Gift or Grift?

AI is hot. Failure – the Podcast? Not so much. Still, we persevere and our guests suffer. Take today’s victim, for example: Seth Earley, founder of Earley Information Science. He’s the champion of “There is no AI without IA.” (Huh? Yeah, our sentiments exactly.) Seth joined us to discuss AI agents, knowledge architecture, and whether the time saved by AI is worth the time spent setting it up. Mark wonders if we’re all just LARPing. The rest of us wonder if Mark was paying attention. Three opinions, two half-wits, and one full-wit. Maybe not the makings of a good podcast — but, perhaps, for an Oval Office run in 2028?

This trainwreck of a podcast has nearly achieved its eponymous singularity: failure. With no recent episodes to point to, we can’t book guests — so Mark had an idea: hire AI chatbots. Two interviewed well, Copilot and Claude. The fact that they can hold a spoken conversation and remember context almost passes as intelligence. They can’t do snark yet, but they’re more articulate than most of us. Have a listen and a laugh while you still can. We hear an animatronic Clippy, Microsoft’s animated paperclip from the late 1990s, is going to be your next boss.

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.