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Dennis Ford is founder and CEO of Life Science Nation, a sourcing platform for market intelligence and prospect pipeline development for life sciences companies.   An expert in the art of international fundraising, he is also the author of The Life Science Executive's Fundraising Manifesto. In this episode, Dennis shares real-world insight into how fundraising in life sciences has evolved, and why you've got to “go global” to succeed in today's competitive marketplace.  The Four Pillars of Life Science  Put simply, the life sciences industry can be broken down into the “four Ds”: Drugs, Devices, Diagnostics, and Digital Health. Each category has its own timeline and development path – from the lengthy 15-20 year process for drugs to the relatively quick development cycle for digital health solutions. Typically, startup companies need to target 600 to 800 potential investors to run an effective 9-18 month fundraising campaign. This number isn't arbitrary – Dennis has seen even established health tech funds vetting 800 companies just to make three investments in a year.  Similarly, the global life sciences market can be divided into three main regions:  Asia Pacific (including China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and Australia)  Europe and the UK  North America (U.S. and Canada)  While there is activity in other regions like Africa and South America, these three markets represent the primary playing field for life sciences innovation and investment.  This new reality means going global isn't an option, it's a necessity. Dennis explains: “There just aren't enough investors in a particular region to allow them to play that numbers game.” Even in rich ecosystems like Boston/Cambridge or Silicon Valley, staying local severely limits opportunities.    The Language Myth  One common concern about going global is the language barrier. Dennis easily counters that notion as an obstacle, explaining that English typically serves as the universal language in the field, particularly among academic and research institutions. Investors, licensing partners, and other stakeholders are often comfortable communicating in English, “and I have not seen in my conferences or any of my trips that me not speaking the native language is a deal killer,” he adds.  Interestingly, while language should never stop you from expanding globally, Dennis discovered an unexpected cultural challenge: the persistence required in following up with potential investors. Entrepreneurs from certain cultures are hesitant to make multiple attempts to reconnect, viewing it as inappropriate or “spammy.” Dennis emphasized that success often comes after numerous attempts – sometimes even on the twentieth contact.  He describes in detail how syndicated investments typically work, with a lead investor taking primary responsibility for oversight and management of the company through regular meetings and milestones. Even with a diverse group of investors from different countries (e.g., Chinese, European, and American investors), the lead investor – often chosen based on geography or similar criteria – handles the day-to-day management while other investors participate at key milestones and funding calls. To facilitate these international connections, Life Science Nation holds RESI (Redefining Early Stage Investment) conferences every few months, providing regular engagement beyond one's local region.  Once a company secures international funding, Dennis advises companies to source investors from different regions because they have “footprints” in a particular region; more than just capital, diversity provides valuable regional expertise, connections to distributors, and insights into local markets when it's time to commercialize.    True Stories Translate  Ultimately, what matters most to investors? While scientific validity is crucial, Dennis explains, investors are equally – if not more – interested in the human story behind the science. He shares a powerful story of an experienced pharma executive who was initially reluctant to share the story of how her son's illness inspired her work. Once she finally embraced the storytelling, she went on to win Australia's top entrepreneurial pitch competition.  Key Takeaways for Global Success:  Start with a comprehensive target list of 600-800 potential investors  Implement a proper CRM system to manage relationships  Develop a compelling narrative that can be told in various time frames (5 seconds to 3 hours)  Don't limit your reach to the local region or even your home country  Prepare for a 9-18 month fundraising journey  Be persistent in follow-ups, regardless of cultural norms  Balance technical expertise with personal storytelling    The Global Life Sciences Opportunity  The life sciences industry has entered a golden age, with innovations emerging from research institutions worldwide. The global distribution of talent and innovation means that neither the best technologies nor the best funding opportunities are confined to any single region.  For entrepreneurs in the life sciences space, the message is clear: thinking globally isn't just about expanding your market – it's about survival. Whether you're developing a groundbreaking drug in Boston, a medical device in Minneapolis, or a diagnostic tool in Singapore, your fundraising strategy needs to be global from day one.  Check out the links below to learn more about global fundraising in life sciences and his book, The Life Science Executive's Fundraising Manifesto.    Links Email: dford@lifesciencenation.com  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Science-Executives-Fundraising-Manifesto/dp/0990325105  Website: www.lifesciencenation.com RESI Conference: https://resiconference.com/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2775813   Connect with Wendy - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendypease/  Music: Fiddle-De-Dee by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

This is the Women of Influence Podcast series, delivering next level insights and expertise live from GlobeSt.'s Women of Influence Conference.The Women of Influence Podcast Series is an exclusive mini-series of The Crexi Podcast, an insider's look at all things commercial real estate, produced in collaboration with GlobeSt. The Crexi team visited Women of Influence and recorded in Lake Tahoe, California, from the floor of the conference, highlighting movers and shakers in commercial real estate. The Crexi Podcast explores various aspects of the commercial real estate industry in conversation with some of the top professionals in the space. In each episode, we feature different guests to tap into their wealth of CRE expertise and explore the latest trends and updates from the world of commercial real estate. In this episode, Crexi's Shanti Ryle sits with Julie Baird, President of First American Exchange Company, and Shayna Platt, Senior Director, ESG, at BioMed Realty, to cover wide-ranging topics, including:Introduction to the Crexi PodcastMeet Julie Baird: A Leader in Real EstateJulie's Career JourneyBuilding a Collaborative CultureChallenges and AchievementsMeeting People Where They AreCreating a Collaborative CultureAdvice for Young LeadersBuilding Trust and CollaborationChallenges and Opportunities for Women in LeadershipIndustry-Wide Efforts for DiversityConclusion and Contact InformationShayna Platt's Journey into ESGUniversity Influence and Early CareerRole at BioMed RealtyUnderstanding ESG in Commercial Real EstateChallenges in Implementing ESG PracticesGaining Internal Buy-In and EngagementPositive Outcomes and Executive SupportFuture Trends in Life Sciences Real EstateThe Importance of Accurate ESG DataAdvice for Young Professionals in ESGConnecting and Mentoring in ESGClosing RemarksAbout Julie Baird:Julie Baird is President of First American Exchange Company. She leverages people centered leadership practices to foster an organizational culture of collaboration, transparency, and trust, with employees reporting high job satisfaction while delivering record setting financial results.A fierce advocate for elevating female voices within the CRE industry, Julie has been a member of GlobeSt Woman of Influence speaking faculty since its inception and was awarded as a Woman of Influence in 2023; she was awarded First American's DPK Circle of Excellence Award in 2022, a recognition given to a very small number of the highest achieving employees in the entire organization of nearly 20,000 employees, and Julie was invited to participate in First American's Women in Leadership class of 2021 and selected by her class as a presenter to the First American Financial executive team.Julie is a past President of the Federation of Exchange Accommodators and is past Director for CREW Denver. She is a frequent speaker and author on 1031 exchange and industry related topics.Julie is a former Chair of the Executive Committee of the Real Property Law Section of the State Bar of California and she is the prior Managing Editor of the California Real Property Journal. In 2009, Julie was named as one of the "Top 20 Under 40" real estate professionals by the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Network. Prior to joining First American, Julie was a real estate attorney in San Francisco.About Shayna Platt:Shayna Platt is the Senior Director of Environmental Social Governance (ESG) at BioMed Realty. A Blackstone Real Estate portfolio company, BioMed Realty is a leading provider of real estate solutions to the life science and technology industries. BioMed owns and operates high quality life science real estate comprising 15.9 million square feet concentrated in leading innovation markets throughout the United States and United Kingdom, including Boston/Cambridge, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and Cambridge, U.K. In addition, BioMed maintains a premier development platform with 2.5 million square feet of Class A properties in active construction to meet the growing demand of the life science industry.About GlobeSt. Women of Influence: The Women of Influence Conference is an exclusive two-day event that celebrates the women who drive the commercial real estate industry forward. These influential leaders will discuss the critical issues facing CRE now and in the future, what it means to be a woman in business today and how women CRE leaders can uplift and support each other on their journey to the top.  If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our newsletter and enjoy the next podcast delivered straight to your inbox. For show notes, past guests, and more CRE content, please check out Crexi's blog. Ready to find your next CRE property? Visit Crexi and immediately browse 500,000+ available commercial properties for sale and lease. Follow Crexi:https://www.crexi.com/​ https://www.crexi.com/instagram​ https://www.crexi.com/facebook​ https://www.crexi.com/twitter​ https://www.crexi.com/linkedin​ https://www.youtube.com/crexi

Singer, guitarist, jug-band pioneer and songster Jim Kweskin joins me on the show today. I can't tell you how many times I heard Jim's name before I ever heard his music. To the generation before me, he was a total legend, and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band was very influential to many musicians who grew up in the 60's and 70's. Jim came up in the Boston/Cambridge area and The Jug Band was legendary around those parts and eventually across America. Old blues, jug and string band music was considered old fashioned at that point in time, and Jim spearheaded its return and kicked off a musical revolution that inspried bands like the Lovon' Spoonful and The Grateful Dead (don't forget they started off as a jug band too). With bandmates like Geoff and Maria Muldaur, Bill Keith, Mel Lyman and Fritz Richmond, the Jug Band was signed to a major label, sold thousands of records and toured across the country tirelessly between 1963-1970. They turned countless young musicians on to the music of artists like Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Boy Fuller and the Mississippi Sheiks.Jim has continued making records and performing under his own name and has just put out a rerally cool album called “Never Too Late”, which is mostly duets with some of his friends on vocals like Maria Muldaur, Meredith Axelrod and many more.I won't go too in depth on his bio here because in the interview, he actually had a bio preopared and read it to me, which you'll hear on the show. It's a first “written statement” for the podcast! I think you'll dig that part of the conversation. You can get all the latest info on Jim at jimkweskin.com - Enjoy my conversation with Jim Kweskin!This season is brought to you by our sponsors Larivée Guitars and Fishman AmplificationYou can join our Patreon here to get all episodes ad-free, as well as access to all early episodesThe show's website can be found at www.makersandshakerspodcast.com Get ad-free episodes and access to all early episodes by subscribing to Patreon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Under New York City lies a patchwork of long-dormant dark fibers that are now illuminating with entangled rubidium atoms.In our conversation with Noel Goddard, CEO of Qunnect, we learn about the tough tech testbed named GothamQ. Qunnect is pioneering the future of the telecom industry by transforming existing fiber optics into quantum networks, providing a robust, secure communication channel for the next evolution of the digital age.Qunnect's rubidium-based networking devices promise to safeguard communications against eavesdropping by ensuring that any attempts at interception destroy the transmitted message. This makes digital communications that are provably secure, and is gaining attention as a key component of a layered approach to quantum networking solutions that meet the needs of clients ranging from enterprise players to government agencies.“We work in atomic vapor,” Goddard says, “we use the same vapor that they [atomic clocks for Global Positioning Systems] do. What's nice about it is that atoms are the same everywhere in the universe, so whether it's outer space, underwater, on a mountain… atoms provide a very high precision reference tool.” Quantum networking protocols require sophisticated levels of precision “which has never been seen by normal digital communications”, adding that “atoms offer a very interesting way to do that because of this ability to locally reference them” at scale. Qunnect's networking hardware is a physical manifestation of decades of basic and applied research into quantum physics, information theory, and optics, with the GothamQ test site as the next evolution in the broadening deployment of their hardware portfolio composed of quantum sources, quantum memory, wavelength referencers, and more.In a candid moment, Goddard acknowledges the unique challenges facing quantum science startups, including the need for substantial capital investment and the patience to develop highly complex and sensitive technologies. However, she remains optimistic about the future, highlighting the growing interest and support from government and corporate investors willing to take long-term bets on tough tech innovations.Goddard reflects on the broader implications of quantum security. By providing a fundamentally secure communication method, Qunnect isn't just advancing technology but also safeguarding economic and national security in an increasingly digital world.P.S. If you're in the Boston-Cambridge area this fall, check out JMill's Tough Tech On Tap, presented by The End Effector! P.P.S. Thank you to our tough tech champions. We really appreciate your support. We have pay-if-you-can membership options so you can help us bring Tough Tech Today to more folks!

