Failure - the Podcast

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. Ha...

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...

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. Arju...

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 f...

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...

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...

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 s...

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 f...

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 th...

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 ortho...

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...

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 wil...

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 diagno...

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 interferen...

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 Giulian...

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....

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 Am...

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, af...

Yup, the team from Failure – the Podcast has been busy, too. End of year, and all that. When we weren’t worrying about systemic election fraud, it was that “undemocratic coup“ that the New York Post was railing about. But, with vaccine distribution started, the pandemic relief bill signed and the defense bill ... well … we’ll just see…, it’s time to move forward. We might’ve been busy, but that do...

Fintech intelligentsia light up when they hear about new payment processing platforms, sometimes referred to as "rails." It's an allusion to moving goods via railway with tracks, switches, sidings and all those other things grandpa used to reminisce about but that you've never actually seen in person — save for that one harrowing flight out of Midway Int'l in January 2015, when you swore you...

Some things just take a long time.  The campaigning.  The lawsuits.  The voting.  The lawsuits.  The counting.  The lawsuits.  The re-counting.  The lawsuits.  The certifications.  The lawsuits.  It’s a process.  And, after all, nobody said democracy was easy.  In fact, had the 19th-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck had the...

It certainly seemed that the team from Failure - the Podcast went into Covid-induced hibernation these past few months. We might say that we spent them on a promotional tour to shore up flagging subscriptions in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, with Joe Rogan putting the last few bricks into his “blue wall” of podcast fame in those hotly-contested markets — a wall, we will note...