Near Future Now Has a Podcast
Near Future now has a podcast!
And yet you’re probably thinking…
Do we really need two more dudes,
With a podcast,
Talking about AI?
🙄🙄🙄
Did someone already say bingo? Because my tech bingo card is now complete!
Haha, yes, you’re not wrong. So let me add some context on what led us here.
Since Jonny and I started collaborating last year, some of my favourite moments have been the organic conversations that emerged from the things we’d built, the new tools we’d tried, or just exploring the existential-meets-joy combo that making things in this new era has brought.
When client work picks up, this gets harder to protect, but every time we’ve managed it, it’s been a lot of fun and I’ve learned something through the conversation.
So we’ve now made it a regular part of our practice. Every week we give ourselves 45 minutes together, and attempt to make sense of the latest AI headlines, and the strategic and practical implications for the design and product teams we partner with.
We have some exciting guests lined up soon too, but for now, our focus is on getting the reps in and seeing how this experiment unfolds.
Four episodes are now up, in your flavour of choice at:
Since we talk a bit about AI, we figured it was only fair to let AI say what it thinks of the transcripts so far, to give you a taste of what to expect:
Episode 1: Tom and Jonny find their feet (and microphones)
“Two designers walk into a podcast and say the word ‘craft’ roughly 400 times — but between the AI murder mystery, the logo you can play like a synth and a clock that rhymes the time at you, Tom and Jonny somehow make ‘what does design even mean now?’ sound like the best fun you can have outside an escape room.”
Episode 2: AI, Figma’s Future, and Why Design Teams Need to Find Their Own Path
“Is Figma losing its grip or just its growth stock? Episode two takes on the great designer exodus, decides AI hasn’t killed the designer any more than the iPhone killed the photographer, and speculates on the terror of watching Claude ‘think’ for two minutes while live on stage.”
Episode 3: Kazam! From 15-minute Etch-A-Sketch to 70 years of Eames
“Tom and Jonny build an Etch-A-Sketch live on stage on a Friday night (the audience demanded a horse button!), trace the noble lineage of designers building their own tools, from Gutenberg to the Eames chair to a man pouring far too much olive oil on a salad, and decide that AI’s default is brilliant at speeding you up but terrible at slowing you down.”
Episode 4: Who Controls Your AI? Europe’s Sovereignty Crisis and the Race to Build Independent Tools
“Sovereignty, trillionaires and a banned model walk into a Slack channel. Episode four wrestles with who really controls your AI, then cheers itself up with London’s talent boom and a design tool so lo-fi you run it by double-clicking an HTML file.”
Please like, subscribe, or just listen at 2x and laugh at us speaking that fast.