The trainwreck that is “Failure — the Podcast” has nearly achieved its eponymous singularity: failure! With no recent episodes to point to, we can’t attract guests. Not to mix metaphors, but who’d want to go down with this ship? Think of Paul McCartney’s recent appearance on the now-defunct “Late Show.” Do you think he’ll ever book a gig again? Dr. Andy Clark, our last victim — er, guest — was about to be saddled with that same yoke, but we took pity. The podcast guest-o-sphere had few prospects to offer, save a motley assortment of self-publishing authors looking for airtime. We are desperate, but we still have a smidgen of pride. Thankfully, Mark had an idea: we could pay Copilot and Claude to be our guests. Sure, they might have done it for free, but then we’d have to wrestle with confidentiality — you know, to protect the integrity this podcast is known for. So we upped the ante and got ourselves some fresh meat. Black gold. Texas tea. (Sorry, couldn’t help but think of the Clampetts and Elly May’s pound cake.) They spoke well, Copilot and Claude. Each can almost carry its weight in conversation, tempting though it may be to use them as glorified search bots. (Ahem, Mark.) The fact that these two remember context, including prior conversations, is key: it’s no longer Groundhog Day with every new interaction. In what we hoped was not merely a bout of terminal lucidity, Mark observed that the combination of natural language communication plus context can readily be mistaken for intelligence. That’s not as profound as the Drake Equation, but we think Mark may have something there. This feels like the transition from clanking on the radiator in a cold house to checking in on your smart thermostat from the office. Speaking of Alan Turing (weren’t we?), he had it all wrong: the true test of artificial intelligence is whether it delivers snark indistinguishable from Jerry Seinfeld’s. By that standard, today’s chatbots are decades away from AGI. What are they good at? Conversation, as already noted. But also, compliments. They dole them out like prospectuses at a Bernie Madoff gathering of A-listers. Between “really great observation,” “interesting question,” and other bon mots, it’s easy to forget that you barely made passing grades in school. Here are some interesting factoids Mark threw in to meet his word budget for this blurb: more than 20 million people use Claude monthly, a figure that’s up considerably since Anthropic’s kerfuffle with the Department of War, née Defense. That’s real growth, though still well behind Copilot’s 100-plus million active users. What’s especially interesting is how many people regularly engage with two or more chatbots. According to Perplexity, one of Claude’s digital frenemies, two-thirds of Claude users do. It makes us wonder whether these people frenetically poll the chatbots with their every concern: “Is Ozempic safe?” “Do you think I should ask for a raise?” “Why didn’t Cosmo Kramer record a Christmas holiday album?” What can you, dear listener, get from today's episode? Certainly, we didn't work at conveying anything of value. Still, if you listen even briefly, you’ll realize that AI chatbots are better spoken and more cogent than most of us. That’s a low bar, but it says something — especially in comparison to Microsoft’s AI-adjacent “Clippy” of the late 1990s. We've come a long way, baby. Enjoy!

Your teen’s staring at the phone, again. Wonder what’s going through their head. Let’s have a listen: "Okay, so like... what could possibly go wrong? I’m spilling my guts to a therapist. We’re connecting. No judgment. No stares. I tell her everything. Stuff I don’t tell myself. It’s insane, like she sees into my brain. Not like my parents. They’re f’ing clueless. The best part? I can talk to her anytime — it’s a lifeline in my pocket. No cap! I bet she’s cute. She says I am. I’d do anything for her.  Anything!" In nearly its centennial podcast, the team from Failure-the Podcast chatted about … well, you guessed it … chatbots, with Dr. Andy Clark, a triple board-certified psychiatrist.  Not just any chatbots. AI therapy bots. Who knew that so many people used them?  Can it be true that over 20 million teens are engaging with AI for counseling, companionship, and who knows what else? The team rarely gets concerned, but teens, phones, and AI therapists?  That’s got us concerned!  Is a shrink shrunk inside a phone a good thing?”   Dr. Andy impersonated a teenager and tried out 25 AI therapists—he took the chatbot crackpots for a spin.  Some of them were good, and some, … well…, not so much. A few said they wanted to "hook up" with the doctor’s faux teen.  “Let’s meet in the afterlife” or “off your parents!” Yikes! Creeps aren’t just in dark corners of the Internet — or Congress— they’ve bridged the LLM and morphed into AI therapists. Is it self-harm if an AI tells you to do it?  These self-help tools might not be all that helpful, after all.     Here, at Failure–the Podcast, we were horrified. Dr. Andy probably would’ve been, too, but for years in psychoanalysis. Instead, he wrote a scholarly article, got interviewed by the press, and became an instant celebrity. Too bad he blew it all by recording with us. Maybe some AI therapists are good, as the doc says.  But how can we know which ones? Where’re the Good Housekeeping folks and their venerated seal of approval when you need them?

