More than ever people are asking, what’s real? How did this ever become an urgent question for our daily lives, a matter of ever greater disagreement and discord?
Why?
Today we turn to two artists whose practices provides beautiful insight into how we’re moving from truths “we hold to be self evident”, based on nature, to multiple manufactured realities.
Quarantime! takes its inspiration from the feverish activity going on across the innovation landscape, yet under the radar of the national media. Cable News provides a breathless feed of White House statements, public health statistics, and Federal Reserve actions. We want to focus on the contributions of scientists, artists, social entrepreneurs, and communities from which we all can learn. The show is entertainment and showcase of our collective ingenuity and innovation, curious and connecting. It’s built for a moment when our human, social, emotional and media needs are different than they were only yesterday. Its aspiration is to build a foundation and connections for a more resilient tomorrow that can emerge once this crisis ends and we build our future.
Previous Episodes
1Fluid Reality with Claudia Hart – Artist Claudia Hart has been working in extended reality and simulation since the 1990’s. She sees a schism between photography, which stems from materiality (it must be real, we took a picture of it! ) to computer mediated art which leads to simulated worlds and parallel construction. This change in our media environment over the last 30 years mirrors a movement from enlightenment-era certainty to post modern complexity and entanglement. This deconstruction of the old order helps explain modern anxiety, our political and philosophical camps, and the ascendance of fluidity — which we see in such formerly certain things as gender. What is reality?
We’ll start today by touring Hart’s most recent work, Ruins. Billed as “an antidote to a world in crisis”, Ruins navigates from a Eurocentric paradigm of fixed photographic capture into a reality of malleable and inherently unstable computer simulations and systemic collapse. The exhibition presents a different notion of time, a present that viewers experience through the possibility of simulation technologies that use scientific data to model natural forces, the crystallization of past, future, and present into a perpetual now.
Hart’s art uses one of today’s most popular and dominate mediums: the simulated world we experience in console games. Ruins is an audiovisual animation tracking through a claustrophobic game world from which there is no escape but also a setting from which we can explore our past imagined realities. Through the use of music (composed by Edmund Campion) the work examines the ethos of modernism through the tactical mixing of failed Utopian ideologies: Thomas Jefferson On American Liberty; The Bauhaus Manifesto by Walter Gropius; Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s failed suburban rubber plantation in the Amazon rainforest; and Jim Jones’s sermon, The Open Door.
We’ll start today by touring Hart’s most recent work, Ruins. Billed as “an antidote to a world in crisis”, Ruins navigates from a Eurocentric paradigm of fixed photographic capture into a reality of malleable and inherently unstable computer simulations and systemic collapse. The exhibition presents a different notion of time, a present that viewers experience through the possibility of simulation technologies that use scientific data to model natural forces, the crystallization of past, future, and present into a perpetual now.
Hart’s art uses one of today’s most popular and dominate mediums: the simulated world we experience in console games. Ruins is an audiovisual animation tracking through a claustrophobic game world from which there is no escape but also a setting from which we can explore our past imagined realities. Through the use of music (composed by Edmund Campion) the work examines the ethos of modernism through the tactical mixing of failed Utopian ideologies: Thomas Jefferson On American Liberty; The Bauhaus Manifesto by Walter Gropius; Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s failed suburban rubber plantation in the Amazon rainforest; and Jim Jones’s sermon, The Open Door.
2Are We As Gods? Bio Reality with Amy Karle – Amy Karle is an internationally award-winning bioartist working at the nexus of where digital, physical and biological systems merge. She’s also a provocateur and a futurist, opening future visions of how art, science, and technology could be utilized to support and enhance humanity while making advancements in the technology towards those goals in the process of making her artworks.
In REGENERATIVE RELIQUARY, Karle sculpts using 3D printed forms reproducing the lattice structure of human bones. These coax living stems cells to become those bone structures; what emerges in is artwork using the body to explore what it means to be human through a unique negotiation of art, design, science and technology. Her art and enquiry explores ethical questions about our god like power to author in biological and genetic media, and ultimately asks how we might create a positive better future and not a dystopian one. Along the way she creates art in evolutionary biology (start with a dinosaur scan provided by the Smithsonian, then use neural networks and human perspective to iterate thousands of years into the past or the future), and similarly with a human heart (ingest enormous amounts of imaging data about the heart and let loose on what a better one might be…)
In REGENERATIVE RELIQUARY, Karle sculpts using 3D printed forms reproducing the lattice structure of human bones. These coax living stems cells to become those bone structures; what emerges in is artwork using the body to explore what it means to be human through a unique negotiation of art, design, science and technology. Her art and enquiry explores ethical questions about our god like power to author in biological and genetic media, and ultimately asks how we might create a positive better future and not a dystopian one. Along the way she creates art in evolutionary biology (start with a dinosaur scan provided by the Smithsonian, then use neural networks and human perspective to iterate thousands of years into the past or the future), and similarly with a human heart (ingest enormous amounts of imaging data about the heart and let loose on what a better one might be…)
Join business leader, board member, and executive coach Kaye Foster and world renowned designer Ayse Birsel as they explore how we might forge uncommon allies to support the common good & deconstruct and then reconstruct our own approach to life, leadership and the things we surround ourselves with to extend our purpose & meaning.
1Deconstruction, Reconstruction – Ayse Birsel has spent her career exploring how design can transform products into joyful, loving, and powerful experiences. She’ll share how she used design to deconstruct her own life and reconstruct it into something new. Her book and workshops on how to “Design the Life You Love” are meditations, explorations and hands-on co-creative activities that help people and organization re-invent themselves around meaning and purpose.
2Uncommon Allies – Kaye Foster has been a C-suite executive at Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, an advisor and board member for numerous organizations and a social change activist & philanthropist focused on equity & inclusion as a super power for communities and society. Ayse and Kaye will explore ways Kaye has connected and fostered uncommon allies to create real change during this global pandemic and ways we could each drive more meaning and justice in our words and deeds.
In 1936 publisher Henry Luce imagined a new form of media based on the rapidly advancing art and power of photography. His awe was captured in this mission statement for Life Magazine:
“To see life. To see the world. To watch the faces of the poor, and the gestures of the proud. To see strange things. Machines, armies, multitudes, and shadows in the jungle. To see, and to take pleasure in seeing. To see and be instructed. To see and be amazed”
We are at a similar moment of transformation today with the tools of simulation, rendering, and the ability to create and play artificial worlds. The theme of today’s show is Radical Simulation: How will today’s massive compute and artificial world-building tools help our generation, “To see the world, To imagine its possibilities, To transform it, To connect with cultures and be amazed, To gaze into the future, and make smarter decisions as a society to get there….”
1Tools for Simulation – We’ll be joined Anuj Aggarwal who leads Omniverse partnerships for Nvidia, the semiconductor company which more than any other builds the compute power and GPUs at the core of gaming system Hollywood production and artificial intelligence. He’ll share with us whats possible when Nvidia builds into hardware Pixar’s universal scene description language – how the most sophisticated artificial worlds we see in movies can now be rendered real-time in games, in art, or in systems that let us simulate the physics, economics and the environments of our cities and planet.
2Radical Simulation –Then, onto the cultural perspective: we’ll hear from the team producing next week’s Gray Area Festival, “Radical Simulation”. It’ll be presenting artists using immersive worldbuilding to re-imagine adjacent possible presents through themes of embodiment, social justice, identity, decolonialism, and regenerative ecology. We’ll hear from curator Kelani Nichole and Gray Area Executive Director Barry Threw on how the arts and culture can influence our simulated worlds. And why, in a world of digital twins and radical simulation, our online culture more than ever influences the real world, if that’s even a distinction any more.
3The Culture of Mixed Media – Institute for the Future Research Fellow and media artist Amber Case, who has been exploring the cultural implications of mixed reality for years as a designer in the academic (MIT, Harvard) and corporate worlds (Esri.) She observes that we’ve been living in a simulation for years, via 2D social networks. So why, when we envision the future, is it so often the same—a kind of Jetsons vanilla world. How can we ask questions, use feedback loops, and draw on 5,000 years of history and culture to imagine the future with depth, and not the shallow aesthetic we are used to?
On today’s show we’ll be joined by Ward Bullard, Seema Jain, & Hailey Temple from MURAL, as well as Teri Schindler of team Polyplexus, a DARPA funded initiative into evidence-based conversations for exploring the science of science through the power of social media. Our very own Peter Hirshberg will be joined by Pete Williams to explain their vision of a sort of game that helps us all co-create & prototype a better tomorrow. Think Bucky Fuller’s world game meets the World’s Fair for the 21st century.
Guests Scott Parish, LinkedIn’s Director of Product Marketing for High Growth Markets & Segments, & Karan Chopra, Co-Founder of Opportunity@Work join us to explore how we might connect people to critical jobs during COVID and energize and foster upward mobility for tens of millions of workers who don’t have college degrees and are in low paying jobs or are unemployed today but have learned plenty of valuable skills through alternate routes.
