Private research university in Stanford, California, US
POPULARITY
Categories
What if AI is more than a tool? What if it's a toddler learning from us? In this mind-expanding episode of The Greatness Machine, futurist Elatia Abate joins Darius to explore the ethical and emotional dimensions of artificial intelligence. From the power of diverse voices shaping AI to how kindness in prompts can actually improve results, Elatia shares a bold vision of co-creating the future with technology. She also reflects on her personal journey—how pretending to be anything less than her full self held her back, and how authenticity unlocked her greatness. In this episode, Darius and Elatia will discuss: (00:00) Introduction and Personal Background (03:05) Cultural Heritage and Identity (05:57) Career Journey and Transition to Futurism (09:04) The Impact of Technology on Work (11:55) Education and Influences (15:14) The Role of Humanity in Leadership (18:08) Exploring the Future of Work (20:59) Navigating the Age of AI (25:32) The Rise of AI and Its Impact on Employment (30:37) Navigating the Future of Work (34:55) The Velocity of Change and Workforce Displacement (38:40) Societal Implications of AI and Automation (41:57) Reimagining Value Creation in the Age of AI (48:04) Consciousness and AI: A New Frontier (53:57) The Importance of Diverse Voices in AI Development Elatia Abate is a globally recognized entrepreneur and futurist on a mission to revolutionize leadership in the Age of AI. Named a Forbes leading female futurist, she serves as Futurist in Residence at Paylocity and is the creator of Future-Led Leadership™️, a framework used by organizations such as Verizon, Deloitte, and GMAC. A sought-after keynote speaker and TEDx presenter, Elatia has shared insights on the future of work, leadership, and resilience with audiences from Citi to SHRM. Formerly an HR executive at Anheuser-Busch InBev and Dow Jones, she is also the author of Build a Career You Love and a featured expert in work with Tony Robbins and Trevor Noah. Elatia teaches at Stanford, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and LinkedIn Learning. Sponsored by: Constant Contact: Try Constant Contact free for 30 days at constantcontact.com. IDEO U: Enroll today and get 15% off sitewide at ideou.com/greatness. Indeed: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/darius. Shopify: Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/darius. Connect with Elatia: Website: https://elatiaabate.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elatiaabate Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elatiaabate/ Connect with Darius: Website: https://therealdarius.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariusmirshahzadeh/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imthedarius/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Thegreatnessmachine Book: The Core Value Equation https://www.amazon.com/Core-Value-Equation-Framework-Limitless/dp/1544506708 Write a review for The Greatness Machine using this link: https://ratethispodcast.com/spreadinggreatness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Think burnout is a badge of honor? Think again. In this eye-opening episode, high-performance coach Lisa Goldenthal breaks down the real reason high-achievers burn out—and it's not because they're working too hard.
Let's dive deep into the ACC's contenders and rebuilding projects in part two of our three-part conference preview. From Clemson's championship steam to Stanford's complete rebuild, we break down the teams at the top and bottom of the conference hierarchy. In this college football podcast episode, we debate whether Clemson is the clear conference favorite and discuss whether Cade Klubnik can take the next step. We examine Miami's Carson Beck experiment and defensive coordinator change, make the case for Pitt as a sleeper contender, and discuss SMU's inevitable step back after their magical 2024 run. Plus, we dive into Louisville's massive roster turnover, Georgia Tech's potential as a dangerous spoiler, and why both programs represent fascinating wild cards. We also look at Jake Dickert's fresh approach at Wake Forest and Stanford's complete overhaul with interim coach Frank Reich. Can Wake Forest find an offensive identity with Robbie Ashford? Will Stanford be competitive despite massive roster turnover? And which of these teams has the best chance to pull off an upset? This is your deep dive into the most compelling storylines at the top and bottom of the ACC heading into 2025. Timestamps:3:23 - Clemson Preview15:21 - Miami Preview26:51 - Pitt Preview35:30 - SMU Preview41:44 - Louisville Preview49:36 - Georgia Tech Preview57:21 - Wake Forest Preview1:03:56 - Stanford Preview Support the show and get perks like ad-free episodes, early releases, bonus content, Discord access and much more: https://www.verballers.com _____ A fan of our college football podcast? Leave us a rating and review, and don't forget to subscribe or follow so you don't miss any of our podcast episodes: Apple Podcasts: https://play.solidverbal.com/apple-podcasts Spotify: https://play.solidverbal.com/spotify Amazon Music: https://play.solidverbal.com/amazon-music Overcast: https://play.solidverbal.com/overcast Pocket Casts: https://play.solidverbal.com/pocketcasts Podcast Addict: https://play.solidverbal.com/podcast-addict CastBox: https://play.solidverbal.com/castbox Our college football show is also available on YouTube. Subscribe to the channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@solidverbal Learn more about the show on our website: https://www.solidverbal.com/about Want to get in touch? Give us a holler on Twitter: @solidverbal, @tyhildenbrandt, @danrubenstein, on Instagram, or on Facebook. You can also find our college football podcast out on TikTok and Threads. Stay up to date with our free weekly college football newsletter: https://quickslants.solidverbal.com/subscribe. College football has been our passion since we started The Solid Verbal College Football Podcast back in 2008. We don't just love college football, we live it!Support the show!: https://www.patreon.com/solidverbalSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dr. Mark Jacobson is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Atmosphere Energy Program at Stanford University, where he's been one of the most vocal advocates for powering the world entirely with wind, water, and solar energy. No nuclear, no carbon capture, no fossil fuels of any kind. His research team has created 100% renewable energy roadmaps for all 50 U.S. states and 149 countries, helping shape policies like New York's clean energy mandate. In this episode, Dr. Jacobson shares his perspective on where we are in the renewables adoption curve and explains why he believes that technologies like nuclear power, carbon capture, and biofuels aren't just unnecessary, they're harmful distractions from the clean energy transition he sees as both achievable and urgent.This conversation may be polarizing. While many will agree with Mark's take on renewables and the grid, his firm rejection of other low-carbon tech challenges mainstream climate thinking. We believe these fault lines are worth exploring, even, or especially, when they make people uncomfortable.Episode recorded on June 30, 2025 (Published on July 15, 2025)In this episode, we cover: [02:32] Why proposed tax changes threaten renewables[05:45] Fossil fuel subsidies vs. renewables support[06:29] China's rapid clean energy deployment[10:44] Rooftop solar offsets California's rising demand[12:20] Home and utility batteries reshaping grid usage[14:40] Texas grid inefficiencies and renewables progress[18:21] Combining wind, solar and batteries[19:26] Land use myths about wind and solar[22:49] Dr. Mark Jacobson's background and research[27:23] How to phase out existing fossil infrastructure[31:36] Dr. Jacobson's rejection of carbon capture[36:52] His thoughts on nuclear[42:11] Dr. Jacobson's thoughts on geothermal[46:19] How he sees the next decade unfolding Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.Connect with MCJ:Cody Simms on LinkedInVisit mcj.vcSubscribe to the MCJ Newsletter*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant
Is everyone really low in vitamin D? Or have we been sold a narrative that doesn't hold up under scrutiny? In this mind-blowing episode, Tara sits down with Regina and Kristin, the investigative duo behind the Normal Curves podcast, to explore the truth behind the so-called "vitamin D deficiency epidemic." Spoiler: it may have been manufactured by outdated, flawed science—and driven by people with major conflicts of interest. This is a must-listen for anyone taking vitamin D or worried about their levels. If you've been told your D is “low,” this episode might change everything. In this episode we cover: How the original vitamin D reference ranges were set (and how they were quietly reversed in 2024) Why testing vitamin D routinely may be doing more harm than good The role of conflicts of interest in shaping clinical guidelines What the latest randomized controlled trials (RCTs) actually show about supplementing vitamin D for disease prevention Why observational data can mislead us, and how low D might be the consequence—not the cause—of illness How much sun you actually need to make enough vitamin D (hint: it's a lot less than you think) Why the “low D” narrative stuck around even after the science was overturned If you're thinking about taking D, already taking D, or have been told your vitamin D is "low" (it likely isn't) then this one is for you. WATCH THIS EPISODE ON YOUTUBE -https://www.youtube.com/@TaraThorne Regina Nuzzo is a Gallaudet professor, award-winning science journalist, and co-host of the Normal Curves podcast. She brings statistics to life for students and audiences worldwide, often using sex-science examples to keep things lively. Her writing has appeared in Nature, The New York Times, Scientific American, and the Los Angeles Times, where she wrote a column on the science of sex and relationships. Alongside co-host Kristin Sainani, she penned a long-running statistics column for Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and now teaches a Stanford summer course on statistics for clinical informatics. Regina's work earned the American Statistical Association's Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award. Kristin Cobb Sainani is a Stanford professor, science journalist, and co-host of the Normal Curves podcast. She brings statistics and scientific writing to students and audiences around the world. She also works as a statistician on sports medicine projects. Kristin has written widely about health, science, and statistics for both academic and popular audiences. She was a health columnist for Allure magazine for ten years and, alongside co-host Regina Nuzzo, penned a long-running statistics column for the journal Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. In 2018, she received Stanford's Biosciences Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Known for her statistical sleuthing and ability to cut through academic jargon, Kristin champions clear language and rigorous methods in science. Mentioned in this episode: Normal Curves Podcast https://www.normalcurves.com/vitamin-d-part-1-is-the-deficiency-epidemic-real/ https://www.normalcurves.com/vitamin-d-part-2-good-for-more-than-just-your-bones/ Normal Curves Website: https://www.normalcurves.com/ EQUIP PRIME PROTEIN – Click HERE to grab yours and use my code: TARA to get 15% off. When you sign up for a subscription via my link, you'll save 30% on the first month & 15% on any subsequent months! Purchase Herbatonin here to get 15% automatically applied to your cart: https://symphonynaturalhealth.com/Tara PIQUE TEA – These are some of Tara's favourite teas! They're crystal form, which makes them super unique and easy to transport in your purse, (they come in single use satchels!) and higher in polyphenols. They're made from high quality ingredients with triple toxin screening, (super important when it comes to your tea). Click HERE to visit the shop. HRT Made Simple™ - Learn how to confidently speak to your doctor about the benefits of hormone replacement therapy so you can set yourself up for symptom-free, unmedicated years to come without feeling confused, dismissed, or leaving the medical office minus your HRT script. Hair Loss Solutions Made Simple™ – This course will teach you the best natural, highly effective, and safe solutions for your hair loss so you can stop it, reverse it, and regrow healthy hair without turning to medications. The Perimenopause Solution™ – My signature 6-month comprehensive hormonal health program for women in midlife who want to get solid answers to their hormonal health issues once and for all so they can kick the weight gain, moodiness, gut problems, skin issues, period problems, fatigue, overwhelm, insomnia, hair/eyebrow loss, and other symptoms in order to get back to the woman they once were. [FREE] The Ultimate Midlife Perimenopause Handbook - Grab my free guide and RECLAIM your confidence, your mood, your waistline and energy without turning to medications or restrictive diets (or spending a fortune on testing you don't need!). [BOOK A 30-MINUTE SESSION WITH TARA HERE]
In this episode of Stories from Real Life, host Melvin E. Edwards interviews Cristian Cibils Bernardes, a digital historian and founder of Autograph. Cristian shares his unique journey from Paraguay to Stanford University, highlighting the cultural contrasts he experienced. He discusses the entrepreneurial spirit instilled in him by his parents and the lessons learned from their business endeavors. Cristian reflects on his teaching experience at Stanford and how it shaped his perspective on education. The conversation delves into the creation of Autograph, a platform aimed at preserving personal stories and connecting families through AI technology. Cristian emphasizes the importance of storytelling and the impact it can have on future generations. The episode concludes with insights on success, the future of storytelling, and the value of modeling behavior for personal growth.Want to be a guest on Stories from Real Life? Send Melvin Edwards a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/storiesfromreallife. www.podcastreallife.comhttps://autograph-ai.comGet 1 month free for the Autograph subscription.TakeawaysCristian's journey from Paraguay to Stanford was shaped by his unique upbringing.Cultural differences between Paraguay and California influenced Cristian's perspective on success.Lessons in resilience and problem-solving were learned from his entrepreneurial parents.Teaching at Stanford provided Christian with valuable experiences in education and communication.The idea for Autograph emerged from a desire to connect stories and preserve family legacies.Cristian's vision for Autograph includes using AI to create a digital version of individuals.The name 'Walter' symbolizes the importance of storytelling and preserving history.Autograph aims to democratize the recording of personal histories and experiences.The future of storytelling may involve advanced AI technologies and interactive experiences.Modeling behavior is a key strategy for personal and professional success. Get full access to Melvin E. Edwards at storiesfromreallife.substack.com/subscribe
Interview Summary So, you two, along with a number of other people in the field, wrote a chapter for a recently published book called The Handbook of Children and Screens. We discussed that book in an earlier podcast with its editors, Dmitri Christakis and Kris Perry, the executive director of the Children and Screens organization. And I'd like to emphasize to our listeners that the book can be downloaded at no cost. I'd like to read a quote if I may, from the chapter that the two of you wrote. 'Screen time continues to evolve with the advent of continuous and immersive video reels, voice activated assistance, social media influencers, augmented and virtual reality targeted advertising. Immersive worlds where children can virtually shop for food and beverages, cook or work in a fast-food outlet from a smartphone, a tablet, a computer, or an internet connected tv and more.' So as much as I follow the field, I still read that and I say, holy you know what. I mean that's just an absolutely alarming set of things that are coming at our children. And it really sounds like a tidal wave of digital sophistication that one could have never imagined even a short time ago. Amanda, let's start with you. Can you tell us a little bit more about these methods and how quickly they evolve and how much exposure children have? I think you're right, Kelly, that the world is changing fast. I've been looking at screen media for about 20 years now as a researcher. And in the earlier years, and Tom can attest to this as well, it was all about TV viewing. And you could ask parents how much time does your child spend watching TV? And they could say, well, they watch a couple shows every night and maybe a movie or two on the weekend, and they could come up with a pretty good estimate, 1, 2, 3 hours a day. Now, when we ask parents how much time their children spend with media, they have to stop and think, 'well, they're watching YouTube clips throughout the day. They're on their smartphone, their tablet, they're on social media, texting and playing all these different games.' It really becomes challenging to even get a grasp of the quantity of screen time let alone what kids are doing when they're using those screens. I will say for this book chapter, we found a really great review that summarized over 130 studies and found that kids are spending about three and a half or four hours a day using screens. Yet some of these studies are showing as high as seven or eight hours. I think it's probably under-reported because parents have a hard time really grasping how much time kids spend on screens. I've got a one-year-old and a five-year-old, and I've got some nieces and nephews and I'm constantly looking over their shoulder trying to figure out what games are they playing and where are they going online and what are they doing. Because this is changing really rapidly and we're trying to keep up with it and trying to make sure that screen time is a safe and perhaps healthy place to be. And that's really where a lot of our research is focused. I can only imagine how challenging it must be to work through that landscape. And because the technology advances way more quickly than the policies and legal landscape to control it, it really is pretty much whatever anybody wants to do, they do it and very little can be done about it. It's a really interesting picture, I know. We'll come back later and talk about what might be done about it. Tom, if you will help us understand the impact of all this. What are the effects on the diets of children and adolescents? I'm thinking particularly when Amanda was mentioning how many hours a day children are on it that three to four hours could be an underestimate of how much time they're spending. What did kids used to do with that time? I mean, if I think about when you and I were growing up, we did a lot of different things with that time. But what's it look like now? Well, that's one of the important questions that we don't really know a lot about because even experimental studies that I can talk about that look at reducing screen time have not been very good at being able to measure what else is going on or what substitutes for it. And so, a lot of the day we don't really know exactly what it's displacing and what happens when you reduce screen time. What replaces it? The assumption is that it's something that's more active than screen time. But, you know, it could be reading or homework or other sedentary behaviors that are more productive. But we really don't know. However, we do know that really the general consensus across all these studies that look at the relationship between screen time and nutrition is that the more time children spend using screens in general, the more calories they consume, the lower the nutritional quality of their diets and the greater their risk for obesity. A lot of these studies, as Amanda mentioned, were dominated by studies of television viewing, or looking at television viewing as a form of screen use. And there's much less and much more mixed results linking nutrition and obesity with other screens such as video games, computers, tablets, and smartphones. That doesn't mean those relationships don't exist. Only that the data are too limited at this point. And there's several reasons for that. One is that there just haven't been enough studies that single out one type of screen time versus another. Another is what Amanda brought up around the self-report issue, is that most of these studies depend on asking children or the parents how much time they spend using screens. And we know that children and adults have a very hard time accurately reporting how much time they're using screens. And, in fact when we measure this objectively, we find that they both underestimate and overestimate at times. It's not all in one direction, although our assumption is that they underestimate most of the time, we find it goes in both directions. That means that in addition to sort of not having that answer about exactly what the amount of screen time is, really makes it much tougher to be able to detect relationships because it adds a lot of error into our studies. Now there have been studies, as I mentioned, that have tried to avoid these limitations by doing randomized controlled trials. Including some that we conducted, in which we randomized children, families or schools in some cases to programs that help them reduce their screen time and then measure changes that occur in nutrition, physical activity, and measures of obesity compared to kids who are randomized to not receive those programs. And the randomized trials are really useful because they allow us to make a conclusion about cause-and-effect relationships. Some of these programs also targeted video games and computers as well as television. In fact, many of them do, although almost all of them were done before tablets and smartphones became very common in children. We still don't have a lot of information on those, although things are starting to come out. Most of these studies demonstrated that these interventions to reduce screen use can result in improved nutrition and less weight gain. And the differences seen between the treatment and control groups were sometimes even larger than those commonly observed from programs to improve nutrition and increased physical activity directly. Really, it's the strongest evidence we have of cause-and-effect relationships between screen use and poor nutrition and risk for obesity. Of course, we need a lot more of these studies, particularly more randomized controlled studies. And especially those including smartphones because that's where a lot of kids, especially starting in the preteen age and above, are starting to spend their time. But from what we know about the amount of apparent addictiveness that we see in the sophisticated marketing methods that are being used in today's media, I would predict that the relationships are even larger today than what we're seeing in all these other studies that we reviewed. It's really pretty stunning when one adds up all that science and it looks pretty conclusive that there's some bad things happening, and if you reduce screen time, some good things happen. So, Amanda, if you know the numbers off the top of your head, how many exposures are kids getting to advertisements for unhealthy foods? If I think about my own childhood, you know, we saw ads for sugar cereals during Saturday morning cartoon televisions. And there might have been a smattering if kids watch things that weren't necessarily just directed at kids like baseball games and stuff like that. But, and I'm just making this number up, my exposure to those ads for unhealthy foods might have been 20 a week, 30 a week, something like that. What does it look like now? That is a good question. Kelly. I'm not sure if anyone can give you a totally accurate answer, but I'll try. If you look at YouTube ads that are targeting children, a study found that over half of those ads were promoting foods and beverages, and the majority of those were considered unhealthy, low nutritional value, high calorie. It's hard to answer that question. What we used to do is we'd take, look at all the Saturday morning cartoons, and we'd actually record them and document them and count the number of food ads versus non-food ads. And it was just a much simpler time in a way, in terms of screen exposure. And we found in that case, throughout the '90s and early 2000s, a lot of food ads, a lot of instances of these food ads. And then you can look at food placement too, right? It's not an actual commercial, but these companies are paying to get their food products in the TV show or in the program. And it's just become much more complicated. I think it's hard to capture unless you have a study where you're putting a camera on a child, which some people are doing, to try to really capture everything they see throughout their day. It's really hard to answer, but I think it's very prolific and common and becoming more sophisticated. Okay, thanks. That is very helpful context. Whatever the number is, it's way more than it used to be. Definitely. And it also sounds as if and it's almost all for unhealthy foods, but it sounds like it's changed in other ways. I mean, at some point as I was growing up, I started to realize that these things are advertising and somebody's trying to sell me something. But that's a lot harder to discern now, isn't it with influencers and stuff built in the product placements and all that kind of stuff. So, to the extent we had any safeguards or guardrails in the beginning, it sounds like those are going to be much harder to have these days. That's right. It really takes until a child is 6, 7, 8 years old for them to even identify that this is a commercial. That this is a company that's trying to sell me something, trying to persuade. And then even older children are having to really understand those companies are trying to make money off the products that they sell, right? A lot of kids, they just look at things as face value. They don't discriminate against the commercial versus the non-commercial. And then like you're suggesting with social influencers, that they're getting paid to promote specific products. Or athletes. But to the child that is a character or a person that they've learned to love and trust and don't realize, and as adults, I think we forget sometimes too. That's very true. Amanda, let me ask about one thing that you and Tom had in your chapter. You had a diagram that I thought was very informative and it showed the mechanisms through which social media affects the diet and physical activity of children. Can you describe what you think some of the main pathways of influence might be? That figure was pretty fun to put together because we had a wonderful wealth of knowledge and expertise as authors on this chapter. And people provided different insight from the scientific evidence. I will say the main path we were trying to figure out how does this exposure to screen really explain changes in what children are eating, their risk for obesity, the inactivity and sedentary behavior they're engaging in? In terms of food, really what is I believe the strongest relationship is the exposure to food advertisement and the eating while engaging in screen time. You're getting direct consumption while you're watching screens, but also the taste preferences, the brand loyalty that's being built over time by constantly seeing these different food products consistently emerge as one of the strongest relationships. But we identified some other interesting potential mechanisms too. While kids are watching screens or engaging in screens, there's some evidence to indicate that they're not able to read their body as well. Their feelings of hunger, their feelings of satiety or fullness. That they're getting distracted for long periods of time. Also, this idea of instant gratification, just like the reward process of instant gratification with using the screen. They're so interactive. You can go online and get what you want and reach what you want. And the same thing is happening with food. It becomes habitual as well. Children get off of school and they go home, and they grab a snack, and they watch tv or they watch their YouTube clips or play their games. And it becomes an eating occasion that may not have otherwise existed. But they're just associating screen time with eating. There's some evidence even on screen time impacting inhibition and controlling impulse and memory. And that's more emerging, but it's interesting to just consider how this prolonged screen time where you're not interacting with someone in person, your eyes are focused on the screen, might actually be having other cognitive impacts that we may not even be aware of yet. If we ask the question why Is screen time having a bad impact on children and their diets? It's almost let us count the ways. There are a lot of possible things going on there. And speaking of that, there's one question in particular I'd like to ask you, Tom. Certainly