Reinvent Podcast

The digital revolution has thoroughly transformed everything to do with information, and we’re now in the early stages of the digital revolution transforming the world of material things. Makers of today are like the hackers of the 1990s, who did the experimentation and early innovation that prefigured the information and media world we take for granted now. Today’s makers are roughing out innovative new processes that dramatically collapse the time it takes to manufacture goods, and open that process up to anybody who wants to make anything at any time. In our October What’s Now: San Francisco event, Nick Pinkston, co-founder of one of San Francisco’s most intriguing next-generation manufacturing firms, Plethora, explained what’s happening in this new industrial revolution and reflected on the coming repercussions.

The results of the 2016 election will have many repercussions for the San Francisco Bay Area, the tech sector, the innovation economy, California, not to mention the nation and world. One week after the election, California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom analyzed what really happened, what opportunities have now opened up, and what the best strategies are going forward. At What’s Now: San Francisco, we drew a cross-section of leading innovators from many fields to pool insights and think through the implications of the 2016 election.

How should civic-minded technologists approach the ongoing reinvention of government in the Trump era? The Bay Area tech community, like much of the rest of the country, is still grappling with what Trump’s election will mean for the future of the United States. Donald Trump’s stance on innovation and technology is somewhat of an unknown at this stage, and has attracted much less attention than many of his other divisive campaign platforms. The future of many digital efforts—including the United States Digital Service, created by President Obama in 2014 to encourage people with tech expertise to do a tour of duty improving government—is one looming question.

Every day the average American uses the same amount of energy that he or she would get from eating 1,000 cheeseburgers. That’s the equivalent of all Americans consuming 320 billion burgers worth of energy every 24 hours. Saul Griffith, co-founder and CEO of Otherlab, presented for the first time an interactive wall-sized map detailing America’s daily energy use at the July gathering of What’s Now: San Francisco. Saul and his Otherlab team aggregated data from a wide range of obscure databases and created a dynamic visualization that shows the flow of energy through the entire American economy and society.

Humans are bad at long-term decision-making – yet we need it more today than ever before. Dealing with climate change is just one of many examples. Steven Johnson, the bestselling author of ten books on science, tech, and the history of innovation including Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From, and How We Got To Now, is now applying his mind toward helping drive some innovation into long-term decision-making. At What’s Now: San Francisco, Steven—a part-time Bay Area resident—laid out in public for the first time his thinking about his next book on long-term decision-making.

Many people have heard of bitcoin and might know something about blockchain, the technology system underlying the crypto currency. Yet few people understand how important blockchain technology could be not just for financial tech, but also for almost every other field. Blockchain develops transparent ledgers in distributed databases that can’t be tampered with, thus ensuring complete trust in transactions between strangers. In the near future, blockchain could track parts in a supply chain, or medical records, or votes in a ballot box.

Andrew Hessel, Distinguished Research Scientist at Autodesk Life Sciences says new biomedical technologies are on the cusp of dramatically impacting not only healthcare and how we treat disease, but life itself. We’re hearing about pending breakthroughs in editing DNA, stem cells that regenerate damaged tissue, and drugs designed to precisely target an individual’s disease. If this sounds like science fiction, it is—but probably not for long. Scientists like synthetic biologist Andrew Hessel are working to make these and other eye-popping new technologies real.

Ken Goldberg, William S. Floyd Distinguished Chair of Engineering at UC Berkeley, doesn’t buy into the prevailing robot panic of our times. His experience running a robotics lab suggests that AI and robots will empower humans, not replace them. “The important question is not when machines will surpass human intelligence, but how humans can work together with them in new ways,” Ken wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal.

Nick Hanauer, one of the most vocal proponents of raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, wants his fellow one percenters to understand the importance of addressing income inequality. No one has a bigger stake in a thriving middle class than the wealthy, Hanauer said. Yet over the past few decades, the creation of billionaires has impoverished everyone else. People at the bottom lost power, and people at the top gained power, which Hanauer describes as unfair and self-defeating. “Not only do you destroy the economy by killing the feedback loop between customers and businesses as you systematically impoverish greater and greater groups of people, but you also seriously threaten the democracy, as people begin to believe it’s not legitimate,” said Hanauer. “My argument is that the better at the people at the bottom do, the more billionaires will be created.”

Jeremiah Owyang, Founder of Crowd Companies, thinks that the sharing economy—though he prefers the term collaborative economy—could exceed PwC’s projections of $335 billion in revenue by 2025. “There’s really no question whether it’s going to happen or not,” Owyang said of the high rates of adoption of peer-to-peer platforms. “The question [for cities] is – what are you going to do about it? Cities need to move forward and embrace these models.” Owyang’s company helps larger companies incorporate aspects of the collaborative economy into their businesses. He created the popular honeycomb model of the collaborative economy, which breaks down its various subsets, from vehicle sharing, to health, to learning.

