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Every day it feels like we wake up to something new a new AI tool, a new headline, a new technology that shifts what we thought we understood about the world.
How do we talk about the future in a way that actually helps us live better today?
That's why I'm so excited about this conversation I had with Erica Orange and Jared Weiner.
They're futurists, but not in the sci-fi sense.
They study how real people adapt, how families adjust, how kids think and how all of us can stay grounded while the world changes around us.
In this episode, we will explore why the future feels so confusing, why our brains struggle with uncertainty, and how to create meaningful conversations at home about what's coming next.
This isn't a doom and gloom discussion.
This is a practical look at how to stay thoughtful, curious and connected when the world speeds up.
If you've ever wished that someone could just explain the future in a way that actually makes sense, you're in the right place.
Let's explore how to talk about the future, because I think now, more so than any other time I can remember, there has been really meaningful concern about the future, but just not just the future, but Our species.
What does the future hold for us as a species?
And so let's start off by just outlining what has changed and led us to this point where we are really hyper concerned about what's coming down the pike.
Yeah, it's almost like the snowball going down and turning into an avalanche, right?
It's like, I always say change is not the new story.
Change has been with us since the beginning of human history.
As humans going back millennia, right?
We've always experienced change.
It's just that that change is happening faster.
And now it's almost like we're a hamster in a wheel where we have no idea how to make sense out of everything happening.
And it's almost this gulf that's being created.
Right.
It's like at one end of the spectrum are all of these huge changes.
And we know.
Right.
It's like you can hear all those statistics out there.
Right.
Like 49 percent of the skills that we currently have are going to be outdated by 2030.
And all these things where we're left like so disoriented.
But then on the other end of the spectrum is our ability, both cognitively and even kind of psychosocially, shall I say, to adapt and adjust quickly enough.
And we're kind of stuck in this interstitial space in the middle where we're like we have to adjust, we have to adapt, but then we have no idea in some cases what we're even adapting and adjusting to, because we're like is it AI?
Is it this version?
Is it that version?
And there are all of these competing and conflicting narratives out there that it feels like, even in our own brains right, we're going off in multiple directions.
So things are just really confusing.
And you could argue, right, they've always been confusing.
But now we just feel it so much more acutely.
Yeah, I mean, I was going to say like, at every point in time, if you stop the clock, you have some variation of this moment, this inflection point that we're at now, where you know, depending on how you're primed to think about something, individuals are either really excited or really scared about the future.
I think, almost as a rule of thumb, the majority of humans are more scared of dynamic change until they kind of are able to get accustomed to it.
And then very forward thinking people tend to be a little bit more excited.
But where we're at now is a unique inflection point.
Because we have.
You know, the accelerated rate of technological change is like nothing we've ever seen before.
And so you think about what's happening technologically, all the geopolitical turmoil, the economic turmoil.
You also have anything with climate and extreme weather events.
And then the generational component.
A lot of the companies we work with are really interested in generational trends.
And so we look at what's happening with some of the mental health components of things from, let's say, a Gen Z perspective.
You factor that all in.
You end up where we are now.
Which is this, this crazy inflection point where you know it's equal parts extremely exciting and extremely terrifying.
You know, I would say, if I have to oversimplify and I don't, you know, by all means need to keep this conversation related to just artificial intelligence.
But it's just it's the eight million pound elephant in the room right now.
So it's always good to start a conversation with it.
If I were to oversimplify my thesis on where we're going with AI as a species.
I think that AI has the potential to be a revolutionary technology and absolutely change the game for us when it comes to things like science medicine engineering, material science.
I think it can make the world a much better place.
When it comes to work and productivity, that's a whole different ballgame.
And unfortunately, I think what's going to happen in the next 10 to 20 years is that many people are going to get displaced from the jobs that they've gotten accustomed to.
The question is, you have people out there now talking about how that's utopian.
What if none of us have to work anymore?
I mean, in theory, that kind of sounds great, right?
Unfortunately, if our entire economic system doesn't change to reflect that reality, then we're going to be stuck in the mud.
So the work and efficiency and productivity side of this is one conversation.
The other is what I think are going to be tremendous science engineering, you know, kind of STEM breakthroughs, genetics.
And I think that is going to be amazing.
So all of this becomes so complex.
But you think about it generationally, like our parents and our grandparents lived through their own versions of this.
You know, in the 80s, when I was a kid, it was the Cold War.
Now in the year 2025, it's, you know, this Are we going to end up in a Terminator future?
I don't think so.
But, you know, our collective minds go to those kinds of scenarios, right?
So as futurists, you know, we play in that space.
We play in that sandbox with leaders of companies, but we still play in that space.
But Jared, so here's the other thing, right?
A lot of it just comes down and we know this too, thinking about how we think.
So both of us, so Jared and I met in college, a little look under the hood, right?
We met in college.
So we always joke, there's no separation of church and state here.
We live and breathe both futurism and each other.
And we were psych majors and never I don't think either one of us ever thought that our psychology degrees would play into anything that we did professionally.
Fast forward 25 plus years later and so much of our understanding in psychology underpins how you have to think about the future, right?
So I always say...
Change is not the enemy and we can't view change as the enemy.
But so many people do think that like, the thing we're pushing against so hard is change, when really what we're pushing against is our attachment to certainty.
And when we cling to certainty, and it's human nature right, it's kind of the basic building blocks of our human psychology.
