Future-Focused Leadership: How to Prepare for What’s Next

FUTURE-FOCUSED - CLEANED TRANSCRIPT Lightly edited for clarity and readability. Repeated words, false starts, punctuation errors, and obvious transcription glitches have been cleaned up while preserving the original ideas, examples, and conversational tone. Dev: Hey, Michelle, how’s Peru going? I know you’re down there for a while.

Michelle: It’s been amazing. We’ve had such great weather that I even got to go surfing in the middle of winter. Dev: Nice. Do you know how to surf, or was this your first time?

Michelle: I should say I tried surfing for the first time. It was amazing. Katie taught me this thing called “type one fun.” Dev: Type one fun?

What does that mean? Michelle: Apparently, type one fun is stuff you enjoy while you’re doing it - although I guess the aftereffects can vary. The kids these days are also really into type two fun. Dev: What is type two fun?

Michelle: Type two fun is stuff that might not be great in the moment, but it’s for your future self. You look back on it and say, “I’m so glad I did that.” Dev: Yeah. Michelle: I basically realized I’m exclusively into type one fun.

I don’t understand type two fun. Who wants to do things like going to the gym? Dev: So going to the gym is type two fun for you? Michelle: It’s not fun.

It’s just not what I’m into. Dev: I think I spend a lot of my leisure time in type three fun. Michelle: Which is? Dev: You have an amazing time, and afterward you regret it so much.

Michelle: Just living in remorse. Dev: I’m Dev Patnaik. Michelle: And I’m Michelle Razamola. Both: And you’re listening to the Jump Podcast, the conversation for future-focused leaders.

Michelle: Today we’re talking about the assumptions that keep us from being truly future-focused. Later, we’ll discuss some headlines from the future. Are you ready, Dev? Dev: Let’s go.

Dev: Michelle, we have TEDx San Diego coming up. I was invited to speak. There’s the mothership TED, which was in Vancouver, and I guess next year they’re moving it to San Diego. As part of the ramp-up, they’ve asked me to come in and talk about this whole idea of future-focused leadership, which will be great.

It’s for a wider audience, not just businesspeople. Michelle: I don’t think that’s an accident. Future focus is a topic that seems even more top of mind for leaders right now. There’s so much changing.

Our planning cycles are under pressure, and we don’t know with any certainty what’s going to happen next. There’s a lot of interest in questions like: How do we engage with the future? How do we lead with the future more in mind? Dev: Surprisingly so.

It makes sense, but we’ve lived through periods - certainly coming out of COVID and then through threats of recession - when executive leadership teams seemed to be keeping their heads down. Now, more people are reaching out. A company’s general counsel, head of HR, or someone else will say, “Would you come talk to us about being future-focused? We’re thinking about where we go from here.

Where will we be in five or seven years? Help us figure this out, or at least give us some starter thoughts.” There’s a lot more interest than there was when leadership teams were hunkered down. Michelle: Right.

There’s interest, but we’ve been doing this research for a while, and we know not many of us are future-focused. I think the research says it’s about 16 percent. Dev: Right. People at Stanford, including Philip Zimbardo and Everett Rogers, have done studies on this.

Some people at Jump are also doing more precise research on it now. But we know only about 16 percent of people are future-focused. Michelle: Broadly speaking - not just leaders, but the general population. Dev: Yes.

About 16 percent of human beings are future-focused, meaning their outlook or worldview is fundamentally shaped by what the world might look like in five, seven, or ten years - not just by what’s happening right now or what they’re going to do next. Another roughly 14 percent are past-focused. Their worldview is based on nostalgia, precedent, tradition, and the idea that “this is the way it’s always been,” so that’s how they make decisions. Then there’s the 70 percent in the middle of the bell curve who are largely present-focused.

We’re all about now, and we struggle to imagine what the world will look like in the future. Michelle: I think even when present-focused people acknowledge some part of the future, they might ignore it. I can empathize with that. There are parts of the future these days that you might want to ignore.

Dev: There’s the urgency of the now. You can say, “Okay, the world is changing. Climate change is real, or AI is coming online - not just as a chatbot, but in ways that fundamentally change how society is productive. These things will have massive effects in the next five or seven years.

” But if you’re present-focused, many of us just say, “That kind of breaks my brain. It may all be true, but I need to focus on this quarter, this project, or whatever I have going on this week.” Michelle: I still have to get up in the morning and brush my teeth. Dev: Exactly.

