Introduction of Sam Rad / Revised

Someone once said our next guest is what happens when you mix a futurist, an anthropologist, and an entrepreneur—then hand her a microphone. I’d add a few ingredients: the discipline of an engineer, the charisma of a rockstar, and the calm confidence of an ex-professional skydiver.

She has “died” more than most video-game characters—and learned from every reboot. At sixteen, a cardiac event paused her between worlds. Two years later, on her third solo skydive, she corkscrewed into her own parachute and pulled herself back from a 35-second countdown. She’s respawned online as everything from a purple-haired fairy to a wolf-god while building deep-tech companies and publishing under her name, pseudonyms, brand handles, and anonymous collectives. Most people meet the avatars first; her LLC even owns the rights to her name, image, and likeness.

But behind the masks is a builder of radical futures. She co-founded one of the first enterprise blockchain companies, has advised Fortune 500s and governments, and landed on Forbes “30 Under 30.” She doesn’t just predict what’s next—she architects it. And from that builder’s vantage point, she sees the cracks in our current social operating system.

In her new book, Radical Next: Reclaiming Your Humanity in a Post-Human World, she argues we’re running society on an OS built for a world that no longer exists—trapping us in a crisis of disconnection, stuck in a tug-of-war between the linear, logical “left brain” and the intuitive, creative “right.” Her remedy is “Radical Reconnection.” And the skydive taught her the method: sometimes survival means doing the opposite of instinct—letting go, relaxing, and surrendering to the free fall. She believes we’re all in a kind of societal free fall; the task now is to learn how to surf it.

She flips the anthropologist’s lens onto our tech-soaked civilization to show how identities, institutions, and social OS’s are being rewritten—and how we can meet the future with informed optimism, not fear.

Please join me in welcoming the futurist, the anthropologist, the author, the skydiver—Samantha Radocchia, better known as Sam Rad.