marketing might affect what kids prefer. Like it might make them want to have a cereal or a beverage A or snack food B or whatever it happens to be. But could it also affect hunger? How much kids want to eat? I mean, you think, well, hunger is biological, and the body sends out signals that it's time to eat. How does that all figure in? The research suggests it can. Advertising in particular but even non-advertising references or images of food can trigger hunger and eating whether or not you felt hungry before you saw them. And I'm guessing almost everyone's experienced that themselves, where they see an image of food, and all of a sudden, they're craving it. It can be as simple as Pavlov's dogs, you know, salivating in response to cues about food. In addition, I think one of the mechanisms that Amanda brought up is this idea that when you're distracted with a screen, it actually overruns or overwhelms your normal feelings of fullness or satiety during eating. When distracted, people are less aware of how much they're eating. And when you're eating while using a screen, people tend to eat until they've finished the plate or the bag or the box, you know? And until that's empty, till they get to the bottom, instead of stopping when they start to get full. Well, there's sort of a double biological whammy going on there, isn't there? It is affecting your likelihood of eating in the first place, and how hungry you feel. But then it also is affecting when you stop and your satiety happening. And you put those two together there's a lot going on, isn't there? Exactly. And it's really one of the reasons why a lot of our programs to reduce weight gain and improve nutrition really put a lot of emphasis on not eating in front of screens. Because our studies have shown it accounts for a large proportion of the calories consumed during the day. Oh, that's so interesting. Amanda, you mentioned influencers. Tell us a little bit more about how this works in the food space. These social influencers are everywhere, particularly Instagram, TikTok, et cetera. Kids are seeing these all the time and as I mentioned earlier, you often build this trusting relationship with the influencer. And that becomes who you look to for fads and trends and what you should and shouldn't do. A lot of times these influencers are eating food or cooking or at restaurants, even the ones that are reaching kids. As you analyze that, oftentimes it's the poor nutrition, high calorie foods. And they're often being paid for the ads too, which as we discussed earlier, kids don't always realize. There's also a lot of misinformation about diet and dieting, which is of concern. Misinformation that could be harmful for kids as they're growing and trying to grow in a healthy way and eat healthy foods. But kids who may look to overly restrict their foods, for example, rather than eating in a healthier manner. So that's definitely a problem. And then also, oftentimes these social influencers really have these unattainable beauty standards. Maybe they're using a filter or maybe they are models or whatnot. They're projecting these ideal body images that are very difficult and sometimes inappropriate for children to try to attain. Now, we've seen this in other forms, right? We've seen this in magazines going back. We've seen this on websites. But now as soon as a kid turns on their smartphone or their tablet and they're online, it's in front of them all the time. And, and they're interacting, they're liking it, they're commenting and posting. I think the social influencers have just really become quite pervasive in children's lives. Somebody who's an influencer might be recording something that then goes out to lots and lots of people. They're eating some food or there's some food sitting in the background or something like that. And they're getting paid for it, but not saying they're getting paid for it. Probably very few people realize that money is changing hands in all of that, I'm suspecting, is that right? Yes, I do believe they're supposed to do hashtag ad and there are different indicators, but I'm not sure the accountability behind that. And I'm also not sure that kids are looking for that and really understand what that means or really care what that means. Okay. Because they're looking to sense what's popular. But there's an opportunity to perhaps further regulate, or at least to educate parents and kids in that regard that I think would be helpful. Tom, while we're on this issue of conflicts of interest, there was recent press coverage, and then there were reports by reporters at the Washington Post and The Examination showing that the food industry was paying dieticians to be influencers who then posted things favorable to industry without disclosing their funding. How big of a problem do you think this is sort of overall with professionals being paid and not disclosing the payments or being paid even if they disclose things. What kind of a negative impact that's having? Yes, I find it very concerning as you would guess, knowing me. And I believe one of the investigations found that about half of influencers who were being paid to promote foods, drinks, or supplements, didn't disclose that they were paid. It was quite a large magnitude. It goes throughout all types of health professionals who are supposed to be sources of quality information and professional organizations themselves which take advertising or take sponsorships and then don't necessarily disclose it. And you know in this day when we're already seeing drops in the public's trust in science and in research, I think this type of information, or this type of deception just makes it a lot worse. As you know, Kelly, there's quite a bit of research that suggests that being paid by a company actually changes the way you talk about their products and even conduct research in a way that's more favorable to those products. Whether you think it does or not, whether you're trying to be biased or not. Tom, just to insert one thing in my experience. If you ask people in the field, does taking money from industry affect the way scientists do their work and they'll almost always say yes. But if you say, does it influence your work, they'll almost always say no. There's this unbelievable blind spot. And one might conclude from what you were telling us is that disclosure is going to be the remedy to this. Like for the half of people who didn't disclose it, it would be okay if they took the money as long as they disclosed it. But you're saying that's obviously not the case. That there's still all kinds of bias going on and people who are hearing some disclosure don't necessarily discount what they're hearing because of it. And it's still a pretty bad kettle of fish, even if disclosure occurs. It's especially pernicious when it doesn't, but it seems even when disclosure happens, it's not much of a remedy to anything. But you may not agree. No, I definitely agree with that. And that's only, you know, part of it too because there's the other side of the audience that Amanda brought up as well. And in particular what kids, but also adults, how they react to disclosures. And, while it's been possible to teach people to recognize potential bias, you know, when there's a disclosure. And to make people aware, which is a good thing, we want disclosure, I guess, so people are aware to be more vigilant in terms of thinking about what biases may be in the messages. There's not much evidence that teaching people that or making them aware of that changes their behavior. They still believe the advertising. Right. They still act in the same way. It's still just as persuasive to them. One more little editorial insertion. The thing that has always puzzled me about disclosure is that it implies that there's something bad going on or else, why would you have to disclose it? And the solution seems not to disclose it, but not to do the bad thing. And it's like, I could come up and kick you in the leg, but it's okay if I disclose that I kick you in the leg. I mean, it just makes no sense to me. But let me move on to something different. Amanda, I'd like to ask you this. I assume the food industry gets a lot more impact and reach per dollar they spend from when the only option was to run ads on national television and now, they're doing things at much less expense, I think, that can have, you know, orders of magnitude more impact and things. But is my perception correct? And how do you think through that? I think of it like the Tupperware model, right? You're building these trusted local or national celebrities, spokespeople for kids. Oftentimes these young adults or teenagers who are doing funny things and they're engaging, and so you're building this trust like you did with the Tupperware. Where you go and train people to go out to people's homes and their neighbors and their friends and their church and sell the product. It's really similar just in an online space. I think you're right; the cost is likely much less. And yet the reach and even the way these influencers are paid is all about the interaction, the likes, the comments, that sort of thing. The reposts. It's become quite sophisticated, and clearly, it's effective because companies are doing this. And one other thing to mention we haven't talked about yet is the food companies themselves have hired young people who use humor as a way to create a following for the different brands or products. It's not a person now, it's either the branded character or the actual company itself. And I think that has great influence of building some loyalty to the brand early in life. So that child is growing up and not only persuading their parents to purchase these products, but as they have more disposable income, they're going to continue purchasing the product. I wonder if Edward Tupper or I don't know if I remember his first name right, but I wonder if you could have ever imagined the how his plastic invention would permeate more of society than he ever thought? Tom, what about the argument that it's up to parents to decide and to monitor what their children are exposed to and the government needs to back off. Oh, it would be so nice if they were that easy, wouldn't it? If we could depend on parents. And I think every parent would love to be able to do that. But we're talking about individual parents and their kids who are being asked to stand up against billions, literally billions and billions of dollars spent every year to get them to stay on their screens as long as possible. To pay attention to their marketing, as Amanda was talking about the techniques they use. And to really want their products even more. If you could think of a parent with endless knowledge and time and resources, even they are really unable to stand up to such powerful forces working against them. Unfortunately, and this is not unique to the issues of screens in children's health, but really many of the issues around health, that in the absence of government regulation and really lack of any oversight, this really difficult job is dumped on parents. You know, not their choice, but it's sort of in their lap. We still try and help them to be better at this. While we're waiting for our elected representatives to stand up to lobbyists and do their jobs, we still in a lot of our interventions we develop, we still try and help parents as well as schools, afterschool programs, teachers, health professionals, develop the skills to really help families resist this pool of media and marketing. But that shouldn't be the way it is. You know, most parents are really already doing the best they can. But it's drastically unfair. It's really an unfair playing field. That all makes good sense. We've been talking thus far about the negative impacts of media, but Amanda, you've done some work on putting this technology to good use. Tell us about that if you will. I do enjoy trying to flip the script because technology is meant to help us, not harm us. It's meant to make our lives more efficient, to provide entertainment. Now with video chatting, to provide some social connection. A lot of my work over the past 20 years has been looking at what's commercially available, what kids are using, and then seeing let's test these products or these programs and can we flip them around to promote healthier eating? To promote physical activity? Can we integrate them for kids who are in a weight management program? Can we integrate the technology to really help them be successful? It doesn't always work, and we certainly aren't looking to increase screen time, but we also need to recognize that achieving zero hours of screen time is really unattainable pretty much universally. Let's try to evaluate the screen time that is being used and see if we can make it healthier. A few examples of that include when the Nintendo Wii came out about 18 years ago now. I was part of a group that was one of the first to test that video game console system because up until that point, most of the games you sat down to play, you held a remote in your hand. There were Dance Dance Revolution games and arcade halls so you could do a little bit of movement with games. But pretty much they were sedentary. Nintendo Wii came out and really changed a lot because now you had to get up off the couch, move your body, move your arms and legs to control the game. And we found it cut across all demographics. Men, women, boys, girls, different age groups. There was content available for a lot of different groups. These types of games became really popular. And I did some of the earlier studies to show that at least in a structured program that kids can engage in what we call moderate levels of physical activity. They're actually moving their bodies when they play these games. And over time, I and others have integrated these games into programs as a way to be an in with kids who may not be involved in sports, may not go outside to play, but they're willing to put on a video game and move in their living room at home. Building from that, we've developed and tested various apps. Some of these apps directly reach the parents, for example, teaching the parents. These are strategies to get your child to eat healthier. Prepare healthier meals, grocery shop, be more physically active as a family. We've looked at different wearables, wristwatches that can help kids and parents. Maybe they'll compete against each other to try to get the most steps of a day and that sort of thing. And then some of my recent work is now integrating chatbots and artificial intelligence as ways to provide some tailored feedback and support to kids and families who are looking to be more physically active, eat healthier. And then one study I'm really excited about uses mixed reality. This is virtual reality where you're putting on a headset. And for that study we are integrating children's homework that they would otherwise do on their Chromebook. And we're removing the keyboard and computer mouse so that they now have to use their body to click and point and drag and move the screen. And these are just a few examples. I do not think this is the magical solution. I think as Tom alluded to, there are different levels of government regulation, educating parents, working with schools. There's working with the food industry. There's a lot that we need to do to make this a healthier media space for kids. But I think this is something we should be open to, is figuring out if people are going to spend a lot of time using screens, what can we do to try to make those screens healthier? You make me smile when I'm hearing that because all these things sound really exciting and like there's plenty of potential. And you're right, I mean, if they're going to be on there anyway, maybe there can be some positive way to harness that time. And those all sound really important and really good. And let's hope that they spread enough to really touch lots and lots of children and their families. Tom, you and I keep caught up. We see each other at professional meetings or we just have periodic phone calls where we tell each other what we're up to. And you've been telling me over the past couple years about this really amazing project you're heading up tracking screen usage. Could you tell us a little bit about that? I'd love to. Really it addresses the problem that came up before, which is really how we measure what people are doing and seeing on their screens. Basically all the studies of media effects for the past a hundred plus years that the field has been studying media, has been dependent on people telling us what they do and what they saw. When in fact, we know that's not particularly accurate. So now we have technology that allows us to track exactly what people are doing and seeing on their screens. We call this screenomics, like genomics, except instead of studying how genes affect us, it's studying how screens affect us and how the screens we experience in our lives really are a reflection of our lives. The way we are doing this is we put software on your phone or your laptop, and it can be on other screens as well, and it runs in the background and takes a screenshot every five seconds. And it covers everything on the screen because it's just taking a picture of the screen. All the words, all the images. Then we use AI to help us decipher [00:34:00] what was on those screens. And so far, we've collected over 350 million screenshots from several hundred adults and teenagers who've participated in our studies for periods of six months to a year. Some of our most interesting findings, I think, is how much idiosyncrasy there is in people's screen use. And this has a huge impact on how we do research on the effects of screens, I believe. Because no two people really have the same screenomes, which is what we call the sequence of screenshots that people experience. And even for the same person, no two hours or days or weeks are the same. We're looking at both how different people differ in their screen use, and how that's related to their mental health, for example. But also how changes over time in a single person's screenome is related to their mental health, for example. Comparing your screen use this afternoon to your screen use this morning or yesterday, or last week or last month. And how that changes your health or is at least associated with changes in your health at this point. Eventually, we hope to move this into very precise interventions that would be able to monitor what your screen experience is and give you an appropriate either change in your screen or help you change your behavior appropriate to what you're feeling. One of our current studies is to learn really the details of what, when, how, why, and where foods and beverages appear in adolescent screenomes. And how these factors relate to foods and beverages they consume and their health. In fact, we're currently recruiting 13- to 17-year-olds all over the US who can participate in this study for six months of screenome collection and weekly surveys we do with them. Including detailed surveys of what they're eating. But this sort of goes back to an issue that came up before that you had asked us about how much is advertising? I can tell you that at least some of our preliminary data, looking at a small number of kids, suggests that food, it varies greatly across kids and what they're experiencing, especially on their phones. And, we found, for example, one young girl who 37% of all her screens had food on them. About a third, or more than a third of her entire screenome, had food in it. And it wasn't just through advertising and it wasn't just through social media or influencers. It was everywhere. It was pictures she was taking of food. It was influencers she was following who had food. It was games she was playing that were around food. There are games, they're all about running a restaurant or making food and serving and kitchen work. And then there were also videos that people watched that are actually fairly popular among where you watch other people eat. Apparently it's a phenomenon that came out of Korea first. And it's grown to be quite popular here over the last several years in which people just put on their camera and show themselves eating. I mean, nothing special, nothing staged, just people eating. There's all kinds of food exists everywhere throughout the screenome, not just in one place or another, and not just in advertising. Tom, a study with a hundred data points can be a lot. You've got 350 million, so I wish you the best of luck in sorting all that out. And boy, whatever you find is going to be really informative and important. Thanks for telling us about this. I'd like to end with kind of a basic question to each of you, and that is, is there any reason for hope. Amanda, let's, let's start with you. Do you see any reason to be optimistic about all this? We must be optimistic. No matter how we're facing. We have no choice. I think there's greater awareness. I think parents, policy makers, civic leaders are really recognizing this pervasive effective screen use on mental health, eating, obesity risk, even just the ability to have social interactions and talk to people face to face. And I think that's a good sign. I've seen even in my own state legislature in Louisiana, bills going through about appropriately restricting screens from schools and offering guidance to pediatricians on counseling related to screen use. The American Academy of Pediatrics changed their guidelines a number of years ago. Instead of just saying, no screens for the really little ones, and then limit to fewer than two hours a day for the older ones. They recognized and tried to be more practical and pragmatic with family. Sit down as a family, create some rules, create some boundaries. Make sure you're being healthy with your screen use. Put the screens away during mealtime. Get the screens out of the bedroom. And I think going towards those more practical strategies that families can actually do and sustain is really positive. I'd like to remain optimistic and let's just keep our eyes wide open and talk to the kids too. And ask the kids what they're doing and get them part of this because it's so hard to stay up to date on the technology. Thanks. I appreciate that positive note. Tom, what do you think? Yeah, I agree with Amanda. I can be positive about several things. First of all, I think last year, there were two bills, one to protect child privacy and the other to regulate technology aimed at children. COPPA 2.0 (Children's Online Private Protection Act) and KOSA (Kid's Online Safety Act). And they passed the Senate overwhelmingly. I mean, almost unanimously, or as close as you can get in our current senate. Unfortunately, they were never acted upon by the house, but in the absence of federal legislature regulation, we've had, as Amanda mentioned, a lot of states and also communities where they have actually started to pass bills or regulate social media. Things like prohibiting use under a certain age. For example, social media warning labels is another one. Limiting smartphone use in schools has become popular. However, a lot of these are being challenged in the courts by tech and media industries. And sadly, you know, that's a strategy they've borrowed, as you know well, Kelly, from tobacco and food industry. There also have been attempts that I think we need to fight against. For the federal legislature or the federal government, congress, to pass legislation to preempt state and local efforts, that would not allow states and local communities to make their own laws in this area. I think that's an important thing. But it's positive in that we're hearing advocacy against that, and people are getting involved. I'm also glad to hear people talking about efforts to promote alternative business models for media. I believe that technology itself is not inherently good or bad, as Amanda mentioned, but the advertising business models that are linked to this powerful technology has inevitably led to a lot of these problems we're seeing. Not just in nutrition and health, but many problems. Finally, I see a lot more parent advocacy to protect children and teens, especially around tech in schools and around the potential harms of social media. And more recently around AI even. As more people start to understand what the implications of AI are. I get the feeling these efforts are really starting to make a difference. Organizations, like Fair Play, for example, are doing a lot of organizing and advocacy with parents. And, we're starting to see advocacy in organizing among teens themselves. I think that's all really super positive that the public awareness is there, and people are starting to act. And hopefully, we'll start to see some more action to help children and families. Bios Developmental psychologist Dr. Amanda Staiano is an associate professor and Director of the Pediatric Obesity & Health Behavior Laboratory at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University. She also holds an adjunct appointment in LSU's Department of Psychology. Dr. Staiano earned her PhD in developmental psychology and Master of Public Policy at Georgetown University, followed by a Master of Science in clinical research at Tulane University. Her primary interest is developing and testing family-based healthy lifestyle interventions that utilize innovative technology to decrease pediatric obesity and its comorbidities. Her research has involved over 2500 children and adolescents, including randomized controlled trials and prospective cohorts, to examine the influence of physical activity and sedentary behavior on body composition and cardiometabolic risk factors. Thomas N. Robinson, MD, MPH is the Irving Schulman, MD Endowed Professor in Child Health, Professor of Pediatrics and of Medicine, in the Division of General Pediatrics and the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. Dr. Robinson focuses on "solution-oriented" research, developing and evaluating health promotion and disease prevention interventions for children, adolescents and their families to directly inform medical and public health practice and policy. His research is largely experimental in design, conducting school-, family- and community-based randomized controlled trials to test the efficacy and/or effectiveness of theory-driven behavioral, social and environmental interventions to prevent and reduce obesity, improve nutrition, increase physical activity and decrease inactivity, reduce smoking, reduce children's television and media use, and demonstrate causal relationships between hypothesized risk factors and health outcomes. Robinson's research is grounded in social cognitive models of human behavior, uses rigorous methods, and is performed in generalizable settings with diverse populations, making the results of his research more relevant for clinical and public health practice and policy.
Ali “AMAC” McGuire, is a platinum mix engineer turned speaker and mental health advocate who knows that story firsthand. After working with Joji, Murdabeatz, Kelly Rowland, Shordie Shordie, Post Malone, and more, Ali realized that outward success doesn't always mean inner peace. Now 13.5 years sober, she shares her Inner Compass framework to help others - especially creatives and young adults - build lives rooted in purpose, not pressure. Her framework has been shared across stages from Stanford, Rowan University, University of San Diego and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Rebecca Lester, a professor of accounting at Stanford, about a tax provision within the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that could further tech R&D and innovation.
Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Rebecca Lester, a professor of accounting at Stanford, about a tax provision within the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that could further tech R&D and innovation.
About this episode: Artificial intelligence is changing everything about how we work, live, and study—and, now, AI therapy chatbots are poised to transform mental health care. In this episode: Stanford researcher Nick Haber details recent data that suggests that therapeutic AI has a long way to go in addressing biases and recognizing safety-critical situations in order to provide adequate care. Guest: Nick Haber, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and by courtesy, Computer Science, where he researches AI implementation for learning and therapeutic tools. Host: Stephanie Desmon, MA, is a former journalist, author, and the director of public relations and communications for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, the largest center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Show links and related content: Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers—FAccT '25: The 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency Kids Are in Crisis. Could Chatbot Therapy Help?—New York Times Exploring the Dangers of AI in Mental Health Care—Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI Transcript information: Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel. Contact us: Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website. Follow us: @PublicHealthPod on Bluesky @JohnsHopkinsSPH on Instagram @JohnsHopkinsSPH on Facebook @PublicHealthOnCall on YouTube Here's our RSS feed Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.