You definitely need to brush your teeth. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think about the larger consequences. Brushing your teeth is actually a good example. You’re doing it so your breath doesn’t smell today, but you’re also doing it so you’re not wearing dentures when you’re 70.

Michelle: Exactly. It’s a future-focused act, when you think about it. I can pat myself on the back. Dev: There you go.

Michelle: One thing that comes up for me in these conversations - and I think you and I have talked about this - is that there’s knowing we need to engage with the future more, and then there’s actually being future-focused. Michelle: We see that very few of us actually are. As we try to become more future-focused, I notice a lot of misconceptions and assumptions about what that means and how we lead. Those assumptions can get in the way.

Dev: I see this a lot. I was with a leadership team a couple of weeks ago, and as we got into the question of how to do this, they said, “Can’t we just go out and hire some futurists?” I said, “Wait. Being a future-focused leader is not the same as being a futurist.

” That’s an important misapprehension. A futurist is someone trying to envision future trends and make predictions: maybe we’ll all have virtual reality, cryptocurrency, or whatever. They’re living in the future, at least in their brain space, and that can be a great exercise. Michelle: I remember when Jane McGonigal came to the off-site and had us imagine things.

She’s so smart and can imagine things I never would have thought of. Engaging in that is amazing. But I’ve often seen companies call us and say, “I want my leadership team to engage more with the future,” and it becomes a one-day exercise. Then it doesn’t actually change the day-to-day.

Dev: Exactly. Good futurists often have rigorous methodologies, but we’re not talking about a methodology. We’re talking about a mindset - a stance you take. The people we’ve worked with, whether Richard Branson, Terry Rasmussen, Ratan Tata, or other amazing future-focused leaders, don’t have the ability to live in the future.

Their ability is to build a bridge from what’s happening now to what might happen next. Michelle: So it’s much more an act of leadership. Dev: Right. That’s why we talk about future-focused leadership, not just being future-focused.

Dev: It’s a stance. Yes, we have to brush our teeth now. With Luca, you’re basically his CEO. You have to say, “Luca, we need to brush our teeth today.

” You do it so he doesn’t have spinach in his teeth today, but also because you want him to have healthy gums and avoid infections over the long term. Michelle: We’re also flooded with trend reports. It reminds me of the classic Kodak story and the digital camera. We often talk about companies being surprised by the future, but companies like Kodak can know what’s next and still fail to connect the dots from now to next.

Dev: Kodak invented the digital camera and then got disrupted by it because all its money was based on processing film. Knowing is not the problem. Michelle: For a lot of companies, everyone is looking at the same information, but they’re not seeing the seeds of something different within it. Dev: That’s a trait great future-focused leaders have.

They’re exquisitely tuned to distant early warnings - the little signals of what’s going on. They ask, “How might this mess with my life? How might this wreck our business? What do I need to do to make sure I’m on the upside of this change, not the downside?

” Michelle: They don’t ignore it. They build the bridge, as you’re saying. Dev: Right. I remember something at Amazon.

Jeff Bezos was running the company at the time, and he was making everybody’s lives crazy about machine learning and AI. People would say, “If you have a meeting with Jeff today, don’t go in unless you have an answer for how you’re going to build machine learning into your plan. Otherwise, he’s going to rip you a new one.” You think, “Okay, AI and machine learning.

That makes sense for a CEO today.” Dev: Michelle, that was 2004 - 22 years ago. He was making people’s lives crazy about machine learning. This was long before ChatGPT, before transformers were invented, and before large language models were viable as a solution.

He was thinking, “This is coming, and we need to build it into our thinking.” Michelle: I love that. If it’s a mindset, not just an exercise you do once in a while, then you bring it into every plan. Every conversation has a now-and-next component.

Dev: Exactly. It’s a stance you take, a mindset you have - not just a day retreat you attend. Michelle: So we have one big misconception: people often think being future-focused means being a futurist. Dev: Not true.

Michelle: It’s more of a stance or mindset than a methodology or a one-off exercise. Dev: I think that’s a fair shift for people to make if they want to get ahead of this stuff. Michelle: It also sounds hard. Another thing I often hear is that future-focused leadership is about having the right analysis.

If I do the right research and analysis, I’ll become a more future-focused leader because I’ll know where the world is going and what the data says. There’s a kind of prediction embedded in that. Dev: And this bugs you. You’re not into the analysis idea.

Michelle: Not because I want to take away the rigor. But if you only focus on analysis and trends - even if you’re good at identifying uncertainties and certainties - you still have to decide what to do. For example, people are eating less of certain things. You can probably bet that sugary cereal isn’t suddenly going to grow massively.