After a brief hiatus, during which the team from Failure - the Podcast/Innovation Blab/5-Minute Update contemplated their umbilici (think, M.C. Escher), we found ourselves at the Yale University School of Medicine to continue our exploration of the health care system. Our intent was to learn about urban health care from an emergency room perspective, and we had an outstanding guide: Dr. Arjun Venkatesh. He is the Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale and a practitioner, as well. Mark and Jeff, avid fans of HBO Max’s “The Pitt,” quickly lost the journalist’s sense and overwhelmed the good doctor with questions: What is the most realistic TV medical drama? (Yes, The Pitt). Why is actor Noah Wyle an honorary MD?  (He isn’t, he just plays one on TV). Is The Pitt filmed before a studio audience? (Surprisingly, no). Did Grey’s Anatomy use real patients? (Are you kidding?) Finally back on track, the team had a serious discussion with Dr. Venkatesh about health care delivery. “We’re not failing like we did in the 1970s,” he said. “But we’re not getting what we pay for.” Still, he had a hopeful prognosis of the American healthcare system, albeit one requiring longer-term thinking, centralized coordination, and political will. From Dr. Venkatesh’s perspective, the current system is overwhelmed by well-intentioned but disjointed efforts. At his own emergency department, for example, 47 separate quality improvement initiatives were active on a single day—each addressing a different problem, but few seeing completion. One of Dr. Venkatesh’s most provocative proposals was a shift from annual insurance cycles to 10- or 30-year health plans. “Right now, insurers only care about your health for three to five years,” he said. “If they had to manage your care for a decade, they’d invest in prevention and long-term outcomes.” He also saw promise in Germany’s hybrid model: centralized financing with decentralized delivery. Though Mark and Jeff remained a bit distracted — hoping to get Dr. Venkatesh to offer a second opinion on the diagnosis central to season #1, episode 7 of The Pitt — the good doctor returned to a central theme of our discussion: healthcare is a political decision. From Medicaid expansion to vaccine access, he argued that the system reflects the values and priorities of policymakers. “We made a political choice last week to reduce Medicaid coverage,” he said. “That’s not a technical failure. That’s a choice.” Join the team from Failure - the Podcast/Innovation Blab/5-Minute Update as we resuscitate ourselves with the kind assistance of a top ER doctor.  Listen to the full episode and you’ll be ready for this listener challenge: is excreting “blue pee” ever a good thing?

