Author Nir Eyal joins Michael for his second appearance on the show. And today it’s all about distraction.

For example. You sit down at your desk to work on an important project, but a notification on your phone interrupts your morning. Later, as you’re about to get back to work, a colleague taps you on the shoulder to chat. At home, screens get in the way of quality time with your family. Another day goes by, and once again, your most important personal and professional goals are put on hold.

What would be possible if you followed through on your best intentions? What could you accomplish if you could stay focused? What if you had the power to become “indistractable?”

Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving us to distraction. He describes why solving the problem is not as simple as swearing off our devices: Abstinence is impractical and often makes us want more.

Eyal overturns conventional wisdom and reveals:

• Why distraction at work is a symptom of a dysfunctional company culture—and how to fix it.

• What really drives human behavior and why “time management is pain management.”

• Why your relationships (and your sex life) depend on you becoming indistractable.

• How to raise indistractable children in an increasingly distracting world.

Empowering and optimistic, Indistractable provides practical, novel techniques to control your time and attention—helping you live the life you really want.

Scott Adams and Wise Advice About Not Staying in Your Lane.

A New 2020 Book with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.

“AI is the ‘runtime’ that is going to shape all of what we do.” –Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani show how reinventing the firm around data, analytics, and AI removes traditional constraints on scale, scope, and learning that have restricted business growth for hundreds of years. From Airbnb to Ant Financial, Microsoft to Amazon, research shows how AI-driven processes are vastly more scalable than traditional processes, allow massive scope increase, enabling companies to straddle industry boundaries, and create powerful opportunities for learning–to drive ever more accurate, complex, and sophisticated predictions.

When traditional operating constraints are removed, strategy becomes a whole new game, one whose rules and likely outcomes this book will make clear. Iansiti and Lakhani:

• Present a framework for rethinking business and operating models.

• Explain how “collisions” between AI-driven/digital and traditional/analog firms are reshaping competition, altering the structure of our economy, and forcing traditional companies to rearchitect their operating models.

• Explain the opportunities and risks created by digital firms.

• Describe the new challenges and responsibilities for the leaders of both digital and traditional firms.

This is an essential guide for rethinking how your firm competes and operates in the era of AI.

Marco Iansiti, the David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, also heads the school’s Technology and Operations Management Unit and the Digital Initiative. Iansiti is an expert on digital innovation, with a special focus on strategy and business and operating model transformation. He advises Global 1000 companies on digital strategy and transformation and has conducted research on a variety of organizations, including Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Amazon, Alibaba, and Google, among many others.

Karim R. Lakhani is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration and the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Fellow at Harvard Business School. He is the founder and codirector of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, the principal investigator of the NASA Tournament Laboratory at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the faculty cofounder of the Digital Initiative at HBS. He is also Chair of the Harvard Business Analytics Program. He specializes in technology management and innovation.

“In the age of fake news, understanding who we trust and why is essential in explaining everything from leadership to power to our daily relationships.”

We live in a world where proven facts and verifiable data are freely and widely available. Why, then, are self-confident ignoramuses so often believed over thoughtful experts? And why do seemingly irrelevant details such as a person’s appearance or financial status influence whether or not we trust what they are saying, regardless of their wisdom or foolishness?

Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks compellingly explain how in our uncertain and ambiguous world, the messenger is increasingly the message. We frequently fail, they argue, to separate the idea being communicated from the person conveying it, explaining why the status or connectedness of the messenger has become more important than the message itself.

Messengers influence business, politics, local communities, and our broader society. And Martin and Marks reveal the forces behind the most infuriating phenomena of our modern era, such as belief in fake news and how presidents can hawk misinformation and flagrant lies yet remain.

Stephen Martin, the CEO of the consulting and training company Influence at Work, works with companies around the world. He is the co-author of Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion, which has sold over a million copies internationally and been translated into 26 languages. Steve’s work has been featured in broadcast and print media across the world, including BBC TV and Radio, MSNBC, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired, The London Times, Sunday Telegraph, and the Guardian. Joseph Marks is an associate consultant with Influence at Work and a doctoral candidate working jointly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University College London. His research and studies have been published in both academic journals and The New York Times, Bloomberg and the Harvard Business Review.

The Daily Stoic Meets The Trend Attitude with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.

Award-winning Carleton University neuroscientist Kim Hellemans and cognitive scientist Jim Davies created an audio show called “Minding the Brain.” Michael, Kim and Jim jump into all that is the mind!

Jim Davies is an award-winning American/Canadian cognitive scientist, playwright, artist, and author. He is a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science and the School of Computer Science at Carleton University, where he is the director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory. His research focuses on visual reasoning, analogy, and imagination. Kim Hellemans is a Senior Instructor in the Department of Neuroscience at Carleton University, where her research focused on understanding the biological basis of drug addiction.

Roll into 2020 with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.

Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur based in Pescadero, California.

Blank is recognized for developing the customer development method that launched the lean startup movement, a methodology which recognized that startups are not smaller versions of large companies, but require their own set of processes and tools to be successful. His Lean Launchpad class (taught as the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps) has become the standard for commercialization for all federal research.

Blank writes and teaches about customer development and the lean startup method. He is an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford; lectures at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and is a senior fellow at Columbia University. He has written four books: The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost, The Startup Owner’s Manual and Holding a Cat by the Tail.

And I am lucky to have Steve on today!