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  • Well, We're in the Valley of Doom. Here Are Some Paths Forward.

    Well, We're in the Valley of Doom. Here Are Some Paths Forward.

    · Soonish

    If you listened to my previous episode, you’ll remember that I described four "valleys" or scenarios for how the 2024 presidential election could unfold. The fourth scenario was one where Donald Trump wins both the electoral college and the popular vote, with a margin big enough to claim he has a mandate for change. I called that the Valley of Doom. And like it or not, that's the one we're in.

    Now that we know which path we’re really on, it’s time to think through through what’s next. Plenty of other smart people are trying to dissect the Democrats’ mistakes; what feels much more urgent to me is figuring out how to understand the moment we’re in now and how to respond to it. How did civic conversations that used to be built around mutual respect and a shared sense of reality devolve into a free-for-all where lies are more powerful than truth? How did trust in government and institutions decay to the point that a majority of voters were willing to hand power to a disruptor who feeds on chaos and confusion? What options are open now for people who still care about values like community and compassion and equality and enlightened self-government?

    To talk it through I reached out this week to two people who helped me think about those questions in two different ways that you could loosely call top-down and bottom-up. The top-down thinker is Jamais Cascio. He’s a futurist and scenario planner based in California, and he’s a familiar voice to listeners of this podcast. The last time Jamais joined us was during the pandemic, and we talked about a framework he’d come up with to help describe the historical forces at play in that crisis. The framework has an acronym, BANI, which stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. Those feel like pretty good adjectives for this moment too, and in our chat we dived into how a BANI framework helps describe our experience of the Trump era and how we can adapt and respond to the coming changes.

    The bottom-up thinker featured in this episode is named Rose Friedman. She’s the co-founder and executive director of a nonprofit called The Civic Standard. And she spends every day thinking about how to support dialogue and togetherness and mutual aid in her rural corner of Vermont. I think it’s the kind of work that could help build a new foundation for democratic dialogue and get us past the fear, terror, and loneliness some politicians would like us to feel. In the second half of the episode, I explain how I learned about The Civic Standard—and why I think their mission is so important.

    For notes, resources, and a full transcript of this episode, go to https://www.soonishpodcast.org/515-valley-of-doom

  • Harris, Trump, and the Four Valleys

    Harris, Trump, and the Four Valleys

    · Soonish

    Why does every presidential race lately get described as "the most important election of our lifetimes"? Because it's true. In any election where Donald Trump is on the ballot, Americans are faced with a world-changing choice about whether we want the democratic experiment to continue. Right now, four weeks out from the 2024 vote, it's totally unclear which choice we'll make, but it's not too soon to be thinking about the possible consequences. This episode of Soonish walks through four plausible post-election scenarios, with the main outcomes driven by who wins the popular vote and who wins in the electoral college. These are the "Four Valleys"—the Valley of Hope, the Valley of Survival, the Valley of Greed, and the Valley of Doom.

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  • Introducing The Rabbis Go South from the Hub & Spoke Expo

    Introducing The Rabbis Go South from the Hub & Spoke Expo

    · Soonish

    Don't worry, the next regular season of Soonish is still coming. But meanwhile I wanted to bring you something really special that I think you’ll like. It's first episode of a new podcast from Hub & Spoke called The Rabbis Go South. It’s a documentary that we’re presenting as part of a new project we’ve cooked up called the Hub & Spoke Expo.

    The Expo is our way of working with independent audio creators who are making limited-run series, as opposed to the ongoing podcasts that make up the rest of the collective. The Rabbis Go South is our very first Expo series, and the creators Amy Geller and Gerald Perry released the first episode just this week.

    We’re really proud that we can help get the show out to the world, because it tells the story of an important but little-known episode in the history of the pivotal civil rights summer of 1964. You’ve heard of the march in Selma and the bus boycotts in Montgomery. But what you probably haven’t heard is that Black civil rights groups led by Martin Luther King Jr. also faced vicious opposition to their effort to integrate the deeply segregated city of St. Augustine, Florida. As part of a strategy to bring as much media attention as he could to the situation in St. Augustine, Dr. King called on friends from the Jewish community to come to Florida to participate in marches and other actions. Sixteen rabbis heeded that call, and they were so successful at getting under the skin of local law enforcement that they all ended up in a jail run by sheriff’s deputies who were also leaders of the local Ku Klux Klan. Amy and Gerry went out and talked to the surviving members of that group about why they did what they did to help their Black compatriots, and what this rare moment of Black-Jewish cooperation can teach us today.

    So I hope you enjoy this first episode, and if you do you can hear the rest of the story in new episodes of The Rabbis Go South, coming out every Monday from now through late October. You can find it at hubspokeaudio.org/rabbis or wherever you get your podcasts.

  • Welcome to Technofeudalism

    Welcome to Technofeudalism

    · Soonish

    I’ve been arguing on the show since 2019 that the companies that run the big technology platforms—Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the rest—have far too much wealth and power. In the world these companies have built, we exist only to generate behavioral data. We supply that data through our decisions about what social media posts to click on and what stuff to buy and what videos and songs we consume; the companies hoover it up and use it to craft and curate more content they know we’ll like, so that they can sell us even more stuff.

