MSP56 [] The Not So Dark Episode.

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So many of his shows are influenced by what he's been watching or reading that week. Judging from today's subject matter, CulturePops, Matt Armitage, has finished Game of Thrones and seems to have been binging on Goop for the past few days. This is MSP. You want to talk about innovation this week?

Yeah, and frankly, you're a little bit off the mark with the Goop reference, so we're not going to be talking about products for steaming yourself or coconut oil's miraculous ability to bridge political division and heal the culture wars. I wanted to explore the tangents that you tried really hard to keep me off last week's show, where we were talking about pig technology and the growing unease that people have with technology companies. That's not surprising when you see how Facebook has been fairing the last couple of weeks. No, and you're absolutely right, which is why I would direct people back to our tech visionaries episode.

So we did touch on this story a little bit last week. It now seems that Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, has also been implicated in the company's SOROS Gates scandal, which was essentially engaging a PR company that specializes in opposition research and disinformation and deflection campaigns. It's also come to light this week that the board said that she made a correct decision in conducting that kind of opposition research. For a company that's in the midst of a supposed battle to control the fake news epidemic and deliver balance to its users, this decision to engage a company to conduct what is essentially a fake news smear campaign is honestly quite baffling.

And on its heels is we've had the story that Facebook blocked a post by one of its own former managers outlining the reasons he thinks the company has failed both its black employees and its black users. And of course the irony of the post being blocked, that it goes up against the site's community standards. So what you're saying to Matt in a red about way is enough with the bad news? Partly, I'm saying that we shouldn't get kind of sidetracked or get too focused on the bad news.

Certainly we shouldn't ignore it. I don't want people to be cyber ostriches with their heads in the silicon. But when you feel the anger rising in your chest or that feeling of apathetic helplessness, when you see yet another tech company transgression, have a search around and look for the positive things that technology is doing as well. Like enabling drone strikes on civilian populations?

Yes, today's turning out to be not quite so fluffy after all, but I promise we will get there. Drone strikes are another example of what I'm talking about. They're potentially an incredible technology, but again we get sidetracked by the people who use them as weapons or tools to spy on you. And truly that is part of the story, a very big part of the story.

But look at the other things they can do like airlift medicines to remote areas. It's not the entire story. Or scan for survivors during the National Disasters. Yeah, I mean you're getting into the swing a bit.

You know, look at the whole story. Look at the incredible things we're inventing and discovering. Like last week's geek story about solid state aircraft. Yeah.

You know, planes that genuinely have no moving parts or a traditional engine, but still create the thrust you need to fly. Right. Or that special light we talked about that's been developed to help diagnose things like diabetes and heart disease. So today I want to look at that side of the picture.

We know there'll be another Facebook scandal next week. Twitter will ban someone and inexplicably it'll allow somebody else to say online. Snapchat will do something that no one understands. And I will still be watching kitten videos on Instagram.

Alright, where does the innovation start? Well, today is the fluffy episode. So let's start with killing something. Of course.

Of course. Cancer to be precise now. Yeah, exactly. Well my mum thinks that the word would be better with no crocodiles in it, but I'm opting for cancer for this one.

This is a story that dropped in November with the announcement of this year's Nobel Prize for medicine. And the prize went to two scientists. They shared the honor this year. One's American, a guy called James Allison, the other's Japanese.

He's called Tasuko Honjo. Now they have separately pioneered the use of a new breed of cancer fighting drugs that use our own immune system to fight the cancer. And despite the prize hardly anyone knows about this approach to treating these diseases. Right.

Fighting cancer is something that comes up on BFM on various shows and segments. A Nobel Prize is an enormous thing. Why do you think a few people know about this immunotherapy? Well, according to a Stanford University research on colleges called Daniel Chen, who is quoted in the Guardian.

This, the field of immunotherapy, it's moving so fast and so unexpectedly that even fellow scientists are struggling to keep up. And one of the knock-on effects of that is it's quite bewildering for doctors and patients to actually sort out what's going on with these treatments. Not to mention the fact that anything that's touted as a kind of miracle cure when it comes to cancer also faces that goop effect. I knew you had an ulterior motives for mentioning goop with the start.

Well, you know, we're used to hearing a lot of new age remedies for serious illnesses. You know, we're used to hearing about quack remedies like I don't know, boiling radish and leaving it under your pillow and letting your immune system fight off the disease. So when we see a word like immunotherapy, we naturally think new age and not science. So where is the science?

