Shows
The Active VoiceThe Active Voice: Etgar Keret is thinking weird thoughtsEtgar Keret’s parents, both of whom survived the Holocaust, gave him the gift of imagination, a garden he has been watering with stories since he was a child. His father crouched in a hole in the ground for more than 600 days to escape the Nazis in Belarus, getting through the time by telling himself stories of a parallel universe in which everything was the same except for one detail (like that there were still Nazis who chased Jews, but when they caught them they would give them sweets). Etgar’s mother crafted bedtime stories with as much care as i...2023-02-1754 min
The Active VoiceThe Active Voice: Paul Kingsnorth is happiest on the marginsIn the 1990s, the English writer Paul Kingsnorth was a radical environmental activist, taking part in road blockades and protesting at WTO summits. Today he calls himself a “recovering environmentalist” and doesn’t believe people can do all that much to halt the march of the markets and technology. For instance, he thinks of climate change as a predicament to be endured, not a problem to be solved. His focus instead is on making sense of this revolutionary time we are living through and finding wisdom in old stories, especially religious ones, to help us live well through civilizational collap...2023-01-271h 00
The Active VoiceThe Active Voice: Jessica DeFino is revealing the real face of the beauty industry (and it’s not pretty)Jessica DeFino’s face literally had to peel off before she gave up on beauty products and turned a critical eye on the beauty industry. As a journalist covering the industry, she had been inundated with free beauty products, which she enthusiastically accepted. Then she developed dermatitis and had a bad reaction to the steroids she was prescribed to treat it.“My skin started peeling off of my face in chunks,” she says. “For months, my skin was just oozing red. I couldn’t put makeup on. I couldn’t use products. I could barely splash water on my face w...2023-01-1955 min
The Active VoiceThe Active Voice: Ted Gioia takes the long viewTed Gioia, the great music and cultural critic, has never lived in New York and it has cost him. He knows he is completely out of touch. “I didn’t make the relationships, I didn’t have editors opening doors for me,” he says. “Things were harder for me at every step along the way because I wasn’t at those cocktail parties.” But not being in New York has its upsides. Perhaps most importantly: it has helped Ted retain the mindset of an independent outsider, less vulnerable to the groupthink that can overtake the modern media. From his perch...2023-01-1251 min
The Active VoiceThe Active Voice: Doomberg is willing to make some big callsDoomberg, the top-earning finance publication on Substack, is led by a cartoon chicken that previously worked in heavy industry. Okay, so it wasn’t the chicken that worked in heavy industry—but its anonymous creators, with a background in hard sciences and energy, did. They chose the green chicken as their publication’s logo because they want it to be instantly recognizable on Twitter, which they use as their main marketing channel (it is, after all, the bird app). The plucky avian also fits with the cheeky “defensive pessimism” of Doomberg’s ethos, as captured in its tagline: “Chicken Little Gets a...2022-12-0243 min
The Active VoiceThe Active Voice: George Saunders thinks you should watch your mindA couple of days after I interviewed George Saunders for the first episode of this podcast, I caught up on some of his recent posts on Story Club, his writing-focused Substack. In “A Lost Speech, Found,” he wrote about rediscovering the script for a graduation speech he had given many years ago. The speech would earn him a reputation as “The Kindness Guy.” “If the question ‘How should I live’ can be answered: ‘Live so as to minimize your regrets,’” he had said in that speech, “then I have to tell you: What you actually regret, when you’re older, is very si...2022-10-201h 06
a16z PodcastAll About Synthetic BiologyOver the last 20 years, the idea of “designing biology” has gone from science fiction to just science, as the field of synthetic biology has exploded, with applications from therapeutics to manufacturing and more. In this episode from January 2019, one of the pioneers in the field, professor James J. Collins of MIT, joins a16z general partner on the Bio + Health fund, Vijay Pande, and editorial partner Hanne Winarsky, to discuss the origins of synthetic biology or "synbio", to what "engineering and designing" biology really looks like in action and the disciplinary differences between how biologists and engineers see t...2022-07-0636 mina16z PodcastMining the Data for CobaltIn this episode from July 2019, Kurt House, CEO and co-founder of Kobold Metals, John Thompson, professor of earth and geosciences at Cornell; and Connie Chan, a16z general partner for consumer, talk with editorial partner Hanne Winarsky about the way technology is transforming how we find cobalt, and the mining industry as a whole, as well as the science behind why cobalt is so critical for batteries, the data and knowledge behind mining today vs the past, and more.
