Grow Big Always

Even without hard numbers you most likely feel the economic polarization that’s been happening over the last few decades. And who needs numbers to know just how much technology has changed our lives. It’s the connection between tech and the economy that I personally find super fascinating and it’s an area of expertise for this week’s guest, MIT’s Andrew McAfee. Andrew is a principle research scientist at MIT. He’s focused on how tech is changing business, the economy and society overall. He’s written a number of books on this, the most recent one is The Second Machine Age, which was a New York Times bestseller and won a book of the year award. He has been a referenced source by Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall St. Journal, and The New York Times. He’s talked about his work on The Charlie Rose Show and 60 Minutes, at TED, Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and in front of many other audiences.

No. Sunny Haire didn’t feel like he was born into the wrong body. He’s not that popularized, stereotypical trans story. His is far more fluid, organic and personal and unlike most stories, he’s not promoting a book or part of a media circuit. He’s not trying to simplify a huge community of people or put a headline on his story. He's just a friend brave enough to share a deeply personal journey of growth. I felt for Sunny in this conversation because so often, when you’re part of a differentiated or marginalized group (especially one that’s controversial) and a microphone is put in front of you, somehow you’re the expert— the spokesperson— as if, by just being a member you have all the answers. Sunny is no more the spokesperson for Queer or Transgendered people than I am for dorky, middle-aged Jews. He’s no different than you: A person who is figuring himself out as he faces life's challenges. A guy who wants authenticity, personal freedom and to be true to himself. There’s a reason that Sunny has so many people who love him in the Bay Area. After you hear what he has to say, I’m sure you’ll be one, too.

At least once a week for almost 20 years, Sgt. Kevin Briggs would stand just a few feet away from a severely depressed person who had climbed over the rail in the middle of the Golden Gate bridge and was a step away from falling to their death. While they both stood there with noisy traffic and cold, strong wind creating insane vibrations, Kevin had to find a way to do whatever he could to break through and get people to decide to climb back. In this conversation, Kevin shares the enormous challenges he’s faced whole life -- his own family’s history with suicide, a mom dying from cancer at 49, learning about his own cancer at 21 and then battling a severe depression of his own along with multiple heart operations all while dealing with people at their darkest hour. We all have moments of despair so I hope that, in this brief conversation with the man who’s become known as the “Guardian of the Golden Gate,” you can borrow from the powerful technique and messages that he used too help hundreds of people save themselves.

When better than Easter to talk about...yes, "eggs," but also how a guy, his brother and a friend came up with the drunken idea of throwing goofy mustache parties and when they got really popular did something completely unexpected. That's what happened to Movember's Adam Garone and his unexpected move was to connect the youthful mustache-growing popularity to the crotchety world of not-for-profit causes like Prostate Cancer Research.

Hard to imagine someone better to talk growth with than the person who wrote "The Growth Mindset," world-renowned professor and best-selling author, Carol Dweck. Her work has been featured in such publications as The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, and she has appeared on Today and 20/20.

As a kid of immigrants, Christian Piccholini felt marginalized, abandoned by his working parents, and bullied. In fact, one day when he was cornered by a bully, he fought back and beat the guy down. He became respected by the other boys. Soon after, he was approached by an older charismatic father-figure kid who pulled him into the skinheads where he rose through the ranks over 7 years, ultimately using hate music to recruit other young boys to fight back against the imaginary invasion of “others.”

As day-by-day goes by do you even have a sinking feeling that none of life-as-we-know it, is sustainable? There’s a fragility to the things that we’ve built in our post-WW2 civilization that seems like it could topple over at any minute. It just doesn’t make sense. Surely we know there’s not really an endless stream of resources and a well-oiled machine that backs up the world that we’ve come to expect and rely on. If you want a completely different point of view on what that means long-term, then this podcast with James Howard Kunstler is a must-listen. He’s been studying where all this stuff is headed for quite some time. Jim is an author and a critic with many non-fiction, novels and plays behind him. He’s also done a fantastic TED talk on “The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs,” a lecturer at universities like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, University of Illinois, DePaul, Texas A & M, West Point, and Rutgers University not to mention a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Slate.com, RollingStone, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and the Op-Ed page where he often covers environmental and economic issues. He’s even been on the Colbert Report. Hopefully his point of view on how America is likely to get a lot smaller and how the different skills that we have as communities and individuals might need a really big change, gives your brain a wake-up call.

If you’re a BMW or automobile lover, you may have heard of Chris Bangle. At only 35, he was the man in charge of BMW design— so all models and brands from BMW, Mini and Rolls Royce— reported up to him— and his designs shook up the automotive industry for 17 years. People still write and talk about it today. Today he has his own firm re-approaching design for all sorts of products from smartphones to alcohol bottles. We talked from his studio near Turin, Italy, about everything from self-driving cars to AI to how he’s designed starting his own company and growing it as an inspiration for his employees as well as the community around him.

This conversation I had with Diane Benscoter will be an important one to listen to. When she was 17, Diane found herself sucked into a cult. She was a part of the Unification Church, better known as a “Moonie,” a cult led by Rev Moon. You may have seen pictures of huge, mass weddings which are conducted by that organization. After luckily escaping, Diane became a “deprogrammer” herself trying to rescue people who had been pulled into cults. That solution involved kidnapping the cult member, which Diane was arrested for.

This is one of the episodes I’ve been waiting to release— it’s with Agent Provocateur CEO Garry Hogarth and it was recorded a few months ago in his hotel, just after he came back from opening a new AP store in China. But, while getting ready to finally put this episode out there, wouldn’t you know it, but I got a note from Garry that last week he parted ways with the investors behind Agent Provocateur— the company that he turned around.