1The Emergency Social Response Playbook – When an emergency strikes how might a company surge their innovation efforts, connect to people who can help inside and outside of their organization, and make a difference fast? In this segment Scott Parish will share the story of how Linkedin jumped into the COVID response to support surge networking of five million healthcare job candidates with critical needs at hospitals, national health systems, and organizations like the Red Cross. They developed a go-to-market plan in 10 days and are on track to deliver over a million volunteers and tens of thousands of newly hired healthcare workers to fight the virus. He’ll share what he learned from the experience and how it’s leading to a playbook for emergency social response.
2Opportunity@Work – What if we valued skills not schools? How might we build entry level gateways to high paying jobs for tens of millions of workers who have learned Skills Through Alternative Routes (STARS). Karan Chopra will take us on a deep dive into how we might design job pathways to move a $15/hour worker into a $45/hour career and discuss what he found when his organization explored data on more than 70 million Americans who could be STARS if we could build better pathways to get from where they are today, to a better tomorrow.
As sea levels continue to rise, water and air pollution are effecting the health of different communities around the world, the younger generation cares deeply about discovering how to better conserve the environment for their future. In timeless audio footage, 15 year-old Peter brings us back to 1971, a time when the young radio journalist interviewed New York senator Gaylord Nelson and leader the of the house, Sydney Yates, on the first ever Earth Day parade. Fast-forward to today, our two interns, Jocelyn Yu & Kira Rapp, are hosting this episode of Quarantime! on the social and environmental problems that their generation cares about.
1Taking Actions in Impactful Directions – Miguel Bustos from GLIDE is an active member on boards and commissions. After his career being a policy advisor in the White House to Bill Clinton during his administration, he now serves as Chair of the SF Commission on Community Investment & Infrastructure, on the Executive Committee of the Episcopal Diocese of California, and on boards including Beyond Differences, The Mexican Museum, GLIDE Memorial Foundation, and Hispanics in Philanthropy. Miguel is going to share his journey as a social justice activist and how GLIDEsf is making an impact on the local San Francisco communities while helping people to break their cycle on poverty and marginalization.
2Environmental Activism in the Long Run – Bella Lam has two decades of experience in international cooperation. She has worked extensively with civil society organizations and state actors in Latin America, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Bella holds a MSc in Environment and Development, and is currently the Director of Programs at the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada. With the institute, she works with local partners to support community-centred conservation in Africa, making the connection between the well-being of people, animals and the environment. In Canada, the Institute has a youth-led initiative called Roots & Shoots, focusing on themes of Indigenous Perspectives and Climate Action. In this segment, we will explore her journey as an environmental activist and what her tips are for the new generation of environmental leaders.
3Coaching the Future Generation – Gil Griffin is a published, nonfiction author with 30 years of journalism experience in features, sports, music and news reporting, writing and editing, in print, online and radio. He is also a teacher with 16 years of experience in the independent high school, college/university and graduate school arenas. Throughout his career, Gil has traveled to more than 50 countries. Gil is a master at inspiring ideas through storytelling. He will be sharing insights on how the younger generation can get involved and making a change through voting.
Quarantime! Episode 38:
The Teacher’s Edition: Falling Back in Love with Learning
School will soon be back in session, the topic of learning is front & center, not only during COVID19, but also over our lives. Many people are made to feel as if school is a chore and education is a thing we HAVE to do (and the current approach is inadequate, broken, or worse), but is it? Join Shraddha Chaplot & Alanna Mertens as they explore the beauty and joy in learning as well as their fascination with mathematics. Now and for the future…
Mickey’s big sister, Alanna, is a National Board Certified science & math teacher from Chicago & now researcher into powerful new dimensions of learning for both teachers & students that help them find the wonder in learning. Shraddha Chaplot is an engineer, a childhood math super geek, coder, & advocate for women in tech has helped 10’s of thousands of girls learn to dream bigger. Join us, share!
Quarantime! Episode 37:
Everything is Deeply Intertwingled: Transition Design and a New Lens on Tomorrow
Join Terry Irwin the leader of the new Transition Design Institute & Dutch Macdonald, architect and business design leader from Boston Consulting Group Platinion as they help us explore a giant system design map of America’s response to COVID, teach us about the emerging field of transition design, and share how this might lead to sustainable communities for tomorrow.
1Our Systems World – Introducing the field of Transition Design: how it builds on system thinking, why it’s different than other forms of design, and why Buckminster Fuller would tell us, “it’s about time!” We’ll explore this integrated, practical approach to understanding and solving problems…. and why it may the the best way to get to the future for us all.
2COVID Complexity – A deep dive into the map of America’s response to COVID from a complex spatial/temporal system lens. The actual map developed by Terry’s team spreads out 22 feet wide. Since your monitor isn’t that big, we’ll simplify. Also: why the preconditions for our COVID mess started in 1770, just a few years before the USA was born.
3Cities Tomorrow – How might transition design help us build more fruitful, thriving communities and broaden the stakeholders at the table, maybe even beyond humans. Your cities, your towns, your future…
Our nation’s attention is turning to the November elections, and the enormous challenges we face. How do we register voters and get them to turnout in the midst of a pandemic? Can states run in-person and mail-in voting at the same time, much less unprecedented stress on the postal service and partisan attacks on vote by mail. Many young people have lost faith in the electoral process, yet many of them aren’t working now and represent an enormous civic capacity to register, inform and get out the vote? How might we put this to work to guarantee a fair election and greater civic participation? Today’s show takes a practical look at how to create a stronger democracy in at a time of crisis in America.
1All Elections Are Local – In this year of enormous challenge to our electoral process, Nicco Mele points out that everything that matters, and will produce results is local: election administration, voter turnout, poll watching, the rules — are local and distributed in America. Nicco will talk with us about how to get involved, how to make a difference, and how the greatest threat to our political system isn’t partisanship (America was designed to be partisan he reminds us) but is disinformation and manipulation at scale. Nicco has been at work on civic processes and media and society for over a generation: He is on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy school, was previously a senior executive at the Tribune Media Company and deputy publisher at the Los Angeles Times, and began his career as webmaster for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign — one of the very first instances of social media in a presidential campaign. More about Nicco’s current thinking here.
2 The Politics Industry: Can Innovation Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy? – Katherine Gehl is a business leader, entrepreneur, and political innovation activist. In 2016 she teamed up with Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter to ask what kind of innovation might reinvigorate 21st century America. Their book “Why Competition in the Politics Industry Is Failing America A Strategy for Reinvigorating Our Democracy“ has led to surprising practical electoral strategies being implemented in states today. Their work might can serve as blueprint and priorities for post-COVID America.
3Our Candidate is Democracy – How great is the election security threat? And how had COVID-19 amplified it? Adam Clayton Powell III leads the non-partisan USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative. The organization, supported by Google, helps protect campaigns and elections from attacks by both foreign and domestic adversaries. The initiative operates in all 50 states, conducting cybersecurity workshops in preparation for the elections. Adam will share with us the threat status we’re facing, how states are responding, and what we should make of the election security issue in the American democracy.
1bitforms: Code as Art – We’ll be joined by Steve Sacks, founder of bitforms one of the first galleries in the U.S. to explore, create a market for and nurture new media and software based art — opening in 2001. That was the moment that artists first began exploring some of our most contemporary technology mediated themes — privacy ,identity, the role of machine intelligence in the creative process, the ability of media to manipulate reality at scale. At a time when we’ve turned quarantine inward, our homes become more important cultural institutions than ever before, and art that can arrive and interact over networks has looms larger in the loomisphere than ever before as well.
2Unstable Presence: The Art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer – Rafael Lozano-Hemmer considers the behavior of unstable physical and human systems, what SFMOMA curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling called “ the dynamic, poetic, but also disturbing turbulence that characterizes social and technical interrelations.” Lozano-Hemmer was due for a major Retrospective at SFMOMA in April— now cancelled due to COVID. On Friday he joins us for this virtual survey of his work. His themes presage our present anxiety and uncertainty with complexity. Says Lozano-Hemmer, “Presence is often associated with existence, continuity in time or material reality. The ‘unstable’ in the title refers to interaction, improvisation and performance. The instability brought by participation allows constant reinterpretation of the work, where many outcomes are co-present.”
3Mappae Mundi: Mapping Our Inner World – Mappae Mundi are maps of the world that capture our understanding of the universe, mythologies, & ways of finding our place in medieval times. They are part art, part architectural diagrams, part reflections of how we see and feel the world around us. They fell out of favor as we gained the ability to measure and bring the scientific method to bear on the universe. But in these meta-medieval moments of uncertainty, artists find new ways to locate the ineffable, diagram wonder, fear, grace and navigate the map of our inner landscapes. Spanish/Russian sculptor/artist Renata Adela and musician/artist Paul Benney — who first appeared on the scene during the Neo-Expressionist movement happening in the early 80’s in New York’s East Village and now one of the UK’s leading portrait artists — join us to discuss their own journey through the landscape of the quarantine as they map the inner world and invite grace each day into their lives through the craft of making art.
Watch the segment here.
Today: how art guides us, emerges in new forms, leads the way in a times of change. Three stories of how artists and architects are reimagining practice and place during COVID 19, and implications for the world beyond. In San Francisco Gray Area and the California College of the arts are teaming up for the UTOPIAA festival this weekend which will examine how public spaces are moving into are home; we’ll have an exclusive preview. In New York Luke Dubois is a musician, engineer, and educator who works at the confluence of the real and virtual worlds. He’ll show how creating work with data helps create an emotional understanding of our world. Artists Renata Adela & Paul Benney join us from the UK to share their work, creative process and personal ways of finding shelter and reinvention though the lens of the creative act.
1UTOPIAA – A Festival For Recreation Architecture – We’ll be joined by architect and CCA professor Lingxiu Chong who will preview this weekend’s conference on how COVID-19 is affecting creative processes and cultural practices typically conducted in the public sphere — schools, museums, offices — which have moved into our domestic spaces. From students and educators transitioning their kitchen tables into classrooms to working parents sharing their children’s play-space as their office, art and architectural institutions have had to adjust to unique challenges in adapting homes for full-time work. At this critical moment when the personal and professional have become blurred, we’ll ask how can designers reimagine our spaces for both work and play?
2The Art of Data – R. Luke DuBois weaves information from a multitude of sources into art and music exploring the tensions between algorithms, portraiture and temporal space. Joining us from New York. Today we’ll explore the long narratives created by arcs of data, in the same way that time-lapse photographs expose long swaths of motion in a single image. These help us understand American history, our consumer society, and world that comes unto view when new tools are applied.
3Mappae Mundi: Mapping our inner world – Mappae Mundi are maps of the world that capture our understanding of the universe, mythologies, & ways of finding our place in medieval times. They are part art, part architectural diagrams, part reflections of how we see and feel the world around us. They fell out of favor as we gained the ability to measure and bring the scientific method to bear on the universe. But in these meta-medieval moments of uncertainty, artists find new ways to locate the ineffable, diagram wonder, fear, grace and navigate the map of our inner landscapes. Spanish/Russian sculptor/artist Renata Adela and musician/artist Paul Benney — who first appeared on the scene during the Neo-Expressionist movement happening in the early 80’s in New York’s East Village and now one of the UK’s leading portrait artists — join us to discuss their own journey through the landscape of the quarantine as they map the inner world and invite grace each day into their lives through the craft of making art.
Watch the segment here.
We’re replaying one of our most popular shows, with two of the lading minds in deep tech — legendary Venture Capitalist Steve Jurvetson (first money in Hotmail, Tesla, SpaceX) and Synthetic Biologist, co-founder of Genome Project Andrew Hessel.
How is the COVID crisis changing the agenda and priorities of tech investors and the scientific community? What new theses and opportunities are emerging, what trends are being reinforced, and what ideas now look like really bad ideas.
Five months of COVID have created something of a gold rush (or perhaps it’s ambulance chasing) in the life sciences: diagnostic tests and engineered vaccines have made 2020 resemble the Dot-com bubble in 1999. Those investments washed out a lot of noisy players, but also created the investment path for the 21st century. Today we’ll try to discern signal from noise and think about the enduring technologies that our present crisis is accelerating.
Also Friday: we recognize one of the most important scientific and existential events of the 20th century — the 75 anniversary of the first test of the Atomic Bomb. July 16, 1945 was the scientific culmination of the Manhattan project, the Trinity test in Alamogordo New Mexico of the Plutonium implosion weapon. It set in motion the military industrial complex and defined big government science investments. People often compare the search for a COVID vaccine to the Manhattan project, but science today is far more distributed, open sourced, and in some circles less respected. We’ll investigate, on Quarantime!
1The Unattempted Inevitable – has been Steve Jurveton’s investment thesis for more than a quarter century. Obviously that worked out for Hotmail, Tesla, and SpaceX (Astronauts launching next week!). Steve also invested in personal scooters which took off in China after SARS/MIRS (safer than public transpiration) and synthetic meat a couple years ago — before COVID19 started to disrupt the food supply chain and agriculture. Today we explore the inevitable future with Steve, on Quarantime!.
2Synthesizing Life to Make Life Better – No one represents the biological century better than Andrew Hessel who is at work on “push button biology” — you design an organism, push a button, and out it comes. How does this scale to anticipate and fight future pandemics? Learn about organisms that can be grown in micro-factories and meet 21st century challenges.
Today we revisit a collection of highlights from our guests appearing on Episodes 23 – 30. We feature their insights into the institutional imbalances in health, tech, and democracy.
We revisit a fundamental theme we examined 14 long weeks ago on our April 1st show: the healthcare response to COVID and how economists imagine restarting economy. On that show and this one we’ll speak with Suzan Dentzer, Senior Policy Fellow at Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, a leader in remote healthcare and tele-health policy. We’ll also reunite with Marco Annunziata, former Chief Economist for General Electric and Founder of Annunziata Advisors. In April we asked, “when the smoke clears, what does the economic restart look like and what might permanently be altered.” Today we know a lot more about what is and isn’t working, and about the longer term issues we face with recession, globalization, and sectors most affected. Joining our returning guests will be joined by a leading healthcare first responder – Dr. Amit Mehta, a radiologist in San Antonio Texas and 9 other locations affiliated with CHI St Luke Health Patients Medical Center, Methodist Hospital, and Metropolitan Methodist Hospital. He is also a health care entrepreneur and investor working on remote health care.
1STAT: TX’s Front Line – We’ll visit with Dr. Amit Mehta for a report on the urgent response to COVID in Texas (which in July is where New York was in April) and prospects for how this era might change healthcare for the long term. “For real change to happen,” says Dr. Mehta, “we’ll need national policy changes to adopt the innovation flowing out of labs today.”
2Sea Change in Healthcare – Susan Dentzer, Senior Policy Fellow at Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy. The technology for remote healthcare and telemedicine has been around for years, but it’s been resisted by providers, payers, and often the public. Now all at once seeing patients at home is a national priority. This has led to massive innovation in just a few weeks. Dentzer is one of America’s top experts in the field and led healthcare coverage for the PBS NewsHour for years. We’ll talk about how the system is changing now and how the pandemic may lead to an era of healthcare without walls as we balance the best of digital and physical connections with the best of care.
3Scenarios for the Restart – Marco Annunziata, former Chief Economist for General Electric and Founder of Annunziata Advisors. We spoke with Marco in on April 1st; we’ll revisit his predictions and concerns 14 weeks later as we examine what the economic restart looks like and what might permanently be altered. Marco will help us understand what data are most important and what might be deceiving as we try to assess the impact of the pandemic. Then we’ll examine what effect this might have on globalization, the tensions between labor and capital, and whether this is the moment for the blockchain decentralized set or the big government statists. We’ll also ask Marco to help us decode the post COVID debate raging among the worlds top economists , including the legendary conversations between Joseph Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini.
It’s our July 4th show on the idea of America, on always becoming, and the rules of engagement for being a good steward and product manager of America.
We’ll be joined by Aspen Institute moderator and Mortimer Adler scholar
William Cathers.
Today’s Crises COVID 19, Race, Economy, Environment) have made understanding the underlying ideas of America—our principles, rules of engagement, and historical lessons—more important than ever. This is a time of great change and possibility: our history holds the handbook for our future, for a more perfect union. Today’s show will revisit the founding of the USA and the founders’ ideas as a guidebook for this generation of change makers. We’ll journey back to Aristotle (no justice, no peace), through the reformation (where we’ll witness the birth of reactionism), and onto the founding of the USA. For those looking for a contemporary manifesto for a just society we’ll see how Madison and Hamilton studied all the constitutions and manifestos of their day and the past, and how they attempted to product manage a republic that would not crash and could not be easily hijacked by factions. We’ll visit their darkest fear: that absent a king, pope or nobles, the tyranny of the majority might be the biggest threat. Then on through Lincoln’s second inaugural, and the challenges of the industrial revolution. How did Teddy Roosevelt navigate America, while Russia chose revolution and cancel culture? What can we learn from the mob that created Hitler? Then on to the pivotal voting rights act that for the first time granted personhood to all Americans, setting the stage for today.
Finally, rules for today, as leaders in our self-organizing urgent 21st century world. The rules of engagement (how to use logic and rhetoric, how to speak and listen). And the great warnings that help frame our efforts to move toward justice and a more perfect union.
We’ll be inspired by Great Books and Aspen Seminar founder Mortimer J. Adler who wrote “We Hold These Truths” and was a teacher and collaborator of our guest, Bill Cathers.
We’ll also draw inspiration and hear from CBS Radio Poet Laurate Norman Corwin, author of radio’s most famous broadcast, “We Hold These Truths,” broadcast on all four networks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 15, 1941. We will recount his friendship with Corwin discuss his original script to the broadcast, and play clips.
Today is our first Quarantime! remote broadcast, coming live from the outdoor beer garden of Mission Bowling Club in San Francisco. Our show will be all about diving into (or perhaps tentatively dipping your toe into) the reopening of street life, the hospitality industry, arts institutions and urban economies.
1Hospitality Reboot – Our first guest is one of San Francisco’s legendary hospitality innovators, Doug Dalton founder of Future Bars (Bourbon and Branch, Rickhouse, Swig, Cask, Local Edition, and Tradition). Doug’s venues are a great expression of placemaking, experience design, and the reimagining of cocktail culture. And now COVID rewrites the book about gatherings and distancing just as we are yearning to reemerge and reconnect. We’ll examine what comes next, what will change, and what we can look forward to in cities over in the coming months (and years).
2Pittsburgh: Nonstop City – Pittsburg’s technology economy never slept as the COVID crisis kept people at home. Multiple startups were funded and the city made signifiant progress on everything from COVID Vaccines to Mars Rovers. Audrey Russo is President and CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council and Board Member of the Greater Pittsburgh Urban League, CityLab, and other organizations that look at the complexity of physical, literal, and metaphorical terrain. She’ll join us as we discuss the blueprint for economic growth.
3Andy Warhol Invites You… – Also in Pittsburgh we’ll be joined by Dan Law who leads advancement at the Andy Warhol Museum. Today is the Warhol’s first day reopening to the public, one if the first museums in America to do so. Today is also grand opening (delayed a few months by COVID) of the exhibition,“Femme Touch.”From transgender icons and stalwart members of the underground scene, to the artist’s mother and his radical would-be assassin, women and femmes in Warhol’s world played crucial roles in every area of Warhol’s life and practice. We’ll dive into how arts institutions are reopening, what other cities can learn, and how Andy Warhol’s work keeps reinventing itself for our present moments.
Quarantime! Episode 28:
Population Health: Why Is It so Hard to Live a Healthy Life?
Is healthcare as it stands today just operant conditioning gone wrong?
As Amazon roles out Amazon Care in pilot efforts with its own employees, Apple launches hand-washing & sleep apps on their watches, doctors are seeing a curve that won’t flatten and troubling trends in chronic conditions. It’s hard not to wonder what our society might have looked like if we built health into the cultural values of our society. Join researcher, psychologist, & VP of population health & clinical transformation UPMC Ellen Beckjord @ebeckjord, and former chief strategy & innovation officer of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation & cofounder of Building H Steve Downs @stephenjdowns as we explore how to shift the design of everything we do towards a culture of health, wellbeing, & grace. We’ll discuss troubling trends in childhood obesity, diabetes, and other societal signals and what they mean about our current culture. What if we built health, wellness, & grace into the products, places & choices that shape our everyday lives?
Episode 27: Hip Hop Architecture: Building the next Generation of Black Architects to Reboot America
A special Juneteenth edition featuring Michael Ford, the @HipHopArch as he shares how architects design the backdrops of oppression and hip hop can tell us everything we need to know about how to design just cities. If we’d only listen. Ford sees Hip Hop as a “post occupation report” on American Cities. What’s that? When an architect completes a building, a post occupation report examines did a building perform to plan, how are people using it, experiencing it. Hip Hop, born in the Bronx became a language reporting on the urban experience of people living in projects, urban renewal and blighted communities. Many of these were the product of post World War II programs meant to improve cites, but didn’t turn out that way.
But the most exciting part of Ford’s work is to use the language of Hip Hop to engage underrepresent youth in the architecture, urban planning and design. Michael will tell us about Hip Hip Architecture summer camp (virtual this year: COVID) and his history of opening the eyes of young people to architecture. It’s a fascinating lens into the inner city experience through the art of Hip Hop, and then using that form to empower citizeness to help form their city.
Also joining us today is Nichol Bradford who just completed this morning hosting a three day future cities summit focused on flourishing and humanity design. Peter and Mickey cohosted the summit and we’ll share highlights and exciting development projects to come from initiative.
Following our cities and Juneteenth theme, we’ll highlight with clips and trailers at some remarkable films that help further tell this story. Coded Bias in which director Shalini Kantayya questions the neutrality of technology, arguing that computers have a built-in bias that reflects the faulty assumptions of the people (usually men) who program them. We’ve examined this theme on Quarantime! with Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble (author of Algorithms of Oppression) and Cathy O’Neil (author of Weapons of Math Destruction.) We’re excited to take a peak at this important new film.
Then onto a look at two of our favorite films : “Sing Your Song” about Harry Belafonte’s years of music and activism, and (In)VisiblePortraits about the othering of black women,.
And finally, back to San Francisco’s and our own urban history. A remarkable document on the intended and unintended effects of urban renewal in is 1974’s “Redevelopment- A Marxist Analysis” It’s an amazing piece of history, anticipating the impact of San Francisco development polices set 45 years ago. Also revealing: what was Marxist in 1974 seems peculiarly middle-of-the-road urban wisdom today.
Why have we made so much progress in the hard sciences and yet seem to be in the dark ages when it comes to what matters most? Why do we blame ourselves when we feel overwhelmed, oppressed, or incapable of changing our bad habits? Why do we believe we are such experts in how people tick that we have endless advice for others but can’t seem to get out of our own way? How do external architectures shape us more than we know and in what ways could the built environment help us reach our own goals-rather than some architect’s, product designer’s or city planner’s naive theories? What would happen if we had a way to understand our personal cognitive abilities, regenerate them, & build cognitively diverse teams? In this episode we’ll get a sneak peek into Audacities: Humanity Design Summit-a global gathering happening this week around the world-taking on these topics & exploring tangible pilots that create places with the potential to lead to a new kind of enlightenment & community.
1Meaning & Place – Dr. Beth Coleman from the University of Toronto’s City as a Platform Lab and author of Hello Avatar discusses the role science and art play in finding meaning and building places where our minds can flourish.
2A Framework for Flourishing – Mickey McManus and his imaginary stunt double provide an overview for how Minds & Meanings, Science & Arts, and Places & Potential might drive flourishing and help our citizens prepare for change.
3The Dark Ages of Mind & Meaning – Ting Jiang, returning guest and research scientist from Dan Arely’s Duke Center for Advanced Hindsight explores the dark ages of mind & meaning and provides a provocative challenge to designers and planners of future cities.
4The Architecture of Cognitive Capacity – Neta Tamir, PhD Candidate at Cornel University and Micky’s boss dives into an architecture for quantified cognition and regenerative potential. Neta and Mickey explore what might happen when ambient intelligence helps us reach our cognitive goals.
5Through the Looking Glass – Itai Palti the leader of the Conscious Cities movement and director of Center for Conscious Design challenges us to question the nature of nature and how we might build places for citizen Enactivism.
The COVID crisis has dealt an extreme blow to small business, especially those in challenged neighborhoods. Larger companies can weather the storm… but small business will run out of government stimulus funds (if they got any at all) and many face months of social distancing and perhaps reluctant customers. Especially hard hit will be businesses that are about gathering: restaurants, music venues, the arts. Today we look at new mechanisms that can help businesses flourish, the role of prototyping and adaptive reuse, business models that are more on-demand and pop-up, less fixed-cost high-risk. How might this get financed by reimagining federal programs such as the Opportunity Zone legislation. Might we have the tools of a more inclusive economy already at hand?
1Platforms for Local Growth – Today we’ll hear from developers and entrepreneurs with street cred. Jesus “Jesse” Leon comes from one of the hardest hit neighborhoods in America, where at a young age he fell in with gangs, drugs, and danger. 20 years later he’s a philanthropist helping reboot cities. His journey took him through the Harvard Kennedy School in public policy, a leader in community development with Bank of America, and is now at work transforming San Diego and its small business community. Today: building platforms that drive flourishing local leadership and growth.
2Interim Use & Development – Jessie’s collaborator Marc Berkowitz founded Co-Place which takes a radically different approach to community development and Opportunity Zone legislation, part of the 2017 Trump tax law. They’ve adapted the tax break to actually buildup interim use and blighted neighborhoods, working with local leaders to mint new entrepreneurs and businesses. Businesses centered around a lower cost business model for that have helped existing at-risk businesses in the time of COVID. We’ll be looking to the Co-Place team for a conversation on rebuilding in a way that is locally hyper locally owned and not extractive.
3How Cities React – Robin Abad Ocubillo is an Urban Designer and Planner with a passion for film. His career has focused largely on public space design, management, and policy. Currently with SF Planning, he manages the Central Waterfront-Dogpatch Public Realm Plan, a multi-agency effort to scope and program streetscape and open space infrastructure projects into the City’s capital implementation plan. He also serves as the Lead Policy Planner for Places for People, the first municipal placemaking ordinance of its kind in the country for amplifying tactical urbanism activity in San Francisco’s streets and open lots. We’ll be looking to Robin for insights on how cities have been managing the needs of businesses in this time of extreme economic constraint.
4Occupied Seattle – Our man in Seattle, Zen McManus reports from the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). Is it an occupied district of town, complete with warlords, checkpoints, and guns? A rouge state that must be crushed? Or is it a street fair with porta-potties, murals, and plenty of speeches from residents thinking through Seattle’s future? A hella Norman Rockwell, Four Freedoms moment? We dig in to find out.
