Reinvent Podcast

Way back in 2010, Eli Pariser came up with the term filter bubble, the idea that people on the Internet tend to see only information that agrees with them, and then he published his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Since that time, Facebook took off, viral marketing went nuts, fake news appeared, American politics polarized to the extreme, and now we’ve got a huge backlash to globalization and technology companies. Businesses increasingly are caught in between this polarization. If a brand takes a stand that pleases some stakeholders in one bubble, then it risks alienating other stakeholders in another one. The situation is getting untenable.

Alex Tapscott, a blockchain investor, entrepreneur, and author, launched The Blockchain Research Institute with his father Don Tapscott in 2017. The Institute, which is comprised of more than 50 companies and governments—including Tencent, IBM, and the government of Canada—employs more than 40 research associates around the world, all of whom are researching “the way blockchain...

Alex Tapscott, a blockchain investor, entrepreneur, and author, launched The Blockchain Research Institute with his father in 2017. The Institute, which is comprised of more than 50 companies and governments—including Tencent, IBM, and the government of Canada—employs more than 40 research associates around the world, all of whom are researching "the way blockchain is going to change everything," in Tapscott's words.

Chris Hughes considers himself lucky—too lucky. Chris was born into a modest family in North Carolina before getting a scholarship to Harvard University, where he was the freshman roommate to a guy named Mark Zuckerberg. That led to him becoming one of the co-founders of Facebook, core to the startup in the early days, including...

Jonny Dyer of Google helped us answer questions like these as he lead a conversation about this new new space sector at What’s Now: San Francisco. Dyer grew up as a self-described space nerd and garage-shop rocket builder in Texas before studying mechanical engineering at Stanford University and doing early work at SpaceX, Blue Horizon...

What the world needs now is a positive vision of the future of work. We’ve got plenty of dystopian visions of the rise of the robots, the race to the bottom of globalization, and the loss of myriad jobs on the horizon. Enough already. Marco Zappacosta, the young co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, one of the most successful startups in the sharing economy, thinks we now need more positive thinking about how the next economy could work better for everyone.

Chris Hughes considers himself lucky—too lucky. Chris was born into a modest family in North Carolina before getting a scholarship to Harvard University, where he was the freshman roommate to a guy named Mark Zuckerberg. That led to him becoming one of the co-founders of Facebook, core to the startup in the early days, including being the spokesperson for the company. That alone made him a very lucky man, and a very, very wealthy one—too wealthy.

Unity Stoakes presents this month at What's Now: New York. We’re in an extraordinary moment in the healthcare industry—similar to where the web was in the mid-1990s. Just like the Netscape IPO marked the beginning of a boom in 1995, Fitbit recently going public marked a new era in digital health. People in the know can see how the whole industry could be transformed over the next five years. The $1,000 sequencing of a person’s full genome will soon drop to $100. Watches and phones are embedding clinical-grade medical sensors. Prosthetics are already being produced on 3D printers at home. Consumers even have access to new diagnostics and data to get much better clarity on how they may ultimately die. The more these developments, and the next ones to emerge, scale to larger numbers of people, the more the whole industry will change.

At What’s Now: San Francisco Ting Kelly (daughter of tech guru Kevin Kelly) and Carson Linforth Bowley led a conversation about how members of these collectives thrive together and how Millennials more broadly are changing the balance between work and life. Ting and Carson are Millennials and entrepreneurs who are rooted in The Factory but...

Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills, and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at the OECD believes that in our new economy, skills matter much more than qualifications. Technology both replaces and complements workers, says Schleicher. 

Lenny Mendonca, Chair of the New America Foundation, sees strong parallels between our current economic moment and the tail-end of the Industrial Revolution, which coincided with the progressive movement of the late 20th century.

We’re in an extraordinary moment in the healthcare industry—similar to where the web was in the mid-1990s. Just like the Netscape IPO marked the beginning of a boom in 1995, Fitbit recently going public marked a new era in digital health. People in the know can see how the whole industry could be transformed over the next five years.

Here we go again. We’ve got another dotcom disruption taking place in—of all places—outer space. There was a time, not long ago, when space was the exclusive domain of nation states. Driven by national imperatives (and funded accordingly), the early space age truly was “rocket science”.

Niels Nielsen, Managing Director of the World Refugee School, is on a mission to make sure that the roughly 32 million refugee children around the world receive an education. If you add to this the number forcefully displayed children and people in fragile economies, the number of children who don't receive an education is as high as 600 million, says Nielsen. The World Refugee School aims to provide high-quality, inexpensive education to these children using technology.

Susan Lund, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, co-authored a December 2017 report titled "Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation." The report analyzes the future destruction and creation of jobs, as well as the rise of independent workers, thus making Lund an authority—or at least, as much of an authority as it's possible to be when forecasting the future—on the future of workers.

Tim O’Reilly’s official book launch party kicked off at our November Edition of What's Now: San Francisco, hosted in conjunction with Capgemini and Bloomberg Beta. Tim’s new book WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. At What’s Now, the founder of O’Reilly Media laid out his thoughts on the future of work, and in particular, the role that platforms will play in this future. Tim used this book to force the tech world to face up to the responsibility the industry has to actively spread wealth and structure systems so that they benefit everyone. “We must keep asking,” Tim writes in the introduction, “what will new technology let us do that was previously impossible? Will it help us build the kind of society we want to live in?”

When Vivienne Ming began her neuroscience PhD program in the early 2000s, she wanted to learn how to build cyborgs. Her classmates thought the idea was crazy. Fast forward fifteen years, and the idea doesn’t sound so crazy anymore. What was once purely theoretical is becoming possible. Neuroscience research is rapidly becoming applied neuroscience, and the Bay Area is leading the way, both in terms of conducting innovative research and translating this research into exciting new startups.

John Battelle was the perfect person to kick off the series What’s Now: San Francisco. John not only told the big-picture story of the Bay Area tech boom, but he also had new insights into one of the region’s key drivers of innovation – startups.

Kevin Kelly is one of the most original thinkers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he has spent much of his life seeking out other cutting edge innovators in the region. In June, Kevin published his latest book that synthesizes much of what he has learned over the course of his long and impressive career: The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

At the fourth What’s Now gathering, Jane McGonigal, world-renowned game designer and bestselling author, shared the latest in her ground-breaking body of work. Jane believes that Pokemon Go has created super-empowered hopeful individuals around physical activity and social interaction. She outlined the neurological research about the benefits of play, and discussed the success of Pokemon Go. Jane’s most recent project involves incorporating gaming into political action through a new form of social canvassing. This game, which launches October 10th, explores whether the same neuroscience that turns Pokemon Go players into super-empowered hopeful individuals can be replicated to draw out these traits in order to increase political engagement.