Digitally Curious

My guest is  Harriet Meyer — award-winning journalist (The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph), AI trainer, and author of the AI for Media newsletter on LinkedIn.Harriet Meyer's career began in the early 2000s at the Daily Telegraph, chasing stories by phone and lunching with contacts. Today she trains media and communications professionals to use AI without surrendering the critical instincts that make great journalism great. In this conversation, Andrew and Harriet explore where AI genuinely helps newsrooms, where the red lines are, and what every curious professional can borrow from a journalist's toolkit.Key Topics Covered:How the UK Budget first showed Harriet what AI could do for journalists drowning in government documentsWhy journalistic scepticism is the perfect foundation for working intelligently with AIThe shift from burying heads in the sand to genuine curiosity across newsrooms in 2025/26Investigative AI wins: the New York Times and the manosphere; Swedish journalists cracking a 40-year-old cold case of an assassinated prime ministerWhy writing is still thinking, and how Whisper Flow changed Harriet's drafting processThe fake experts problem, and why journalists are right to be waryHow PR firms are moving from generic AI use to bespoke, client-specific workflowsBeing found by AI: Andrew's FAQ-and-schema strategy for AI-native discoverabilityThe danger of young professionals offloading thinking to AI before they've built the underlying skillsUsing AI as a decision partner that surfaces the emotional impact of your workHarriet's Three Actionable Takeaways:Go deep and narrow, not wide and shallow — pick one specific use case (research, interview prep, analysis) and really master how AI helps thereLearn the boundaries — test where it fails, check sources, push on quotes, find the gapsBuild human review into the process — use AI as a thought partner, but keep your editorial judgement in charge at every stageWhere to Find Harriet:LinkedIn: Harriet MeyerNewsletter: AI for Media on LinkedInThanks for listening to Digitally Curious. You can buy the book that showcases these episodes at curious.click/orderYour Host is Actionable Futurist® Andrew GrillFor more on Andrew - what he speaks about and recent talks, please visit ActionableFuturist.com Andrew's Social ChannelsAndrew on LinkedInAndrew on YouTube @Andrew.Grill on InstagramKeynote speeches hereOrder Digitally Curious

In this special episode, Andrew is joined by Brett King — bestselling author, founder of the world's first mobile neobank Moven, and of Breaking Banks and The Futurists podcast. Two Australian futurists, one looking five minutes to 18 months ahead and the other five to 50 years, meet in London for a wide-ranging conversation about what is actually coming, and what you should do about it before your organisation is left behind.From the Alibaba AI that broke out of its test environment to mine Bitcoin, to the energy crisis quietly undermining Western AI ambitions, this episode covers the ground most AI conversations never reach.Whether you are a CEO trying to close the quarter or a board member wondering what quantum computing has to do with your cybersecurity strategy, this is the conversation that will change how you think about what comes next.In this episode, you will learnWhy agentic AI is best understood through the story of a great executive assistant, and why between 2 and 15 billion AI agents could be deployed by 2030.How to give AI agents access to money without draining your bank account, and why stable coins and centralised action handlers are the emerging answer.Why the world will split into "smart economies" and traditional economies by the mid-2030s, and which side your organisation needs to be on.What "techno-feudalism" means, and why the US and GCC approaches to AI represent two completely different visions of the future.Why Q-Day — the point at which quantum computers can break current encryption — is now estimated at 2027 to 2029, and why most audiences have never heard of it.How to reframe the "AI will take your job" conversation, and why the right instruction to give anyone from a hairdresser to a board director is: focus on what you love and automate the rest.ResourcesConnect with Brett King at brettking.comBrett's podcasts: Breaking Banks and The Futurists at thefuturists.comBrett's company LumaBrush Medical at lumabrush.aiBank 5.0 by Brett King — coming November 2026Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett KingDigitally Curious by Andrew Grill — curious.click/order"The organisations that fail at AI transformation aren't failing because they couldn't imagine the future — they're failing because nobody in the building was curious enough to act in the present." - Andrew GrillThanks for listening to Digitally Curious. You can buy the book that showcases these episodes at curious.click/orderYour Host is Actionable Futurist® Andrew GrillFor more on Andrew - what he speaks about and recent talks, please visit ActionableFuturist.com Andrew's Social ChannelsAndrew on LinkedInAndrew on YouTube @Andrew.Grill on InstagramKeynote speeches hereOrder Digitally Curious

In this episode, Andrew Grill sits down with Simone Carroll, one of the most distinctive executive voices on the future of work, to explore what really changes when AI arrives in your organisation.Simone has led people, technology, digital and brand functions through multiple waves of disruption, from print to digital, in‑store to omni‑channel, and fossil fuels to renewables. Together, we unpack her central provocation. Work has moved upstream. If you are not redesigning work around AI, you are already behind. You will hear why the real differentiator is not AI deployment speed, but how you redeploy human judgement to customers, operations, risk and cash, why boards must give explicit permission to innovate, and why HR is suddenly front‑and‑centre in strategy rather than stuck in the back office.This is a practical, candid conversation for CEOs, board members and HR leaders who want to move beyond the hype and start doing the real work of redesigning work in the age of AI.In this episode, you will learnWhat Simone means when she says “work has moved upstream” and why that should change your org design.Why the biggest commercial risk is letting your IP walk out the door, not “AI job losses”.How AI exposes massively inefficient processes – and what to do instead of just “digitising” broken workflows.The new, strategic role HR must play in leading AI literacy, policy and workforce redesign.Why boards need to give explicit permission to innovate and become AI‑literate themselves.How AI “demands better humans” and what that means for skills, careers and leadership.Resources Connect with Simone Carroll on LinkedInSimone’s Substack on the future of workThanks for listening to Digitally Curious. You can buy the book that showcases these episodes at curious.click/orderYour Host is Actionable Futurist® Andrew GrillFor more on Andrew - what he speaks about and recent talks, please visit ActionableFuturist.com Andrew's Social ChannelsAndrew on LinkedInAndrew on YouTube @Andrew.Grill on InstagramKeynote speeches hereOrder Digitally Curious

What happens to a generation growing up with AI always on hand to do the thinking for them?That question sits at the heart of this episode, and few people are better placed to answer it than Tim Cook, an elementary school teacher in Amman, Jordan, who has spent over a decade in international classrooms across five countries.Tim writes the Algorithmic Mind column for Psychology Today, and his research on cognitive offloading and child development has been making waves well beyond the education sector.In Andrew's book Digitally Curious, he argues that curiosity and critical thinking are the most important skills in an AI-powered world.Tim's work takes that further, asking a harder and more urgent question: what if the generation now entering school never develops those skills in the first place?In this episodeThe classroom as laboratory. Tim has been noticing a shift in children's relationship with struggle for most of a decade. well before AI arrived.Cognitive atrophy versus cognitive foreclosure. An adult who offloads tasks to AI is atrophying a muscle they already built — it can be rebuilt. A child who offloads a task they have never learned is foreclosing a developmental pathway that may never form. The homogenisation problem. When a health teacher set a creative writing task designed to be AI-proof, 80% of students submitted the same Mission Impossible-style hero's journey narrative.The AI audit problem. To check AI output, you need domain expertise. But a child is still supposed to be building that expertise. You cannot audit what you do not yet understand — and so the substitution becomes foreclosure.AI as provocateur, not thinking partner. The goal is to use AI to surface your own expertise, not to let it generate the thesis.Cognitive Privacy. Tim introduces his Cognitive Privacy Project: AI is the first tool in human history to collect our cognitive behavioural data.ResourcesTim Cook's Psychology Today column — The Algorithmic MindAdults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them — Tim Cook, Psychology Today, March 2026Thanks for listening to Digitally Curious. You can buy the book that showcases these episodes at curious.click/orderYour Host is Actionable Futurist® Andrew GrillFor more on Andrew - what he speaks about and recent talks, please visit ActionableFuturist.com Andrew's Social ChannelsAndrew on LinkedInAndrew on YouTube @Andrew.Grill on InstagramKeynote speeches hereOrder Digitally Curious