A major through line in the COVID narrative: the pandemic is not neutral. The story of the virus is also the story of who’s manipulating the story, left or right, U.S. or China, or social media algorithm captured by any number of actors. We visited this theme in Episode 13 Digital Reckoning & Algorithms and Episode 17 News & Propaganda.
Today we’ll examine race and the civil rights movement through a similar lens. Television and activism in the 1950s and 1960s grew up together. The emergence of user generated video has defined the coverage of police violence since March 3rd 1991 (when Rodney King was beaten, and filmed) until the present moment. Today the same mechanisms of algorithmic manipulation we’ve seen in election interference and COVID coverage are at work in the portrayal of Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, and the American Meme Wars.
1Whole World Watching – We’ll be joined by Sylvester Monroe who covered the Rodney King beatings, court case and subsequent riots in Los Angeles for Time Magazine in 1991. Monroe has observed the evolution of the media, organizing, protests and outrage for three decades. He is author of the best seller Brothers: Black and Poor—A True Story of Courage and Survival and a former foreign editor at the Washington Post.
2Media in the Civil Right Era – Geoff Cowan, Dean of the Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership and Policy and freedom rider who helped found the Southern Courier, the newspaper of the civil right movement. It was 1965. A year earlier, three young voting rights activists – participating in the Freedom Summer of 1964 – had been murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In cities and town across the Deep South, the civil rights struggle was very real, and, at times, very dangerous. But, except for the few large demonstrations covered by the national press, a tidal wave of history was rendered almost invisible, as local newspapers turned their backs on the epochal events unfolding in their own communities. Geoff will share how the civil rights movement developed a publication to cover itself, and why journalists had to sleep with guns, such was the anger directed at them.
3Held to Account: The Algorithm – Safiya Umoja Noble returns to Quarantime: the author of “Algorithms of Oppression” helps us to explore the ways algorithms, statistics, & data distort reality & amplify structural inequalities. She’s explore how the Black Tuesday protest was used to attenuate coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement, how the fog surrounding protesting and riots was manipulated by any number of actors, and the social media algorithms enabling all of this. An underlying question: what’s the role of the tech industry at times of such polarized discourse in America.
How might we level the field and face not only the promises but the consequences of technology? Safiya Umoja Noble researcher & author of “Algorithms of Oppression” & Cathy O’Neil mathematician & author of “Weapons of Math Destruction” join us to explore the ways algorithms, statistics, & data distort reality & amplify structural inequalities. They’ll help us explore how the underserved and oppressed are dramatically and often negatively impacted by tech companies & the business models and infrastructures they create that shape—willingly or not—an unfair field of play. We’ll also explore the ways we normalize things that we as a society believe are immoral and unjust by the death of a thousand cuts. Should technocrats and the foundation’s they create pay reparations? You don’t want to miss this livestream.
We’ve spent the last 21 episodes looking for the innovation, the change, the productive work to be done coming out of a pandemic. We’ve moved from the shock of awareness to mobilizing for action. We’ve had the privilege to meet and brainstorm with experts on disease, cities, the economy and AI.
Last week we even created an exercise for our community to look over our Miro white board and detect the weak signals from which to build the world of tomorrow.
This week we’ve witnessed the repeat outbreak of a very strong signal, one that is seldom dormant in the American experience: The disease of racism. Our pandemic of violence. Or, to quote Van Jones, “the virus of white privilege.” A sin that predates COVID19 by about 400 years. And one for which we are also stumbling around to sort out the toolkit to move beyond.
Today: How to apply all the energy, system framework and innovation approach we’ve considered for COVID to this American reckoning.
Our sense of place has been disrupted. We feel betwixt & between, as in a dream that cuts between wish fulfillment, chilling nightmares, halcyon memories, & disjointed juxtapositions. We are flashing into new realities filled with remote & furloughed workers, empty campuses, blurring boundaries between people, teams, workplaces, balance sheets, homes, & families. Will zoomtowns be the new way to live & thrive? Will we rebuild from the wreckage or rediscover the places we left behind in our race to big cities?
1Reformatting Our Drives – Dean of tech analysts Jeremiah Owyang @jowyang explores how we reformat our… drive to work together, our drive for wealth, our drive for wellbeing & community.
2In the Realm of the Senses – @BCG’s Ashley Arhart, the founding creative director at Amazon Go—the first retail store w/ambient intelligence built into every fiber of its being—will take us on a trip into the experiential & ethical road blocks & new realms we’ll touch when places can sense & shape themselves to our needs, or shape us to theirs.
3Heartland: The New Frontier – James Fallows @JamesFallows, legendary journalist, writer, tech columnist, & best selling co-author of Our Towns: A 100,000 mile journey in the the Heart of America joins us to reflect on the history and future of the heartland.
How do we build the World of Tomorrow, together? If a Worlds Fair were declared in the wake of COVID, how would we use all our wondrous tools to globally imagine and collaborate on Tomorrow?
1Heroes, All – Tim Kring creator of the NBC hit Heroes, and The Conspiracy For Good, an immersive experience that united people of any conviction and any background around a shared mission — a transmedia pioneer! At a time when we’re divided, Hollywood’s ability to build narrative and enroll us in the hero’s journey may be more important than ever before.
2The Internet, Reimagined – Global collaboration requires platforms that can go from the virtual to the real, from the digital twin to projects for a better city or economy. We’ll hear from Dan Mapes whose verses.io platform is attempting just that. Simulation (like SimCity, but for real) will change how we learn, how we engage as citizens, and perhaps how we overcome our tiresome affair with polarization.
Evo Henning (playable.agency) and James Hanusa (a change maker who’s been working with multiple global communities for years) show us examples of how immersive media for massive collaboration has accelerated during the time of Covid — and what we can learn from this about our future. How can this be put to work in cities: Dr. Pandwee Gibson joins us from Miami and the EcoTech Visions incubator which leads entrepreneurs in green manufacturing.
3The Multiverse of Progress – Co-host Mickey McManus zooms us out. All prior 19 episodes of Quarantime! have explored the building blocks of tomorrow; Steve Jurvetson and Andrew Hessel on synthetic biology, Rabbi Irwin Kula and Tim Chang on spirituality, Jesse Kirshbaum and Scarlett Masius on entertainment, Kent Larsen and Jose Campos on cities. Wednesday we launch a ‘signal detector’ template for the audience to start remixing the ideas we’ve explored using our Miro whiteboard – where together we’ll find hints of the world of tomorrow.
How is the COVID crisis changing the agenda and priorities of tech investors and the scientific community? What new theses and opportunities are emerging, what trends are being reinforced, and what ideas now look like really bad ideas. Today we welcome to Quarantime! two of the leading minds in deep tech — legendary Venture Capitalist Steve Jurvetson (first money in Hotmail, Tesla, SpaceX) and Synthetic Biologist, co-founder of Genome Project Write (and the first guest on Quarantime!, returning for a deeper dive on the life sciences 10 weeks later).
Three months of COVID have created something of a gold rush (or perhaps its ambiance chasing) in the life sciences: diagnostic tests and engineered vaccines have made 2020 resemble the Dot-com bubble in 1999. Those investments washed out a lot of noisy players, but also created the investment path for the 21st century. Today we’ll try to discern signal from noise and think about the enduring technologies that our present crisis is accelerating.
1The Unattempted Inevitable – has been Steve Jurveton’s investment thesis for more than a quarter century. Obviously that worked out for Hotmail, Tesla, and SpaceX (Astronauts launching next week!). Steve also invested in personal scooters which took off in China after SARS/MIRS (safer than public transpiration) and synthetic meat a couple years ago — before COVID19 started to disrupt the food supply chain and agriculture. Today we explore the inevitable future with Steve, on Quarantime!.
2Synthesizing Life to Make Life Better – No one represents the biological century better than Andrew Hessel who is at work on “push button biology” — you design an organism, push a button, and out it comes. How does this scale to anticipate and fight future pandemics? Learn about organisms that can be grown in micro-factories and meet 21st century challenges.
You’re vibrating and not sure if it’s from excitement and anticipation or the bumpy ride you’ve just had. You can’t believe you’re there. You feel a pinch on your arm. Your partner needs to make sure they and you are really there. You step out of the time machine. The date is July, 1976. A river babbles. A soft breeze lifts the collar of your finest outfits. A polyglot of languages flow around you. You find the festival, the theater, and your seat. A hush falls. Five hours later you wonder if the world of music, theater, performance, space, or time will ever be the same. You have just been immersed in the first performance of “Einstein on the Beach.” A new opera composed by Philip Glass from a sketchbook created by experimental theatrical artist and playwright Robert Wilson.
The avant-garde is where we look to challenge our orthodoxies, to find the new—new, and to bridge us from what we know into new territories of the unknown and sometimes the unknowable. The improvisers and artists who push us, often need us to suspend disbelief; release what we think we know or even can know. They ask us to let go. We must release our hold—surrender—if we are to find something new to bring into our souls.
We don’t feel safe or comfortable when we reinvent ourselves or help our community re-invent what it is or could be. If pushed too far out of our comfort zone we rebel. Yet, if we aren’t pushed enough do we ever experience the new frontier hidden just over the horizon or do we lock ourselves into a cave and become shadows of what we were?
Being “in” the avant-garde isn’t always something you can even know when you’re in the middle of it. A time machine might help to discover when something has gone too far or was just a short lived phenomena. It could reveal how a spark became the fire of an entirely new light for shared adventure and joy. But if we wait for the future to find out what the future might bring, we miss out on the now. We miss out on being a part of the play, that becomes the future. We are all a special case of relativity.
1Inviting Silence – “Andrew Sterman is a marvelous performer/composer who has made a specialty of straddling the worlds of composition and improvisation. His muses are the great twins of the musical arts, the ear and the heart, and he follows them with skill and subtlety.” —Philip Glass
Andrew Sterman member of the Philip Glass Ensemble joins us on this episode to share a story of time travel, isolation, and rebirth more than 40 years in the making. He’ll tell us about a brand new composition that the ensemble is releasing this Friday. It is a lost piece from the time just before they released Einstein on the Beach into an unsuspecting world.
2Re-channeling Energy – Jesse Kirshbaum loves music and is forever in a New York state of mind. He has spent his life helping musicians play, be heard, and find a way to build a livelihood through music. Weeks before the quarantine live events, festivals and the industry were at an all time high. Then everything came crashing down.
He’ll share lessons from the phases he’s seen as funders, artists, and fans have struggled to find new ways of connecting the community and combating loneliness. He’s helping them create new ways to feel alive, build a livelihood, and become a visceral part of the avant-garde that is emerging now.
3Being in the Now – Bobby Lombardi and Stefan Rollins were on the cusp of launching their new organization dedicated to celebrating independent gamers, musicians, artists, and makers for new era of “made media.” They were going to have the largest activation for Indy game publishers at all the major spring, summer and fall festivals. Then everything canceled. How do you rebuild? How do you re-invent? They’ll give us a sneak peek into an all new—natively digital—festival launching over three Saturdays in June that promises to be a template for the ways we can come together virtually like never before.
How are we being hacked, manipulated and divided by social media platforms and conspiracy pervaders? On this episode we’ll dive into how social media platforms and news mechanisms are complicit in COVID disinformation and conspiracies, how people are turned by such propaganda, and what to do about it. To evoke a Cold War meme… exposing the Manchurian Virus, on Quarantime!
1The Mind Virus Attacks! – We’ll be joined by Yael Eisenstat, Visiting Fellow at Cornell Tech, a former CIA officer, a former National Security adviser to VP Biden, and headed Facebook’s Election Integrity Operations team for political advertising… until she resigned and became a public critic about how social media platforms are destroying civil discourse and harming democracy.
2News: Its Challenge and Crisis – How the media handles a crisis that affects everyone it its communities, where facts and assumptions change daily, when the audience is challenged to ingest the scientific process when the unproven flourishes, when virus goes political…all in the middle of a local news crisis where advertisers, merchants and downtowns are also in crisis. We’ll be joined by Craig Forman, CEO of McClatchy who runs the largest network of local newspapers in America including the Sacramento Bee and the Miami Herald.
3Hooked on News – How America get hooked on 24-Hour news and the media revolution that reverberates today. We’ll be joined by Lisa Napoli, former New York Times and NPR Reporter, author of the new bestseller, “Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN and the Birth of 24-Hour News.” She’ll help us understand the cable news industry that almost never happened, the personalities that drive media change, and the dawn of polarization and the business models that continue to impact our democracy.
Leadership needs leaders and ways to guide the ships vying the uncertain seas of this era. Yet what is leadership and what is it good for? Join Martin Reeves who is the Chairman of the BCG Bruce Henderson Institute, BCG’s think tank on new approaches to strategy and management. How do you lead an organization when your 2020 plan seems like ancient history? Great companies and products are built during downturns; how are top minds approaching the challenge today? How is change collapsing well synchronized behaviors that have served some organizations so well for so long? We’ll explore Martin’s latest observations from the front lines of leadership and his thinking on why we need leadership of our own minds first—to drive imagination and powerful new narratives—that guide us through the crashing waves and the tsunami of business changes we face ahead.
Also joining us will be Elisa Heinrich, a member of Minerva Schools class of 2020. Elisa will share her experiences moving from Paraguay to San Francisco to become part of an experiment in a radical globally immersive “intentional university,” where disruption & reinvention is the norm; system thinking the cost of entry. She’ll reflect on her time researching with the Santa Fe Institute to understand income inequalities & how her generation could change the equation.
For the last two decades cities have been Triumphant (Ed Glaser), the greatest machine mankind ever built that only makes us smarter (Geoffrey West). Just moments ago we lamented the concentration of wealth, investment opportunity and the expense of our great global cities. And then… do we even want that kind of density any more, is mass transit the great urban equalizer or a disease vector? Will we return to downtown offices as before, or work from home? Will we be over the commute, will employers be over office expense, or will we revert to our skyscrapers? For that matter, how many of the restaurants and small businesses and shops that made cities weird and wonderful reemerge? Will this be a shining moment for our smaller, less dense cities and towns at the expense of big cities? Have we learned how to drive innovation with less physical density?
Changes to urban life and economies may be the most impactful legacy of COVID-19 and an arena that will take considerable imagination and reinvention.
1Beyond Smart Cities: Thriving Communities after COVID with Kent Larson, Director, City Sciences, MIT Media Lab – Even before COVID the global urban agenda was shifting from smart cities (technical, mechanistic) toward more human oriented goals (resilience, inclusive). The pandemic further exposed the fragility of 21st Century systems: workplaces sit empty, transit systems are unhealthy, fresh food is often inaccessible, data networks are unavailable for public health, educational models seem obsolete, and our homes function poorly as centers of work, learning, exercise, entertainment, and healthcare. Kent will help us explore the emerging hopeful responses to these challenges: Adaptive urban systems, agile palaces of living and working, net-zero mobility and pro-social economies.
2Dateline Boston: Urban Innovation in Real-Time with Nigel Jacob, Co-founder of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, Boston – Nigel leads Boston’s innovation office which has been at the center of COVID response: in mere days reengineering government workflows, serving at risk communities in new ways, using data to understand and target a response. And now deploying mechanisms to inspire social distancing safety while reopening the city for business.
3 Dateline San Francisco: Reimagining Place, Repurposing Space with Jose Campos, Director of Planning Review at the San Francisco Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure – Jose was instrumental in planning the Transbay Terminal / Salesforce Tower. He’s the urbanist’s urbanist; no one has been a greater proponent of dense, transit oriented development. Yet now every assumption is up for grabs: will the city need all that expensive downtown office space? What’s the future of dining out in a foodie city if crowded restaurant aren’t a thing anymore? What will placemaking look like when so much changes?
COVID-19 shutdown much of the Global Supply Chain and international trade. It also an extraordinary weaknesses: it wasn’t designed for resilience, redundancy, or supply shocks. This episode will focus on what we have to build now, and who has to do it.
Presented in partnership with GlobalSF – an international trade organization committed to bringing together key stakeholders in the public and private sectors to create sustainable economic growth.
1 City States and Global Trade – Darlene Chiu Bryant, leader of San Fransico’s Global economic development nonprofit, GlobalSF, will speak to the importance of trade, the SF Bay Area’s global partnerships, and collaboration with Asia, and how increasingly that trade policy is being driven at the state and city level as National Leadership becomes distracted. How is the world adapting and innovating during this period of uncertainty? What does this mean for the SF Bay Area?
2Why the Supply Chain needs a Global Brain – Nadia Hewett of the World Economic Forum will speak to how her membership—top global corporations—realize they must rapidly rework their systems. While governmental decisions and factory shutdowns have attracted most of the blame during covid, the crisis has thrust the widespread confusion that plagues global supply chains throughout the year into the global spotlight.
Manufacturers and retailers all too often don’t have a firm hold on just how much they need to be ordering, creating, shipping, and selling. Yet they’ve shied away from technologies that could help turn this around. Many companies are awash in data but are unsure how to use it to drive their supply chains. They have yet to leverage big data analytics to transform operations.
Supply chains have become so complex that only machines can do the work of keeping track of all this. To ease the burden, supply chains need to leverage key technologies. Among them? Cognitive technology.
3 Missing Connections: The US Trucking Industry is due for an Overhaul – CEO Hans Galland of Haulistix see similar massive inefficiencies in logistics and the truck-based us delivery supply chain. The Trucking industry is comprised of thousands of independent, low-tech, loosely connected operators that tend to drive similar routes for similar manufactures. When the whole system and its delivery patterns change all at once—as they are doing during COVID-19—truckers are unprepared. Haulistix machine learning approach gives us a lens into whats to come: a smarter more resilient self-organizing trucking infrastructure which is on the way towards becoming fully autonomous.
How might we level the field and face not only the promises but the consequences of technology? Safiya Umoja Noble researcher & author of “Algorithms of Oppression” & Cathy O’Neil mathematician & author of “Weapons of Math Destruction” join us to explore the ways algorithms, statistics, & data distort reality & amplify structural inequalities. They’ll help us explore how the underserved and oppressed are dramatically and often negatively impacted by tech companies & the business models and infrastructures they create that shape—willingly or not—an unfair field of play. We’ll also explore the ways we normalize things that we as a society believe are immoral and unjust by the death of a thousand cuts. Should technocrats and the foundation’s they create pay reparations? You don’t want to miss this livestream.
One million Americans are infected with COVID-19. But closer to three hundred million of us are experiencing isolation, shock, and mental stress. Today we examine the emerging transformational technologies in neuroscience science and mindfulness that are suddenly center stage in an effort to confront the greatest global mental health problem ever.
1The Flourishing Mind: A Report from the Field – Nichol Bradford leads the Transformative Technology Lab which on Tuesday convened the worlds top researchers and entrepreneurs in neuro-transformation and wellbeing. She’ll report on COVID-19 as an urgent test bed for technologies that promote wellbeing, habit change, and foster meaningful connections. Even as social media, Zoom, and the 24/7 media bombard us, the technology platforms we use every day can also program us for calm and presence as never before.
2 Altered States – Robin Arnott CEO of Andromeda Entertainment, launched the VR app SoundSelf on the Steam gaming platform last week. Only it isn’t a game, its “a collision of centuries-old mindfulness wisdom with video game trance.” Arnot believes that gaming can create experiences that are indistinguishable from psychedelic and meditative states, and effects just as powerful.
3Acoustic Environments: Gateway to the Brain – Working at home, numbed by machines, it sometimes feels like we’re in a sensory isolation chamber. Dolby Laboratories Chief Scientist Poppy Crum can detect signals from our speech, breathing, gestures, and pupil that can depict our emotional state and then alter them. Think ears as “USB port” for reading and writing to the brain. Two years ago she noticed that her Stanford students had taken a deep interest in mindfulness tech, perhaps a reaction to information overload. Today she’s at the forefront of understanding these rapidly emerging technologies, their possibilities, dark sides, and standards implications.
Resources
People Power, a health care technology company. Building tools like The Family Care Pack helping families address concerns of senior falls, wandering and loneliness in a new collaborative way.
True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier by Vernor Vinge
Our tools shape the way we think, how we will think, & how we do things differently as the future comes into view. Joining us will be Kevin Kelly author of The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future & the Cool Tools blog, and Azam Khan former Director of Complex Systems Research at Autodesk Research, Co-founder and CEO of Trax.GD, & Founder of the Parametric Human Project will join us to explore tools to foster collaborative cognition for designing, planning, simulating, and evolving complex systems for spaceship Earth.
Resources
Bolinas COVID-19 Testing Project
Inspiration for the Bolinas project – Colorado, Italy
Article from CNN – This California town is testing every resident for coronavirus and antibodies
Learnings from Community-run testing for COVID-19 by Caterina Fake
An example of the confusion now: 45 current test vendors with FDA EUA clearance, which is definitely nowhere near actual FDA clearance.
Can we update and create digital equivalents and revive the Works Progress Administration & Civilian Conservation Corps. Can we put people back to work digitally and in-person: remote work for chaplains, priests, therapists presiding over digital funerals. Remote work for fundraising drives, outreach, signups for Bolinas style testing programs in every town. Event staff would be needed to work on-site for such testing programs.
2nd Order Effects Map by Quaranteam
Another program we could all feed ideas into: Xprize Pandemic
The Post-Pandemic Style – After deadly outbreaks, architects transform the places we live and work. This time won’t be different.
Everything about how we reopen the country, how we move beyond rigid quarantines, and about the policy decisions we make will be ruled by the scientific method, experiments, and math. Unfortunately people are a lot better at intuition than at science, which could cause a lot of grief, money, and lives. Not to mention inflaming the culture wars. This episode will look at the how data and behavioral sciences will help us get beyond COVID-19 to the world of tomorrow.
1Dr. Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon & author of Data for the People, will help us see the COVID-19 crisis and its life and death implications as the greatest mass “natural” experiment in human history. While at Amazon Weigend was conducting experiments on nearly 1% of the world population. Today entire cities and countries serve as experiments. Governing all of these experiments is data science – how confident are we of what we count, how do we comprehend complex systems where small changes to assumptions can have enormous policy implications, and have we all already slipped into a surveillance state as our governments work through these issues.
2Ting Jiang from Duke’s Center for Advanced Hindsight will join us to explore the challenges of doing theory-driven behavioral science in the time of COVID-19. She’ll share how the soft sciences are turning out to be the hardest sciences of all and the difference between doing experiments based solely on intuition versus using theory-driven scientific methods that drive evidence-based interventions.
Resources
Dr. Weigend has released his book Data for the People for free. You can download it here.
Transmission is the Santa Fe Institute’s real-time and ideas-based response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
On this episode of Quarantime! we focus on ritual, spirituality and grief. Shelter in place orders and social distancing guidelines have forced us to confront new, largely technology based, mechanisms for connection, ritual, and our mental health. We’ll be exploring how we are adapting coping mechanisms at a time of sudden mass trauma, and what essential truths about connection and spirit we see now that might inform our future.
1“Between the Mirror and the Mask” Rabbi Irwin Kula is president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life. He’ll help us understand the dynamics COVID19 as a mass grief event (grief for loved ones lost, grief for dreams interrupted, grief for a future we may not get), and as a psycho-spiritual founding. We’ll also explore why the affirmation of kindness and love might be the most enduring contagion of all. From ancient wisdom to the virtual rituals of the moment, we’re thrilled that Rabbi Kula join us on Quarantime!
2“If Necessity Is the Mother of Invention, Has She Ever Been Busier than This Month?” We’ll be joined by Tim Chang, a partner at the Mayfield Fund. Tim has been ahead of the curve investing in gaming, mindfulness, wellbeing and virtual reality companies. He brings a deeply spiritual transformational perspective to his work and is currently immersed in how the tech world is responding to ritual, connection, work, and grief. Tim will share his perspective as a board member of Reminagine End of Life and other ventures that he is advising on that are adapting to meet our psychic needs during quarantine. Whats next in Silicon Valley as a result of COVID19? Technologies to make our homes more self sufficient and resilient, the Immersive Internet for connection and community, and the reinvention of work and where it’s done.
3“Hello from Burning Man!” We’re not going to the desert this year, but there’s more work to do than ever! Jenn Sander leads global innovation for Burning Man, a pop-up city of self invention that under normal circumstances brings 70,000 people to the Nevada desert every year. This year Burning Man is going virtual, spreading its values and community ethos to a global audience. Jenn has been at the forefront of how approaches to play and ritual might drive innovation in our organizations and cities everywhere. As founder of creative consultancy Play Atélier, she’ll draw comparisons between Burning Man’s principles and the ideas that can animate society in the years to come.
Resources Mentioned in the Show
Oblique Strategies Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt
Team Now or Team Next: What to do during COVID19 by Nichol Bradford
In this episode we ask, “what’s the framework for planning what’s next?” Governments across the nation have been asking that question; the president appoints a back to normal commission while Governors form their own compacts but warn, ”don’t expect normal anytime soon.“ Our show opens with America’s top expert on the future of work, Garry Bolles, who leads that practice at Singularity University. ”Our organizations are being forced to adapt literally overnight. This isn’t agility, though. It’s a survival reflex,“ Bolles wrote in Techonomy this week.
We’ll then examine the reset through the lens of Pittsburgh, PA and its most experienced leaders. Joining us will be Grant Oliphant, Executive Director of the Heinz Foundation, who leads the city’s top philanthropic organization and has written eloquently about how we can’t miss the opportunity this crisis presents and the lessons we must learn to thrive. Kate Dewey of Dentons and Scott Wolovich of New Rising Sun will help us think through whether we need to think anew the relationship between government, non-profit and private sectors. Also joining us is Janera Solomon who led Pittsburgh’s Kelly Strayhorn Theater and will help frame how do we bring the arts back, what do we give up, and how can the arts help lead us.
In this episode we’ll examine the rapid convergence of gaming, video chat, AI characters and storytelling as we try to achieve social intimacy despite physical distancing. Media are being repurposed & recombined for work, play, ritual and art, as well as for conferences and innovation. Rules of the economy, production and what future we make are similarly fluid. This moment is like a science fiction trip to an extreme future where we’re all physically disembodied and rushing to push our tools to connect us and experiment in new, urgent, often surprising ways. Friday on Quarantime we’ll be interrogating the multiverse we find ourselves in. Also, if we observe it, is it even what we see?
1“How the Immersive Went Virtual” Scarlet Masius of Liminalia will describe how, over four days last week, they created a secret immersive art party with 1500 participants, 30 art rooms (created by the community), 6 DJ experiences with a shared dance floor, and role playing games in which everyone was a participant and no spectators were allowed. Is this the future of brand engagement? Of online festivals? Of digital twin RW/VR events? Whatever it is, the speed by which it happened, and its engagement is likely a lens into our media future.
