Marty Makary and Mehmet Oz Talk 'Interspecies Communication'
The Door is Open to Big Market Innovation
Interspecies communication refers to the exchange of information between individuals of different species. This can happen in many ways — through sounds, gestures, body language, chemicals (like pheromones), or even technology-assisted methods.
Dogs understand certain human words, tones, and gestures, while humans interpret barks, whines, tail wagging, or body posture. Some flowers change color or release scents to attract pollinators like bees or butterflies. In short, it's all about how different species send and interpret signals across the species divide. The Santa Fe Institute is deeply engaged in exploring interspecies communication, not in the literal sense of translating animal languages in real‑time, but in developing new concepts from complex systems theory to decode and understand communication across species.
In a recent paper in Animal Behaviour, four SFI postdoctoral fellows introduced three new concepts from complex systems science — scales of organization, compression, and emergence — that could be particularly useful to researchers studying complexity in animal sociality.
“None of these three concepts are, by themselves, diagnostic of a complex system, but all three are often part of one,” says Elizabeth Hobson (University of Cincinnati), a former SFI complexity postdoc and lead author on the paper. “These concepts could lead us in totally new directions and offer new insights” to better tackle longstanding problems about communication across different species.
Like “government” and “market” inter-operating as a single economic system.
Marty Makary and Mehmet Oz wrote an opinion piece yesterday in the Wall Street Journal (Cooperation Is the Key to MAHA) arguing that government working with industry (or, depending on your perspective, industry working with government) will enable big system change faster than blunt-force regulation alone. The piece opens with the new deals struck between the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Brands Association to phase artificial colors out of the food and beverage industry, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used its convening power to tackle pre-authorizations.
“These are two of many examples of the Health and Human Services Department achieving Trump administration priorities through direct negotiation with the private sector. As regulators, we could have approached our goals through the traditional rulemaking process. But that route would have taken years, may not have been as far reaching and could have stalled out like many other aspirations. As doctors, we have no patience for wasting time when it comes to the biggest healthcare issues facing Americans.
Working with industry is the best place to start. And we believe in industry to do the right thing when called upon. Our approach—inspired by President Trump and led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—is to invite companies to the table, persuade them of the public interest and recognize the ones that cross the finish line. Our agencies are in a strong position to show Americans which companies are doing the right thing when it comes to popular reforms. By the time we’re done, we will have built new relationships and be better positioned to hold them accountable.
The problem with prescriptive regulation is that it often puts more power in the hands of bureaucrats than society is willing to tolerate. As agency leaders directly accountable to the president, our cabinet secretary and Congress, we answer to the public. Market solutions keep the power in the hands of the public. That keeps us focused on results.
Makary and Oz say much of their agenda will come from new deal making between industry and government, strategy for economic innovation, “that result from successful negotiations with the large segments of the U.S. economy we regulate. The response to our invitation to come to the table and improve outcomes for consumers, patients and clinicians has been overwhelming. Everyone wins when the government leads with purpose instead of paperwork.”
Space for ‘New Industry Narratives’
The massive grapple in healthcare is positioning ‘value alignment’ across a system of markets, where different species cohere, construct and communicate better visions for the future. And then using the ‘convening power’ of that positioning as leverage to break structural stalemate, to crack The Mad Riddle with better storytelling and story selling.
The Blue Spoon perspective:
As a general rule, you can’t “fix” an embedded economic system, whether that economic system orbits around CVS Health, Moderna, UnitedHealthcare, the NHS or the U.S. Congress. This has nothing to do with desire and ambition so much as it does with feedback loops sustaining the status quo.
Healthcare is not going to evolve as an ecosystem if the species within it are locked in a discursive war, mounting long attacks on each other (say Big Pharma vs. Big PBM vs. Big Payer, with Big EBC floating somewhere in the middle). Nor will it evolve by chasing operational “efficiency” in the hope it conjures shareholder value. That delivers what we have now: strategic atrophy, systemic performance declines, a celebration of short-term wins, a stunningly bad ROI from a $5 trillion investment made every year in trying to preserve the horseless carriage.
"Everyone is looking for signals on what Trump might do on a host of health issues. On the early Executive Orders, Trump doesn't show his cards," said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF not long ago.
I read “Cooperation Is the Key to MAHA” through this lens:
There are some things money can’t buy, but these days, not many.
Today, almost everything is up for negotiation within the context of a business deal. The bigger the business deal, and the more disruptive it is to the status quo, the better aligned its value proposition will be to the world according to Trump.
“President Trump approaches diplomacy and engages in a very transactional manner, with economics as the foundation and driving force behind international affairs,” retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the president’s special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, explained at an event in Washington recently.
For Trump, it’s about leverage, not friendship; dollars as much as values.
From bees to birds to humans, the animal kingdom is full of organisms that have evolved complex social structures to solve specific problems they encounter. Everything is on the table for a world that has turned upside down practically overnight, a place where market thinking and market relationships define every human activity.
Former Chief of MI6, Sir Alex Younger speaking on BBC NewsNight about the “dawn of a new era” where decades of policy and international relations aren’t going to be determined by conventional rules of engagement, but by playing a completely different game, defined as"strong men and deals" made through the lens of market power, leverage and control:
"I don't think we're going back to the one we had before," he says. "The entry ticket to this conversation is about hard power, and the category challenge" is how to develop that power to get a seat at the negotiating table.
And there are no bigger business deals to be made than the ones that invent new economic systems (‘ecosystem-centered market strategy’), the kind with 'gravitational pull' to displace or degrade current structures, that have the conventing power to snap things into a whole new orbit for market innovation.
On the Origin of Species
Healthcare is a ‘nested market’ — its main feature is the density of structural linkages and interactions that cut across domains. By not understanding how to create with complexity, the collective We lack the vision and understanding of how to develop policy that enables 'market interoperability' – an innovation agenda to align value, to cohere the ‘commercial determinants of health’ in a way that a new economic species is born.
And that process starts by intensive cooperation among diverse ‘market sets’ to realize workable economic futures. It takes joint articulation of vision and story, forming weird alliances (‘differential connectedness’), negotiating deals and managing complex relationships.
Few have been schooled in these arts.
In related news, Oscar Health yesterday said it is slashing its full-year guidance by about half a billion dollars. Its shares are down almost 40 percent over the past month.
/jgs
John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new industry narratives.