Douglas Rushkoff, author most recently of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, doesn’t blame the billionaires for income inequality—he blames the operating system. “It’s not about redistributing the spoils of capitalism after the fact,” said Rushkoff, “It’s about pre-distributing the means of production before the fact.” Our market, Rushkoff says, prioritizes stockholder profit over corporate sustainability. “The object of the VC is not to build a company. The object of the VC is to flip the company for 100x or 1000x of their original investment,” said Rushkoff. He gave examples of companies that he thinks are getting certain things right, like Kickstarter, a revenue-based business that chose an alternative way to structure its stock options; Meetup, which still profits a few million dollars annually and brings people together face to face; and Chobani, which gave ten percent of their shares to their employees pre-IPO.

Palak Shah is the Social Innovations Director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), the leading voice for the millions of women who work as domestic workers, women who have been excluded from U.S. labor laws for decades. The NDWA, founded in 2007 and consisting of 55 organizations around the country, champions an eight-value framework called the Good Work Code, which includes principles like safety, transparency, stability, flexibility, and inclusion. Shah helps domestic workers navigate challenges that derive from their jobs moving online—how to leave a job that feels unsafe, for instance, without fearing the repercussions of a negative rating on an app.

Few people understand innovation, and the peculiar kinds of innovation practiced in both New York and San Francisco, better than Steven Johnson. The best-selling author has written 10 books that essentially all deal with innovation, and he maintains a home in both places, shuttling his family between each. Steven was the perfect person to launch our inaugural event in our new What’s Now: New York series, an expansion of our highly successful What’s Now: San Francisco series of the last two years.

Adam Werbach, Yerdle Co-Founder, thinks rampant consumerism should be one of the first things to go.The global population is set to reach ten billion by 2100. Humans currently use 60 billion tons of natural resources each year. Yerdle facilitates the exchange of goods online, with the goal of reducing the amount of new goods purchased by one quarter. Werbach believes that cities should join sharing economy companies to organize people who want to share resources. He emphasized the importance of reinventing regulations so that people aren’t left behind in this new iteration of the economy.

Michael Nutter, Former Mayor of Philadelphia has plenty of experience with people clinging to the status quo. “What I say back home is, Philadelphians love change,” said Mayor Nutter. “As long as things can stay the same.” Mayor Nutter believes that city officials should first and foremost remain open to the possibility of disruptive companies that can provide new or better services to their constituents.

Robin Chase, Zipcar Co-Founder, believes the status quo is broken, and that sharing economy platforms—which she refers to as “peers inc”—can help rebuild a new status quo. Chase devised the “peers inc” terminology because of the mutual importance of what she sees as two halves of the sharing economy equation: the platform and the peers. As co-founder of one of the original sharing economy companies, Zipcar, Chase believes that harnessing excess capacity is both attractive economically and vital for the sustainability of our planet.

Michelle Miller, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Coworker.org, thinks that in the not-so distant future, work could mean long periods of short-term employment and short periods of having a single job. By 2020, Miller says, 50 percent or more of workers will be freelancers. Coworker.org, which Miller describes as a digital platform for worker voices, facilitates networking and activism among workers at decentralized workplaces, from Starbucks baristas to Uber drivers.

Casey Fenton, Co-Founder of Couchsurfing, believes that people are fundamentally good and want to help each other. Fenton, who founded Couchsurfing in 2003 as a way to explore the world and meet new people while saving resources, describes Couchsurfing as a “backstage pass to the world.” Fenton views Couchsurfing and Airbnb as “overlapping circles” in that both allow more people to travel and get different perspectives on the world and themselves, while lowering the cost of traveling and decreasing its environmental footprint.

Andrew Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and author of Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, believes a universal basic income is the best way for the United States to deal with massive changes in our economy—changes that will only be exacerbated by increasing automation. “If we wanted to appropriately rename the country, we would call it the United States of Anxiety,” said Stern. “Only 21 percent of people think the economy is excellent or very good, despite the numbers to the contrary. Only 47 percent could find $400 in the case of an unexpected bill.” Stern says the purpose of Raising the Floor was twofold: to identify the problem on the horizon, and to ask what we’re going to do about it if the worst should come to pass. He talked about the historical origins of universal basic income, and shared specifics on his own plan, which would involve giving every individual age 18-64 one thousand dollars each

Natalie Foster, Co-Founder of Peers.org, is a strong proponent of creating a new social safety net outside the bounds of traditional employment. Foster, who is a Research Affiliate for the Future of Work Initiative at The Aspen Institute, believes that benefits and protections should be portable, prorated and universal. It is increasingly hard to imagine bringing back the unionized jobs that built the American middle class, Foster says. “Work is shifting away from protected jobs and towards service and retail sectors.”