Grant McCracken is a cultural anthropologist. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and is the author of 14 books including The Return of the Artisan, published recently by Simon & Schuster. He was the founder and Director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. He has taught at the Harvard Business School, University of Cambridge, and he was a member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. (He is a co-founder of the Artisanal Economies Project.) He is the inventor of an early warning system for social and cultural change. He consults widely, and his clients include Google, Ford Foundation, Netflix, Reddit, Sony, Boston Book Festival, NBC, IBM, Nike, and the White House. He is credited with spotting the rise of Donald Trump, the decline of Second Life, and the disruption of CPG by Alice Waters.