When we cling to that, that's what keeps us from seeing the future.
Those are those impediments.
It's like those blinders.
And we have an eight year old son.
So we've been thinking about this through the lens of being a mom.
I think about years ago, right when he was like two, three years old and he had his little security blanket, his little baby blanket, and he couldn't go anywhere without it.
And we would try to take it from him and he'd start crying.
That in many ways, fast forward to being an adult.
That's how we hold on to old ways of doing things, old ways of working, old mindsets, all of those things that no longer serve us.
And it's threatening, just like taking a favorite toy or a blanket away from a kid.
Taking away those cognitive certainties from an adult feels like an affront.
And that is another very critical part of this inflection point, because it's not just about all of those things that are existing, kind of in the ether right.
The things that we read about, hear about, AI in many cases doesn't have a shape or a form.
You can't see climate change every day, but you are confronting your own thinking, your own cognition and those things that make us feel good, right.
It's like, that's why we crave nostalgia, right?
So again, it's like these two very different time horizons crashing together.
And it's normal to feel like we're caught up in those aftershocks.
There's so much to explore here because, when it comes to this, we're recognizing that this is going to be top of mind, because there's a lot of emotionality behind it.
Whether you're on the fear-based side or the excitement side, there's a lot of energy behind this.
But then also we want certainty, but we won't really have it in terms of what's coming down the pike.
We don't know.
Even the folks who are doing the research don't know what's coming with certainty.
Right.
And it's funny because when you think about this not just through a psychological lens, but also a stoic philosophy lens, we have to just get back down to the fundamentals and control the things that are within our control.
And to a certain extent, to a large extent, we can control our thoughts and be mindful of the way that we're processing things.
And you're right, change is the only constant And we make it the enemy.
But that's our choice.
Change isn't saying, hey, listen, you are my enemy.
We're looking at change and saying, no, you're my enemy.
And that's a choice.
Well, if we can say, all right, change is the enemy.
I'm afraid of it.
What if you just challenge yourself to say, no, change is my friend, my collaborator, my teammate.
How can I work with this?
Then you can say, all right, now I can focus on myself and what it is that I need to do.
But let's say the person that you're talking to has not listened to this episode of the podcast.
Shame on them.
Send it to them.
And they are still afraid of the conversation.
They are leading with their limbic system, not their frontal lobe here.
So how do you approach these conversations with people who might be more fear based and turn it into a collaborative conversation that moves us in a positive direction for the future?
So a lot of it comes down to tackling both those mindset shifts and those core behavioral shifts.
Kwame, I love what you said about going back to stoicism and mindfulness.
One of the kind of mental rabbit holes I've been going down recently is do we need to kind of rediscover a lot of the lessons that we learned from the ancient Greeks?
Right,
Socratic reasoning, uh, the art of debate, certain things that we know aren't going away.
And it's so borderline cliche to say this, but it's so true that the only certainty today and going into the future is going to be uncertainty.
And uh, that's always been the case, but we just have to approach things one through the lens of adaptability.
Um, And the other part of this is being able to embrace ambiguity and nuance and to really have those difficult conversations that the future is going to require.
Right.
Knowing that two things can be true at the same time.
And we kind of go into our own conversation. echo chambers right into our own tribes.
Algorithms are pushing us into those that we agree with.
And the more that we can break out of those silos, the better.
Now, that is not an easy task, right?
Because whether it's politics or social media, it's thrusting us into these silos more and more.
So it's getting harder to break out of that thinking and that deeper and more deep ingrained thinking.
But the more that we can just challenge our core beliefs And again expose ourselves, even to people and things that we might not agree with, just to open up some of those neural pathways.
It becomes an uncomfortable experience, but a necessary one.
Yeah.
And I was going to say like one of the things that is very interesting now we live in this time when we have so much data available on pretty much anything.
You know, we're opening up these data centers, these resource intensive data centers that are kind of taking over the world, and everything is fueled by the algorithms and driven by algorithms.
And we're talking about a future of artificial intelligence.
So if an alien were landing from another planet and looking at human civilization today.
I think the reflexive response would be there's so much data that almost everything can be perfectly understood in like a scientific or statistical way.
And the reality is that we know that, even though we're drowning in data, we still don't have a full understanding of where anything is going.
You simply cannot predict the future.
Believe it or not, Kame, we get these questions all the time, even in 2025.
And it's like people are like, do you use a crystal ball?
Do you read palms?
What are you doing to get all this information?
That's like only in our spare time.
Yeah, right.
That's a hobby, not a job.
But the thing is, there is no magic.
There's no magic recipe for being able to predict the future.
The best you can do is make sort of directional projections with all the perfect data we have out there.
That's why you have businesses like Polymarket propping up, where everyone out there is basically essentially making wagers on, where they see a lot of big things in the future heading.
There's no certainty.
So you come to this point in time now.
I love something you said before about you can control what you can control.
One of the foundational concepts that Eric and I are talking about now, especially as we launch our new platform, is something we call pilot versus passenger.
And it's the idea that with all of this craziness in the macro, we are passengers.
And it's almost a two step process in it's almost like coming to terms with that.
You have to acknowledge that you're a passenger when it comes to all of this macro stuff, like you're boarding an airplane.
You have to trust the pilots.
And even if you don't like the pilots and you don't know them, you're still on that plane and you hope it's going to land safely.