Well, as I said, you know, we're not talking about radishes. We're talking about oncologists. It's quite a sad thing to say, especially on this fluffy episode, but having a lot more people on the planet means you have a lot more people with cancer. And having a lot more people with cancer means that we have a lot more data about the behavior of cancer cells and the way they interact with and dominate our bodies.

And one of the mysteries of cancer has always been its ability to overwhelm our immune system and protect the, sorry, prevent the immune system from attacking those cancer cells as they replicate and take over. Which is where the boiled radish comes in? You can go and boil a radish. I'm going to carry on doing today's show.

Our Nobel winner, Jim Allison, realized that cancer wasn't overwhelming or exhausting our immune systems. It was essentially tricking the immune system into being docile. So his approach is a bit like that TV show breaking the magician's code. He's exposing the tricks and, of course, coming up with new ways to block them.

And that was way back in 1994. I'm guessing there's quite a few of our listeners who weren't born in 1994, so it's hardly a rapid development. Which brings us back to the boiled radish. Allison and his team had a drug that worked on certain melanomas in mice, but it was actually quite dangerous for humans.

So the drug worked for some people, but that process of kickstarting the immune system, kickstarting those T cells could actually flood the body with toxins that were also very damaging to people. So when it did work, the results were remarkable. They found that some people who were at the very end of stage for cancer were effectively cured by these treatments. So let's speak for today.

Why has this slow-moving discovery suddenly picked up speed? Well, partly because of that data I mentioned, and partly because of the way the process of innovation often works. So if we use the humble mobile phone analogy, they were introduced in the 1980s, they started to become commonplace in the 1990s. But it was only around 10 years ago when the phones had already been around for 25 years, that they suddenly became more than something you could make calls on.

Obviously, this is a bit of a simplification because it goes hand in hand with the development and miniaturization of computers and chips and a lot of other pieces of hardware. But look at how quickly phones have moved on in the last decade. Assuming that I don't have to write any long documents or presentations, I don't need a computer with me to work anymore. In fact, I sent you all the notes for today's show from my phone at great long tedious effort, but it is possible.

So I don't either try and look this back to cancer research somehow. Well, in those first decades of the mobile phone, there were incremental improvements. So we had better screens, better battery life, we had the introduction of technologies like Bluetooth, text messaging. I mean, do you remember when WOP was the only way that you could get online and that used really slow 2G connections?

And that's how it went with the immunotherapy drugs as well. So Dr. Tazuko Hondo of Kyoto University, the Konobel winner we mentioned earlier, he made a further discovery. He made a discovery that cancers were tricking the T cells that were supposed to fight them into believing that they were actually buddies.

So instead of fighting, they were all going out to party together. And that allowed him to start building a newer class of these same drugs that had fewer toxic side effects than the first class, which are CTL-A4 drugs. That doesn't work. Okay, that allowed him, so we'll go from they were buddies.

Yeah, okay. And that allowed him to build a newer class of drugs that had fewer toxic side effects than this original class of drugs we were discussing earlier. So these are the ones that former US President Jimmy Carter took a couple of years ago? Yeah, so these drugs are classed as PDL1 checkpoint inhibitors because people in the medical industry are really good at coming up with catchy names.

So Carter, despite being in his 90s, responded really quickly to what was a very aggressive cancer. That drug is known in most countries today as Keytruder, and it's the most widely known immunotherapy cancer treatment. But the Guardian article points out that this has actually been immunotherapies, penicillin moment. So it means...

Sure, sure. The Guardian article points out that this is the penicillin moment for immunotherapy, by which they mean that this has been the development that's opened the door to a whole new generation of potentially world-changing drugs. What kind of scale are we talking about? Well, we're talking about going from the iPhone and its initial app store to the pocket computers that our phones have become today.

There are now more than 900 immunotherapeutic cancer drugs in development. Half a million patients are involved in more than 3,000 clinical trials around the world. There are another 1,000 clinical trials which are about to start. And that's just with this classification of checkpoint drugs.

Other areas of research include bespoke vaccines, so these are drugs that are specific to the individual, so that the medicine adopts a specific approach rather than this kind of catch-all one. And that can help to increase the efficiency, the effectiveness, and also to limit the side effects because it's tuned to your body's chemistry. Now anytime something comes along and talks about it being a smoking gun for cancer research and one thing or another, there's a danger that we get carried away with the hype. Because this is the big C, it's the horrible, the most deadly...

