Life of the Mind with Akshay Birla

Ilya Zaritskiy arrived in Los Angeles as a refugee from Ukraine. He was a child, in middle school, perhaps. There were tanks on the streets in LA – the 1992 Rodney King riots were happening. Neither he nor his family spoke any English. This podcast is the story of how one immigrant kid used the […]

Rohit Chopra is the co-host of the podcast India Explained and Associate Professor at Santa Clara University. We talk about journalism in India and it’s evolution from the days of Doordarshan to the cornucopia of (mostly bad) options available today. Through our conversation I was introduced or reintroduced to a number of people and bodies […]

Jim Tanner founded Just Good Advice with the goal of providing sound financial advice to ordinary people. In the story that takes him to Just Good Advice, we talk about his first fin-tech company from when the best way to transmit data was the fax machine; Morningstar, where Jim ran the sales team; and the […]

Adam Greenberg shares his journey to become a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia via AmeriCorps and other random travel. For someone so young, he’s certainly lived in a lot of places by his own choosing; this conversation was great. We need to all think more about the impact of student debt on the labor market […]

Dr Jon Peeples takes us behind the scenes into the world of psychiatry for a fascinating conversation around mental health, being a smarter consumer of psychiatric care, and public health. We talk about encounters in the ER and serving some of the poorest and most vulnerable populations. As he observes, Prozac is not going to […]

Brian Hart is the co-founder of Lighthouse DC, a non-profit that helps people transitioning from homelessness in turning empty spaces into homes that are welcoming and functional for their families. We talk about homelessness in the capital of the world’s richest country, how to talk about homelessness to people with a spectrum of views on […]

Tova Levin has worked closely with two of the most prominent economists of our generation – Steven Levitt and John List – serving as Levitt’s Chief of Staff for several years before joining Humana as a leader in their behavioral economics division. We nerd out about so much in economics – Gary Becker (read the […]

Katy Dickinson has been around the tech-block. Hired by Eric Schmidt at Sun Microsystems, she literally wrote the book on the software development lifecycle that Sun used for release of almost 10,000 releases. She is a technologist, entrepreneur, mentor, and writer. In our conversation Katy talks about her work as a technologist on creating processes: […]

Phill Keene builds insides-sales organizations for companies that are selling to other companies (“B2B”). We jam about what it takes to build a successful inside sales organization, staying relevant in a world that’s changing quickly because of technology, podcasting (he co-hosts a very successful podcast, #RealSalesTalk), and what I’d think of as flourishing or living […]

I stumbled upon Avi Patchava because of his recent post, “The 5 unexpected reasons why Indians make it as CEOs of global companies,” and I was surprised that it was so sincerely reasoned. Avi graciously agreed to jam with me  and we talked about his journey from London/McKinsey to InMobi, the tech scene in India […]

Jodi Kovitz. I didn’t realize this at the time I invited Jodi to be a guest on this show, and I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have even tried to have her on the show if I did, but Jodi was named as one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada this year because of […]

Kathryn Hume is a technologist and philosopher. She’s the VP of Product at integrate.ai, Venture Partner at ffVC, and writer at Quam Proxime. If you’re nerdy enough, she’ll talk about her PhD research on the 17th and 18th century version of “fake it till you make it” which she does here (score!). In this episode […]

This week I jam with Srishti Handa on her journey as a solopreneur woman in India, and talking about her experience in starting, and then closing, The Temperamental Chef, a frozen food business in India. If you’re not familiar with India, you might find this surprising, although it did make me wonder on how frequently […]

This week’s guest, Jim Dickie, has had a front-row seat in the changing sales landscape, and after years of skepticism he’s convinced that a world of AI-enabled sales is here. We jammed on sales, technology, the future, and privacy in age of an advertising-driven anti-privacy arms race. The sales process is there for one thing […]

My guest this week is Kurt Metzger, the Director of Sales Operations at Walgreens. We talk about what sales operations is, how this function supports the sales team, what sort of business problems sales operations professionals (sales operators?) help solve, and how to recruit and retain for this role. I was also surprised to learn […]

My guest this week is fellow UChicago alumnus Azeem Zainulbhai, who quit being an international financier to be a tech entrepreneur in India. I spoke with him about his journey and stories, from co-founding Restaurant Week India (successful exit) to Housing.com (there’s lots on the internet about that story) to ShopX, his current professional home. […]

This week’s guest, David Akinin, spoke to me from Namibia, where he has boldly embarked on the mission to help urbanization. Unlike the mindset of foreign intervention, aid, or charity, David’s motive is to satisfy customers (small as the promises might be) and deliver good returns for his investors. (The token reference to Namibia if […]

My guest this week is Suheil Tandon, the Founder and Director of Pro Sport Development, an NGO in India with the lofty mission of using sports to transform India’s youth. This group first showed up on my radar when they were raising money to buy shoes for children/youth in one of their projects so that […]

Caitlin Tulloch is a policy economist at the International Rescue Committee where she studies the cost effectiveness of policy intervention. It’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t initially seem to be, but actually is, novel in the area of humanitarian interventions. Caitlin’s background and work experience at JPAL also provides very useful context and understanding […]

An alumnus of the Chicago Public Schools, Concordia University Chicago, The University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago and Loyala University Chicago, Pete makes for a very unusual police officer. But his range and depth of perspectives from academia, the US Army, and the Chicago Police Department make him uniquely qualified to help […]

If you aren’t at a college or university, and don’t have children, the chances are that you haven’t been to a public library recently. Most of my neighbors don’t even know that we have a public library right down the street! So I thought I’d talk to a librarian about whether public libraries are still […]

I spoke with Greg on what was a very early Shanghai morning and late Atlanta evening, and had just so much fun jamming about what Greg has been up to. Greg Nance is an entrepreneur, an ultra-marathoner, and a passionate champion of people-to-people diplomacy (although he doesn’t say as much). Some show notes: Moneythink: is […]

I had a lot of fun jamming with Ngiste Abebe, fellow UChicago alum, author of Bidding for Development: How the Olympic Bid Process Can Accelerate Transportation Development, Co-Found and COO of Aulenor Co, and a campaign organizer in Virginia and the District of Columbia. Our conversation spanned sports (ok, not really), politics, fantasy and sci-fi, […]

There are some conversations that you cannot plan, and this was one of them. I thought that my guest Joe Sroka would be interesting to chat with about finance (he is currently the Chief Investment Officer at NovaPoint Capital) and his career in/through finance. But Joe ended up giving me (a foreigner) a tour of […]

I got incredibly lucky and had a chance to jam with Keenan Pontoni, a fellow UChicago alum. We talked a lot about UChicago and if you went elsewhere… well, let’s just say we’re #happyclients and you might spend the first few minutes in envy. But this conversation went deeper than I’d have anticipated on statistics, […]

In my first conversation for Life of the Mind, I jam with Neal Idnani, Founder of Naan Stop, a chain of fast-casual Indian restaurants in Atlanta. We talk about the way in which Neal built his business and the struggles of growing a business while balancing the instinct to grow quickly against the risk of […]