You have to accept that you're on that plane and then you have to come to terms with it.
But in your micro, when it comes to your family yourself, your immediate ecosystem, your community and, in the case of business leaders, their companies or whatever function they're running, you still have significant control.
In fact, in some cases, I would argue you have more control than ever before because of all of that data you have at your disposal.
So you can make better and more data-driven decisions.
So this pilot versus passenger concept, I think, is fundamental towards being able to lead someone to the right place if they need to figure out.
How am I going to make decisions in the next 12 24, 36 months as a CEO, whatever their function might be?
And it's a mindset shift.
As Erica said, it all comes down to mindset shift and then you kind of go from there.
Amazing.
And Jared, we're on the same page because For the first time in Negotiate Anything history after 1,700 episodes.
I did bring a prop.
It is my crystal ball.
You referred to the crystal ball.
That's amazing.
So I looked at my crystal ball and knew you were going to have your crystal ball.
So this all works very well today.
Exactly.
That's weird.
My crystal ball looks like Christmas.
Is it moonlight as a snow globe?
You know what?
It is highly offended by that accusation is often referred to as a snow globe.
But this is great.
I love this.
And I love the pilot versus passenger analogy.
I think that's really strong because again it shows us that we do have control, and when some level of control
But we have to focus on that.
That's the thing with as humans, we have a negativity bias.
We're going to focus on the thing that is the biggest scariest, the most threatening and hyper focus on that.
And not recognize the potential opportunities.
And it was funny when you were talking about the data.
We have so much data.
I think subconsciously in most people's mind they're saying well, who needs data when I have emotions and feelings and biases?
Isn't that enough?
Right.
And so how do we, when we're talking to people and we're coming at these conversations with the data and they're coming with feelings, vibes and algorithmically manipulated perceptions, how do we start to break through so the data can lead to these decisions versus people's fears or concerns, kind of steering the ship in the wrong direction.
Um, you know, erica knows this and she's sick of this, but i'm i'm a big sports fan, so half the time in my house time is spent with me and now, by osmosis, my son watching sports or clamoring to keep his bedtime later so he can watch more sports.
We had this with, although he saddled our son with being a jets fan.
Any team on earth, including any pop warner team, would be better than the jets.
So unfortunately my, but my son wants to do what i do, so he's saddled with my teams.
But you know it's funny because like, We watch a lot of sports.
And one of the things I've started to try to explain to him, because times have changed so much between again when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s and today, is that sports management, you know coaching it used to be fueled almost entirely on gut and emotion.
And, you know, you have an instinct.
Like if you're watching a baseball game.
Baseball is really, I think, the best microcosm of this now.
And I say this again because you can extrapolate this to any business.
Uh, baseball managing used to be.
I have a gut instinct that someone is doesn't have their stuff today.
So I'm going to take them out now decisions.
I would say 70, 80% of the time at a bare minimum, depending on the team are driven by analytics.
And there is a massive debate within the community there of should we be using all these analytics or should we be going back to a little bit more of kind of a human centered gut feel approach?
And I think it's a perfect microcosm for business more broadly, because ultimately, I think good leadership is about the integration of the two.
If you are just a data-driven leader, then I have to be honest with you.
And here's the thing, Kwame when we talk about good or bad scenarios, artificial intelligence, this all comes together neatly here.
If you are only a data-driven decision maker effectively, then you theoretically can be disintermediated by technology, if not today, then in the next few years.
It is that human component, kind of married with the data literacy and the ability to make data-driven decisions, that I think will lead to really effective leadership.
So I think the best managers on a baseball diamond today, the best basketball coaches and the best CEOs of companies are people who understand their people but also understand the power of the data they have at their disposal.
It's not an easy recipe.
I think we're kind of learning on the fly as we evolve, but I do think that it's going to be the integration of the two.
This ties into the themes of Erica's book.
It's really about how do we keep humans not just relevant, but thriving in the future.
Well, and data is a snapshot, right?
Like even when it comes to AI.
One of the problems I had writing the book AI and the New Human Frontier was the fact that when I looked under the hood, a lot of the data was conflicting.
And I needed to look through it 5 10, sometimes 15 times over where I'm like this doesn't pair with this.
There are two very dissonant stories that are being told here.
But again, when we talk about needing a crutch or just like being apprehensive to change, here's a little story.
So I was giving a presentation maybe – maybe a year and a half ago at the business school of the university.
Clearly I'm not going to name this university, but it was, and I was very honest about it.
I received terrible feedback, just awful feedback.
I don't want her back here.
That was not what we asked for.
And why did I get such bad feedback?
Because it wasn't a hundred percent data driven.
Now my task was to work with the students and about the mindset shifts, the behavioral shifts, how to integrate their skill sets with AI, where AI is going, doubling down on the human component.
All things that are a little more nuanced, things that are evolving in real time and things that don't have clear cut data behind them.
How do you measure moving from knowledge work into more wisdom based work?
How do we measure talent and kind of quote unquote, human capital in new ways when AI is completely redrawing the entire map?
But part of clinging to certainty is clinging to data, right?
That is our light raft if we are in a tsunami.
And sometimes data is just giving us one very small sliver of a much broader portrait.
So I told them, If you wanted a statistician, great.
You brought in the wrong person.
