Dinosaur Hunting with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.
The Godmother of Silicon Valley, legendary teacher, and mother of a Super Family shares her tried-and-tested methods for raising happy, healthy, successful children using Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness: TRICK.
Esther Wojcicki—“Woj” to her many friends and admirers—is famous for three things: teaching a high school class that has changed the lives of thousands of kids, inspiring Silicon Valley legends like Steve Jobs, and raising three daughters who have each become famously successful. What do these three accomplishments have in common? They’re the result of TRICK, Woj’s secret to raising successful people: Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness. Simple lessons, but the results are radical.
Wojcicki’s methods are the opposite of helicopter parenting. As we face an epidemic of parental anxiety, Woj is here to say: relax. Talk to infants as if they are adults. Allow teenagers to pick projects that relate to the real world and their own passions, and let them figure out how to complete them. Above all, let your child lead. How to Raise Successful People offers essential lessons for raising, educating, and managing people to their highest potential. Change your parenting, change the world.
Note: Her husband is Stanford University professor of physics Stanley Wojcicki. They have three daughters: Susan (CEO of YouTube), Janet, a Fulbright-winning anthropologist, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and researcher, and Anne (co-founder of 23andMe).
Wake Up and Think with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. A special mega episode!
Art Markman is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Founding Director of the Program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. The HDO program brings the humanities and the social behavioral sciences to people in business. Art’s research explores thinking. He has studied the way people form and use analogies, the mechanisms of decision making, the modes that allow people to form categories, and the influences of motivation on reasoning. Art is also the executive editor of the journal Cognitive Science and is a former executive officer of the Cognitive Science Society.
If you’re in a job interview, how should you think about the mindset of the interviewer? If you’ve just been promoted, how do you handle the tensions of managing former peers? And what are the telltale mental signs that it’s time to start planning your next career move?
We know that psychology can teach us much about behaviors and challenges relevant to work, such as making better decisions, influencing people, and dealing with stress. But many popular books on these topics analyze them as universal human phenomena without providing real-life, constructive career help.
Bring Your Brain to Work changes all that. Art Markman focuses on three essential elements of a successful career–getting a job, excelling at work, and finding your next position–and expertly illustrates how cognitive science, especially psychology, sheds fascinating and useful light on each of these elements.
To succeed at a job interview, for example, you need to understand the mindset of the interviewer and know how to come across as exactly the individual the company wants to hire. To keep that job, it’s critical to master the mental challenge of learning every day. Finally, careers require constant development, so you need to be able to sense when it’s time to move up or out and to prepare yourself for the move. So many of the hurdles you face throughout your career are, first and foremost, psychological challenges, and Markman shows you how to use your different mental systems–motivational, social, and cognitive–to manage them more effectively.
Integrating the latest research with engaging stories and examples from across the professional spectrum, Bring Your Brain to Work gets inside your head, helping you to succeed through a better understanding of yourself and those around you.
Social Control Arrives with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.
Jeff Dyer (Ph.D UCLA) is the Horace Beesley professor of strategy at Brigham Young University as well as professor of strategy at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Before becoming a professor he spent five years as a consultant and manager at Bain & Company, a top management consultancy. His book “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators”, with Harvard professor Clayton Christensen and MIT professor Hal Gregersen, identifies the behaviors of the world’s best innovators to demonstrate how individuals can enhance their own innovator DNA and increase the innovation capabilities of their organizations.
Today Jeff and Michael discuss his newest book Innovation Capital. You see, great leaders of innovation know that creativity is not enough. They succeed not only on the basis of their ideas, but because they have the vision, reputation, and networks to win the backing needed to commercialize them. It turns out that this quality–called “innovation capital”–is measurably more important for innovation than just being creative.
The authors have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator’s DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator’s Method). Now they share what they’ve learned from a multipronged research program designed to determine how people compete for, and obtain, resources to launch new ideas.
How you can build a personal reputation for innovation. What techniques you can use to amplify your innovation capital. How you can garner attention for your ideas and projects and persuade audiences to support them. What it means to provide visionary leadership and how you can achieve it. Featuring interviews with the superstars of innovation–individuals like Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Elon Musk (Tesla), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo), and Shantanu Narayen (Adobe)–Jeff dives in deep.
Cheerios and Failure with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.
After a lifelong fascination with financial markets, Steve Burns started investing in 1993, and trading his own accounts in 1995. It was love at first trade. A natural teacher with a gift for cutting through the bull and making complex ideas simple, Steve took to blogging and social media by founding New Trader U in 2011.