Caroline Diarte-Edwards and Maria Wich-Vila on the changes for MBA applicants
Drs. Hope Rugo, Sheri Brenner, and Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode discuss the struggle that health care professionals experience when terminally ill patients are suffering and approaches to help clinicians understand and respond to suffering in a more patient-centered and therapeutic way. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Hope Rugo: Hello, and welcome to By the Book, a monthly podcast series from ASCO that features engaging conversations between editors and authors of the ASCO Educational Book. I'm your host, Dr. Hope Rugo. I'm director of the Women's Cancers Program and division chief of breast medical oncology at the City of Hope Cancer Center, and I'm also the editor-in-chief of the Educational Book. On today's episode, we'll be exploring the complexities of grief and oncology and the struggle we experience as healthcare professionals when terminally ill patients are suffering. Our guests will discuss approaches to help clinicians understand and respond to suffering in a more patient-centered and therapeutic way, as outlined in their recently published article titled, “Oncology and Suffering: Strategies on Coping With Grief for Healthcare Professionals.” I'm delighted today to welcome Dr. Keri Brenner, a clinical associate professor of medicine, palliative care attending, and psychiatrist at Stanford University, and Dr. Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode, a senior research fellow in philosophy in the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Buckingham, where he also serves as director of graduate research in p hilosophy. He is also a research fellow in philosophy at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford and associate professor at the University of Warsaw. Our full disclosures are available in the transcript of this episode. Dr. Brenner and Dr. Sławkowski-Rode, thanks for being on the podcast today. Dr. Keri Brenner: Great to be here, Dr. Rugo. Thank you so much for that kind introduction. Dr. Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode: Thank you very much, Dr. Rugo. It's a pleasure and an honor. Dr. Hope Rugo: So I'm going to start with some questions for both of you. I'll start with Dr. Brenner. You've spoken and written about the concept of suffering when there is no cure. For oncologists, what does it mean to attune to suffering, not just disease? And how might this impact the way they show up in difficult conversations with patients? Dr. Keri Brenner: Suffering is something that's so omnipresent in the work of clinical oncology, and I like to begin by just thinking about what is suffering, because it's a word that we use so commonly, and yet, it's important to know what we're talking about. I think about the definition of Eric Cassell, who was a beloved mentor of mine for decades, and he defined suffering as the state of severe distress that's associated with events that threaten the intactness of a person. And my colleague here at Stanford, Tyler Tate, has been working on a definition of suffering that encompasses the experience of a gap between how things are versus how things ought to be. Both of these definitions really touch upon suffering in a person-centered way that's relational about one's identity, meaning, autonomy, and connectedness with others. So these definitions alone remind us that suffering calls for a person-centered response, not the patient as a pathology, but the panoramic view of who the patient is as a person and their lived reality of illness. And in this light, the therapeutic alliance becomes one of our most active ingredients in care. The therapeutic alliance is that collaborative, trusting bond as persons that we have between clinician and patient, and it's actually one of the most powerful predictors of meaningful outcomes in our care, especially in oncologic care. You know, I'll never forget my first day of internship at Massachusetts General Hospital. A faculty lecturer shared this really sage insight with us that left this indelible mark. She shared, “As physicians and healers, your very self is the primary instrument of healing. Our being is the median of the medicine.” So, our very selves as embodied, relationally grounded people, that's the median of the medicine and the first most enduring medicine that we offer. That has really borne fruit in the evidence that we see around the therapeutic alliance. And we see this in oncologic care, that in advanced cancer, a strong alliance with one's oncologist truly improves a patient's quality of life, treatment adherence, emotional well-being, and even surpasses structured interventions like psychotherapeutic interventions. Dr. Hope Rugo: That's just incredibly helpful information and actually terminology as well, and I think the concept of suffering differs so much. Suffering comes in many shapes and forms, and I think you really have highlighted that. But many oncologists struggle with knowing what to do when patients are suffering but can't be fixed, and I think a lot of times that has to do with oncologists when patients have pain or shortness of breath or issues like that. There are obviously many ways people suffer. But I think what's really challenging is how clinicians understand suffering and what the best approaches to respond to suffering are in the best patient-centered and therapeutic way. Dr. Keri Brenner: I get that question a lot from my trainees in palliative care, not knowing what to do. And my first response is, this is about how to be, not about knowing what to do, but how to be. In our medical training, we're trained often how to think and treat, but rarely how to be, how to accompany others. And I often have this image that I tell my trainees of, instead of this hierarchical approach of a fix-it mentality of all we're going to do, when it comes to elements of unavoidable loss, mortality, unavoidable sufferings, I imagine something more like accompaniment, a patient walking through some dark caverns, and I am accompanying them, trying to walk beside them, shining a light as a guide throughout that darkness. So it's a spirit of being and walking with. And it's so tempting in medicine to either avoid the suffering altogether or potentially overidentify with it, where the suffering just becomes so all-consuming like it's our own. And we're taught to instead strike a balance of authentic accompaniment through it. I often teach this key concept in my palli-psych work with my team about formulation. Formulation is a working hypothesis. It's taking a step back and asking, “Why? Why is this patient behaving in this manner? What might the patient's core inner struggle be?” Because asking that “why” and understanding the nuanced dimensions of a patient's core inner struggle will really help guide our therapeutic interactions and guide the way that we accompany them and where we choose to shine that light as we're walking with them. And oftentimes people think, “Well Keri, that sounds so sappy or oversentimental,” and it's not. You know, I'm just thinking about a case that I had a couple months ago, and it was a 28-year-old man with gastric cancer, metastatic disease, and that 28-year-old man, he was actually a college Division I athlete, and his dad was an acclaimed Division I coach. And our typical open-ended palliative care questions, that approach, infuriated them. They needed to know that I was showing up confident, competent, and that I was ready, on my A-game, with a real plan for them to follow through. And so my formulation about them was they needed somebody to show up with that confidence and competence, like the Division I athletes that they were, to really meet them and accompany them where they were on how they were going to walk through that experience of illness. Dr. Hope Rugo: These kinds of insights are so helpful to think about how we manage something that we face every day in oncology care. And I think that there are many ways to manage this. Maybe I'll ask Dr. Sławkowski-Rode one question just that I think sequences nicely with what you're talking about. A lot of our patients are trying to think about sort of the bigger picture and how that might help clinicians understand and support patients. So, the whole concept of spirituality, you know, how can we really use that as oncology clinicians to better understand and support patients with advanced illness, and how can that help patients themselves? And we'll talk about that in two different ways, but we'll just start with this broader question. Dr. Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode: I think spirituality, and here, I usually refer to spirituality in terms of religious belief. Most people in the world are religious believers, and it is very intuitive and natural that religious beliefs would be a resource that people who help patients with a terminal diagnosis and healthcare professionals who work with those patients appeal to when they try to help them deal with the trauma and the stress of these situations. Now, I think that the interesting thing there is that very often the benefit of appealing to a religious belief is misunderstood in terms of what it delivers. And there are many, many studies on how religious belief can be used to support therapy and to support patients in getting through the experience of suffering and defeating cancer or facing a terminal diagnosis. There's a wealth of literature on this. But most of the literature focuses on this idea that by appealing to religious belief, we help patients and healthcare practitioners who are working with them get over the fact and that there's a terminal diagnosis determining the course of someone's life and get on with our lives and engaging with whatever other pursuits we might have, with our job if we're healthcare practitioners, and with the other things that we might be passionate about in our lives. And the idea here is that this is what religion allows us to do because we sort of defer the need to worry about what's going to happen to us until the afterlife or some perspective beyond the horizon of our life here. However, my view is – I have worked beyond philosophy also with theologians from many traditions, and my view here is that religion is something that does allow us to get on with our life but not because we're able to move on or move past the concerns that are being threatened by illness or death, but by forming stronger bonds with these things that we value in our life in a way and to have a sense of hope that these will be things that we will be able to keep an attachment to despite the threat to our life. So, in a sense, I think very many approaches in the field have the benefit of religion upside down, as it were, when it comes to helping patients and healthcare professionals who are engaged with their illness and treating it. Dr. Hope Rugo: You know, it's really interesting the points that you make, and I think really important, but, you know, sometimes the oncologists are really struggling with their own emotional reactions, how they are reacting to patients, and dealing with sort of taking on the burden, which, Dr. Brenner, you were mentioning earlier. How can oncologists be aware of their own emotional reactions? You know, they're struggling with this patient who they're very attached to who's dying or whatever the situation is, but you want to avoid burnout as an oncologist but also understand the patient's inner world and support them. Dr. Keri Brenner: I believe that these affective, emotional states, they're contagious. As we accompany patients through these tragic losses, it's very normal and expected that we ourselves will experience that full range of the human experience as we accompany the patients. And so the more that we can recognize that this is a normative dimension of our work, to have a nonjudgmental stance about the whole panoramic set of emotions that we'll experience as we accompany patients with curiosity and openness about that, the more sustainable the work will become. And I often think about the concept of countertransference given to us by Sigmund Freud over 100 years ago. Countertransference is the clinician's response to the patient, the thoughts, feelings, associations that come up within us, shaped by our own history, our own life events, those unconscious processes that come to the foreground as we are accompanying patients with illness. And that is a natural part of the human experience. Historically, countertransference was viewed as something negative, and now it's actually seen as a key that can unlock and enlighten the formulation about what might be going on within the patient themselves even. You know, I was with a patient a couple weeks ago, and I found myself feeling pretty helpless and hopeless in the encounter as I was trying to care for them. And I recognized that countertransference within myself that I was feeling demoralized. It was a prompt for me to take a step back, get on the balcony, and be curious about that because I normally don't feel helpless and hopeless caring for my patients. Well, ultimately, I discovered through processing it with my interdisciplinary team that the patient likely had demoralization as a clinical syndrome, and so it's natural many of us were feeling helpless and hopeless also accompanying them with their care. And it allowed us to have a greater interdisciplinary approach and a more therapeutic response and deeper empathy for the patient's plight. And we can really be curious about our countertransferences. You know, a few months ago, I was feeling bored and distracted in a family meeting, which is quite atypical for me when I'm sharing serious illness news. And it was actually a key that allowed me to recognize that the patient was trying to distract all of us talking about inconsequential facts and details rather than the gravitas of her illness. Being curious about these affective states really allows us to have greater sustainability within our own practice because it normalizes that human spectrum of emotions and also allows us to reduce unconscious bias and have greater inclusivity with our practice because what Freud also said is that what we can't recognize and say within our own selves, if we don't have that self-reflective capacity, it will come out in what we do. So really recognizing and having the self-awareness and naming some of these emotions with trusted colleagues or even within our own selves allows us to ensure that it doesn't come out in aberrant behaviors like avoiding the patient, staving off that patient till the end of the day, or overtreating, offering more chemotherapy or not having the goals of care, doing everything possible when we know that that might result in medically ineffective care. Dr. Hope Rugo: Yeah, I love the comments that you made, sort of weaving in Freud, but also, I think the importance of talking to colleagues and to sharing some of these issues because I do think that oncologists suffer from the fact that no one else in your life wants to hear about dying people. They don't really want to hear about the tragic cases either. So, I think that using your community, your oncology community and greater community within medicine, is an important part of being able to sort of process. Dr. Keri Brenner: Yes, and Dr. Rugo, this came up in our ASCO [Education] Session. I'd love to double click into some of those ways that we can do this that aren't too time consuming in our everyday practice. You know, within palliative care, we have interdisciplinary rounds where we process complex cases. Some of us do case supervision with a trusted mentor or colleague where we bring complex cases to them. My team and I offer process rounds virtually where we go through countertransference, formulation, and therapeutic responses on some tough cases. You know, on a personal note, just last week when I left a family meeting feeling really depleted and stuck, I called one of my trusted colleagues and just for 3 minutes constructively, sort of cathartically vented what was coming up within me after that family meeting, which allowed me to have more of an enlightened stance on what to do next and how to be therapeutically helpful for the case. One of my colleagues calls this "friend-tors." They coined the phrase, and they actually wrote a paper about it. Who within your peer group of trusted colleagues can you utilize and phone in real time or have process opportunities with to get a pulse check on where what's coming up within us as we're doing this work? Dr. Hope Rugo: Yeah, and it's an interesting question about how one does that and, you know, maintaining that as you move institutions or change places or become more senior, it's really important. One of the, I think, the challenges sometimes is that we come from different places from our patients, and that can be an issue, I think when our patients are very religious and the provider is not, or the reverse, patients who don't have religious beliefs and you're trying to sort of focus on the spirituality, but it doesn't really ring true. So, Dr. Sławkowski-Rode, what resources can patients and practitioners draw on when they're facing death and loss in the absence of, or just different religious beliefs that don't fit into the standard model? Dr. Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode: You're absolutely right that this can be an extremely problematic situation to be in when there is that disconnect of religious belief or more generally spiritual engagement with the situation that we're in. But I just wanted to tie into what Dr. Brenner was saying just before. I couldn't agree more, and I think that a lot of healthcare practitioners, oncologists in particular who I've had the pleasure to talk to at ASCO and at other events as well, are very often quite skeptical about emotional engagement in their profession. They feel as though this is something to be managed, as it were, and something that gets in the way. And they can often be very critical of methods that help them understand the emotions and extend them towards patients because they feel that this will be an obstacle to doing their job and potentially an obstacle also to helping patients to their full ability if they focus on their own emotions or the burden that emotionally, spiritually, and in other ways the illness is for the patient. They feel that they should be focusing on the cancer rather than on the patient's emotions. And I think that a useful comparison, although, you know, perhaps slightly drastic, is that of combat experience of soldiers. They also need to be up and running and can't be too emotionally invested in the situation that they're in. But there's a crucial difference, which is that soldiers are usually engaged in very short bursts of activity with the time to go back and rethink, and they often have a lot of support for this in between. Whereas doctors are in a profession where their exposure to the emotions of patients and their own emotions, the emotions of families of patients is constant. And I think that there's a great danger in thinking that this is something to be avoided and something to compartmentalize in order to avoid burnout. I think, in a way, burnout is more sure to happen if your emotions and your attachment to your patients goes ignored for too long. So that's just following up on Keri's absolutely excellent points. As far as the disconnect is concerned, that's, in fact, an area in which I'm particularly interested in. That's where my research comes in. I'm interested in the kinds of connections that we have with other people, especially in terms of maintaining bonds when there is no spiritual belief, no spiritual backdrop to support this connection. In most religious traditions, we have the framework of the religious belief that tells us that the person who we've lost or the values that have become undermined in our life are something that hasn't been destroyed permanently but something that we can still believe we have a deep connection to despite its absence from our life. And how do you rebuild that sense of the existence of the things that you have perceivably lost without the appeal to some sort of transcendent realm which is defined by a given religion? And that is a hard question. That's a question, I think, that can be answered partly by psychology but also partly by philosophy in terms of looking at who we are as human beings and our nature as people who are essentially, or as entities that are essentially connected to one another. That connection, I believe, is more direct than the mediation of religion might at first suggest. I think that we essentially share the world not only physically, it's not just the case that we're all here, but more importantly, the world that we live in is not just the physical world but the world of meanings and values that helps us orient ourselves in society and amongst one another as friends and foes. And it is that shared sense of the world that we can appeal to when we're thinking about retaining the value or retaining the connection with the people who we have lost or the people who are helping through, go through an experience of facing death. And just to finish, there's a very interesting question, I think, something that we possibly don't have time to explore, about the degree of connection that we have with other people. So, what I've just been saying is something that rings more true or is more intuitive when we think about the connections that we have to our closest ones. We share a similar outlook onto the world, and our preferences and our moods and our emotions and our values are shaped by life with the other person. And so, appealing to these values can give us a sense of a continued presence. But what in those relationships where the connection isn't that close? For example, given the topic of this podcast, the connection that a patient has with their doctor and vice versa. In what sense can we talk about a shared world of experience? Well, I think, obviously, we should admit degrees to the kind of relationship that can sustain our connection with another person. But at the same time, I don't think there's a clear cutoff point. And I think part of emotional engagement in medical practice is finding yourself somewhere on that spectrum rather than thinking you're completely off of it. That's what I would say. Dr. Hope Rugo: That's very helpful and I think a very helpful way of thinking about how to manage this challenging situation for all of us. One of the things that really, I think, is a big question for all of us throughout our careers, is when to address the dying process and how to do that. Dr. Brenner, you know, I still struggle with this – what to do when patients refuse to discuss end-of-life but they're very close to end of life? They don't want to talk about it. It's very stressful for all of us, even where you're going to be, how you're going to manage this. They're just absolutely opposed to that discussion. How should we approach those kinds of discussions? How do we manage that? How do you address the code discussion, which is so important? You know, these patients are not able to stay at home at end-of-life in general, so you really do need to have a code discussion before you're admitting them. It actually ends up being kind of a challenge and a mess all around. You know, I would love your advice about how to manage those situations. Dr. Keri Brenner: I think that's one of the most piercing and relevant inquiries we have within our clinical work and challenges. I often think of denial not as an all-or-nothing concept but rather as parts of self. There's a part of everyone's being where the unconscious believes it's immortal and will live on forever, and yet we all know intellectually that we all have mortality and finitude and transience, and that time will end. We often think of this work as more iterative and gradual and exposure based. There's potency to words. Saying, “You are dying within days,” is a lot higher potency of a phrase to share than, “This is serious illness. This illness is incurable. Time might be shorter than we hoped.” And so the earlier and more upstream we begin to have these conversations, even in small, subtle ways, it starts to begin to expose the patient to the concept so they can go from the head to the heart, not only knowing their prognosis intellectually but also affectively, to integrate it into who they are as a person because all patients are trying to live well while also we're gradually exposing them to this awareness of mortality within their own lived experience of illness. And that, ideally, happens gradually over time. Now, there are moments where the medical frame is very limited, and we might have short days, and we have to uptitrate those words and really accompany them more radically through those high-affective moments. And that's when we have to take a lot of more nuanced approaches, but I would say the more earlier and upstream the better. And then the second piece to that question as well is coping with our own mortality. The more we can be comfortable with our own transience and finitude and limitations, the more we will be able to accompany others through that. And even within my own life, I've had to integrate losses in a way where before I go in to talk to one of my own palliative care patients, one mantra I often say to myself is, “I'm just a few steps behind you. I don't know if it's going to be 30 days or 30 years, but I'm just a few steps behind you on this finite, transient road of life that is the human experience.” And that creates a stance of accompaniment that patients really can experience as they're traversing these tragedies. Dr. Hope Rugo: That's great. And I think those are really important points and actually some pearls, which I think we can take into the clinic. I think being really concrete when really the expected life expectancy is a few days to a couple of weeks can be very, very helpful. And making sure the patients hear you, but also continuing to let them know that, as oncologists, we're here for them. We're not abandoning them. I think that's a big worry for many, certainly of my patients, is that somehow when they would go to hospice or be a ‘no code', that we're not going to support them anymore or treat them anymore. That is a really important process of that as well. And of course, engaging the team makes a big difference because the whole oncology team can help to manage situations that are particularly challenging like that. And just as we close, I wanted to ask one last question of you, Dr. Brenner, that suffering, grief, and burnout, you've really made the point that these are not problems to fix but dimensions that we want to attend to and acknowledge as part of our lives, the dying process is part of all of our lives. It's just dealing with this in the unexpected and the, I think, unpredictability of life, you know, that people take on a lot of guilt and all sorts of things about, all sorts of emotions. And the question is now, people have listened to this podcast, what can they take back to their oncology teams to build a culture that supports clinicians and their team at large to engage with these realities in a meaningful and sustainable way? I really feel like if we could build the whole team approach where we're supporting each other and supporting the patients together, that that will help this process immeasurably. Dr. Keri Brenner: Yes, and I'm thinking about Dr. Sławkowski-Rode's observation about the combat analogy, and it made me recognize this distinction between suppression and repression. Repression is this unconscious process, and this is what we're taught to do in medical training all the time, to just involuntarily shove that tragedy under the rug, just forget about it and see the next patient and move on. And we know that if we keep unconsciously shoving things under the rug, that it will lead to burnout and lack of sustainability for our clinical teams. Suppression is a more conscious process. That deliberate effort to say, “This was a tragedy that I bore witness to. I know I need to put that in a box on the shelf for now because I have 10 other patients I have to see.” And yet, do I work in a culture where I can take that off the shelf during particular moments and process it with my interdisciplinary team, phone a friend, talk to a trusted colleague, have some trusted case supervision around it, or process rounds around it, talk to my social worker? And I think the more that we model this type of self-reflective capacity as attendings, folks who have been in the field for decades, the more we create that ethos and culture that is sustainable because clinician self-reflection is never a weakness, rather it's a silent strength. Clinician self-reflection is this portal for wisdom, connectedness, sustainability, and ultimately transformative growth within ourselves. Dr. Hope Rugo: That's such a great point, and I think this whole discussion has been so helpful for me and I hope for our audience that we really can take these points and bring them to our practice. I think, “Wow, this is such a great conversation. I'd like to have the team as a whole listen to this as ways to sort of strategize talking about the process, our patients, and being supportive as a team, understanding how we manage spirituality when it connects and when it doesn't.” All of these points, they're bringing in how we process these issues and the whole idea of suppressing versus sort of deciding that it never happened at all is, I think, very important because that's just a tool for managing our daily lives, our busy clinics, and everything we manage. Dr. Keri Brenner: And Dr. Rugo, it's reminding me at Stanford, you know, we have this weekly practice that's just a ritual where every Friday morning for 30 minutes, our social worker leads a process rounds with us as a team, where we talk about how the work that we're doing clinically is affecting us in our lives in ways that have joy and greater meaning and connectedness and other ways that might be depleting. And that kind of authentic vulnerability with one another allows us to show up more authentically for our patients. So those rituals, that small 30 minutes once a week, goes a long way. And it reminds me that sometimes slowing things down with those rituals can really get us to more meaningful, transformative places ultimately. Dr. Hope Rugo: It's a great idea, and I think, you know, making time for that in everybody's busy days where they just don't have any time anymore is important. And you don't have to do it weekly, you could even do something monthly. I think there's a lot of options, and that's a great suggestion. I want to thank you both for taking your time out for this enriching and incredibly helpful conversation. Our listeners will find a link to the Ed Book article we discussed today, which is excellent, in the transcript of this episode. I want to thank you again, Dr. Brenner and Dr. Sławkowski-Rode, for your time and for your excellent thoughts and advice and direction. Dr. Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode: Thank you very much, Dr. Rugo. Dr. Keri Brenner: Thank you. Dr. Hope Rugo: And thanks to our listeners for joining us today. Please join us again next month on By the Book for more insightful views on topics you'll be hearing at the education sessions from ASCO meetings and our deep dives on new approaches that are shaping modern oncology. Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Follow today's speakers: Dr. Hope Rugo @hope.rugo Dr. Keri Brenner @keri_brenner Dr. Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode @MikolajRode Follow ASCO on social media: @ASCO on X (formerly Twitter) ASCO on Bluesky ASCO on Facebook ASCO on LinkedIn Disclosures: Dr. Hope Rugo: Honoraria: Mylan/Viatris, Chugai Pharma Consulting/Advisory Role: Napo Pharmaceuticals, Sanofi, Bristol Myer Research Funding (Inst.): OBI Pharma, Pfizer, Novartis, Lilly, Merck, Daiichi Sankyo, AstraZeneca, Gilead Sciences, Hoffman La-Roche AG/Genentech, In., Stemline Therapeutics, Ambryx Dr. Keri Brenner: No relationships to disclose Dr. Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode: No relationships to disclose
New data shows there's been a noticeable surge in high school students passing NCEA numeracy and literacy assessments. Latest results show 57 percent achieved the maths standard across all year levels in May this year, up from 45 percent in the same month last year. 61 percent met the reading standard for all year levels - up from 58 percent. Education Minister Erica Stanford says she's 'proud' to see that achievement rates have gone up. "We've turned the corner, we have a relentless focus on achievement, on literacy and numeracy an hour a day - the clear curriculum, the standard teaching practices and all those resources we're putting in - we're now starting to see these results improving." LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Trust isn't just a moral virtue—it's capital. When an entrepreneur needed to raise $400,000 from American investors for a school in Ghana, they secured the funding based solely on reputation, even from those who had never visited the country. "People give you money even though they have not been here?" government representatives asked in disbelief. The answer was simple: "It is trust, it is integrity."The secret to sustainable business growth lies in what this educational leader calls the "three H's"—humility, honesty, and hard work. Humility keeps you learning and adapting. Honesty builds the foundation of trust that attracts both customers and investors. Hard work, manifested not just in long hours but in strategic thinking and leading by example, inspires your entire team. "If you want quick gains like some young people are doing, you will get it, but it won't last," they caution. True success isn't about cutting corners; it's about building something that endures.After establishing the most respected educational institution in Kumasi, the entrepreneur made what they called "an audacious move" to expand to Accra following their participation in Stanford's SEED program. Despite financial concerns about the expensive East Legon location, they moved forward strategically, bringing their best teachers to ensure quality from day one. The gamble paid off spectacularly—the Accra campus quickly attracted students and now generates more revenue than the original location. But what's most revealing is how they approached this success. When enrollment boomed, instead of celebrating, they became more vigilant: "How about if we fail to meet people's expectations?" This mindset reveals perhaps the most profound lesson of all: genuine success requires remaining humble even when you're in highest demand.Ready to build a business foundation that truly lasts? Listen now to discover how integrity and calculated risk-taking can transform your enterprise—and how the right mindset can turn even your most audacious goals into reality.Support the showWatch the video episode of this on YouTube - https://linktr.ee/konnectedminds
Brought to you by the Founders Unfiltered podcast by A Junior VC - Unscripted conversations with Indian founders about their story and the process of building a company. Hosted by Aviral and Mazin.Join us as we talk to Gaurav Hinduja, the co-founder of axio, about their story.Gaurav studied Commerce at Christ University and went on to pursue his MBA from Stanford. He later served as COO of Gokaldas Exports and, in 2013, co-founded axio, previously known as Capital Float.
