Smart People Podcast

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 this new medium affect its users, and does it have a future beyond fantasy and escapism?This week on the show, Jeremy Bailenson draws on two decades spent researching the psychological effects of VR and other mass media to help us understand this powerful new tool. He offers expert guidelines for interacting with VR and describes the profound ways this technology can be put to use―not to distance ourselves from reality, but to enrich our lives and influence us to treat others, the environment, and even ourselves better.There are dangers and many unknowns in using VR, but it also can help us hone our performance, recover from trauma, improve our learning and communication abilities, and enhance our empathic and imaginative capacities. Like any new technology, its most incredible uses might be waiting just around the corner.Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication, a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and a Faculty Leader at Stanford’s Center for Longevity. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. He spent four years at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.Jeremy is the author of the incredible new book, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do.—This episode is brought to you by:Audible, listen anytime, anywhere to an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original premium podcasts, and more. Start a 30-day trial and your first audiobook is free! Go to audible.com/smart or text SMART to 500-500.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 education is not to enhance students' skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity—in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee. In fact, decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for the average worker but instead in runaway credential inflation, yet employers still reward workers for costly schooling they rarely if ever use. Therefore, his recommendation is to cut education spending.Caplan draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge, and why the more education your rivals have, the more you need to impress employers. He explains why graduation is our society's top conformity signal, and why even the most useless degrees can certify employability. He advocates two major policy responses. The first is educational austerity. Government needs to sharply cut education funding to curb this wasteful rat race. The second is more vocational education, because practical skills are more socially valuable than teaching students how to outshine their peers.Bryan Caplan is professor of economics at George Mason University and a blogger at EconLog. He is the author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun than You Think and The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.http://www.bcaplan.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 and women are the ones who tend to suffer the most.This week on the show we have a chance to talk with Mary Beth Ferrante about the struggles that working mothers face, and the ways they can get what they deserve.Mary Beth is a former Senior Vice President for a Fortune 100 Firm who has made the successful transition to a certified career coach with the International Coach Federation. She is trained in Organizational, Relationship & Systems Coaching (ORSC). In addition, she has chaired national women's organizations and been on the Board of Directors of the Junior League of Los Angeles. Today, she works with new moms (and dads!), managers and organizations to best support new parents, discover what inspires and drives new parents in their careers.Learn more about Mary Beth at LiveWorkLead.com—This episode is brought to you by:Audible, listen anytime, anywhere to an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original premium podcasts, and more. Start a 30-day trial and your first audiobook is free! Go to audible.com/smart or text SMART to 500-500. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 "light" drinking while recording so expect complete openness and a dash of silly.We want to hear from you, the listener!If you're a fan of Smart People Podcast and would like to provide input to help shape the future of the show, please email us at smartpeoplepodcast@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you and get in touch.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 dash of silly. We want to hear from you, the listener!If you're a fan of Smart People Podcast and would like to provide input to help shape the future of the show, please email us at smartpeoplepodcast@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you and get in touch.Here's to 2018! 🙌 💪 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Nancy examined the lives of five of the greatest leaders of all time to better understand how they led through adversity and came out the other side stronger. These extraordinary individuals include: polar explorer Ernest Shackleton; President Abraham Lincoln; legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and environmental crusader Rachel Carson.In her book, Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times, Nancy begins each chapter by showing her protagonist on the precipice of a great crisis: Shackleton marooned on an Antarctic ice floe; Lincoln on the verge of seeing the Union collapse; escaped slave Douglass facing possible capture; Bonhoeffer agonizing over how to counter absolute evil with faith; Carson racing against the cancer ravaging her in a bid to save the planet. Significantly, as we follow each leader’s against-all-odds journey, we begin to glean an essential truth: leaders are not born but made. In a book dense with epiphanies, the most