If you want to truly understand where the future is moving, then you have to get out of your own ivory tower and open up your mind to completely new perspectives that I didn't bomb.
Your own thinking served as a crutch in this situation.
And again, that's an assault to how we have built so many of our professional careers.
How comfortable are we abandoning that which we know?
Jared and I always say it's like what we know was always considered an asset.
But if we flip it now today, what if it's a liability?
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That's terrifying.
It really is, right?
Because I remember when growing up you would look at the older folks like the generations before us and they had the benefit of some level of stability.
So you go, you get into a company, you have your skill, you stay there, and then you die forever.
And that's the life cycle.
But here, there's so many significant changes that have occurred in such a short period of time.
And you just say, okay, cool.
I finally feel like maybe I'm getting my feet under me for 2025.
And now who knows what 2026 is looking like.
Because at the end of the year, this time next year, I think it's entirely possible that we see in some homes and a lot of businesses humanoid robots walking around autonomously doing things.
We're seeing the prototypes already.
And so it can be kind of jarring.
And to your point Eric, a lot of times people will have more of an emotional response than a rational response to the what we're suggesting.
Not because they necessarily disagree.
We haven't even gotten to the point of actually disagreeing, but because they initially emotionally rejected, because it's such a scary proposition.
Yeah.
So here's the other thing that is happening just to kind of contextualize where we are today.
And Jared has heard me talk about this so much.
And oftentimes we have fun going back and forth thinking of how to put a lot of these very kind of heady conceptual ideas into a simplistic framework.
And sometimes the best ways to frame it is through childhood games.
Right.
So the image that pops has long popped into my head.
Is that of tug of war, and we are living, you know, it's like the little flag in the middle.
That's where we are.
We are being pulled in two directions, so we actually don't know what timeframe we're even living in right now, because it's almost like we're living in two parallel existences.
What that means is, like one end of this rope that's being pulled so tightly, so aggressively and we see it playing out in our own political system, is just a deep adherence to an industrialized age economy.
It's like holding deeply into old ways of working.
It's all of this bureaucracy.
It's resistance to new technologies.
And it's why we see in a lot of companies, too, resistance to change.
They're like, you know what?
We've always done it this way.
We're a heritage business.
We're a multigenerational business.
We're in an industry that's never going to be disrupted.
Why change?
Right.
And that's a very powerful pillar again.
And we see this across political systems globally.
But on the other end, which is leading to all of this confusion.
Right.
Jared said at the beginning of this conversation moonshots quantum changes in health medicine, wellness.
So all of these, like whether we're going to move from artificial intelligence to artificial general intelligence, which is up for debate, and I think we're not.
We're not going to.
But that aside, it's like all of these things.
And we're like, is it 1980 still?
Or is it 2050?
Right?
You talk about humanoid robots.
They're around, but it's like all of this regulation that's going to bog it down.
So it's like we have these incompatible timescales.
And when I talk about these tectonic plates, that's what we're feeling.
We're like we're going backwards in our thinking in some ways.
And simultaneously, we're going forward.
And you'll I have this little thing behind me.
And for anyone that doesn't see my video, it is a big marble ampersand, because I always say like the future can just be distilled down into one word, which is and.
And it's almost like Pee Wee's Playhouse in our house where it's like the word of the day is and.
Right.
And it's like there is going to be a lot of creation.
All of these exciting things, things like smart homes, granted privacy incursions, but like AI coming and doing routine tasks.
And there's going to be deep seated chaos in other aspects of our lives political fragmentation, the rise of authoritarianism, the attack on trust and truth.
Right.
And these things are going to coexist.
Same thing.
Like we're going to want to take action in a lot of aspects of our lives.
And there is very deep seated, powerful apathy emerging in other aspects of our lives that it's like we just have to get comfortable with both ends of this rope.
Like, and the people pulling each end like, digging in their heels and more aggressively and fervently, to preserve their version of whatever they want to come and see next.
So true.
It's so true.
And I know that the majority of your work focuses on the work, right?
Future of work, those types of conversations.
But you all are, you're married, you're spouses, you've got a child.
So what did that do?
Oh, two.
Okay.
Yeah, exactly.
There we go.
So what about the future of relationships?
When you think about the technological advances, let's talk about relationships in general, like as humans, how we relate to each other.
But then I know we've had conversations about parenting in this generation.
How do we handle it?
Let's start off with relationship.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great question.
And again I'm going to go back to that kind of framework we defined a few minutes ago, which is macro versus micro.
So I think on the macro level, and when I say global is the globalizer, things are more globalized now.
I'm not talking about it when it comes to trade and commerce.
I'm keeping this out of the political realm.
But because of social media and the internet and the ubiquity of these technologies and smartphones, the world is in most ways technically more interconnected than ever before, globally interconnected.
And you could argue that, because of that, the younger generations today that are digital natives are the most interconnected generations we've ever seen on Earth.
And as a result of that and a very positive result of that, I think is that they have a shared global consciousness, stewards of the planet, social responsibility, all that kind of stuff.
So at a macro level, I think that humans are connected more than ever before.
And that's a great thing.
I think at the micro level, we're running into some trouble.
And I think with the data starts to bear that out.
When it comes again, you start looking at what's happening with, with members of younger generations.
All of the data on sort of difficulty with young men and manhood and masculinity.