    This unimaginably profitable business model has been called “surveillance capitalism”—but that term doesn’t feel right, since surveillance is usually covert, and these companies are doing what they do right out in the open, with our willing participation. This week on the show, we bring you an interview with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, who has a better name for it: technofeudalism.

    The thesis of his new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is that since 2008 or so, old-fashioned capital has been eclipsed by Internet-powered cloud capital. The real power in today’s economy, Varoufakis argues, resides not with the owners of the means of production, but with the owners of the platforms that turn our behavior into data and use that data in turn to modify our behavior. Whereas old-fashioned feudal lords collected actual rent from their serfs in return for the right to farm the land they owned, cloud capitalists collect cloud rent—a tax on access to their platforms.

    If you’re like me, you’re not very happy about the rise of technofeudalism and the decline of free, open markets. And you worry about how democracy can survive and how we can continue to flourish as creative beings when so much wealth and power is concentrated in so few companies and people. Fortunately, Varoufakis isn’t simply in the business of diagnosing the problem. In Technofeudalism, together with his 2021 science fiction novel Another Now, he does a lot of work to sketch out alternative worlds and ways we could get there.

  • The Otherworldly Power of a Total Eclipse

    The Otherworldly Power of a Total Eclipse

    · Soonish

    The most important piece of advice David Baron ever got: “Before you die, you owe it to yourself to see a total solar eclipse.”

    The recommendation came from the Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff, a beloved teacher and textbook author, after Baron interviewed him for a 1994 radio story. Baron listened—and it changed his life. He saw his first eclipse in Aruba in 1998, and has since become a true umbraphile. The upcoming eclipse of April 8, 2024, will be the ninth one he’s witnessed.

    A veteran science journalist and former NPR science correspondent, Baron joined Soonish from his home in Boulder, CO, to talk about his 2017 book American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch The Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. It’s a dramatic account of the total eclipse of July 29, 1878, which crossed through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas and drew a fascinating cast of characters into its path, including a young Thomas Edison.

    Everyone who chased the 1878 eclipse went West for their own reasons. In Edison’s case, it was to prove his bona fides as a scientist, not just an inventor. For the arrogant University of Michigan astronomer James Craig Watson, it was to hunt for the hypothetical planet Vulcan. For Vassar College astronomer Maria Mitchell and her students, it was to prove to a skeptical public that women could do science and still be “feminine.” Baron’s book shows how their adventures made the eclipse into a major cultural and scientific turning point for the young nation, previously considered a backwater of science. And it reminds us that for the people who flock into the path of totality, an eclipse can still be transformative today.

    The first edition of Baron’s book came out right before the great American eclipse of August 2017, and it has now been reissued with a new afterword priming readers for April 8 eclipse. In an unexpected twist for a work of narrative science history, the book is now being made into a Broadway musical, which will have its world premiere at Baylor College in Waco, TX, on April 7, the day before the eclipse.

    On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited is Baron? “Oh, gosh, it’s going to sound silly, but it’s 100, it’s a million,” he says. “I mean, my life revolves around going to solar eclipses, and this one I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time.”

    Soonish will be in MazatlĂĄn, Mexico, for the total eclipse of April 8, 2024. If you’ll be there too, drop us a note at [email protected].

    This episode is dedicated to the memory of Jay Passachoff (1943-2022).

  • Looking Back at 50 Episodes of Soonish

    Looking Back at 50 Episodes of Soonish

    · Soonish

    After a long hiatus, Soonish is back for a celebration: this is the 50th full episode of the show! (I’m not counting a few bonus episodes in that total.) Tamar Avishai, creator and host of the Hub & Spoke podcast The Lonely Palette, joins this time as co-host to help us take a look back at the first 49 episodes of the show. She quizzes me on the accuracy of many of the technology forecasts and predictions I offered along the way. And she prompts me to explain how the show has evolved since its launch in 2017, why it’s become more political than I ever expected (it’s the democracy, stupid), and where it’s going in the future.

    Episodes Referenced

    Monorails: Trains of Tomorrow? (January 25, 2017)

    Meat Without the Moo (March 8, 2017)

    Astropreneurs (April 20, 2017)

    Hacking Time (May 11, 2017)

    Looking Virtual Reality in the Eye (January 5, 2018)

    A Future Without Facebook (March 22, 2019)

    Election Dreams and Nightmares (October 31, 2019)

    Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible: How One Futurist Frames the Pandemic (May 12, 2020)

    Unpeaceful Transition of Power (June 24, 2020)

    After Trump, What Comes Next? (September 15, 2020)

    American Reckoning, Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them (October 9, 2020)

    American Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of Nation (October 12, 2020)

    The End of the Beginning (November 15, 2020)

    Goodbye, Google (June 25, 2021)

    Notes

    A special thanks to Tamar Avishai for co-hosting this episode and making it so fun.

    The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All the additional music in the show is from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.

    If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show!