Simon & Schuster provided me with an advanced copy of the superb book After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, scheduled for release on July 8, 2025. The University of Texas authors, Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, have written a mind-blowing book! It's my second favorite book of 2025! My favorite 2025 book is They're Not Gaslighting You. Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-JfpjJRkok Podcast The Population Whimper When I was born, Paul R. Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb, was a mega-bestseller. Although I never read the book, my generation believed the book's message that humanity is dangerously overpopulated. The book gave me one major reason not to have children. The book made intuitive sense, built on Thomas Malthus's observations, that if our population continues to expand, we will eventually hit a brick wall. However, Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist, made these stunningly wrong predictions in The Population Bomb: Mass Starvation in the 1970s and 1980s: The book opened with the statement, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." England's Demise by 2000: He suggested that England would not exist by the year 2000 due to environmental collapse related to overpopulation. Devastation of Fish Populations by 1990: He predicted that all significant animal life in the sea would be extinct by 1990, and large areas of coastline would need to be evacuated due to the stench of dead fish. India's Famine: He predicted catastrophic food shortages in India in the 1990s that did not materialize. United States Food Rationing by 1984: He envisioned the U.S. rationing food by 1984. Instead of all this doom and gloom, here's what happened: we went from 3.5 billion (when Ehrich wrote his doomsday book) to 8 billion people today, most of whom are fat. Today, our biggest problem isn't famine but obesity. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso's new book should have been called The Population Whimper because it says the opposite of what The Population Bomb said. Forget a catastrophic demographic explosion. We're going to suffer a catastrophic demographic implosion. The graph on the cover of After the Spike sums up the problem: during a 200-year time period, the human population will have spiked to 10 billion and then experienced an equally dramatic fall. Three criticisms of After the Spike For a book packed with counterintuitive arguments, it's remarkable that I can only spot three flaws. Admittedly, these are minor critiques, as they will disappear if we stabilize below 10 billion. 1. Wildlife lost The authors correctly argue that the environment has been improving even as the human population has been growing rapidly. For example: Air and water are now cleaner than they were 50 years ago, when the population was half its current size. Our per capita CO2 consumption is falling. Clean energy production is at an all-time high. There's one metric that authors overlooked: wildlife. As the human population doubled, we've needed more space for growing food. This has led to a decrease in habitat, which is why biologists refer to the Anthropocene Extinction. While fish farms are efficient, overfishing continues. The Amazon gets denuded to make space for soy and cattle plantations. The loss of African wildlife habitats is acute, as the African population is projected to quadruple in this century. I imagine that the authors of After the Spike would counter: National parks didn't exist 200 years ago. Green revolutions and GMO foods have made the most productive farmers ever. De-extinction may restore extinct species. And they're correct. There are bright spots. However, as we approach 10 billion, wildlife will continue to suffer and be marginalized. The book should have mentioned that. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso would likely agree that if humans continue to grow nonstop, wildlife will continue to suffer. However, they aren't arguing for nonstop human expansion. They want stabilization. When you combine stabilization with technology (e.g., vertical farming and lab-grown animal products), we would reverse the downward trend in wildlife habitat. 2. Increased energy consumption Dean Spears and Michael Geruso celebrate humanity's progress in energy efficiency and productivity. However, they overlook these facts: 1. The Rebound Effect (Jevons Paradox): As energy efficiency improves, the cost of using energy services effectively decreases. This can lead to: Increased usage of existing services: For example, more efficient air conditioners might lead people to cool their homes to lower temperatures or for longer periods. More fuel-efficient cars might encourage more driving. Adoption of new energy-intensive activities: The increased affordability of energy services can enable entirely new consumption patterns that were previously too expensive to adopt. Think about the proliferation of data centers for AI and digital services, or the growth of electric vehicles. While individual electric vehicles (EVs) are more efficient than gasoline cars, the rapid increase in their adoption contributes to overall electricity demand. 2. Economic Growth and Rising Living Standards: Increased demand for energy services: As economies grow and incomes rise, people generally desire greater comfort, convenience, and a wider range of goods and services. This translates to greater demand for heating and cooling, larger homes, more personal transportation, more manufactured goods, and more leisure activities, all of which require energy. Industrialization and urbanization: Developing economies, in particular, are undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization. This involves massive construction, increased manufacturing, and the expansion of infrastructure, all of which are highly energy-intensive. Even with efficiency gains, the sheer scale of this growth drives up overall energy consumption. Emerging technologies: The growth of data centers, AI, and other digital technologies is leading to a significant increase in electricity demand. 3. Population Growth: While efficiency might improve per unit of output, the overall global population continues to grow. More people, even if individually more efficient, will inherently consume more energy in total. 4. Shifting Economic Structures: Some economies are shifting from less energy-intensive sectors (like agriculture) to more energy-intensive ones (like manufacturing or specific services). Even within industries, while individual processes might become more efficient, the overall scale of production can increase dramatically. 5. Energy Price and Policy Factors: Low energy prices: If energy remains relatively inexpensive (due to subsidies or abundant supply), the incentive for significant behavioral changes to reduce consumption might be diminished, even with efficient technologies available. Policy limitations: Although many countries have energy efficiency policies, their impact may be offset by other factors that drive demand. Conclusion: While technological advancements and efficiency measures reduce the energy intensity of specific activities, these gains are often outpaced by the aggregate increase in demand for energy services driven by economic growth, rising living standards, population increases, and the adoption of new, energy-intensive technologies and behaviors. The challenge lies in achieving a proper decoupling of economic growth from energy consumption, and ultimately, from carbon emissions. Humanity's per capita energy consumption has been steadily increasing with each passing century, a trend that is unlikely to change soon. Therefore, humans of the 26th century will consume far more energy than those of the 21st century. The authors of After the Spike would probably argue that in 2525, we'll be using a clean energy source (e.g., nuclear fusion), so it'll be irrelevant that our per capita energy consumption increases ten times. Again, short term, we're going in the wrong direction. However, in a stabilized world, we won't have a problem. 3. Designer babies The authors of After the Spike never addressed the potential impact that designer babies may have. I coined the term "Homo-enhanced" to address our desire to overcome our biological limitations. Couples are already using IVF to select the gender and eye color of their babies. Soon, we'll be able to edit and select for more complex traits such as height or even intelligence. It's easy to imagine a world like Gattaca, where parents collaborate with CRISPR-powered gene tools to create custom-made babies. One reason some people don't want to reproduce is that it's a crap shoot. Any parent who has more than one child will tell you that each of their children is quite different from the others. Given that they grow up in the same environment, it suggests that genetics is a decisive factor. Until now, we couldn't mold our children's DNA. Soon, we will. If we were to remove the lottery aspect of having a child and allow parents to design their children, perhaps there would be a baby boom. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso would probably argue that this is unlikely or centuries away from happening. We'll be descending the steep population slope long before we are homo-enhanced. One trillion humans in this millennium? In the Bulgaria chapter of The Hidden Europe, I observed that Bulgaria is depopulating faster than any other European country. Having peaked at 9 million in the late 1980s, a century later, it will be half that size. Despite that, in that chapter, I predicted that in 500 years, we'll have one trillion humans in the solar system, with at least 100 billion on Earth. This video explains how and why that may happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lJJ_QqIVnc Conclusion In 2075, will After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People look as stupid as The Population Bomb looks 50 years after publication? Does After the Spike make the same errors as The Population Bomb? Paul Ehrlich's underestimated technology and the continued collapse in fertility rates. As Dean Spears and Michael Geruso point out, fertility rates have been declining since they were first measured. Had Ehrlich extrapolated the trendline, he would have realized that our demographic collapse was imminent, not an explosion. Furthermore, technology solved many of the problems Ehrlich imagined. Is After the Spike making the same error? Fertility rates won't fall forever. They must stop. Otherwise, we'll become extinct. However, will fertility rates soar due to technology or some other reason? What could make our fertility rates return to three or more? Here are a few ideas: We master fusion energy, providing us with ultra-cheap energy and dramatically decreasing the cost of having children. Robots perform most jobs, leaving humans with ample time to raise large families. As the negative effects of depopulation start rippling across the world, a global cultural panic erupts, prompting people to prioritize reproduction. Homo-enhanced humans, merged with artificial general intelligence, decide to proliferate to dominate the planet. Vertical farms and lab-grown cultured meat improve the environment so dramatically that humans feel less guilty about having three or more children, and generous subsidies offset the costs. Admittedly, these scenarios are unlikely to occur during the next 50 years, so After the Spike won't become the joke that The Population Bomb became in 50 years. Still, I predict that Ehrlich's great-great-granddaughter will write The Population Bomb II: Thomas Malthus Will Be Right Someday. Verdict 10 out of 10 stars! Excerpts The excerpts below are from an advanced copy, which may have undergone edits. Hence, some of these excerpts may have been reworded or deleted in the final print. The reason I am quoting them is that even if the excerpts are removed in the final edition, they illustrate the book's overall message. It would be easy to think that fewer people would be better—better for the planet, better for the people who remain. This book asks you to think again. Depopulation is not the solution we urgently need for environmental challenges, nor will it raise living standards by dividing what the world can offer across fewer of us. Despite what you may have been told, depopulation is not the solution we urgently need for environmental challenges like climate change. Nor will it raise living standards by dividing what the world can offer across fewer of us. To the contrary, so much of the progress that we now take for granted sprang up in a large and interconnected society. Part I's big claim: No future is more likely than that people worldwide choose to have too few children to replace their own generation. Over the long run, this would cause exponential population decline. Whether depopulation would be good or bad depends on the facts and depends on our values. We ask about those facts and values, building up to an overall assessment: Part II and Part III's big claim: A stabilized world population would be better, overall, than a depopulating future. Part IV's big claim: Nobody yet knows how to stabilize a depopulating world. But humanity has made revolutionary improvements to society before— we can do it again if we choose. We won't ask you to abandon your concerns about climate change; about reproductive freedom and abortion access; or about ensuring safe, healthy, flourishing lives for everyone everywhere. We won't ask you to consider even an inch of backsliding on humanity's progress toward gender equity. We insist throughout that everyone should have the tools to choose to parent or not to parent. This book is not about whether or how you should parent. It's about whether we all should make parenting easier. In 2012, 146 million children were born. That was more than in any year of history to that point. It was also more than in any year since. Millions fewer will be born this year. The year 2012 may well turn out to be the year in which the most humans were ever born— ever as in ever for as long as humanity exists. Within three hundred years, a peak population of 10 billion could fall below 2 billion. The tip of the Spike may be six decades from today. For every 205 babies born, human biology, it turns out, would produce about 100 females. Average fertility in Europe today is about 1.5. That means the next generation will be 25 percent smaller than the last. Birth rates were falling all along. For as long as any reliable records exist, and for at least several hundred years while the Spike was ascending, the average number of births per woman has been falling, generation by generation. In the United States in the early 1800s, married white women (a population for whom some data were recorded) gave birth an average of seven times. If life expectancy doubles to 150 years, or quadruples to 300 years, couldn't that prevent the depopulating edge of the Spike? The surprising answer is no. The story of the Spike would stay the same, even if life expectancy quadrupled to three hundred years. In contrast, if adults' reproductive spans also changed, so people had, say, one or two babies on average over their twenties, thirties, and forties and then another one on average over their fifties, sixties, and seventies, then that would stop depopulation— but it would be because births changed, not because later-adulthood deaths changed. Where exactly should humanity stabilize? Six billion? Eight? Ten? Some other number? This book makes the case to stabilize somewhere. Exactly where will have to be a question for public and scientific debate. So the extra greenhouse gas emissions contributed by the larger population would be small, even under the assumption here that the future is bleak and we go on emitting for another century. The environmental costs of a new child are not zero. Not by a long shot. Not yet. But they are falling. Each new person who joins the ranks of humanity will add less CO2 than, well, you over your lifetime. Humanity could choose a future that's good, free, and fair for women and that also has an average birth rate of two. There is no inescapable dilemma. In that kind of future, people who want to parent would get the support that they need (from nonparents, from taxpayers, from everyone) to choose parenting. The most plausible way humanity might stabilize— and the only way this book endorses— is if societies everywhere work to make parenting better. Globally, we now produce about 50 percent more food per person than in 1961. “endogenous economic growth.” Endogenous means “created from the inside.” Ideas do not come from outside the economy. They come from us. Because scale matters, a depopulating planet will be able to fill fewer niches. A threat with a fixed cost: A threat has arisen that will kill all humans (however many) unless a large cost is paid to escape it (such as by deflecting an asteroid) within a certain time period. Could a kajillion lives ever be the best plan? That question goes beyond the practical question that this book is here to answer. Between our two families, we have had three live births, four miscarriages, and three failed IVF rounds. Parenting will need to become better than it is today. That's what we, your authors, hope and believe. The opportunity cost hypothesis: Spending time on parenting means giving up something. Because the world has improved around us, that “something” is better than it used to be. In no case is there evidence that more support for parents predicts more births. Nobody— no expert, no theory— fully understands why birth rates, everywhere, in different cultures and contexts, are lower than ever before. I hope these excerpts compel you to buy the book. If you're still undecided, consider that the book features numerous graphs and illustrations that will rewire your brain. Buy After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People. Connect Send me an anonymous voicemail at SpeakPipe.com/FTapon You can post comments, ask questions, and sign up for my newsletter at https://wanderlearn.com. If you like this podcast, subscribe and share! On social media, my username is always FTapon. Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram TikTok LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Sponsors 1. My Patrons sponsored this show! Claim your monthly reward by becoming a patron for as little as $2/month at https://Patreon.com/FTapon 2. For the best travel credit card, get one of the Chase Sapphire cards and get 75-100k bonus miles! 3. Get $5 when you sign up for Roamless, my favorite global eSIM! Use code LR32K 4. Get 25% off when you sign up for Trusted Housesitters, a site that helps you find sitters or homes to sit in. 5. Start your podcast with my company, Podbean, and get one month free! 6. In the United States, I recommend trading cryptocurrency with Kraken. 7. Outside the USA, trade crypto with Binance and get 5% off your trading fees! 8. For backpacking gear, buy from Gossamer Gear.
Reimagining the Future of Education Through Innovation with Ariam Mogos. Ariam leads the emerging tech portfolio at Stanford's d.school, where she supports students and educators in designing with tools like AI, always with a keen eye on their ethical impact on people and the planet. Her work spans continents, from Africa and Asia to the US and Europe, collaborating with organisations like UNICEF, the World Bank, and the LEGO Foundation. A National Geographic Explorer, Ariam's contributions to digital learning and inclusion have also been recognised by Mozilla and Fast Company
Eric Topol (00:06):Hello, this is Eric Topol from Ground Truths, and I'm delighted to welcome Owen Tripp, who is a CEO of Included Health. And Owen, I'd like to start off if you would, with the story from 2016, because really what I'm interested in is patients and how to get the right doctor. So can you tell us about when you lost your hearing in your right ear back, what, nine years ago or so?Owen Tripp (00:38):Yeah, it's amazing to say nine years, Eric, but obviously as your listeners will soon understand a pretty vivid memory in my past. So I had been working as I do and noticed a loss of hearing in my right ear. I had never experienced any hearing loss before, and I went twice actually to a sort of national primary care chain that now owned by Amazon actually. And they described it as eustachian tube dysfunction, which is a pretty benign common thing that basically meant that my tubes were blocked and that I needed to have some drainage. They recommended Sudafed to no effect. And it was only a couple weeks later where I was walking some of the senior medical team at my company down to the San Francisco Giants game. And I was describing this experience of hearing loss and I said I was also losing a little bit of sensation in the right side of my face. And they said, that is not eustachian tube dysfunction. And well, I can let the story unfold from there. But basically my colleagues helped me quickly put together a plan to get this properly diagnosed and treated. The underlying condition is called vestibular schwannoma, even more commonly known as an acoustic neuroma. So a pretty rare benign brain tumor that exists on the vestibular nerve, and it would've cost my life had it not been treated.Eric Topol (02:28):So from what I gather, you saw an ENT physician, but that ENT physician was not really well versed in this condition, which is I guess a bit surprising. And then eventually you got to the right ENT physician in San Francisco. Is that right?Owen Tripp (02:49):Well, the first doctor was probably an internal medicine doctor, and I think it's fair to say that he had probably not seen many, if any cases. By the time I reached an ENT, they were interested in working me up for what's known as sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSHL), which is basically a fancy term for you lose hearing for a variety of possible pathologies and reasons, but you go through a process of differential diagnosis to understand what's actually going on. By the time that I reached that ENT, the audio tests had showed that I had significant hearing loss in my right ear. And what an MRI would confirm was this mass that I just described to you, which was quite large. It was already about a centimeter large and growing into the inner ear canal.Eric Topol (03:49):Yeah, so I read that your Stanford brain scan suggested it was about size of a plum and that you then got the call that you had this mass in your brainstem tumor. So obviously that's a delicate operation to undergo. So the first thing was getting a diagnosis and then the next thing was getting the right surgeon to work on your brain to resect this. So how did you figure out who was the right person? Because there's only a few thousand of these operations done every year, as I understand.Owen Tripp (04:27):That's exactly right. Yeah, very few. And without putting your listeners to sleep too early in our discussion, what I'll say is that there are a lot of ways that you can actually do this. There are very few cases, any approach really requires either shrinking or removing that tumor entirely. My size of tumor meant it was really only going to be a surgical approach, and there I had to decide amongst multiple potential approaches. And this is what's interesting, Eric, you started saying you wanted to talk about the patient experience. You have to understand that I'm somebody, while not a doctor, I lead a very large healthcare company. We provide millions of visits and services per year on very complex medical diagnoses down to more standard day-to-day fare. And so, being in the world of medical complexity was not daunting on the basics, but then I'm the patient and now I have to make a surgical treatment decision amongst many possible choices, and I was able to get multiple opinions.Owen Tripp (05:42):I got an opinion from the House clinic, which is closer to you in LA. This is really the place where they invented the surgical approach to treating these things. I also got an approach shared with me from the Mayo Clinic and one from UCSF and one from Stanford, and ultimately, I picked the Stanford team. And these are fascinating and delicate structures as you know that you're dealing with in the brain, but the surgery is a long surgery performed by multiple surgeons. It's such an exhausting surgery that as you're sort of peeling away that tumor that you need relief. And so, after a 13 hour surgery, multiple nights in the hospital and some significant training to learn how to walk and move and not lose my balance, I am as you see me today, but it was possible under one of the surgical approaches that I would've lost the use of the right side of my face, which obviously was not an option given what I given what I do.Eric Topol (06:51):Yeah, well, I know there had to be a tough rehab and so glad that you recovered well, and I guess you still don't have hearing in that one ear, right?Owen Tripp:That's right.Eric Topol:But otherwise, you're walking well, and you've completely recovered from what could have been a very disastrous type of, not just the tumor itself, but also the way it would be operated on. 13 hours is a long time to be in the operating room as a patient.Owen Tripp (07:22):You've got a whole team in there. You've got people testing nerve function, you've got people obviously managing the anesthesiology, which is sufficiently complex given what's involved. You've got a specialized ENT called a neurotologist. You've got the neurosurgeon who creates access. So it's quite a team that does these things.Eric Topol (07:40):Yeah, wow. Now, the reason I wanted to delve into this from your past is because I get a call or email or whatever contact every week at least one, is can you help me find the right doctor for such and such? And this has been going on throughout my career. I mean, when I was back in 20 years ago at Cleveland Clinic, the people on the board, I said, well, I wrote about it in one of my books. Why did you become a trustee on the board? And he said, so I could get access to the right doctor. And so, this is amazing. We live in an information era supposedly where people can get information about this being the most precious part, which is they want to get the right diagnosis, they want to get the right treatment or prevention, whatever, and they can't get it. And I'm finding this just extraordinary given that we can do deep research through several different AI models and get reports generated on whatever you want, but you can't get the right doctor. So now let's go over to what you're working on. This company Included Health. When did you start that?Owen Tripp (08:59):Well, I started the company that was known as Grand Rounds in 2011. And Grand Rounds still to this day, we've rebranded as Included Health had a very simple but powerful idea, one you just obliquely referred to, which is if we get people to higher quality medicine by helping them find the right level and quality of care, that two good things would happen. One, the sort of obvious one, patients would get better, they'd move on with their lives, they'd return to health. But two and critically that we would actually help the system overall with the cost burden of unnecessary, inappropriate and low quality care because the coda to the example you gave of people calling you looking for a physician referral, and you and I both know this, my guess is you've probably had to clean plenty of it up in your career is if you go to the wrong doctor, you don't get out of the problem. The problem just persists. And that patient is likely to bounce around like a ping pong ball until they find what they actually need. And that costs the payers of healthcare in this country a lot of money. So I started the company in 2011 to try to solve that problem.Eric Topol (10:14):Yeah, one example, a patient of mine who I've looked after for some 35 years contacted me and said, a very close friend of mine lives in the Palm Springs region and he has this horrible skin condition and he's tortured and he's been to six centers, UCSF, Stanford, Oregon Health Science, Eisenhower, UCLA, and he had a full workup and he can't sleep because he's itching all the time. His whole skin is exfoliating and cellulitis and he had biopsies everywhere. He's put on all kinds of drugs, monoclonal antibodies. And I said to this patient of mine I said, I don't know, this is way out of my area. I checked at Scripps and turns out there was this kind of the Columbo of dermatology, he can solve any mystery. And the patient went to see him, and he was diagnosed within about a minute that he had scabies, and he was treated and completely recovered after having thousands and thousands of dollars of all these workups at these leading medical centers that you would expect could make a diagnosis of scabies.Owen Tripp (11:38):That's a pretty common diagnosis.Eric Topol (11:40):Yeah. I mean you might expect it more in somebody who was homeless perhaps, but that doesn't mean it can't happen in anyone. And within the first few minutes he did a scrape and showed the patient under the microscope and made a definitive diagnosis and the patient to this day is still trying to pay all his bills for all these biopsies and drugs and whatnot, and very upset that he went through all this for over a year and he thought he wanted to die, it was so bad. Now, I had never heard of Included Health and you have now links with a third of the Fortune 100 companies. So what do you do with these companies?Owen Tripp (12:22):Yeah, it's pretty cool. These companies, so very large organizations like Walmart and JPMorgan Chase and the rest of the big pioneers of American industry and business put us in as a benefit to help their employees have the same experience that I described to provide almost Eric Topol like guidance service to help people find access to high quality care, which might be referring them into the community or to an academic medical center, but often is also us providing