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).

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).

Boomers say that life is a bowl of cherries.  We’ve never fully understood that one, but it calls to mind a scene from a 1950’s thriller in which Kirk Douglass’s character, the eponymous Ulysses, leads a team of warriors into the cave of a giant, ravenous cyclops.  What could possibly have gone wrong did. We don’t think that Boomers who use the metaphor have that in mind.  Though, to be fair, it only took but a brief google to appreciate that its original meaning has been lost to time.  Likely, it’s that the sweetness of anything and everything is as ephemeral as life itself, as the lyric of the original 1930’s tune by Ray Henderson and Lew Brown suggests.  The Boomers take a less cynical view inherited from the Greatest Generation, no doubt. And, what a generation that was.  You gotta be thankful for what they did in Europe.  Hopefully, our isolationist friends in Washington won’t give it all away. Speaking of Ukraine, we’ve also heard it said that life is “nasty, brutish and short.”  That one was coined in the seventeenth-century, but who among us doesn’t throw it in from time to time at the water cooler.  It’s eternally fresh.  Thanks, Thomas Hobbes.  He had in mind life outside of society and espoused absolute monarchy as the fix. We’d guess that Hobbes had a penchant for subservience: perhaps The Donald could dust him off and prop him up for Veep. Catch them on a good day, and we suspect that many an entrepreneur would say that bootstrapping a business is also 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. Want a political analogy?  We do.  Take a small town mayor who’s received nary a penny in campaign contributions but stayed in office for decades.  There are a lot of them: Margaret Doud, Mackinac Island, Michigan (50 years); Robert Heidenescher, Dupont, Ohio (49 years); William Tate, Grapevine, Texas (48 years).  Wikipedia goes on, and so could we. 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.  (Remember, the cyclops?) Now, you’ve got to navigate not only the vagaries of the marketplace, staffing and the supply chain but, also, the crushing ROI expectations of professional investors.  If we were turning to another political analogy, we’d mention RFK, Jr., the CNN debate that wasn’t, and Nicole Shanahan. Don’t worry.  We won’t. Speaking of turns, let’s give Thomas Collet, the guest of today’s episode, a moment in the spotlight.  After all, it’s not all about us.  Thomas is a serial entrepreneur.  We lost track, but we think he’s on his seventh successful startup — and, that’s only counting since we recorded with him two weeks ago. Would Thomas (Collet, not Hobbes … though, we’ll get back to him) have described his startup experiences as bowls of cherries or nasty, brutish and short?  We don’t know.  We didn’t ask.   You don’t think we prepare in advance for these podcasts, do you?  Perhaps when our sponsors start looking for ROI, we will. But, for now, we are all cherries.  We have yet to be visited upon by Thomas Hobbes’ brutish ghost.  That day will come, surely. In the meanwhile, have a listen to Thomas Collet.  We can help you with that.  Click below.  If you’d prefer Hobbes, we’d suggest a seance or, perhaps, mushrooms.

Want to sound like an insider? Just ask an entrepreneur: “what keeps you up at night?” Guaranteed, they’ve heard The Question before and have an answer at the ready. But that won’t prevent a feigned moment of reflection before they launch into it. You’ll realize that it’s not just entrepreneurs who play the game, If you’re lucky enough to watch a fund-raising pitch to an investor group. The Question will invariably be posed by one of them at the end of Q&A, and the others 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. Sadly, theatrics and reality merge, with entrepreneur and investors alike convinced of the truth of the seemingly revelatory moment. A rarefied and distorted example of truth speaking to power. So what is the answer? A nothing-burger tailored to context no better than fast food. Have it your way. The entrepreneur need merely choose from a small menu of common business concerns: supply chain, staffing, distribution. Done right, it’s an answer with which none would quibble and that’s guaranteed to be true, other than in the event of global nuclear war. It’s also one that subliminally drives home a key point: this business will succeed, unlike 95% of the other startups begging for the investors’ backing. Here’s a classic answer: “That’s a good question…. I’ve thought a lot about it, and I think we’ll have to work hard to keep ahead of the hiring curve. Demand is going to ramp quickly, and we’lll need trained employees to meet it.“ This is best delivered in the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker. There probably was a time when The Question was less trite. A few moments of old-school search on Google suggests that ended in the late 1990’s. Indeed, by the early 2000’s, prolific self-help author Andy Staley was touting The Question as leading to the discovery of “personal vision” and Wharton School’s business journal was posing it in published interviews of industry greats. Here, at the Innovation Blab, we don’t see it letting up. The Question is as popular as ever. Will George Jetson’s boss, Cosmo G. Spacely, of the fictional Spacely Sprockets still be asking The Question in 2060. We wouldn’t be surprised. Ok, back to today’s episode. 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. If you didn't know better, you'd wonder whether the press was just stirring things up. You know, to sell papers, get clicks, or what have you. Nah. The press is too ethical for that. They wouldn't rerun stories just to attract eyeballs. In fact, we're sure that editors at the major news organizations are oblivious to the expected $12+ billion in political ad spend in 2024. Yep. We're not immune to it. Even in Boston, where you can hardly throw a stone without hitting a scientist or engineer. Innovation hums 24 hours a day. Still, it's not loud enough to drown out the political din. So we succumbed. It didn't help that our guest, a serial entrepreneur hot on the trail of a multibillion dollar market went AWOL. With a recording session in the calendar and an anxious listenership waiting, we charged forward. No topic? No problem. We figured we'd talk about the first thing that came to mind. Join us in today's episode of Innovation Blab. Without giving away too much, suffice it to say that MAGA conservatives aren't the only ones who hang out in echo chambers.