    If you like the types of stories and interviews you hear on Soonish, I know you’ll like all the other Hub & Spoke shows. February is the month of love, and so the collective is raising money to invest in what we love — independent podcasting. Please consider participating in our Valentine’s Day fundraiser at hubspokeaudio.org/love

    You can also support Soonish with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

  • For the Love of Audio: It's the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour

    For the Love of Audio: It's the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour

    · Soonish

    Hey listeners! A new, original episode of Soonish is coming very soon. Meanwhile, I wanted to share a Valentine's Day treat.

    As the philosopher Haddaway once asked, "What is love?" Well, it can be anything that stirs the heart: passion, grief, affection, kin. The desire to consume; the poignancy of memory. At Hub & Spoke—the collective of independent podcasts where Soonish was a founding member back in 2017—we want to stretch our arms, and ears, around it all.

    This special episode of our anthology show, the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour, looks at love from four different angles. It's hosted by Lori Mortimer and edited by Tamar Avishai. Production assistance from Nick Andersen. Music by Evalyn Parry, The Blue Dot Sessions, and a kiss of Dionne Warwick.

    Listen to the full episodes we excerpted here:

    Rumble Strip, “Forrest Foster Lays Karen to Rest”

    Mementos, “Cherie’s Letters”

    Ministry of Ideas, “Consumed”

    The Lonely Palette, “Jean-HonorĂ© Fragonard's The Desired Moment (c. 1770)”

    Discover the full slate of Hub & Spoke shows.

    And please share the love by supporting Hub & Spoke's Valentine’s Day fundraiser. Donate here.

  • Bonus Episode: TASTING LIGHT Publication Day

    Bonus Episode: TASTING LIGHT Publication Day

    · Soonish

    Why does the world of young adult fiction seem to have more wizards, werewolves, and vampires in it than astronauts and engineers?

    And why have the writers of the blockbuster YA books of the last 20 years fixated so consistently on white, straight, cisgender protagonists while always somehow forgetting to portray the true diversity of young people’s backgrounds, identities, orientations, and experiences?

    Well, you could write a whole dissertation about those questions. But instead, my friend and colleague A. R. Capetta and I went out and assembled a counterweight. It’s a YA science fiction collection called Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions, and after more than two years of work, it comes out today—October 11, 2022.

    Tasting Light highlights the plausible futures of science fiction rather than the enticing-but-impossible worlds of fantasy. Don’t get me wrong: I love both kinds of stories. But fantasy doesn’t need any extra help these days—just turn on your favorite streaming TV network and you’ll see show after show featuring dragons, magic, and swordplay. There’s some great science fiction out there too (The Expanse, For All Mankind, the never-ending Star Trek universe), but it isn’t nearly as pervasive.

    The two genres do different kinds of work, and I think Hollywood and the mainstream publishing world have been focusing so hard on one that the other has been getting edged out. That’s too bad, because to me, fantasy is the literature of escape, longing, and lost worlds, while science fiction is the literature of hope and possibility. And hope is something we need more of these days.

    As a project, Tasting Light was born at Candlewick Press, a prominent publisher of YA and middle-grade books based here in the Boston area. Candlewick had formed a pair of collaborations with the MIT Press called MITeen Press and MIT Kids Press, and they were looking for someone to put together a YA-oriented science fiction collection under the MITeen Press imprint—a book that would do for the YA market what the MIT Press and MIT Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows books (one of which I edited in 2018) was doing for mainstream sci-fi. Namely, prove that it’s stil possible to create technically realistic “hard” science fiction in the style of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Robert Heinlein from the 1950s and 1960s, but do it in a way that speaks to readers now in the 2020s. (For more on the Twelve Tomorrows vision listen to my 2018 episode Science Fiction That Takes Science Seriously.)

    At the same time, though, MITeen Press wanted to open up space for stories that reflect a wider range of human experiences and perspectives. So they recruited A. R. and me to edit, and we went out and recruited the smartest, most accomplished, most diverse set of authors we could find to write hard sci-fi stories with heroes who would be recognizable and relatable to young adults today.

    As you’ll hear in today’s episode, that includes William Alexander, whose story “On the Tip of My Tongue” follows two young people of unspecified gender as they attempt to tame the loopy orbital mechanics of a space station suspended at the L1 LaGrange point. It includes the Chicago-based thriller and sci-fi writer K. Ancrum, who wrote a lovely story called “Walk 153” about a the complex relationship that develops between a lonely, infirm, elderly woman and the college student who helps her experience the outside world through his GoPro-like body camera. And it includes the prolific Elizabeth Bear, who wrote a story called “Twin Strangers” that tackles the issues of body dysmorphic disorder and anorexia through a story about two teenage boys and their misadventures programming their “dops” or metaverse avatars.

    There’s also a luminous story by A. R. themself called “Extremophiles,” set amidst the ice of distant Europa. And there are five more remarkable stories by Charlotte Nicole Davis, Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, A.S. King, E.C. Myers, and Junauda Petrus-Nasah, as well as a gorgeous comic / graphic novella by Wendy Xu about a sentient robot and the teen girl who discovers it in the forest.