care delivery ourselves through on-demand primary care, urgent care, behavioral health. And now just last year we introduced a couple of our first specialty lines. And the idea, Eric, is that these companies buy this because they know their employees will love it and they do. It is often one of, if not the most highly rated benefits available. But also because in getting their employees better care faster, the employees come back to work, they feel more connected to the company, they're able to do better and safer and higher quality work. And they get more mileage out of their health benefits. And you have to remember that the costs of health benefits in this country are inflating even in this time of hyperinflation. They're inflating faster than anything else, and this is one of most companies, number one pain points for how they are going to control their overall budget. So this is a solution that both give them visibility to controlling cost and can deliver them an excellent patient experience that is not an offer that they've been able to get from the traditional managed care operators.Eric Topol (14:11):So I guess there's a kind of multidimensional approach that you're describing. For one, you can help find a doctor that's the right doctor for the right patient. And you're also actually providing medical services too, right?Owen Tripp (14:27):That's right.Eric Topol (14:30):Are these physicians who are employed by Included Health?Owen Tripp (14:34):They are, and we feel very strongly about that. We think that in our model, we want to train people, hire people in a specific way, prepare them for the kind of work that we do. And there's a lot we could spend time talking about there, but one of the key features of that is teamwork. We want people to work in a collaborative model where they understand that while they may be expert in one specific thing that is connected to a service line, they're working in a much broader team in support of the member, in support of that patient. And we talk about the patients being very first here, and you and I had a laugh on this in the past, so many hospitals will say we're patient first. So many managed care companies will say they're patient first, but it is actually hard the way that the system is designed to truly be patient first. At Included Health, we measure whether patients will come back to us, whether they tell their friends about us, whether they have high quality member satisfaction and are they living more healthy days. So everybody gets surveyed for patient reported outcomes, which is highly unusual as you know, to have both the clinical outcomes and the patient reported outcomes as well.Eric Topol (15:41):Is that all through virtual visits or are there physical visits as well?Owen Tripp (15:47):Today that is all through virtual visits. So we provide 24/7/365 access to urgent care, primary care, behavioral health, the start of the specialty clinic, which we launched last year. And then we provide support for patients who have questions about how these things are going to be billed, what other benefits they have access to. And where appropriate, we send them out to care. So obviously we can't provide all the exams virtually. We can't provide everything that a comprehensive physical would today, but as you and I know that is also changing rapidly. And so, we can do things to put sensors and other observational devices in people's homes to collect that data positively.Eric Topol (16:32):Now, how is that different than Teladoc and all these other telehealth based companies? I mean because trying to understand on the one hand you have a service that you can provide that can be extremely helpful and seems to be relatively unique. Whereas the other seems to be shared with other companies that started in this telehealth space.Owen Tripp (16:57):I think the easiest way to think about the difference here is how a traditional telemedicine company is paid and how we're paid because I think it'll give you some clue as to why we've designed it the way we've designed it. So the traditional telehealth model is you put a quarter in the jukebox, you listen to a song when the song's over, you got to get out and move on with the rest of your life. And quite literally what I mean is that you're going to see one doctor, one time, you will never see that same doctor again. You are not going to have a connected experience across your visits. I mean, you might have an underlying chart, but there's not going to be a continuity of care and follow up there as you would in an integrated setting. Now by comparison, and that's all derived from the fact that those telehealth companies are paid by the drink, they're paid by the visit.Owen Tripp (17:49):In our model, we are committing to a set of experience goals and a set of outcomes to the companies that you refer to that pay our bill. And so, the visits that our members enjoy are all connected. So if you have a primary care visit, that is connected to your behavioral health visit, which is great and is as it should be. If you have a primary care appointment where you identify the need for follow-up cardiology for example. That patient can be followed through that cardiology visit that we circle back, that we make sure that the patient is educated, that he or she has all their questions answered. That's because we know that if the patient actually isn't confident in what they heard and they don't follow through on the plan, then it's all for naught. It's not going to work. And it's a simple sort of observation, but it's how we get paid and why we think it's a really important way to think about medicine.Eric Topol (18:44):So these companies, and they're pretty big companies like Google and AT&T and as you said, JPMorgan and the list goes on and on. Any one of the employees can get this. Is that how it works?Owen Tripp (18:56):That's right, that's right. And even better, most of what I've described to you today is at a low or zero cost to them. So this is a very affordable, easy way to access care. Thinking about one of our very large airline clients the other day, we're often dealing with their flight crews and ramp agents at very strange hours in very strange places away from home, so that they don't have to wait to get access to care. And you can understand that at a basic humanitarian level why that's great, but you can also understand it from a safety perspective that if there is something that is impeding that person's ability to be functioning at work, that becomes an issue for the corporation itself.Eric Topol (19:39):Yeah, so it's interesting you call it included because most of us in the country are excluded. That is, they don't have any way to turn through to get help for a really good referral. Everything's out of network if they are covered and they're not one of the fortunate to be in these companies that you're providing the service for. So do you have any peers or are there any others that are going to come into this space to help a lot of these people that are in a tough situation where they don't really have anyone to turn to?Owen Tripp (20:21):Well, I hope so. Because like you, I've dedicated my career to trying to use information and use science and use in my own right to bring along the model. At Included Health, we talk about raising the standard of care for everybody, and what we mean by that is, we actually hope that this becomes a model that others can follow. The same way the Cleveland Clinic did, the same way the Mayo Clinic did. They brought a model into the world that others soon try to replicate, and that was a good thing. So we'd like to see more attempt to do this. The reality is we have not seen that because unfortunately the old system has a lot of incentives in place to function exactly the way that it is designed. The health system is going to maximize the number of patients that correspond to the highest paying procedures and tests, et cetera. The managed care company is going to try to process the highest number of claims, work the most efficient utilization management and prior authorization, but left out in the middle of all of that is the patient. And so, we really wanted to build that model with the patient at the center, and when I started this company now over a decade ago, that was just a dream that we could do that. Now serving over 10 million members, this feels like it's possible and it feels like a model others could follow.Eric Topol (21:50):Yeah, well that was what struck me is here you're reaching 10 million people. I'd never heard of it. I was like, wow. I thought I try to keep up with things. But now the other thing I wanted to get into you with is AI. Obviously, that has a lot of promise in many different ways. As you know, there are some 12 million diagnostic serious errors a year in the US. I mean you were one, I've been part of them. Most people have been roughed up one way or another. Then there's 800,000 Americans who have disability or die from these errors a year, according to Johns Hopkins relatively recent study. So one of the ways that AI could help is accuracy. But of course, there's many other ways it can help make the lives of both patients helping to integrate their data and physicians to go through a patient's records and set points of their labs and all sorts of other things. Where do you see AI fitting into the model that you've built?Owen Tripp (22:58):Well, I'll give you two that I'm really excited about, that I don't think I hear other people talking about. And again, I'm going to start with that patient, with that member and what he or she wants and needs. One and Eric, bear with me, this is going to sound very banal, but one is just making sense of these very complicated plan documents and explanations of benefits. I'm aware of how well-trained you are and how much you've written. I believe you are the most published in your field. I believe that is a fact. And yet if I showed you a plan description document and an explanation of benefit and I asked you, Eric, could you tell me how much it's going to cost to have an MRI at this facility? I don't think you would've any way of figuring that out. And that is something that people confront every single day in this country. And a lot of people are not like you and me, in that we could probably tolerate a big cost range for that MRI. For some people that might actually be the difference between whether they eat or not, or get their kids prescription or not.Owen Tripp (24:05):And so, we want to make the questions about what your benefits cover and how you understand what's available to you in your plan. We want to make that really easy and we want to make it so that you don't have to have a PhD in insurance language to be able to ask the properly formatted question. As you know, the foundation models are terrific at that problem. So that's one.Eric Topol (24:27):And that's a good one, that's very practical and very much needed. Yeah.Owen Tripp (24:32):The second one I'm really excited about, and I think this will also be near and dear to your heart, is AI has this ability to be sort of nonjudgmental in the best possible way. And so, if we have a patient on a plan to manage hypertension or to manage weight or to manage other elements of a healthy lifestyle. And here we're not talking about deep science, we're just talking about what we've known to work for a long period of time. AI as a coach to help follow through on those goals and passively take data on how you're progressing, but have behind it the world's greatest medical team to be able to jump in when things become more acute or more complex. That's an awesome tool that I think every person needs to be carrying around, so that if my care plan or if my goal is about sleeping better, if my goal is about getting pregnant, if my goal is about reducing my blood pressure, that I can do that in a way that I can have a conversation where I don't feel as a patient that I'm screwing up or letting somebody down, and I can be honest with that AI.Owen Tripp (25:39):So I'm really excited about the potential for the AI as an adjunct coach and care team manager to continue to proceed along with that member with medical support behind that when necessary.Eric Topol (25:55):Yeah, I mean there's a couple of things I'd say about that. Firstly, the fact that you're thinking it from the patient perspective where most working in AI is thinking it from the clinician perspective, so that's really important. The next is that we get notifications, and you need to not sit every hour or something like that from a ring or from a smartwatch or whatever. That isn't particularly intelligent, although it may be needed. The point is we don't get notifications like, what was your blood pressure? Or can you send a PDF of your heart rhythm or this sort of thing. Now the problem too is that people are generating lots of data just by wearing a smartwatch or a fitness band. You've got your activity, your sleep, your heart rate, and all sorts of things that are derivatives of that. No less, you could have other sensors like a glucose monitoring and on and on. No less your electronic health record, and there's no integration of any of this.Eric Topol (27:00):So this idea that we could have a really intelligent AI virtual coach for the patient, which as you said could have connects with a physician as needed, bringing in the data or bringing in some type of issue that the doctor needs to attend to, but it doesn't seem like anything is getting done. We have the AI capabilities, but nothing's getting done. It's frustrating because I wrote about this in 2019 in the Deep Medicine book, and it's just like some of the most sophisticated companies you would think Apple, for the ring Oura and so many others. They have the data, but they don't integrate anything, and they don't really set up notifications for patients. How are we going to get out of this rut?Owen Tripp (27:51):We are producing oil tankers of data around personal experience and not actually turning that into positive energy for what patients can do. But I do want to be optimistic on this point because I actually think, and I shared this with you when we last saw each other. Your thinking was ahead of the time, but foundational for people like me to say, we need to go actually make that real. And let me explain to you what I mean by making it real. We need to bring together the insight that you have an elevated heart rate or that your step count is down, or that your sleep schedule is off. We need to bring that together with the possibility of connecting with a medical professional, which these devices do not have the ability to do that today, and nor do those companies really want to get in that business. And also make that context of what you can afford as a patient.Owen Tripp (28:51):So we have data that's suggestive of an underlying issue. We have a medical team that's prepared to actually help you on that issue. And then we have financial security to know that whatever is identified actually will be paid for. Now, that's not a hard triangle conceptually, but no one of those companies is actually interested in all the points of the triangle, and you have to be because otherwise it's not going to work for the patient. If your business is in selling devices. Really all I'm thinking about is how do I sell devices and subscriptions. If my business is exclusively in providing care, that's really all I'm thinking about. If my business is in managing risk and writing insurance policies, that's really all I'm thinking about. You have to do all those three things in concert.Eric Topol (29:34):Yeah, I mean in many ways it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is we're in this phenomenal era of information to the fifth power. But here we are, we have a lot of data from multiple sources, and it doesn't get integrated. So for example, a person has a problem and they don't know what is the root cause of it. Let's say it's poor sleep, or it could be that they're having stress, which would be manifest through their heart rate or heart rate variability or all sorts of other metrics. And there's no intelligence provided for them to interpret their data because it's all siloed and we're just not really doing that for patients. I hope that'll happen. Hopefully, Included Health could be a lead in that. Maybe you can show the way. Anyway, this has been a fun conversation, Owen. It's rare that I've talked in Ground Truths with any person running a company, but I thought yours.Eric Topol (30:36):Firstly, I didn't know anything about it and it's big. And secondly, that it's a kind of a unique model that really I'm hoping that others will get involved in and that someday we'll all be included. Maybe not with Included Health, but with better healthcare in this country, which is certainly not the norm, not the routine. And also, as you aptly pointed out at terrible costs with all sorts of waste, unnecessary tests and that sort of thing. So thanks for what you're doing and I'll be following your future efforts and hopefully we can keep making some strides.Owen Tripp (31:15):We will. And I wanted to say thanks for the conversation too and for your thinking on these topics. And look, I want to leave you just with a quick dose of optimism, and you and I both know this. The American system at its best is an extraordinary system, unrivaled in the world, in my opinion. But we do have to have more people included. All the services need to be included in one place. When we get there, we're going to really see what's possible here.Eric Topol (31:40):I do want to agree with you that if you can get to the right doctor and if you can afford it, that is ideally covered by your insurance. It is a phenomenal system, but getting there, that's the hard part. And every day people are confronted. I'm sure, thousands and thousands with serious condition either to get the diagnosis or the treatment, and they have a really rough time. So anyway, so thank you and I really appreciate your taking the time to meet with me today.****************************************************************Thanks for listening, watching, reading and subscribing to Ground Truths.An update on Super Agers:It is ranked #5 on the New York Times bestseller list (on the list for 4th time)https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/advice-how-to-and-miscellaneous/New podcastsPBS Walter Isaacson, Amanpour&Co Factually, With Adam ConoverPeter Lee, Microsoft Researchhttps://x.com/MSFTResearch/status/1943460270824714414If you found this interesting PLEASE share it!That makes the work involved in putting these together especially worthwhile.Thanks to Scripps Research, and my producer, Jessica Nguyen, and Sinjun Balabanoff for video/audio support.All content on Ground Truths—its newsletters, analyses, and podcasts, are free, open-access.Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Please don't hesitate to post comments and give me feedback. Let me know topics that you would like to see covered.Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe
Teacher: Daniel HopkinsChurch Services: Bible Class - 9:30 - 10:15 Sunday Morning Worship Service - 10:30 - 11:30 Sunday Evening Worship Service - 6 - 7 Wednesday Evening Bible Study - 6 - 7 Stanford, Kentucky
Teacher: Daniel HopkinsChurch Services: Bible Class - 9:30 - 10:15 Sunday Morning Worship Service - 10:30 - 11:30 Sunday Evening Worship Service - 6 - 7 Wednesday Evening Bible Study - 6 - 7 Stanford, Kentucky
Favorites (3:22): Clemson, Miami, SMU, Louisville, Duke, Georgia TechCan they sustain success? (28:25): Syracuse, Boston CollegeCan they Bounce Back? (33:08): Florida State, Pitt, North Carolina, NC StateSurprise? (48:36): Virginia Tech, Virginia, Wake Forest, Stanford, Cal
“Obedience” in marriage is a loaded word—what does it really mean? Are women expected to submit like servants? Is Christian marriage inherently unequal? Or is there something deeper, more beautiful, and profoundly mutual at play?Today I'm joined by Mary Stanford, who has spent her career unpacking this very paradox. How can a woman “submit” as described in Ephesians 5 and still be a full, free, and equal partner in marriage?Mary dives into the God-given differences between men and women—how our bodies and dispositions reflect distinct, complementary gifts—and how this complementarity can lead to deep unity and even fruitfulness, both literally and spiritually.This topic isn't without controversy. The line between holy submission and enabling harmful dynamics is razor thin. Join the conversation in the comments and help us wrestle with one of the most misunderstood teachings in Scripture.Obedience Paradox book: https://www.amazon.com/Obedience-Paradox-Finding-Freedom-Marriage/dp/1681926954Mary's faculty website: https://www.christendom.edu/academics/undergraduate-faculty/mary-stanford/NEW: Join our exclusive Rose Report community! https://lilaroseshow.supercast.com - We'll have BTS footage, ad-free episodes, monthly AMA, and early access to our upcoming guests.A big thanks to our partner, EWTN, the world's leading Catholic network! Discover news, entertainment and more at https://www.ewtn.com/ Check out our Sponsors:-We Heart Nutrition: https://www.weheartnutrition.com/ Get high quality vitamin supplements for 20% off using the code LILA. -Good Ranchers: https://go.goodranchers.com/lila Purchase your American Meat Delivered subscription today and get a free add-on of beef, chicken, or salmon! Use code LILA for $40 off! -EveryLife: https://www.everylife.com Buy diapers from an amazing pro-life diaper company and use code LILA and get 10% off!00:00:00 - Intro00:06:39 - Few people have parents as model relationships00:10:40 - Good Ranchers00:11:52 - Key successes in Mary's parent's marriage00:19:04 - What did fighting and resolution look like?00:23:11 - EveryLife00:24:11 - What is the Obedience Paradox?00:32:26 - Man as an instrument00:36:22 - We Heart Nutrition00:37:20 - What does submission mean?00:51:01 - The temptation for women00:54:30 - What are women's fallen traits?01:08:38 - Do's/Don'ts of Biblical Submission01:27:13 - Final thoughts
On this week's AI/XR Podcast, Charlie Fink and Rony Abovitz welcome Ananya Chadha, founder of Quander.co, a startup building AI-powered marketing agents for businesses of all sizes. Chadha, a Stanford grad with experience at Neuralink and IBM, is betting that distribution—more than product—is the defining challenge for small and large businesses in an age of content overload. Quander's tools scrape social platforms for niche conversations and automate personalized outreach, while also optimizing ad creative based on performance data. The hosts discuss AI's growing role in media and marketing, Meta's $3.5B investment in Luxottica, and the rise of “AI slop” across the internet. They also touch on Nvidia's $4T valuation and XR news from Zoom, Mentra, and Sesame. Thank you to our sponsor, Zappar!Don't forget to like, share, and follow for more! Follow us on all socials @TheAIXRPodcasthttps://linktr.ee/thisweekinxr Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We dissect a quote from Scott Frost during his brief time at Stanford, celebrate Brice Matthews getting the call to "The Show", and we preview this weekend's MLB Draft and answer your burning questions.
On this episode of Investor Connect, we are joined by Ron from South Highland Ventures for an enlightening presentation on search funds, touted as the best-performing asset class in the world. Ron dives deep into the 40-year-old model initially developed by Stanford and Harvard, highlighting its relevance and success today in addressing the $10 trillion succession challenge faced by businesses globally. He emphasizes the robust returns and lower risks associated with search funds compared to traditional venture capital or private equity, detailing how they capitalize on small, stable companies with strong profit margins that lack succession planning but have immense growth potential. Ron also shares insights into the distinctive features of South Highland Ventures and its collaboration with Nova Stone Capital Advisors in building a streamlined deal flow machine, underscoring the firm's innovative and scalable approach to search fund investments. For more updates and information, connect with Ron through the contact details provided, and join us next time on Investor Connect. Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding. Let's go startup something today. _______________________________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at: Check out our other podcasts here: For Investors check out: For Startups check out: For eGuides check out: For upcoming Events, check out For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of
Katherine Boyle is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and cofounder of its American Dynamism practice, investing in sectors such as defense, aerospace, manufacturing, and infrastructure. She serves on the boards of Apex Space and Hadrian Automation, and is a board observer for Saronic Technologies and Castelion. Previously, she was a partner at General Catalyst, where she co-led the seed practice and backed companies like Anduril Industries and Vannevar Labs. She was also a reporter at The Washington Post. Katherine holds a BA from Georgetown, an MBA from Stanford, and a Master's from the National University of Ireland, Galway. She sits on the boards of The Free Press and the Mercatus Center. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://americanfinancing.net/srs NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://tryarmra.com/srs https://betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://shawnlikesgold.com https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://masachips.com/srs – USE CODE SRS https://paladinpower.com/srs – USE CODE SRS https://patriotmobile.com/srs https://rocketmoney.com/srs https://ROKA.com – USE CODE SRS https://trueclassic.com/srs https://USCCA.com/srs https://blackbuffalo.com Katherine Boyle Links: Website - https://a16z.com/author/katherine-boyle X - https://x.com/KTmBoyle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today's guests are Cameron Josse and Joel Reinhardt. Cameron Josse is an Assistant Strength & Conditioning Coach with the Detroit Lions. He's previously led training at DeFranco's and worked in college football at UNC Charlotte and Indiana, training athletes across the NFL, NHL, UFC, and WWE. Joel Reinhardt is the Director of Football Performance at Lafayette College. He's coached at San José State, Stanford, UMass, and Nicholls State. Both Cameron and Joel are field leaders in applied performance, data-driven programming, and athletic movement for physical preparation in American Football. Details in athletic preparation change from the level of high school to college to professional. On today's episode, Cameron and Joel speak on the nature of contact and collision preparation in their athlete populations, with a specific emphasis on the use of the ground and rolling patterns. They discuss the specific game demands of football, especially on the college and pro level, and how to prepare athletes for 25,000+ weekly yards of total on-field movement. They break down their approaches to speed, direction change, and capacity building work, with these ideas in mind. This was a show with lots of wisdom on helping players fully meet the needs of their sport. Today's episode is brought to you by Hammer Strength and LILA Exogen wearable resistance. Use the code "justfly25" for 25% off any Lila Exogen wearable resistance training, including the popular Exogen Calf Sleeves. For this offer, head to Lilateam.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. (https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-home/) Timestamps 1:57 – In-Season Program Differences: NFL vs. College Strength Cycles 4:48 – Navigating Player Relationships with Private Trainers 15:57 – Adapting Contact Prep and Agility for Different Levels 32:38 – Tempo Running as a Foundation for Training Camp Readiness 37:44 – Total Yardage and Conditioning Strategy in Football Preparation 50:16 – Designing Multi-Directional Conditioning Sessions That Mimic Football 58:28 – Integrating Multi-Directional Movements in Conditioning for Athleticism 1:03:46 – Reframing Speed Development Within Annual Training Cycles 1:10:04 – Shifting Focus: From Pure Speed to Building Complete Players Actionable Takeaways In-Season Program Differences: NFL vs. College Strength Cycles [1:57] College and NFL environments demand different strategies due to season length, player access, and structure. Joel discusses managing heavy summer phases before camp, while Cam explains the shift in autonomy and scheduling when transitioning to the NFL. What to try: In college, leverage summer access to build in more football-specific work before camp. In pro settings: Expect less year-round control—build players' autonomy and keep lines open during away periods. Plan for longer in-season stress in the NFL (17+ games); taper early and build recovery into weekly rhythms Navigating Player Relationships with Private Trainers [4:48] Cameron emphasizes collaboration with private-sector coaches when players train off-site. Rather than resisting outside input, he advocates for using it to better individualize in-team programming. What to try: Reach out to private coaches working with your athletes—especially vets with long-standing relationships. Use those conversations to shape training direction, not override it. Drop the ego—focus on what helps the athlete feel and perform best Adapting Contact Prep and Agility for Different Levels [15:57] Literal contact prep (e.g., wrestling, rugby-style drills) is mostly off-limits in team settings. Cam shifts toward decel work, ground-based drills, and rolling patterns to mimic collisions without violating rules. What to try: Use crawling, rolls, and tumbling as proxies for contact—especially during early prep phases. Emphasize deceleration and COD mechanics for lower body contact loading.
What happens when AI decides who gets promoted and who gets fired? Blake and David dive into the shocking reality that 60% of managers now use AI for HR decisions, with over 20% letting algorithms make final calls without human oversight. They explore a Stanford study revealing that tax preparers are the #1 profession seeking automation, but only for basic calendar scheduling. Plus, discover why young Americans now rank health over wealth as their top measure of success, and how this generational shift is reshaping talent recruitment in accounting.SponsorsCloud Accountant Staffing - http://accountingpodcast.promo/casKeeper - http://accountingpodcast.promo/keeperChapters(01:27) - Tax Prom: The Must-Attend Event (04:15) - AI in HR: Promotions and Firings (08:48) - AI in the Workplace: Automation and Worker Preferences (13:32) - AI Adoption and Security Concerns (18:21) - AI Training and Education in Firms (24:01) - Armanino's New AI-Powered Data Warehouse (33:07) - The Annoying Know-It-All Employee (33:18) - The Perfect AI Assistant (35:48) - Young People's Values on Success (38:55) - Global Perspectives on Success (41:23) - The Talent Shortage in Accounting (43:10) - Unlimited PTO and Burnout (46:53) - Tariffs Update (50:42) - The Big Beautiful Bill (01:03:52) - IRS Staffing Cuts and Refund Delays (01:08:26) - Conclusion and CPE Information Show Notes Half of Managers Use AI To Determine Who Gets Promoted and Firedhttps://www.resumebuilder.com/half-of-managers-use-ai-to-determine-who-gets-promoted-and-fired/Future of Work with AI Agentshttps://futureofwork.saltlab.stanford.edu/Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06576 What workers really want from artificial intelligence https://hai.stanford.edu/news/what-workers-really-want-from-artificial-intelligence Big 4 Firm Discovers That Bragging About AI Efficiencies Leads Clients to Expect a Discounthttps://www.goingconcern.com/big-4-firm-discovers-that-bragging-about-ai-efficiencies-leads-clients-to-expect-a-discount/ Monday Morning Accounting News Brief: PwC Clients Ask For an AI Discount; Big 4 Firms Losing Hundreds of Partners https://www.goingconcern.com/monday-morning-accounting-news-brief-pwc-clients-ask-for-an-ai-discount-big-4-firms-losing-hundreds-of-partners-6-30-25/ Armanino planning data warehouse service, used AI for development https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/armanino-planning-data-warehouse-service-used-ai-to-help-development Bolt's millennial founder has just ‘killed' its unlimited PTO perk because it was actually causing burnout https://fortune.com/2025/07/02/bolt-millennial-founder-ceo-ryan-breslow-killed-unlimited-pto-burnout-mandatory-four-weeks-paid-vacation-fintech-startup/ Agentic Misalignment: AI Agents in Corporate Environmentshttps://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment Relationships, health and financial stability are the defining priorities for Gen Z, according to new EY survey https://www.ey.com/en_gl/newsroom/2025/05/relationships-health-and-financial-stability-are-the-defining-priorities-for-gen-z-according-to-new-ey-survey 2025 Technology Perceptions Survey https://www.intapp.com/2025-tech-perceptions-survey/ Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2025/trust-attitudes-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence.html Tax Foundation Tax Prom 2025 https://taxprom.comNeed CPE?Get CPE for listening to podcasts with Earmark: https://earmarkcpe.comSubscribe to the Earmark Podcast: https://podcast.earmarkcpe.comGet in TouchThanks for listening and the great reviews! We appreciate you! Follow and tweet @BlakeTOliver and @DavidLeary. Find us on Facebook and Instagram. If you like what you hear, please do us a favor and write a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. Call us and leave a voicemail; maybe we'll play it on the show. DIAL (202) 695-1040.SponsorshipsAre you interested in sponsoring The Accounting Podcast? For details, read the prospectus.Need Accounting Conference Info? Check out our new website - accountingconferences.comLimited edition shirts, stickers, and other necessitiesTeePublic Store: http://cloudacctpod.link/merchSubscribeApple Podcasts: http://cloudacctpod.link/ApplePodcastsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAccountingPodcastSpotify: http://cloudacctpod.link/SpotifyPodchaser: http://cloudacctpod.link/podchaserStitcher: http://cloudacctpod.link/StitcherOvercast: http://cloudacctpod.link/OvercastClassifiedsREFRAME 2025 - http://accountingpodcast.promo/reframe2025Want to get the word out about your newsletter, webinar, party, Facebo...
I encourage all of my patients to find what I refer to as a “cabana boy.” I like the idea of someone fanning them with a big palm leaf, and taking care of their every need while they relax and take it easy during fertility treatment. Since it can be hard to find a good cabana boy these days, I am always on the lookout for ways to make things easier for my patients. Still, eating right is super important during fertility treatment, AND meal prep and planning can be one more thing to add to your “plate” during an already busy time. When I found out about Methodology, I knew I had to have CEO Julie Nguyen on The Egg Whisperer Show. I know you'll be inspired by Julie's story of how she started Methodology as a way to eat better, and eat healthier, while still having quick and easy options for a busy life. In this episode you will learn about how gut health impacts your overall health, easy ways to eat a cleaner diet, and how some of those ailments (eczema, asthma, and sometimes sleep issues) you have might be the result of what you're eating.. Our current culture provides so many opportunities to pick up fast and processed foods, and while that seems like a faster option, it's not always your best option. I hope you'll join Julie and I as we talk about ways to fix this, especially during a time when you are looking for ways to eat healthier and have easy food prep options. Julie Nguyen is the Founder & CEO of Methodology, a company that makes high-quality, fully cooked meals for busy professionals. Julie holds a BA in Economics from Stanford, and started Methodology after discovering that her own diet was negatively impacting her health and causing eczema, asthma, and poor sleep. Six years, Two nutritionists, 3 personal trainers, and an enormous excel sheet later, Julie had unlocked the keys to tracking her own eating habits and that was the start of Methodology. Get the full show notes for this episode on Dr. Aimee's site. You can find Methodology here, https://www.gomethodology.com/ Would you like to learn about IVF?Click here to join Dr. Aimee for The IVF Class Dr. Aimee will explain Egg Freezing and IVF and there will be time to ask her your questions live on Zoom. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more fertility tips! Join Egg Whisperer School Checkout the podcast Subscribe to the newsletter to get updates Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh is one of America's most well known fertility doctors. Her success rate at baby-making is what gives future parents hope when all hope is lost. She pioneered the TUSHY Method and BALLS Method to decrease your time to pregnancy. Learn more about the TUSHY Method and find a wealth of fertility resources at www.draimee.org.
Hello everyone, Jim here. We're taking a brief two-week break from new episodes to spotlight a couple of golden oldies from the archive. Years later, these remain some of my favorite conversations. We'll be back soon with fresh episodes, but in the meantime, here's my September 2022 chat with the always interesting Will Storr. _________________ Will Storr is an award winning journalist and author. His book ‘The Status Game' transforms our understanding of human nature by demonstrating how our unconscious desire for status ultimately drives our behaviour. Important Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/wstorr?s=21&t=ZdtIqP9eE3_a5qZocDjEXQ Website: https://willstorr.com The Science of Storytelling: https://www.thescienceofstorytelling.com Show Notes: Will's origin story The strange case of David Irving The fundamental nature of status games The Stanford prison experiment and dominance games The status games played by cults Luxury beliefs Why we are all moral hypocrites The importance of being funny Social status and socioeconomic status Human OS and the education system How status seeking leads to the “very best of human nature” The murderous nature of reputation destruction The post WW1 humiliation of Germany Loaded magazine Finding the true reason behind seemingly crazy beliefs The value of religion Trading status Spreading humility Why we could be wrong about our closest beliefs Books Mentioned: The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science; by Will Storr The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History; by Howard Bloom The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism; by Howard Bloom The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous; by Joseph Henrich The Science of Storytelling; by Will Storr Slaughterhouse-Five; by Kurt Vonnegut Selfie: How We Became so Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us; by Will Storr The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It; by Will Storr
If addiction is a disease of the brain, what does that mean for how we treat people—and how we write policy? In this wide-ranging conversation, Stanford addiction expert and policy advisor Keith Humphreys returns to the show to walk us through what neuroscience has taught us about substance use disorders and how that science intersects with law, public health, and politics.From the biology of craving to the limits of autonomy, we explore the tension between compassion and accountability, and what truly effective treatment and prevention might look like.Episode HighlightsWhy addiction isn't just a moral failure—and how brain science explains drug-seeking behaviorThe biological pathways affected by opioids, alcohol, and stimulants—and why some drugs are harder to treatWhat makes some people more vulnerable to addiction than othersWhy effective addiction policy must account for impaired decision-makingHow policy can—and can't—respond to the scienceThe promise and limitations of brain stimulation, psychedelics, and medications like naloxoneWhy prevention—especially for teens—is key to long-term changeWhat a more human, effective, and science-based future could look likeResources & LinksLearn more about Keith HumphreysLearn about the Stanford Network on Addiction PolicyRead about the NeuroChoice Initiative at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences InstituteNIH resources on addiction science and treatmentRead Humphreys' 2024 report on "The rise and fall of Pacific Northwest drug policy reform, 2020–2024" (Brookings Institution, 2024)Read about CARE Courts ( "New California Court for the Mentally Ill Tests a State's Liberal Values", New York Times, 2024)Read Humphreys' 2025 Op-Ed: "Does harm reduction still have a future in San Francisco?" (SF Chronicle, 2025)Read a policy summary, "Blue states change course on mental health policies" (Axios, 2025)We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.eduSend us a text!Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience. Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
V epizodi 187 je bil gost dr.Jure Leskovec, profesor računalništva na Stanfordu, soustanovitelj podjetja Kumo.AI. Pred leti je delal tudi na Pinterestu kot "Chief Scientist". V epizodi se dotakneva naslednjih tematik: Potovanje v Ameriko in zgodnja kariera Doktorski študij in mentorstvo Prehod v Silicijevo dolino Razvoj umetne inteligence in strojnega učenja Vloga umetne inteligence v družbi Vpliv umetne inteligence na industrije Etika in prihodnost umetne inteligence Primerjava tehnoloških sil po svetu Nasveti za prihodnje generacije =================== Prijavi se na AIDEA newsletter (obvestilo glede LIVE dogodka): https://aidea.si/aidea-mailing-lista
Six practical steps to harness the full power of your mind. Our guest today is James R. Doty, a neurosurgeon who has just written a whole book about the science of manifestation – although, as you'll hear him admit, there's very little ‘magic' involved in his process. James R. Doty, M.D. is a Stanford neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, compassion researcher, inventor, entrepreneur, author and philanthropist. He's the founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University. In this episode we talk about: Doty's six steps to manifest His very interesting backstory The art and science of intention setting and the role of our neural pathways. How caring can ignite our parasympathetic nervous system, which in turn can help us manifest better Practical tips for embedding an intention into our subconscious The keys to understanding what we want vs. what we need And how to ‘alert the bloodhound' to harness the full power of your mind We originally aired this episode in July 2024. Related Episodes: #388. The Science of Training Your Attention | Dr. Amishi Jha The Art and Science of Compassion: Thupten Jinpa #425. Compassion Is the Ultimate Tool for the Truly Ambitious | Paul Gilbert Join Dan's online community here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel To advertise on the show, contact sales@advertisecast.com or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris
What happens when Barbie becomes your kid's AI best friend? Look, we're already watching kids lose basic human skills because they can Google everything. Now Mattel wants to stick ChatGPT into toys so your eight-year-old can have deep conversations with Optimus Prime about life's meaning. Stanford says nobody under 18 should be touching this stuff, but apparently corporate profits trump child psychology. We're about to witness the first generation that never has to imagine anything because their toys will do it for them. Meanwhile, we're racing toward a 15-hour work week where robots do everything, leaving men, especially, scrambling for purpose in a world that no longer needs their Protestant work ethic. The future looks like either Ready Player One or we all become batteries for our robot overlords - and honestly, I'm not sure which is worse. Listen now to discover how to protect your kids' humanity in an increasingly artificial world. Topics Discussed: Why AI-powered toys represent a bigger threat than Terminator's Skynet How ChatGPT integration removes children's need for imagination and creativity The concerning link between AI exposure and mental health breakdowns in young people Why Stanford researchers say no one under 18 should use AI technology How losing our imagination muscles affects human development and problem-solving The coming economic disruption of widespread job automation and universal basic income Why men's mental health will suffer most when work-based identity disappears How virtual reality and AI dependency mirror dystopian movie predictions The difference between helpful technology and creativity-killing shortcuts What happens when an entire generation grows up with "AI privilege" ---- MORE FROM THE FIT MESS: Connect with us on Threads, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok Subscribe to The Fit Mess on Youtube Join our community in the Fit Mess Facebook group ---- LINKS TO OUR PARTNERS: Take control of how you'd like to feel with Apollo Neuro Explore the many benefits of cold therapy for your body with Nurecover Muse's Brain Sensing Headbands Improve Your Meditation Practice. Get started as a Certified Professional Life Coach! Get a Free One Year Supply of AG1 Vitamin D3+K2, 5 Travel Packs Revamp your life with Bulletproof Coffee You Need a Budget helps you quickly get out of debt, and save money faster! Start your own podcast!
Design experts explore how we can engage with uncertainty and shape the future with clarity, creativity, and intention. Drawing from their work at Stanford's d.school and their book Assembling Tomorrow, they offer tools for navigating rapid technological change while anchoring our creations in empathy, responsibility, and hope. Carissa Carter is the academic director at Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school) and a former geologist. Her work focuses on systems thinking, climate innovation, and design futures. Scott Doorley is the creative director at Stanford's d.school. He has worked at the intersection of storytelling, physical space, and creative education, and has a background in film and media. They are co-authors of Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving FutureInterview Date: 4/4/2025 Tags: Carissa Carter, Scott Doorley, design, future, innovation, creativity, ethics, emotion, healing, runaway design, AI, synthetic biology, maps, metaphors, empathy, humility, Michael Bierut, Antonio Damasio, Gregory Bateson, Creativity, Philosophy, Technology, Design Thinking, Systems Thinking
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded its latest Term. And over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has continued to duke it out with its adversaries in the federal courts.To tackle these topics, as well as their intersection—in terms of how well the courts, including but not limited to the Supreme Court, are handling Trump-related cases—I interviewed Professor Pamela Karlan, a longtime faculty member at Stanford Law School. She's perfectly situated to address these subjects, for at least three reasons.First, Professor Karlan is a leading scholar of constitutional law. Second, she's a former SCOTUS clerk and seasoned advocate at One First Street, with ten arguments to her name. Third, she has high-level experience at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), having served (twice) as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ.I've had some wonderful guests to discuss the role of the courts today, including Judges Vince Chhabria (N.D. Cal.) and Ana Reyes (D.D.C.)—but as sitting judges, they couldn't discuss certain subjects, and they had to be somewhat circumspect. Professor Karlan, in contrast, isn't afraid to “go there”—and whether or not you agree with her opinions, I think you'll share my appreciation for her insight and candor.Show Notes:* Pamela S. Karlan bio, Stanford Law School* Pamela S. Karlan bio, Wikipedia* The McCorkle Lecture (Professor Pamela Karlan), UVA Law SchoolPrefer reading to listening? For paid subscribers, a transcript of the entire episode appears below.Sponsored by:NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment at nexfirm dot com.Three quick notes about this transcript. First, it has been cleaned up from the audio in ways that don't alter substance—e.g., by deleting verbal filler or adding a word here or there to clarify meaning. Second, my interviewee has not reviewed this transcript, and any transcription errors are mine. Third, because of length constraints, this newsletter may be truncated in email; to view the entire post, simply click on “View entire message” in your email app.David Lat: Welcome to the Original Jurisdiction podcast. I'm your host, David Lat, author of a Substack newsletter about law and the legal profession also named Original Jurisdiction, which you can read and subscribe to at davidlat dot Substack dot com. You're listening to the seventy-seventh episode of this podcast, recorded on Friday, June 27.Thanks to this podcast's sponsor, NexFirm. NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment at nexfirm dot com. Want to know who the guest will be for the next Original Jurisdiction podcast? Follow NexFirm on LinkedIn for a preview.With the 2024-2025 Supreme Court Term behind us, now is a good time to talk about both constitutional law and the proper role of the judiciary in American society. I expect they will remain significant as subjects because the tug of war between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary continues—and shows no signs of abating.To tackle these topics, I welcomed to the podcast Professor Pamela Karlan, the Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law and Co-Director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School. Pam is not only a leading legal scholar, but she also has significant experience in practice. She's argued 10 cases before the Supreme Court, which puts her in a very small club, and she has worked in government at high levels, serving as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice during the Obama administration. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Professor Pam Karlan.Professor Karlan, thank you so much for joining me.Pamela Karlan: Thanks for having me.DL: So let's start at the beginning. Tell us about your background and upbringing. I believe we share something in common—you were born in New York City?PK: I was born in New York City. My family had lived in New York since they arrived in the country about a century before.DL: What borough?PK: Originally Manhattan, then Brooklyn, then back to Manhattan. As my mother said, when I moved to Brooklyn when I was clerking, “Brooklyn to Brooklyn, in three generations.”DL: Brooklyn is very, very hip right now.PK: It wasn't hip when we got there.DL: And did you grow up in Manhattan or Brooklyn?PK: When I was little, we lived in Manhattan. Then right before I started elementary school, right after my brother was born, our apartment wasn't big enough anymore. So we moved to Stamford, Connecticut, and I grew up in Connecticut.DL: What led you to go to law school? I see you stayed in the state; you went to Yale. What did you have in mind for your post-law-school career?PK: I went to law school because during the summer between 10th and 11th grade, I read Richard Kluger's book, Simple Justice, which is the story of the litigation that leads up to Brown v. Board of Education. And I decided I wanted to go to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and be a school desegregation lawyer, and that's what led me to go to law school.DL: You obtained a master's degree in history as well as a law degree. Did you also have teaching in mind as well?PK: No, I thought getting the master's degree was my last chance to do something I had loved doing as an undergrad. It didn't occur to me until I was late in my law-school days that I might at some point want to be a law professor. That's different than a lot of folks who go to law school now; they go to law school wanting to be law professors.During Admitted Students' Weekend, some students say to me, “I want to be a law professor—should I come here to law school?” I feel like saying to them, “You haven't done a day of law school yet. You have no idea whether you're good at law. You have no idea whether you'd enjoy doing legal teaching.”It just amazes me that people come to law school now planning to be a law professor, in a way that I don't think very many people did when I was going to law school. In my day, people discovered when they were in law school that they loved it, and they wanted to do more of what they loved doing; I don't think people came to law school for the most part planning to be law professors.DL: The track is so different now—and that's a whole other conversation—but people are getting master's and Ph.D. degrees, and people are doing fellowship after fellowship. It's not like, oh, you practice for three, five, or seven years, and then you become a professor. It seems to be almost like this other track nowadays.PK: When I went on the teaching market, I was distinctive in that I had not only my student law-journal note, but I actually had an article that Ricky Revesz and I had worked on that was coming out. And it was not normal for people to have that back then. Now people go onto the teaching market with six or seven publications—and no practice experience really to speak of, for a lot of them.DL: You mentioned talking to admitted students. You went to YLS, but you've now been teaching for a long time at Stanford Law School. They're very similar in a lot of ways. They're intellectual. They're intimate, especially compared to some of the other top law schools. What would you say if I'm an admitted student choosing between those two institutions? What would cause me to pick one versus the other—besides the superior weather of Palo Alto?PK: Well, some of it is geography; it's not just the weather. Some folks are very East-Coast-centered, and other folks are very West-Coast-centered. That makes a difference.It's a little hard to say what the differences are, because the last time I spent a long time at Yale Law School was in 2012 (I visited there a bunch of times over the years), but I think the faculty here at Stanford is less focused and concentrated on the students who want to be law professors than is the case at Yale. When I was at Yale, the idea was if you were smart, you went and became a law professor. It was almost like a kind of external manifestation of an inner state of grace; it was a sign that you were a smart person, if you wanted to be a law professor. And if you didn't, well, you could be a donor later on. Here at Stanford, the faculty as a whole is less concentrated on producing law professors. We produce a fair number of them, but it's not the be-all and end-all of the law school in some ways. Heather Gerken, who's the dean at Yale, has changed that somewhat, but not entirely. So that's one big difference.One of the most distinctive things about Stanford, because we're on the quarter system, is that our clinics are full-time clinics, taught by full-time faculty members at the law school. And that's distinctive. I think Yale calls more things clinics than we do, and a lot of them are part-time or taught by folks who aren't in the building all the time. So that's a big difference between the schools.They just have very different feels. I would encourage any student who gets into both of them to go and visit both of them, talk to the students, and see where you think you're going to be most comfortably stretched. Either school could be the right school for somebody.DL: I totally agree with you. Sometimes people think there's some kind of platonic answer to, “Where should I go to law school?” And it depends on so many individual circumstances.PK: There really isn't one answer. I think when I was deciding between law schools as a student, I got waitlisted at Stanford and I got into Yale. I had gone to Yale as an undergrad, so I wasn't going to go anywhere else if I got in there. I was from Connecticut and loved living in Connecticut, so that was an easy choice for me. But it's a hard choice for a lot of folks.And I do think that one of the worst things in the world is U.S. News and World Report, even though we're generally a beneficiary of it. It used to be that the R-squared between where somebody went to law school and what a ranking was was minimal. I knew lots of people who decided, in the old days, that they were going to go to Columbia rather than Yale or Harvard, rather than Stanford or Penn, rather than Chicago, because they liked the city better or there was somebody who did something they really wanted to do there.And then the R-squared, once U.S. News came out, of where people went and what the rankings were, became huge. And as you probably know, there were some scandals with law schools that would just waitlist people rather than admit them, to keep their yield up, because they thought the person would go to a higher-ranked law school. There were years and years where a huge part of the Stanford entering class had been waitlisted at Penn. And that's bad for people, because there are people who should go to Penn rather than come here. There are people who should go to NYU rather than going to Harvard. And a lot of those people don't do it because they're so fixated on U.S. News rankings.DL: I totally agree with you. But I suspect that a lot of people think that there are certain opportunities that are going to be open to them only if they go here or only if they go there.Speaking of which, after graduating from YLS, you clerked for Justice Blackmun on the Supreme Court, and statistically it's certainly true that certain schools seem to improve your odds of clerking for the Court. What was that experience like overall? People often describe it as a dream job. We're recording this on the last day of the Supreme Court Term; some hugely consequential historic cases are coming down. As a law clerk, you get a front row seat to all of that, to all of that history being made. Did you love that experience?PK: I loved the experience. I loved it in part because I worked for a wonderful justice who was just a lovely man, a real mensch. I had three great co-clerks. It was the first time, actually, that any justice had ever hired three women—and so that was distinctive for me, because I had been in classes in law school where there were fewer than three women. I was in one class in law school where I was the only woman. So that was neat.It was a great Term. It was the last year of the Burger Court, and we had just a heap of incredibly interesting cases. It's amazing how many cases I teach in law school that were decided that year—the summary-judgment trilogy, Thornburg v. Gingles, Bowers v. Hardwick. It was just a really great time to be there. And as a liberal, we won a lot of the cases. We didn't win them all, but we won a lot of them.It was incredibly intense. At that point, the Supreme Court still had this odd IT system that required eight hours of diagnostics every night. So the system was up from 8 a.m. to midnight—it stayed online longer if there was a death case—but otherwise it went down at midnight. In the Blackmun chambers, we showed up at 8 a.m. for breakfast with the