Dev: Right. We’re not eating the way we did 40 years ago. That’s changing, and in a good way. Michelle: But what do you do about it?

Going back to the idea of building the bridge between now and next, future-focused leadership isn’t just about being future-focused. It’s about being a leader. It’s not enough to have the right analysis and do the right research. Dev: Stewart Brand, whom I love and who’s like the father of all this future stuff, said years ago that the best way to predict the future is to create it.

You can sit there and watch trends all day long, but that isn’t enough. Years ago, I spoke with the CFO of a large consumer packaged goods company. He said, “Dev, there isn’t a single market trend in the last 20 years that we didn’t see coming.” He said it as a point of pride, but I took it as a damning statement.

Why didn’t you do anything about it? If you didn’t know this stuff was coming, that’s one problem. But if you knew it was coming, why didn’t you take action? It’s too easy to delegate all of this to an insights or trends department, get a quarterly report, and then keep going about your business instead of making changes.

Michelle: Do you think it isn’t scary enough? What leads to the lack of action - to actually creating that future? Dev: For a lot of people, they want to cross every T and dot every I. They want to be sure they’re right, and they want their ideas to be defensible.

That may work for present-day issues. But if you’re thinking about shifting your business model over the next five years, you’re never going to know for sure. Dev: You have to start doing and trying things. People may say, “We can’t make a big bet on that.

” Fine - don’t make one big bet. Make five little bets. Try things, learn, and then come back and do something different based on what you learned. Michelle: That reminds me of so many conversations with our partners.

They’ll say, “We need to put it through our stage-gate process,” or, “It needs to fit this dashboard.” But the metrics we use to measure the present don’t work for weak signals that are emerging. We often don’t have the experimental tools to test them. Dev: It’s funny you mention the stage-gate process.

It came out of product development. After agile, most product development organizations don’t use stage gates in the same way anymore. But that mindset and vocabulary have infected all kinds of other parts of the business. No one wants to be the person who screwed it all up or lost a bajillion dollars.

So there’s this feeling that we need the right analysis and we need to be sure. Michelle: But when it comes to the future, there’s also intuition and creativity. You have to try something. There’s a sense of agency that we often see in leaders.

To bring up Amazon again, one of the most impressive ideas I’ve learned from them is the “future-back” process. Dev: Future-back. What does that mean? Michelle: It can sound like a new methodology: define an end state and work backward to understand how it happened.

Often, though, the end state is treated as something we’re certain will happen. In Amazon’s world, the end state is something they want to create. They imagine the consumer experience five years from now, then work backward to create it. There’s a strong belief embedded in that process that you can create the future.

Dev: That idea is embedded in the little projects you’re describing. Choose action over analysis or anxiety. Try something, create something, learn something, and then come back and do something different. Michelle: You’ve also brought up another point that’s implicit in this conversation: prediction.

Some people think future-focused leaders are simply very good at predicting the future. Dev: They imagine those leaders have a crystal ball that the rest of us don’t. Michelle: Right. Dev: I don’t think that’s true.

The people we’ve spent time with don’t have a crystal ball. They’re thinking, “A lot of things might happen in the future. I need to try a bunch of things and be ready. No matter which possibility happens, I want a game plan in place.

” I like to joke that they don’t have a crystal ball; they have a wrecking ball. Michelle: They prepare for multiple possibilities instead of betting everything on one thing. Dev: Exactly. They rarely bet the farm on one thing because they’re constantly running little experiments and making little bets.

Did you ever read Peter Sims’s book Little Bets? Peter is a friend of ours and spent time with Jump. He wrote it 10 or 15 years ago, and it’s all about trying lots of small things before circumstances force you to bet everything in the fourth quarter with a Hail Mary pass. Michelle: I wouldn’t correct your football metaphor.

That’s not my strength. Dev: The point is to make many little bets before life forces you to make one big bet. Michelle: I’m going to push us here. Some of this thinking has existed for 10 or 15 years, and scenario planning has existed since Shell did it in the 1970s.

Dev: The 1960s, even. Michelle: So what makes this so hard to do? Dev: You’re fighting your own wiring. That’s the thing.

It goes back to mindset over methodology. For 70 percent of us, a future-focused mindset runs contrary to how our brains are currently wired. Michelle: That’s tough. Dev: It is.