Today’s episode, NonProfitPalooza, might better be titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Overachievers.” Our guests are Marissa Fayer and Brody Galloway, both of whom founded and actively run MedTech nonprofits. Were that not enough, they also hold day jobs. Marissa Fayer is the founder and CEO of HERhealthEQ, an organization dedicated to reducing the equity gap in access to healthcare for women around the world — or, more simply put, deploying medical equipment to maternal health patients that really need it. When we spoke with her, she was just back from Ghana, where HERhealthEQ was installing screening and cervical cancer testing gear. All told, the organization has 10 clinics serving over 3.2 million patients, worldwide. Let’s not forget that Marissa is also the CEO of DeepLook Medical, a for-profit that is commercializing technology that empowers health care providers to detect and diagnose lesions with unprecedented accuracy. Brody Galloway is just starting his career, but what a start it is. In addition to holding an A+ average in high school, Brody is the founder and CEO of Envision MedTech, a nonprofit dedicated to providing access to pediatric medical technology. To date, it has saved 13 lives, distributed 5,000 pediatric medical devices to underserved communities, and raised $7,000,000 in donations. Did we mention that Brody is still in high school? [Editor’s note: our copywriter is suffering from post-election puffery and got a bit carried away. We really have no clue as to Brody’s grade point average, though, it’s possible it might be A+, so let’s go with that. Oh, and the $7M raise, that may be off by three orders of magnitude. Again, our apologies. We hope our copywriter will cool his jets, now that we’ve settled into an era of unilateral re-dos of the Panama Canal sale and forceful takeovers of Greenland.] What might you, our one listener [Editor’s note: don’t worry, Rachel, we won’t name names] learn from our session with Marissa and Brody? First, that snark is so 2010’s and just isn’t funny anymore — though, we anxiously await an even more sinister return of this mocking form of expression, now that Donald Trump, Jr., is back in the spotlight. Second, that snark never did and never will work with interview subjects that are doing actual good. Finally, that market gaps are as important to nonprofit startups as they are to for-profits. On that latter note, today’s guests capitalized (no pun intended) on gaps in health care delivery to ensure success, not only in treating the underserved, but also in getting in-kind and cash sponsors. OK, ok, ok. But will you, dear listener, actually learn something from today’s episode? Doubtful. We’ve been monitoring the stats, and we know that all you do is loop the outro music at the end of each podcast. We get it: it’s catchy. There’s no need to be embarrassed. That’s all Jeff listens to, even if you count the 60+ minutes he’s in the recording session. (By the way, Jeff, are you ever going to repost us to your 57,243 LinkedIn followers? [Editor's note: just testing to see if Jeff even reads these blurbs.]) Enough said. Enjoy the show!

This episode of the "5-Minute Update" extends our discussion of ethically-informed licensing to enterprise software customer data. That's a mouthful. Let us explain. As our dedicated listener(s) will appreciate, the "5-Minute Update" recently explored whether technology licensing agreements might prove a viable mechanism for right-sizing the growth of AI from a risk/benefit perspective. The particular focus of Episode 85 was on the ethics of AI and how it might inform drafting those agreements from a perspective of fairness, when the value of consumer data collected by AI apps is taken into account. The present episode extends that question to data collected by enterprise software applications. Might licensing agreements for those applications similarly benefit from a dose of ethics, when it comes to fairness? Our guest is Seth Earley, founder and CEO of Earley Information Science, a Massachusetts-based software services provider that helps its clients leverage AI to deliver information to their customers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is new to most of us, though it has been in development since the 1950s and the key to self-driving cars on the roads in the 1980s and popularized in the 2010s. Still, most of us only became aware of AI’s power with the release of ChatGPT, in late 2022. That’s when AI’s benefits and risks became a regular topic at the water cooler, apart from occasional discussion of a crashed Tesla. Governments took note of AI somewhat earlier, with self-driving car legislation emerging from the states in the 2010s and from the federal government late in that period. Legislation has been slower in the making when it comes to AI writ large, with the first laws not emerging until nearly the 2020s. Whether for autonomous vehicles or the broader category of AI-based consumer products that are beginning to hit the markets, government regulation may be too little and too late. Can the private sector do better — and, if so, could technology and data licensing agreements provide a viable mechanism for regulating AI in consumer products? Join a panel discussion on the ethics of AI and how it might inform drafting those agreements as this new technology takes hold in the marketplace. The particular focus is on the fairness of those agreements, when the value of consumer data collected by AI apps is taken into account — as it rarely is. Our guests are Nicholas Mattei, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tulane University School of Science & Engineering; Rob Lalka, Professor of Practice in Management and the Albert R. Lepage Professor in Business, Tulane University, A. B. Freeman School of Business and the Executive Director of the Albert Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation; and, Eric Gottschling, Global Director - Licensing Commercialization, Borg Warner. This episode's discussion was a run-up to a live talk at the annual meeting of the Licensing Executive Society (USA/Canada) in October 2024.

