Brian to extract the key points for listeners of The Futurists podcast.
August 14 · 58 min
Mass Media and Artificial Intelligence with Jeff Jarvis
To understand the future, it’s best to begin by studying the past. Jeff Jarvis returns to the Futurists to share a lively summary of the long arc of mass media, and he unpacks several valuable lessons for our present moment. Jeff’s new book Hot Type provides a compelling account of the long struggle to mechanize typesetting, one invention at a time, including the many failures that led to other mechanical breakthroughs. The invention of the Linotype machine made print cheap, and thereafter society consumed far more printed works, paving a path for modern mass marketing and mass consumption. Rob Tercek and Jeff discuss the direct parallel between the economic impact of mass media 100 years ago and the current advent of AI and the commoditization of human cognition. Topics include Jevon’s paradox, human-mechanical hybrids, unanticipated change versus technological determinism, a dozen parallels to our contemporary media economy, the importance of advertising and the attention economy, the advent of subscription sales of literature, a new definition of literacy.
August 7 · 1 hr 4 min
The Future Of Healthcare
This week on the futurists host Brett King sits down with Dr Julia Michelin to discuss the future of healthcare and how AI, gene-therapy, robotics, neural interfaces, cybernetics, 3D bio printing and other bio-tech is going to transform human society and culture.
August 3 · 54 min
The Watershed with Mark Pesce
In November 2025, the global techno-economy shifted subtly, then dramatically, as AI agents became viable additions to the workforce. Mark Pesce has documented these changes, what he refers to as “The Watershed”, in a remarkable series of articles at https://thewatershed.markpesce.com/. Pesce joins the Futurists to explain his perspective about how companies and work have changed forever. Pesce and Rob Tercek discuss the future of jobs for humans working alongside AI agents, and what happens when an AI with compounding capability begins to set its own goals. Topics: relative super intelligence versus AGI; The Bitter Lesson and what remains durable work for humans; private insurance markets as the mechanism for pricing AI risk, why governments will evade that measurement, and the dissolving boundaries that used to define corporations.
July 24 · 53 min
Fututistae Londinienses
This week on The Futurists we are joined by David Wood from the London Futurists, Rohit Telwar CEO of Fast Future, Andrew Grill the Actionable Futurist, and Dr. Julia Michelin, CEO/Founder and author of The Future of Dentistry. It’s an all star cast as we delve into the forecasts for tomorrow with the impact of AI and longevity treatments being a key focus. We discuss collaborative intelligence, gene therapy, nanobots and AGI. It’s a great discussion in the heart of London.
July 10 · 58 min
AI Music Rings The Bell
Marcus “Bellringer” Bell is a musical polymath: songwriter, producer and technological pioneer. His credits include collaborations with Beyoncé, Niki Minaj, Snoop Dogg, Timbaland and music featured by Amazon, HBO, Netflix. Marcus has used AI to generate tens of thousands of songs in multiple genres. He uses AI to design agents, personas, and new tools for musical expression and personal growth. He joins the Futurists to talk to Rob Tercek about AI and the creative process.
July 3 · 40 min
Future of Human Consciousness in an AI-Driven World
What if AI could replicate your consciousness? Listen as Brett King connects with Paolo Sironi, host of Provoke.fm's The Banker's Bookshelf about Paolo's latest book, Quantum Sapiens. Paolo's foray into literary fiction explores the intersection of quantum gravity, philosophy, and the future of human consciousness in an AI-driven world, providing a unique way to explore complex topics. Available at major bookstores and on Amazon, Quantum Sapiens is a haunting novel blending scientific speculation, the frontiers of artificial intelligence, theories of consciousness and urgent ethical questions into a compelling narrative. Join Paolo and Brett as they dive into the "hard problem" of consciousness and how technology like AI acts as a mirror for the human experience.
June 26 · 55 min
AI’s Disposable Workers
Paul Osterman, MIT labor economist and author of Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment , tells Rob Tercek about the fastest-growing category of the US workforce in the age of artificial intelligence. According to Osterman, a rising number of employers prefer to hire three categories of “disposable workers” with no long-term stake in the company. Today, such workers comprise more than 35% of the entire US workforce. The employers get the benefit of flexibility, and they push the risk and uncertainty onto the workforce. This interview covers the social, political, and organization consequences of the shift. And it anticipates how the deployment of AI will intensify the trend.
