Reinvent Podcast: Recent Episodes
Reinvent
Reinvent gathers top innovators in video conversations about how to fundamentally reinvent our world.
What started out as a simple game of shooting a ball through a hoop has turned into a high-tech juggernaut. The NBA, more than any other professional sports league, has attracted owners from the tech world, built super high-tech stadiums, and adopted big-data analytics and other innovative technology tools to run the business. No team...
Brian Sager is a polymath and serial entrepreneur who has taken on fields as varied as biotechnology, clean energy and music. He most recent venture, Omnity, uses machine learning, and is in position to take on the challenge of searching and connecting the rush of data being produced in our digital world. Every day 10,000...
Brian Sager is a polymath and serial entrepreneur who has taken on fields as varied as biotechnology, clean energy and music. He most recent venture, Omnity, uses machine learning, and is in position to take on the challenge of searching and connecting the rush of data being produced in our digital world. Every day 10,000 new scientific papers are published, just in English, and other fields are also producing data at an extraordinary rate. No human being in any field can possibly keep up with all that new knowledge production.
What’s a nice tech investor like Esther Dyson doing in Muskegon, Michigan? Dyson was an early tech guru, impresario of the highly influential conference PC Forum and newsletter Release 1.0, friendly with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. She was a shrewd angel investor and board member of visionary startups, and a pioneer involved in new...
Ann-Marie Slaughter heads the nearly 20 year old New America – a think tank that considers itself “a civic platform that connects a research institute, technology lab, solutions network, media hub and public forum.” Her wide-ranging and energizing conversation touched on many of the challenges and downsides of the new era of tech as as...
What started out as a simple game of shooting a ball through a hoop has turned into a high-tech juggernaut. The NBA, more than any other professional sports league, has attracted owners from the tech world, built super high-tech stadiums, and adopted big-data analytics and other tech tools to run the business. No team is more representative of this trend than the Sacramento Kings - who built a state-of-the-art stadium that won Best Elite Sports Facility in the world by the Sports Technology Awards in 2017. Our July What’s Now: San Francisco will feature Chris Kelly, one of the major owners who bought the Kings in 2013 and who now sits on the Executive Board. Chris also was Facebook’s first Chief Privacy Officer, first General Counsel, and Head of Global Public Policy who helped take the startup from its college roots to one of the most successful companies in the world.
Of all our senses, the sense of smell is probably the least studied and appreciated. However, in recent years our scientific understanding of how we perceive scents and what they do to our brains and immune systems has deepened. It turns out that scent accounts for around 80% of the experience of flavor, a...
What’s a nice tech investor like Esther Dyson doing in Muskegon, Michigan? Dyson was an early tech guru, impresario of the highly influential conference PC Forum and newsletter Release 1.0, friendly with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Yet now she’s regularly flying from her base in Manhattan into a handful of small communities in America’s heartland, trying to spread the same message of long-term thinking and learning through trial and error that pervades Silicon Valley. The problems she’s addressing have a lot to do with time. At July’s What’s Now: New York event, presented in partnership with Capgemini at their Applied Innovation Exchange, Dyson will lead a conversation about how we need to rethink private and public behavior by shifting from short-term to longer-term horizons.
Fifty years ago the Whole Earth Catalog burst onto the cultural scene and helped set in motion waves of innovation that reverberated through the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest of America – and that continue to this day. The one-and-only Stewart Brand was the creative force behind that unique media publication and cultural...
Ann-Marie Slaughter heads the nearly 20 year old New America - a think tank that considers itself "a civic platform that connects a research institute, technology lab, solutions network, media hub and public forum." Her wide-ranging and energizing conversation touched on many of the challenges and downsides of the new era of tech as as well as her optimism relating to how communities throughout the US are finding solutions.
What have we wrought? Many in the tech community are increasingly pondering that question in the past year as public scrutiny roams from election hacking on Facebook to #metoo charges in the Valley. One tech veteran has been thinking about what tech has wrought longer than most and has developed some ideas about what could...