Of course. And everyone is very scared of coming out and saying, you know, this is going to be the thing that transforms everyone's lives. And of course, we already have some quite effective treatments. So still the most effective way to use these drugs is in combination with treatments like radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

So those treatments do the kind of rapid work of killing tumors, and it leaves the immune system to mop up and clear the debris that's left over. And yes, as you said, it's not a miracle cure. As we mentioned earlier, restarting those T cells have been tricked into inaction, can flood the patient's body with toxins, so there are potential problems with these drugs. But I think one of the biggest issues we have to think about is cost, because while these treatments can be successful, some of these things can cost for a full course, more than a million US dollars.

And that kind of really limits the application, because it suggests that we're going to end up with these kind of tiered streams of medication and treatment, where only those who are really, really wealthy or have fantastic insurance coverage can actually access these cutting edge treatments. But again, that's where we come in. As I said earlier, you know, the field is moving faster than many doctors, and we, the general public, can keep up with. So we're the ones who have to put pressure on the people we elect to make sure that these treatments are widely available and also affordable.

I suppose that's a fluffy end to our first half. After the break then, all the fluff you can eat, you are listening to MSP here on BFM 89.9. Boss, can you give me more data? I use that in my quota.

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Boss, can I also get a visa? Begin, fun moments. BFM 89.9, the business station. BFM 89.9, the business station.

Today we're looking at the happy smiling face of innovation, though in typical MSP fashion. That involves killing cancer cells. What have you got for us in this half-mat? I'm going to be a bit zippy in this half of the show.

I'm sorry if there's anything that listeners want to hear about in a bit more detail, so please head over to the Max Blaine Facebook page and let me know. Can I tweet? They can semaphore in the dark for all the good that tweeting is going to do, which is actually the perfect segue for us to talk about agroforestry. No, it's not.

I know it isn't, but I might not have noticed if you haven't pointed it out, which makes it the perfect segue into agroforestry. I like this story because it's actually one of those reverse technology ideas. So we reported earlier this year on a story about China's urban planets looking to classical and traditional Chinese town planning as a way to build cities that are more environmentally sound and sustainable. So simple things like teard ponds to help retain water and mitigate flooding, as well as to nourish the greenery that can help to cleanse the air and reduce the temperature.

And agroforestry is a climate mitigation technique that lends itself really, really well to tropical countries like Malaysia. It's nice to see you've done some actual research for today, rather than just spouting up. You're very, very mean. I'm glad Jeff's going to be back soon.

There have been various high-tech solutions for scrubbing carbon from the air, announced over the last few years. Now, a company called Carbon Engineering announced in June that it had a new technique that takes carbon out of the air and turns it into fuel, which is very useful. Now, this one does sound a bit like it came out of a kid science competition project. Massive fans blow hot air or blow air rather onto a surface that is coated with a solution that then traps the carbon dioxide.

So you can imagine it being a bit like an eight-year-old volcano project. You see in the sitcoms where it spews foam all over the principle and everyone surrounding it. The company estimates that the cleaning costs will amount to around $100 per metric tonne of CO2. And apparently that's much cheaper than a lot of the rival technologies.

That's still billions in investment than infrastructure costs. You're actually talking hundreds of billions and potentially trillions. Something else that we've mentioned before, we get fixated on the shiny innovation and stop thinking about the technologies that came before them. When it comes to carbon cleaning, we already have a very effective technology that is efficient, long-lasting and remarkably cheap.

Donuts. Fine, man. Though carbon-sinking donuts is actually an awesome idea, but that would require us not to digest them, which could be problematic in the long run. I was thinking more along the lines of trees.

Agroforestry is an environmental management technique that's literally thousands of years old. When we think about agriculture, we tend to think of it in its modern sense, which is acres and acres of denuded land, planted with whatever cereal or staple or vegetable we put in the ground. We spray them with pesticides to keep them clear of pests and weeds and to, obviously, increase those yields. And we chop down all of the trees and hedges because that makes it harder for the farm machinery, like tractors and trailers to gain access to those fields.

Are you saying you want to turn back the clock now, then? Well, that's a new technology isn't always better technology. And we aren't talking about replanting every field of barley with oak trees. We're talking about things that set aside.

There are plenty of schemes that pay countries or private landowners to set land aside, especially forested land, and leave it uncultivated. Agroforestry allows you to turn some of that set aside into financially productive land that also has a positive net effect on the world's climate, which of course is a win-win. So we're not talking about developing virgin rain forests? No, this is something you could do with secondary forest or as part of a wilding process with previously cultivated land or potentially even brownfield sites.

It involves combining trees, shrubs and crops. The trees absorb the carbon, but they also provide shade for a lot of crops for them to grow. And among those trees, you can also plant fruit trees, cacao trees, a lot of money bearing trees, essentially. So what you have is a carbon sink that is revenue generated.

It's the last to cost money. I was looking at a Washington Post article that was examining this. Now, there's a thing called Project Drawdown. This is a global project that is based around agroforestry.

Now, they're looking to turn 19 million hectares of land over to agroforestry. Now, I know that's really difficult for people to know exactly. It's just a number. That's an area of land that's larger than the land area of Cambodia.

So you're looking at turning an area larger than a decent sized country over to agroforestry globally. So the estimated cost for that is about $27 billion. So that's relatively cheap when you look at the hundreds of billions for some of the other carbon cleaning projects. But it's projected to yield the profit of over $700 billion by 2050.

I'm starting to feel a bit fluffy. I'm getting there. I'm being cuddled by the fluffy. By the fluff.

Then you're really going to like the next one. This is something I've talked about many times over the fantastic number of years that people have been letting me wail and holler from the heights of BFM. And it's the full day working week. Yeah, everyone likes that idea.

I think we mentioned earlier this year, a company in using perpetual guardian was experimenting with a four day work week for its staff of over 250 people. Hang on. Why is this technology? This is social and cultural design.

So this is human technology. Semantics. Not semantics. We talk a lot about automation and machines replacing human workers.

But one of the weird things is that most people, wherever they are in the world, are actually working longer hours than they have done in decades. So technology, whether it's email or instant messaging, has helped to push work inexorably into our private lives. But we aren't necessarily seeing productivity gains from all this increase of work. For things like stress related disorders and the cost of time off relative to productivity.

Yeah. And most of us are hunched over our laptops in cheap chairs. So there's also the physical and health effects of being sedentary for long periods of the day. So the net effect of all the overwork can end up being less work, less productivity at an increased cost, which of course is a lose lose for everybody.

All right. And so give us the good news from New Zealand. Yeah. Back to perpetual guardians.

So the trial was very simple. They worked for eight hours a week, but they were paid their normal salaries for five. So it wasn't like a lot of the flexi time schemes that we've seen where you still work your 40 days, but you do it over four days instead of five. And of course, the days are all staggered.

So the company operates Monday to Friday. I feel we should have a drum earlier. Yeah. You're saying to get into the fluffy spirit.

I can feel it now. No, academics who've looked at the results of the trial. And this happened in, I think, March and April this year. Now they found that staff felt better about their work, life balance.

They felt less stressed and they were much happier in their jobs. So as a result, the company has decided to adopt the model full time, but of course on a voluntary basis. So staff who need the flexibility of say a five day week because there are days when they leave early for childcare reasons or other commitments, they will still be able to work that traditional five day week. Do you see more companies rolling this out?

I mean, we've spoken about it a lot on a bit of battery. Yeah, no, of course. I mean, it's not a model that can work for everyone. Or rather, it's a model that only works if kind of everybody works and gets in sync.

So it'd be hard for BFM, for example, to operate on a four day week because you'd have to hand over the other three days of a week to another station. But I do support the concept of working less. If that means the time you spend at work is used a lot more productively. And it's easy for us to say that because we're not employers.

Well, I do get that and I'm not an employer anymore, but I did used to be and I was the one who would turf my staff out of the office. And most of them were employed in part because of their extracurricular activities and interests. So part of their intrinsic value to my company was vested in their social life and their hobbies. Right.

Isn't it more normal for bosses to want to see their staff spend as much time in the office as possible? Which of course is very short sighted. Having them spend as little time as possible while getting the job done to a high standard should be your goal. That should be the optimal outcome.

We have to get past the idea that we own people and we own their time. It's a trade. Both sides have something to gain. So it's in everyone's interest to make that experience as pleasant and frictionless as possible.

A lot of people forget that happiness is an established economic indicator. So happy, healthy people are a great advertisement for your company and the great for your bottom line. I'm still waiting for the Gates of Health to open and for Matt to summon for some fire-sitting hell-hound to consume at the end of the show. But it looks like he's been true to his word.

You've been all fluffy today. I'm feeling very odd. Brilliant. If you'd like to find out more about Matt and his cat or read transcripts of these shows, head over to CulturePop.com.

That has been MSP here on BFM 89.9. Stick around. We've got Geekswalk up in just a few minutes. You've been listening to BFM 89.9, the business station.

Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9, the business station.