Justice, and we left at midnight, five days a week. Then on the weekends, we were there from 9 to 9. And they were deciding 150 cases, not 60 cases, a year. So there was a lot more work to do, in that sense. But it was a great year. I've remained friends with my co-clerks, and I've remained friends with clerks from other chambers. It was a wonderful experience.DL: And you've actually written about it. I would refer people to some of the articles that they can look up, on your CV and elsewhere, where you've talked about, say, having breakfast with the Justice.PK: And we had a Passover Seder with the Justice as well, which was a lot of fun.DL: Oh wow, who hosted that? Did he?PK: Actually, the clerks hosted it. Originally he had said, “Oh, why don't we have it at the Court?” But then he came back to us and said, “Well, I think the Chief Justice”—Chief Justice Burger—“might not like that.” But he lent us tables and chairs, which were dropped off at one of the clerk's houses. And it was actually the day of the Gramm-Rudman argument, which was an argument about the budget. So we had to keep running back and forth from the Court to the house of Danny Richman, the clerk who hosted it, who was a Thurgood Marshall clerk. We had to keep running back and forth from the Court to Danny Richman's house, to baste the turkey and make stuff, back and forth. And then we had a real full Seder, and we invited all of the Jewish clerks at the Court and the Justice's messenger, who was Jewish, and the Justice and Mrs. Blackmun, and it was a lot of fun.DL: Wow, that's wonderful. So where did you go after your clerkship?PK: I went to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where I was an assistant counsel, and I worked on voting-rights and employment-discrimination cases.DL: And that was something that you had thought about for a long time—you mentioned you had read about its work in high school.PK: Yes, and it was a great place to work. We were working on great cases, and at that point we were really pushing the envelope on some of the stuff that we were doing—which was great and inspiring, and my colleagues were wonderful.And unlike a lot of Supreme Court practices now, where there's a kind of “King Bee” usually, and that person gets to argue everything, the Legal Defense Fund was very different. The first argument I did at the Court was in a case that I had worked on the amended complaint for, while at the Legal Defense Fund—and they let me essentially keep working on the case and argue it at the Supreme Court, even though by the time the case got to the Supreme Court, I was teaching at UVA. So they didn't have this policy of stripping away from younger lawyers the ability to argue their cases the whole way through the system.DL: So how many years out from law school were you by the time you had your first argument before the Court? I know that, today at least, there's this two-year bar on arguing before the Court after having clerked there.PK: Six or seven years out—because I think I argued in ‘91.DL: Now, you mentioned that by then you were teaching at UVA. You had a dream job working at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. What led you to go to UVA?PK: There were two things, really, that did it. One was I had also discovered when I was in law school that I loved law school, and I was better at law school than I had been at anything I had done before law school. And the second was I really hated dealing with opposing counsel. I tell my students now, “You should take negotiation. If there's only one class you could take in law school, take negotiation.” Because it's a skill; it's not a habit of mind, but I felt like it was a habit of mind. And I found the discovery process and filing motions to compel and dealing with the other side's intransigence just really unpleasant.What I really loved was writing briefs. I loved writing briefs, and I could keep doing that for the Legal Defense Fund while at UVA, and I've done a bunch of that over the years for LDF and for other organizations. I could keep doing that and I could live in a small town, which I really wanted to do. I love New York, and now I could live in a city—I've spent a couple of years, off and on, living in cities since then, and I like it—but I didn't like it at that point. I really wanted to be out in the country somewhere. And so UVA was the perfect mix. I kept working on cases, writing amicus briefs for LDF and for other organizations. I could teach, which I loved. I could live in a college town, which I really enjoyed. So it was the best blend of things.DL: And I know, from your having actually delivered a lecture at UVA, that it really did seem to have a special place in your heart. UVA Law School—they really do have a wonderful environment there (as does Stanford), and Charlottesville is a very charming place.PK: Yes, especially when I was there. UVA has a real gift for developing its junior faculty. It was a place where the senior faculty were constantly reading our work, constantly talking to us. Everyone was in the building, which makes a huge difference.The second case I had go to the Supreme Court actually came out of a class where a student asked a question, and I ended up representing the student, and we took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. But I wasn't admitted in the Western District of Virginia, and that's where we had to file a case. And so I turned to my next-door neighbor, George Rutherglen, and said to George, “Would you be the lead counsel in this?” And he said, “Sure.” And we ended up representing a bunch of UVA students, challenging the way the Republican Party did its nomination process. And we ended up, by the student's third year in law school, at the Supreme Court.So UVA was a great place. I had amazing colleagues. The legendary Bill Stuntz was then there; Mike Klarman was there. Dan Ortiz, who's still there, was there. So was John Harrison. It was a fantastic group of people to have as your colleagues.DL: Was it difficult for you, then, to leave UVA and move to Stanford?PK: Oh yes. When I went in to tell Bob Scott, who was then the dean, that I was leaving, I just burst into tears. I think the reason I left UVA was I was at a point in my career where I'd done a bunch of visits at other schools, and I thought that I could either leave then or I would be making a decision to stay there for the rest of my career. And I just felt like I wanted to make a change. And in retrospect, I would've been just as happy if I'd stayed at UVA. In my professional life, I would've been just as happy. I don't know in my personal life, because I wouldn't have met my partner, I don't think, if I'd been at UVA. But it's a marvelous place; everything about it is just absolutely superb.DL: Are you the managing partner of a boutique or midsize firm? If so, you know that your most important job is attracting and retaining top talent. It's not easy, especially if your benefits don't match up well with those of Biglaw firms or if your HR process feels “small time.” NexFirm has created an onboarding and benefits experience that rivals an Am Law 100 firm, so you can compete for the best talent at a price your firm can afford. Want to learn more? Contact NexFirm at 212-292-1002 or email betterbenefits at nexfirm dot com.So I do want to give you a chance to say nice things about your current place. I assume you have no regrets about moving to Stanford Law, even if you would've been just as happy at UVA?PK: I'm incredibly happy here. I've got great colleagues. I've got great students. The ability to do the clinic the way we do it, which is as a full-time clinic, wouldn't be true anywhere else in the country, and that makes a huge difference to that part of my work. I've gotten to teach around the curriculum. I've taught four of the six first-year courses, which is a great opportunityAnd as you said earlier, the weather is unbelievable. People downplay that, because especially for people who are Northeastern Ivy League types, there's a certain Calvinism about that, which is that you have to suffer in order to be truly working hard. People out here sometimes think we don't work hard because we are not visibly suffering. But it's actually the opposite, in a way. I'm looking out my window right now, and it's a gorgeous day. And if I were in the east and it were 75 degrees and sunny, I would find it hard to work because I'd think it's usually going to be hot and humid, or if it's in the winter, it's going to be cold and rainy. I love Yale, but the eight years I spent there, my nose ran the entire time I was there. And here I look out and I think, “It's beautiful, but you know what? It's going to be beautiful tomorrow. So I should sit here and finish grading my exams, or I should sit here and edit this article, or I should sit here and work on the Restatement—because it's going to be just as beautiful tomorrow.” And the ability to walk outside, to clear your head, makes a huge difference. People don't understand just how huge a difference that is, but it's huge.DL: That's so true. If you had me pick a color to associate with my time at YLS, I would say gray. It just felt like everything was always gray, the sky was always gray—not blue or sunny or what have you.But I know you've spent some time outside of Northern California, because you have done some stints at the Justice Department. Tell us about that, the times you went there—why did you go there? What type of work were you doing? And how did it relate to or complement your scholarly work?PK: At the beginning of the Obama administration, I had applied for a job in the Civil Rights Division as a deputy assistant attorney general (DAAG), and I didn't get it. And I thought, “Well, that's passed me by.” And a couple of years later, when they were looking for a new principal deputy solicitor general, in the summer of 2013, the civil-rights groups pushed me for that job. I got an interview with Eric Holder, and it was on June 11th, 2013, which just fortuitously happens to be the 50th anniversary of the day that Vivian Malone desegregated the University of Alabama—and Vivian Malone is the older sister of Sharon Malone, who is married to Eric Holder.So I went in for the interview and I said, “This must be an especially special day for you because of the 50th anniversary.” And we talked about that a little bit, and then we talked about other things. And I came out of the interview, and a couple of weeks later, Don Verrilli, who was the solicitor general, called me up and said, “Look, you're not going to get a job as the principal deputy”—which ultimately went to Ian Gershengorn, a phenomenal lawyer—“but Eric Holder really enjoyed talking to you, so we're going to look for something else for you to do here at the Department of Justice.”And a couple of weeks after that, Eric Holder called me and offered me the DAAG position in the Civil Rights Division and said, “We'd really like you to especially concentrate on our voting-rights litigation.” It was very important litigation, in part because the Supreme Court had recently struck down the pre-clearance regime under Section 5 [of the Voting Rights Act]. So the Justice Department was now bringing a bunch of lawsuits against things they could have blocked if Section 5 had been in effect, most notably the Texas voter ID law, which was a quite draconian voter ID law, and this omnibus bill in North Carolina that involved all sorts of cutbacks to opportunities to vote: a cutback on early voting, a cutback on same-day registration, a cutback on 16- and 17-year-olds pre-registering, and the like.So I went to the Department of Justice and worked with the Voting Section on those cases, but I also ended up working on things like getting the Justice Department to change its position on whether Title VII covered transgender individuals. And then I also got to work on the implementation of [United States v.] Windsor—which I had worked on, representing Edie Windsor, before I went to DOJ, because the Court had just decided Windsor [which held Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional]. So I had an opportunity to work on how to implement Windsor across the federal government. So that was the stuff I got to work on the first time I was at DOJ, and I also obviously worked on tons of other stuff, and it was phenomenal. I loved doing it.I did it for about 20 months, and then I came back to Stanford. It affected my teaching; I understood a lot of stuff quite differently having worked on it. It gave me some ideas on things I wanted to write about. And it just refreshed me in some ways. It's different than working in the clinic. I love working in the clinic, but you're working with students. You're working only with very, very junior lawyers. I sometimes think of the clinic as being a sort of Groundhog Day of first-year associates, and so I'm sort of senior partner and paralegal at a large law firm. At DOJ, you're working with subject-matter experts. The people in the Voting Section, collectively, had hundreds of years of experience with voting. The people in the Appellate Section had hundreds of years of experience with appellate litigation. And so it's just a very different feel.So I did that, and then I came back to Stanford. I was here, and in the fall of 2020, I was asked if I wanted to be one of the people on the Justice Department review team if Joe Biden won the election. These are sometimes referred to as the transition teams or the landing teams or the like. And I said, “I'd be delighted to do that.” They had me as one of the point people reviewing the Civil Rights Division. And I think it might've even been the Wednesday or Thursday before Inauguration Day 2021, I got a call from the liaison person on the transition team saying, “How would you like to go back to DOJ and be the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division?” That would mean essentially running the Division until we got a confirmed head, which took about five months. And I thought that this would be an amazing opportunity to go back to the DOJ and work with people I love, right at the beginning of an administration.And the beginning of an administration is really different than coming in midway through the second term of an administration. You're trying to come up with priorities, and I viewed my job really as helping the career people to do their best work. There were a huge number of career people who had gone through the first Trump administration, and they were raring to go. They had all sorts of ideas on stuff they wanted to do, and it was my job to facilitate that and make that possible for them. And that's why it's so tragic this time around that almost all of those people have left. The current administration first tried to transfer them all into Sanctuary Cities [the Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group] or ask them to do things that they couldn't in good conscience do, and so they've retired or taken buyouts or just left.DL: It's remarkable, just the loss of expertise and experience at the Justice Department over these past few months.PK: Thousands of years of experience gone. And these are people, you've got to realize, who had been through the Nixon administration, the Reagan administration, both Bush administrations, and the first Trump administration, and they hadn't had any problem. That's what's so stunning: this is not just the normal shift in priorities, and they have gone out of their way to make it so hellacious for people that they will leave. And that's not something that either Democratic or Republican administrations have ever done before this.DL: And we will get to a lot of, shall we say, current events. Finishing up on just the discussion of your career, you had the opportunity to work in the executive branch—what about judicial service? You've been floated over the years as a possible Supreme Court nominee. I don't know if you ever looked into serving on the Ninth Circuit or were considered for that. What about judicial service?PK: So I've never been in a position, and part of this was a lesson I learned right at the beginning of my LDF career, when Lani Guinier, who was my boss at LDF, was nominated for the position of AAG [assistant attorney general] in the Civil Rights Division and got shot down. I knew from that time forward that if I did the things I really wanted to do, my chances of confirmation were not going to be very high. People at LDF used to joke that they would get me nominated so that I would take all the bullets, and then they'd sneak everybody else through. So I never really thought that I would have a shot at a judicial position, and that didn't bother me particularly. As you know, I gave the commencement speech many years ago at Stanford, and I said, “Would I want to be on the Supreme Court? You bet—but not enough to have trimmed my sails for an entire lifetime.”And I think that's right. Peter Baker did this story in The New York Times called something like, “Favorites of Left Don't Make Obama's Court List.” And in the story, Tommy Goldstein, who's a dear friend of mine, said, “If they wanted to talk about somebody who was a flaming liberal, they'd be talking about Pam Karlan, but nobody's talking about Pam Karlan.” And then I got this call from a friend of mine who said, “Yeah, but at least people are talking about how nobody's talking about you. Nobody's even talking about how nobody's talking about me.” And I was flattered, but not fooled.DL: That's funny; I read that piece in preparing for this interview. So let's say someone were to ask you, someone mid-career, “Hey, I've been pretty safe in the early years of my career, but now I'm at this juncture where I could do things that will possibly foreclose my judicial ambitions—should I just try to keep a lid on it, in the hope of making it?” It sounds like you would tell them to let their flag fly.PK: Here's the thing: your chances of getting to be on the Supreme Court, if that's what you're talking about, your chances are so low that the question is how much do you want to give up to go from a 0.001% chance to a 0.002% chance? Yes, you are doubling your chances, but your chances are not good. And there are some people who I think are capable of doing that, perhaps because they fit the zeitgeist enough that it's not a huge sacrifice for them. So it's not that I despise everybody who goes to the Supreme Court because they must obviously have all been super-careerists; I think lots of them weren't super-careerists in that way.Although it does worry me that six members of the Court now clerked at the Supreme Court—because when you are a law clerk, it gives you this feeling about the Court that maybe you don't want everybody who's on the Court to have, a feeling that this is the be-all and end-all of life and that getting a clerkship is a manifestation of an inner state of grace, so becoming a justice is equally a manifestation of an inner state of grace in which you are smarter than everybody else, wiser than everybody else, and everybody should kowtow to you in all sorts of ways. And I worry that people who are imprinted like ducklings on the Supreme Court when they're 25 or 26 or 27 might not be the best kind of portfolio of justices at the back end. The Court that decided Brown v. Board of Education—none of them, I think, had clerked at the Supreme Court, or maybe one of them had. They'd all done things with their lives other than try to get back to the Supreme Court. So I worry about that a little bit.DL: Speaking of the Court, let's turn to the Court, because it just finished its Term as we are recording this. As we started recording, they were still handing down the final decisions of the day.PK: Yes, the “R” numbers hadn't come up on the Supreme Court website when I signed off to come talk to you.DL: Exactly. So earlier this month, not today, but earlier this month, the Court handed down its decision in United States v. Skrmetti, reviewing Tennessee's ban on the use of hormones and puberty blockers for transgender youth. Were you surprised by the Court's ruling in Skrmetti?PK: No. I was not surprised.DL: So one of your most famous cases, which you litigated successfully five years ago or so, was Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the Court held that Title VII does apply to protect transgender individuals—and Bostock figures significantly in the Skrmetti opinions. Why were you surprised by Skrmetti given that you had won this victory in Bostock, which you could argue, in terms of just the logic of it, does carry over somewhat?PK: Well, I want to be very precise: I didn't actually litigate Bostock. There were three cases that were put together….DL: Oh yes—you handled Zarda.PK: I represented Don Zarda, who was a gay man, so I did not argue the transgender part of the case at all. Fortuitously enough, David Cole argued that part of the case, and David Cole was actually the first person I had dinner with as a freshman at Yale College, when I started college, because he was the roommate of somebody I debated against in high school. So David and I went to law school together, went to college together, and had classes together. We've been friends now for almost 50 years, which is scary—I think for 48 years we've been friends—and he argued that part of the case.So here's what surprised me about what the Supreme Court did in Skrmetti. Given where the Court wanted to come out, the more intellectually honest way to get there would've been to say, “Yes, of course this is because of sex; there is sex discrimination going on here. But even applying intermediate scrutiny, we think that Tennessee's law should survive intermediate scrutiny.” That would've been an intellectually honest way to get to where the Court got.Instead, they did this weird sort of, “Well, the word ‘sex' isn't in the Fourteenth Amendment, but it's in Title VII.” But that makes no sense at all, because for none of the sex-discrimination cases that the Court has decided under the Fourteenth Amendment did the word “sex” appear in the Fourteenth Amendment. It's not like the word “sex” was in there and then all of a sudden it took a powder and left. So I thought that was a really disingenuous way of getting to where the Court wanted to go. But I was not surprised after the oral argument that the Court was going to get to where it got on the bottom line.DL: I'm curious, though, rewinding to Bostock and Zarda, were you surprised by how the Court came out in those cases? Because it was still a deeply conservative Court back then.PK: No, I was not surprised. I was not surprised, both because I thought we had so much the better of the argument and because at the oral argument, it seemed pretty clear that we had at least six justices, and those were the six justices we had at the end of the day. The thing that was interesting to me about Bostock was I thought also that we were likely to win for the following weird legal-realist reason, which is that this was a case that would allow the justices who claimed to be textualists to show that they were principled textualists, by doing something that they might not have voted for if they were in Congress or the like.And also, while the impact was really large in one sense, the impact was not really large in another sense: most American workers are protected by Title VII, but most American employers do not discriminate, and didn't discriminate even before this, on the basis of sexual orientation or on the basis of gender identity. For example, in Zarda's case, the employer denied that they had fired Mr. Zarda because he was gay; they said, “We fired him for other reasons.”Very few employers had a formal policy that said, “We discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.” And although most American workers are protected by Title VII, most American employers are not covered by Title VII—and that's because small employers, employers with fewer than 15 full-time employees, are not covered at all. And religious employers have all sorts of exemptions and the like, so for the people who had the biggest objection to hiring or promoting or retaining gay or transgender employees, this case wasn't going to change what happened to them at all. So the impact was really important for workers, but not deeply intrusive on employers generally. So I thought those two things, taken together, meant that we had a pretty good argument.I actually thought our textual argument was not our best argument, but it was the one that they were most likely to buy. So it was really interesting: we made a bunch of different arguments in the brief, and then as soon as I got up to argue, the first question out of the box was Justice Ginsburg saying, “Well, in 1964, homosexuality was illegal in most of the country—how could this be?” And that's when I realized, “Okay, she's just telling me to talk about the text, don't talk about anything else.”So I just talked about the text the whole time. But as you may remember from the argument, there was this weird moment, which came after I answered her question and one other one, there was this kind of silence from the justices. And I just said, “Well, if you don't have any more questions, I'll reserve the remainder of my time.” And it went well; it went well as an argument.DL: On the flip side, speaking of things that are not going so well, let's turn to current events. Zooming up to a higher level of generality than Skrmetti, you are a leading scholar of constitutional law, so here's the question. I know you've already been interviewed about it by media outlets, but let me ask you again, in light of just the latest, latest, latest news: are we in a constitutional crisis in the United States?PK: I think we're in a period of great constitutional danger. I don't know what a “constitutional crisis” is. Some people think the constitutional crisis is that we have an executive branch that doesn't believe in the Constitution, right? So you have Donald Trump asked, in an interview, “Do you have to comply with the Constitution?” He says, “I don't know.” Or he says, “I have an Article II that gives me the power to do whatever I want”—which is not what Article II says. If you want to be a textualist, it does not say the president can do whatever he wants. So you have an executive branch that really does not have a commitment to the Constitution as it has been understood up until now—that is, limited government, separation of powers, respect for individual rights. With this administration, none of that's there. And I don't know whether Emil Bove did say, “F**k the courts,” or not, but they're certainly acting as if that's their attitude.So yes, in that sense, we're in a period of constitutional danger. And then on top of that, I think we have a Supreme Court that is acting almost as if this is a normal administration with normal stuff, a Court that doesn't seem to recognize what district judges appointed by every president since George H.W. Bush or maybe even Reagan have recognized, which is, “This is not normal.” What the administration is trying to do is not normal, and it has to be stopped. So that worries me, that the Supreme Court is acting as if it needs to keep its powder dry—and for what, I'm not clear.If they think that by giving in and giving in, and prevaricating and putting things off... today, I thought the example of this was in the birthright citizenship/universal injunction case. One of the groups of plaintiffs that's up there is a bunch of states, around 23 states, and the Supreme Court in Justice Barrett's opinion says, “Well, maybe the states have standing, maybe they don't. And maybe if they have standing, you can enjoin this all in those states. We leave this all for remind.”They've sat on this for months. It's ridiculous that the Supreme Court doesn't “man up,” essentially, and decide these things. It really worries me quite a bit that the Supreme Court just seems completely blind to the fact that in 2024, they gave Donald Trump complete criminal immunity from any prosecution, so who's going to hold him accountable? Not criminally accountable, not accountable in damages—and now the Supreme Court seems not particularly interested in holding him accountable either.DL: Let me play devil's advocate. Here's my theory on why the Court does seem to be holding its fire: they're afraid of a worse outcome, which is, essentially, “The emperor has no clothes.”Say they draw this line in the sand for Trump, and then Trump just crosses it. And as we all know from that famous quote from The Federalist Papers, the Court has neither force nor will, but only judgment. That's worse, isn't it? If suddenly it's exposed that the Court doesn't have any army, any way to stop Trump? And then the courts have no power.PK: I actually think it's the opposite, which is, I think if the Court said to Donald Trump, “You must do X,” and then he defies it, you would have people in the streets. You would have real deep resistance—not just the “No Kings,” one-day march, but deep resistance. And there are scholars who've done comparative law who say, “When 3 percent of the people in a country go to the streets, you get real change.” And I think the Supreme Court is mistaking that.I taught a reading group for our first-years here. We have reading groups where you meet four times during the fall for dinner, and you read stuff that makes you think. And my reading group was called “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” and it started with the Albert Hirschman book with that title.DL: Great book.PK: It's a great book. And I gave them some excerpt from that, and I gave them an essay by Hannah Arendt called “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” which she wrote in 1964. And one of the