Failure - the Podcast

Chatbots Gone Wild!

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?

It's Not an Emergency

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?

NonProfitPalooza

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, 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!

Corporate Espionage

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.

Buyer Beware

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.