IN THIS EPISODE: In this podcast episode, host Philip Guarino speaks with Andrew Lo, a distinguished professor at MIT and an entrepreneur with a focus on healthcare and deep tech ventures. Andrew shares his journey from academia to entrepreneurship, detailing his transition from economics to founding a quantitative investment firm and later exploring the financial challenges of drug development. He discusses the fundraising challenges for deep tech entrepreneurs, how investors' risk calculation differs for more complex ventures and how this requires continuous investor communication and learning. Lo also highlights the vibrant innovation ecosystem in the Boston-Cambridge area and his passion for mentoring students in entrepreneurial projects. GUEST BIO: Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering, and principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a co-founder and director of BridgeBio Pharma, a director of AbCellera, Atomwise, and Vesalius, a co-founder and chairman of QLS Advisors, and a member of the advisory board to the American Cancer Society's BrightEdge Impact Fund. Dr. Lo received his B.A. in economics from Yale University and his A.M. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Of all the parts of this enjoyable conversation with Seth Zeren, now of Providence, RI, the part I liked the most was this quote:The worst fight is with your allies that betray you.The quote, which is mostly about perception, says a lot about people who are frequently in heated agreement with each other, but find themselves disagreeing on something that's very minor in the big picture. We discuss this as we discuss his post called, “When New Urbanists and YIMBYs fight.”Seth has a great Substack, talking about all the overlap in his interests from city planning to development and more. His path and his passion are impressive. From his early days working in local government, to now the cold, hard reality of making development projects work. And what's next? Perhaps some place management, perhaps some housing policy advocacy, perhaps just more really interesting redevelopment projects.Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin's Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you'd like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Transcript:Kevin (00:01.269)Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I'm excited today to have Seth Zarin here with me on the podcast. Seth and I have met in the past and corresponded a little bit. Seth has a sub stack that I definitely recommend called Build the Next Right Thing. And he's in Providence, Rhode Island, which is actually, I think, one of the sort of most underratedsmaller cities in the country. I've always really liked Providence, enjoyed it. So Seth, welcome to the podcast. I know we're going to have a lot of good things to talk about. We're going talk some housing and some other stuff, but glad to have you on so we can do this.Seth Zeren (00:43.574)Thanks Kevin, it's nice to be here.Kevin (00:46.261)I think, you know, Seth, I want to kind of start by talking about you're another guy who has a really interesting path and background into becoming into the development world, which is what you're doing now, but certainly not at all where you started. And I wonder if you could kind of walk people through your professional background and then even like why you wanted to do a sub stack.in the first place, as some of us silly people do to put thoughts out in the world.Seth Zeren (01:19.862)Yeah, absolutely. I usually introduce myself when I meet people by saying that I'm a former climate scientist, recovering city planner, turned real estate developer. I usually get a laugh on recovering. Much like people who have all sorts of addiction issues, city planning is something that you always kind of in the back of your head, always kind of want to work on, but can be really challenging.Kevin (01:35.381)Ha ha ha.Seth Zeren (01:48.918)I'm actually from California. I grew up in the San Francisco suburbs, south of the city in Silicon Valley, basically. And by the time I graduated high school, it was quite clear that I would never be able to afford to live there. At that point, houses were selling for about a million dollars for a little ranch. Now it's about $3 million. And so by the time I left for college, I sort of knew that the housing situation there had been a little bit of a mess.broken so much that it was really unlikely that I would be able to find a good quality of life there for myself at that time. In college, I ended up studying geology and climate science. So I was a geology major, geosciences major, and I narrowly averted the PhD. I dodged it, fortunately, and I found myself really becoming interested after college. I went and lived in South Korea for a year and I taught English there. AndIt was such a different experience than growing up in an American suburb or in a small town where I went to college. And it really got me thinking a lot. And when I came back to the U S and I went and worked at a boarding school while I was figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. And I started to read about cities and urbanism and architecture. And I realized that, Oh, actually at the time I thought I wanted to go to school and do architecture, but I was really intimidated by portfolio and drawing. And I had, I was a scientist. I mean, I could do data.I understood geology, but, um, so I was really intimidated by that. I ended up going to an environmental management program at Yale where I could kind of moonlight in law and architecture and business. And so that was kind of my entree. And I discovered I really liked zoning at the time. Uh, and I like to say like, I like board games and zoning is basically just the biggest board game imaginable. It's a huge map, bunch of colored spaces and a really long rule book, which was totally my jam. And.Kevin (03:38.485)Yeah. Yeah.Seth Zeren (03:46.038)So I was a zoning, big zoning nerd. I interned with the planning department, but you know, in between the two years of graduate school and then got a job as a zoning official after graduate school for Newton, Massachusetts, which is kind of that wealthy first ring suburb outside of Boston where the doctors and professors go to have children. And, uh, I was there for about three years before I kind of realized this was not the place for me. I wanted to do stuff. I wanted to shake things up and.One of the dynamics you'll encounter when you find a sort of a wealthy sort of trophy suburb, right, is that people buy there because they like what it is. Right. So the political dynamic in a place like Newton, like many wealthy suburbs around many cities in America is people are buying a particular place and they want it to stay that way. That's what they bought. And so there's a real change aversion there, which was just a bad fit for someone in their twenties, whose master's degree and wants to get stuff done. And.I had also at the time had the opportunity to work with a bunch of developers. And this was coming out of the financial crisis. So there wasn't a lot happening right away, but slowly, slowly things started to get back in gear. And after about three or four years there, I decided I was going to jump ship from the, from the planning side and eventually found myself working at a development shop as a development manager, kind of coming in to do the permitting work. Right. So I just basically switched sides. I was going to go do permitting for the developer.moving complex projects through design review and master plan approval and stuff like that. And I did that for my sort of early apprenticeship for about three or four years. And got to the point where, you know, I got married, we thought about buying a house and realized Boston was also too expensive. So we started considering other places and Providence was nearby. We'd visited, we had friends here. And at the time, certainly it was massively more affordable than the Boston Cambridge area.So we moved down here about eight, maybe nine years ago, about. And so I was working as a development manager, you know, for a larger firm. And then when I came down here, I was still working remotely, but I connected with some local developers and eventually joined a local firm, Armory Management Company, which is a 35 year old, almost 40 year old partnership now that has done historic rehab.Seth Zeren (06:09.782)Main Street revitalization ground up in field development and came on board here, you know, also as a development manager and kind of worked my way up. Now I'm a partner and working on kind of the future of the firm and future of development in the Providence area. So that's kind of my, my origin story. It's one path. I haven't met a lot of other people who've come through the planner path into development. I would say that I was one of those people that you probably remember this, Kevin, you know, whatever eight, nine, 10 years ago at CNU.There was this whole conversation about why are you working for shitty developers? You know, to architects, planners, engineers, go be your own. And I took that very much to heart and was trying to find a way to do it. And I've kind of managed to find a way to do it, come through that.Kevin (06:54.709)Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have met a few other folks who kind of started in the planning route and then ended up in development. But yeah, you're right. There's not too many. I mean, one thing I'm curious about, Seth, so like I'm a Midwestern or so. I don't have that experience of growing up someplace and then realizing like I'm never going to be able to come back. I mean, so a lot of Midwesterners like myself leave at some point.And then often we find our way back home, but it's like, and there may, there's lots of reasons why people do the things, but there's never seems to be this like logistical issue that says, well, I'm just not going to be able to afford to come back where I grew up. What, what's that? And what's that like to at some point have this realization in the place you grew up in, which you probably have some really fond feelings and memories for that you just, you weren't going to be able to make it back or you weren't going to be able to afford to.make it back. That must be a strange feeling.Seth Zeren (07:55.414)It is, and I will say it becomes a lot stranger when you have your own kids, which I have now. I have two young children and we go back to California, you know, once maybe twice a year visit my parents who are still in the house I grew up in. And you know that neighborhood that I grew up in, you know, hasn't built. More than a couple net new homes in the last 50 years, right? Homes get torn down and they get replaced by bigger homes, but.Kevin (08:00.501)Yeah, sure.Seth Zeren (08:24.246)There's no net additional homes. But my parents raised three kids in that house who all have their own households. My parents are still in that house. So sort of mechanically, if you have a neighborhood that doesn't add any homes, you're essentially, but you have, but you have children, those children have to leave, right? Mechanically, right? And if you then multiply that across an entire region, well, then they have to leave the whole region, which is like why people have to leave California. And I, so I have a very,like complicated relationship with it. It's like, obviously, it's my home, it has like a smell and weather and just like the culture that is what I grew up with. It's it's I have nostalgia for that. But I also go whenever I go back there, I'm like, this place makes me crazy. Because it's not like you couldn't build more buildings, you know, you couldn't, it's not like the soil can't support more buildings, right? There's no physical limitation, really. It's the self imposed limitation. And then when you go back, especially,after the last 20 years or so, and you look, you know, here's a region in the world that is the current sort of nexus of tremendous wealth accumulation, right, the Bay Area. And what did we get for it? Right, we got kind of mediocre drive it strip malls, and the, you know, single family houses that go for three and a half million dollars to $5 million. You know, it's similar times in the world, we got, you know,London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Shanghai, Tokyo, like these metropolitan areas were built and there's this tremendous physical capital that's created by economic growth. But in the Bay Area, it's, it's, it's, it's, so it's kind of depressing for me. I feel like it's helpful to go back as a, as like a cautionary tale, you know, it's, it's a, it's a practice, you know, you have to go to the meditation retreat and struggle. And that's a little bit like what it is for me. Um,So you would ask why I write and so I'm a full -time developer. I run, you know, commercial development, residential development, run commercial leasing, a lot of architecture design permitting, you know, I would say, you know, there's a lot of different backgrounds. One can bring into the development world and all of them come with different strengths. Uh, being the planner background gives me a lot of facility with permitting. And so zoning is an area where we're really effective zoning historic.Seth Zeren (10:50.74)neighborhood relationships, all that kind of stuff. And then finding value in buildings that other people don't see because we look around at what other people are doing in other parts of the country and we're able to import those ideas and try things out. Other people have different advantages that they bring. The reason I write is probably like you, I've got like some thoughts in my head that I have to get out. And, you know, development is a great practical.you know, craft practice, you know, and it's, I mentioned, I think earlier apprenticeship, like there are a few schools that teach development, real estate development, kinda, but mostly they teach what we think of institutional development. So if you want to go build a skyscraper, go to MIT or Columbia. Fine.Kevin (11:37.333)Yeah, MIT's got those great courses and everything else that, yeah.Seth Zeren (11:39.51)Yeah, and like, totally fair. Like, that's a reason that's a thing that makes sense in the world, but it's not going to help you, you know, renovate a triple decker or, you know, put up an ad or or renovate a Main Street building. It's just not the skill set. They're not teaching that. So it's an apprenticeship. I mean, it's still really an apprenticeship job. You have to go and you have to go through a lot of stuff and struggle and you see all the pain and suffering and you go through the stress andKevin (11:53.877)Yeah. Yeah.Seth Zeren (12:08.726)You start to learn stuff and it's one of those jobs. There's so much to learn that you, you know, here I am 40 a partner doing a bunch of development work and I'm learning stuff every day, right? And we're all learning stuff every day. So it's it's really satisfying in that way, but. It's not necessarily intellectual job, right? I mean, thinking about stuff is important. Math is important. Those are all relevant things, but it's not the only thing that matters. And so I write because trying to figure out some stuff, right? Trying to figure out.for myself, but then also how to explain things to other people. Um, cause one of things I say to people is that, and I learned this when I became a developer is that like as a developer, I had more in common with the blue collar tradespeople without a college degree in terms of my understanding of the built environment than I did with someone who had my equivalent class background, education, income level, like an attorney or something, right?They live in a house that they bought from someone else, right? They are a consumer of the built environment, but they know very little about how it gets built. They don't get under the hood. But conversely, like I, you know, the plumber and I under, you know, we're in it together. Now we have very different jobs. We might, you know, we're having a different experience of it, but we both are seeing this world. We're both participating in the making of stuff. And so we end up with this very different environment. And then.because of the way we've regulated the built environment, now there's this huge chasm between the people who build the cities and the people who consume the cities that are built for them. Because people don't build much for themselves or for their cousin or for their neighbor.Kevin (13:44.533)Yeah, yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a really interesting point. I like that Seth. And it sort of resonates with me too. And, you know, in my experiences in design and development and you get some of that in architecture too. If you're the kind of an architect who you spend a lot of time doing construction administration or on job sites, you really, I think get a very different feel for that than if you're just kind of working in schematic design all the time. But yeah, that art of.creating things. And this is what I kind of often tell people about development. One of the things that just completely, like routinely frustrates me is this sort of parody of developers that's put out in the world. It's like, you know, as the black hat evil people trying to, you know, ruin cities and, and not this understanding that actually, and not that there aren't those people, there are some, you know, there are crappy people in every field. But most developers are just simply in the act of creating things that other people are going to use.Seth Zeren (14:36.278)Yeah.Seth Zeren (14:44.022)That's true. And I say that all the time as well. And I would add to that, that one of things that's interesting about development, right, coming from planning. So like real estate or city planning, right? Graduate degrees, conferences, magazines, there's even a licensure, right? You get your AICP, go to the conference, get the magazine. It's a profession. Real estate development isn't really a profession.Kevin (14:44.181)Like that's the whole point.Seth Zeren (15:11.254)You get $2 million and buy a CVS, you're a real estate developer. There you go. You put it on your business card, it's your real estate developer. So there's no professional boundaries for good and for ill. I mean, sometimes I think the boundaries around some of these professions are actually really harmful, but you kind of know what you're going to get. You know what the professional culture is and you kind of know how it changes and you know the institutions. Development really doesn't have any of that. Even the Urban Land Institute, ULI, which is a major player still like,compared to like the APA and planning is minuscule. And so like part of the challenges is that, so that's one piece of it. It's not really a profession. The other piece of it is that one of the things that's happened in the 20th century is we blew up our development culture, right? We had an ecosystem of building places, you know, that was the design, the construction, the operations, the leasing, the materials.the trades, there was a sort of ecosystem of it, and we kind of blew it up. We radically transformed it over a short period of decades. And so there's no continuity. So when people do development, there's not a sense of there's any kind of private constraint or private rules. So it feels even less like there's a profession. There's not like a coherent culture, we're going to build more of that, or we're going to evolve incrementally from a coherent culture of building.We're just going to build whatever you end up. That's where you end up with the like two story building with a mansard. That's like with the weird landscaping. It's just this weird Chimera because the developer and to a large extent, the architects have no grounded. There's, there's no like lineage they're working from. There's no continuity. They're just throwing stuff at the wall, you know,Kevin (17:00.341)Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think one of the other aspects is that in development, so many of the players in the non -institutional world are entrepreneurs. At their heart of hearts, they're entrepreneurs. And it's hard to gather together a whole group of entrepreneurs who are, in some sense, in competition with each other all the time, to feel like a common sense of purpose.Seth Zeren (17:25.174)Yeah, and they're often grinding for their own private gain, which in many parts of the United States is sort of seen as not good, right? Profit is bad to a lot of people. And I think that's unfortunate because while certainly people can do bad things and that's not good, making a profit from doing good things is good. It's a good sign. It means you get to do more of it, right? We say we have to make a profit because that's what we, that's the...Kevin (17:30.101)Yeah.Seth Zeren (17:53.062)seed corn for the next project, right? If we ate all of our seed corn, we would have no next project, right? And if we run out of seed corn, we all starve, right? So you don't get to lose money very many times in real estate before you're out of the game. So it's...Kevin (18:05.685)Yeah, well, and nobody bemoans the local cafe or the barbershop or whomever from making a profit. We all want them to make a profit and succeed, but for some reason, the local developer in a business that's far riskier and more expensive, it's like we completely beat them up about the idea that they actually need to make money to keep going.Seth Zeren (18:22.326)Yeah.Seth Zeren (18:27.606)Yeah. And I think part of it is that there is part of this change in building culture, right? Is that there is where there is more of, or a greater percentage of the built of the new development is sort of seen as done by outsiders for short -term gain. And then they're gone. You know, you'll you've talked to other folks in the incremental development world between the farmer and the hunter, right? And it's we're, we're 90%, 95 % hunters now, you know, instead of 25 % hunters. And that just really changes.Kevin (18:41.397)Yeah. Right.Kevin (18:48.661)Yeah, sure.Seth Zeren (18:56.918)the relationship. So we're a local firm. I work in the neighborhoods in which we live. We work down the block from our projects. If we do a bad job, I have to look at it every day. People know who I am. They're going to yell at me. Like there's a level of responsibility. The profits are most, many of the profits are being reinvested again locally into the next project or into donations to local organizations. So it gets it, you know, not, it's not just as a matter of credibility, but as a matter of like the actual development culture and ecosystem, it's just a better way of life. Um,I think one of the things that's key though about the developer image, right? Is that there was this real period and formative period for, for you and for me, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s of the real estate developer is always the villain, right? And every hallmark movie and every, you know, real estate developers are always the bad guys. And it's a really easy trope, right? It's, it's, it's change for, you know, we're going to change something that's here now that's good for profit, you know, and then they're going to be gone. Um, we don't have any valorous.Kevin (19:37.811)Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Sure.Seth Zeren (19:56.442)examples of the real estate developer in popular culture. And I think if I had a magic wand, I would like I would have some great popular sitcom about, you know, a real estate developer, young Latino builder in LA doing interesting stuff and growing over the course of seasons and be hilarious because there's so much tragic comedy and development. So if anyone out there wants to pitch a show to Hollywood, that's that's what I would pitch. Oh, my God, no, that's not me.Kevin (20:19.893)Well, I think you've got your next screenwriting gig. So, give us an example of a project that you're involved with now, something you're working on to get people sent to what you're doing.Seth Zeren (20:31.798)Yeah, so yeah, I'll give two quick examples. So we just finished a rehabilitation of an historic structure, four story masonry building that was converted back to residential, right? It had been turned into actually a nursing home. It was first as a hospital than a nursing home in the 20th century. It was originally built as four brick row houses. And so we brought that back to residential. That just finished last summer, 12 units. And that project was really great. It's really beautiful building.We are a little bit counter -cultural in some times what we do. So we built, in part following the logic of the building, because we were doing a federal historic tax credit project, we didn't want to torture the building. So the units are large. We have, you know, 1500 square foot, two bedroom, two bath apartments, which is on current construction, like weird. It's just, they're really big and they're expensive as a consequence of being big. But what we're finding is there are people who will like nice stuff, and they're willing to pay.more for an apartment. And it's still cheap compared to New York or Boston. It's expensive in Providence, but there are people who will pay that. And right now we're working on the second phase of that project. So that's probably 26 unit building. We're going to try to get some three bedroom apartments in that, which is again, sort of philosophically, we think it's important that there are places where families could live in multifamily housing. It's on a park. It's a beautiful location. And then the project we just started,As we acquired a 50 ,000 square foot mill building in a kind of old industrial area of the city that has, it's one of those things where the previous owner kind of ran out of money and attention. So some things got done, but not other things. So we're finishing that up and that project, we are actually going to complete sort of the previous owner's plan, which was to create modestly priced commercial spaces. So we, in our portfolio, about 50, 50 residential and commercial, which isn't.necessarily by strategy. It's just sort of where we've ended up. Uh, but I think on the margin, we're a little bit more comfortable with commercials than the typical developer or landlord in our area. So because we run so much of it and it's full, I mean, we're 95, 97 % full and commercial across 300 and something thousand square feet. Um, and that's because we price to rent it, you know, and we take a good job caring for it. Uh, we follow the advice of making things smaller if they don't rent.Seth Zeren (22:57.878)Right? So if you make them smaller, then you make the rent smaller, which means more people can rent it. Um, and there's turnover, but you have a reusable unit, just like an apartment, people move right into it, uh, run their business out of that. So it's been good. I mean, you know, who knows things could always change, but we see a lot of value in, you know, one of the things that happened in American cities is disinvestment and white flight took place was not only did the people leave, but I'll sort of all the businesses.So it's like, what is your dentist? Where's your doctor's office? Where's your accountant? Where's your graphic designer? Or, you know, where's your retail shops, you know, your salons, your banks, your restaurants, your bars and restaurants and bars usually come first, but that's only a piece of the ecosystem. You know, it's a whole, you know, you need gyms and retail stores and yoga studios. And I know that sounds kind of trite, but it's sort of a, a, a curating kind of orientation. So this building, part of the strategy is to create a building that is safe.and modestly priced and not pristine so that it's a building in which people can do work. So it's artists, fabricators who have real businesses but need a space to operate their real business. It's not just a crazy building, spray painting the walls, but a reasonable building, not too expensive, not too fancy, but safe. Sprinklers and a roof that doesn't leak. So that's kind of our current project.Kevin (24:16.149)Yeah. Yeah. That's a great model. It reminds me a little bit of one of Monty Anderson's projects in South Dallas, sort of a similar deal, large former industrial building and essentially a minimal, very minimal tenant finish, but incredibly flexible. And if it's priced right, it, you know, in his case, at least up, you know, very quickly. That's a cool model. So I didn't really have any, a whole lot of personal experience withProvidence probably until the CNU was hosted there in what was that? Mid 2000s or so. Which was the best Congress up to that point and the best one until we hosted one in Savannah, of course. And anyway, I was really impressed by Providence. I thought it was...just an incredibly interesting city, very walkable, really cool architecture everywhere, nice downtown. Just seemed like it had a ton of assets, especially in that region. And like you said, priced very differently than Boston or New York. And so I'm curious about the last decade or so, what's going on in Providence. How's the market there? How are things changing? And as a...more of like a third tier city, what do you see that's different compared to some of the larger markets?Seth Zeren (25:47.094)Well, I think that the big story of the last 10 years is that we're no longer kind of isolated on our own. And I don't know if that's mostly a combination of remote work or if it also has something to do with just how expensive Boston and New York have become and other cities. And Providence has seen some of the highest year over year property appreciation in the country. So you're right. It's a nice place to live, you know, and then if you're paying, you know,$3 ,500 a month for, you know, kind of crappy two bedroom apartment in Somerville, you move to Providence and you can get a really nice apartment for $3 ,500 or you can save a bunch of money. And so that it's not so similar for me, right? We moved down here because it was cheaper. And so that adds demand. It adds demand in the upper end of the market. So a big part of what's happening in Providence, Rhode Island is, is that there's a relatively small number.but of people with a fair amount of resources, income and capital moving here. And the state chronically, because it's sort of been tucked away for a long time, it has very little home construction, right? We are the last, second to last, third to last in per capita home construction every year for the last few decades. And so the intersection of those two things is causing a really crazy housing spike and a lot of angst.And for myself, this is one of the places where like my own experience growing up in the Bay Area and then having my own kids has really hit home because, you know, I know in 20 years, I'm still going to need a house to live in. And my two kids are probably each going to want their own house to live in or apartment. Right. So I either got to build them one. They're going to buy yours or they got to leave. It's math. Right. And so it's put the question of housing shortage kind of on the sharp end of the stick for me personally.Right? Is, you know, am I going to be able to see my grandchildren more than once or twice a year kind of thing? You know, and that's a big deal. Right. And I know people don't quite appreciate it yet. I feel a little bit like a harbinger of doom sometimes because in Rhode Island, the feeling is like this could never happen here. Right. Because we're kind of this backwater sort of economically hasn't done well since deindustrialization. You know, there's some bright spots, but it's a little tough and nice quality of life, but not too expensive. And that whole script.Seth Zeren (28:13.142)of worked for a generation or two, but it's not relevant anymore unfortunately. And then that psychic cultural transformation is going to be really hard.Kevin (28:23.541)So coming from the background that you came from, how do you compare the development or the regulatory apparatus in Rhode Island and in Providence compared to places you've worked or pros and cons and what's going on there?Seth Zeren (28:36.086)Oh boy.Seth Zeren (28:41.494)Yeah, when I go to CNU and I'd say I'm from New England, they're like, how do you work there? Because it's hard. Yeah, we're more heavily regulated region. I think that in some ways that's beneficial to someone like me, right? If you're good at navigating the rules, then it's actually to your advantage to work in a regulated market because there's, you I'm not competing on how cheaply I can put up drywall. I'm competing on who can come up with the most creative use of land and get through the regs.Kevin (28:45.685)Ha ha ha ha.Seth Zeren (29:13.686)It's, you know, Providence itself has a mod, what I would call like a modern zoning ordinance. It's got a lot of, you know, there's things I would quibble with, there's things I would change, but it's basically a functioning ordinance that like does the right things more or less, right? And which is great. We mostly work in Providence. I'd say the rest of the state, like most of the rest of New England, it's