Hidden In Plain Sight

49 episodes listed below

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Breathing science to defense tech, one guest at a time

The gist

Hidden In Plain Sight places a single guest conversation inside a narrated frame, which might borrow a 1930s science fiction story or a world halted by a virus. Guests range from a scientific journalist on breathing to a General Catalyst partner on defense technology to a guest explaining CW Labs, a push for clinical research on CBD.

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About Hidden In Plain Sight

Hidden In Plain Sight is an interview show about technology, data and science, built around one guest per episode. What sets it apart happens before the interview. Episodes tend to open on a line from the guest, then hand over to a narrated setup that frames the subject with a story, a bit of history or a pointed question. Sometimes that frame is literary. For the Derek Belch episode, the narration reads the opening paragraph of a 1930s Stanley G. Weinbaum story built around a pair of goggles, then turns to Belch's argument for training people inside a headset instead of through lectures, videos and PowerPoints. Sometimes it is cultural: Stacey Shulman's conversation is set against Hollywood's long-running picture of technology that rises up and stops serving people, and the narration asks what changes if technology is treated as an ally instead. Sometimes it is simply the moment. Mariesa Coughanour's conversation about automation is introduced with cities and entire countries brought to a standstill by a virus. After the setup, the guests get room to be specific. Coughanour calls data foundational to RPA and explains how manual entry and everyday typos leave gaps and quality problems, with a shared grumble about autocorrect along the way. Shulman holds that innovation serves humanity, noting that people once feared cars and phones. She explains federated learning with the example of a hospital that builds models on its own patient records and moves the patterns forward rather than the records. Katherine Boyle, a partner at General Catalyst who has backed Stripe and the defense company Anduril, pushes back on the media story that Silicon Valley avoided defense work on ethical grounds. She calls that largely a myth. Engineers drawn to robotics and hard problems, she says, can count DoD customers among the first places to try them. Not everything here is software. James Nestor, a scientific journalist and author of the books Deep and Breath, comes on to talk about breathing, and his episode's cold open cites a study that ranked lung size and respiratory health above genetics, diet and exercise in determining lifespan. He describes a pattern he kept finding: people who developed breathing therapies that worked, only to see those therapies fade away, an arc he says runs through centuries of scientific revolutions. Deanie Elsner's episode turns to hemp and CBD, a category the narration calls booming but unregulated, and she lays out CW Labs, set up to advance clinical research with academic institutions and generate the data the FDA wants. Across all of that, data is the thread that keeps coming back: training data for machine learning, clean data for automation, clinical data for a regulator. One episode title, 'Data as the Key to Customer Discovery', puts the word right up front. What a listener gets is a set of working problems from business and science, each introduced with enough framing that the guest's argument arrives with some context around it.

Made for: Suits a listener who likes technology and business conversations that open with some story or history, and who is happy to move from machine learning to breathing science to CBD research from one episode to the next.

What sets it apart: Narrated frames set up the conversations, drawing on a 1930s science fiction story, Hollywood's fear of runaway technology or a world halted by a virus. The guest list also reaches past software, putting a scientific journalist on breathing and a clinical CBD research effort alongside AI, automation and defense investing.

In their own words

Long-form conversations with the executives, innovators, and thought leaders who are working to predict, solve, and preempt some of humanity’s most complex problems.

Why you'd press play

Jim Collins's bullet-before-cannonball logic belongs in your next big-idea meeting.

Press play if you want

to hear why a machine-learning company might build for practitioners instead of their VPs
to weigh a VR training pitch against another round of PowerPoint slides

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

immersive headset-based trainingmachine learning and federated learningautomation and the future of workdata quality and data strategydefense technology and venture investingbreathing and respiratory healthCBD research and regulation

Talks about

Technology Data Science Environmental Science Venture Capital

Best episodes of Hidden In Plain Sight

Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.

The Lost Art of Breath: A Conversation with James NestorDec 16, 2020

A grounded historical case for treating breath as a rediscovered technology of the body.

Breath becomes a surprisingly rich subject in this PlayNext review of a single episode with James Nestor, a veteran scientific journalist and author of Breath.