things she says there is she talks about people who stayed in the German regime, on the theory that they would prevent at least worse things from happening. And I'm going to paraphrase slightly, but what she says is, “People who think that what they're doing is getting the lesser evil quickly forget that what they're choosing is evil.” And if the Supreme Court decides, “We're not going to tell Donald Trump ‘no,' because if we tell him no and he goes ahead, we will be exposed,” what they have basically done is said to Donald Trump, “Do whatever you want; we're not going to stop you.” And that will lose the Supreme Court more credibility over time than Donald Trump defying them once and facing some serious backlash for doing it.DL: So let me ask you one final question before we go to my little speed round. That 3 percent statistic is fascinating, by the way, but it resonates for me. My family's originally from the Philippines, and you probably had the 3 percent out there in the streets to oust Marcos in 1986.But let me ask you this. We now live in a nation where Donald Trump won not just the Electoral College, but the popular vote. We do see a lot of ugly things out there, whether in social media or incidents of violence or what have you. You still have enough faith in the American people that if the Supreme Court drew that line, and Donald Trump crossed it, and maybe this happened a couple of times, even—you still have faith that there will be that 3 percent or what have you in the streets?PK: I have hope, which is not quite the same thing as faith, obviously, but I have hope that some Republicans in Congress would grow a spine at that point, and people would say, “This is not right.” Have they always done that? No. We've had bad things happen in the past, and people have not done anything about it. But I think that the alternative of just saying, “Well, since we might not be able to stop him, we shouldn't do anything about it,” while he guts the federal government, sends masked people onto the streets, tries to take the military into domestic law enforcement—I think we have to do something.And this is what's so enraging in some ways: the district court judges in this country are doing their job. They are enjoining stuff. They're not enjoining everything, because not everything can be enjoined, and not everything is illegal; there's a lot of bad stuff Donald Trump is doing that he's totally entitled to do. But the district courts are doing their job, and they're doing their job while people are sending pizza boxes to their houses and sending them threats, and the president is tweeting about them or whatever you call the posts on Truth Social. They're doing their job—and the Supreme Court needs to do its job too. It needs to stand up for district judges. If it's not willing to stand up for the rest of us, you'd think they'd at least stand up for their entire judicial branch.DL: Turning to my speed round, my first question is, what do you like the least about the law? And this can either be the practice of law or law as a more abstract system of ordering human affairs.PK: What I liked least about it was having to deal with opposing counsel in discovery. That drove me to appellate litigation.DL: Exactly—where your request for an extension is almost always agreed to by the other side.PK: Yes, and where the record is the record.DL: Yes, exactly. My second question, is what would you be if you were not a lawyer and/or law professor?PK: Oh, they asked me this question for a thing here at Stanford, and it was like, if I couldn't be a lawyer, I'd... And I just said, “I'd sit in my room and cry.”DL: Okay!PK: I don't know—this is what my talent is!DL: You don't want to write a novel or something?PK: No. What I would really like to do is I would like to bike the Freedom Trail, which is a trail that starts in Montgomery, Alabama, and goes to the Canadian border, following the Underground Railroad. I've always wanted to bike that. But I guess that's not a career. I bike slowly enough that it could be a career, at this point—but earlier on, probably not.DL: My third question is, how much sleep do you get each night?PK: I now get around six hours of sleep each night, but it's complicated by the following, which is when I worked at the Department of Justice the second time, it was during Covid, so I actually worked remotely from California. And what that required me to do was essentially to wake up every morning at 4 a.m., 7 a.m. on the East Coast, so I could have breakfast, read the paper, and be ready to go by 5:30 a.m.I've been unable to get off of that, so I still wake up before dawn every morning. And I spent three months in Florence, and I thought the jet lag would bring me out of this—not in the slightest. Within two weeks, I was waking up at 4:30 a.m. Central European Time. So that's why I get about six hours, because I can't really go to bed before 9 or 10 p.m.DL: Well, I was struck by your being able to do this podcast fairly early West Coast time.PK: Oh no, this is the third thing I've done this morning! I had a 6:30 a.m. conference call.DL: Oh my gosh, wow. It reminds me of that saying about how you get more done in the Army before X hour than other people get done in a day.My last question, is any final words of wisdom, such as career advice or life advice, for my listeners?PK: Yes: do what you love, with people you love doing it with.DL: Well said. I've loved doing this podcast—Professor Karlan, thanks again for joining me.PK: You should start calling me Pam. We've had this same discussion….DL: We're on the air! Okay, well, thanks again, Pam—I'm so grateful to you for joining me.PK: Thanks for having me.DL: Thanks so much to Professor Karlan for joining me. Whether or not you agree with her views, you can't deny that she's both insightful and honest—qualities that have made her a leading legal academic and lawyer, but also a great podcast guest.Thanks to NexFirm for sponsoring the Original Jurisdiction podcast. NexFirm has helped many attorneys to leave Biglaw and launch firms of their own. To explore this opportunity, please contact NexFirm at 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment at nexfirm dot com to learn more.Thanks to Tommy Harron, my sound engineer here at Original Jurisdiction, and thanks to you, my listeners and readers. To connect with me, please email me at davidlat at Substack dot com, or find me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, at davidlat, and on Instagram and Threads at davidbenjaminlat.If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate, review, and subscribe. Please subscribe to the Original Jurisdiction newsletter if you don't already, over at davidlat dot substack dot com. This podcast is free, but it's made possible by paid subscriptions to the newsletter.The next episode should appear on or about Wednesday, July 23. Until then, may your thinking be original and your jurisdiction free of defects. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidlat.substack.com/subscribe
Getting into college isn't just about grades. It's about finding the right fit emotionally, socially, and academically. In this episode, Dr. Pamela Ellis shares how families can approach the high school-to-college transition with more clarity, less stress, and renewed confidence. From building trust with your teen to letting go of outdated expectations, you'll walk away with a fresh perspective on what success really looks like for them and for you. What to expect in this episode:The overlooked framework that helps teens find their perfect college fitWhy believing in your kid might matter more than their GPAThe surprising reason parents struggle most with letting goWhat many families get wrong about gap years and how to use them rightHow to support your teen's independence without losing your influenceAbout Dr. Pamela EllisDr. Pamela is the founder of Compass College Advisory and a Stanford-educated expert in the high school-to-college transition. With decades of experience as a researcher, advisor, and parent, she helps families navigate the college admissions process with confidence, clarity, and heart. Known as “The Education Doctor,” Dr. Ellis empowers complex kids and their parents to find the right college fit without the stress.Connect with Dr. PamelaWebsite: Compass College Advisory LinkedIn: Pamela Ellis, PhD, MBA Get Dr. Pamela Ellis's free College Confidence Blueprint by messaging “blueprint25” on LinkedIn. Related Links:It's All About Control: Are You Ready? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-135-its-all-about-control-are-you-ready/id1565976964?i=1000634092094Helping Young Adults get back on Track https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-144-helping-young-adults-get-back-on-track/id1565976964?i=1000641123620Parenting & Hope: Helping Kids Navigate an Uncertain Future https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-186-parenting-hope-helping-kids-navigate-an/id1565976964?i=1000674953062 Get your FREE copy of 12 Key Coaching Tools for Parents at https://impactparents.com/gift.Read the full blog here:https://impactparents.com/college-confidence-for-complex-teens-finding-the-right-fit Connect with Impact Parents:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/impactparentsFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ImpactParentsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/impactparentsSponsors "Cognitive Ergonomics from the Inside Out" – A New ADHD InterventionDo you recognize current ADHD interventions fall short? At DIG Coaching, we've developed a groundbreaking field of engineering called Cognitive Ergonomics from the Inside Out. Discover a fresh approach to ADHD care that looks beyond traditional methods.Learn more at www.cognitive-ergonomics.com
Notion te regala 3 meses del plan Business + IA ilimitada
In this special episode, host Chris Patil (VP-Media, BioAge) moderates a live panel discussion at the 25th Bay Area Aging Meeting at UCSF, bringing together six leading voices across the aging research ecosystem to tackle one of the field's most critical challenges: how to move promising discoveries from the laboratory to therapies that can benefit patients.The distinguished panel spans academia, industry, and scientific publishing, featuring Janine Sengstack (CEO, Junevity), Saul Villeda (Professor, UCSF), Jodi Nunnari (Director, Bay Area Institute of Science, Altos Labs), Sebastien Thuault (Chief Editor, Nature Aging), Anne Brunet (Professor, Stanford), and Nir Barzilai (Professor, Albert Einstein College of Medicine). Together, they explore the most promising research directions for clinical impact, the revolutionary tools enabling modern aging research, and the structural challenges that must be overcome to bring longevity therapies to market.Listeners will gain insights into the emerging science of cellular rejuvenation, the importance of systemic factors in aging, how to balance high-risk discovery with practical drug development, and the cultural shifts needed to better prepare the next generation of scientists for translational work. The panel also addresses the regulatory challenges of targeting aging itself as an indication and offers candid advice for young researchers navigating this rapidly evolving field.The Finer Details:Emerging research directions with the greatest clinical potential: cellular senescence, rejuvenation and repair, DNA methylation clocks, and understanding what makes aging biomarkers tickThe revolution in cellular and spatial resolution tools and how single-cell technologies are revealing cell-type-specific aging responsesSystemic factors and the remarkable plasticity remaining in aging organisms that can be unlocked through interventionsThe critical importance of starting with human data and working backward to validate targets and approachesChallenges unique to aging biotech: the need for aging-specific cellular assays, testing in older animal models, and genetic validationCultural and structural barriers between academia and industry, including the shift from mechanism-focused to mission-driven researchBalancing high-risk fundamental discovery with the practical needs of drug development and clinical translationThe regulatory landscape for aging interventions and potential pathways to FDA approval beyond traditional disease indicationsAdvice for young scientists: embracing rejection as part of the process, finding passion, working as teams, and considering diverse career paths in the growing longevity ecosystemQuotes:"Our goal as a company is to increase human health span, and the way I like to frame that more colloquially is we want to increase the number of happy, healthy years each person gets to spend on Earth." - Janine Sengstack"There is an exquisite amount of plasticity left in an aging organism, both within the tissues, within the cells. There is plasticity that we can actually tap into." - Saul Villeda"Burn bright, but don't burn out." - Jodi Nunnari"The challenge that we run into is that there are so many combinations that very quickly it would become intractable to line up enough test tubes to test them all." - Sebastien Thuault, on the complexity of aging interventions"We love our job. If not, we would not be doing it. I would do it again in a heartbeat... you get paid to play, to ask the questions that interest you, the approaches that interest you to play with who you want to—it is a fantastic job." - Saul Villeda"Our life is a life of rejection...and still, we're having fun and making an advance. So don't give up." - Nir Barzilai
Jessica speaks with Emily Holland, co-founder of Wild Poppy Creative Consulting, a podcast consulting company that helps small business owners hone and increase their impact on the world. She loves spending time outside rock climbing, trail running, running ultramarathons, hiking, skiing, or just watching her rescue pup Kayda frolic in the woods. Through her work on The Stokecast she told stories of how top outdoor athletes, adventurers, and entrepreneurs build their lifestyles and careers while in pursuit of adventure, purpose, and stoke. And in her podcast Nature Untold, she explored the intersection of addiction, recovery and sobriety with the outdoor community. Emily is based in Boulder, CO with her partner and pup. Follow Emily at https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilylholland/Learn more about Wild Poppy Creative Co at https://www.wildpoppycreativeco.com/ Learn more about Founded Outdoors, where Emily serves as Community Manager: https://foundedoutdoors.com/ ~Are you a high achiever, a leader, or an Ampersand looking for a sounding board? Jessica helps executives, leaders, and founders like you gain clarity and lead bravely. As your trusted advisor and growth partner, she works with you to make the invisible visible and develop an action plan to fulfill your goals. For nearly two decades, Jessica led marketing teams, launched products, and grew businesses at places like Apple, the San Francisco Opera, Smule, and Magoosh. As an Ampersand in many facets, she knows personally what it's like to hold many roles simultaneously, to sit on the executive team, and to find fulfillment. With a BA in Music and a BS in Product Design from Stanford, coupled with an MBA from UC Berkeley and coach training from the Center for Executive Coaching, her unique mix of analytical & creative allows her to bring both depth and breadth of perspective into the coaching process.As a coach, Jessica works to champion you – the full, multifaceted you – so you can thrive.Visit jessicawan.com or BOOK AN INTRO CALL: https://calendly.com/jessicawancoaching/intro-call-coachingCreditsProduced and Hosted by Jessica WanCo-produced, edited, sound design, and original music by Carlos SchmittWant to support this show in a small way? Rate and review it at theampersandmanifesto.com, or buy me a coffee: coff.ee/jessicawan
If/Then: Research findings to help us navigate complex issues in business, leadership, and society
This week on If/Then, we're sharing an episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, a podcast hosted by Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer and friend of the show, Matt Abrahams.How do you communicate with others when you're confused yourself? For fellow GSB lecturer Rob Siegel, leadership isn't about avoiding uncertainty: it's about embracing the clarity that ambiguity can bring.In his latest book, “The Systems Leader: Mastering the Cross Pressures That Make or Break Today's Companies,” Siegel explores how leaders today are “living in dualities,” caught between managing existing processes and adapting to emerging disruptions. “The sooner we get comfortable with [change] in the sense of ‘I don't have to like it, but I can deal with it,' then [we can] lead our teams and give them the calm to know they can get through this.”On this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Siegel and Abrahams explore how to communicate effectively amid constant change. From preparation strategies for spontaneous speaking to building trust through candid conversations, you'll hear practical tips for communicating with clarity when nothing is certain but change.More Resources:Rob Siegel, faculty profileMatt Abrahams, faculty profileThink Fast Talk Smart If/Then is a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business that examines research findings that can help us navigate the complex issues we face in business, leadership, and society. For a full transcript of this episode, visit our podcast's website.Chapters: (00:00:00) IntroductionKevin Cool previews season three and introduces a featured episode from Think Fast Talk Smart.(00:00:40) Introduction to Rob SiegelMatt Abrahams welcomes Rob Siegel and introduces his new book The Systems Leader.(00:01:34) Teaching in a Time of ChaosRob explains how his course on systems leadership evolved amid global uncertainty and AI disruption.(00:02:39) Frameworks for Modern LeadershipRob outlines key leadership frameworks, including five cross pressures from his book.(00:04:01) Communication's Role in LeadershipThey discuss how facts, context, and communication help leaders navigate uncertainty.(00:06:18) Balancing Innovation and ExecutionThe conversation turns to managing the tension between creative innovation and operational goals.(00:08:00) Leading Through AmbiguityThey explore how leaders can embrace ambiguity as a normal, strategic part of leadership.(00:09:41) Navigating Short- vs Long-Term ThinkingRob breaks down how leaders balance quarterly goals with long-term planning and vision.(00:12:32) Strength and Empathy in LeadershipMatt and Rob examine how leaders can balance warmth and strength in team relationships.(00:16:03) How to Keep Students EngagedRob shares his best practices for engaging students through preparation, spontaneity, and challenge.(00:18:55) Building Trust Through Genuine CareThey reflect on the role of genuine interest in others as a foundation for trust and communication.(00:21:35) Communication Role Models and RecipesRob names Irv Beck as a communicator he admires and shares his top three ingredients for great communication.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Will other business schools and corporate partners follow? We discuss
Carissa Carter is the academic director at Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school) and a former geologist. Her work focuses on systems thinking, climate innovation, and design futures. Scott Doorley is the creative director at Stanford's d.school. He has worked at the intersection of storytelling, physical space, and creative education, and has a background in film and media. They are co-authors of Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future.Interview Date: 4/4/2025. Tags: Carissa Carter, Scott Doorley, design, fiction, storytelling, awkwardness, appreciation, creativity, humility, insight, metaphors, future, Buckminster Fuller (Bucky Fuller), David Byrne Creativity, Design Thinking, Personal Transformation, Emotional Intelligence, play, creativity
How to communicate clearly in any context, from newsrooms to the world stage.All good communication, whether spoken or written, is built on the same foundation. In everything from police reporting for a newspaper to serving as spokesman for the Pope, Greg Burke has found the key: "Keep it as simple as possible."Burke has worked as a journalist for Time Magazine and Fox News, as Director of Communications at IESE Business School in Barcelona and Madrid, and even as a communications advisor and spokesman for the Vatican. Across his varied experiences, he's found that the biggest communication challenges often require the simplest solutions. From expressing “curiosity and real interest” in those we're speaking with to ensuring our messages are “clear, consistent, and timely,” he advocates for core principles that apply in all types of communication.In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Burke and host Matt Abrahams discuss communication strategies that work whether you're presenting to a team of five or millions of parishioners worldwide. As Burke shares, it's all very simple: “Know your audience, practice, and have fun.”To listen to the extended Deep Thinks version of this episode, please visit FasterSmarter.io/premiumEpisode Reference Links:Greg BurkeEp.22 Under Pressure: How to Communicate Clearly and Timely During a Crisis Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> hello@fastersmarter.ioEpisode Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedInChapters:(00:00) - Introduction (01:56) - Asking Good Questions (03:49) - Writing Clearly and Concretely (05:28) - Editing and AI's Role in Writing (06:44) - Three Keys to Great Communication (08:33) - The Importance of Feedback (10:13) - Communication at the Vatican (12:57) - Crisis Communication: Lessons from the Vatican (15:59) - The Final Three Questions (22:40) - Conclusion *****This Episode is sponsored by Stanford. Stay Informed on Stanford's world changing research by signing up for the Stanford ReportSupport Think Fast Talk Smart by joining TFTS Premium.
Send us a text & leave your email address if you want a reply!What do you get when you combine a Stanford neurobiology background with shamanic arts, sex magic, and thousands of years of Tantric wisdom? You get Layla Martin - the global Tantra leader who's literally rewriting the rules on sexual healing. As founder and creator of the VITA Coaching certification, Layla has guided thousands of women from sexual trauma to sacred empowerment. But here's what makes her story so powerful: she didn't start as some naturally enlightened goddess. She started as a terrified teenager who was so disconnected from her body that she showered in a bathing suit and prayed every night to never become a woman. Her journey from childhood sexual abuse to becoming one of the world's most respected sacred sexuality teachers isn't just inspiring - it's a roadmap for anyone who's ever felt broken by their past.EPISODE HIGHLIGHTSFrom Trauma to Tantra Teacher: How Layla transformed from a teenager so terrified of her body she showered in a bathing suit to becoming a global leader in sacred sexuality and healing thousands worldwideThe 7-Day Manifestation Ritual That Works: Layla's powerful combination of morning grief rituals + evening sex magic that called in her life partner (plus the neuroscience of why this method is so effective)Sacred Sexuality as Spiritual Practice: Why "your body is just as sacred as prayer" and how ancient traditions used erotic energy as a direct pathway to divine connection before religious suppressionReal Talk on Healing Timelines: The honest truth that deep sexual trauma healing takes 5-10+ years, and why Layla still has breakthrough moments after decades of this workSomatic Trauma Release Techniques: How to identify where trauma lives in your nervous system through body scanning, and why energy phenomena like shaking and speaking in tongues are natural sacred responsesBreaking the "Specialness Trap": How the desperate need to feel worthy and special can actually block spiritual growth, and why true power comes from knowing you're already enough exactly as you areLINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED IN LAYLA'S EPISODE CAN BE FOUND HEREThe Power of Pleasure, A Free Summit July 23-24, 2025. This 2-day live event will feature trailblazers in the field of conscious sexuality. Join us for FREE! AWAKENING THE GODDESS IN CRETE! Leah & Willow want to take you on an all-woman's tantric pilgrimage to Greece Oct 5-12, 2025! Join us for a trip of lifetime. LAST 10x LONGER. If you suffer from premature ejaculation, you are not alone, master 5 techniques to cure this stressful & embarrassing issue once and for all. Save 20% Coupon: PODCAST20. Support the show SxR Website Dr. Willow's Website Leah's Website
How do you create, shape, and strengthen your career brand?Why is showing up in the small moments is key to creating a strong presence?My guest on this episode is Lorraine Lee, Author of “Unforgettable Presence,” Keynote Speaker, Instructor at LinkedIn Learning and StanfordDuring our conversation Lorraine and I discuss:How she transitioned from her corporate career in tech to becoming an award-winning keynote speaker, LinkedIn instructor, and author.Why adopting a “CEO of your own career” mindset is essential for professional growthHow HR leaders build a strong, authentic presence on LinkedIn, even if you're just starting out.How you can use her EPIC Career Brand Framework to achieve your career goals. How the “Think-Do-Feel Matrix” helps you prepare, understand, and connect with your audience.Connecting with Lorraine: Connect with Lorraine Lee on LinkedInLearn more about Lorraine or buy Unforgettable PresenceEpisode Sponsor: Next-Gen HR Accelerator - Learn more about this best-in-class leadership development program for next-gen HR leadersHR Leader's Blueprint - 18 pages of real-world advice from 100+ HR thought leaders. Simple, actionable, and proven strategies to advance your career.Succession Planning Playbook: In this focused 1-page resource, I cut through the noise to give you the vital elements that define what “great” succession planning looks like.
In this episode of The Last 10%, host Dallas Burnett interviews Jason Hreha, a behavioral scientist and author of the book 'Real Change.' Jason shares his journey from studying neuroscience at Stanford to pioneering behavioral science teams at Walmart and leading his company, Persona. He discusses the limitations of academic behavioral science and the importance of practical, applied approaches. Jason also highlights the significance of personalized habit formation and the impact of proper recruitment on organizational culture and performance. The conversation delves into remote work dynamics, comparing them to in-office environments, and offers actionable advice for leaders managing remote teams. Check out Jason's Book on Amazon: Real Change
In this powerful conversation, Michael D. Levitt and branding expert Barry LaBov explore the critical role of differentiation in today's hyper-competitive and fast-moving business world. It's not about being the biggest or best in every category—it's about being unmistakably you. The Human Edge of Differentiation Barry opens with a compelling take: while modern tools have made producing fast, mediocre content easier, what sets brands apart today is authenticity and humanity. He warns that failing to stand out leads to commoditization, lower profits, and disengaged teams. The takeaway? Know what makes you unique—and amplify it with intention. Purpose Starts with "Who Are We?" Michael shares a story from a nonprofit healthcare board meeting where a simple but profound question was raised: “Who are we?” That moment sparked a conversation about alignment, identity, and clarity. He reminds leaders to pause regularly, assess direction, and stay grounded in purpose. Barry echoes this, referencing Simon Sinek's “Start With Why,” but adds: you also need to clearly explain what you do and how it fulfills that purpose. Belief Begins Within Barry shifts the focus inward, discussing how employee belief in a company's mission and differentiation directly impacts its longevity—citing that 16 of 17 startups fail within 10 years. His latest book, written during the COVID-era resignation wave, focuses on helping companies win hearts and minds through internal and external clarity. Real-world stories and practical frameworks help teams rediscover what makes them special. Small Shifts, Big Impact Michael dives into adaptability with a brilliant metaphor: changing the lighting in a room can completely alter its feel without replacing the furniture. In the same way, businesses often need thoughtful tweaks—not complete reinventions. He also addresses current workplace trends—like post-2021 turnover and return-to-office debates—urging leaders to listen to their people and lead with empathy and internal communication. Say It Like You Mean It Wrapping up, Barry and Michael discuss how language shapes culture. Self-deprecating phrases like “best kept secret” can quietly undermine confidence inside and outside the organization. Instead, leaders should communicate honestly and boldly about their value—without veering into ego. Michael even mentions recommending Barry's book to a client struggling with this exact challenge. Key Takeaways: True differentiation stems from authenticity, not superiority. Purpose is revealed by asking the hard questions—internally and externally. Your team must believe in what sets your organization apart. Minor shifts in leadership and culture can produce major results. How you describe your business matters—internally and externally.