The people who make dramatic changes - the people we call the “frackers,” who cause big shifts in the world - are anomalies. They’re relative weirdos in that 16 percent of the population. If your brain is constantly saying, “All of that may be true, but it feels esoteric. It’s outside my day-to-day, and I have six things to worry about right now,” your brain is playing tricks on you, and you don’t even know it.

Michelle: The cultures inside organizations often work against us, too. They don’t help us rewire our brains. We work with a lot of public companies, and I often hear, “I have a certain responsibility,” or, “I need to report something.” Then someone comes in and says, “I can guarantee this for you.

” Dev: That feels so good, but they’re fooling you - or they’re fake. If someone says, “I can guarantee it 100 percent,” that person is a con man. About 20 years ago, we were starting a project with a company, and the leader said, “We want to be entrepreneurial. We’re ready to take big risks, but we just need to be sure it’s going to work.

” I said, “That’s not a risk, buddy.” Michelle: Even in the markets, didn’t you tell me they were discussing changing reporting requirements - maybe at Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange? Dev: The SEC was proposing that companies could optionally report semiannually instead of quarterly. Dev: What I find interesting is the reaction from companies.

Michelle: To your point about taking risks, no one wants to be the first company to do it - especially when it’s optional - because people might assume you’re hiding something. Dev: Maybe. But it’s also about stepping into a future that could be helpful. Who’s going to be first?

I think it would have to be a company like OpenAI or Anthropic when it goes public. It would be setting completely new expectations and behavior, and the market would treat it as its own space, without easy comparisons. That’s more likely than a company like Wells Fargo doing it. Michelle: If you’re operating entirely around how an analyst will react on the day you release that quarter’s earnings, it’s hard to make even little bets because everything feels too risky.

Dev: Exactly. Anything we can do to align people with long-term thinking, future-oriented thinking, and different incentives would be helpful. Michelle: Let’s recap. First, people sometimes think being future-focused means being a futurist.

Dev: Not true. It’s mindset over methodology. Michelle: Second, people think future-focused leadership is about having the right analysis. Dev: That’s somewhat true, but there’s also the idea of creating the future and taking action.

That’s the leadership part. Michelle: Third, people think a future-focused leader needs to be certain about the future - certain about what to bet on and able to guarantee it. Dev: You’re never going to be certain. Dev: You can put this on my gravestone - if I had a gravestone: preparing over predicting.

Future-focused leaders don’t con themselves into thinking they can predict the future. They imagine multiple possibilities and prepare for those futures, no matter what comes to pass. Michelle: You’ve been having these conversations one-on-one and giving talks. Is there anything else that people seem not to understand?

Dev: It’s not that they don’t understand. It’s more of a reasonable concern that comes up. I was speaking to a large group at a pharmaceutical company, and someone said, “You’re talking about being future-focused instead of present-focused. But my yoga and meditation instructors tell me the key to happiness is being present, and you’re telling me I shouldn’t be present.

” I thought that was fascinating because it’s a completely different meaning of the word. Michelle: Isn’t being present a mindset, too? Dev: It’s more than a mindset. Being present is a state of mind or a state of experience.

It means being here, right now. I’m paying attention to you. I’m not thinking about lunch or where the economy will be in ten years. That’s very different from having a present-focused mindset.

Present-focused means spending all your time reacting to what’s happening around you. I’d argue that most Americans in modern society aren’t particularly present. Michelle: Social media killed that. We’re a generation of distracted people.

Dev: But we’re still present-focused. We’re highly distracted and completely obsessed with what’s happening right now. Michelle: So, in our language, a mindset is more like a worldview that persists across situations. Dev: Right.

You can move through the world with extreme presence. I’m looking at you right now. I’m not distracted. I’m here, right now.

At the same time, I can be highly attuned to where this moment is going. I can be future-focused in my decision-making and in how I pay attention to what’s coming down the pike. A future-focused leader is constantly looking for small signals of change - something strange or surprising out there. If you’re totally distracted, you’ll miss those signals.

You won’t catch them if you’re on your phone, playing a video game, or driving down the road without looking where your car is going. Michelle: I love this distinction. Maybe you can be my therapist for a moment. We’re constantly told that good leadership means being present and that we should meditate.

All of that is true and great. But if I’m confessing a little, there’s something about the future right now that fills me with anxiety. When I can focus on the present, I’m much happier. Let’s go back to surfing.

That’s much better. Dev: When you were up on the board, it was hard, and there were so many ways to mess it up that your brain had to be completely focused on the moment. Michelle: Exactly. That was great.