    The reviews of Tasting Light have been wondrous and welcome. Kirkus Reviews gives it a rare starred review and says “Capetta and Roush introduce engaging, thoughtful, beautifully written entries about identity and agency, all unfolding within the bounds of real science.” Publishers Weekly calls it “dazzling” and notes that “the creators seamlessly tackle relevant issues such as colonization, misogyny, transphobia, and white entitlement in this eclectic celebration of infinite possibility and the ever-present human spirit.” Buzzfeed says “Each story is unique, brilliant, and brimming with hope.”

    I hope the three excerpts you’ll hear in today’s episode will entice you to get a copy of Tasting Light for yourself; it’s available at Amazon and everywhere you buy books. Or if you decide to become a new supporter of Soonish on Patreon at the $10-per-episode level or above, between now and December 31, 2022, I’ll send you a free signed copy of the book!

    For more about this episode, including a full transcript, please visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-509-tasting-light

  • Strange Newt Worlds

    Strange Newt Worlds

    · Soonish

    This week we're featuring a conversation with Ian Coss, co-creator of Newts, a wild new six-part musical audio drama from PRX and the fiction podcast The Truth. The show is inspired by the writings of the Czech journalist and science fiction pioneer Karel Čapek. He’s best known for coining the word "robot" in his 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R—but his less famous 1936 novel War with the Newts is actually a funnier, weirder, and more biting reflection of politics and social affairs in the first half of the twentieth century. It's also a sprawling, jumbled, irreverent story that turns out to be perfect material for an adaptation like Newts.

    In the show, Ian and his collaborator Sam Jay Gold have taken Čapek's speculative story about how humanity might deal with the appearance of a second intelligent, speaking, tool-using species on Earth and added wealth of new layers, not the least of which is a catchy Beach-Boys-inspired musical score. It's hard to describe in just a few words, but if you listen to the series (and our interview with Ian), you might just come away with a new perspective on the nature of our relationships with other animals; on the human species' alternately tender and warlike instincts; and on Karel Čapek's underappreciated contributions to 20th-century literature.

    Newts launched on June 7, and you can hear it at newtspod.com wherever you get your podcasts.

    For a transcript of this episode and additional information about Newts, visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/508-strange-newt-worlds

    Pacific newt photograph by Connor Long, shared under a CC BY-SA license.

    Notes

    A special thank you to Ian Coss for spending time with Soonish and providing all of the music and sound effects files used in the episode.

    The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

    If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

    Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

    Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

  • A Soundtrack for the Pandemic

    A Soundtrack for the Pandemic

    · Soonish

    For most people, nightmares produce insomnia, exhaustion, and unease. For Graham Gordon Ramsay, a spate of severe nightmares in April 2020 developed into something more lasting and meaningful: a five-movement, 18-minute musical work for organ or string ensemble called "Introspections." To me, it's one of the most arresting artistic documents of the opening phase of the global coronavirus pandemic, and so we've made it the subject of this week's Song Exploder-style musical episode. (Headphones recommended!)

    Graham is a friend of the podcast; longtime listeners will recognize him as the composer of our opening theme. But he's also a prolific writer of contemporary pieces for solo voice, solo instruments, chamber ensemble, choir, and orchestra. In this three-way conversation, which includes organist and conductor Heinrich Christensen of King's Chapel, we retrace Graham's musical and psychological journey from the pandemic's dark, lonely early months (echoing through the turbulent, disquieting first and second movements of "Introspections") to the gradual adaptation and broader reckoning that marked the late summer of 2020 (reflected in the fifth and final movement's turn to more conventional major keys and harmonies).

    As Graham himself emphasizes, there's no easy 1:1 correspondence between his pandemic experiences, his nightmares, and this composition. The piece is less literal than that, and listeners will, of course, bring their own experiences and interpretations to the work. But "Introspections" clearly takes its place among a genre of musical creations tied to a particular crisis or tragedy, with examples ranging from Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" to Krzysztof Penderecki's "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" to John Adams' "On the Transmigration of Souls," which won the Pulitzer Prize for its portrayal of the 9/11 attacks.

    Composers—alongside poets, artists, and even architects—help us gain some perspective on our collective traumas. And speaking for myself, both as Graham's friend and as one of the first to hear "Introspections," the piece will always be associated in my mind with the grim, stressful, baffling, but occasionally uplifting events of 2020.

    After the interview with Graham and Heinrich, stick around to hear "Introspections" in its entirety.

    I. Unrushed but steady (37:50)

    II. With an improvisatory feel (40:56)

    III. Quick, with a very light touch (46:08)

    IV. Uncomfortable, plodding (47:12)

    V. Poignantly, rubato throughout (50:38)

    For more on Graham Gordon Ramsay, including his discography and musical scores, see http://www.ggrcomposer.com.

    "Introspections for Organ"—a YouTube playlist of the five movements for organ, performed by Heinrich Christensen at Kings Chapel, Boston

    "Introspections for String Ensemble" by Graham Gordon Ramsay — the full Proclamation Chamber Ensemble performance on video

    Notes

    A special thank you to Graham Gordon Ramsay, Heinrich Christensen, King's Chapel, the members of the Proclamation Chamber Ensemble, and all the volunteers who helped with the GBH rehearsal and recording sessions on September 7 and 8, 2021.

