Near Future Podcast

A regular podcast covering design and AI from the founders of Near Future, a boutique AI consultancy focused on teams that care about craft. We cover both what we're seeing on the ground and industry trends, ways of working and occasional guests from the design world.

Near Future Podcast is a arts podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 12 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Near Future Podcast, a arts show with 12 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #12

  Ep #12: James Storer (Monzo): Fake Banks, Real Learning, and Being Monzo's Biggest Token Burner

  Aug 14, 20261h 9m

  Tom and Jonny sit down with James Storer, who leads design in Monzo's AI and personalisation collective and is the biggest token burner in the whole company. They dig into the fake Monzo his team built to prototype with, why he stepped off the leadership track to get back in the tools, and what he went to Config to ask Figma. CHAPTERS 00:00 Introducing James Storer 02:12 Why go back to doing the work after leading teams 10:13 The founder's fight: ship it, or make it better 14:47 Being a loud mouth turned out to be the skill 18:35 AI lowers the floor, so who raises the ceiling 25:30 Everyone an expert in everything, or still not enough hours 28:01 Building hardware when you can't solder 30:07 Should there be an app store with one user 33:43 Is the value the software, or making it with your kid 36:08 The UNO clone his six-year-old wanted to explode 40:01 A 69-year-old vicar and the church website 41:31 The messy middle: AI inside a regulated bank 43:44 A fake Monzo with fake money 49:36 Handoff should be a handshake 54:16 "What will you do to make me open you every day?" 60:39 Quickfire 68:31 Wrap PEOPLE James Storer — Design Lead, AI & Personalisation, Monzo https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesstorer/ Avi Ashkenazi, Deel — previous Near Future guest, on raising the floor and the ceiling https://www.linkedin.com/in/aviashkenazi/ Jake Knapp — author of Sprint — https://www.jakeknapp.com Simon from Morse — spoke alongside James at Mostly Working https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-amor/ COMPANIES Monzo — https://monzo.com Deliveroo — https://deliveroo.co.uk Freetrade — https://freetrade.io Habito — https://www.habito.com Klarna — https://www.klarna.com Twist — James's design agency Jitty — the house-buying startup James co-founded TOOLS AND PRODUCTS MENTIONED Cursor — https://cursor.com Claude Code — https://claude.com/product/claude-code ChatGPT — https://chatgpt.com Figma — https://figma.com Figma Make, Figma Weave, code layers — announced at Config FigJam — https://figma.com/figjam Lovable — https://lovable.dev Stitch — https://stitch.withgoogle.com NotebookLM — https://notebooklm.google.com Notion — https://notion.com Linear — https://linear.app Abstract — version control for Sketch files Sketch — https://sketch.com Three.js — https://threejs.org React Native — https://reactnative.dev Nano Banana — Google's image model, via Gemini Hex — open-source dictation app Wispr Flow — https://wisprflow.ai Wabi — personal app builder for iPhone MeatLayer — agents paying humans for real-world tasks — https://meatlayer.ai M5Stack — small dev boards — https://m5stack.com Lumi / ROLI — light-up keyboards, now open sourced — https://roli.com BigQuery — https://cloud.google.com/bigquery ALSO REFERENCED Config 2026 — Figma's conference — https://config.figma.com Mostly Working — Tom's design and AI meetup in London https://luma.com/mostly-working Sprint, by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz UNO — the card game James and his son cloned as "Duo" NEAR FUTURE Podcast — https://nearfuture.works/podcast Get in touch — podcast@nearfuture.works

