Doug Shapiro, one of the leading analysts of trends in the media and entertainment industry, explains how Hollywood now faces a second phase of digital transformation. First, the Internet unbundled media distribution, and now AI is reshaping the creative process. No one will be spared: impact will be felt by major media companies, independents and the full range of professionals from screenwriters to directors, cast and crew. Â Shaprio provides a summary of the changes that occurred in the past 20 years and his bold forecast of the AI-defined future that will lead to infinite content. Â Topics covered in this episode: how the definition of quality is shifting; Â how value is migrating to new control points in the media supply chain; Â how YouTube and TikTok paved the way for GenAI; the demise of middlemen; the fragmentation of attention; the extreme power law of popularity; Â the rise of new gatekeepers.
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1:13:11
Colin Megill on Computational Democracy
Colin Megill joins the Futurists to describe a new model for finding consensus in a time of political chaos and intense partisan division. He is the inventor of Pol.is, a powerful open-source platform for coordinating the feedback, opinions, and preferences of large dispersed groups. Polis has been successfully deployed by governments in Asia and Europe to find pockets of agreement amid partisan rancor.  If you crave an alternative to political division and polarization, don’t miss this interview.
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52:18
The Future of Money & Machine Identity
In this week's episode of THE FUTURISTS, host Brett King sits down one on one with Dave Birch to talk about the future of AI based payments, money and the concepts around Agentic AI such as KYA (Know-your-Agent instead of KYC Know Your Customer) or how we'll tell if specific agents have the authority to make payments, etc. And we get into the utility problem of money in a highly autonomous world. This is future of money, identity and payments all wrapped into one with two of the most future thinking people in the finance space today.
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50:30
Foresight with Joanna Lepore and Ross Dawson
This week, frequent guest and friend of The Futurists, Ross Dawson, takes over the hosting chair to speak with Joanna Lepore about Foresight and Vision(s) of the Future.
Ross, founder of AHT Group (Advanced Human Technologies Group) and the futures think tank Future Exploration Network, introduces us to Joanna Lepore. In 2024, Joanna founded and now co-leads Foresight Inside Group (FIG), an invite-only network for corporate futurists. Previously, she established and led Foresight at McDonald’s global HQ and Mars Wrigley, helping to push the strategies of some of the world’s best-known brands into the future. Motivated by the power of diverse perspectives, she also created and hosts Looking Outside, a podcast to share those perspectives.
This episode is packed with powerful and practical insights into the future, offering inspiration on how to seize today’s opportunities and drive change in a transforming world.
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56:57
What’s the end game with Tariffs?
In this week’s show Brett and Rob discuss why the Administration were happy to bring the world’s markets to the brink of global recession and why it’s happening now? Is this a massive, economy scale Pump and Dump or is it an existential threat of China surpassing the U.S. as the world’s largest economy? Will these tariffs put any dent in China’s meteoric rise? Let’s find out.
Australia