Part of me doesn’t want to engage with the future because it creates anxiety. Dev: This is the challenge with language. Maybe we need better terminology. Present focus is not the same as presence.

Michelle: They use the same word, but they mean very different things. Dev: You’ll probably be a happier person if you practice constant presence. Michelle: And not just happier. What I’m hearing is that being present may be key to being a future-focused leader.

Dev: Yes. Michelle: Two things come up for me. One is what we already discussed: building a bridge from now to next. The other is noticing signals - seeing what’s coming down the pike, questioning assumptions, and taking time to notice.

That brings up a beginner’s mindset: being present and opening your eyes to what’s happening right in front of you. Dev: Maybe we need a better term than “present-focused.” It sounds like an academic distinction, but it’s important. In fact, many of the most future-focused leaders I know are also incredibly present.

The opposite of being present isn’t being future-focused. The opposite of being present is being distracted. Michelle: It’s our favorite time of the day: Headlines from the Future. Dev: This is when you show us things that sound like they’re happening in 2030 or 2035, but are actually happening right now.

Michelle: Yes. Dev: I’m excited. Don’t bum me out or creep me out too much. What do you have?

Michelle: I’ll try. It’s my joy to keep you on your toes. Headline number one: Vermont is the latest state to make it illegal to read your mind without permission. Dev: Illegal to read your mind?

I assume you’re not talking about one of those mentalists - “Think of a person. Barack Obama. My God, how did you guess?” Michelle: No.

I didn’t realize how many products either have patents for, or are already using, technology that works with our brain waves. Take Apple AirPods. Apple has a patent for AirPods with EEG sensors. There’s also the Muse meditation headband and things like Neuralink.

Muse isn’t nearly as invasive as Neuralink, but it can still read brain waves and provide neurofeedback. Several states - including Connecticut, California, and Colorado - already have different versions of protections. Vermont is one of the latest to include this kind of information in its data privacy law. Your brain waves are your own data.

Dev: That’s phenomenal. It seems unusually ahead of the curve for regulation. Michelle: It also covers third-party data, AI training, and data licensing. This isn’t a world where everyone is wearing a brain-reading headband yet, and our AirPods don’t currently have EEG sensors.

But regulators are getting ahead of it because wearables appear to be a major area of investment. Dev: Ten years ago, we might have been more naive about this. But after Cambridge Analytica and everything else, we know Facebook and other companies have been perfectly willing to spy on us. You might have thought government access was different.

But now we’re living in a time when ICE agents can stop people entering the country and search their phones with a very low level of reasonable suspicion. Because many people use Face ID, an agent can hold the phone up to their face and unlock it. People have been advising visitors entering the United States to turn off Face ID before they arrive so that can’t happen. Michelle: That also highlights the difference between certain states and the federal government.

California, Colorado, Connecticut, and Vermont are the states we’re talking about. Dev: It’s fascinating that blue states, which have often embraced technology and said, “The future is California,” are stepping back and saying, “Wait. I didn’t like what the last generation of tech companies did with my data, and I’m especially scared about what the federal government might do with it.” Maybe this is the beginning of the privacy backlash we’ve been talking about for years.

Michelle: It raises the question: What does data privacy mean, and what does it mean to own my data? Dev: Scott McNealy, the cofounder of Sun, used to say, “Privacy is dead. Get over it.” I don’t think we’re getting over it.

Michelle: I don’t think so. Dev: All right. Headline number two. Michelle: Americans now spend twice as many hours with AI companions as they do on dating apps.

Dev: On average, or is that just a few sad people? Michelle: On average. Dev: What the hell? Michelle: U.

S. users logged about 705 million hours on AI companion apps last quarter, compared with roughly 280 million hours on dating apps. The two categories swapped places in a single year. Dev: When you say “companions,” you don’t mean someone going to ChatGPT and asking for Google’s stock price.

Michelle: No. They’re not counting you and your great relationship with ChatGPT. Dev: You mean companion apps that are specifically trying to simulate a partner. Michelle: Yes - apps like Character.

AI and Replika. xAI’s Grok added a companion avatar named Ani in 2025. We’re talking about the specific companion feature, not just Grok generally. Dev: So online companions like Character.

AI have passed Match.com and Tinder? Michelle: Yep. Dev: My God.

We’ve seen dating apps decline for a while, so there are other variables. But it’s fascinating how many hours people spend with AI companions compared with looking for romantic sparks. There may be some hope in this. Maybe a lot of people want to be with human beings but don’t want to use dating apps anymore.