galvanizing one may be that the power to lead courageously resides in each of us.Join us as we learn the keys to leadership in turbulent times and the lessons we can glean from some of the most well respected individuals of all time.Nancy Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E. Robison chair of Business Administration. Koehn's research focuses on how leaders, past and present, craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Koehn earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before taking her MA and PhD in History from Harvard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 evolution and increase our mental and physical resilience?This week on the show we interview investigative journalist and anthropologist Scott Carney (scottcarney.com). In his New York Times best selling book, What Doesn't Kill Us, Scott tries to figure out if it is possible to hack our bodies and use the environment to stimulate our inner biology?Helping him in his search for the answers is Dutch fitness guru Wim Hof, whose ability to control his body temperature in extreme cold has sparked a whirlwind of scientific study.In this episode, Scott tells us about his own transformational journey as he pushes his body and mind to the edge of endurance, a quest that culminates in a record-bending, 28-hour climb to the snowy peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro wearing nothing but a pair of running shorts and sneakers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 did they feel when making that jump—and afterward?Mike sought guidance from others who had “jumped,” and the responses he got—from a banker who started a brewery, a publicist who became a Bishop, a garbage collector who became a furniture designer, and on and on—were so clear-eyed and inspiring that Mike wanted to share what he had learned with others who might be helped by those stories. Out of these stories came When To Jump, a community dedicated to exploring the fundamental question we all think about: when is the right time to go do what you really want to be doing?Mike is the author of the brand new book, When to Jump: If the Job You Have Isn't the Life You Want, and he is also the host of the new hit podcast, When To Jump.—This episode is brought to you by:Health IQ, an insurance company that helps health conscious people get special life insurance rates. Go to healthiq.com/SPP to support the show and see if you qualify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 every creator and their creation to get stuck from time to time. And it is in those times, that we need someone like Steve on our side.This week on the show we speak with Steve McKee - an expert on revitalizing stalled, stuck, or stale brands. The lessons we discuss can apply to all creative endeavors, and go far beyond business.Steve is the president and co-founder of McKee Wallwork & Company, an integrated marketing firm that specializes in revitalizing stalled, stuck and stale brands. MWC is an Inc. 500 company, has twice been awarded the American Marketing Association's Effie Award (one of the industry's highest honors), and has been recognized by Advertising Age as one of ten top small agencies in the nation. Steve has nearly three decades' experience coaching troubled brands as they look to better position themselves for success. Steve writes for SmartBrief and is the author of the books Power Branding: Leveraging the Success of the World's Best Brands, and When Growth Stalls: How It Happens, Why You're Stuck, and What to Do About It.—This episode is brought to you by:Health IQ, an insurance company that helps health conscious people get special life insurance rates. Go to healthiq.com/SPP to support the show and see if you qualify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"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 SimonWhen we put our money in a bank (or a mutual fund, pension plan, endowment, etc.) it doesn't just sit there, it is put to use. It is invested in the economy, and it has power. But have you ever stopped to wonder what your money is being invested in? Is it supporting the causes and communities you care about? Or is it being used to further the cause of individuals, organizations, or governments that you disagree with.It is time to recognize that we are all investors, and that it is up to us to make sure we are adding more value than we extract and that the risk and returns are balanced between our investments and the communities.This is the basis for impact investing. Impact investing is the support of social and environmental projects with a financial return, and it has become a hot topic in the world's philanthropy and development circles. In the next decade, it is poised to eclipse traditional aid by ten times. Yet for all the excitement, there is work to do to ensure it actually realizes it’s potential.This week on the show we are interviewing an expert in this field, Morgan Simon. Morgan is the author of the brand new book, Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change. Over the past seventeen years, she has influenced over $150 billion in capital. Morgan currently co-leads Candide Group, which supports two clients, including members of the Pritzker family on behalf of the Libra Foundation. She is also co-founder and chair of the non-profit Transform Finance.Previously, Morgan served as the founding CEO of Toniic, a global network of impact investors, and as the founding executive director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition.—This episode is brought to you by:Health IQ, an insurance company that helps health conscious people get special life insurance rates. Go to healthiq.com/SPP to support the show and see if you qualify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices