The Mindset Economy

Trust isn't just a feeling. According to Dr. Paul Zak, it's a measurable neurochemical process and it might be the strongest predictor we have of whether a person, a company or even a country will thrive. In this episode, host Jean Gomes talks to Paul Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, the founder of neuroeconomics as a field, and one of the most cited scientists in the w...

What do you do when your chatbot understands you better than the people in your life? Dr Charlotte Blease is a health informaticist and philosopher who's spent the last decade surveying doctors about how they actually use AI, not how they're supposed to use it. She holds positions at Harvard Medical School, the University of Melbourne and Uppsala University, and she's the author of...

Raising kids to handle failure matters more than teaching them any specific fact about how the brain works, and our guest on episode 8 of The Mindset Economy podcast Nicholas Wright makes that case using his own family history. His Great Uncle Sydney fought through World War II as a tank commander, one of just three from his officer training class to survive without death or serious injury, and li...

Dr. Leo Anthony Celi thinks half the deans at universities and half the seats in health ministries should go to young people, and he's got a story to back it up. Back in 2022 during a basketball game that was taking place at the Moda Center in Portland, Oregon, the basketball net got tangled. The men on the court kept trying to out-jump each other to fix it, but it was the women's cheeri...

COVID forced fast, sweeping change in a way almost nothing else has, and design futurist Sarah Housley says the reason why is worth understanding properly.  Talking on The Mindset Economy podcast, Sarah explains the Overton window, the range of ideas a politician can propose and still keep their job, and how it flew wide open during the pandemic because there was one clear problem and one clear so...

Leor Zmigrod won't hand you a five-step plan to become a more flexible thinker, because that would just be another rigid system to follow. Instead she offers two things worth sitting with: question the rules and routines that quietly narrow your life, and chase creativity that actually breaks the mould instead of following a recipe. Earlier this year, Leor was a guest on The Mindset Economy p...

Five years from now, organisations will look smaller, portfolio careers will be normal again, and your employer will have a far better read on your mood than you'd probably like. If you listen to episode 5 of The Mindset Economy podcast, you’ll hear Ja-Naé Duane and Steve Fisher lay out where they think work is heading, from agentic technology replacing whole roles to digital twins reshaping...

Complaining feels productive right up until you realise it's getting you nowhere, and during his conversation with Mindset Economy co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, guest Chris Hirst breaks down what he calls the ROI of complaining. His argument is blunt: the vast majority of what happens to you, your team, or your business sits outside your control, from the economy to your competitors...

Mind wandering isn't a sign you're slacking off. On The Mindset Economy podcast, Mithu Storoni explains it's actually your brain telling you it needs a break, and reaching for coffee instead of listening to that signal has consequences you won't notice until later. Mithu breaks down her three-gear model of the brain, from the floaty, unfocused state of gear one to the locked-in...

Most conversations inside your organization don't meet a basic bar for quality according to Amy Edmondson, and during episode 4 of The Mindset Economy podcast she'll tell you exactly why. Amy lays out three things that separate a genuinely useful conversation from one that just fills time: everyone's either contributing or listening, there's a real mix of statements and questio...

Winston Churchill packed one and a half working days into every single day of World War II and still made time to reflect. In episode 8 of The Mindset Economy podcast, guest Nicholas Wright walks through a handful of historical examples that sharpen the point: Eisenhower building a wide base of knowledge thanks to a mentor who forced him to read widely, Stalin outperforming Hitler partly because h...

In 2026, AI is mostly being used to retrieve information faster, and during his conversation with Jean Gomes on The Mindset Economy podcast, Dr. Leo Anthony Celi shares that that's a massive waste of what the technology could actually do. He wants AI built to make us more creative, more humble, more curious, and less gullible, and explains why training it on nothing but the internet's co...

"People are not excited about the future anymore."  That's the opening line of design futurist and guest on The Mindset Economy podcast Sarah Housley's book Designing Hope, and it's where this conversation starts. She talks through why the big visions of the last century, fossil fuels and plastic among them, delivered real progress and real damage in the same breath, and w...