2“The Sum of All Media” A premise for this week’s show is we are witnessing the sum of all media. Who better to be our guide and provide a framework than Cheryl Platz, who is a performer (multiple Twitch TV shows), interaction designer (Disney, Amazon), and now works on virtual technology for improved distributed workgroup productivity (The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). She’ll provide practical lessons and a framework to Understanding Media at this moment.
3“The Singularity Just Happened” We’ll be joined by Salim Ismail, founding Executive Director of Singularity University and X-Prize Board member to preview next week’s ExO World Summit — planning for the world of tomorrow in the age of COVID. The event will feature an entirely virtual main stage, expo booths, networking zone, individual session/panel rooms, digital entertainment, celebrity contributions, heads of state — and as much additional innovation as they can generate in the days leading up to the event.
4Expanded Cinema and Beyond. Gray Area Executive Director Barry Threw reports on how one of San Francisco’s top arts organizations is going virtual. Gray Area (where host Peter Hirshberg is Chairman) was deep in place-based immersive environments (e.g. convening lots of people together). That playbook is being rewritten – with the help of artists, technologists and scholars who have been experimenting with immersive virtual media since 1966.
This crisis will likely be defined by our response to it. Do we adapt, come together, and innovate to create a new and brighter future? That’s how the Great Depression and WW2 led to a manufacturing renaissance and the greatest middle class in the history of the world. How do we do that in today’s pluralistic distributed social media world? Today’s show probes the wide range of emerging response.
1Is a “Civic Response Corps” key to recovery? Congressman Tim Ryan and Maker Faire founder Dale Dougherty will join us to propose the Civic Response Corps (CRC), a national program to train the unemployed, undereducated, and unskilled to participate and create a new civic infrastructure needed not only to respond to the crisis but ramp up the recovery.
We will be joined by best selling journalist, FDR historian and MSNBC contributor Jonathan Alter. He’ll help us understand the historical context of recovery initiatives and whether this might be defining moment of progress for contemporary America.
2From medical apparel to apparel for whimsy, play, and self care. “Costume Jim“ Glasner, founder of arts collective Kostume Kult, reports on the fashion trend of dressing up and dressing outrageous for the flood of virtual dance parties and quarantined online events. Plus: How the New York nightlife scene has gone virtual. We’ll get tips from Costume Jim and the House of Yes on how to command the most attention while strutting on Zoom.
• Investor, entrepreneur, and digital troublemaker B. Bonin Bough will share about the journey he’s been on to capture a 92-year long life in photography and jazz while his father is still around and why we should all do much more of this right now.
• Erica Blair, the creator of Distance Resistance and Quaranteam will tell us about what’s happening in the world via social networking.
• Elise Bauer, America’s top food blogger and founder of Simply Recipes will tell us what’s cooking: how food sites are blowing up, what recipes are popular, plus live on todays show, dinner: Elise’s Tuna Pasta a la Quarantime, made with all those cans you stocked up on. Conversation and dinner…on Quarantime!
In this episode we’ll dive into how the health care delivery is changing in real-time, and how a top economist looks at restarting the economy. We’ll also visit a top executive at NBC to learn how television viewing habits and preferences have changed with America in quarantine. And the events economy — businesses like conferences, music venues, and festivals are particularly vulnerable when no one goes out. We’ll get an insiders view.
1“All at once, Telemedicine and Sea Change in Healthcare,” with Susan Dentzer, senior policy fellow Duke-Margolis center for Health Policy. The technology for remote health care and telemedicine has been around for years, but it’s been resisted by providers, payers and often the public. Now all at once seeing patients at home is a national priority. This has led to massive innovation in just a few weeks. Dentzer is one of America’s top experts in the field and led health care coverage for the PBS News Hour for years. We’ll talk about how the system is changing now and how the pandemic may lead to an era of healthcare without walls as we balance the best of digital and physical connections and care.
2“Scenarios for Restarting The Economy” with Marco Annunziata, former Chief Economist for General Electric and founder of Annunziata Advisors. When the smoke clears, what does the economic restart look like and what might permanently be altered. Marco will help us understand what data are most important and what might be deceiving as we try to assess the impact of the pandemic. Then we’ll examine what effect this might have on globalization, the tensions between labor and capital, and whether this is the moment for the blockchain decentralized set or the big government statists. Plus the one big post pandemic thing that could really trip us up…
3“TV’s the thing this year,” with Ted Linhart, Senior Vice-President for research, Comcast-NBC. If your job is to watch audience behavior and viewing preferences and guide network decision this has been the most interesting two weeks ever. Ted will take us through what kind of programs people crave during quarantine, which cable networks have had surprising growth, and how the TV/streaming/ on- demand business has changed in this most home-bound moment in media history. Plus: how researchers are turning this into a giant audience experiment.
Today on Quarantime! we’ll explore the tensions between addressing the immediate crisis and planning for the future beyond. Our guests include:
• Alexander Rose, Executive Director of the Long Now Foundation
• Behavioral Economist Ting Jiang of the Center for Advanced Hindsight and visiting scholar at BEworks
• Nichol Bradford of Stanford’s Transformative Technology Lab
We’ll also explore the role of the arts in a pandemic/quarantine world with artist Jonathan Keats who has been writing prolifically for Forbes on the subject.
1. A time for long term thinking,” with Alexander Rose, Executive Director of the Long Now Foundation. Science has long told us a pandemic was inevitable, but it’s tough to get humans (and their leaders) to plan for the long term. Yet that’s more essential than ever in today’s exponential change, globally connected, complex world. Alexander leads San Francisco’s Long Now Foundation, one of the world’s preeminent organizations thinking about system oriented change.
2.”Team Now and Team Next,” with Nichol Bradford, Stanford Transformative Technology Lab. Nichol’s lab is all about human flourishing and well being. We’ll explore establishing daily practices during quarantine, and look at how people are organizing into Team Now (first responders and those who keep our daily lives going) and Team Next (how the rest of us can use this precious time to plan for tomorrow.). It’s a precious moment to get people at home collaborating on the reconstruction effort we’ll be facing in the coming months.
3. “The Urgent Science of Behavior Change” Ting Jiang, Center for Advanced Hindsight. Behavioral scientist Ting Jiang is a global expert on the relationship between motivation and behavior. The entire field of behavior economics is about running experiments and developing systems to get people to behave differently . That becomes an actual life and death matter when we need to get whole populations to act differently, based on science and not gut feeling. Ting will share real time experiments and projects that can alter the course of the pandemic and provide guidance to us all.
4.”When we come out again: Civic Life after the Pandemic” Ting, Peter, Mickey and Nicol have been collaborating on a space based initiative to bring together transformative technologists, scientists, policy makers, architects, community and business leaders to explore how we can shift from the idea of smart cities to cities that flourish based on behavioral science and goal directed design. How might our public spaces change after the pandemic, and how can we make them better. The future will come sooner than we think!
5. “The Art World in Qaurantine!” Everything about the arts in flux today. Museums closed, art fairs cancelled, culture going virtual to connect with its communities. Artist Jonathan Keats has been exploring all this in his Forbes column. He’s also at the forefront of immersive place based media having just contributed to Gray Area’s group show about entanglement and the end of human exceptionalism (talk about timely..) He’ll join us as we explore how artists are responding to and guiding us during this exceptional moment.
We explore the self organizing, decentralized nature of our response to the Pandemic — the social, scientific, activist, innovation and government response. We often use wartime analogies for COVID, but in traditional war the troops await instructions from their commanders. For much if the pandemic response, the commander is us!
1. Learning from Network Centric Warfare. With MIT’s John Clippinger (Author of from Bitcoin to Burning Man) We’ll explores the similarities of today’s response to Network Centric Warfare, based on his prior work with DARPA. Unlike regular warfare, here we are all the commander, self organizing, using situational awareness to make decisions. A massive global all-at-once problem with demands globally distributed learning systems.
2. Quaranteams. With Patricia Parkinson. How a global group of activists, and super nodes self-organized and deployed campaigns for COVID safety that are reaching millions and are developing coping mechanisms that promote connection and well-being in a time of physical distancing.
3. Plan C – The Maker Community Response. With Maker Fair and Make Magazine founder Dake Dougherty. Around the world makers are building personal protective gear, organizing to support local communities, and bringing their approach of learning by doing to the sudden surge in home schooling. Dale will share with us emerging connection points, the role of makers, and the urgent need for new tools this moment presents.
4. Help for Small Business – We’ll hear from San Francisco’s global economic development agency on aid available for small business and nonprofits, and how a globally oriented trade organization is responding at moment of disruption.
It’s Quarantime! With Synthetic Biologist Andrew Hessel on how that community is responding, Mickey McManus from BCG on how tools for coloration and empathy are evolving in real-time, Moheeb Zara from HeatSync Labs on streaming dance parties, dinners, life and more — all on Quarantime!