Learning By Doing: When the Real and Virtual Worlds Collide with Derek BelchOct 13, 2020

A practical case for virtual reality as workplace training people actually have to take part in.

Virtual reality gets a grounded workplace hearing here, as Derek Belch, CEO and co-founder of Stryver, makes the case that headsets could become part of the same everyday toolkit as laptops and phones. The episode links that idea to Stanley G.

Merging Mission with Margin: A Conversation with Katherine BoyleOct 8, 2020

Catherine Boyle links defense technology's old market structure to the founders trying to reshape it.

Catherine Boyle frames Silicon Valley's long hesitation around defense technology as a question of mission, market structure, and founder temperament.

Ally or Enemy: The Rise of New Technologies with Stacey ShulmanOct 6, 2020

Stacey Shulman presents emerging technology as a practical, human-centered partner in problem-solving.

The conversation with Stacey Shulman considers whether emerging technology deserves the suspicion Hollywood has trained audiences to bring to it.

The Future of Work with Mariesa CoughanourOct 1, 2020

A practical look at why automation depends on the messy, error-prone data companies already have.

The future of work is framed through a stubborn, unglamorous prerequisite: getting company data into usable shape. Marisa Koganauer, head of automation advisory at Cognizant, links intelligent automation and robotic process automation to the ordinary mistakes that can quietly…

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About Hidden In Plain Sight

In their own words

Why you'd press play

Talks about

Best episodes of Hidden In Plain Sight

Podcasts like Hidden In Plain Sight

Episodes

The Lost Art of Breath: A Conversation with James Nestor

Learning By Doing: When the Real and Virtual Worlds Collide with Derek Belch

Merging Mission with Margin: A Conversation with Katherine Boyle

Ally or Enemy: The Rise of New Technologies with Stacey Shulman

The Future of Work with Mariesa Coughanour

Data as the Key to Customer Discovery with Deanie Elsner

The Battle for Scale with David Kidder

Fueled by Data with Ashim Bose

Alpha Storytelling with Julian Guthrie

Deep Learning is Eating The World

Taking Agency Over Your Health with Peter Foley

The Secret Formula to High-ROI Digital Transformations with GE Digital CEO Pat Byrne

Creating a Better Internet with Anneka Gupta

Entering the Data Age with Doug Merritt

A New Approach to Mental Health with MAPS’ Rick Doblin

Using Data for Good with Dionna McPhatter

Stop Talking and Start Planting with Felix Finkbeiner

The Hybridization of Higher Education

Gamifying Our Financial System with Richard Craib

Becoming a Super Learner with Ruben Harris

Solving The Largest Existential Threats with Bill Goldstein, Director of LLNL

On a Mission to Level 5 with Aicha Evans

The State of Natural Language Processing with Mike Tamir

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at National Defense with Annie Jacobsen

The Critical Art of Data Preparation with Dean Abbott

The Future of Quantification with Jordyn Bonds

An Athlete’s Approach to Data with Adam Stepanovic

Developing a Global Security Perspective with Mick Baccio of Splunk

Becoming a Troublemaker with Leslie Berlin

Collecting Data From Above with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's Dr. Andy Brooks

Chaotic Good: The Ethics of Technology with Joseph Menn

A Data-Driven Approach to Workplace Culture with Janine Yancey

Democratizing Political Power by Liberating Opportunity with Matt Stoller

Deep Learning Illustrated with Jon Krohn

The Art Behind Data Science and Machine Learning with Dr. Jesse Spencer-Smith

Becoming Great by Choice with Jim Collins

Forecasting the Future with Amber Case

Viewing the Pandemic Through a Sci-Fi Lens with A.G. Riddle

Hidden in Plain Sight is Back!

Into the Data: An Aftershow with Sophia Bush

Using Data to Build a Secure Future

Curing Disease With Data

Using Data to Fight Human Trafficking

Conservation International: Can Data Literally Save the World?

Real Answers to Fake News

Privacy Protection for Dissident Voices

Bitcoin: A Lifeline in Venezuela

Entering the Mirror World

Welcome to Hidden In Plain Sight