Climb down the rabbit hole of web browsing and you’ll realize that teaching innovation is all the rage. Not innovation in teaching, but teaching about innovation. Google it. Clearly, this is a topic that breeds opinions like … well, you know. Click through the first dozen hits, or so. Now, you know why JFK once said that “too often …. we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” Who doesn’t have an opinion about innovation? Haven’t you daydreamed about making a fortune from chance discovery — you know, like curing cancer with the mold from your shower stall? (That’s no excuse for not cleaning, by the way. It wasn’t last year nor the year before, either.) What a dream: a disappearing wart on your big toe leads to a call from Pfizer and $93 million for exclusive rights. After you drifted through that a few times, you embellished it with a corner office at HBS and a permanent appointment as entrepreneur in residence. Dreams do not experts make, though, even if the local school board didn’t see right through you. After all, they were probably too busy with book bans. So, now you’re heading up development of an innovation curriculum for the high school. Woo hoo! For the teens, it’ll be like car privileges without chores. (You know, that shower really does need work, and there’s a bottle of Clorox right next to the pile of clean towels). Why drudge through grammar, civics and science classes, when you can get right to learning how to make billions. The kids’ll tell you that’s how Mark did it: he skipped his classes, spent a little time with the Winkelvoss twins and, voila, Facebook. Easy peasy? Some of us think not. Dig past the urban myths, and you’ll find that Zuckerberg’s academic creds include Phillips Exeter Academy. Perhaps he skipped all of his classes there, too, but we doubt it. His getting into Harvard speaks otherwise. Are reading, writing and arithmetic passé? Do students really need the basics, or can they get right to classes on innovation — knowledge be damned? Join us in a discussion with Diane Bouis, director of MedTech Innovator, the world’s largest life science startup accelerator program, and judge for yourself.

The genesis of the hat is shrouded in mystery. It’s safe to say that dinosaurs didn’t sport them, though a triceratops with three beers dangling from her spiky crown would’ve been the life of any prehistoric party. Fast forward about 63 million years, and the tallest ape ever to exist was likely too preoccupied with the looming threat of extinction to fuss over a fedora. One might pardon Gigantopithecus, the ape, but what about the hominid Australopithecus or the ever trendy Neanderthal? Surely, they would have valued a bit of protection from the weather, not to mention a fashionable accessory to attract a mate. A short hop and skip through time and space bring us to Ötzie, the intrepid traveller of the Bronze Age who was just recently found -- petrified, of course -- en route through the Alps hat in hand, and to Babe Ruth and his legendary home run in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series. By then, the baseball cap had become emblematic of America’s favorite pastime. Half a century later, it became firmly entrenched among the up-and-coming with the emergence of the health club. What better way to flaunt and extend your leisure-time than by rocking a baseball cap while perusing Camemberts at the cheese shop? Our guess is that the baseball cap didn’t make its way to the political big leagues, so to speak, until the late 1980s. Jesse Jackson often donned one on the campaign trail in his 1988 presidential bid. The Donald kicked it up a notch (thanks, Emiril!) in 2016 when he championed a bright red cap, a matching tie, and a new twist on the Tea Party movement (no thanks, Sarah!). Who but the Australopithecines could have possibly guessed that evolution might occasionally take a step backward? We wouldn’t propose that the Democrats go that route, but they might find a key to success in the four iconic letters emblazoned on The Donald's headwear. Not that we have a vested interest, but we’d suggest that the Dark Brandon make a go at it with “MIGA.” You know, Make Innovation Great Again. It would pair perfectly in blue, and who could have predicted it better than the Gershwin brothers in the refrain of their 1937 musical hit “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”: You like potato and I like potatoe; You like MAGA and I like MIGA; Potato, potatoe, MAGA, MIGA! Let's call the Mayorkas impeachment off! Which brings us, in the usual roundabout way, to today’s episode. Our 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. (Bribe? What bribe?)

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. There was the time Mark stole an air mask from Jet Blue and hooked it to a canister of helium while impersonating Marjorie Taylor Green. Oops, no oxygen. Thankfully, the EMTs had a spare pig's brain for the transplant. And, how about when Mic hired Rudy Giuliani to defend that pesky 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 mind wonders from yellow on the sheets in Moscow to yellow and blue flags flapping in a nuclear breeze. Now, we are at serious. Ukraine serious. Which brings us to the topic of today's podcast: Putin in Ukraine. A bull in a china shop, but add enmity and cluster bombs. So, how did we get here? Join the team from Failure - the Podcast in a conversation with 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.