Data Scholar Michael Clark joins Looking Outside to discuss the value behind the data we collect and how the definition of data is changing.

Michael is a futurist focused on data, a digital payment and open banking and Vice President of Global Digital Transformation at Mastercard. To explore the topic, he starts quite simply by defining what data even is. Speaking to how data’s origin as a gift, quite literally the meaning of the word being datum or gift, has changed over time, Michael contextualizes not just what the concept of data is but how our relationship with it has changed.

Looking Outside comes to you LIVE from the Dubai Future Forum, the largest gathering of futurists in the world.

In this conversation we talk about disruptive technology and transformative blue sky innovation with Airbus Senior Vice President and Head of Disruptive Research and Technology, Dr Grzegorz (Greg) Ombach. Greg describes the mindset shift he experienced in leading innovative transformation across various industries, each with their own lifecycle.

Looking Outside comes to you LIVE from the Dubai Future Forum, the largest gathering of futurists in the world.

In this conversation we talk about sustainable design with Arup's Director of Foresight, Josef Hargrave. Arup is focused on creating more sustainable built environments, and Josef speaks to how designing for the future needs to be anchored in decisions for the present, by understanding deeply the structural limitations and infrastructure of today.

Today we’re talking about the big topic of Sustainability within big business. Former Chief Sustainability & Social Impact Officer at McDonalds, Bob Langert, joins the show and shares his three decade long journey in making environmental change happen at one of the biggest organizations in the world.

An environmental activist at heart, Bob shares how he was able to take a topic he cared deeply about but was low on the company priority list, and over time use his passion to make people notice and act. Bob speaks about the need for change agents; fewer people laying low and trying to stay out of trouble, more people who are open, patient and bring big ideas. Ultimately that passion and persistence helps the business, because as Bob says, “Businesses that are satisfied and content are going to die.”

In this episode of Looking Outside we venture into dark futures with global futurist Nikolas Badminton, crossing over the line of realism into dystopia.

While positive futures are important, Nik says facing into the fact that ‘bad stuff does exist’ is the important starting point. We often see plans or goals that are so far out, particularly in government policies, that are psychologically disconnected from the people planning them and therefore aren’t designed to provide anything tangible enough to motivate people to act.

We kick off Season 4 bravely with the visionary Amy Webb, Quantitative Futurist, CEO of the Future Today Institute, professor at NYU and author. In this episode, as in Amy’s book The Genesis Machine, we discuss the paths towards synthetic futures and the methods in creating more credible focus on the long term future.

Amy takes us into the future, and the topic of the latest book she co-authored with Andrew Hessel, The Genesis Machine, explaining how over 13 years of researching AI she noticed something profound happening in the synthetic biology space. General purpose technologies have the potential to fundamentally alter society and impact the economy, like electricity and the internet have, and while Amy concedes scaling it is a ‘ways off’, we should be paying attention, and planning for synthetic biology to act as the next generative purpose technology – transforming medicine, the environment and our food systems.

In this episode of Looking Outside we learn how to weave together the voices of the future, the agents with vision, to create Coalitions of Change, with Cat Tully, Founder and Director of the School of International Futures.

Having created the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Network, Cat speaks to why it’s critical we use the voice of young people as evidence towards future planning, by allowing those who will live in the future to speak for it.

Be prepared to teeter on the edge of excitement and cynicism, as we explore The Metaverse in this episode of Looking Outside, with technology futurist and Metaverse expert, Theo Priestley. Theo is CEO and Co-Founder of Metanomic, a complete web3 economic platform for developers, but he is also one of the public voices ready to poke holes in Metaverse concepts commonly spouted.

To peel back the polished veneer, Theo discusses the need to look at the gaps in the arguments made today on the Metaverse; like how technologies that make up web3 are at varied levels of understanding and development across industries, while the technologies adopted in every day use are still quite dated.

In this episode of Looking Outside we look closer at the numbers and what they are telling us, exploring the predictive human powers of Demographics. For this we chat with fellow Aussie, Bernard Salt, Founder & Executive Director of The Demographics Group.

As a well known personality, famous for injecting a bit of humor into his public speaking events and newspaper columns, Bernard shares his philosophy on presenting the numbers in a way that is engaging and compelling. He speaks to how to establish the facts, make a strong case, demonstrate your credibility … and be bold enough to have a bit of fun with it.

We start season 3 digging deep into human values, while speculating on their evolved expression into the future, with futurist and Associate Professor at University of Houston's Foresight Program, Dr Andy Hines.

Having authored a book on the topic of values, ConsumerShift, Andy shares how defining what a value is and how it is expressed by people with differing typologies, helps us perceive them as something less static and therefore shows us their potential evolution into the future.