Failure - the Podcast

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.

Whether for autonomous vehicles or “smart” consumer products, government regulation may be too little and too late when it comes to right-sizing the growth of AI from a risk/benefit perspective.  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 Guest: Suman Lal

We’d thought we’d learned from a prior guest to this august podcast that Big Pharma could provide cures for more diseases, if only flaws in America’s third-party payor health care system could be fixed.  Today’s guest is not so sure of that.  Dr. Seth Powsner, a professor at Yale and a practicing ER physician, says that it’s really a question of will: the collective will of a nation to solve a problem.  That’s especially true when it comes to curing diabetes.  Sure, a cure might be around the corner, but more likely, it’ll take the will the people and the government to solve the obesity crisis.  And, by the time we belly up to that bar, it might be as well to simply start eating better.  That may prove a better cure than even Big Pharma can provide, with or without an adequate reimbursement mechanism.

Join the team from Failure - the Podcast (a/k/a Innovation Blab) as they stumble upon the dark underbelly of Big Pharma.  Our guest, Imran Nasrullah, has 25+ years of experience in the industry, specializing in drug licensing and business development.  He tell tales that few know or want to believe.  One in ten thousand, for example:  9,999 candidate drugs tested and rejected for one that makes it to the next stage-gate.  Few drugs make it through all the hurdles, but a surprising number that do are cures — not merely daily, weekly or monthly treatments.  Unfortunately, the most efficacious drugs aren’t necessarily the ones that either the makers want to make or insurers want to pay for.  Is there a better way?  Who knows.  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?Join the Innovation Blab (a/k/a 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. 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).Who knew that podcasts could be so much better than watching a felon anoint a faux hillbilly as successor-in-chief before a cheering crowd in red?

Who knew?Join 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.Who knew that podcasts could be so much better than a presidential debate between octogenarians?

Catch them on a good day, and we suspect that many an entrepreneur would say that bootstrapping a business is like a bowl of cherries, pits and all.  Leaving aside the independently wealthy, that more traditional approach may destine the enterprise to slower, bounded growth.  A lifestyle business.  One that’s likely to yield more pits than flesh early on, but that with the right mix of hard work, pivots and luck can be fruitful in the long run.Nasty, brutish and short might be what you hear of startup life from founders who took outside investment.  Not all of them.  Not all of the time.  But, we bet they skew more that way on the spectrum than do the lifestyle-istas.  What would you expect?  Take on an angel investor and there’s one more mouth to feed.  Take on venture capital and it can be a vicious, gaping one.Join the Innovation Blab in a conversation with Thomas Collet, a serial entrepreneur who’s on his seventh startup.  Would Thomas describe his experiences as bowls of cherries or nasty, brutish and short?  Listen to today’s episode and you may find out.

Ask an entrepreneur: “what keeps you up at night?”  They’ve heard The Question before and have an answer at the ready.  But they’ll make you wait through a feigned moment of reflection before they launch into it.Investors play the game, too.  Get a group of them together and, invariably, one of them will pose The Question whenever an entrepreneur does a pitch.  All present will nod knowingly as the collective’s secret weapon is unleashed.  The entrepreneur’s perfectly timed pause, then, answer (the latter, offered with the gravity of a Churchill wartime address) only add to the excitement.  Theatrics and reality merge, and all present will walk away convinced of the truth of the seemingly revelatory moment.Join the Innovation Blab in a discussion with Jamie Magrill and Anna Frumkin of DECAP Research and Development, Inc., a Canadian startup that aims to change the way hospital and healthcare workers dispose of syringes.  Don’t worry, we don’t pose The Question to Jamie and Anna.  We do get close, however, and some may find the discussion that ensues amusing.  Have a listen …

Election fever.  With all the news, who can avoid it?  Not a news ticker scrolls by without a mention of Biden's age, Trump's trials and RFK's betrayals.   We're not immune to it.  So when a scheduled guest went AWOL, we figured we'd talk about the first thing that came to mind.  Suffice it to say that MAGA conservatives aren't the only ones who hang out in echo chambers.

Join us in a discussion with Diane Bouis, director of MedTech Innovator, the world’s largest life science startup accelerator program.

Not that we have a vested interest, but we’d suggest that Joe Biden make a go at it with a blue baseball cap sporting the acronym MIGA.  You know, “make innovation great again!”  Speaking of innovation, today’s guest is John Daniels, a tinkerer turned entrepreneur who is daring fate by joining the Innovation Blab in a discussion of his latest venture.  It’s developing a rapid diagnostic kit to test for Covid and whatever else ails mankind. With a bit of luck, he’ll launch the product before Kari Lake returns to Arizona politics following a two-year break.