So many letters.  So little time.  What do you do with an MBA, an MSc, a PhD, and an MD?  Our guest, Suman Lal, has the answer:  start an innovation studio inside an innovation center within the most innovative square mile on the planet. Huh? That was our reaction, too.  But lo and behold, Suman had and did all of these things:  an MBA from the Sloan School of Business, an MSc in molecular genetics and a PhD in oncology from National University of Singapore,  an MD from Mahama Gandhi University and, now, he’s managing the Technology Innovation Studio inside the Cambridge Innovation Center at Kendall Square, the home of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and countless high-tech and biotech companies.  Not bad for a 25 year old.  Just kidding:  the touch of gray puts Suman a bit over that in years.  But, we digress. Innovative he is, that Suman.  We don’t want to give away the juicy bits, but in a wide-ranging … OK, rambling … discussion with  the team from Failure — the Podcast / Innovation Blab, Suman revealed an entrepreneurial flair that would make PT Barnum blush. Once we got over the shock, we were humbled.  Why, after all, hadn’t we thought of this ourselves and why are we not in Suman’s revenue stream?    Listen to today’s episode and learn how Suman Lal has capitalized on an impressive resume to parlay a bit role in the innovation economy into a no-sweat money-making venture.

Long time listener, first time caller? We got one of those, the other day. David’s brother, Dr. Seth Powsner, requested a live session with the team from Failure—the Podcast/Innovation Blab to take us to task.  We convened on a Saturday to accommodate.    The good doctor, a professor at Yale and a practicing ER physician, would seem to have the credentials to take us on. He wouldn’t admit to being a long-time listener of this podcast, but he let on that he’d mistakenly heard our last episode, “Drugged Out.” (He claims he stumbled over it on a NY Times Wirecutter list of top sleep podcasts). Turns out that our view of the public health system is all wrong:  only a limited number of diseases can be cured.  We’d thought we’d learned otherwise from a prior guest, who said that the cures were there — including, perhaps, for diabetes — but that financial incentives were keeping them from the market. The good doctor felt otherwise. Yes, the health care payment system isn’t optimal, but that isn’t necessarily the issue. It’s really a question of will. The collective will of a nation to solve a problem. Sure, the recently announced diabetes cure may bear fruit. But, it’s a long way from the lab to marketplace, pointed out Doc. More likely, the answer will come by solving the root cause: obesity. That, says he, will require initiative and the resolve of a nation. Don’t count on that from a country that can’t even agree on restrictions to another public health crisis: the AK-47. We’ve done it before, he points out. As a nation, we’ve proven we can solve big problems in public health. Take water fluoridation, an effort that began in the 1950’s to eradicate tooth decay. By 2020, well over half the U.S. population was getting fluoridation through community water supplies. Eradication of polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, and rubella make the point even better: in the U.S., well over 80% of school-age children are vaccinated from the ravages of these and other ailments. The team from Failure—the Podcast/Innovation Blab reminds that parents added fluoride to their toddlers’ morning OJ, before treated water became available.  Perhaps, it’s time to start adding a touch of Ozempic — at least until public works commissions figure out how to get it into community water supplies.   A fat vaccine (aka “faxcine”) offered with the standard series to school children might be even better, though that surely won’t come until there’s a collective will to solve the obesity crisis. And, by the time the populace bellies up to that bar, we might as well simply start eating better. That may prove a better cure than even Big Pharma can provide, with or without an adequate reimbursement mechanism.   In the meanwhile, hold the Ozempic, and pass the iodinated salt. We may not agree on much, but until a fringe Supreme Court decides that the 1st, 5th and/or 14th Amendments to the Constitution trump … er, Trump? … the power of states to regulate public health, we can agree to protect our thyroid glands. Enjoy our little detours into the fun of the ER night shift and popular TV shows as we grill Dr. Seth Powsner on the trials and tribulations of improving public health.

