Think Forward EP 122: Inside Out Futures with Jo Lepore

This week I'm talking with Stacey A. Robinson, an artist and Afro-surrealist whose work lives at the intersection of hip hop, comics, and what he calls the Afro now. We go back to his earliest memory, drawing every morning at a window as a seven year old, and to the exact record he heard that same year that changed how he thought about art and sound before the genre it belonged to even had a name. From there we trace his path through Milestone Media, the Black-owned comic company that reshape...

Tanja Schindler was a competitive Latin dancer at twelve and the family member who set up every television, a split between creative and technical that would define her career. She trained as an electrical engineer, worked the shift from traditional lighting to LED at Osram, and got asked the question every futurist eventually hears, what comes next, before she had ever heard the word foresight. She taught herself scenario planning on spreadsheets, then left Germany to study under Peter Haywa...

Hauson Le cried in his first foresight session. A Disney executive's mentorship pulled him out of data analytics, and three six-hour sessions later he had found the thing he now says he would let go of entirely if it meant making a bigger impact. Today he builds foresight cultures inside American local government through the Alliance for Innovation, where the fires never stop and the pace of change keeps outrunning the pace of decision. His core insight reframed how I think about resistance t...

Paul Baier has spent the last few years in the rooms where large companies decide what to actually do about AI, and he has trained something like 15,000 people within those organizations. So when he says the technology is almost never the bottleneck, it lands differently than it would from someone selling a platform. He grew up in Ohio watching the Midwest get hollowed out by forces everyone could see coming, and nobody managed to get ahead of, and he brings that same unsentimental realism to...

One hundred and fifty episodes in, this is the conversation Think Forward was built for. Radha Mistry leads foresight at Arup, and before that she built a corporate foresight practice from a standing start inside a global design software company that did not know it wanted one. It began with an audit she invented on the spot: a hundred interviews that revealed people all over the organization already sensing the future, separately, in different languages, with no way to bring it together. Fro...