    Thanks also to Hrishikesh Hirway for his inspiring work on Song Exploder from Radiotopia. It's not just one the smartest and most educational music podcasts out there—it's one of the top podcasts, period.

    The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

    The outro music is from "In Praise of San Simpliciano" (2009), also by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

    If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

    Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

    Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

  • Can Albuquerque Make Room for Its Past and Its Future?

    Can Albuquerque Make Room for Its Past and Its Future?

    · Soonish

    Last summer, a pair of murals celebrating New Mexico's landscape, heritage, and diversity appeared in Albuquerque's historic Old Town district. The large outdoor pieces by muralists Jodie Herrera and Reyes Padilla—two artists with deep roots in New Mexico—brought life back to a once abandoned shopping plaza and became instant fan favorites, endlessly photographed by locals and tourists alike.

    But in a January hearing, the the city’s Landmarks Commission, which is charged with preserving Old Town and Albuquerque’s other historical districts, said the murals were unauthorized and ahistorical and should be destroyed. Business owners and the arts community fought back, saying the commission’s ruling was capricious would amount to cultural erasure. Boosted by a flood of news coverage and public support, this coalition eventually won a new hearing before the commission.

    In a city with such a rich multicultural heritage and a vibrant art scene, how did a disagreement about a couple of murals on private property escalate into a culture-war issue? Must communities make a binary choice between historical preservation and creative growth? Inside historic districts, which versions of history do we choose to preserve—and who gets to make these decisions?

    Those are the big questions at the heart of this episode. We’ll hear from Herrera and Padilla, but also from small business owners trying to revitalize Old Town—and from a city official charged with trying to steer sensible enforcement of the city’s historic preservation ordinances. “Historic preservation is valuable and something we all respect, but it has to be parallel with a thriving contemporary community,” says Laura Houghton, who runs the Lapis Room Gallery in Albuquerque and selected Herrera and Padilla to paint the murals. The question for Albuquerque, and many other American cities, is how to balance both needs.

    UPDATE: The second Landmarks Commission hearing on the future of the murals took place as scheduled on May 11, 2022, and the commissioners voted to let the murals remain. Listen to the end of the episode for a postscript about the hearing and local reaction to the decision.

    For a full transcript, photographs of the murals, and more details please go to https://www.soonishpodcast.org/506-albuquerque

    Notes

    A special thank you to Jodie Herrera, Reyes Padilla, Jasper Riddle, Laura Houghton, Rosie Dudley, and Ellen Petry Leanse for all their help with this episode.

    The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

    All additional music in this episode is from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.

    If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

    Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

    Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

  • How Novartis Built a Hit Factory for New Drugs

    How Novartis Built a Hit Factory for New Drugs

    · Soonish

    When you hear people use the phrase "It's a hits-driven business," they're usually talking about venture capital, TV production, videogames, or pop music—all industries where you don't make much money unless you come up with at least one (and preferably a string of) massively popular products. But you know what's another hits-driven business? Drug development. This week, we present the fourth and final episode in the Persistent Innovators miniseries, originally produced for InnoLead's Innovation Answered podcast and republished here for Soonish listeners. It's all about the giant Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, maker of more than a dozen blockbuster drugs like Cosentyx for psoriasis, Entresto for heart failure, and Gilenya for multiple sclerosis.

    Because companies lose patent protection on their old drugs after 17 years, they must constantly refill their pipeline of new drugs—and Novartis has done that by placing a huge bet on the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), its 2,000-person R&D lab based in Soonish's hometown of Cambridge, MA. In this episode you'll meet Tom Hughes, a biotech entrepreneur and former Novartis executive who helped to set up NIBR in the early 2000s, as well as NIBR's current president, Jay Bradner. They explain why the decision to build NIBR was initially controversial even inside Novartis, and how the labs are structured today to take big but manageable risks and ensure that the company can capitalize on biology's growing understanding of the molecular and genetic underpinnings of disease.

    "I find from the top down, our chairman to our CEO, to every commercial leader, there is a tolerance and an appetite for bravery in drug discovery that is really refreshing and honestly very empowering," Bradner says of Novartis. "If you looked at the type of programs in our portfolio, they’re not for the faint of heart. And this is for a very specific reason. We worry that if we don’t try to [do it] well, then who will?"

    "What Makes Novartis a Persistent Innovator?" was first published by Innovation Answered on February 28, 2022. You can hear the entire miniseries at innovationleader.com or in your podcast player of choice.

    Logo photo by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash

    Full transcript available at http://www.soonishpodcast.org/505-novartis

  • How LEGO Learned to Click Again

    How LEGO Learned to Click Again

    · Soonish

    LEGO is so omnipresent in today’s culture—through its stores, its theme parks, its movies, and of course its construction kits—that it’s hard to imagine a world not strewn with billions of colorful plastic LEGO bricks. Yet less than two decades ago, in 2003, the company came close to extinction, thanks to a frenetic bout of new-product introductions that left out LEGO’s core customers: the kids and adults who just love to build stuff with bricks. In today’s episode of Soonish, hear how the family-owned company behind the LEGO “system of play” recovered from this near-death experience and reconnected with fans to become the world’s most valuable toy brand.

