Meikles & Dimes

By Nate MeikleEducation

Meikles & Dimes episodes

March 17, 2025191: Harvard Professor Iris Bohnet on Fairness
Iris Bohnet is a Professor of Business and Government and the co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. As a behavioral economist, she combines insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, often with a gender or cross-cultural perspective. She is the author of the award-winning book, What Works and co-author of the new book Make Work Fair.
In this episode we discuss the following:
If we’re concerned about fairness, it cannot be a program. It has to be a way of doing things. For example, DEI trainings are programs. And the research shows that they don’t change behavior.
When Astrid Linder collected data on car accidents, she learned that women tended to have worse injuries than men because the crash test dummies that had been used to inform the cars’ design had been made to represent a prototypical male. Designing crash test dummies that are more representative of women is an example of doing things that make life more fair.
16 min
March 16, 2025 190: Sundays With Tozer Episode 21 | Tozer Helps Me Get Recruited & We Discuss Oppenheimer
In this episode we discuss how Tozer helped me get recruited out of high school, and we discuss the movie Oppenheimer, given that Tozer spent more than a decade at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
52 min
March 16, 2025 189: Sundays with Tozer Episode 20 | Tozer and Zairrick Wadsworth
In this episode of Sundays with Tozer, we talk with Zairrick Wadsworth, one of the great wrestlers from Idaho, and one of the great coaches in Idaho, who likely would have never attended college if not for Tozer.
1 hr 17 min
March 10, 2025188: Sabina Nawaz, former Microsoft Executive | How Pressure, Not Power, Corrupts
Sabina Nawaz is a former executive at Microsoft and a coach for C-level executives at Fortune 500 corporations. During her fourteen-years at Microsoft, she led the company’s executive development efforts for over 11,000 managers, advising Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer directly. She has written for, and been featured in, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, NBC, and Nasdaq. She is also the author of the book, You're the Boss.
In this episode we discuss the following:
As a leader, it’s important to use your “shut up” muscle. Don’t over participate, don’t over speak. Instead, let others speak first. For Sabina she tries to be the third, or later, to speak.
Don’t treat delegation like an on/off switch, but rather treat it like a dial which is calibrated to people’s readiness and ability.
Our behavior as leaders gets amplified on the way down, and peoples’ responses get muted on the way up. But by reacting to feedback kindly, and consistently asking for specific feedback, we can amplify the volume of the responses coming back to us
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18 min
March 03, 2025187: Teach People How to Treat You | Melody Wilding, Professor & Executive Coach
Melody Wilding is an award-winning executive coach, keynote speaker, and author of Managing Up. Named one of Insider’s “most innovative career coaches,” her clients include CEOs and managers at Google, Amazon, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase, among others.
A human behavior professor at Hunter College In New York City, Melody’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and dozens of other media outlets. She is also a contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Psychology Today and Forbes.
In this episode we discuss the following:
We’re always teaching people how to treat us.
We may be prone to over-apologize. But rather than over-apologize, we can simply say, “Thank you for your patience.”
Rather than prefacing a comment with, “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” we can say, “I believe we should try X.”
When setting boundaries, rather than just saying, “No” to a request, we can say, “I’m happy to make an exception this time.”
Rather than always trying to get to the point, we can share anecdotes and stories that will be much more memorable.
To make sure we’re working on things that our managers value, we can ask questions like, “What do you wish you had more time to work on?” or “What could I do to make your job easier right now?”