Welcome to Innovation Blab, a new series of podcasts (…keep fingers crossed…) offering the B-side to Failure - the Podcast. Yes, Mark will be back, and we hope to put up both Innovation and Failure posts in the coming days (months, more likely), but as they say about the alleged clandestine romantic relationship surrounding appointment of the special prosecutor in the Georgia election interference cases, we shall see.Can’t say that much has been made of the B-side of late.  Baby boomers are probably the last to have given it much thought, but in its heyday, the B-side was pretty much the tomalley of 45 RPM, 7-inch vinyl records.  (Don’t know tomalley?  Ask a lobster.)  Aficionados looked forward to it.  Everybody else, not so much. The B-side could grow on you, though.  Take Elvis’s “Hound Dog,” the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”  The list goes on.  So does the beat.To the armchair intellectual, the A-side and the B-side are like yin and yang.  There’s no need to drag Eastern philosophy into an LA marketing gimmick, though.  Two sides of the same coin is more like it.  The only philosophy here is KISS:  keep it simple stupid.Speaking of innovation and failure (were we?), maybe they’re like yin and yang.  We asked ChatGPT, and we got a qualified “sort of.”  It felt a little like the prize every kid gets at soccer, win or lose.  Yes, the AI said, innovation and failure can be complementary forces, but no, they are not interconnected and interdependent opposites.  Just to check that, we asked the electric savant the same of Donald Trump and the news media.  We pretty much got the same answer.  Consistency doesn’t prove correctness, but it’s a start.So what does any of that have to do with today’s podcast?  Have a listen and judge for yourself.  Our guest is Stefan Koehler, director of therapeutics licensing at the University of Michigan.  We didn’t ask him about yin and yang, nor about failure — though, he did give some insights into licensing that would make Jim Harbaugh proud.  (Sorry, Stefan, wrong department, but you catch our drift).

It's not often the team from Failure - the Podcast gets serious. Sure, there was the time Mark stole an air mask from Jet Blue and hooked it to a canister of helium. He was impersonating Marjorie Taylor Green for our "Fly Me to the Moon" episode, but forgot to put oxygen in the mix. Thankfully, the EMTs had a spare pig's brain on board for the transplant. And, how about when Mic hired Rudy Giuliani to defend "the team" in Joe Rogan's trademark infringement suit.It's times like these you realize that some things are serious. Mark turning blue while impersonating Greene. Serious. Handing over your defense to Rudy. Serious (mistake). Just ask Donald.Speaking of Donald, the porcine frontal cortex (Mark's, not Donald's) drifts to yellow raining down on the sheets in Moscow. And, from there, to yellow and blue flags flapping in a nuclear breeze. Now, we are at serious. Ukraine serious. Even the segue there from humor (or, in our case, faux humor) seems a crime. Though, to put things in perspective, Zelensky made the transition and proved a true hero.Which, the reader will be relieved to learn, brings us to the topic of today's podcast. Zelensky? Not directly. More like Putin in Ukraine. A bull in a china shop, but add enmity and cluster bombs. Not a pretty thing. So, how did we get here? Join the team from Failure - the Podcast in a conversation with Daniel Barenboym, a Boston-area entrepreneur with roots in Eastern Europe, and Sam Bendett, an expert on the Russian military with the Washington D.C.-based think tanks CNA and CNAS.

No, it's not the ice cream. It's the podcast. This one, and you can be sure it's in bad taste. But, hey, don't be too disappointed. Before reality sunk in, we did offer you the briefest glimmer of hope. That's more than a certain congressperson from Georgia has done for you. What is today's podcast, other than the usual meaningless banter? There is that, of course. But, there is more, too. Coffee. Yep, you guessed it, and what a genius you are! The coffee business, to be more precise. And, because we failed, yet again, in finding a guest who didn't, it's about a coffee business that's prospering. Go figure.How much do you know about coffee — we mean really know? The Team from Failure - The Podcast has been imbibing for nearly 100 years, collectively. (Get your mind out of the gutter. We mean coffee.) And, that's only two of us. Add, Mic and ... well, you'd need to go to scientific notation. So, we thought we knew a thing or two about coffee. Just like many of you think you know a thing or two about wine, beer, or you name it. But, how much do you really know, other than where to buy them and what salesperson has you wrapped around his/her finger? So we brought in a coffee pro. We would say he was a pro from Dover, but unless you saw M*A*S*H, the movie (starring Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland), you really wouldn't get it. But we did bring in a pro. He was the seventh hire at one of the region's largest full-service coffee distributors. And what a success story he was. He rose from janitor to CEO in a matter of years. Many of them. And, in reality, he didn't quite come in as a janitor nor did he exit as a CEO, but you get the point.Anyway, you want to learn about coffee? Listen to this podcast. Erik Modahl, coffee curator and founder of BeanTrust Coffeebar, has something to say, even if it means talking over the knuckleheads that are Failure — the Podcast.

