The Futurists

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.

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 24×7. 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.

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.

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.

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.