Smart People Podcast

This week we interview Bob Rosen. Bob is a trusted CEO adviser, organizational psychologist, and bestselling author. Bob set out to help executives become better leaders so he founded Healthy Companies International. Bob is frequently a keynote speaker across the globe. Bob has spoken in all areas of leadership: transformation, innovation, and growth. Bob is the author of many books, but this week...

This week we interview Mike Rognlien. Mike spent most of his career in tech. He worked at Facebook, where he built their first-ever professional and manager development programming. He also partnered with COO Sheryl Sandberg to build Facebook’s Managing Unconscious Bias course. He is an expert facilitator that focuses on leadership, strengths, and talking about the tough stuff. Mike is the author...

This week we interview Due Quach. Due is a refugee from Vietnam and a graduate of Harvard College and the Wharton MBA program. Due overcame the long-term effects of poverty and trauma by turning to neuroscience and meditation. After building a successful international business career in management consulting and private equity investments, Due traveled throughout Asia to study various contemplativ...

This week we interview Dr. Traci Stein. Dr. Stein is a Columbia-trained, licensed clinical psychologist and health educator. She is also certified in clinical hypnosis by the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH). Her focus has been on helping people to reduce uncomfortable physical and emotional symptoms and gain greater insight into who they are and want to be.  Dr. Stein is also the auth...

This week we interview John Hooker. John Hooker is Professor of Operations Research and Holleran Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at Carnegie Mellon University. His book, Taking Ethics Seriously: Why Ethics Is an Essential Tool for the Modern Workplace, develops an intellectual framework for analyzing ethical dilemmas that is both grounded in theory and versatile enough to de...

This week we interview Dr. Elizabeth Boham. Dr. Elizabeth Boham is a physician and nutritionist who practices Functional Medicine at The UltraWellness Center is Lenox, MA. Through her practice and lecturing she has helped thousands of people achieve their goals of optimum health and wellness. Her DVD, Breast Wellness: Tools to Prevent and Heal from Breast Cancer explores the functional medicine ap...

This week we interview Barbara Lipska. Barbara is a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness and she has an absolutely fascinating story to tell. It would be unfair to give anything away from the interview or the book, so download the episode and give it a listen! We discuss: What does a typical day look like for the director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the National Institute...

This week on the show we interview Adam Braun. Adam is the CEO & Co-Founder of MissionU, a debt-free college alternative for the 21st century that CNN called "perfect for young people who are eager to launch their career." Adam's goal is to overhaul the traditional higher education model by providing a solution that doesn't require upfront tuition and allows students to graduate debt-free. We disc...

Like our bodies, our brains have very specific food requirements. In this episode we speak with Dr. Lisa Mosconi, who is both a neuroscientist and a certified integrative nutritionist, as she explains what should be on our menu. Dr. Lisa Mosconi, whose research spans an extraordinary range of specialties including brain science, the microbiome, and nutritional genomics, notes that the dietary need...

"Don’t just chase the new – Innovate the old." - Soon Yu Modern business gurus all cry for the need to innovate, to disrupt, and to act like a startup. It’s hard to argue with that kind of thinking. It’s sexy and exciting. But it’s wrong. Too many businesses become enamored by shiny new objects and end up overlooking the value locked away in their existing products. Maybe your business is one of t...

Virtual reality is able to effectively blur the line between reality and illusion, pushing the limits of our imagination and granting us access to any experience imaginable. With well-crafted simulations, these experiences, which are so immersive that the brain believes they’re real, are already widely available with a VR headset and will only become more accessible and commonplace. But how does t...

It's not often I truly feel that a guest changes my paradigm on the spot - but this is an exception. This week we speak with Bryan Caplan about his newest book, The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. As Bryan explains, despite being immensely popular--and immensely lucrative—education is grossly overrated. Bryan argues that the primary function of educat...