Sounds promising: fun with numbers. If not the mathematicians and physicists, certainly the accountants might get something from this podcast. And, if not them, the actuaries will have a field day. Think about it: a podcast even an actuary could love. Stultifying.Well, not so fast. If you’ve not learned anything from the last four years, it’s that labels can be deceiving. Take “Super Happy Fun America,” a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that, from the looks of it, should be more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Dig a little deeper, and it’s clear that this group is about anything but fun. Super happy? We doubt it, not with the post-insurrection arrests.But, it’s not just the far right that is loose with labels. In fact, the team from Failure - the Podcast would hazard to guess that those of all political persuasions are guilty as charged. (Ya’ think?! Hey, give us a break, here. We’re just trying to meet our word quota on this blurb). Hell, even this podcast has been known to stretch the truth from time to time — and we are as about apolitical as it gets. Ha!So, fun with numbers. Not so much. But you can’t fault us for trying. After all, our guest was with one of the Big Four accounting firms. Admittedly, he was working as a lawyer, not an accountant. And, whether he actually saw a single number during his tenure is left for the imagination. Certainly, the team from Failure - the Podcast didn’t ask him. That would have taken advance preparation, and you know how we eschew that. Moreover, who would have thought months ago, when we recorded this, that we’d ultimately call it “fun with numbers”? Surely, you expect too much of us.Our guest? Why, it’s none other than Tony DaSilva. Lawyer to the stars … or, at least, the accountants. And, what an absolute wit. He lulled the team from Failure - the Podcast into believing that they were asking good questions, and that he was answering them. In fact, it was the same drivel as the last 71 episodes. You know the old saying: same stuff, different day. Well, we promise you only the latter. And, speaking of stepping in it, please don’t forget to wipe your shoes on Matt Goetz … er, the mat … before you leave.

It took a little doing, but the team from Failure - the Podcast think they found the first use of that magical phrase "testing, testing one, two, three.....". No, it wasn't in 2010, when Biden dropped the F-bomb on an open mic while introducing then-President Obama's eponymous health care bill. Nor, was it when Sleepy Joe muttered "God save the queen" at the close of the 115th Congress in 2017, after announcing that The Donald had won the electoral college. Had Joe prefaced these utterances with "testing, testing one, two, three," we might be more sure they weren't gaffes and that he isn't the Democrat re-incarnation of Jerry Ford.We took our search to Google Books, hoping to find something through its Library Project. You remember that, don't you? All the fanfare over scanning the world's books onto the Internet so that they could be searched from your browser. No such luck: the copyright laws prevailed. Good thing for that. Which brings us to Google n-grams, a handy tool that searches millions of books (perhaps, collected during the ill-fated Library Project?) for words and phrases, and returns their frequency by year. Search for "pandemic," for example, and you get spikes at 1920, 2008 (remember the "swine flu"), and ... well ... let's just assume 2020, once the books are written on this one.So, how about "testing, testing one, two, three ...," when did that phrase come about? Best the team from Failure - the Podcast can tell, it was the mid-1940's. World War II, and all that. Sounds about right, doesn't it? You can just imagine a John Wayne character at the mic as he readies to rally the troops for yet another epic battle. (Don't know John Wayne? Think Ronald Regan minus the political years, but with a whole lot more luck at the box office).Which brings us back to testing. COVID-19, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. (Cue the "Beverly Hillbillies" theme). It's not behind us. Testing, that is. (The hillbillies? Like the 1960s, they _are_ behind us). Sure, the vaccine will help. A whole lot, we hope. But the need for testing? Well, let's just say that serial entrepreneur Sanjay Manandhar has it right when he says "24 hours to get COVID-19 test results? There's got to be a better way!" Who's Sanjay? Have a listen to today's episode of Failure - the Podcast, and find out.