still like 1955 and there's no...resources, no political impetus to like really fix that yet. I've, I've helped one of my responses is I helped found last year a group called Neighbors Welcome Rhode Island, which is a sort of strong towns meets UMB type or organization that we're still kind of launching a website now. We're working on legislation, state level legislation, and also trying to support local organizing in these towns.Seth Zeren (30:14.998)So it's a, it's, it's, you know, very similar to the markets I'm used to. It's a new England place. Everyone's in everyone else's business. The place has been inhabited buildings on it for, for, you know, hundreds of years. I think one thing that's always interesting about, about new England though, you know, compared to the national conversation is the missing middle is not missing here. Like our cities are made out of triple deckers, twos, threes, fours, sixes all over the place.Kevin (30:37.653)Mm -hmm.Seth Zeren (30:43.062)Our problem is we don't know what comes next. So a city like Providence right now, the only plan is, and this is true, Boston and these places, you can, sure, you can build on the vacant lots and there's a bunch of vacant lots and you can build those for a while. There's gonna be some bad commercial buildings. You can build on those for a while. There's some old industrial land. You're gonna build on that for a while. But in a different way, but similar to the regions where everything's zoned single family and it's built out single family, you can't add anything.to the bulk of the neighborhoods, which are zoned for two and three family homes, because there's already two and three family homes there. And what we don't have, and I don't think anyone has an answer to this, is how do you create a building typology and a business model and a regulatory framework, building code, zoning code, et cetera, to add density to those neighborhoods, to take a three -family neighborhood and bring it to the next increment.whatever that is, because I don't, I don't think we have a model for that other than to go to a full like five over one big apartment building, but the land assemblage there is really prohibitive. So what's the next thing that's denser than three families on 5 ,000 square foot lots, but isn't a big commercial building. And I don't think we have an answer for that yet. I mean, as a urbanist architecture development community, and we certainly don't have a regulatory framework that will allow us to build it either. So that's like an R and D project. That's sort of a back burner curiosity of mine.Kevin (32:08.981)Does the regulatory framework allow you to build the triple -deckers in place?Seth Zeren (32:14.198)Uh, under zoning. Yeah, kind of under building code. No, right. Cause triple deckers are commercial code. So you need sprinklers. So you can't build them. The cost difference. You'd just build a big two family instead of building a three family. It's a much better strategy. So one of the things that neighbors welcome is proposing this legislative cycle to follow on North Carolina's example and Memphis's examples to move three, four, five, six family dwellings into the residential code. And, you know, with no sprinklers, a single stair. Um,And, you know, we'll keep the two hour rating, just add more drywall. Okay, fine. But, you know, that's one of the things we're proposing along with a single stair reform for the small apartment buildings. But yeah, I mean, it's a chicken and the egg, right? There's no point coming up with the prototype and you can't build it. But then no one wants to reform the building code because there's no prototype that makes sense that people are excited about. So it's really kind of trapped. And so, you know, that's an interesting challenge that we struggle with.Kevin (33:14.069)Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thing to think about what that next increment to would be beyond the freestanding, you know, triple deckers and stuff like that. Because, you know, I guess the first thing that comes to mind as you start to think about neighborhoods more like you would see in New York or Boston, certain parts of those cities that went to like five and six story walk up buildings that, yeah, yeah. And they're not.Seth Zeren (33:39.476)Buildings that touch. That's the big thing.Kevin (33:43.931)really townhouses wouldn't call them townhouses, but they might be like a five story walk up. Like you'd see, you know, on the upper East or upper East side or upper West side or something like that.Seth Zeren (33:49.598)Yeah.Seth Zeren (33:52.982)Yeah, there's two tiers, I think. There is a version that's more about lot subdivision, right? So we have decently sized lots and three families are big, but you might be able to get some more houses on them or bigger versions. And then I certainly moving to the part where you have party wall construction and the buildings that touch, you recover a bunch of lost area to thin side yards that no one can use. That tier is really interesting because you could probably keep them as owner occupant.Right? They'd be small, you know, two, three, four families, but on smaller piece of land, you know, buildings that touch whatever the next year above that, you know, which is like a single stair elevator, five, six stories, you know, 20 apartments. That's a commercial loan. It's a commercial operator. And, you one of the virtues of the triple decker, right, is that you have a distributed ownership, right? So that it's not just.You know, we have tons of landlords in the state, you know, because everyone I own, the triple decker I live in, right? Everybody owns, you know, a two family, a three family mom, grandma's two family, right? It's just it, there's so many opportunities for people to be small landlords for good and for ill, mostly I think for good, but there are, there are some limitations to it. Um, you know, so when I look around at international examples, right. You know, so for example, I teach real estate development on the side, cause I really care about bringing more people into this profession and not profession trade.craft, whatever. And I had some European students last fall, and I brought them to Providence on a field trip, took them around my neighborhood, which is, you know, to native Rhode Islanders like the hood. It's like the inner city. Ooh, scary. And they're like, this is a very nice suburb, right? Because to them, a bunch of detached two and three family dwellings with a few vacant lots in between them or parking lots, this is suburban density. And they're wrong. And they're not wrong. They're right.Kevin (35:19.893)Yeah.Seth Zeren (35:47.786)you know, historically like that, that was a transition. You'd go from town, right? Which is mostly detached, small multifamily buildings to herb to the city. The building starts to touch because the frontage is really valuable and you wouldn't just leave it for like, you know, five foot grass strips and whatever. Um, and so, you know, it still ends up being quite car focused because, you know, everything is sort of far apart and you know, you got to fill in the empty gaps.Kevin (36:13.781)Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that reminds me a little bit of what Jane Jacobs used to talk about in Death and Life of Great American Cities as sort of like the gray zones. Yeah, the in -between density.Seth Zeren (36:23.094)Yeah, the gray density. Yeah. And what I would say is what happened to my neighborhood to a certain extent, and I think this is true of a lot of American, you know, urban neighborhoods, you know, sort of pre -auto suburbanization is that what happened, there was so much, there was a lot of removal, even where there wasn't wholesale urban renewal, you know, mercantile buildings were taken down and replaced with a gas station, right, or a parking lot. And the church is, you know, brought down, you know, there's little holes in the fabric.And when I look at the neighborhood as like someone who thinks about cities and can see, can, you know, learns to look in that way, it's kind of looks like someone who's slightly sick, right? Their skin's a little pale, a little drawn, you know, there's a little yellow in their eyes. That's what it kind of feels like. And so it's about kind of filling it back up again. I think we've kind of, in a lot of cases, we kind of dipped down into the gray zone and we're trying to get back into it because once we get kind of out of that gray zone, adding density is good.Right, it brings more services, more people, which can support more businesses. And there's this positive feedback that strengthens the neighborhood and makes it better. But in the gray zone, it's like, well, is more people gonna make it worse? Like, what are we? It's a nice callback, because most people don't make it past parks in death and life. It's just too bad. I tell them all the good bits are at the end.Kevin (37:37.781)There's many good bits. But yeah, I think there's an interesting aspect of American cities in particular there where you have, and I think about this a lot, we wrestle with this so much in my part of town in Kansas City where there is a sort of urban density that actually works pretty well where everybody pretty much drives still, right? If you know what I mean, like it.Seth Zeren (38:05.526)Yep. Yep. Bye, Norris.Kevin (38:06.869)The parking is easy and it's just not that, it's not really urban, but it's not really suburban. And I think there was a generation of people who re -occupied a lot of urban places like that in the 70s and 80s in particular, who love it for that. They love the fact that they're like in the city, but it's like parking was easy. Now the problem is, yeah.Seth Zeren (38:17.91)Yeah.Seth Zeren (38:32.182)Yep, we have that here too, absolutely.Kevin (38:34.997)The problem is like historically that was a complete non -starter. Those neighborhoods had far more people, were far more urban. And by today's standards, it would have been incredibly difficult to have a car and drive it around everywhere and park it.Seth Zeren (38:49.258)Well, people forget that like you could have the same number of housing units and have fewer people because house hold size is so much smaller today. So the street is relatively empty, right? Compared to when grandma was living here, you know, 80 years ago, um, as far fewer people around.Kevin (38:53.365)Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.Kevin (39:03.381)Yeah. And now with the prevalence of like one car per adult everywhere, the challenge of trying to upgrade those neighborhoods to become more like their historical predecessors, it does create a lot of conflict because then all of a sudden we are wrestling with the, it's really the car issue in many respects. Yeah.Seth Zeren (39:15.798)Yeah.Seth Zeren (39:22.774)Yeah, you're moving from one equilibrium to another equilibrium. And that's always really painful because it's going to reduce quality along the trip, even if you end up in a better place on the other side. You know, one of the things I find really helpful or really valuable, and I admired your work about this, is the business improvement district. And I don't know, whatever we call that microform of government. And we're involved in helping create one on a main street near us that has suffered from a tremendous amount of urban renewal and...Kevin (39:32.501)Yeah. Yeah.Kevin (39:46.003)Mm -hmm.Seth Zeren (39:53.3)institutional concentration and we're trying to figure out how to improve that. And one of things that I've learned from doing that is that the city, even with a pretty strong planning department, Providence has a good planning department, lots of good people, plenty of staff. It's not low capacity, but they got a big city to run, right? And they can't know it super deeply everywhere all the time, right? And here, and I'm involved because we own a bunch of property nearby and I've been working in the area for years. And so I get to know all the other owners and I get to know thethe nonprofits and the businesses and residents and you know, but I'm working on like eight square blocks, if that right. And I know that really well. I can talk about this block versus this block and this crosswalk and that curb and this parking lot and that, that tenant and you know, at that micro level. And it just seems to me that that's gotta be the future of a lot of this governance stuff. Cause to get out of that bad equilibrium is going to require a bunch of really careful.tactical hands -on changes to infrastructure, to private development, public, you know, all those pieces. And when I look at the whole city, I'm like, there's not enough coordination, right? There's not enough attention. There's too many things going on, too many fires to fight. It's at that micro level that I could kind of organize enough people, run the small planning exercise, coordinate the private development, coordinate the public investment and keep on top of everybody. But it's only, you know, eight square blocks, right? In a big city.So how does that work?Kevin (41:21.525)Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's something we've wrestled with a lot and we obviously do a bunch of it here, but I'm a big believer in, you know, place management at that scale. And I think one of the issues that we've seen over and over again is, you know, my city is even much bigger. It's like 320 square miles geographically. It's insanely large. Half a million people in the city limits. So like relatively low density for that large of a city, but...the ability of staff to actually manage all that and know what's going on. It's impossible. It's literally impossible. Yeah.Seth Zeren (41:57.142)Well, I've been city staff and I remember how insane it was. I mean, you don't get out of the building because you're too busy answering emails. You know, this is like you fight with the engineers or whoever about an intersection is like, have you ever stood in the intersection for an hour? Because I have, right? Because I'm there all the time. But you can't run the city, you know, not getting out into the field and seeing the mucky bits, right? And that's like.Kevin (42:17.045)Yeah, there's just a there's a huge mismatch in how we manage cities and their ability to change and solve just solve problems, solve basic problems.Seth Zeren (42:25.43)Well, so one of my questions is, is that in part because like the way we teach kind of all the pieces of city building and management is kind of like, and it feels like they're individually busted and then the system is busted. So like public administration, civil engineering, architecture, planning, you know, development, all, you know, whatever that there's a whole package of different professional schools that you could go to that would teach you these different skills, but none of them talk to each other.And so when they're graduates, I remember being a planner and then talking to the civil engineer Newton being like, we're from different planets, man. Like the words I'm saying, you don't understand the words you're saying, I don't understand, like, and no one's in charge. So we're just kind of like, because every department, one of the things that happens in cities, right, is every department is co equal under the under a mayor or city manager or something. So like planning department can't tell DPW what to do. They're the same level, you know, and so we're just kind of butt heads.Kevin (43:01.493)HeheheheheSeth Zeren (43:23.67)But planning is in a particularly bad situation because they don't have any shovels or trucks or much free cash or anything else. They don't get to do much. Their only power is persuasion.Kevin (43:33.525)And it's the first jobs that are cut whenever there's a recession too. But yeah, I mean, the whole industry is very siloed. And this has kind of been the classic battle of the new urbanism from the beginning was really the push from our side was to create generalists, that people who could pull everything together. And our charrette process was designed to bring all those people together and problem solve at the same time.Seth Zeren (43:36.83)Yeah.Kevin (44:03.317)And that actually worked really well, and it does work really well when you're able to facilitate that. The challenge you have in a lot of city governments that I've seen is that they're just like you said, they're all vertically, you know, all differentiated vertically and it's all siloed. And there's not a ton of incentive for the different departments to understand each other and work together unless you have a particularly strong executive who forces that to happen.Seth Zeren (44:28.662)Yeah, that's really the game. It's like, does your executive get it and care and willing to spend the time on it? You've said something really interesting in the past on other versions of this podcast, which is that, I don't know if I'll get it exactly right, but we spend like 50 % of the time on design, 40 % on policy and 10 % on implementation. And we should be like a third, a third, a third. Here's the thing. I feel like the charrette process is really great, but then the charrette leaves. New urbanists don't have, as far as I can tell, much of an answer of how you actually run the city.There's no proposal on how to reorganize the departments of the city government. There's no proposal on charter reform for cities or, you know, there's a whole universe of, you what should the education for a city manager be? Right. We have, we have an idea about what planning should do differently, you know, and so there's bits and pieces, strong towns, urban three, talk a little bit about the finance side. We're just starting to think about it. When you open that door, you realize, oh my gosh, where are the new urbanist police chiefs? Where are the new urbanist fire chiefs? Right.the controllers, the tax assessors, there's this huge apparatus of public entities that are out there. And I guess part of the reason why the place management is so cool is that you get to actually just be a little micro government. And instead of having to silo off every little bit of things, you're a taxing entity, you can also go hire people to put out flowers, you can also write regulations, you're a whole thing. And so likewise, I feel like the CNU universe has not yet...Kevin (45:47.541)Yeah. Yeah.Seth Zeren (45:55.19)really contended with like the mucky bits of administering, managing the city.Kevin (46:00.245)Yeah, I think that's totally, I think it's totally fair. And, you know, I got a lot of that thinking from Liz Plater -Zyberg who, and so the way she broke it down was design, policy and management. That's the three legs of the stool. Most of the people who came to the new urbanism originally and were most passionate were designers. So they had a very heavy emphasis on design. There were also a lot of policy wonks. So you got that policy piece, but yeah, very few people from.the world of understanding how to actually manage cities. And we've had a lot of interaction and bring people to the table and conferences and all, but I still think very little understanding in that world of how things work.Seth Zeren (46:42.166)Well, and you go, I think, to the International Downtown Association, right? The IDA. How is it that the IDA and CNU are still, like, not connected at all? As far as I could tell, right? From the outside, it just, like, the stuff we're doing is so, so connected, right? And so this, I guess, is a plea to the CNU folks and a plea to the IDA folks, like, let's get together, guys. Because, like, CNU can bring a whole bunch of the design and policy ideas. But you're right, we need managers. And manager, Strong Town sometimes talks about howKevin (46:45.173)Mm -hmm. Yeah.Kevin (46:55.925)This is a good question.Seth Zeren (47:11.132)maintenance is not sexy, right? It's easier to get people to design a new road than just fix the damn road you got. But that's the problem, right? If nobody's interested and we have no way of making management or administration better, like you'll just keep doing new projects and then as soon as you leave, they'll just fall apart, right? Because no one's going to run them when you go.Kevin (47:32.981)Yeah, no doubt. And so hopefully we can make that happen. I would have talked with a few people about this that we need to find a way to link up. I mean, there's always been a linkage there, but it's just not nearly as tight and as strong as I think it could be. I'm amazed when I go to the IDA conference just how few new urbanist consultants even bother to attend, which is shocking to me. It's enormous. But yes, I think there's an in...Seth Zeren (47:53.558)Yeah, it seems like a huge missed opportunity on both sides.Kevin (48:02.965)One of the, I think, ill effects of the last 30 or 40 years of there's been a lot of education that's pushed really smart, ambitious young people into the policy world instead of emphasizing that how important really good management is. First of all, I would say design also. I mean, and problem solving with projects generally is incredibly important.My bias is doing projects is more important than policy, but I know there's a role for both. But management, God, if you don't have good ongoing management of a place, just like any business, if a business doesn't have good ongoing management, forget it, you're toast. And a city, if it doesn't have it, is gonna suffer tremendously. So, you one, go ahead, go ahead.Seth Zeren (48:54.038)Well, I was gonna say, I feel like in my head, I've been thinking about this for a long time. And when I went to school, I went into an environmental management program, quote unquote management, right? It was supposed to train professional people to manage environmental organizations, work in government, work at the forest service, work for nonprofits, working for profits, doing environmental stuff. Were there any classes on management stuff, right? Managing people, managing budgets.Communications, no, it was all science, which is great, fine, like I need to know some stuff about ecology or water management or whatever, but like, how are we a professional school? You know, we have to go out in the world and run organizations which have budgets and staff and HR and communications and negotiation. You know, you can go to the business school and learn some of that and a lot of people did, but you gotta ask yourself like, well, what are we doing here?Kevin (49:44.405)Yeah. Well, man, I had six years of architecture school and there wasn't one business course that was required the whole time.Seth Zeren (49:49.718)Yeah, I mean, I see that. And the planning people, you know, maybe it's gotten better. But when I was going through it, I took a negotiations class at the business school, which was the most useful class for being a planner. It was negotiations. Most planners, we don't need people with physical planning backgrounds. I mean, you need someone who can do some physical planning. Mostly you need some social workers because local government is like a family therapy. They have fights going back 20 years with their neighbor about whatever and who's yelling at who. And it's like, we need just some people to get people to talk to each other.It's not about technical analysis. No one ever voted for my zoning amendment because I had a great analysis. No, it's relationships. So, you know, I look at this as like, and I know there's been efforts around this at CNU, but I think we need to really get serious about building new educational institutions. I don't know that we can do it inside. I mean, we've tried it, you know, at Miami, we've tried it at Notre Dame, and there's been some successes, but it's just not enough, right? 30 years later, you know, there's just...it hasn't really changed anything in terms of what we're training. So we have another whole generation raised up in the old way of doing business and we're surprised when we get the same results.Kevin (50:55.829)Well, one of the things that even mystifies me, somebody who's gone to a lot of architecture schools to do student crits and everything else is like there's this, there's a whole group that have come through in the last, I would say 15 years that don't even know anything now about the early new urbanism because that was like so long ago and it's just not taught. So it's wild to me. It's like that has gone down the memory hole.Seth Zeren (51:14.038)Yeah.Seth Zeren (51:19.35)Yeah.Kevin (51:21.077)So I talk about that a lot with people that I know just to try to keep some of those things going and make sure people have a memory of what actually happened in a lot of those years.Seth Zeren (51:29.91)What I think is so striking is I don't think it's actually that much money that would be needed to build some of these institutions. So if anyone out there is listening and wants to write checks, fantastic. But you could get a lot done for not a lot of money building these new institutions. I really do think that. And the scale of impact on society could be really huge. Yeah.Kevin (51:51.893)Yeah. Seth, I want to switch gears and do one more topic before we run out of time. I want to hit on this piece that you wrote about Yenbys and New Urbanists in Strong Towns and sort of the differences or perceived differences, you know, amongst the groups. I wonder if you could sort of set the table and talk a little bit about what, where you were going with that one. It's a long piece for anybody who wants to read it, but it's, it's really good.Seth Zeren (51:55.862)Oh, sure.Seth Zeren (52:02.538)Yeah.Seth Zeren (52:14.326)Yeah, it's on my my sub stack build the next right thing which is I have small children So we watch a lot of Disney movies. That's do the next right thing, which is a song from frozen 2 But related to incrementalism, right? You don't have to know the final answer You just when you and you're confused you just do the next right thing, you know, you're gonna work your way through it solve the problem incrementally Pragmatically, it's very American way to work. It's good. That's build the next right thing andKevin (52:27.533)Know it well.Seth Zeren (52:45.27)It's a part because like getting to utopia is not like you're not going to take one jump to utopia. We got to like work in the world we're in. So this piece came out actually, ironically, I started writing this in the emergency room with my child in the middle of the night. Because when you have little children, sometimes they eat like stuff and you end up in the emergency room in the middle of the night. So I'm like, I'm like starting to jot down some notes and the notes were really stimulated by another guy, Steve Mouzon, who's been on your show, I think, who, you know, is active on Twitter and occasionally.regularly gets in fights with sort of the very online Yimby crowd. And then there was an exchange, you know, about a piece that Steve wrote and some other people responded. And, you know, a lot of people that I'm considered I like or I appreciate their work. I mean, I appreciate Steve's work. I assign his book on on on the original green. I appreciate Nolan Gray's work. I assign his his stuff. So but I was really struck by this continuing like fight.In this case, between the CNU and the Yenbis. And in my analysis, I mean, you can go read the piece, but I'll give you the really short version. It's basically that, and since I'm from California, I'm very sympathetic to the Yenbi argument, right? I feel it in my bones, right? I can never return to the soil I was raised on because of the failure that has gone before us. So in the Yenbi world, it's all about supply. We got to build a bunch of homes, right? And that's the overriding value and virtue and goal.right? You see it celebrate. We're going to build so many more homes. And the new urbanist orientation, which is really importantly different for a few reasons. First of all, it was started in the eighties and nineties when there wasn't a housing crisis. So the DNA is not built around a housing crisis was built around building crappy places, right? Go read, you know, uh, suburban nation, right? It's about building bad stuff. Read consular, you know, that's, that's the DNA. It's also mostly working in the South, you know, in the Midwest to a certain extent whereThere hasn't been a supply crunch, you know, because they're building stuff, right? It's building sprawl. We can build better sprawl, worse sprawl, but it's still just getting built. And so, you know, a lot of that is about quality. How do we build good places? And so what's so frustrating about, I think, to both sides about the EMBC and U debate is that often we agree. Often building density and building quality are the same. So we're on the same team, but sometimes they're not. And the worst...Seth Zeren (55:12.502)fight is with your ally who betrays you, right? Your enemies, yeah, f**k that guy, he's terrible, right? You know, that's easy, but my friend, I thought you were with me, but now we're not, ah. And so that's what keeps happening, right? The CNU folks are like, you know, that might be a little bit too much density, aren't you worried about the blank walls? Aren't you worried about X, Y, and Z? And then, and the, and the, the Yenbis are like, are you kidding, man? Like we're all homeless, like, unless we build this building, we don't have time for your cute little nonsense. You know, your ADU is just too slow, whatever.Kevin (55:15.477)YouSeth Zeren (55:41.878)And so that's, that's on sort of goals and the people are different, right? The CNU architects first developers planners, the Yimby movement really comes out of activists, uh, political advocates, regular people, software engineers who are not professional built environment people, uh, lawyers, right? It's a policy oriented movement, economists, right? That's the core. That's their intellectual DNA is.know, economists at George Mason, whereas the CNU, it's, it's an, a few architects at Miami. That's really different DNA, right? And I think the CNU has, for whatever reason, not really, it's done some behind the scenes politics, you know, policy change, right? There's been really important behind the scenes policy change, very not visible to normal people. It's never been interested in mass mobilization, you know, votes.persuading elected officials, it's not their jam. The Yenby movement is a political advocacy movement, right? So they're trying to like win votes and get lost. So the Yenby folks have gotten more bills passed that does a bunch of CNU ideas, right? The missing middle, ADUs, all the stuff that CNU came up with like 20, 30 years ago is being mandated by bills passed by Yenby. So they're like, CNU guys, we're doing the thing. Why are you yelling at us? Right? But the Yenbys don't always appreciate that the CNU has,rebuilt so much of the DNA of 20th century planning. So like, complete streets was like a CNU invention. People don't realize that anymore because it's now so mainstream. And so there's this sort of tension where people don't see the benefits the others have provided because they're kind of operating in different styles. So that's, I think, the sort of core tension. And then I added the strong towns because strong towns sometimes finds itself fighting with both of them.And often aligned, right? Often we're all the same team, right? I consider myself a Yimby. I run a Yimby organization. I also am a Strong Towns founding member and I've been at CNU a lot. But they're subtly different, right? The Strong Towns thing that puts them at odds with some of these groups is that Strong Towns core idea is that we need to reengage bottom -up feedback, right? That the system is too top -down, too...Seth Zeren (58:06.454)tightly wound, too fixed, too set. So we build these places that are built to a finished state. We can't ever change them. We have tables that are not responsive to content. So we're just locked up. We can't get anything done. And the Strong Town's idea is, well, we need the systems to be responsive, right? If housing prices go up, we should build. If they don't go up, we shouldn't build. We need to make the streets context sensitive. And so on the one hand, we're all for getting rid of parking requirements and upzoning stuff. So the inbys are like, great.But then sometimes we're like, well, that might be too much of zoning. Here's some reasons why. And the Yenbis are like, wait, I thought you were pro density. I thought you were pro development. We're like, yes, but right. Uh, the strong towns, people would worry that the Yenbis in 1950 would have been the suburban sprawl advocates, right? They would have said, we need the houses now. Damn the consequences. We're not going to worry about fiscal insolvency in 50 years. We're just going to build the houses now. You know, that's, so that's the strong towns. Sort tension with the Yenby movement is the top down, the sort of.And this is a result of your movement being led by political advocates and attorneys and economists, right? There's the concern about that kind of top -down policy orientation, these sort of single metrics, let's get it done. And then I think sometimes there's also debate with the CNU around things trying to be too precious. Ther

