Innovation

I'm the associate editor of Medical Economics, and I'd like to thank you for joining us today.

In today's episode, I sat down with Wayne Weingarten, senior fellow in business and economics at the Pacific Research Institute, where he also directs the Center for Medical Economics and Innovation.

33 states now restrict the corporate practice of medicine to some degree, and lawmakers and several more are moving to tighten those limits.

Weingarten's argument is that that crackdown is aimed at the wrong target.

today.

Thanks so much for having me.

Once again, that was a conversation I had with Wayne Weingarten, Senior Fellow in Business and Economics at the Pacific Research Institute and Director of the Institute's Center for Medical Economics and Innovation.

You can find a link to his policy brief, How Government Policy is Consolidating the Practice of Medicine in the show notes below.

because you've addressed the reaction what happens yeah what happens after that

so in my opinion i think this is a luck issue um because no one person can tell all the mods but everyone requires skill to adapt yeah it's like Innovation always comes as a surprise.

As a surprise.

I think, in fact, that is just the nature of technology.

Only going to grow faster.

Inflation won't be a problem because in a period of remarkable innovation, which is what we have now, the innovation revolution, Innovation is known for a lot of things, but from an economic point of view, as being disinflationary.

It brings the cost down of everything.

That's one of the great things about innovation and productivity is the cost of most things you have to buy goes down.

It's not happening right now because, again, putting up all these data centers, I mean, that's a lot of spend.

It's kind of remarkable we haven't had more inflation, frankly, in the near term.

Absolute melt-up scenario.

So while we've said, we think, honestly, I think we're in the first inning.

And that's really amazing.

And given all this work that you've done, you are most widely known for an assay innovation that you came up with, which is known as MOPA.

Can you tell us what this assay is, what it does, and why it was such a breakthrough for vaccine development?

Yeah, so before our development of Omopa, vaccine developers were using an assay called ELISA.

Congratulations.

That's really impressive.

And, you know, all these innovations that you've had are now underpinning FDA-approved pneumococcal vaccines, as well as next-generation vaccines, some of which are in late-stage clinical trials, including a 21-valent vaccine that was approved by the FDA recently.

So, Moon, tell us, what is it, or how does it feel, I should say, for you to see this incredible work that you've done throughout your life and your career contributing to vaccines that have the potential to protect millions of additional lives?

Through a cluster of new financial creations, which include establishing a new stablecoin to instantly enable international transactions between different regions and currencies, creating so-called insight tokens where you authorize an AI agent or a merchant to learn about your habits and preferences, and building B2B agentic payments for machines with huge volumes of continuous business transactions.

These are just some of the major advances driving MasterCard to number 10 on Forbes' brand new list just released on Tuesday, America's Most Innovative Large Companies.

The very notion of innovative is, of course, inherently subjective.

But with this new list, Forbes relies solely on hard data that captures dozens of different indicators of sector-leading innovation, no matter their industry or age.

No major feature on innovative companies would be complete without a little innovation of our own.

For the first time, Forbes turned to an AI-based data source as one input into a list.

The Forbes Most Innovative Large Companies list measures how synthetically created audiences of investors, analysts, journalists, and customers, based on real people and built using their previous writing in a variety of situations, responded to thousands of real company announcements, such as Amazon's Proteus press release, as well as social and blog posts, leadership statements, and earnings calls from the past few years.

This data was provided by Kumquat AI, a synthetic audience company founded this year that performs this analysis with archetypes for each industry.

So a lot can be found on BMW's website.

You can Google basically BMW Open Innovation.

You'll see that exact process.

Those are our websites, so that came from central, but the exact same process is what we've adopted for our region.

Where does innovation in Southeast Asia actually start? Here are three conversations from the archive.

Anthony Chow of Igloo on a smart lock for doors with no Wi-Fi, built after 11-hour installs and a recall.

Kelvin Teo of Funding Societies on turning Asia doesn't need innovation into a playbook.

and Dennis Velasco of Prosperna on why none of it counts until small businesses trust you.

What's interesting is that, you know, you're making this set of decisions around this, right? You have to figure out how to hack the product together, which is hardware, you know, so selling, etc.

Of course, trying to sell the book as well.

But it was very inspiring.

And one thing that he said, which shook me a bit, was that he mentioned that Asia doesn't need innovation.

So, uh, they hired him.

The Sixers hired Tommy Balthétas as the Head of Basketball Intelligence, Analytics, and Innovation.

Uh, Michael Scotto-

These, these titles, these titles get more and more obnoxious by the day.

That went on for way too long, into the noughties, I think, Next catalogue.

But of course, you know, we have to salute the Innovations catalogue.

Oh, yes.

Oh.

Yeah

...

it always reminds me of the Innovations catalogue.

[laughs]