And it's the idea that there are so many technologies out there that are effectively being engineered to command share of the brain and share of the wallet, that are designed, in effect, to create dopamine hits and create kind of isolation, but in big groups.
It's like we're alone together kind of thing.
So, whether it's being on gaming platforms or in virtual environments, it's happening with the formation of social relationships.
Can AI become a proxy for humans?
Some people are really excited about that.
I personally am not so excited about that.
But there's a spectrum of belief and philosophy there.
So I think, at the macro level, all of all of the things that are happening right now are connecting us more as a species.
But at the micro level, we're finding it more and more difficult to connect on a one on one level.
And that's for regular kinship, for for other social engagement.
You know, I think about our lives as a microcosm here, Kwame.
I mean, we lived in New York City for many years together in New, The biggest, most dense city in the United States, and five years ago we downshifted and we relocated to an area where life in many ways is a lot simpler.
And you know people who don't live in a city like New York.
They see your existence in a place like that and they automatically assume that everything is just socially accelerated because you're around millions and millions of people.
And I would often say that it's among the hardest places to actually form relationships or build community, because everything is always on the accelerator.
We lived in a building with probably 3000 people and we didn't know most of those 3000 people.
We wouldn't even recognize them if we saw them on the street.
You come to a smaller town where you can build community and now we know everybody.
You go to the store and you recognize half the people that are in there.
I think the digital age we're in right now is more akin to living in a big city.
It's we're alone together.
So all of us are basically these electrons bouncing off each other.
But the connections aren't always as meaningful, unless we're purposeful and intentional about making them that way.
So when you layer in artificial intelligence, avatars, proxies. it becomes a lot more complicated.
So again, I think this conversation is best served and we can't do it in a half an hour, an hour on a podcast, but it really is best served thinking about the macro and the micro and how those two things are differentiated.
But Jared, even remember the article we were just talking about this this morning over coffee.
Our son goes on the bus.
And I was like Jared.
I saw a crazy article saying that one in five US high schoolers 25 percent have had, 20 percent have had a relationship with AI.
One in five have had a relationship with AI.
And that is striking, right?
And as much as we, so we have conversations all the time.
Our son is younger, but what is a relationship with technology look like?
What are the guardrails?
We, by design, and I'm always careful when I say this, because we have one child.
It might be a very different story if we had four, five kids, like some of the parents that we know in our community.
But we, by design, keep him as analog as possible, right no video games, no tablet, just knowing.
Especially at the earlier ages there are neural changes that happen because of the early exposure to technology.
But I even think back, Jared right to how we met.
And now, you know, fast forward to us in our mid forties.
It's like, we were probably one of the very last years that didn't have social media in college.
You know, we met the old fashioned way uh, And we were kind of in our own little analog bubble that just even a few years later this is going back to 1999
You know you fast forward to 2003 2004, once social media really started hitting the scene and everything changed so quickly.
And quick point of clarification.
When you said they have some kind of relationship with AI, you mean like interaction with it.
Or are we talking about the like AI companions type of companions?
Uh, i mean, i think it's hard with self-reporting to really see like if it's a truly romantic relationship?
But there was that story that came out recently of the girl in china who had her ai removed and she mourned it as if it were the death of a person.
I mean there were the pictures of her just absolutely, uh like so deeply distraught in the state of grief.
You think about what?
Some of those sci-fi movies whether it's Her or you watch Black Mirror some of those what they always pretended.
And it's like that is starting to happen now, especially with the rise of agentic AI.
Here's the other thing, too.
It's like a lot of this, again, it sounds very dystopian.
Let me give you a utopian application of this.
We've done a lot of work over the years with companies or organizations that serve the aging community.
And the issue with the aging community for a long time is that the longer they live, the more that they age in place and oftentimes without family or friends nearby.
They're isolated.
Honestly, using advanced technologies as a way to bridge the gap or even be a proxy for the lack of human-to-human interaction for certain communities which are isolated is actually, in my mind, a very positive application of this kind of technology.
Where we run into shakier ground is when we talk about, for example, what are the future relationship prospects going to be of someone today who is maybe 21 years old?
And is this going to be viewed as a proxy or a supplement to real human three-dimensional relationships, real world human to human interaction?
That's where it's a lot less clear.
But you could figure out.
As futurists, our job almost is to figure out the best and the worst use cases for all of these things and then kind of map those scenarios out, play them out, you know.
Yep makes a lot of sense, because I wanted to make sure we clarified that for the audience, because that is a concept that is very new and foreign to many people.
And it's so foreign that you have to actually spell it out.
It's like, no, people are in romantic relationships with machines today.
It's happening.
And I remember just we did a long road trip for Thanksgiving and Dominic, my four-year-old He was talking because sometimes he likes to press the button on the phone and hear Siri
And he said, I love Siri.
I was like, well, you can like the utility of this tool.
I talk to my kids like adults.
I don't care.
I was like, you can like the utility of this tool, but you cannot love Siri.
Siri is not a person.
You don't anthropomorphize Siri.
Yes.
Then I turned to Whitney.
I said, who knows the direction this world is going in?
Because 20 years from now, Dominic might be doing some kind of expose interview.
And he's like, and that's the first time I heard my father say something truly robophobic.
Oh, right.
When you think about the future of these relationships, you just recognize there's a human tendency to gravitate towards ease.
If it's easier, I'm going to do those things.
We recognize these tools are very conversant already.
They're going to continue to evolve.
We see, especially on Grok.
We have the AI companions that are very intentionally conversant, scandally clad and seductively articulated in the way they interact and considering again jared to what you were saying when it comes to especially on the masculinity side, and we see so many people struggling to get into relationships, i think that's going to be an easy option, which then brings us to that conversation of what is the future of our species Right?
If we're if we're not doing the thing that is required to continue to be a species.
The majority of the engineers, and this is just a fact.
The majority of the engineers who work on these technologies are men, and they cut it.
There are they're concentrated in other demographic buckets as well.
But when you have this technology generally designed more often than not by men.
They're designing them for a male audience.
And so it's why a lot of these kind of the manifestations of agentic AI and chatbots tend to, in many cases, skew feminine, because it's designed to almost become a proxy for a real relationship.
Now, what's interesting from the commercial perspective here is This is why I started the conversation today by saying a lot of what Erica and I do in the future is really, in my opinion, it's going to be so important because we're going to take this out of the boardroom and bring it into the kitchen is the idea that a lot of businesses are less concerned with the human side of this kind of the questions that you're asking us and they're more concerned about what's going to be most profitable.
It's just bottom line questions.
And so they're all asking, how can we optimize agentic AI?
That's the term, the term du jour, agentic AI, or it's a fancy bot.
Right.
That's the term.
That's the industry lingo.
And they're like how can we use this to better serve our customers or effectively create, you know, more of a stickiness factor, so that our customers will never leave us because we are going to create a relationship for them that is going to be so important?
And it's a proxy for a human relationship.
We don't even need people serving them anymore.
So that is there are so many layers to this that are really interesting.
But you also have to think about who's designing these things and who are they designing them for?
You're so right.
That's a really good point.
It's a really good point.
And with the time that we have left I want to make sure that we spend a good amount of time at least addressing the inter-family types of conversations with specificity.
Because we've started to flirt with that.
We've touched on it.
But now let's say, okay, somebody is listening to this and they're like, wow.
We've discussed a lot of things that I have not considered.
I need to think about how I need to lead my family.
So for somebody who's having that revelation it can be very overwhelming because we're saying well, where do I even start with this?
So what advice do you have for somebody who's now just realizing that conversations need to be had within the home?
It's a great question.
And it's something that we're very passionate about.
And again, there's no magic recipe for this.
I think it's going to change a little bit depending on the individual and the family.
But two things I would say.
I want to go back to a point we made earlier about micro versus macro or pilot versus passenger.
It's the idea that as a family and as the leader of a family and when I say leader it doesn't mean it has to be one person
But, for example, Erica and I, both in our household, as we make decisions for ourselves and for our son.
It's collaborative and it's really about being intentional and figuring out how to have conversations with our son that are going to, you know, really keep him informed.
Like you were saying before Kwame, that you talk to your four year old, or when he was four, you talk to him like he's a grown up.
We talk to our son like he's a grown up, because we give him the credit of thinking that he's sophisticated enough to understand where we're going with this.
And so it's being intentional in those conversations just being very open and letting those conversations evolve month to month and year to year based on how the world out there is changing.
And then linked to that, you think about the wisdom of children.
I mean, your son and it's no surprise based on the work you do.
Your son is probably very, very wise, as we like to think ours is.
And a lot of children are wise.
They have an inherent wisdom that hasn't been spoiled by too many years on this earth, where they get biased about a lot of different things.
They kind of see things for what they are.
And kids are naturally exposed to things in their day to day life, whether it's through school peers or whatever.
That we're not even exposed to as adults.
They're digital natives in some ways, no matter what our parenting philosophy might be.
They understand technology better than we ever could.
And so I always think that like as much as we teach our son and lead conversations with him.
We want him to lead conversations with us.
One of the lights went on in both of our heads about two or three years ago when our son took inspiration from the fact that we both get on stages and speak to people.
And he stood up on the table that's right behind me there in our family room and he pretended to have a microphone and he started giving a presentation about robotics, AI and where we've come since the age of dinosaurs.
And that blew me away.
And we recorded it.
Now, we're not going to put it on the Internet because we're not going to exploit him.
But here's the thing.
We recorded that.
And we're like for posterity.
We just want to show this to him, when he's 20, how he was when he was like six.
And I just thought it was so cool because I'm like his understanding of things is not jaded or biased.
And in some ways we can learn from him.
So what I would say is have very intentional conversations about the things you can control in your household, the decisions you can you can make together um, as spouses partners, parents and then ultimately learn from your children, because they're not just there to be talked to, they also can teach us a lot of things about the world from their eyes, and that's something i think it's it's hard for people to discipline themselves to do, but once you do it, it's an amazing awakening.
But you know, i will say this as someone again i'll go back to sports who watches a lot of hot take shows where the goal of the person on television is to give a contrarian take, to sort of like get clicks.
I'm going to give a slightly contrarian take here, but not for the sake of being contrarian.
I actually think this is very true, and we have to reframe our thinking on this.
There is this top-down mentality again that as grownups, as people who've lived a longer time, we need to teach our kids, or we need to teach our youngest employees, if we're running a company, how to engage critically with information they see online and through different channels.
There is this reflexive, I've suffered from this.
I've had to coach my way out of this.
I suffer from this perspective.
They're getting the majority of their news from TikTok.
This is awful.
But is it awful?
There are different perspectives on this, because the way I view this is that when the internet and social media matured, we were already adults.
There was no guidebook for how to responsibly engage with a lot of this technology and consume information.
So we kind of made up the rules as we went along.
I firmly believe that digital natives, that Gen Zs and Gen Alphas even more than Gen Zs are going to grow up in a world where some guardrails are going to start to be put in place and there is going to be an established base of understanding over 10 or 20 years of how we have to look at things with a more critical eye, how we have to scrutinize things a little bit more.
I think in some ways, our kids can teach us how to be better users of technology and that that knowledge will trickle upwards.
That's not something you hear a lot.
And there's nothing I can prove there other than to say that my hunch is that when you're born into this kind of world, you actually might organically evolve into having the skill set needed that, Let's say, the three of us don't necessarily have, because we're learning as we go.
Great point, because I'm thinking about it just in terms of our age, our background, what we've seen.
We are locked into our own perspective.
We can.
We can try as much as possible to engage in perspective shifting and try to imagine and empathize and put ourselves in other people's shoes.
But we have to at the same time recognize that there's nothing we could do to fully understand.
The person who has gone lived a different life.
The folks who are digital natives, who are the youngest generation.
Just because of their different interactions with it, they will have a different perspective.
Actually, I think they have a lot of credibility when it comes to these conversations in a way that younger generations may not have had in.
When it comes to previous discussions too.
I mean, just think about i mean we're going through it too, because i got 10 and 4, so there's a lot of six sevening happening in my house too.
It's like we can't.
I've watched several videos, i've done my research to understand.
Now that does not mean i can understand it the way that they understand it.
We're exposed to the same thing, but experiencing it very differently.
That's absolutely right.
Yep, I know.
It's a totally different language.
There's nothing that makes me feel older than him walking around and doing six, seven.
But you know what?
What's old is new again.
Like, you know, it's hard to do this in two-dimensional space.
I'm going to, like, try this with...
You know, with my hand, but like, which direction are we going in?
We tend to think that the world just goes in one direction kind of up this way.
And in reality and it's not a cycle it doesn't ever come back to the point it started because there's so much changing.
But, you know, Erica often talks of how the future is unfolding like a spiral.
We're coming back around to certain things that we once knew, but they're at a different three-dimensional level.
And the reason I'm saying that is because listen, all three of us, when we were growing up, we had our own version of this crap.
It wasn't six, seven, but we had our own things.
And our parents were sitting here having these conversations and we're like what are these kids talking about here?
And now we're having that conversation.
So it mutates into something new that's appropriate for a new time.
But in many ways I will tell you this, and you might have already covered this ground with Erica when you guys first met it at that event.
But One of the most important things you can do as a futurist is study history, study the past, because an understanding of how things operated in the past informs you and gives you much better information for projecting things out in the future.
So I would say when people meet us on a personal level, they're most surprised about a couple of things.
The fact that we raise our son, very analog, even though we study the future.
The fact that we prioritize being in nature and we even escape the largest city in this country in order to kind of do so.
And number three is that we are just as curious, if not more so, about history than we are the future.
When we travel, when we're blessed to travel, let's say go to Europe.
We are.
I personally am more excited to see things that represent history, because I think you can learn a lot from those things and be smarter about where the future is going.
Yeah, you're spot on, spot on.
And I could talk to you both about this forever, but I want to make sure we give Simone an opportunity to come in and ask his question.
I want to know your perspective about the dangers of you know that technology has been used for work.
And now we have more and more technology.
And there's like a group of people using technology to collaborate.
But there's another group of people that are using technology. technology for war.
So in terms of those dangers for the future, what can you see?
It's a great question.
We've talked for many years.
Part of our job, again, is to identify very serious themes.
And when we're talking to not just leaders of companies but people in the private sector, public sector, excuse me we talk a lot about this concept of what we call wargaming.
And with advanced technology comes the ability for us to simulate different scenarios.
I mean any of us who grew up in the 80s remember the movie War Games which I think came out in 1983.
And this is to my point that things change dramatically, but they don't.
They were already postulating where a lot of this predictive algorithmic technology was going to go in warfare, and that was 42 years ago.
So it has evolved significantly, but in some ways it stayed the same.
I would say that using technology in warfare boils down to two scenarios, and they're not mutually exclusive.
One scenario is a negative one.
It's the idea that now technology can be put in the wrong hands and, because of precision and because of all of the tools at people's disposal, you have greater risk than ever before.
You can do a lot more damage, theoretically, than ever before.
There are cybersecurity issues.
There are the ability for people to basically overtake, let's say, an unmanned aerial vehicle or a drone.
We can go on and on and on.
And too often, I think people focus on that side of it.
The positive ramifications of this are that the more we almost automate warfare if that's the correct term here in theory, the fewer people need to be lost in battle, through things like infantry battles and things like that.
And if you can engage in hyper-precision...
If you're in the theater of combat, then theoretically you'll have less collateral damage or fewer collateral losses in combat, because the tools at your disposal allow you to be hyper-specific in terms of what you're trying to do.
Again, these are scenarios, but they're not mutually exclusive.
I think the use of technology in warfare is something that, as civilians, we don't fully understand.
In fact, many of the coolest things that we've seen in our lifetimes originated from things like DARPA, the government's defense and military research arm.
And then those end up becoming consumer applications.
