Welcome to the Lovejoy Hour, sponsored by Cook 100 degree boiling hot water straight from your kitchen tap.

It's called The Lovejoy Hour as it's an hour of chat.

And I'm Tim Lovejoy.

On today's podcast, we'll be traveling into the future with a friend of the podcast, Tom Cheez-Rite, who's a futureologist or a futurist. He predicts the future

for a job, which sounds like a great job. If you want to see any stuff he does, by the way,

go to tomcheesright.com and follow him there where he discusses the future a lot. I love having

these conversations. I love trying to work out what is going on in the future for myself.

So let's waste no more time. Let's meet him. Tom Cheeswright. Hi, Tom.

Hello, Tim. You call yourself a futurist, don't you? You're not a futurologist.

Yeah, but, you know, I'm kind of happy with either. My only differentiation is the ology in

future suggests that somehow we're sort of traveling forward and studying the future, since that's the root of this of the ology word from Greek. And I don't think it's

really a study. It's more of a sort of projection, storytelling, with some evidence behind it.

Right. Okay. What do you think is one of the best predictions you've made, do you think?

I guess not so much one I've made, but one that through research I was aware of was the pandemic.

So my last book, there is if only a brief reference to this possibility of what the World Health Organization then called Disease X,

this possibility they just convened a panel

to prepare for and work out how the world should respond, should another SARS-like virus

start to spread around the world. So your job is to go into, or one of your main jobs is to go

into companies and advise them on what's happening in the future. Did you say to them there could be a

chance for a pandemic? No, because it's very sort of domain specific my work. So I'm very rarely

talking about the future. I'm usually talking about your future and that your future is often

quite narrow. So whether it's a, you know, a Facebook or a

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