    This episode comes to you courtesy of InnoLead, where I’m guest-producing and guest-hosting a four-episode podcast miniseries called “The Persistent Innovators.” This is Episode 3: “What Makes LEGO a Persistent Innovator?” The driving question of the miniseries is how big, established companies can defy historical trends and come up with the hit products needed to keep them on top of their industries, decade after decade. But it turns out LEGO’s crisis, which played out between 1994 and 2003 or so, wasn’t really a lack of innovation—it was an excess of it.

    To find out what happened, I spoke with Bill Breen, a business journalist who co-wrote the best book about LEGO’s turnaround, and former LEGO executives Robert Rasmussen and David Gram. They explain how the company lost sight of its core mission—encouraging learning and exploration through the “hard fun” of building with LEGO bricks—and how it clawed its way back to success through a careful combination of creativity and discipline.

    "What Makes LEGO a Persistent Innovator?" was first published by Innovation Answered on Febuary 14, 2022. You can hear the entire miniseries at innovationleader.com or in your podcast player of choice.

    LEGO image by Ivan Diaz on Unsplash

  • Art and Technology at Disney

    Art and Technology at Disney

    · Soonish

    This week, Soonish presents Part 2 of The Persistent Innovators, a miniseries I've been guest-producing and guest-hosting for Innovation Answered, InnoLead's podcast for people with creative roles inside big companies. You can think of Persistent Innovators as the corporate equivalent of human super-agers—meaning they don’t settle into a complacent old age, but manage to keep reinventing themselves and their products decade after decade. Two weeks ago I republished the miniseries' debut episode about Apple, and now I want to bring you the next episode, about The Walt Disney Company. As you'll hear, I focused on how the rise of new technologies like computer graphics and smartphones forced Disney to rethink both of its core businesses: feature animation and theme parks. Enjoy!

    "What Makes Disney a Persistent Innovator?" was first published at Innovation Answered on January 31, 2022. You can hear the entire miniseries at innovationleader.com or in your podcast player of choice.

    A full episode transcript is available at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/503-art-and-technology-at-disney

    Logo photo by Benjamin Suter on Unsplash.

  • The Reinvention of Apple

    The Reinvention of Apple

    · Soonish

    This week, I've got something different for Soonish listeners. I'm sharing Part 1 of "The Persistent Innovators," a miniseries I'm currently guest-producing and guest-hosting for InnoLead's podcast Innovation Answered. The big question the series tackles is: "How do big companies become innovative—and stay innovative?" I'm looking at four long-lived global companies—Apple, Disney, LEGO, and Novartis—and asking how they've all stayed creative and curious long past the age when most companies stop innovating and decide to coast on profits from their existing businesses.

    For this initial episode, I traced Apple's evolution from a renegade upstart in the early 1980s to near-bankruptcy in the late 1990s to its current status as world-conquering smartphone maker. It's based on interviews with people who worked alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and saw how leadership, culture, and technology came together to make Apple...Apple.

    "What Makes Apple a Persistent Innovator" was first published by InnoLead's Innovation Answered podcast on January 18, 2022. Parts 2, 3, and 4 will be published by Innovation Leader on January 31, February 14, and February 28, 2022; you can hear them all at innovationleader.com or in your podcast player of choice.

    Logo photo by Zhiyue Xu on Unsplash.

  • This Is How You Win the Time War

    This Is How You Win the Time War

    · Soonish

    Clock time is a human invention. So it shouldn’t be a box that confines us; it should be a tool that helps us accomplish the things we care about.

    But consider the system of standard time, first imposed by the railroad companies in the 1880s. It constrains people who live 1,000 miles apart—on opposite edges of their time zones—to get up and go to work or go to school at the same time, even though their local sunrise and sunset times may vary by an hour or more.

    And it also consigns people like me who live on the eastern edges of their time zones to ludicrously early winter sunsets.

    For over a century, we've been fiddling with standard time, adding complications such as Daylight Saving Time that are meant to give us a little more evening sunlight for at least part of the year. But what if these are just palliatives for a broken system? What if it's time to reset the clock and try something completely different?

    * * *

    As I publish this, we’re just days away from the most discouraging, and the second most dangerous, day of the year. It's the day we return to Standard Time after eight months of Daylight Saving Time. (In 2021 that happens at 2:00 am on November 7.)

    It's discouraging because twilight and sunset will arrive an hour earlier that day, erasing any lift we might have enjoyed from the theoretical extra hour of sleep the night before. It's dangerous because the shift throws off our biological clocks, just the same way a plane trip across time zones would. The only more dangerous day is the first day of Daylight Saving Time in mid-March, which always sees a wave of heart attacks and traffic accidents.

    As someone who's lived at both the western and eastern extremes of my time zone, I've long been sensitive to the way differences in longitude can cut into available daylight. It's bad enough that for Bostonians like me, the sun sets long before it does for people in New York or Philadelphia or Detroit. But after the return to Standard Time, when the curtain of darkness descends yet earlier, it feels like we're living most of our lives in the dark.