Of all our senses, the sense of smell is probably the least studied and appreciated. However, in recent years our scientific understanding of how we perceive scents and what they do to our brains and immune systems has deepened. It turns out that scent accounts for around 80% of the experience of flavor, a dominant force in the experience and enjoyment of eating. We also are learning how scents clearly and directly affect our emotions. Some scents (even when you hardly perceive them) will pick you up and give you energy while others will help calm you down or take you to a remembered experience. Our deepening understanding has reached the point where a new wave of technologies is being developed by a new crop of startup companies that promise to make an impact on a range of industries from food and restaurants to health and wellness.
Fifty years ago the Whole Earth Catalog burst onto the cultural scene and helped set in motion waves of innovation that reverberated through the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest of America - and that continue to this day. The one-and-only Stewart Brand was the creative force behind that unique media publication and cultural phenomenon and we’re honored that he talked about the Whole Earth’s intellectual and entrepreneurial legacy at our What’s Now: San Francisco. He also talked the positive side of having to solve a civilizational-scale problem like climate change and why he believes we will solve it. The event also featured a dozen remarkable people give moving testimonials about the legacy of the catalog and Stewart. Be sure to watch this unforgettable evening.
Interest in new blockchain technologies has exploded in the last year as the possibilities for applications keep rapidly expanding. One way to understand the blockchain revolution is through a technical discussion – something we did early in our What’s Now: San Francisco series with Brian Behlendorf. This month we looked at the financial side of...
What have we wrought? Many in the tech community are increasingly pondering that question in the past year as public scrutiny roams from election hacking on Facebook to #metoo charges in the Valley. One tech veteran has been thinking about what tech has wrought longer than most and has developed some ideas about what could be done about some of these unintended consequences. Julie Hanna has founded or run five venture-backed startups (including Healtheon, formerly WebMD), and currently is an advisor to X (formerly Google X) and Executive Chairwoman of Kiva, to name just some of what she does. She has spent a lot of time thinking about purpose-driven profit, values-based leadership and responsible innovation.
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,...
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...
Eric Ries, the bestselling author of Silicon Valley bible The Lean Startup, wants to accomplish something that many in the business world think will be harder than nuclear reactors: reinventing the stock exchange to prioritize long-term, rather than short-term, gains. The problems with our economy are so obvious that for the most part we don’t talk about...
Eric Ries, the bestselling author of Silicon Valley bible The Lean Startup, wants to accomplish something that many in the business world think will be harder than nuclear reactors: reinventing the stock exchange to prioritize long-term, rather than short-term, gains. The problems with our economy are so obvious that for the most part we don’t talk...
Interest in new blockchain technologies has exploded in the last year as the possibilities for applications keep rapidly expanding. One way to understand the blockchain revolution is through a technical discussion - something we did early in our What’s Now: San Francisco series with Brian Behlendorf. This month we will look at the financial side of blockchain - how those with money are wading into the space and how the revolution can get funded better and really scale up.
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.
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 month.
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.”
Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, believes we should rethink the world using today’s technology. “Let’s stop optimizing for the short-term. Let’s start optimizing for the long-term, and think about how to make the society we want,” O’Reilly says. O’Reilly acknowledges that technology is destroying jobs today, but only because “we’ve built incentives into our economy to encourage those choices.” O’Reilly believes that an economy not optimized for the short-term would place much less importance on stock performance, and would pay workers more. He refers to the current economy as the WTF economy (also the name of his Medium publication) because he sees WTF as an expression of both wonder and dismay, and in today’s economy, O’Reilly says, we see both.
Laura Murphy, the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s DC legislative office, recently conducted a 90-day review of discrimination on Airbnb (read the report here). Murphy says that she believes it’s in the enlightened self-interest of not only Airbnb, but all sharing economy companies, to make a sustained effort to serve entire communities, not just an elite market share. All companies, Murphy said, should be prepared for complaints of discrimination. “To have a company stick its head in the sand and say there’s not a problem out there is naive and also dangerous…You don’t know where discrimination is going to manifest itself, because it’s so much a part of our culture in the United States. Given that, you can’t just do one thing and expect it to solve discrimination for all time.”
Annise Parker, the mayor of Houston, Texas, from 2010 until January 2016, is well-accustomed to navigating the often murky waters of sharing economy regulation. Parker’s first experience with the sharing economy was using Zipcar’s technology to manage Houston’s fleet of light-duty vehicles. Later in her tenure as mayor, Parker worked to create a regulatory level playing field for the taxi industry and ride-sharing apps by lessening regulations on taxis and applying what she viewed as necessary regulations to the apps. “You can’t take a heavily regulated industry and de-regulate it overnight,” Parker said.
