Podcasts

Originally shared in our October 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist behind the research on learned helplessness and optimism, spends two Hidden Brain episodes with Shankar Vedantam on why some people act on what’s in front of them while others decide nothing they do will matter. In Part 1, he builds his case for agency, which he describes as having three parts, efficacy, optimism, and imagination. To illustrate this,…

Originally shared in our June 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis built his career on a simple contrarian habit: looking at the same headlines everyone else reads and asking, “What does this make possible?” His Moonshots podcast is a weekly, unfiltered tour of where technology, longevity, and entrepreneurship are heading, acting less as a tidy lesson than a standing invitation to practice seeing abundance where others see disruption. Long time followers…

Originally shared in our May 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant has a counterintuitive take on sales: the best sellers don’t sell at all. In this episode of the Naval podcast, he argues that the most powerful thing you can do, whether you’re recruiting talent, raising money, or closing a deal, is to be credible. That means being honest about what you believe, knowledgeable enough to explain it simply, and genuinely…

Originally shared in our April 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Daniel Lubetzky didn’t set out to build a snack empire. He set out to build peace in the Middle East through commerce. What he discovered was that mission, no matter how meaningful, isn’t what moves people to act. Customers don’t buy your values. They buy what works for them. That hard-won insight, and the willingness to pivot without abandoning what he cared about, is what…

Originally shared in our March 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. We often inherit cultural scripts that tell us to chase the next achievement or optimize our routines, promising that “meaning” will be waiting for us on the other side. Yet, as the bar continually moves, we can lose touch with what truly brings us alive. In a recent episode of the Rich Roll Podcast, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, co-founders of Stanford’s Life Design Lab,…