Running Through Walls

Leading AI researcher and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute Melanie Mitchell joins Ethan Batraski for a conversation on how our current generation of AI is powerful, promising, and still badly in need of transparency about how it actually "thinks." She gives advice on how to redesign our benchmarks as true measures instead of targets, and how we can incorporate dynamic testing and deeper interpretability to close the gap between today's AI systems and true intelligence.

Siobhan Nolan Mangini sat down with author and UCSF physician Bob Wachter for a fireside chat about his new book on AI in healthcare, A Giant Leap. In this special live-recorded episode, he reflects on what he learned from interviewing top leaders across healthcare and technology about the coming wave of AI in healthcare. The discussion unpacks how AI could ease clinician burnout and expand access to care, while raising deeper questions about incentives, cost, and what role humans should ultimately play in the delivery of healthcare.

Pete DeJoy, CEO and co-founder of Astronomer, who helped commercialize Apache Airflow. He recounts a high-profile public crisis and the leadership lessons that followed. He traces Astronomer’s origins with Airflow and why a commercial platform was needed. He explores Airflow’s role in AI: RAG context, batch inference, and agent orchestration, and talks about tooling that empowers modern data engineers.

Farzad Mostashari, CEO and founder of Aledade, and Sunny Kishore, Associate Professor at UCSF, join Bob Kocher for a conversation about why U.S. blood pressure control has stalled for two decades despite having the tools to do far better. Sunny and Bob recently co-authored a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine about this paradox, and Farzad launched the Million Hearts campaign to prevent heart attacks so they are uniquely positioned to break down the problem and identify solutions. The episode offers practical guidance for clinicians and patients alike: combine focused lifestyle changes with timely treatment intensification, make blood pressure visible and urgent, and treat prevention as both lifesaving and economically smart care.

Bryan Mistele, co-founder and CEO of INRIX, who built a mobility-data company and an internal Innovation Week. He explains shutting the company for a week to form cross-functional teams. They describe open pitching, junior team members presenting, heavy partner support, and how AI speeds prototypes into deployable projects.

One of the critical questions in our first annual Beyond the Battlefield survey was how we more effectively get technology from the private sector to the battlefield. Who better to discuss that than the man responsible for making those decisions for the US Department of Navy, Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli. He joins Morgan Hitzig for a deep dive on the results and what they mean for the future of our warfighters.

Ezekiel Emanuel joins Venrock's Bob Kocher to talk about his newest book, Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life and dive deeper on what surprised him and how his own life changed through his research. From the magnitude of the impact of social relationships to how to build new neural pathways and expand your mind to fiber becoming the new protein supplement, their conversation is a fun ride through his New York Times bestseller.

Morgan Hitzig speaks with two of Forterra's leaders, Josh Araujo, CEO, and Scott Sanders, CGO about how they refounded Forterra in flight and their approach to implementing autonomy at scale. Their conversation serves as a roadmap for building in defense tech, from finding investors who understand the market to the right approach to dual-use and shoring up supply chains– and when to light things on fire and start over.

Dominik Schumacher, CEO and co-founder of Tubulis GmbH and inventor of a phosphorus-based ADC chemistry, discusses targeted cancer therapies. He explains how their linker chemistry improves safety and delivery. He talks about choosing indications like ovarian and lung cancer, working with big pharma, leading a distributed team, and moving from lab science to company leadership.

Siobhan Nolan Mangini, a healthcare contributor, joins Bob Kocher and Bryan Roberts to lay out bold predictions for the future of healthcare. They review last year's hits and misses while defining 'blip' as significant yet subtle innovations. Mangini highlights concerns over sustained high pharmacy spending and introduces a new AI billing code aimed at enhancing access to chronic care. The trio discusses the upcoming challenges with AI integration, including potential friction between provider and payer systems, and speculates on the implications for Medicare and political economy ahead.