Francesco Rutelli, former Mayor of Rome and a member of Airbnb’s Mayoral Advisory Board, wants tourists visiting Italy to take full advantage of the wealth of culture that Italy has to offer. Rutelli believes that Airbnb is part of the answer to the question of how to provide tourists with personalized experiences. Rutelli also views home-sharing as a more sustainable alternative to mass tourism.
Stephen Yarwood, the former Lord Mayor of Adelaide, Australia, is a firm believer in our digital future. “I’ve always been convinced that technology was going to not only drive change, but create a new operating system for cities,” said Yarwood. Now Yarwood runs his own consultancy firm, called city 2050, and serves on Airbnb’s Mayoral Advisory Board, in addition to renting out his own home on Airbnb. He warns city officials against over-regulating particular companies in the sharing economy, for fear of undermining the trajectory of the entire sharing economy. “I think people want solutions in their lives,” Yarwood says, “but they don’t want to be told what to do.” Yarwood pointed to the example of dairy farmers in Australia and New Zealand, who are struggling to make ends meet as dairy prices drop. These farmers can now supplement their incomes by renting rooms on their dairy farms to locals and tourists interested in learning more about the industry in a personalized way.
Arun Sundararajan, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and author of the recent book The Sharing Economy, believes crowd-based capitalism could replace managerial capitalism in the next 10-20 years. Sundararajan believes crowd-based capitalism is an inherently superior model, one that uses resources more efficiently, which tends to result in increased economic productivity. Crowd-based capitalism, according to Sundararajan, also tends to increase the variety, diversity, and sometimes quality of goods, which results in higher levels of consumption. Economists don’t agree on much, Sundararajan says, but “if there are two things we agree about, one is that productivity growth leads to economic growth, and the other is that increases in consumption lead to economic growth.” Sundararajan’s research also indicates that crowd-based capitalism will have an equalizing effect on the economy by beginning to de-centralize the means of production.
Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, first explored the potential of the modern sharing economy in a Yale Law Journal article in 2004, and is credited as one of the first people to articulate the concept. More than a decade later, Benkler spoke about how our reality measures up to his initial conception. In this interview, he outlined the transition of sharing information through social networks to sharing within a market framework. “It takes time to be a decent sharer,” Benkler said. “It takes emotional load. Sometimes it’s just easier to pay, depending on what you’re trying to do.” Benkler prefers the term “on-demand economy” for those companies that incorporate a market framework.
Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), believes that while regulation isn’t necessarily bad, it shouldn’t be over-intrusive. The Disruptive Innovation Council, a subset of the CTA, does market research and lobbies governments in the hopes of promoting the idea that innovation is great for society. The CTA also rates every state in the U.S. based on how innovation-friendly it is, evaluating metrics like broadband deployment, STEM graduates, taxation systems, flexible workforce rules, and attitudes towards sharing economy companies. Shapiro believes that the attitudes of legislators towards new technology often depend on their personal familiarity with the product. If they haven’t used it themselves, or something close to it, Shapiro says, they don’t know it. Shapiro generally supports getting products to market first so that consumers can understand them before applying too much regulation.
April Rinne, Sharing economy expert and advisor, has traveled to almost 100 countries and worked in around 50 of them. “None define sharing the same way,” Rinne says, though she adds that the most general definition of the sharing economy involves sharing under-utilized assets, spaces, and skills. Rinne believes that there’s been a global pendulum shift in the last 18 months, one that led to an increased awareness—if not quite increased expertise—of the sharing economy among policymakers. And while the United States, and the Bay Area in particular, has maintained its role as a leader in technological innovation, it lags behind when it comes to policy innovation. Rinne discussed global policy innovations related to the sharing economy, like the UK’s sharing economy trade association, and Seoul’s Sharing City government department.