Since then, New Trader U has attracted hundreds of thousands of visits a month, becoming the go-to resource for people who want to build a strong trading foundation. New Trader U offers an extensive blog resource with more than 1,000 original articles, as well as online courses and best-selling books covering a variety of topics.
Steve and Michael get together once again on the podcast–an ongoing conversation going back to 2013!
Keep Going with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.
David Weinberger is an American technologist, professional speaker, and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (originally a website, and eventually a book, which has been described as “a primer on Internet marketing”). Weinberger’s work focuses on how the Internet is changing human relationships, communication, knowledge and society.
Artificial intelligence, big data, modern science, and the internet are all revealing a fundamental truth: The world is vastly more complex and unpredictable than we’ve allowed ourselves to see. Now that technology is enabling us to take advantage of all the chaos it’s revealing, our understanding of how things happen is changing–and with it our deepest strategies for predicting, preparing for, and managing our world. This affects everything, from how we approach our everyday lives to how we make moral decisions and how we run our businesses.
Take machine learning, which makes better predictions about weather, medical diagnoses, and product performance than we do–but often does so at the expense of our understanding of how it arrived at those predictions. While this can be dangerous, accepting it is also liberating, for it enables us to harness the complexity of an immense amount of data around us. We are also turning to strategies that avoid anticipating the future altogether, such as A/B testing, Minimum Viable Products, open platforms, and user-modifiable video games.
Through stories from history, business, and technology, philosopher and technologist David Weinberger finds the unifying truths lying below the surface of the tools we take for granted–and a future in which our best strategy often requires holding back from anticipating and instead creating as many possibilities as we can. The book’s imperative for business and beyond is simple: Make. More. Future. The result is a world no longer focused on limitations but optimized for possibilities.
A Beijing Journey with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. You have not been yet? Go. See it.
Based on eight years of research visiting dozens of startups, tech companies and incumbents, Harvard Business School professor Thales Teixeira shows how and why consumer industries are disrupted, and what established companies can do about it—while highlighting the specific strategies potential startups use to gain a competitive edge.
There is a pattern to digital disruption in an industry, whether the disruptor is Uber, Airbnb, Dollar Shave Club, Pillpack or one of countless other startups that have stolen large portions of market share from industry leaders, often in a matter of a few years.
As Teixeira makes clear, the nature of competition has fundamentally changed. Using innovative new business models, startups are stealing customers by breaking the links in how consumers discover, buy and use products and services. By decoupling the customer value chain, these startups, instead of taking on the Unilevers and Nikes, BMW’s and Sephoras of the world head on, peel away a piece of the consumer purchasing process. Birchbox offered women a new way to sample beauty products from a variety of companies from the convenience of their homes, without having to visit a store. Turo doesn’t compete with GM. Instead, it offers people the benefit of driving without having to own a car themselves.
Illustrated with vivid, indepth and exclusive accounts of both startups, and reigning incumbents like Best Buy and Comcast, as they struggle to respond, Unlocking the Customer Value Chain is an essential guide to demystifying how digital disruption takes place – and what companies can do to defend themselves.
A Wild Takeoff and Bezos the Trend Trader Revisited with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.
Amy Webb is an American futurist, author and founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute. She is professor of strategic foresight at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and was a 2014-15 Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Her new book is “The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity.” It is a call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head.
We like to think that we are in control of the future of “artificial” intelligence. The reality, though, is that we–the everyday people whose data powers AI–aren’t actually in control of anything. When, for example, we speak with Alexa, we contribute that data to a system we can’t see and have no input into–one largely free from regulation or oversight. The big nine corporations–Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple–are the new gods of AI and are short-changing our futures to reap immediate financial gain.
In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI–the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself–is broken. Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don’t share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity.
Eyes Wide Open Brain on Neutral with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.
Michael interviews Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic about his new book “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It).” He is currently the Chief Talent Scientist at Manpower Group, co-founder of Deeper Signals and Metaprofiling, and Professor of Business Psychology at University College London and Columbia University.
There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes, that prevents women from accessing the ranks of power. Conservatives and chauvinists tend to endorse the first; liberals and feminists prefer the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. But what if they all missed the big picture?
In Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.
The Foundation of Good Trading with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.
Jules Pieri is Co-Founder and CEO of The Grommet – a marketplace for unique and innovative ideas to launch. She helps entrepreneurs bypass the corporate chain by reshaping how consumer products get discovered, shared, and bought. Her new book is “How We Make Stuff Now: Turn Ideas into Products That Build Successful Businesses.”
Jules loved fine arts in school. She went to the University of Michigan and subsequently put herself on an “art diet” so she could focus her studies in other areas. She eventually took a sculpture class and saw some unique tools that were created by students. She had a light bulb moment-wanting to know how to get into the space of creating new products. Jules started her career as an industrial designer for technology companies and later moved into senior executive roles for large brands, such as Keds, Stride Rite, and Playskool.
