All-Time Greatest Podcasts

My guest today joined the Stanford Design Division faculty in 1962. He was the youngest member of the university faculty and now decades later, he’s the oldest faculty member. His name is Bernard (Bernie) Roth and he is the author of The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life. As one of the founders of Stanford’s d.school, he remains active in the d.school’s development and currently serves as the Academic Director. Bernie’s primary intention as both an educator and a person is to empower his students, family, and friends to have fulfilling lives. He’s the...

This week my guest is Jeff Speck, a city planner and urban designer who advocates internationally for more walkable cities. His book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time was written not just for designers, but to also convert generalists to his cause. Walkability doesn’t just impact city planning; it has huge effects on economics, health, and the environment. Jeff’s TEDtalks on the subject has been viewed over 4 million times. We built our cities to accommodate pedestrians for centuries and they worked well. Now we’re building our cities structured around the idea of everyone...

Dr. Antonio Zadra is the author of When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep alongside co-author Robert Strickgold, they detail a new theory on why we dream and call it the NEXTUP model. Antonio is a researcher who focuses on the scientific study of dreams, including everyday dreams, nightmares, lucid dreams, sleep terrors, and sleepwalking. Together with his students and collaborators, Antonio has published over one hundred research articles and collected thousands of firsthand dream reports.

This guest is Eve Joseph, an award-winning poet, incredible storyteller, and the author of a book about death and dying (which also happens to be her memoir) entitled In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying. The book flows out of Eve’s lessons and insights from working with and serving people at the end of their lives as a hospice care provider and represents the two central themes of the conversation: death and writing.

Matthew Gavin Frank’s life has been filled with remarkable experiences. He has lived in Alaska, worked as a sommelier and grape harvester in Italy, spent time on the orange farm in South Africa where his wife is from, lived out of a Coleman Cimmaron in New Mexico, and held dozens of different jobs. He’s an accomplished cook and a travel addict, has learned through the past two decades how to live well in close relationship with another person, and is committed to fixating on and losing himself in all aspects of life - the simple, the complex, and the mystifying.

In this podcast, Stephan shares the origins of the 8-hour workday and his experience shifting his own employees to practicing the 5-hour workday. He dives into how the experiment came to be, the percentage increase in productivity, the people who influenced Stephan’s career, and the importance of company culture. Listen as Stephan brings you along on his journey of how he shifted his views on life and work.

Marcus joins me today to share openly about the challenges he has faced, overcome and to explain his inspiring life journey. Marcus talks about his experience becoming and being an entrepreneur and author; offers thoughts on how he thinks about the world, himself and the concept of story; and comments on the power that entrepreneurship, words and healthy self-care all hold.     

Dean revisits with us today to discuss the science behind mental health and its treatments. We talk about what causes or contributes to depression, the concept of toxic positivity, the significance of social norms, and how it determines what is and isn’t considered mentally healthy.

Today Stephen Cope joins me to talk about his journey. He discusses the concept of Dharma, going into both how to recognize it and how to know when you have it.

Today, Steven Kotler joins me to expand on this principle. He discusses how stopping to think about the prospect of completing a task is the greatest obstacle to doing it. He talks about how beginning is the hardest part. He discusses curiosity, passion, and purpose, noting that with these most tasks don’t take more than twenty seconds of grit: the grit it takes to start. He mentions the three most important aspects of feedback on his writing, what defines a peak performer, and the importance of knowing where you’re going instead of just where you’re starting.

Peter McGraw joins me to talk about his journey and what he’s learned from it. He talks about the common denominator of all comedy, what makes a good comic, and the “benign violation” theory.