Repeat founder Agustin Lopez Marquez, ex-nference, brings his AI savvy to food delivery with his new startup. Built on CloudKitchens' infrastructure, Mowgli addresses pain points for diners, sous-chefs and drivers. Loved my chat with this brilliant and practical founder. Sample Mowgli's homey meals from exotic places at https://khipi.com/. (delivers only to Boston & Cambridge for now)   Highlights:   ●      Sal Daher Introduces Agustin Lopez Marquez ●      "... my co-founder, who happens to be my wife, Brinda, she was the one that started the company and the first product about a couple of years back..." ●      "... The idea here is that these are meals for explorers, for people who like to venture out, travel. This is not pizza or your usual weekend fare for the kids, and so forth..." ●      "... it's an infrastructure play that has happened in the last three to five years. It's modular kitchens that are just the kitchens that are meant for delivery-only companies..." ●      "... You're going to become like the McDonald's of adventurous eating..." ●      "... we already have more than 10 drivers that consistently, every Tuesday, they choose to work for Khipi as opposed to working for any other food delivery company..." ●      "... I understand you have 400 customers ordering right now. 90 of those are super dedicated and they order every week. They give you 80% of your business..."    Topics: co-founders, culture, discovering entrepreneurship, robotics/AI Title: AI for Discovery Dining

“College Boy” Greg Harrington started working at Tower Records Burlington MA and did so well on his first day of register, they threw him back in receiving to do pricing. Not the usual path to working in the receiving department, but our guest this week didn't have a conventional career at Tower Records.Burlington MA, the big store on Boston's Newbury Street and the Cambridge store were all part of Greg Harrington's Tower journey. But in between all of that were stints at The Boston Phoenix, the Virgin Megastore and when Tower shut down, a considerable stint at FYE.Through it all Greg Harrington handled his Tower gigs with a positive outlook, a keen sense of humor and a pair of Oakley sunglasses wrapped around his head.On this week's episode of “2500 DelMonte Street” Greg Harrington, a Star Wars nerd, recalls ringing up Natalie Portman in Cambridge, an incident of a never solved, inside job robbery at the Newbury St. store, visits from New York Yankee coach Willie Randolph, regular visits to all three locations from Boston legend Peter Wolf, once with Van Morrison in tow and a whole lot more.Join us for a hilarious conversation with Greg Harrington on this week's episode of “2500 DelMonte Street: the Oral History of Tower Records”. 

The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet. Chris with Eileen ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing the Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative [Hiring!], published by kuhanj on December 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: The Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative (CBAI) is a new organization aimed at supporting and accelerating Cambridge and Boston students interested in pursuing careers in AI safety. We're excited about our ongoing work, including running a winter ML bootcamp, and are hiring for Cambridge-based roles (rolling applications, priority deadline Dec. 14 to work with us next year). We think that reducing risks from advanced AI systems is one of the most important issues of our time, and that undergraduate and graduate students can quickly start doing valuable work that mitigates these risks. We (Kuhan, Trevor, Xander and Alexandra) formed the Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative (CBAI) to increase the number of talented researchers working to mitigate risks from AI by supporting Boston-area infrastructure, research and outreach related to AI alignment and governance. Our current programming involves working with groups like the Harvard AI Safety Team (HAIST) and MIT AI Alignment (MAIA), as well as organizing a winter ML bootcamp based on Redwood Research's MLAB curriculum. We think that the Boston and Cambridge area is a particularly important place to foster a strong community of AI safety-interested students and researchers. The AI alignment community and infrastructure in the Boston/Cambridge area has also grown rapidly in recent months (see updates from HAIST and MAIA for more context), and has many opportunities for improvement: office spaces, advanced programming, research, community events, and internship/job opportunities to name a few. If you'd like to work with us to make this happen, we're hiring for full-time generalist roles in Boston. Depending on personal fit, this work might take the form of co-director, technical director/program lead, operations director, or operations associate. We will respond to applications submitted by December 14 by the end of the year. For more information, see our website. For questions, email kuhan@cbai.ai. We'll also be at EAGxBerkeley, and are excited to talk to people there. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

What is the best approach to starting a novel deep tech life science company?In this episode, I am talking with Samatha Dale Strasser, CSO, and co-founder of Pepper Bio, about her academic career at the University of Cambridge and MIT and the process of starting Pepper Bio.Backed by VC firm NFX, Pepper Bio uses proprietary lab methods and computational abilities to unlock a new level of sophistication in drug discovery. Called the "Google Maps for drug discovery" Pepper Bio helps partners find the safest, fastest route to new, effective drugs in clinical trials by analyzing transomics data. So far, the company has already identified applications of its technology for rare diseases in oncology, neurology, and inflammatory. Samantha Dale Strasser, PhD, is CSO and co-founder of Pepper Bio. Samantha co-founded Pepper Bio based on foundational work she pioneered during her PhD studies at MIT.  Her development of the first trans-omic machine learning platform revolutionizes how we discover drugs and treat disease.  This approach has already identified and validated previously unseen insights in inflammatory diseases and undruggable cancers.  She paved the way to Pepper's first commercial partner, eager to apply this approach to central nervous system diseases.  We are talking about:⭐The Eco-Systems in Boston⭐ The Importance of Aligning Vision – Mission – Goals – Actions⭐ Challenges in Drug Development⭐ Fundraising strategies for the United States⭐The Story Behind Pepper Bio⭐ And Much, Much moreYoutube

Parsl.run is a new company in the Boston - Cambridge area, co-founded by two recently graduated MIT students, Angel & Ruben. Almost all delivery products struggle with the "last mile problem" - getting an item from the last warehouse to the actual end customer. Parsl.run attempts to solve this problem for lightweight packages by connecting with runners to seamlessly integrate small item delivery as part of their trip, benefitting all parties. Minimally frictionless solutions like this are inspiring for better future, and Ruben was kind enough to come on and talk a bit about his company's work and goal.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Do you want to work in the new Boston EA office at Harvard Square?, published by Kaleem on May 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: We're opening a Constellation/Trajan style office in Boston in 2023 and we're interested in user feedback. We – Kaleem Ahmid, CEA's new Project Manager for the Boston Office, supervised by Jonathan Michel, CEA's Head of Property – are managing the creation of an office space in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is currently projected to open in the first half of 2023. The (currently unnamed) office will consist of a space dedicated to EA outreach, and a productivity-optimized, professional, interdisciplinary co-working space. Our current plan includes: Student outreach: One section of the space will be outreach-focused, with a coworking/event space and various meeting spaces for students at Harvard and other Boston-area schools and offices for full-time outreach professionals. Professional coworking space: One section will be dedicated to full-time professionals, in the style of Trajan House or Constellation, with private offices, meeting and coworking spaces, and various amenities. We imagine this will accommodate ~40 people at any given time. Note that there will be a reasonably clear separation between these two spaces, e.g. being on different floors. We won't be settling on the final group of individuals and orgs who will work in the office space for a while, and reserve the right to make changes to the mix as the space develops. However, if you are interested, we encourage you to read on. If you might want to work in either of these spaces, please fill out our interest form ASAP for two reasons: We are in the early design stages, and many of the decisions we will make benefit from potential-user input. As we approach the opening of the space, we will reach out to people who fill out this interest form as we build our initial community, including both full-time office occupants and tentative plans for a semester-long fellowship to work out of the office and talk to a bunch of students. So if you express interest early, your application will be considered when there are still plenty of spots to fill. Don't wait too long! We're also interested in hearing about other people who you think we should consider reaching out to, or who should fill out this form. Feel free to tell us at the end of filling it out yourself, or send me a DM. Some examples of people we'd be interested in hearing from: You are a dedicated and knowledgeable EA and would like to work from our office to engage with others members of the community. You are working for an EA org, starting a new EA org, (in the area) and you are looking for an office. You're an experienced community builder and are interested in building the EA community at Harvard/MIT, and want to use the dedicated outreach space at the office to do so. You're working on an EA project which would benefit from being housed in a space full of other EAs or in proximity with university students. Why a Boston/Cambridge, MA hub for outreach and EA more broadly? The office will be located in the only two mile radius on earth home to two of the world's top 5 universities, in the center of Harvard's campus (less than 5 minutes walking-distance from the Kennedy School, the Law School, the Science Center, and most undergraduate residences), as well as being within half an hour of other well-regarded universities like Tufts, Boston University, Brandeis, Northeastern, Boston College, Suffolk University, Emerson, UMass Boston, and is right next to a subway station on the MBTA red line (15 minutes to MIT). EA community building is a high-impact endeavor. Increasing the chances of Harvard and MIT students to pursue high-impact careers seems like a very valuable thing to do. A world-class office ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My Q1 2019 EA Hotel donation, published by vipulnaik on the Effective Altruism Forum. Write a Review On March 31, 2019, I donated 3200 GBP to the EA Hotel fundraiser via GoFundMe. The donation cost me $4,306.14 USD. My decision was based mainly on the information in the EA Hotel page and the documents linked from the donations list website page on EA Hotel, which include the recent Effective Altruism Forum posts. In this post, I describe the reasons that influenced my decision to donate. I didn't draft the post before donating, so some of the elaboration includes aspects that didn't (at least consciously) influence my donation decision. I limited the time I spent writing the post, and will most likely not be able to respond to comments. But please feel free to comment with your thoughts in response to my post or other comments! NOTE: I have no affiliation with the EA Hotel. I have never visited it, nor have I closely collaborated with anybody living there. I did not show this post to anybody affiliated with the EA Hotel before posting. Nothing here should be taken as an official statement about the EA Hotel. The sections of the post: I like the idea of the EA Hotel I like the skin-in-the-game of the key players I like the execution so far I see institutional risk reasons for lack of institutional funding: These reasons don't apply to individual donors, so I don't see the lack of institutional funding as a reason to dissuade me from donating I have not been dissuaded by the reasons against donating that I have seen so far I find the value of marginal donations high and easy to grasp How I decided to donate and determined the donation amount I like the idea of the EA Hotel My interpretation of the fundamental problem the EA Hotel is trying to solve: provide low-cost and optimized transient living arrangements to people engaged in self-study or early stages of projects. The hotel's low-cost living arrangements are further subsidized so that long-term residents don't have to pay anything at all, and in fact, get a stipend to cover some living expenses. This means that residents can pursue projects with single-minded focus without burning through savings or having to do additional jobs just to keep themselves financially afloat. The backdrop of the problem, as I understand: EA communities have congregated in some of the most expensive places in the world, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston/Cambridge, New York City, and London. Even outside of these, most places with significant numbers of EAs tend to be cities, and these tend to have higher costs of living. Most EA projects have trouble raising enough money to cover costs of living in these places, even after they get funding. Moreover, most EA organizations, which are also based in these areas, do not pay enough of a premium for people to build savings that would allow them to comfortably spend months working on such projects in these expensive locations. Tendencies within EA to donate large fractions of one's personal wealth may have further exacerbated people's lack of adequate savings to pursue EA projects. These problems, specially the first one, have been widely acknowledged. Attempts to figure out a new, lower-cost city for EAs and build group housing in that city started since as far back as 2014, when the Coordination of Rationality/EA/SSC Housing Project group was created. Browsing through the archives of that Facebook group is interesting because it shows the amount of effort that has gone in over the years in identifying lower-cost living places for EAs. This is the group where EA Hotel founder Greg Colbourn first announced his intention to buy a hotel in Blackpool. Side note: Peter McCluskey's comment suggests that complaining about the high rent in major hubs is a signal of low status, because the mo...

On episode 34 of "Unfiltered", listen as Emily explains what she wishes she knew one year ago, using all she's learned and experienced over the past year to give some advice to incoming freshmen!! She also hosts a "Top Five" series where she gives recommendations on her top five meals, desserts, coffee shops, healthy eats, and activities in the Boston/Cambridge area. Why are upperclassmen the best resource for advice/help, in Emily's opinion? Why is it important to not wish the time away? And where can one find the best dessert in the city? Find out on this episode :)

At the corner of Prospect and Ferry Streets, a restaurant had a quiet opening. The usual fanfare around grand openings had to wait. The Ironbound was in the grips of a pandemic that brought the usually bustling thoroughfare to a mute standstill. Nevertheless, SIhana set its tables and opened its doors to the community, presenting a fresh new take on a space to eat, hang out, and absorb art. Kreshnik Beresha, one of the founders and owners of Sihana, joins the pod to discuss the unique mission of Sihana and what it is like to open a space during what may be the most challenging epoch in this city’s history—at least in the last 50 years.. Guest: Kreshnik Beresha—Kreshnik is an owner and founder of Sihana. Originally from Albania, he grew up in New Jersey and has spent time in other cities like Boston/Cambridge. He is currently a Newark resident. Background & Articles:Sihana’s Facebook Page: hereQuote: ““To tell the truth, this was one of the few cases in which she had not told him just what she was thinking. Usually, she let him know whatever thoughts happened to come to her, and indeed he never took it amiss if she let slip a word that might pain him, because when all was said and done that was the price one paid for sincerity.” Broken April,, Ismail Kadare

Our next guest has been continuously active in the fields of innovation, entrepreneurship, human-centric design and digital marketing since earning his Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree. He went on to earn his MBA degree with distinction at Yale. He began his career in Silicon Valley, and has spent his entire career in the world's leading innovation clusters of Silicon Valley / San Francisco, Boston / Cambridge, Austin, TX and Tel Aviv, Israel. He's a successful serial tech entrepreneur, multi-award winning professor, innovation consultant, angel investor, board member, hackathon & design sprint leader, popular keynote speaker, podcast author, and in-demand startup mentor.

Listeners to Dirty Spoon may recall journalist Anna Nguyen from our episode where she profiled and interviewed Chris Scott, from the show Top Chef. Since then, Anna has relocated from Montreal to Cambridge/Boston to take a position as a research fellow at Harvard. We catch up on what it is like living in the city during lockdown, and the racist blowback one can feel just for being an Asian-American out for a jog during a pandemic. Find Anna's work at www.ilostmyappetite.com

Bryson's parents travel to Boston/Cambridge, the global capital for rare disease research. Their goal: to ask private biotech companies to help in their search for a cure. Scientists provide new clues, but also raise difficult questions. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/unlocking-bryson-s-brain-transcripts-listen-1.6740317

Bryson's parents travel to Boston/Cambridge, the global capital for rare disease research. Their goal: to ask private biotech companies to help in their search for a cure. Scientists provide new clues, but also raise difficult questions.

Arthur Kleinman is a name that comes up again and again when you search around our big college town of Boston / Cambridge for people asking the great human questions, about our lived experience — ... The post The Soul of Care appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Arthur Kleinman is a name that comes up again and again when you search around our big college town of Boston / Cambridge for people asking the great human questions, about our lived experience — ... The post The Soul of Care appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

New York native with a Romanian Descent, graduate of PENN STATE LAW, discusses his start up and influence from Luamky, rhapsody, where dance has taken him, speciality, dance techniques, his recent move to the Boston/Cambridge area. FOLLOW him on IG: @patrick.opran --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/DancersReport/message

The following is an excerpt of an ArtScience talk on New England Foodways held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Leah Mennies, Senior Food Editor at Boston Magazine organized and hosted the event which consisted of a Panel discussion. Panelist included Babson Food Historian Fred Opie, Irene Li, chef/owner of Mei Mei, and Marc Sheehan, chef/owner of Loyal Nine. Both are Cambridge based restaurants. The theme of the talk is the future of New England Foodways--How do we define them now? How should that change? What are the challenges? What does a regional sense of place through cuisine look like? How does the past inform this? How can the storytelling surrounding New England cuisine be stronger/better/more informed? What does that look like here in Boston/Cambridge vs. in the region as a whole? Let's keep the conversation going with panels of experts from different fields and occupations in as many spaces as possible around the region--colleges, public and private libraries and schools, churches, historical societies and museums. And let's record these panel and publish them as a series as the first step in documenting the region's foodways. Please share your ideas and suggestions for advancing the project. Take the time to review the show on You Tube, iTunes, Stitcher, and Soundcloud. If you like what you hear and learn, tell others about it and share and post the link to the show Leah Mennies' Food Writing: https://www.bostonmagazine.com/author/lmennies/ About Fred Opie: http://www.fredopie.com Mei Mei's: https://www.meimeiboston.com/menu Loyal Nine: https://www.loyalninecambridge.com/ Subscribe to the Podcasts: http://www.fredopie.com/podcasts/

Immigration and Russian foreign policy are focal points of contemporary US politics, yet little in-depth information about either is on offer. This panel discussion will address both through the lens of the unrecognized impact of the waves of Russian-speaking immigrants to the US described in Hammer and Silicon, (Cambridge University Press, 2018). The presentation of the book and the panel discussion will provide important background for current policy discussions through delving into the unintended consequences of past Soviet and Russian foreign policy that allowed for the immigration of many highly educated, talented Russian-speaking scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs to the US. Hammer and Silicon presents the untold story of the significant contributions of these technical professionals to the US innovation economy, particularly in the sectors of software, social media, biotechnology and medicine. Drawing upon more than 150 in-depth interviews split between Boston/Cambridge and Silicon Valley, the book chronicles the hardships they endured in transit and in cultural adaptation; while also exploring how they took advantage of new opportunities in their adopted homeland. Their stories and experience are part of a broader picture of immigrant contributions to the US tech sector that is extremely relevant to today’s debates over the future of immigration policy. Author Bios: Dr. Sheila M. Puffer is University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, Boston, USA, where she is a professor of international business at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. She is also an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and has served as program director of the Gorbachev Foundation of North America. In 2015 she was a visiting research professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University where she studied entrepreneurs and other technical professionals from the former Soviet Union. She worked for six years as an administrator in the Government of Canada and has consulted for a number of private and nonprofit organizations. Dr. Puffer earned a diploma from the executive management program at the Plekhanov Institute of the National Economy in Moscow and holds BA (Slavic Studies) and MBA degrees from the University of Ottawa, Canada, and a PhD in business administration from the University of California, Berkeley. Daniel M. Satinsky, Esq. is a Business Development Consultant and Independent Scholar. For more than 20 years, Daniel has been engaged in technology-related international business projects and building practical business networks, with a concentration on Russia-related projects. He has traveled to the Soviet Union and Russia more than 100 times from 1984 to the present. He was President of the Board of the U.S.-Russia Chamber of Commerce of New England for more than 15 years and is an Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of Harvard University. He holds a Master of Law and Diplomacy degree from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, a Juris Doctor degree from Northeastern University Law School and a Bachelor of Arts degree from James Madison College of Michigan State University. Moderator: Anna Uritsky, is a Harvard Club member, who has been the Executive Director and a Board member of the U.S.- Russian Chamber of Commerce of New England for the last 8 years. She studied and worked in Russian, Hungary, and the United States. She previously worked at Morgan Stanley, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (Moscow office), and pre-eminent strategic communications firm the PBN Company (Moscow office). Anna attended the Budapest University of Economic Sciences (currently Corvinus University of Budapest) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