When Jules worked at Playskool she saw a large concentration of power among the big brands and noticed innovation slipping away as big retailers like Walmart, Kmart, Target and Toys-R-Us were unwilling to buy new/fresh products. They would take on new products but only ones with slight variations or products with a little new twist. The Grommet was later formed as a response – Jules saw a new route for getting products made and she jumped on the idea. Since October 20th, 2018 The Grommet has launched one new product a day and given small brands the chance to grow among the big competitors.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio:
Inventing
Patents & Trademarks
Innovation
Amazon and counterfeit products
New product launches
Taking the Damn Loss with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.
Rich Karlgaard is a journalist, entrepreneur, and speaker. He has been with Forbes for 27 years and became publisher of Forbes magazine in 1998. Rich has written three books, “Life 2.0: How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness,” and “The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success.” His latest book is “Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement.”
What was the trigger that pushed Rich to write “Late Bloomers?” Rich grew up as a late bloomer himself. He was at non-fulfilling “dead end jobs” up until his late 20’s, even with gaining a college degree. He doesn’t see his 20’s as a time of being lazy or having a lack of motivation, he simply didn’t feel like he was ready to enter the adult world. He also has two children whom he raises in Silicon Valley. He knows the added pressures being put on children and what those repercussions look like– from low self esteem to even suicide in teenagers. He felt a need to point out some of the major misconceptions adults may have about schools, tests, and the learning curve in each child.
Rich makes arguments for gap years, mandatory military service, and reforming how we look at academic tests. Americans are slipping every year compared to other counties and their youth. This has trickled into human resources and legal sides of companies that have turned to ranking employees with more tests and categorizing personalities based off data. Rich’s books, articles, and speeches also primarily focus on fundamentals of business, necessity of constant innovation, and the importance of building the right corporate culture.
The trading author Jack Schwager helped launch this podcast. Enjoy!
Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist, New York Times bestselling author, and a weekly advice column writer for The Atlantic titled, “Dear Therapist”. Her most recent book, “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone” (set for release in April, 2019), is not about getting people to go to therapy but rather to reflect on their lives – to be more open with the people around them. Lori also shows patients, through her book, that she herself is human and has issues in her own life relatable to most everyone.
What got Lori interested in psychotherapy? She had other careers leading up to becoming a therapist. She was a T.V. executive, went to medical school in her late 20’s, became a journalist, and then went back to school for clinical psychology. With help from her Dean at Stanford, she realized that she was searching for a more personal connection in her work – clinical psychology was a perfect match for her.
When most think about the idea of seeking a psychologist for help, they look at it as a sign as weakness. When it comes to emotional help people become closed off or don’t think they have a valid enough reason to be depressed. How does Lori help clients get past these social biases? She helps clients work through their problems by seeing personal blind spots and how they might be sabotaging themselves with crutches in their lives. But, most of all, she shows them how to grow through connection with others.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio:
Calculated risk
Idiot compassion vs. wise compassion
Loneliness epidemic
“Them and Us” mentality
Speed of want
24-hour news cycle
The Alternative Thinking Universities Shun with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio.
Brent Huigens is an entrepreneur in the world of trading cards. He is founder and president of PWCC Marketplace, the largest seller of investment trading cards globally with more than $50 million in annual revenue. In 1998 Brent founded PWCC to provide buyers and sellers an efficient, honest and predictable marketplace. In 2012, he set his current engineering career aside to pursue the growth of PWCC full time.
When did Brent collect his first playing card? From the early age of about five he never wanted anything other than trading cards for his birthday or Christmas. He was hooked from the beginning. He had a modest card collection growing up, but it wasn’t until his early teenage years that his collection had grown to something he was proud of. Brent had a family friend that aided him in taking his collection to the next level–that same family friend also introduced him, in 1998, to the internet and eBay. By age 20, he was selling hundreds of thousands of dollars in trading cards all while gaining two engineering degrees.
Trading cards date back to the 1800’s–originally made as a means to getting another product sold. They were produced to be put inside tobacco products, then ventured into cracker jacks and later in gum. In the 1980’s trading cards started to gain speed and were printed off on a broader scale. With the internet, eBay, and professional grading, Brent was able to see the unbridled future in the investment aspect of trading cards. Professional grading and the internet have made the trading card game more liquid and opened up the game to investors by giving them a way to trust in their investment without ever seeing it.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio:
Card trading
eBay
Professional grading
Impact of the internet on trading cards
Auctions trading
Eclectic Mega Episode with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio featuring: