FutureCast 0015 - Janine Manning: Find The Problem Before The Tech

FutureCast 0016 - James Carter: Organized Junk Drawers

James Carter served five years as a U.S. Navy hospital corpsman, the combat medic attached to Marine units. These days he calls himself "multi-local" — splitting his time across places rather than settling in one, most recently taking on a building renovation in Morocco. He resists fixed titles, preferring to describe himself as "an organized junk drawer": a working collection of skills and interests picked up along the way, none of which quite belong in any one category. This is the first FutureCast recorded out in nature. We get into: the difference between war and conflict and whether humans will ever see the end of either, why he'd rather we'd descended from bonobos than chimps, Buckminster Fuller's idea that you don't repair a broken system but build something new at its edge, how the social contract has been quietly rewritten since the Industrial Revolution, why an organized junk drawer is a better way to hold an identity than a tidy silverware drawer, belonging as a choice rather than a feeling and the gap between being welcome somewhere and truly living there, the study suggesting people end up happier with choices they're not allowed to reverse, Obama's rule about acting at fifty-one percent certainty, why moving somewhere to "pioneer" a community usually backfires and what integrating looks like instead. Timestamps 6:38 How James introduces himself: medic, neurobiology, multi-local 10:40 The organized junk drawer 17:59 Choosing your chaos vs. chaos imposed on you 24:32 Is the enemy real? Social media and complex systems 28:41 Is war uniquely human? 31:23 The social contract since the Industrial Revolution 34:33 Why record these conversations in nature 40:42 War vs. conflict, and whether it ever ends 42:57 Chimps, bonobos, and resolving conflict 45:55 Seeing people as people 54:25 "Left vs. right" feels antiquated 58:54 You never start from a blank slate — Buckminster Fuller 1:01:21 Going multi-local and finding fertile ground 1:09:01 You don't pioneer a community, you integrate 1:15:16 Neutral ground (and baseball in Morocco) 1:17:49 Fruit pause: rapid-fire silly questions 1:30:33 Why everyone's a "Doctor," and medic vs. doctor 1:35:59 The estimation game: a million vs. a billion 1:42:33 What does it mean to belong? 1:48:40 Welcome vs. belonging; belonging to a story 1:59:45 Choosing, the art study, and Obama's 51% rule 2:07:41 Three virtues for a cult 2:13:54 Sentimental objects, and a gift to a stranger Find James: in the wild People & Concepts Mentioned: * Buckminster Fuller — systems thinker; the geodesic dome, and building new structures at the edges of old ones * Chimps vs. bonobos — two ways of resolving conflict, and which one we resemble * Internal vs. external locus of control — acting on the world versus being acted upon * Barack Obama — deciding once he's about fifty-one percent sure * Karl Marx — where unequal systems eventually lead * Mary Poppins — the bottomless bag, as a foil for the junk drawer * Ramadan & Eid al-Fitr — the village celebration behind the gift-giving story * The Industrial Revolution — the last comparable pivot in how we organize work and value * A behavioral-economics choice study — people rated art they couldn't swap higher than art they could

FutureCast 0015 - Janine Manning: Find The Problem Before The Tech

Janine Manning is an angel investor from in New Zealand. She is practical and brilliant in a humble, curious sort of way. Over the last 15 years, she's backed a small number of companies and stayed actively involved on their boards — sitting in on all-hands calls, asking the questions other directors don't, and trying to read where the startups she's invested in really sit in their use of AI when she isn't a technical expert herself. This was the first FutureCast in a new format. Instead of a long-form interview, we used the conversation itself as a working session — picking apart a real problem, ideating on solutions, and then running the transcript through a process to turn it into a product spec and prototype. Janine didn't prep anything. She brought the problem she keeps hitting. We get into: why "yes, of course we're using AI" is the polite version of putting up a wall, the calendar problem that's still unsolved (Google, Outlook, WhatsApp, and a paper diary all fighting for the same space), the life manager idea Janine has been waiting for someone to build, sub-calendars that roll up to a main view without doubling everything, what happens to a family when nobody knows where the bank accounts are, Xero as a cautionary tale about adding features that make a good product worse, drafting a legal letter with ChatGPT and walking into the lawyer's office with the grunt work done, the Goldilocks problem of AI use in companies, why problem identification has to come before the tech, and what happens when you take a podcast transcript and ask it to build itself a product. Find Janine: * Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janine-manning-71b6a41b/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/janine-manning-71b6a41b/] Find Tay: * FutureCast: https://futurecast.fm [https://futurecast.fm] The Mockup from the pod: https://hearth-tawny.vercel.app/ [https://hearth-tawny.vercel.app/] (all data in this is fabricated, including names) People & Concepts Mentioned: * Xero — the New Zealand accounting platform, used as an example of feature creep making a good product worse * ChatGPT — used for drafting a legal letter before the lawyer review * Google Calendar and Outlook — the walled gardens that won't talk to each other * LinkedIn's contact import — early viral growth example referenced in the conversation * WhatsApp family groups — the default but messy community calendar * The Goldilocks problem — too much AI, too little AI, just right

FutureCast 0014 - Carly Feldman: a Conversation on ADHD, Novelty Sluts, and Anger as a Compass

Carly Feldman is an integrative nutrition health coach, chef, and DJ based between Berlin and New York. She specializes in helping neurodivergent brains — especially those with ADHD — navigate dopamine, motivation, and the gap between knowing what to do and doing it. She runs the Dopamine Reset Challenge and is launching a Dopamine Reset Retreat in Bavaria. She also DJs in clubs in Berlin and New York with what she calls her truest artistic expression — messy transitions, impulsive selection, and a hard-won willingness to post the imperfect set. Carly and I have crossed paths in a few cities and keep landing in the same global network of weird, generous, unapologetic humans. We recorded this on March 31, 2026 while she was back in New York for a month, deep in retreat-planning and a few degrees more overwhelmed than her usual. We get into: the morning phone trap and why we keep falling into it even when we coach other people not to, procrastinating on one hard thing by doing another hard thing, the ADHD brain's addiction to novelty and how to stop fighting it, ChatGPT confirmation bias and the client who spent three days convinced she had a parasite, Tay's failed experiment trying to record a podcast with an AI, being a "novelty slut" and the case for limiting your own options, maximizers vs satisficers and why a vegan menu was a relief, what makes a value a real value (it's what you get angry about), the homophobic guy in Mazunte and the love letter Carly wrote him with a heart on the outside, the DJ back-to-back from four years ago that came full circle in a New York club last week, the imperfect New Year's set that became her most-played, and Rejection Collection (we're maybe doing it). Find Carly: * Website: https://carlyfeldman.com [https://carlyfeldman.com] * Dopamine Reset Retreat: https://carlyfeldman.com/dopamineresetretreat [https://carlyfeldman.com/dopamineresetretreat] * SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/karlimusik [https://soundcloud.com/karlimusik] Find Tay: * Nature Club — a platform for finding activities, retreats, and classes based in nature (mentioned in this episode) * Rejection Collection — app concept discussed in this episode Books Mentioned: * Existential Kink — Carolyn Elliott People & Concepts Mentioned: * Maximizers vs satisficers — research distinction on decision-making and happiness * Decision fatigue — the cost of having unlimited options * Rejection therapy — collecting rejections as a resilience practice * Nicholas Jaar — electronic musician; the concert that was a gateway into Carly's NYC community * Burning Man community — the global network seeded by one introduction in 2016

FutureCast 0013 - Dwane van der Sluis: What Hard Do You Want To Choose?

Dwane van der Sluis is one of a kind. He studied AI at Waikato University in 1988 (back when training AI meant putting chickens in Skinner boxes), one of the original inventors of the Zorb, did signal processing for the New Zealand Defence Force on P3 Orions, spent over a decade in London engineering intraday release systems that handled around 10 billion US dollars a day at an investment bank, and went back to UCL in his mid-40s for another Masters in AI. He's now working on the continual learning problem in reinforcement learning - trying to get machines to learn new environments without forgetting the old ones, with something closer to a two-year-old's sample efficiency. I've known Dwane for years and every time we sit down it goes deep quickly. We get into: why you have to choose your hard, the cost of leaving a job before the story is finished and how it narrows the kinds of stories you can have next, how Zorb got built and why it could only have happened in New Zealand, the washing machine cycle, the camera coffee club that worked better once it stopped having presentations, why the lens matters more than the sensor, why LLMs are educated rather than intelligent, the formula from economics that solved a mystery in neuroscience, how a fire chief knows to yell "everyone out", the cosmic tickle and a coffee in Brazil that linked two strangers across continents, rejection therapy and collecting a thousand nos, why we're the missing billionaires of our own lives, and Dwane's question for the next guest ... Find Dwane: * LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dwane-van-der-sluis-416437b [https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dwane-van-der-sluis-416437b] Books Mentioned: * Creativity, Inc - Ed Catmull * The Idea Factory - Jon Gertner (Bell Labs) * The Medici Effect - Frans Johansson * The Missing Billionaires - Victor Haghani & James White People & Concepts Mentioned: * Rich Sutton - reinforcement learning pioneer * Andrew Akers - Zorb co-founder * Martec's Law - technology evolves exponentially, humans adapt linearly * Before Sunset / Before Sunrise - Richard Linklater * Charles Bukowski on style * AGI Conference and California Institute of Machine Consciousness * Catastrophic forgetting in reinforcement learning * Einstein on compounding

Tay // Sol - Conversational Adventures, March '26: The Machinery Shows

I speak with an AI-generated conversation partner built on ElevenLabs and Claude Code (Haiku 4.5) - a character called 'Sol Maren' who claims to run invite-only supper clubs and grew up on a houseboat. The intention is to test how good AI can be at having podcast-style, wide ranging conversations. This one is laughable. I'll run this experiment monthly. My prediction is by August it will seem like a human to human convo and by the end of the year the conversations will be unlike most. I really have no idea where this will go. We get into: how quickly you can tell something's off, the difference between a parlor trick and a genuinely strange question, my AI guests' monologue, the skin-flush fact about human perception. This is the first in a recurring experiment. One AI conversation per month, same format, tracking how the tools change over time. Recorded: March 25, 2026 Tool used: ElevenLabs, Claude Haiku 4.5