Near Future Podcast

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.

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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...

Tom and Jonny sit down with Avi Ashkenazi, Senior Product Design Director at Deel, for the podcast's first-ever guest episode. Avi shares the story behind Vidit, an internal screen-recording tool he built (and vibe-codes on weekends) that now has 600 daily users and 10,000+ videos produced — and which he's now made free for anyone at viddit.video.

The conversation dives deep into Deel's AI-forward culture: designers losing Figma seats after 30 days of disuse, "super users" burning through massive AI token budgets, twice-weekly AI showcase sessions, and how much of the design workflow has shifted from Figma into tools like Cl...

Tom and Jonny share updates from Tom’s Mostly Working meetup in London with Kate Pincot (Multiverse), focused on scaling design impact through tooling and agents, and preview upcoming podcast guests in July.

They reflect on how the meetup format has evolved as more people have hands-on AI experience, shifting from first experiments to practical, scaled adoption inside teams, with more focus on token costs and measurable value.

They discuss Figma Config releases (Motion, Figma Weave, Sites/Make, and upcoming code components), debating canvas-first vs code-first workflows and the “source of truth” question for enterprise teams...

Tom and Jonny are back for another wide-ranging episode.

Jonny starts by recapping his golf trip to Mallorca — where a non-technical friend used Lovable to vibe-code a fully functional scoring app for their annual 16-man Ryder Cup-style tournament, the Stryder Cup. It's a perfect case study in personal software.

From there, Tom brings a meaty topic: the "death of the middle manager" narrative gaining steam in the press. Drawing on his five years as Director of Product Design at Monzo, Tom and Jonny debate whether this is a real structural shift or a post-ZIRP overcorrection — and...

Jonny and Tom dig into the uncomfortable reality of Europe's dependence on US-controlled AI — sparked by Anthropic's Fable 5 being banned outside America days after launch. They explore what the dystopian narrative Europe 2031 predicts for the continent, debate London's surprising rise as an AI talent hub, wrestle with what it means to build a business in the age of AI, and Tom reveals his open-source design tooling project, Kazam.

0:00 — Introduction & the content pipeline
Jonny and Tom kick off the episode and share their very low-tech approach to collecting topics throughout the week — a Slack thread — which immediately surfaced...

Tom and Jonny reflect on their live workshop at Product Unleashed in London, explore the history of designers building their own tools, and dig into how AI can be used as a counterbalance to your own working style — not just an amplifier.

Chapters

Building a Design Tool in 15 Minutes at Product Unleashed
Tom and Jonny recap the workshop they ran at Product Unleashed, where they built retro design tools (Etch A Sketch, MS Paint) live in front of an audience — twice. They discuss how the challenge evolved, why they pivoted from serious tool...

Tom and Jonny dig into the outcomes of Tom's Mostly Working event featuring James Storer from Monzo, unpacking how leading design teams are using AI not to ship faster, but to learn faster — and why the language of "design vs. product" is getting in the way. They get into the state of Figma: is it losing its grip on the design workflow, or is it actually thriving? And they draw an unexpected parallel to the smartphone camera era to ask whether AI will democratise design the same way. Plus: upcoming events, what they're each building, and some honest holiday pa...

Near Future Podcast – Pilot Episode

Welcome to the Near Future Podcast, where Tom and Jonny explore what they're building, learning, and experimenting with as AI reshapes how we work.

In this episode:

Agentic Murder Mystery
Jonny walks through his experiment building a six-agent murder mystery game using NanoClaw. He created a cast of AI suspects — each with their own secrets, personalities, and email inboxes — and ran a live session with a group of exited startup founders. The conversation covers what makes agents distinct from standard LLMs (triggers, tools, memory, collaboration), and th...