    Considering that all these problems are self-imposed—the by-products of a time-zone architecture introduced by scientists, government ministers, and corporate interests in the 1880s—it seems odd that we continue to tolerate them year after year. But it turns out that there are lots of people with creative ideas for changing our relationship with time. And for today's episode, I spoke with three of them: Tom Emswiler, Dick Henry, and Steve Hanke.

    Should we make Daylight Saving Time permanent? Should we move the boundaries between time zones, or transplant whole regions, such as New England, into neighboring time zones? Should we consider abolishing time zones altogether and simply live according to the movements of the sun? All of these would be improvements, in my mind. Come with me on today's audio journey through the history and future of standard time, and I think you'll end up agreeing.

    For show notes, links to more resources, and a full transcript, please go to soonishpodcast.org.

    Notes

    The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

    If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

    Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

    Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

  • Goodbye, Google

    Goodbye, Google

    · Soonish

    What if a technology company becomes so rich, so powerful, so exploitative, and so oblivious that that the harm it's doing begins to outweigh the quality and utility of its products? What if that company happens to run the world's dominant search, advertising, email, web, and mobile platforms? This month's episode of Soonish argues that it's time to rein in Google—and that individual internet users can play a meaningful part by switching to other tools and providers. It's half stem-winder, half how-to, featuring special guest Mark Hurst of the WFMU radio show and podcast Techtonic.

    * * *

    Back in 2019, in the episode A Future Without Facebook, I explained why I had decided that it was time to delete my Facebook account. In short, I was tired of being part of a system that amplified hateful and polarizing messages in order to keep users engaged and drive more advertising revenue for Zuckerberg & Co.

    I knew at the time that Google also engages in such practices at YouTube, and that the search giant's whole surveillance capitalism business model rests on tracking user's behavior and serving them targeted ads. But I continued as a customer of Google nonetheless, while keeping one eye on the company to see whether its tactics were growing more toxic, or less.

    The moment when Google finally exhausted my patience came in December 2020, when the company fired a prominent Black computer scientist and AI ethicist named Timnit Gebru in a dispute over a scholarly paper she'd co-written. Gebru and her co-authors argued in the paper that without better protections, racial and gender bias might seep into Google's artificial intelligence systems in areas like natural language processing and face recognition. Google executives thought the paper was too harsh and forbade Gebru from publishing it; she objected; and things went downhill from there.

    It was a complicated story, but it convinced me that at the upper echelons of Google, any remnant of a commitment to the company's sweeping motto—"Don't Be Evil"—had given way to bland and meaningless statements about "protecting users" and "expanding opportunity" and "including all voices." In fact, the company was doing the opposite of all of those things. It was time for me to opt out.

    How I went about doing that—and how other consumers can too—is what this episode is all about. I explain the Gebru case and other problems at Google, and I also speak at length with guest Mark Hurst, a technology critic who runs the product design consultancy Creative Good and hosts the radio show and podcast Techtonic at WFMU. Mark publishes an important site called Good Reports, where consumers can find the best alternatives to the services offered by today's tech giants in areas like search, social media, and mobile technology.

    Hurst emphasizes—and I agree—that leaving Google isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. The company is so deeply embedded in our lives that it's almost impossible to cut it out entirely. Instead, users can uncouple from Google step by step—first switching to a different search engine, then trying a browser other than Chrome, then switching from Gmail to some other email platform, and so forth.

    "Setting a goal of getting ourselves 100 percent off of Google is is unrealistic," Mark says. "And it's I think it's a little bit of a harmful goal, because it's so hard that people are going to give up early on. But instead, let's let's have a goal of learning what's happening in the world and then making some choices for ourselves, some small choices at first, of how we want to do things differently. If enough of us make the decision to extricate ourselves from Google, we'll form a movement and other companies will see an opportunity to build less exploitative tools for us. You've got to start somewhere!"

    Notes

    The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

    If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

    Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

    Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

    Chapter Guide

    0:08 Soonish theme

    00:21 Time to Find a New Favorite Restaurant

    02:46 What I'm Not Saying

    04:01 Re-introducing Mark Hurst

    07:08 The Ubiquity of Google

    11:04 Surveillance Capitalism and YouTube Extremism

    12:29 The Timnit Gebru Case

    18:01 Hurst: "Let's shut down the entire Google enterprise"

    19:48 Midroll announcement: Support Soonish on Patreon

    20:54 10 Steps toward Reducing Your Reliance on Google

    29:04 Using Google Takeout

    30:20 The Inevitability of YouTube

    31:44 Be a Google Reducetarian

    32:20 Enmeshed in Big Tech

    37:04 The Value of Sacrifice

    40:17 End Credits and Hub & Spoke Promo for Open Source

  • Fusion! And Other Ways to Put the Adventure Back in Venture Capital

    Fusion! And Other Ways to Put the Adventure Back in Venture Capital

    · Soonish

    Venture capital is the fuel powering most technology startups. Behind every future Google or Uber or Snapchat is a syndicate of venture firms hoping for outsize financial returns. But the vast majority of venture money goes into Internet, mobile, and software companies where consumer demand and the path to market are plain. So what happens to entrepreneurs with risky, unproven, but potentially world-changing ideas in areas like zero-carbon energy or growing replacement human organs? If it weren't for an MIT-born venture firm called The Engine and a tiny handful of other venture firms tackling "Tough Tech," they'd probably never get their ideas to market.

