2020 was a lot of things. For Yaniv, it was the year he stopped moving long enough to actually notice what he'd been missing — and the year he built something new from scratch. In this unedited solo episode, he shares three things COVID taught him, what it really takes to run a weekly podcast, and where the School of Innovation is headed in 2021.

What We Cover

• Three things COVID taught Yaniv — about stillness, connection, and family
• Why boredom is a muscle worth training (even if he never practiced what he preached)
• How solitude made people more reachable — and why Yaniv leaned into that
• The gut-punch realization: not knowing his own kids as well as he thought
• What it actually takes to run a weekly interview podcast — and what nobody warns you about
• Consistency as a superpower and kryptonite
• The 5 most popular episodes of Season 1
• Why the innovation conversation is broken — and who Yaniv really wants to talk to
• What's changing in Season 2: fewer interviews, more conversations, a full digital school

Timestamps

(00:00) A different kind of episode — no music, no guest, no edits

(01:00) Three things COVID taught Yaniv

(02:28) Lesson 1: Permission to stop and be bored

(03:30) Lesson 2: Solitude made people more accessible

(04:25) Lesson 3: Rediscovering family — and the punch-to-the-stomach moment

(06:11) Why 2020 was the year of the pivot — from consulting to podcasting

(08:19) What he learned from running the podcast: it's hard, consistency is harder

(10:35) The good side: people are more open than you think

(12:36) Being a great interviewer is its own skill — and Yaniv's honest self-assessment

(14:37) The 5 most popular episodes of Season 1

(20:00) What's next: the School of Innovation goes digital

(21:53) The real pivot — from innovation professionals to everyday innovators

(25:18) Closing quote: Robert A. Heinlein on why specialization is for insects

The 5 Most Popular Episodes of Season 1

1. My Journey from Venture Architect to Multicultural Innovator — Christine Wang (Ep. 27)
2. The Entrepreneurial Scientist — Christian Tidona, hosted by Adrian Rubstein (Ep. 21)
3. Culture, PropTech and New Ventures — Anthony Lu (Ep. 4)
4. Navigating the In-Between: Ethnography and Innovation — Natalia Lora (Ep. 34)
5. Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing — Marius Orsache, Metabeta (Ep. 28)

Key Takeaways

1. Stillness isn't wasted time — it's a muscle. Workaholics need permission to stop. COVID forced it. Most of us needed it.
2. The innovation conversation is a closed circuit. Innovators talking to innovators gets old fast. The more interesting conversation is with people who don't have "innovation" in their title — but are building and improving things anyway.
3. The best innovators are generalists. As Heinlein put it: "Specialization is for insects." The School of Innovation is built for the rest of us.

Where to Find Yaniv Corem

Link in bio: sleek.bio/yanivcorem

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/yanivcorem

Subscribe & Follow

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