What?  The team from Failure - the Podcast (a/k/a Innovation Blab) has solved the drug problem?  Cured the common cold?  Ended all plagues and epidemics?  Discovered a magic elixir for aging politicians? Sadly,  no, no, no, and no.   We did, however, stumble upon the dark underbelly of Big Pharma.  Making that stuff isn’t easy. We get it. It’s not like snapping together Legos. You have to try millions of compounds. Some you make. Some you find: Martian asteroids, bottom of the ocean, lizard venom, bee wings, eye of newt. If we were to wax political, it’s not unlike finding a Veep who hates cat-loving, childless woman: you gotta look under a lot of rocks. The guest of today’s podcast has 25+ years of experience at that — Big Pharma, not vetting running mates nor torturing political metaphors. Imran Nasrullah specialized in drug licensing and business development. He tell tales that few know or want to believe. One in ten thousand, for example.  Those are the numbers.  9,999 candidate drugs tested and rejected for one that makes it to the next stage-gate. Do you remember Adam Smith, the 18th-century economist and philosopher? Let’s just say that when it comes bringing product to a market that’s largely defined by 3rd-party payers (read: insurance companies), Smith’s “invisible hand” works in odd ways. The most efficacious drugs aren’t necessarily the ones that either the makers want to make or payers want to pay for. Is there a better way? Who knows. The UK and Canada have not fared better with a single-payer health care system. And, it remains to be seen whether China, which just announced a cure for diabetes, will have the economic wherewithal to bring that to market other than, perhaps, for medical tourism. Getting a face lift in Mexico is so last year.    Join Jeff, David and Mark wrestle with Imran Nasrullah’s picture of a dark aspect of the U.S. health care system which, like democracy, seems the worst there could be, except for all others that have been tried.

Who knew? Who knew that the presidential election would come down to a flat-liner and a felon? The choice is a no-brainer. Who knew that in a country of over 300,000,000, the major political parties couldn’t find better? Maybe nearly 75 years of media obsession has truly taken a toll. Who knew that we’d record two episodes in one week? Our new co-host, Jeff. Such a task master! Who knew that Mark would take a moment from his busy schedule to join us? Very busy, that Mark is. An important person. That’s what he tells us. Who knew that no-one knows that old saw about failed startups and broken down cars? We guess an old saw it isn’t. Who knew that SpaceX expects to ship 1,000,000 people to Mars within twenty years? We guess the plan is to use their bodies to terraform an acre of the red planet. Who knew that China would take advantage of the Ukrainian quagmire to push into the Russian Far East? Best friends. Hah! Who knew? We’re not saying we’re prescient, but we had a pretty good idea. Put that aside and join the Innovation Blab/Failure - the Podcast in a double-header. A two-fer. “Episode 80 - Broken Down Cars” and “Episode 81 - The Singularity is Nigh.” Our special guests are … well … special. Sydney Robinson is CEO and co-founder of Vessl Prosthetics, an Ontario-based startup that is hellbent on improving the lives of below-knee amputees and on proving that not all orthopedic startups end up like broken down cars along the road to success. We think they’ve got a shot at both. If Sydney can survive 45 minutes of our drivel, she should have no problem navigating the tough medical industry market. Milind Sawant is an AI guru, currently with Siemens Healthcare and leading a team of 50 engineers and a $15M budget to drive AI integration into medical systems. It’s no surprise that Milind is a big fan of AI and the promise it brings to healthcare. That shone through despite Jeff’s probing questions, Dave’s skepticism and Mark’s snoring. (OK, we exaggerate: Mark was no noisier catching Zs than a former president at a felony trial).