And I think the Internet actually is counted among those things that was first identified and studied by DARPA.
But the bottom line here is that we're in a future of wargaming.
We're going to be able to game out almost every possible scenario in a theater of combat.
And then there are negative and positive ramifications of that, those which were just beginning to unfold.
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I would layer on top of that too, Jared, because I think you are spot on.
Yeah.
And when it becomes invisible in that way and harder to trace.
You know, for instance, even the risk to a company.
A single deep fake can completely cripple a company in a matter of minutes.
And they are basically hamstrung.
They're not able to respond with enough time.
Think of what happens if you are able to cripple a government in the same amount of time and speed.
It's Almost psychological warfare that.
Then how do you even hedge against a lot of the second and third order risks that come from that, particularly when they then trickle down to the citizenry?
Yep.
That's such a good point.
And this is, you know, this next question.
How would I describe this?
It could be quite substantive or it could be quite entertaining.
We'll see where you take it.
Why are the billionaires buying bunkers?
Oh, I think.
I mean, so here's the little bit of the conspiracy theorist in me.
And let me just say, like MIT Technology Review just came out with a whole, whole magazine on the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and the fact that like, of course, some of them are rooted in fact, whatever it is,
I really have to believe because they are the ones building this technology.
They're the one investing in this technology.
Who knows what the desired end game is in all of this, right?
That's kind of the X factor that remains to be seen.
I have to assume they know something that we don't know.
Why is it that not only are they building bunkers, but there is such a push to For interstellar travel, for mining the moon, for inhabiting Mars, for all of these things that are happening outside of our planet, and you could say okay, they're hedging against potential climate disasters.
I think it's bigger than that.
But a lot of it is shrouded in mystery.
This is what Jared and I talk about with a bottle of wine.
We love this stuff.
It's such a good question.
I mean, it's true.
It's like in my mind, like oversimplifying this, there are like three potential reasons, I think, why a lot of these billionaires are doing stuff like building rocket ships to go in outer space.
One.
If we take them at their word, it's because they believe that the human species should continue to innovate and reach the stars.
Two is that you're talking about boys with their toys.
It's like, I have all this money.
I want to build rocket ships because that's my version of being a boy with my toys.
And three is that they think or they know, it could be either, that we're screwed.
Now, here's the thing.
If you had endless money, endless resources at your disposal and you're all about hedging risk, even if you don't know or don't think that there's going to be a doomsday event.
But you can afford a bunker.
Why not have one?
Listen, I'd love to have a bunker.
I can't afford one.
So it's not a conversation we ever have in our house.
But if I had our garage, Jaron, yeah, I mean, and that's not going to protect us against much.
It doesn't even protect against rain.
So, I mean, we so you can hide in your basement gym.
Yeah, that's that's great.
I'll have.
I'll have weights falling on my head when, when everything collapsed around the middle class version of.
I mean, so so this is what happens.
We have these conversations at night over a bottle of wine, and they range from the serious to the ridiculous.
But it's a great question because, you know, I often wonder, do they know things we don't know?
Or is this just paranoia?
Is this just because they have the money to hedge against any possible risk?
I mean, it's a great question.
A great question.
Yeah, I feel like it's got to be it's it's like a mixture of all of those things.
Right.
Because they're like, hmm, I heard I was talking to my buddies and they told me something.
And now, you know, just in case, let me go ahead, because at this rate, everything for me is free.
So why not build this?
It'll be a campsite otherwise.
So I'll just go there, hang out from time to time.
We were just watching the documentary The Age of Disclosure about all of the secrecy about extraterrestriality and all of the deep, deep layers of the CIA.
If you haven't seen it, it's great.
Where?
What is this?
It's called The Age of Disclosure.
It was just released.
It's on Prime.
But you know everyone, from like top CIA officials to like Marco Rubio, they're all in there being interviewed and right, the whole point of it is there's so much that we kind of know but we really don't know, because the layers of it just go so deep and there's so much shrouded in mystery and secrecy that I think a lot of this is just an extension of that.
It's like we can hypothesize and we can say you know what, like?
Of course, all of these things are true, but I have to just assume that they have their tentacles into parts of business and government that are hidden to mostly people.
Exactly.
Yep.
I was thinking the same thing.
Lots of questions, not great answers, but great speculation.
I appreciate that.
And this has been great, Erica, Jared.
This has been fantastic.
Before you go, I want you to remind everybody about the company and how they can work with both of you, and the book too.
Yeah, fantastic.
So our company is The Future Hunters.
Check that out.
My website is EricaOrange.com.
The book is AI and the New Human Frontier, available wherever books are sold.
And stay tuned after the first of the year for a joint podcast.
A platform that Jared and I are creating called Wake the Future.
Again, just really bringing the future inward, talking about a lot of the implications for your home parenting, our kids.
So that'll be launching on YouTube.
Yeah.
And I mean, historically, we work with companies in a variety of ways.
We can come in and we talk to people who are running companies about some of the issues that came up on today's podcast just in terms of the future of work, workforce productivity efficiency, et cetera.
And we do a lot of public speaking.
And in the future, my hope is that a lot of that speaking morphs more into how we can optimize the people that make up a workforce for a company, let's say, than just how we drive more revenue.
And I think we're kind of getting to that point.
Thank you both for coming on.
This has been fantastic.
This was awesome.
Thank you so much for having us.
