I'm Building Something

The Future Fellowship is a space for exploring our shared future

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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I want to tell you about something I’ve been building this year.

As we make our way through the 21st-century’s third decade, we can all feel that something is happening to us. We do not yet have a name for it. But in a million ways, we’ve been searching for that name. We’ve been searching for understanding.

I’m talking, of course, about the revolution happening now via the emergence of powerful machine intelligence, and other technologies of vast power.

Everyone is talking about the new Intelligence Age. I’m surrounded by that conversation every day. My work is about helping some amazing people — including some of the world’s most famous investors, and senior leaders inside household-name brands — understand what is happening, and what it means.

But that work also sees me address a set of deeper, and sometimes more personal, questions. What does this mean for how I navigate a career? For how I raise my children? What about my family’s financial security? Can the society I live inside survive what is coming? What will it look like on the other side?

Some people believe that the transition we’re now living through will lead us all to unprecedented new highs. Others are certain it will be catastrophic. In truth, no one can know everything about what is coming.

That means that the people best able to navigate this moment will be those able to sit with uncertainty. Those equipped with frameworks that empower them to explore multiple futures, and make better decisions. And those with access to a network of brilliant peers, and subject matter experts.

Exploring the future that lies ahead — and understanding what it means for you — has always been what New World Same Humans is about. But at the end of last year, I wanted to go deeper.

So I gathered a small group of people together, and made a space for us to explore these questions across 2026. I call it the Future Fellowship.

Right now, the Fellowship is in its infancy. We started earlier this year with a small, hand-selected founding group: CEOs, founders, creatives and more. I lead us in a monthly online get together, and we’ll meet several times in-person across the course of the year.

We share the questions that are on our minds, the experiences that are reshaping the way we think, and the answers we’re coming to. We’re working through what this technology revolution means in practice: work, health, family, legacy, and more. Meanwhile, we’ll also hear from some brilliant outside experts; people in my network who can help us go deeper on a specific slice of the future.

The conversations we’re having are of a kind that I haven’t experienced anywhere else. What’s emerging is something even deeper than I expected: a living record of what it feels like to navigate the most disorienting transformation in human history.

So why am I telling you this now?

Over time, we want to grow the Future Fellowship. We’re going to move slowly on that; but right now, we’re ready to bring in a small number of new members. That means people who are, like us, on a quest to understand what is happening now, what it all means, and how they can flourish inside it.

Spaces are very limited, and this isn’t for everyone. But if it sounds as though it could be for you, we’d love to hear from you. Just take a moment to fill in this form, and we’ll start the conversation.

As I said in the last postcard, at times such as these what we most need is each other. That is, people who are living through the same mixture of challenge and opportunity, and who want to make sense of it all. The Future Fellowship is my answer to that imperative; I couldn’t be more excited to see where it leads.

Thanks for reading; I’ll see you all next week,

David.

This was #25 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is Hypertopographics #9 by Edward Burtynsky & Alkan Avcıoğlu.