Forget fascism and communism for a second. Leor Zmigrod studies ideology as a way of thinking, not a specific set of beliefs, and that reframe changes the whole conversation. On The Mindset Economy podcast, Leor explains what actually makes someone ideological: a rigid system of rules they refuse to question, and a habit of sorting the world into who belongs and who doesn't. It has nothing to...

Leaders are being asked to solve problems from this century with mental models built for the last one, and talking on The Mindset Economy podcast futurist, innovation leader and co-author of SuperShifts Steve Fisher tells us that makes that point often. Steve raises a question worth sitting with: when AI spots a pattern humans can't see, who actually makes the final call? Steve argues that we...

'Whatever you do, don't turn up and be yourself.'  That line got Chris Hirst plenty of grief on social media, but he stands by it. Appearing as a guest on The Mindset Economy podcast, Chris tells us that he can't stand the phrase 'authentic leadership' because he's watched too many senior people use it to excuse bad behaviour. His actual advice is simpler: show u...

Your brain isn't a muscle, but we've been running our workplaces as if it were since the 1950s. Neuroscientist Mithu Storoni traces that mistake back to the Industrial Revolution, when the idea of efficiency got applied to assembly lines and then, without much thought, to knowledge work. In a conversation with Jean Gomes and Scott Allender on The Mindset Economy podcast, Mithu explains w...

Psychological safety isn't about being nice, it's about permission for candour. In this short extract taken from The Mindset Economy podcast, Amy Edmondson (who built her career studying psychological safety) explains why. Learning is never comfortable. You're taking a risk every time you admit you don't know something or that you got it wrong. Amy walks us through why hierarch...

How much of global conflict is driven by our own biology? In this episode of The Mindset Economy, we are joined by Dr. Nicholas Wright to examine the "brain-war" connection through the lens of neuroscience and military strategy. We explore the neuroscience of war, how our evolutionary wiring influences modern battlefields and how the experience of conflict fundamentally reshapes the huma...

AI is not failing because of bad technology. It is failing because of bad questions. Dr. Leo Anthony Celi , critical care physician and researcher at MIT, has spent years exposing a problem that the machine learning community would rather not face. The datasets training our most powerful healthcare AI do not just underrepresent certain populations. They reflect, and quietly reinforce the inequalit...

What does leadership look like when nobody really knows what’s coming next? In this episode, Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are joined by Chris Hirst, former global CEO and leadership advisor, to explore how leaders and individuals make decisions in a world shaped by uncertainty and AI. Chris challenges some familiar ideas, arguing that working hard is not enough, and that the real differentiator i...

The rules that got you here may be the very thing holding you back. Ja-Naé Duane and Steve Fisher call them super shifts, fundamental changes so significant that many of the assumptions underpinning how we work, lead, and create value are quietly becoming obsolete. Expertise, control, certainty: the frameworks that once provided stability are starting to break down. Most organisations are yet to r...

Most leaders say they want candour. Almost none of them have it. Amy Edmondson, Harvard professor and the world's leading researcher on psychological safety, argues that the problem isn't culture, it isn't trust, it isn't people. It's the invisible interpersonal risk that makes speaking up feel more dangerous than staying quiet. In a world where AI is accelerating the pace...

 The greatest risk of the AI era may not be losing our jobs. It may be losing our ability to imagine something better. Futurist Sarah Housley has noticed something troubling. As AI advances and change accelerates, many people are experiencing less agency, not more. The collective imagination about what the future could look like seems to have stalled, replaced by anxiety and short-term thinking at...

Intelligence does not protect you from dogmatism. In some cases, it makes it worse. This is one of the more unsettling findings to emerge from the work of Dr. Leor Zmigrod, neuroscientist at Cambridge and author of The Ideological Brain. Her research reveals that ideology is not defined by what you believe, but by how you believe it. When thinking becomes rigid and fused with identity, the brain n...