This week, we present two stories of scientists under professional and academic pressure, both in the field and in the lab. Part 1: In China, ornithologist Sam Snow and his colleague gather as much data about a species of bird as possible -- but it comes at a cost. Part 2: Biologist Megan Hatlen worries that she’ll never make a breakthrough in her research. Sam Snow is an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist, currently a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. He looks at birds to explore the evolutionary consequences of mate choice for sexual ornamentation, mate-system evolution, and social behavior. His research seeks to understand how females evolve new traits that overcome sexual coercion, reshaping mating systems and male social behavior. In search of answers, he creates theoretical computer models of behavioral evolution and attempts to test these theories by documenting the behavior of birds in the wild. Megan Hatlen is a biologist at Blueprint Medicines, a fantastic biotech located in Cambridge, MA.  Recently transplanted from NYC, she earned her PhD from Cornell University and performed research in oncology at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center prior to making the Boston/Cambridge life-science pilgrimage.  Though nearly a decade has been spent on the East Coast, the West Coast will always have her heart.  Megan is a California native; she was raised in Bakersfield and earned her bachelors in Bioengineering at the University of California – San Diego.  When not running experiments, Megan can be found with her wife, Jess, holding their chubby Pomeranian back as he strives to attack anything and everything on the Minuteman Bikeway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Stargate Pioneer, Agent Lauren and Agent Haley discuss the Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode “What If...” The Agents then finish up the show by running down some weekly Marvel news and responding to listener feedback.   THIS TIME ON LEGENDS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.:   Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. “What If...” Weekly Marvel News YOUR feedback!!!!   AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. [02:21]   WHAT IF…   Directed by: Oz Scott http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0779641/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1#director 107 - That’s right - 107 Directing Credits Including going back to 1981 1 x Hill Street Blues 2 x Archie Bunker’s Place 2 x Gimmie a Break 40 x The Jeffersons 3 x Fame 3 x Scarecrow and Ms. King 1 x Dirty Dancing 5 x The Robert Guillaume Show 4 x L.A. Law (No - he did NOT direct Diana Muldaur (Star Trek’s Dr. Pulaski and TOS’s Dr. Miranda Jones / Ann Mulhall) 1 x Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman 1 x Timecop 4 x Chicago Hope 6 x The Practice 2 x Ally McBeal 1 x The Guardian 6 x Family Law 1 x Ed 2 x JAG 1 x 4400 1 x Boston Legal 1 x Psych 1 x NCIS 1 x Eureka 1 x 90210 11 x CSI: NY 1 x The Tomorrow People 2 x Gotham 1 x Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.   Written By: DJ Doyle http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2677260/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1#writer 13 x Executive Story  editor - Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. 10 x Story Editor - Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. 6 x Written By - Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. 1 x Script - Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.   Meaning of “What If…” What If you’ve biggest regret changed The Matrix - convincingly real Comics Status of S.H.I.E.L.D. No more S.H.I.E.L.D. (See promo for next week) HYDRA is large and in charge Where’s Strucker? Where’s all the HYDRA greats? RIP Bill Paxton...AKA Agent Garrett HYDRA Homeland Strategic Defense        “Suspect It. Report It. For Humanity” Triskelion You NEED your ID Cool Tazer bullets HYDRA came from Nazi’s Alexander Pierce High School Creepy surveillance So every teenager keeps a 2 gallon gas can in his trunk in The Matrix? Ward Traitor …. Again Protecting Skye (Knows she is inhuman blood) Pinksy Who is Pinksy? Coulson Completely bought in What is his regret? HYDRA came from centuries ago….therefor not Nazi’s It’s a magical place New Shield Director “Jeffrey” Mace (Jason O’Mara - Men In Trees, Life On Mars, Terra Nova) NOT IN THIS EPISODE Mack NOT IN THIS EPISODE YoYo NOT IN THIS EPISODE (Name dropped) May Bought in hook, line and sinker Reeling from the girl’s killings in Boston “Cambridge” incident Fitz “The Doctor” Simmons Murdered at the SHIELD Academy Faux-Buried in the UK Daisy Gets into the interrogation Looks up Lincoln Dr Batti Senator Nadeer’s brother, Vijay (Speedy Inhuman) Not in this episode….still “dead”? Resistance Jason Rasheen Aida Mark 2 (Mallory Jansen) RE-codes Simmons and Daisy’s exit Agnes Kitsworth  NOT IN THIS EPISODE The Bus “Zephyr One” NOT IN THIS EPISODE Star Wars Reference Others Inhuman Resistance - Watchdogs Terrance Shockley (John Pyper-Ferguson) NOT IN THIS EPISODE Senator Ellen Nadeer Not an inhuman? Also not alive anymore? Lola NOT IN THIS EPISODE Talbot and Mustache NOT IN THIS EPISODE Darkhold Book. NOT IN THIS EPISODE POST CREDIT SCENE/SCHWARMA/STINGER:    Quotes   NEWS [29:56]   NETFLIX SERIES   Defenders teaser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngpuw41IqPk https://www.yahoo.com/tech/marvel-covertly-reveals-release-date-defenders-netflix-201637579.html   MARVEL   Marvel’s Senior VP of sales & marketing blames diversity for sales slump https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/37152/marvels-david-gabriel-2016-market-shift   CBR: Diversity is not killing Marvel’s sales (with figures) http://www.cbr.com/no-diversity-didnt-kill-marvels-comic-sales/   Mark Waid wants to punch reporters, not Nazis https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/04/02/marvels-mark-waid-weighs-face-punching-debate-not-nazis-bleeding-cool-reporters/   Black Panther, Ms. Marvel, Vision, and Deadpool (movie) nominated for Hugo Awards http://io9.gizmodo.com/here-are-the-2017-hugo-awards-finalists-1793991378   AWWWWWW / COOL STUFF   New Warriors (WITH SQUIRREL GIRL) series ordered at Freeform https://news.marvel.com/tv/62577/marvels-new-warriors-headed-freeform-straight-series-order/   FEEDBACK [38:15]   TWITTER   Johnny ~R‏ @BornToEatBacon  Mar 30 More @LegendsofSHIELD   https://yesspoilers.com/2017/03/29/agents-of-shield-once-upon-a-time-renewal-conundrum-at-abc/   ********************************************* Consultant BlackAdam‏ @Starsaber_222  Mar 30 More Consultant BlackAdam Retweeted Jamie Fay @LegendsofSHIELD Consultant BlackAdam added,   Jamie Fay @jamiefayx My take @IMBrettDalton as Ward from @AgentsofSHIELD colored by the talented @WitchySaint! #AgentsofSHIELD #HailHydra #BrettDalton   **********************   Johnny ~R‏ @BornToEatBacon  Apr 1 More Johnny ~R Retweeted ComicBook NOW! @LegendsofSHIELD FYI Johnny ~R added,   ComicBook NOW!Verified account @ComicBookNOW Is this Agents of SHIELD’s last season? EP Jed Whedon comments on the possible series finale... http://bit.ly/2oufWvR   *********************************   Christy‏ @adanagirl  Apr 1 More Christy Retweeted Geoffrey Colo @LegendsofSHIELD Christy added, Geoffrey Colo @GeoffreyColo Madame Hydra to Appear on @Marvel #AgentsofSHIELD — First Look http://ew.com/tv/2017/04/01/agents-shield-madame-hydra/ … via @ew   **************************************   Dr. Gnome to you‏ @MrParacletes  Apr 3 More @LegendsofSHIELD Oh good, Sony's sticking with the MCU with Spidey. http://epicstream.com/news/Producer-Clarifies-Rumors-About-Spider-Mans-Future-In-The-MCU …   ***********************************   Dr. Gnome to you‏ @MrParacletes  Apr 3 More @LegendsofSHIELD Think well see Kilgrave again too? http://epicstream.com/news/Jessica-Jones-Season-2-Already-in-Production …   OUTRO [50:04]   Haley, Lauren and Stargate Pioneer love to hear back from you about your top 5 Marvel character lists, your science of Marvel questions, who would you pick in an all-female Avenger team, or who’s Marvel abs you would like to see. Call the voicemail line at 1-844-THE-BUS1 or 844-843-2871.   Join Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D. next time as the hosts discuss the Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 4 episode 17 titled “dentity and Change” on Wednesday April March 12th, 2017. You can listen in live when we record Wednesday nights at 8:00 PM Central time at Geeks.live (Also streamed live on Spreaker.com). Contact Info: Please see http://www.legendsofshield.com for all of our contact information or call our voicemail line at 1-844-THE-BUS1 or 844-843-2871   Don’t forget to go check out our spin-off podcast, Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D..: Longbox Edition for your weekly Marvel comic book release run-down with segments by Black Adam on S.H.I.E.L.D. comics, Lauren on Mutant Comics and Anthony with his Spider-Man web down. Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Longbox Edition is also available on the GonnaGeek.com podcast network.   Catch SP and Michelle at The Indiana Comic Con Panels   Indiana Comic Con April 14-16: SP with Michelle Ealey from Starling Tribune FILLING THE EMPTY PODCAST CHAIR 2:00pm – 3:00pm // Rm. 131 Do you want to start a podcast, but need help finding co-hosts? Have you started a podcast, but need help finding a new co-host because someone left? Join veteran podcaster and GonnaGeek Vice President of Network Development Stargate Pioneer along with fan turned Starling Tribune co-host Michelle Ealey for a discussion on finding co-hosts for your podcast and tips for becoming a co-host on an established show.   FINDING CO-HOSTS FOR YOUR PODCAST 11:30am – 12:30pm // Rm. 131 Do you want to start a podcast, but need help finding co-hosts? Have you started a podcast, but need help finding a new co-host because someone left? Join veteran podcaster and GonnaGeek Vice President of Network Development Stargate Pioneer along with fan turned Starling Tribune co-host Michelle Ealey for a discussion on finding co-hosts for your podcast and tips for becoming a co-host on an established show.   HOW TO PRODUCTIVELY PODCAST WITH OTHERS 11:00am – 12:00pm // Rm. 131 Do you want to start a podcast, but need help finding co-hosts? Have you started a podcast, but need help finding a new co-host because someone left? Join veteran podcaster and GonnaGeek Vice President of Network Development Stargate Pioneer along with fan turned Starling Tribune   Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Is a Proud Member Of The GonnaGeek Network (gonnageek.com).   This podcast was recorded on Wednesday April 5th, 2017.   Standby for your S.H.I.E.L.D. debriefing ---   Audio and Video Production by Stargate Pioneer of GonnaGeek.com.

This week on Chef's Story, we profile Chris Himmel, Executive Vice President of Business Development for the Himmel Hospitality Group. The Himmel family owns and operates three of Boston/Cambridge’s most successful and respected restaurants: Grill 23 & Bar, Harvest Restaurant and Post 390 Restaurant. Chris has been a fixture at the restaurants most of his life; first at Grill 23 & Bar, one of the country’s top steakhouses; next at the iconic Harvest in Harvard Square, where New England farmers and product have been the culinary inspiration for over 30 years, and now at the popular Back Bay restaurant, Post 390, known for its “Farm to Post” menus and “Kitchen to Cocktail” program. A graduate of the prestigious Cornell School of Hotel Administration, Chris set his sights on learning from the best in hospitality, training under Danny Meyer and Chef Thomas Keller. Running the three Boston/Cambridge restaurants owned by Himmel Hospitality Group, Chris brings a deep passion for product and hospitality to each of the restaurants.