What does it take to design stories people can step into and feel? Aditi Rajagopal is the Head of Experience Design, Immersive at Atlantic Studios, where she creates interactive educational and entertainment experiences for platforms like Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest. Her recent project, Cosmos in Focus —a virtual planetarium featured at SXSW, turns James Webb Space Telescope data into an emotional, interactive experience that makes the universe feel close and personal. Her career spans anima...
Aug 13, 2025•48 min•Season 2Ep. 3
What does it take to build digital health products that center care, clarity, and trust? In this episode, I talk with Ambreen Molitor, a product leader working at the intersection of reproductive health, equity, and digital access. At Planned Parenthood, where she served as National Director of Product Innovation, Ambreen helped launch and redesign award-winning tools like Roo , an AI-powered chatbot for teens, and Spot On , a bilingual birth control and cycle tracker that prioritized user trust...
Jun 17, 2025•43 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Most companies are stuck toggling between reacting to the moment and chasing the next big thing. Tameka Vasquez helps them pause, zoom out, and build strategy that doesn’t just respond, but reimagines. In this episode, we unpack what futures thinking actually looks like in practice: how to build clarity inside complexity, what makes vision operational (not just aspirational), and why tiny shifts—not big bets—are what shape tomorrow. Tameka Vasquez is a futurist, strategist, educator, and the Fou...
Jun 03, 2025•53 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Have you ever thought about having a digital twin? In this episode of Up Next in Tech, I sit down with Jessica Berger, SVP of Innovation at Publicis Media. Admirably known for her insight and understanding of cutting-edge technology, Jessica shares her expertise on trends like web3, AI, extended reality, and gaming. In this conversation, we focused on 4 emerging trends that Jessica's team highlighted in their recent trends report called, Future Forward. The report included topics like instant co...
Jan 04, 2024•49 min•Season 1Ep. 9
In this episode, I sit down with Cathy Hackl to discuss her journey and inspiration from being a journalist to becoming a futurist and the godmother of the metaverse. We explored what brands should keep in mind when building for Generation Alpha - a group of tech natives who are rewiring the future. Cathy also explained the concept of spatial computing and its applications in various industries and how it may evolve over the next few years. We acknowledged the challenges, the need for ethical co...
Dec 06, 2023•41 min•Season 1Ep. 8
In this episode, I had the chance to speak with my good friend, Chris Denson, who is a marketer, innovation coach, multimedia host, and bestselling author of the book- “10 Essential Rules for Breaking Essential Rules”. Conversations around innovation in the creative, advertising or media side often focuses only on the outputs, so we focused this episode on everything else. We lifted the hood on the mindsets it takes, the internal conversations and day-to-day challenges and so much more. Chris sh...
Nov 22, 2023•55 min•Season 1Ep. 4
The runway is going virtual, empowering new creators and breaking industry boundaries through community-driven digital fashion. In this episode, I chat with Nirmala Shome, the Head of Marketing and Growth at a digital fashion house, The Fabricant, to break down what that means, how they’re trying to build a new fashion industry where everybody participates and profits while leveraging blockchain and augmented reality, how creativity is transcending beyond physical apparel, and the role of fashio...
Nov 08, 2023•1 hr 9 min
When a machine is super intelligent, can we even reason with it? Can we even tell it what to do? Can we understand it at all? In this episode, I sit down with Naimul Huq, former SVP of Operations at Vayner3 and now CEO of Dr. Studio to dig into these questions about AI, and the tech evolution from the first iteration of social media to where we’re headed next. With a wealth of experience spanning over 15 years in digital culture, marketing analytics, and consumer insights, he has become a sought...
Oct 25, 2023•52 min•Season 1Ep. 5
What’s the art of the possible when you blend technologies like AI, augmented reality (AR), and blockchain with play? Turns out, ownable digital companions that you can talk to and interact with, called OnlyBots. It's a new era of Tamagotchis, y’all.🤖 In this episode I sit down with Alex Herrity, who is a cofounder of Anima, a gaming and interactive technology company and has spent his career building consumer products that people use every day, including Fortnite, the Epic Games Store, HBO’s s...
Oct 03, 2023•53 min•Season 1Ep. 4
How do you know when something is a trend or just hype? What trends should we even pay attention to right now? In this episode I sit down with Webby Award-winning writer Matt Klein, a digital anthropologist and quantitative futurist with a decade of experience in trend forecasting, communications and marketing to dig into these questions. We also go into how he recognized a gap in rigorous cultural analysis and began authoring articles on cultural observations, eventually writing for Forbes and ...
Sep 19, 2023•55 min•Season 1Ep. 2
What are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and how do they work? What exactly does it mean to market “direct-to-community”? In this episode, I sat down with Simon Yi, co-founder of the marketing DAO, Myosin.xyz, where he digs into all of this, how he saw the power of DAOs during his time at ConsenSys and what inspired him to start a service agency that is a collectively-owned DAO. Simon and I also talked about: (01:26) Simon's career pivot from finance to growth marketing to web3 (07...
Sep 19, 2023•45 min•Season 1Ep. 1
My guest today is Kat Zhou, a senior product designer who created the toolkit that helps teams forecast the ethical consequences of their products. She also just finished her Master's degree exploring AI Ethics and Society at Cambridge University. She talks about her origin story and the immigrant mindsets that were passed on to her from her parents and how she soon realized that education should be way more than just how to make money after graduation. In this episode, Kat provides thoughtful p...
Sep 19, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 3
