A few months ago I sat down with my friend Bhawna Parmar as a guest on the Quest for Better Futures podcast. Readers of this blog will remember Bhawna from her insightful article in The Caravan that had inspired a previous blog post: While we weren’t looking: The real digital revolution beyond school walls.

Quest for Better Futures is a podcast produced by the Quest Alliance with the goal of bringing …

… voices from young people and their allies at the frontlines of education, work, emerging technologies and climate change to challenge assumptions about what’s possible and reimagine more just and inclusive futures.

I have been listening to the series over the past few weeks and I recommend it highly. If you have to listen to just one episode please listen to their very first episode, Lost and Found: The Voices of Youth. This episode features the voices of two young people and their attempts to “to rise above the chaos with the ambition to create something meaningful for themselves.” As the episode description puts it, “in a time when opportunities feel out of reach and the future is shaped by forces like AI, climate change and outdated education systems, young people are grappling with more than just career choices.” It is powerful and heartbreaking at the same time.

In our, more recent, conversation Bhawna and I covered a lot of ground, from my own chaotic journey through engineering to design, to why “21st century skills” ring hollow without purpose, to what happens when students encounter climate futures and feel paralyzed by anxiety. Bhawna also shared powerful stories from her fieldwork, students in ITIs learning from textbooks that still teach about Windows XP, young people teaching themselves graphic design and video editing online while their formal curriculum stays frozen in time, teachers who respond to questions with suspension rather than engagement.

These aren’t abstract policy problems; they’re the lived realities of young people trying to build futures in systems designed for a world that no longer exists.

We talked about why futures thinking matters, not as prediction, but as a way to give learning purpose. It is in this context that, what we call 21st century skills (creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, communication) make sense. It possibly positions you for action, helping you understand the systems we are all navigating. We also wrestled with harder questions: How do you transform the anxiety that futures thinking can generate into agency? How do you scale innovation when systems corrupt anything imposed from above? Why does computer science being “getting rocks to think” matter more than any specific algorithm?

The full conversation is embedded below. You can also find Quest for Better futures in your favorite podcasting app.