2022-06-2933 min
Raising HealthSolving Medical Mysteries in the World of Rare DiseaseIn this conversation, Stanford Professor Euan Ashley—geneticist, cardiologist, author of the new book, The Genome Odyssey, and first co-chair of the Undiagnosed Diseases Network—talks with Bio Eats World host Hanne Winarsky about one of the first places that genomic sequencing began to dramatically impact patients’ lives, and those of their families around them: in rare disease.
Rare disease is by definition, well, rare. But collectively, it’s surprisingly common: 1 in 15. In this episode, we talk about how rare disease became the clear first use case for genome or exome-scale sequencing, and how sequencing—and other new technologies, and the new in...2021-03-2338 min
Raising HealthSea Turtle MedicineSea turtles occupy a very special biological niche in our world. And we still know relatively little about these creatures, one of the very few marine reptiles on the face of the planet. But as population growth and activity on coasts has exploded, so have our encounters with sea turtles... including, unfortunately, those that cause injury and disease. So what advances in technology and healthcare are helping us treat these incredible, 150 million year old animals—and what are we learning about them as a result? Max Polyak, Director of Rehabilitation at Loggerhead Marine Life Center in...2021-03-0538 min
Raising HealthValue Versus Volume (in Healthcare)The way we pay for healthcare in the US has long been by fee-for-service: per doctor visit, per test, per surgery, per hospital stay. But that system has led to rapidly escalating volumes of services and cost to the system—without actually improving outcomes. What if we shifted everything towards paying for value—and outcomes—instead?
In this episode, Todd Park, co-founder and executive chairman of Devoted Health, and formerly Chief Technology Officer and technology advisor for President Barack Obama; a16z General Partner Vijay Pande; and Bio Eats World host Hanne Winarsky—talk all about the megatrend of value-based care, an...2021-02-2037 min
Raising HealthMay I Have Your Insurance Card Again, Please?There's been a lot of talk (including on this show!) about the many kinds of innovations and technologies changing healthcare delivery for clinicians and patients. But what's happening behind the scenes in healthcare: in billing, in administration, and infrastructure? In this episode, we’re talking about the mountains of work (and paperwork) in the healthcare system, from reimbursement claims to patient registration to call centers scheduling appointments and much more—the enormous cost of inefficiency and waste in these areas adds to the healthcare system, and what kind of tech can help to improve it.
Former Senator Bill Frist—a surgeo...2021-02-0926 min
Raising HealthFrom Junk DNA to an RNA RevolutionWhat the heck is "junk DNA"?
In this episode, a16z General Partner Jorge Conde and Bio Eats World host Hanne Winarsky talk to Professor Rick Young, Professor of Biology and head of the Young Lab at MIT—all about "junk" DNA, or non-coding DNA.
Which, it turns out—spoiler alert—isn’t junk at all. Much of this so-called junk DNA actually encodes RNA—which we now know has all sorts of incredibly important roles in the cell, many of which were previously thought of as only the domain of proteins. This conversation is all about what we know about what...2021-02-0127 min
Raising HealthThe Fundamental Principles of RealityWhat are the fundamental principles that govern the physical world around us, and how did we get to them? In this episode, Bio Eats World hosts Hanne Winarsky and Lauren Richardson talk to Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek about the essential principles of modern physics that have built our understanding of the world. Wilczek (who won the Nobel in 2004 for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction) dives into not just the principles of physics themselves—around space, time, fields, energy, and the laws that govern them—but the key intellectual driver that brought us to t...2021-01-2534 minRaising HealthSo You Wanna Build a Software Company in Healthcare?Building a software company in healthcare is hard—and comes along with unique challenges no other entrepreneurs face. In this conversation, a16z bio general partner (and previous founder of genomics company Knome) Jorge Conde; and a16z bio partner and former founder Julie Yoo (of patient provider matching system, Kyruus) share their mistakes and hard earned lessons learned with Bio Eats World host Hanne Winarsky in this now classic episode, first aired on the a16z Podcast.
Why is this so damn hard? How should founders think about this space differently? What are the specific things that healthcare founders ca...2021-01-0438 min
Raising HealthThe Machine That Made the VaccineA year ago, none of us would believe that mRNA vaccines would be a household name. And yet here we are, at the end of 2020, counting the days towards a vaccine that could not just save lives but help bring us back into a world that feels “normal” again. In this special episode, airing the day the FDA authorized the vaccine for emergency use, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel tells the story of not just the vaccine’s development, but the machine that made the vaccine: the platform, the technology, and the moves behind the vaccine’s development.
This episode of Bio Eats...2020-12-1839 min
Raising HealthThe Google Maps Moment in (Modeling) BiologyYou don't have to build a million planes to test a million aeronautical designs; we have mathematical simulations and models that do that for us. But in biology—once the class you'd take in high school if you loved science, but hated math—that's been impossible... until very recently. In this episode, Markus Covert, Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford, a16z deal partner Judy Savitskaya, and Bio Eats World host Hanne Winarsky, talk all about where we are in our ability to simulate and build models for how biology works.
Because biology has been so qualitative in the past, and so c...2020-12-0732 min
Raising HealthThe Story of SchizophreniaDescriptions of the mental illness we today call schizophrenia are as old as humankind itself. And more than likely, we are are all familiar with this disease in some way, as it touches 1% of us—millions of lives—and of course, their families. In this episode, we dive into the remarkable story of one such American family, the Galvins: Mimi, Don, and their 12 children, 6 of whom were afflicted with schizophrenia.
In his book, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, Robert Kolker follows the Galvins from the 1950s to today—through, he writes, “the eras of institutionalization and shoc...2020-11-3037 min
Raising HealthThe Biology of PainWhy do we experience physical pain? Is all pain the same, or are there different types? Do people experience pain differently? Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School Clifford Woolf, and Bio Eats World host Hanne Winarsky talk about everything we know about the biology of pain.
Technology is today enabling a new, deeper, and much more complex understanding of the phenomenon of pain. Which pathways and neurons are activated in the brain and when, and what patterns might represent different kinds of pain? In this episode (first aired on the a16z Podcast in September 2019), Woolf describes the four...2020-10-1937 minRaising HealthBiology by DesignWe’re at the dawn of a new era where we’re truly able to design biology: from genetically engineered cotton, to meat made from plants, to incredibly complex new therapies composed of engineered cells and genes. And that's just the very beginning. One day, just about everything will be genetically engineered, from our medicines to our materials and manufacturing and much more. The question is no longer, can we design biology? Instead the question now is, what can we build with these tools?
So how does that really happen? How can we build precise functions and circuits inside cells? How...2020-10-1332 min
Raising HealthRevolutions in Cancer Treament—Past, Present, and Futurewith @JorgeCondeBio, @JLimMD, @AmerCancerCEO, and @omnivorousread
In this episode of Bio Eats World, we explore all the major revolutions in cancer treatment across the history of medicine—and what’s coming next. Hanne Winarsky delves into the past and future of the fight against cancer with Gary Reedy, CEO of the American Cancer Society; Jonathan Lim, CEO of Erasca, a biotech company with the mission of erasing cancer; and Jorge Conde, a16z general partner. The conversation spans not only the history of cancer treatment from the early days of surgery and the first radiology treatment (with an x-ray!), but also...2020-09-2934 mina16z PodcastThe Biology of Aging: Introducing Bio Eats World (ep 1)Welcome to the first episode of Bio Eats World, a brand new podcast all about how biology is technology. Bio is breaking out of the lab and clinic and into our daily lives -- on the verge of revolutionizing our world in ways we are only just beginning to imagine.In this episode, we talk all about the science of aging. Once a fringe field, aging research is now entering a new phase with the first clinical trials of aging-related drugs. As the entire field shifts into this moment of translation, what have we learned? What are...2020-09-2328 min
Raising HealthThe Biology of Agingwith @LauraDeming, @kpfortney, @vijaypande, and @omnivorousread
Welcome to the first episode of Bio Eats World, a brand new podcast all about how biology is technology. Bio is breaking out of the lab and clinic and into our daily lives—on the verge of revolutionizing our world in ways we are only just beginning to imagine.
In this episode, we talk all about the science of aging. Once a fringe field, aging research is now entering a new phase with the first clinical trials of aging-related drugs. As the entire field shifts into this moment of translation, what have we learned? Wh...2020-09-2226 minRaising HealthIntroducing "Bio Eats World"This new show, from the same team that produces the popular a16z Podcast, will be all about how biology today is where technology was 50 years ago: on the precipice of revolutionizing our world in ways we are only just beginning to appreciate.Through conversations with scientists, builders, entrepreneurs, and leaders at the intersection of science, tech, and business, the Bio Eats World team, including hosts Hanne Winarsky and Lauren Richardson, examine how biology—and our new ability to engineer it—is going to revolutionize our future, and in ways we are only just beginning to imagine.
2020-08-1801 min