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  Episode #11

  Ep #11: No Shortcuts. Backyard Designers, AI Slop, and the Leadership Squeeze

  Aug 7, 20261 hour

  Tom and Jonny are back for a duo episode after a month of guest interviews — Jonny has just about got the internet back after a house move and a camping trip. They reflect on what the recent guest run has taught them, dig into Backyard Designers Club and the hooha it sparked, and talk through why design and engineering leadership is such a hard place to be right now. Plus: Tom built a 3D chess game for his 5-year-old using Opus 5 and Three.js, and Jonny's Ooda gets a quiet YC moment. Chapters 0:04 — Intro: Jonny's back (and has internet again) 3:44 — Reflections on a month of guest episodes 8:20 — The common thread: leaders who build 17:00 — AI raises the floor, not the ceiling — but the ceiling hasn't moved 21:35 — The AI slop problem: Hacker News, Substack's detector & LinkedIn's report button 22:08 — Ellipsis and the proof-of-work problem for human writing 26:10 — Ini's wireless-in-the-browser project: the opposite of slop 21:32 — Backyard Designers Club: craft, sound design and game-like delight 29:13 — How fast an original idea can be cloned 31:21 — The hoo-ha: exclusion, community claims, and what a community actually is 38:53 — Who's on Backyard Designers — and what it says about design's visible/invisible divide 41:35 — Engineering leadership burnout: Gergely Orosz's three reasons leaders are quitting 44:35 — Is design leadership 12 months behind engineering on the same trajectory? 51:57 — Tom's AI experiments: agent skill pack + a 3D underwater chess game 1:00:01 — Jonny's Ooda project gets a YC validation moment 1:00:42 — What's coming up: Build workshop, Wednesday event with Christine Røde (The Browser Company), Brighton in September Useful Links Backyard Designers Club — https://backyarddesigners.club Broke Ass Designers — the commentary/reaction version - https://brokeass-designers.fly.dev/ Ellipsus — proof-of-work writing tool https://ellipsus.com/ Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) — engineering leadership trends post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gergelyorosz_interesting-recent-trend-im-observing-share-7487619068187852800-ceQ2/ Ooda — Jonny's internal tool hosting project — https://ooda.run Podcast feedback: podcast@nearfuture.works Near Future Build Workshop (Aug 13th): https://nearfuture.works/build Find us at https://nearfuture.works

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  Episode #10

  Ep #10: Ini Abiodun (AirOps): Designing at AI Startup Speed, Personal Workflows, and Palmwine Wireless

  Jul 30, 202659 min

  This week Jonny moves house, so Tom hosts solo. He’s joined by Ini Abiodun, lead product designer at AirOps, to discuss designing inside a fast-moving AI startup and the systems she’s built to move faster. Ini explains how her 90-day onboarding plan collapsed almost immediately due to pace, and how internal AI assistants like Fantino and Clara helped her learn the codebase, accelerate a listening tour, and ship early, including a widely adopted UX writing “skill” that encodes brand voice, product context, and content rules while diagnosing and rewriting copy. She shares how she spends significant time scaling design via cross-functional relationship-building, joining eval conversations to reduce user cognitive load, and enabling engineers through design reviews. Ini also describes her personal “Oracle” knowledge base in Obsidian/Claude for communication, stakeholder context, daily/weekly routines, and performance tracking. The episode closes with Palmwine Wireless, her interactive 1950s-style online radio broadcasting AI-generated Nigerian instrumentals across decades, plus quick-fire questions. (00:00) - Intro & Guest Welcome (00:52) - Joining AirOps: The 90-Day Plan (05:13) - Building the AI Content Design Skill (12:38) - Product Design vs. Design Operations (20:39) - Neurodivergence, Communication & Knowledge Systems (32:04) - Daily Reflection Practices (36:22) - Palmwine Wireless: Building a Nigerian Radio (43:41) - Sound Design Deep Dive (49:26) - Building the Music Library with Suno (52:45) - Quick-Fire Questions (59:00) - Outro & Thanks ## Mentioned in the episode - [Domingo Widen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/domingowiden/) - [Monologue by Every](https://www.monologue.to) - [Andrej Karpathy](https://x.com/karpathy) - [Wes Kao](https://www.weskao.com) - [Lenny’s Data](https://www.lennysdata.com/) ## More about Ini - [Ini’s personal website](https://iniabiodun.com/) - [Palmwine Wireless](https://radio.iniabiodun.com/) - [Ini on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/inioluwa-abiodun/) Find us at nearfuture.works

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  Episode #9

  Ep #9: Hollie Lubbock & Josh Payton (Wise): How Wise Is Rebuilding the Designer's Workflow for the Age of AI