Maybe they’re going to bars, joining volleyball teams, or going to the public library to meet someone. Michelle: The public library? Dev: I don’t know where that came from. I heard Gen Z is drinking again, so things are changing.

Maybe people are going out, and the people left on these apps are turning to AI. Michelle: In absolute terms, this doesn’t mean a majority of people are using AI companions. It’s a measure of total hours, which could be driven by an unknown number of people. I also thought it was interesting that the report found internet searches beginning with “AI” were often followed by words related to dating or companionship: “AI girlfriend,” “AI character,” “AI friend,” or “AI conversation,” rather than something like “AI tool.

” Dev: Who did the study? Michelle: Sensor Tower, a research firm that studies online behavior. Dev: So AI companions are now used more than dating apps. That’s a little sad, but I’m hoping it means more people are getting out into real life.

Michelle: More to come on that. Dev: Before COVID, I think the numbers had settled around the idea that a majority of marriages in the United States involved people who met through an online app. Online dating had fully entered the mainstream. I’d be fascinated to know what’s happening with marriage rates now as another indicator.

Michelle: I’ll come back to you on that one. Dev: Give us another headline. Michelle: Headline number three: The first flights in the U.S.

air-taxi program carried lab-made organs. Dev: There are multiple layers of coolness in that. This one sounds fake. We finally have flying cars, which we’ve been waiting for for 70 years.

What’s going on? Michelle: We’ve imagined this for a long time, and there have been many pilot programs involving vehicles called eVTOLs - electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Dev: They’re basically drones that can go up and down - battery-powered helicopters. Michelle: If we can unlock this, it’s amazing.

But the FAA has had trouble categorizing these flights. They aren’t helicopters, they aren’t planes, and they don’t use runways. That has been a major issue for companies like Archer and others creating these vehicles. The major company involved here is Amazon-backed BETA Technologies.

It worked with the FAA and United Therapeutics, which is developing lab-grown organs and served as the customer. A company like United Therapeutics needs mass-produced, transplantable organs. Michelle: United Therapeutics’ CEO has said the business would need thousands of flights a day to operate at scale. That makes this a perfect use case.

What’s interesting is that BETA completed two official flights using a conventional runway aircraft, not its vertical aircraft. Dev: Because the FAA still needs to write the rulebook before it can issue certifications. Michelle: Right. They need to see how this works in the air first: how the aircraft operate and what the rules should be.

It’s part of a larger FAA program with eight projects across 26 states. Dev: And these vehicles are autonomous? Michelle: Yes. Dev: These are autonomous, people-sized flying drone cars carrying artificial organs and tissues.

There’s a lot going on there. It’s like, “Your chocolate is in my peanut butter, and my peanut butter is on your chocolate” - two great tastes of future-focusedness coming together. Michelle: Exactly. It’s exciting.

Dev: It also points to how this is likely to play out. For years, people didn’t trust elevators. They thought, “That’s crazy. I might plummet to my death.

” Then Otis developed a system that kept an elevator car from falling even if the cable broke. But it still took a long time for people to trust elevators, so the first elevators were used to move heavy packages up and down. Michelle: Don’t risk people. Dev: Apparently, we shouldn’t even risk real organs.

Let’s risk the lab-grown ones. Michelle: It’s interesting that with autonomous vehicles like Waymo, we didn’t start with packages - we started with people. There’s something about being suspended in the air that makes us more cautious. Dev: So we’re people-first with autonomous cars, but package-first with elevators and flying taxis.

Michelle: Flying taxis. That’s easier than saying eVTOLs. Dev: More evidence that the future is here today. It’s a real thing.

Michelle: It’s a real thing. Dev: We could talk about this for hours, Michelle, but we have to go. Thanks for spending time with us. Michelle: Remember, the conversation doesn’t end here.

Every Saturday, you can hear from Dev in your inbox through his future-focused letters for clients and friends. If you like hanging out with us, we’d love it if you left a comment or shared this with a friend. Your hosts for the Jump Podcast are Michelle Loret de Mola and Dev Patnaik. This episode was produced by Katie Adkinson.

Research was done by Michelle, I think. Did you do that? Dev: Pretty good. Artwork was created by C.

O’Carey, and the music was composed by Avi. The Jump Podcast is brought to you by Jump Associates, the strategy firm for future-focused leaders. Stay focused on the future, because it’ll be here before you know it.