June 23 · 57 min
Biological Intelligence
Adrian Woolfson, the CEO and co-founder of the biotech company Genyro, joins the Futurists to chat about the audacious vision that animates his book On The Future of Species. Woolfson conceives of a Artificial Biological Intelligence that will unify diverse fields of genomic research into a new system that enables humans to design and create new species of life. According to Woofson, this marks an unprecedented moment on earth. For the first time ever, natural selection is no longer the only means for species to evolve. Humans can generate new life from first principles. This is true authorship of living organisms. Woolfson unpacks his grand concepts for host Robert Tercek in a lively discussion that spans synthetic biology, ethics, physics and the economics of food, medicine, health care and more.
June 15 · 57 min
The Artist In Dialog With AI
In 2024, Bay Raitt and Rob Tercek co-founded a generative AI startup with experts in machine learning and computer graphics to build agentic tools and workflows optimized for artists. Bay is a polymath: an artist, storyteller, animator, game designer, comic book author. He plays LLMs like a virtuoso performer. In this episode, Bay shares his views on the current state of AI models, trends in vibe coding, the importance of stories with a human heartbeat, context wielding as a creative art, how AI "slop cannons" will get paved over by agentic visualizers, how to build a deeper creative relationship with Claude, how AI can help writers harmonize with the past, how to summon the ghost of Dorothy Parker, how to hypnotize an LLM like a king cobra, why AI sucks when people use artless prompts, AI psychosis, and why Voltaire judged people by their questions not their answers.
June 8 · 1 hr 3 min
The Invisible Interface
What happens when the software you use starts acting independently? Harry Glorikian calls this the invisible interface, and in this episode he unpacks the implications of unseen agency and autonomy in the future workforce. Topics: the personal interface layer; the memory war; who owns the context that makes a personal interface valuable; proofseconds; the four trust signals that determine whether human users are willing to delegate to machines; how occupational dimensionality determines whether an employer will automate an entire job or just parts of it.
June 3 · 45 min
Digitally Curious Future
This week when two Australian futurists walk into a pub in London...well, almost! This week host Brett King and fellow Aussie futurist Andrew Grill sit down for a discussion on what the future means. This is a mashup of The Futurists and the Digitally Curious podcast which Andrew hosts. The discussion that ensues is a wide-ranging debate on the future, how quickly and impactful AI will hit, and how we will adapt to rapid, unrelenting change.
May 22 · 59 min
The Company of the Future with Tatyana Mamut
Wayfound.AI is one of the most exciting new ventures in Silicon Valley. CEO Tatyana Mamut joins the Futurists to share her vision of the agentic company of the future, where AI agents supervise a swarm of workforce comprised of subordinate agents, on behalf of human managers who cannot work 24x7. As a startup venture, Wayfound is a novel experiment in running a business almost entirely with an agentic workforce and just a handful of human employees. It’s the ultimate “eat your own dog food” approach to building a product. Matmut brings a unique perspective to software product leadership as an economic anthropologist. She shares those views here. Anyone curious about the workforce of the future will find this episode fascinating.
May 15 · 46 min
Back to the Moon
This week Captain Scott Kelly returns to the podcast with Brett King to talk Artemis II and NASA’s announcement of its intention to put a permanent base on the moon. Capt Kelly piloted and commanded shuttle missions before spending an entire year as commander of the International Space Station. We delve into the challenges for a lunar base, the similarities between the ISS and a base on the moon, and how the Orion capsule and lunar hardware differ from the shuttle and other spacecraft that Kelly piloted. The race is on between China and the US to set foot back on the moon.
May 8 · 58 min
The Geopolitical Divergence
This week the three hosts Rob, Ross and Brett are back in the studio debating the likely turning point in Geopolitical history from the Iran War, the resultant energy crisis, combined with the emerging demand for energy and compute based on AI. The world is irreversibally changing and The Futurists bring their unique insights and grasp on superforecasting to the momentum for what is coming.
April 27 · 38 min
Everybody’s Robot Fighting
In this week’s Futurists episode Brett interviews bestselling author Igor Pejic on how AI and technology investment is changing valuations of defense industry players. Pejic is the author of Tech Money: A guide to the new game of technology investing. In this wide ranging conversation, Brett and Igor debate the implications of wars fought largely by AI and how tech-first defense players like Palantir, Anduril and others are changing the sector from an investment perspective.

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