  Jul 23, 202647 min

  Hollie Lubbock (Design Director) and Josh Payton (VP of Design) at Wise join Jonny and Tom on the Near Future Podcast to unpack how their design org has rewired itself around AI — from prototyping kits that let anyone "hold" an idea, to the hidden operational grind behind every flashy AI demo. They dig into why disciplines aren't collapsing (they're specializing further), why AI is "an averaging machine," and what it takes to stand out when everyone has the same tools. Plus: a rapid-fire round covering deleted tools, current inspirations, and what they'll do when AGI takes over. Chapters 0:04 — Intro & guest welcome 0:49 — What day-to-day design at Wise looks like right now with AI 2:27 — The early prototyping kit that made AI feel "magical" 4:45 — Solo missions vs. collaboration in AI-driven work 6:07 — The "agent-operator" workflow trap 7:16 — Why scale (8,000 employees) changes the risk calculus 7:33 — How AI adoption varies across design disciplines 8:58 — The unglamorous ops work behind AI prototypes (InfoSec, workflows) 16:49 — Talent development: grads, internships, apprenticeships 19:03 — The three traits that matter most: smart, ambitious, curious 19:49 — Why design disciplines aren't collapsing 20:41 — "AI raises the floor, not the ceiling" — differentiation matters more 24:32 — Josh's 2x2 framework: when to let AI/PMs skip design entirely 29:37 — AI as an "averaging machine" and the tells of AI-generated work 32:13 — A WALL-E-inspired vision of the future 33:15 — Betting on human-curated, handcrafted experiences 34:36 — Josh's secret AI-built app project 35:15 — Josh's actual design process, tool by tool 37:27 — His AI agent fleet: Claude Code, Cowork, and more 39:47 — Bounded validity and lessons from engineering-first principles 42:24 — Quick-fire round begins 43:16 — What they'll never hand over to AI: curation 44:22 — The last tool they deleted (and why) 45:25 — What's inspiring them right now 46:58 — Wrap-up & where to find Hollie and Josh Useful Links Josh Payton, VP of Design at Wise https://www.joshpayton.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshpayton Hollie Lubbock, Design Director at Wise https://www.hollielubbock.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollielubbock/ Podcast feedback: podcast@nearfuture.works Near Future workshop (Aug 13th): nearfuture.works/build Find us at nearfuture.works Click here to view the episode transcript.

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  Episode #8

  Ep #8: Domingo Widen (Fin): Why Fin's designers now ship straight to production

  Jul 16, 202649 min

  Tom and Jonny are joined by Domingo Widen, Staff Product Designer on the Front-End Infrastructure team at Fin (formerly Intercom) Domingo shares how designers at Fin have moved from prototyping in sandboxes to shipping directly to production, and unpacks his team's mission to build the platform and tools that let every team move from concept to production faster with AI. The conversation traces the story of getting designers into developer environments — from a top-down mandate and painful early setup sessions to a smoother, engineer-assisted process — and how that groundwork now lets designers self-serve with Claude. Domingo introduces "Surge Intelligence," an encoded knowledge base that powers design-system skills so AI can enforce front-end conventions without a human policing every decision, and describes the PR-style review process for designers who want to contribute their own skills. The back half explores where design is headed: the enduring value of human judgment and "taste" built through reps, the edge cases only builders learn from experience, and why Domingo believes AI will keep design work capped around 85% for a while. They close with quick-fire questions on tools he wishes existed (a home for aligning on live prototypes, since Figma hand-off has broken down), his favourite product (MyMind), and what he'd do with his free time in an AGI future. Chapters 0:00 – Intro & welcoming Domingo Widen 0:52 – How the Front-End Infrastructure team works today 2:20 – Is Domingo still a "product designer"? 3:49 – Splitting time between infra, design system, and product work 4:22 – Getting designers into developer environments: the origin story 9:45 – Optimizing the setup process with engineering 14:20 – From constant support requests to a self-serve steady state 11:29 – Claude as a fallback for technical hiccups 12:14 – Enforcing design consistency without slowing the company down 14:02 – Introducing Surge Intelligence and how design skills read from it 15:57 – Serving both designers and engineers with shared knowledge 18:13 – Do designers see AI codifying their instincts as a threat? 20:09 – The 85% problem: where human judgment still wins 23:52 – Codifying skills: the PR-and-review process for Team 2X 25:11 – Human judgment vs. automated skill approval 26:15 – Predictions for how the designer role evolves industry-wide 28:20 – Foundational design knowledge that AI won't replace 30:37 – On "taste," reps, and gut instinct 32:38 – The superpower (and blind spots) of designing in code 34:24 – Is Claude enough, or will tools fragment further? 36:20 – The missing tool: aligning on live prototypes instead of Figma 39:28 – Zooming out: is this a temporary infra push or years-long work? 41:12 – Why this becomes "training the brain" rather than a one-off project 42:56 – Optimizing for designers, engineers, and PMs alike 43:56 – Quick-fire: coffee, drawing, and life after AGI 45:37 – Quick-fire: the product Domingo wishes he'd designed (MyMind) Useful Links Domingo’s website: https://www.domingowiden.com/ Domingo on Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/domingowiden Mymind: https://mymind.com/ Podcast feedback: podcast@nearfuture.works Near Future workshop (Aug 13th): nearfuture.works/build Find us at nearfuture.works Click here to view the episode transcript.

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