    VCs love to cultivate an image of themselves as risk-taking cowboys with a nose for great ideas and the ability to help book-smart inventors and programmers grow into savvy entrepreneurs. But in reality, the industry has spent a quarter century chasing Google-sized returns in the relatively safe, efficient, and low-cost markets such as consumer and enterprise software, mobile apps, and to some extent healthcare and drug development. Sure, smartphones and apps are fun—but how much is the next new video-sharing app or gaming platform going to contribute to human welfare?

    The Engine, created by MIT in 2016, is one of the visionary counterexamples. Among the startups it backs is Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is building a new kind of "tokamak" reactor and believes it can demonstrate the feasibility net-positive-energy fusion to power the grid within the next few years. Other portfolio companies at The Engine are tackling thorny problems like reducing food waste, replacing silicon chips with faster photonic ones, and building better batteries for grid storage of power from wind and solar installations.

    Such ideas have come to be known as Tough Tech because they often need more capital, more time, and more expert input to get to market. In this week's episode you'll meet Katie Rae, CEO and managing partner at The Engine, who leads us on a wide-ranging discussion of topics such as

    the ways Tough Tech companies could change the worldthe causes of government and private underinvestment in these areasthe challenges of evaluating and managing Tough Tech startupsthe prospect of growing government support for high-risk innovationthe reasons why institutional investors who could just as easily put their millions into software-focused venture funds might want to consider Tough Tech instead.

    Rae thinks The Engine can outperform traditional software-focused VC firms—even though its companies face higher hurdles—because their chosen markets are more wide-open and the payoffs could be so enormous. "I don't think there's any reason that I should say to my investors, 'You should expect less of me.' In fact, maybe they should expect more of me," Rae says. "And they should also expect that what we invest into, they feel incredibly proud of as well—that they backed a company like that that had impact on the world."

    Notes

    The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

    If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

    Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

    Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

  • Hope for Ultra-Rare Diseases

    Hope for Ultra-Rare Diseases

    · Soonish

    In this episode of Soonish you'll meet Stanley Crooke, the former CEO of Ionis Pharmaceuticals and the head of a new nonprofit called N-Lorem, which is working to make mutation-correcting "antisense oligonucleotide" drugs available free for life to people with uncommon genetic diseases.

    These are conditions so rare they often don't have a name. But while the diseases themselves are unusual, the problem isn't: as many as 350 million people worldwide are thought to carry mutations that give rise to unique "N of 1" health problems.

    The debut of hyper-personalized antisense medicines is a topic I covered in a March 2020 episode of the podcast Deep Tech for MIT Technology Review. Back then, N-Lorem was just getting started. So I was excited to connect with Crooke one year later and go into more depth how antisense drugs work, why they're well-suited for treating some genetic diseases, and how Crooke realized he could give some patients personalized versions of these drugs for free—and for life.

    "It was literally impossible until just now," Crooke says. Listen to find out what changed—and what it could mean for the future of drug discovery and the way we regulate and pay for advanced therapies.

    For more, head to soonishpodcast.org, where we've got the full transcript and additional resources.

    Notes

    The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

    If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

    Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

    Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

  • Technology and Education After the Pandemic

    Technology and Education After the Pandemic

    · Soonish

    The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on education on schools around the world, often rendering in-classroom instruction too dangerous for both students and teachers. But one reason the effects of the pandemic haven’t been even worse is that, in education as in many other fields, a few new technologies were ready for broader deployment.

    I’m not talking about Zoom and other forms of videoconferencing, which have by and large been a disaster for both K-12 and college students. Rather, I’m talking about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as well as the huge body of instructional videos available at low or zero cost on YouTube and sites like Khan Academy.

    Coursera, the world's largest MOOC provider, added 31 million new users in 2020, compared to just 8 million new users in 2019. The second-place MOOC provider, edX, added 10 million users in 2020, twice the number of new students who joined the year before. Evidently, millions of students of all ages want to use their stuck-at-home time to learn something useful.

    But how effective, really, are online course materials? How do MOOCs fit in with what cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are discovering about how students learn best? And what do K-12 schools and institutions of higher education plan to do to incorporate elements of online learning into their curricula and meet the growing demand for high-quality learning experiences after the pandemic passes?

    This week we talk through those questions with Sanjay Sarma, vice president of open learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is one of the founding members of edX and a supplier of hundreds of its most popular MOOCs. Together with co-author Luke Yoquinto, Sarma published a book last August called Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn.

    Though it was written before the pandemic hit, the book offers a timely look at how educators at the K-12 and university level could make smart use of technology to build a new, broader educational pipeline that's more user-friendly and open to millions more people. Sarma says that will mean implementing more of the learning tricks researchers already know about, such as spaced repetition and interleaving, and finding better ways to scale up the coaching and contextual learning that are so effective in in-person settings like MIT's famous 2.007 robot competition.

    For a transcript and more details and links, see our full show notes at http://www.soonishpodcast/408-technology-and-education

    Notes

    The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

    If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

    Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

    Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

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