Fortune Favors the Bold - The Official Mastercard Podcast

Hey, Fortune Favors the Bold listeners— Ashley C. Ford here. I’m back and so is ​Fortune Favors the Bold​ Season 3.

We’ll have new episodes of the podcast in just a few months, but I’m popping into your feed now because we need your help. This season’s theme is “Question Everything.” We’re diving into real questions from real people— the financial questions that everyone thinks about, but no one talks about. So we’re doing something a little different. We’re taking your calls! We want to hear the questions that are keeping you up at night. Are you thinking about how to pay for school? What it means to be “financially stable” in this day and age? How to find work that works for you? Whatever your question is... throw it at us. And this season, we’ll find answers that will help ​all of us​ navigate our ever-changing world. So call us and leave a voicemail with your question— no matter how big or small. Call 971-666-3977. That’s 971 - MONEY QS. You just might hear your question on the show.

Season One host Ashley C. Ford is back for this live bonus episode! She spoke with Nichole Perkins, co-host of the podcast Thirst Aid Kit, and Stefanie O’Connell, who specializes in talking to women about how to take control of their money. 

There’s a misconception that small businesses are overshadowed by big businesses when it comes to driving the economy. The truth?  Small businesses punch way above their weight, creating positive ripple effects far beyond their local community. In this episode, we’ll follow a storefront bakery in Washington, D.C., focused on the betterment of military veterans, their spouses, and their caretakers. We also talk to a woman in the northern farmlands of Rwanda, who built her own brick-making business, all thanks to a nonprofit seeking to guide young entrepreneurs out of poverty.

In 2012, for the first time in history, more people made their homes in cities than rural areas. But now, services designed for a few hundred thousand residents are straining under the pressure of meeting the traffic, housing and health demands of millions, and sometimes tens of millions of people. With limited space and resources, how can city officials make more services work for more people? “Smart city” proponents say new networks, integrated technology and data-driven decision making will make the difference in cities of the future. 

What it means to be employed continues to shift. The old way of thinking? It’s up to employees to learn those new skills, or else companies will find someone else who has them. In this episode, we’ll hear from employers turning that way of thinking on its head — and seeing how their businesses are benefiting.

Long-established methods for determining who gets credit are leaving a lot of people behind. In this episode, we’re talking to the people finding new ways to establish creditworthiness and getting more people access to opportunity in the process.

As technology changes at an ever-faster pace, it’s more important than ever to talk to kids about money. But that’s hard to do if you, as a parent or teacher, never learned about money yourself. We’ll hear from the rule breakers who are making sure future generations don’t have the same blind spot.

Bootstraps, good attitudes and elbow grease? Sorry, that’s not enough to be upwardly mobile these days. See how individuals and countries can fight against the inertia that makes class transition so difficult, and look at some organizations who are tipping the scales.

This season, host Mona Chalabi will help us explore the assumptions that shape the way we think about things like upward mobility, creditworthiness, financial literacy, and more. And then she’s going to talk about who’s kicking those assumptions to the curb and forging new approaches that might just benefit all of society. She’ll also look at how organizations are protecting their own interests by reskilling the 21-Century workforce, how growing cities are outsmarting expectations, and how small businesses remain the workhorses of a huge portion of the global economy and workforce.

Imagine using your phone to give a subway busker a couple bucks. Or, walking into a store knowing you won’t have to wait in line to check-out. Imagine a world beyond cash. In some Scandinavian countries, this is already a reality—roughly 90-percent of all financial transactions are on debit cards. In this episode, taped in front of a live audience in Manhattan, an economist, a humanitarian and a businessman will discuss how cash is being replaced around the world with electronic payments. You’ll hear a lively conversation, moderated by Ashley C. Ford, between representatives from The Fletcher School at Tufts, The International Rescue Committee, and Lyft about what going cashless looks like worldwide, and what the United States can learn from other countries about getting it right.