Reinvent Podcast

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

Alex Tapscott, a blockchain investor, entrepreneur, and author, launched The Blockchain Research Institute with his father Don Tapscott in 2017. The Institute, which is comprised of more than 50 companies and governments—including Tencent, IBM, and the government of Canada—employs more than 40 research associates around the world, all of whom are researching “the way blockchain is going to change everything,” in Tapscott’s words. If there’s one prediction that Tapscott is most confident in, it’s that in the next two years, conversations about blockchain won’t be nearly as common as they are now, because “it’s going to be embedded in everything that we do.” The Blockchain Research Institute focuses on two broad categories of research: first, how blockchain will disrupt industry verticals, and second, how blockchain will change roles within organizations. Blockchain represents an evolution of the Internet in that it is the first native digital medium for value, Tapscott says. It’s revolutionary largely because it is highly secure (though Tapscott points out that nothing, not even blockchain, is completely un-hackable) and decentralized. “On this platform, trust is not established by an intermediary, it’s established through a combination of mass collaboration, consensus, and clever code,” Tapscott says.

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 being the spokesperson for the company. That alone made him a very lucky man, and a very, very wealthy one—too wealthy. Chris now thinks that no one like him should be worth millions of dollars when so many other people in America can barely make ends meet. And if we think it’s bad now, Chris worries that the increasing prevalence of automation might only make things worse. He believes income inequality has become one of the biggest challenges of our time and has dedicated himself to rethinking the fundamentals of our economy. As co-founder of the Economic Security Project, Chris champions the economic policy innovation of Universal Basic Income, or UBI. He also just came out with a book, Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn, that explains UBI and his personal evolution into becoming a believer.

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 and Space Propulsion Group. He joined the founding team of Skybox Imaging, which launched in 2009, raised around $100 million of venture money and was at the leading edge of these new commercial space startups. Skybox Imaging set out to dramatically drop the cost of high resolution images from satellites and open the data up for many new uses. By 2014, after early successes, Google bought the company and brought the team in.

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. Marco fully understands that advanced automation and artificial intelligence will replace many routine jobs, and that globalization will continue to undermine American jobs competing with workers in foreign countries. However, he believes people are overlooking how much opportunity lies ahead for those doing work that is non-routine and not replaceable by machines, or that can’t be traded away because the service must be provided locally. That lack of vision of how that next system could work is undermining efforts to move forward.

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 deeply understand the whole ecosystem, including how it extends beyond San Francisco to other cities and countries with similar scenes. They see this fluid live-work trend as one cultural result of the technological shift that this generation rode into young adulthood. People now can live in the cloud and be completely mobile, connecting with like-minded innovators wherever they happen to be—including all the way out on the Playa at Burning Man. Ting and Carson opened up this topic into a broader conversation with others at the event about how the new work routines Millennials are perfecting will impact the future of work for the broader society.