Sunil Paul co-founded Sidecar in 2011 on a novel premise—that technology could allow anyone to become a driver and accept money for that ride. According to Paul, Sidecar, which was purchased by General Motors in early 2016, pioneered the term “ride sharing”. Paul, who views IT as a “solvent for transaction costs”, discussed his early battles regulating ride sharing in California. “In the beginning, you’re operating in a gray area,” Paul said, “but it’s more or less inevitable that there’s going to be some level of regulation.” Paul supports regulation on the state level, because he sees municipal regulation as too scattered and disparate. He encourages policymakers to look out for the public interest, and believes that promoting innovation is part of that public interest. Paul laid out three potential pathways for disruptive companies facing resistance from incumbent companies or industries: 1) Start so small and silly that you’ll be ignored, 2) Co-opt the interests of the incumbent, and 3) Challenge the incumbent head-on. Sometimes, Paul says, there’s no substitute for saying that you’re the better way.
John Della Volpe, Director of Polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and Founder and CEO of SocialSphere, has been studying Millennials since 2000. It all started, said Della Volpe, with two Harvard students who wanted to survey Millennials and find out why they were volunteering but not voting. Della Volpe has been polling and analyzing this generation—which he defines as people born between 1980 and 2000—ever since. Della Volpe discussed what he considers to be the defining characteristics of the Millennial generation, which include placing less importance on money and more on flexibility, and a relationship with the rest of the world that’s based on a collaborative approach to solving problems. Millennials also have famously low levels of trust in institutions ranging from Congress to the media, and increasingly identify as liberal, but decreasingly identify as Democrats. Della Volpe also talked about the role that Millennials played in the election. If Clinton had won 60 percent of this cohort instead of 55 percent, Della Volpe said, she could have won the election. Eighteen to 29-year-olds represented around 18 percent of votes cast in the 2016 election, but 100 percent participation among this demographic would have doubled that percentage—only about half of people in their 20s voted in the election.
Albert Cañigueral, the OuiShare Connector for Spain and Latin America, is a Barcelona-based sharing economy expert helping to organize the fifth edition of OuiShare Fest, which takes place this July in Paris. Cañigueral describes himself as passionate about, but also critical of, the burgeoning sharing economy. Cañigueral acknowledged that sometimes tensions arise between global, American-based corporations and smaller, local startups. Global companies like Uber face regulatory challenges abroad similar to those they face in the United States. In Spain, only professional, licensed drivers can drive with Uber, and Uber was banned from the country for over a year, returning in March 2016. According to Cañigueral, the primary source of tension around the sharing economy in Barcelona is related to rental prices and housing shortages. Barcelona’s City Hall is focusing on growing and building the “commons-oriented collaborative economy,” and is particularly interested in promoting open source software.
In early December, the Berkeley Work and Intelligent Tools and Systems (WITS) working group hosted a conference to discuss working, earning, and learning in the age of intelligent tools. A number of conference participants sat down with Reinvent to talk about how they would explain the moment we’re in, what challenges we face, what solutions might get us through these challenges, and how optimistic they are about our future. These innovators, hailing from UC Berkeley, McKinsey & Company, and Schmidt Sciences, OECD, among other organizations, shared their thoughts and insights on what many of them see as the biggest economic and technological shift since the Industrial Revolution. They expressed concerns about income inequality and the skills gap, as well as the decline of corporate spending on workforce training. Many described themselves as cautious optimists. If we want to make sure that tomorrow’s economy works for everyone, not just the most highly skilled workers, the participants emphasized, we’ve got our work cut out for us.
In early December, the Berkeley Work and Intelligent Tools and Systems (WITS) working group hosted a conference to discuss working, earning, and learning in the age of intelligent tools. A number of conference participants sat down with Reinvent to talk about how they would explain the moment we’re in, what challenges we face, what solutions...
June Cohen put TED Talks online and scaled their views to 100 million a year. Deron Triff then took TED Talks to 100 million views and listens a month—or 1 billion a year. The two of them are now co-founders of WaitWhat — the first-of-its-kind content incubator that develops and nurtures original media properties aimed at evoking positive emotions thought to be contagious. WaitWhat then turns its successes into diverse media experiences that reach an ever-expanding audience.
Neil Gershenfeld, Alan Gershenfeld, and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld used December’s What’s Now: New York as the official New York launch party for their new book Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution. The book brings the perspectives of science, technology, social science, and humanities to the third digital revolution—through three brothers who are not only observers of the revolution but also active participants in helping guide it.
Each month at What’s Now: San Francisco we explore cutting edge innovation that’s happening in a different field in the region. In January, we looked at innovation happening not in a field but a scene that most people don’t know about. San Francisco has many examples of physical buildings, often old homes, that provide both work and living spaces for groups of people who are collaborating together and want to fuse these two sides of their lives.
Brad DeLong, UC Berkeley Economics Professor says our political system has been hacked by time, circumstance, chaos, and disaster. He pointed to the failings of the electoral college, the fact that “small states hacked the constitution in 1787, so we now have a world in which the minority in the Senate represents 175 million people, while the majority represents 145 million people”, and the gerrymandering after the 2010 census as the primary examples of this dysfunction. DeLong’s recommended fixes for the economy include a 4 percent inflation target from the Federal Reserve, incentivizing businesses to invest in workers, and reinvigorating the idea that technology should be used to augment workers, not replace them.
Our political system has been hacked by time, circumstance, chaos, and disaster, says UC Berkeley Economics Professor Brad DeLong. He pointed to the failings of the electoral college, the fact that "small states hacked the constitution in 1787, so we now have a world in which the minority in the Senate represents 175 million people, while the majority represents 145 million people", and the gerrymandering after the 2010 census as the primary examples of this dysfunction.
Laura Tyson, Faculty Director of the Institute for Business & Social Impact at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, took some time out of her day at a conference hosted by Berkeley and the OECD titled “Working, Earning, Learning In The Age Of Intelligent Tools” to share her thoughts on the future of work.
Lee Rainie, Director of Internet, Science and Technology Research at Pew Research Center, believes we are in the middle of the fourth major technology-based revolution of the 21st century. The first was Internet broadband, Rainie says, which has skyrocketed from zero percent of Americans using it to 73 percent. The second was the explosion of mobile phones—today 77 percent of Americans have smartphones and 51 percent have tablets. The third was social media, which 69 percent of Americans use. The fourth revolution, which we are currently in the middle of, is the rise of the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. When Pew first began tracking Internet usage, in March of 2000, fewer than half of American adults were on the Internet. “We’ve never seen a suite of consumer electronic technologies be adopted this fast with this much impact,” Rainie says.
Rainie views the story of the sharing, or platform, economy as paralleling the growth of the Internet. From the earliest days of the Internet, people used it swap things, says Rainie. While 72 percent of Americans have used some kind of sharing or gig service, broadly defined, the percentage of people who have used ridesharing services (15 percent) or home sharing services (11 percent) remain more modest. Most Americans don’t think that new sharing services should be regulated with old regulatory frameworks, Rainie says, and the majority don’t think that service providers should be treated the same as traditional employees. Despite a growing backlash against the tech industry that has become more pronounced in the past year, most Americans say they couldn’t live without the Internet or smart phones, despite their drawbacks. “It’s as predictable as the sun rising the next morning,” Rainie says, “the role of technology and the enthusiasm for tech companies and tech inventors and innovators is really high in America. They still think it serves them well; they still like the ways in which they feel more productive. They feel more socially engaged; they feel like they learn new things; they feel like they can take better care of their health.”
Lee Rainie, Director of Internet, Science and Technology Research at Pew Research Center, believes we are in the middle of the fourth major technology-based revolution of the 21st century.
How can we better prepare everyone from teens to Millennials for a more decentralized and increasingly independent future of work?
Martjin Arets, an international expert on the emergence and development of the collaborative economy, has studied and discussed the sharing economy in many European countries. Arets sees a difference between sharing economy innovation in the northern half of the continent, which he says is focused more on online platforms, and the southern half, which is focused more on offline sharing, like cooperatives. In the southern half of Europe, people are more accustomed to living in tight communities, says Arets.
Martjin Arets, an international expert on the emergence and development of the collaborative economy, has studied and discussed the sharing economy in many European countries. Arets sees a difference between sharing economy innovation in the northern half of the continent, which he says is focused more on online platforms, and the southern half, which is focused more on offline sharing, like cooperatives.
Kai Jia, a lecturer at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and visiting scholar at UC Davis, talks about two models of the sharing economy: one requires the platform to own little capital, like Airbnb and Uber (or Didi Chuxing, largest ride-sharing platform in China). The other model is capital intensive. The bike-sharing startups that have proliferated across China in recent years are an example of this. In this second model, the suppliers are not the consumers, Jia says, but rather, the suppliers are the companies. Because bike-sharing grew so quickly in China, the industry has very little regulation, and there are so many bikes that they have become a source of waste and overproduction rather than a means for creating more sustainable cities. On the positive side, bike-sharing apps are often far more convenient than alternative forms of transportation, and don’t contribute to the pollution of China’s cities. Jia argues for increased regulation of the sharing economy on the part of the government, and points out that Chengdu has recently issued guidelines around sharing university parking lots. The government can choose to either impose regulations on the platform itself, or on the behavior of the users, says Jia.
Kai Jia, a lecturer at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and visiting scholar at UC Davis, talks about two models of the sharing economy: one requires the platform to own little capital, like Airbnb and Uber (or Didi Chuxing, largest ride-sharing platform in China). The other model is capital intensive.
Orville Schell, veteran reporter and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, has covered China for decades and recently accompanied President Trump to Asia as a Vanity Fair correspondent. Trump loves to be pandered to, Schell pointed out, and cares more about whether he’s “winning” the leader of a foreign country than advancing the national interests of the United States. Despite the aggressive and often antagonistic remarks that Trump made about China while on the campaign, the Chinese government has treated Trump in a more strategic and less reactionary way. They appreciate the transactional nature of the relationship, Schell suggests, and the fact that Trump doesn’t raise vexing questions about democracy and China’s record on human rights.
Veteran reporter and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society Orville Schell has covered China for decades, and recently accompanied President Trump to Asia as a Vanity Fair correspondent. Trump loves to be pandered to, Schell pointed out, and cares more about whether he's "winning" the leader of a foreign country than advancing the national interests of the United States.
Robin Chase is here to say the future is coming much more quickly than many of us think, particularly where autonomous vehicles (AVs) are concerned. Chase, who co-founded Zipcar, believes that AVs will go on the market as early as 2020. Chase is a proponent of what she refers to as FAVES (fleets of AVs...
Pieter van de Glind and Harmen van Sprang, the co-founders of shareNL (a knowledge and networking platform for the Netherlands) and Sharing City Alliance (a global organization facilitating the interconnection of cities), are passionate advocates for the sharing economy’s potential to transform cities. The business partners hail from Amsterdam, which incorporates the sharing economy into...
Jonathan Tourtellot, the CEO of Designation Stewardship and a longtime veteran of National Geographic, effectively illustrates the concept of “overtourism” by pouring a bright red liquid into an overflowing vessel. When transatlantic commercial flight began in 1958, Tourtellot explains, there were 25M annual international tourist arrivals, but by 2010, that number had topped more than...
Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta, may spend his days “slinging money around,” as he phrases it, discovering and investing in hot new artificial intelligence (AI) startups, but he devotes much of his free time helping to imagine and plan for the future of work. These aren’t unrelated pursuits—Bahat says that AI gives him the...
Bloomberg Beta Head Roy Bahat may spend his days "slinging money around," as he phrases it, discovering and investing in hot new artificial intelligence (AI) startups, but he devotes much of his free time helping to imagine and plan for the future of work.
Rachel Botsman, world-renowned trust expert and University of Oxford lecturer, has a new book, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart, explores questions of transparency, scale, and ownership that are at the heart of the sharing economy. Botsman says she “became obsessed with understanding how...
World-renowned trust expert and University of Oxford lecturer Rachel Botsman's new book, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart, explores questions of transparency, scale, and ownership that are at the heart of the sharing economy.
Paul Hawken asks, “Can we stop global warming in the next 30 years?” According to renowned environmentalist, the answer is yes. We can keep the temperature of the Earth from rising past the critical mark of two degrees Celsius and actually draw down carbon out of the atmosphere to reverse the warming by 2050. We...
Sunil Paul took his first ride in an autonomous vehicle (AV) in 2009—at least a decade before most of will have the opportunity. That ride inspired to think about the future of transportation. Just two years later, in 2011, Sunil co-founded Sidecar, where he also served as CEO. Sidecar invented the modern ride-sharing model, operated...
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...
Julian Agyeman, a professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, believes that social justice and environmental justice are—or at least, should be—inextricably intertwined. The question we need to be asking, Agyeman says, is how do we improve people’s lives in a just and equitable manner, and how do we do that...