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20 min
February 24, 2025186: Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson | Focus, Embrace Change, & Treat People Well
Rebecca Henderson is a professor at Harvard Business School and is 1 of only 25 professors at Harvard given the distinction of University Professor, which is the highest honor a professor can receive at Harvard. She is the author of the book Reimagining Capitalism which explores how the private sector can help build a more sustainable economy.
Rebecca is also a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of both the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also sits on the boards of several companies, including AMGEN.
Rebecca earned a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and a PhD in business economics from Harvard.
In this episode we discuss the following:
I love the story Rebecca shared about the book contract she had lined up. She was going to write a book about how we are prone to take on too much stuff, and then she had to cancel the contract because she had taken on too much stuff.
Finding the right balance between staying focused and embracing change is a never-ending struggle. Rebecca worked with Nokia, Kodak, and Motorola. All of them were at the cutting edge of technology and poised to dominate the cell phone and camera market. But none could adapt quickly enough to the changing technology.
I thought it was fascinating to hear how some firms got superior results to other firms, even though they had the same inputs. The economists hated the finding because the research showed that leadership and management practices could make such a difference. The best firms took care of their people.
Here are two of Rebecca's papers:
Innovation in the 21st Century: Architectural Change, Purpose, and the Challenges of Our Time
Moral Firms?
And here is a link to her book website for Reimagining Capitalism.
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19 min
February 17, 2025185: Jon Schmidt of The Piano Guys | Turning His Life Over To God
Jon Schmidt is an American piano composer and member of the musical group The Piano Guys, which has more than 2 billion views on YouTube, and more than 7 million subscribers.
In this episode we discuss the following:
Jon didn’t want to be a musician. But he and his wife adopted the principle of, “Turn your life over to God, and he’ll make more out of it than you’d ever be able to.” And it was that decision that guided Jon back to music.
When I asked Jon what he’d say to his kids if they didn’t believe in God, I loved Jon’s response…that he doesn’t think God gets uptight about how we think of him. So whether people believe in an embodied God or just a higher power, it’s the intention to try to make the most of our lives that matters.
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16 min
February 10, 2025184: Author Elaine Lin Hering on Unlearning Silence
Elaine Lin Hering is a speaker, facilitator, and writer, and she is the author of the USA Today Bestselling book Unlearning Silence. Elaine has taught executive education programs at Harvard, Dartmouth, Tufts, Cal Berkeley, and UCLA and served as a Lecturer at Harvard Law School. And her clients include American Express, Capital One, Google, IBM, Merck, Nike, Salesforce, Shell, Pixar, and the Red Cross. Elaine has B.A.s in Political Science and Music from Cal Berkeley and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
In this episode we discuss the following:
Silence is a learned behavior. We’re endlessly influenced by culture and society, so it’s important to question assumptions, and ask ourselves: In what ways do we self-censor and in what ways do we silence others?
Just as there is no one best time zone, there is no one best way to speak, to look, to act.
We should always seek out data, but remember that it’s not definitive.
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18 min
February 03, 2025183: Combating Addiction in a Dopamine-Saturated World | Stanford Professor Dr. Anna Lembke
Dr. Anna Lembke is a Stanford Professor and Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. Her latest book, Dopamine Nation, is a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 30 languages. It examines the effects of being surrounded by abundant sources of instant gratification, such as food, social media, gaming, pornography, and drugs. Anna combines the neuroscience of addiction with the wisdom of recovery to explore the problem of compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine-overloaded world.
In this episode we discuss the following:
Anna learned from her patients in addiction recovery that if they wanted to maintain their recovery, they couldn’t tell a single lie.
One of the reasons lying hurts ourselves and others is because it denies us access to reality, which of course makes it more difficult to deal with reality.
Radical honesty applies to more aspects of life than we may realize. For example, Anna is able to reduce her anxiety before interviews by being radically honest with herself and remembering that she doesn’t have to be all things to all people, she doesn’t have to be anything more than she already is.

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20 min
January 27, 2025182: The Future of Energy | USC Professor Shon Hiatt
Shon Hiatt is a business professor and director of the Business of Energy Transition initiative at the University of Southern California. He researches entrepreneurship, strategy, innovation, and sustainability, with an emphasis in energy and agribusiness. His work has been published in leading academic journals and featured in popular media outlets. Before joining USC, he was a faculty member at Harvard Business School. In this episode we discuss the following:
The demand for energy, specifically and surprisingly for coal and petroleum, has never been greater, especially with the growth of energy-intensive data centers that power AI. But each energy source comes with tradeoffs, so the more diversified energy sources countries have, the greater potential for resiliency when shocks hit the system.
Estimates indicate that an electric car only becomes less carbon intensive than a combustion engine after it’s been driven for 100,000 miles, in part because dirty energy is often used to charge the batteries, plus mining the material to create the batteries is energy intensive.
While nuclear power is quite clean and becoming much safer, it is especially expensive due to regulatory burdens that haven’t been updated with the latest technology. And while wind and solar help meet overall demand, they cannot reliably hit base load demand.
As Shon tells his students, the holy grail for energy production balances security, safety, affordability, reliability, and cleanliness. In other words, when it comes to energy policy there are no simple solutions. Only tradeoffs.

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23 min

About Meikles & Dimes

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Meikles & Dimes is a podcast dedicated to the simple, practical, and underappreciated. Monologue episodes cover science-based topics in decision-making, health, communication, negotiation, and…