Did you know that working mothers are 50% LESS likely to be promoted than women without children? Or that only 1 in 5 senior executives is a woman? Have you ever realized that working moms are judged when they leave work early to tend to their children AND when they stay at work late (and "neglect" their families)? The truth is, we have a work environment that is not conducive to being a parent an...

We made it. You made it! Here's part 2 of our listener questions and 'year in review.' Quick recap. Before we closed out 2017, we sent an email to our newsletter subscribers asking what questions they would like answered. This is part 1 of Chris and I attempting to answer those questions. It was the first time in years that we recorded under the same roof. How crazy is that?!?! WARNING: there was...

We made it to 2018! Welcome :) Before we closed out 2017, we sent an email to our newsletter subscribers asking what questions they would like answered. This is part 1 of Chris and I attempting to answer those questions. It was the first time in years that we recorded under the same roof. How crazy is that?!?! WARNING: there was "light" drinking while recording so expect complete openness and a da...

For leaders in the 21st century, there is one pressing question: What set of skills is required to lead in crisis, and can history give us answers? Our guest this week, Harvard Business School historian and professor Nancy Koehn, has surveyed some of history’s greatest leaders and made an incredible discovery: courageous leaders are not born but made, and the power to lead resides in each of us. ...

Our ancestors crossed deserts, mountains, and oceans without even a whisper of what anyone today might consider modern technology. Those feats of endurance now seem impossible in an age where we take comfort for granted. But what if we could regain some of our lost evolutionary strength by simulating the environmental conditions of our forebears? Or even more importantly, can we tap into our evolu...

Our guest this week is Mike Lewis, Founder and CEO of When To Jump. When Mike was twenty-four and working in a prestigious corporate job, he eagerly wanted to leave and pursue his dream of becoming a professional squash player. But he had questions: When is the right time to move from work that is comfortable to a career you have only dared to dream of? How have other people made such a jump? What...

We are all creators. Every day we go out into the world and use our unique human abilities to shape our environment. We create a life for ourselves, we create a product or service for others, we create relationships through it all. And what we all come to learn is that creativity is a messy business. We will run into road blocks, we will lose our motivation, we will fail. It is the destiny of ever...

"Money is a tool to create the things that we want. It is a proxy for security, health, and welfare for our families and loved ones. When we lose that holistic thinking about what wealth is, then our money winds up working at a very singular purpose to create more pieces of paper as opposed to create greater human and environmental welfare." - Morgan Simon When we put our money in a bank (or a mut...

Mindfulness is all the rage these days. And yet, even as the New York Times churns out articles like How to Be Mindful While Grocery Shopping and How to Be Mindful When You have Seasonal Allergies a quick look at NIMH or NIH data shows that Americans are sicker than ever, poorer than ever, more psychologically disturbed than ever. Though the literature has certainly been convincing, we have to ask...

In today's work environment, our success is heavily dependent on our ability to consistently deliver strong results. And although there are multiple inputs that lead to our results, there is one secret weapon that outweighs everything else. The key to success ultimately lies in the strength of our relationships. You may be thinking to yourself, "But wait, we are talking about business! With all of...

Narcissism—an inflated view of the self—is everywhere. Public figures say it’s what makes them stray from their wives. Parents teach it by dressing children in T-shirts that say "Princess." Teenagers and young adults hone it on Facebook, and celebrity newsmakers have elevated it to an art form. In a world that measures success by page views and number of followers, those with narcissistic tendenci...

There is no debate that a good education is a critical component of raising smart, well rounded, successful children. But cutting-edge research has proven that early childhood education is crucial for all children as young as 3 years old to gain the academic and emotional skills they need to succeed later in life. In essence, pre-K may actually be the most important year.   Children who attend qua...

"Calling Trump crazy allows us to avoid confronting the craziness in our society—if we want to get sane, we must first gain insight about ourselves. Simply put: Trump isn’t crazy, but our society is." - Dr. Allen Frances This week on the show we interview one of the men who literally wrote the book on mental illness as we answer the question - Is Trump crazy? And what does it say about America tha...