North Star Podcast

Sam Arbesman is a complexity scientist and the author of two award winning books, Technology at the Limits of Comprehension and The Half Life of Facts. He has a PhD in Computational Biology from Cornell University and is the current Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital.

Sam uses the ideas of complex systems to examine how science and technology change over time and what this means for society. In particular, he is obsessed with promoting generalist thinking in our age of specialization, seeing the most hopeful future in the unexpected collisions between disparate ideas. Sam works with companies and startup founders exploring about technological complexity, artificial intelligence, and infusing computation into everything from biology to manufacturing. 

Our conversation starts with talking about science fiction, and specifically The Foundation Trilogy written by Isaac Asimov, and how it cultivated his imagination at a young age. We talk about the past, present and future of knowledge and draw ideas from The Half Life of Facts, which explores how knowledge changes over time. At the end, we explore the relationship between time and immortality before bringing the conversation back to finding meaning in life 

At a young age, Sam’s dad shared a little motto with him every day before he went to school: "Think, have fun, and be a mench." The phrase echoes throughout this wonderful conversation.​​​​​​​

“If you want to create something truly great, you've got to take the chance that it might fail.” -Matthew Luhn

In this episode, Matthew Luhn discusses how to create a feeling that changes lives, how to take feedback in a positive manner, and where the future of storytelling is going. He has helped write some of our childhood favorites, including Toy Story, Cars, Ratatouille, and Finding Nemo. 

After being the youngest animator for The Simpsons at the young age of 19 years old, he was able to see his name in the credits of Season 3.

However, he wasn't fully satisfied. He found his passion and love for screen writing, and in search for being a writer he found himself stumbling into Pixar Animation Studios. Now, he helps develop and craft a story for Fortune 500 companies.

In this episode we hear about his passions and ambitions, and an exclusive behind the scenes of how our favorite stories were created.

Links:

• Creating a Feeling
• Storytelling for Business
• How Big Data Shapes Storytelling

• Pixar

• Creativity Inc. 

• Adidas

• Seth Godin

• Joseph Campbell

• Arianna Huntington - Thrive

Connect with Matthew:

• Instagram

• Twitter

• Website

In this episode, Matthew Luhn discusses how to create a feeling that changes lives, how to take feedback in a positive manner, and where the future of storytelling is going. He has helped write some of our childhood favorites, including Toy Story, Cars, Ratatouille, and Finding Nemo.

After being the youngest animator for The Simpsons at the young age of 19 years old, he was able to see his name in the credits of Season 3.

However, he wasn't fully satisfied. He found his passion and love for screen writing, and in search for being a writer he found himself stumbling into Pixar Animation Studios. Now, he helps develop and craft a story for Fortune 500 companies.

In this episode we hear about his passions and ambitions, and an exclusive behind the scenes of how our favorite stories were created.

Today's guest is Morgan Housel, a partner at the Collaborative Fund, a venture capital firm backing young companies that are moving the world forward.

He was previously a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the Motley Fool. Morgan has an uncanny ability to take complex ideas, distill them, and communicate them in simple ways. His writing draws from psychology, history, neurology, and sociology. Morgan is also an expert on behavioral finance and investing history.

In this episode, we talk about Morgan's experience growing up in Lake Tahoe as a ski racer and how it's impacted his career. Morgan shares stories from America in "The Roaring" 1920s, The Great Depression, and World War II. We discuss penicillin's impact on the modern world, why Morgan is so interested in learning about how people respond to stress, and why psychology has taught him so much about investing.

Joe Norman is a complex systems and data scientist with a PhD in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences. This episode is filled with fresh ways of thinking about our increasingly complex, interdependent world. Joe studies systemic risks in large-scale systems, pattern formations in biological and social systems, biological perception, policy design, and evolution. 

In this episode, we apply the science of complexity to our day-to-day lives. We discuss risk and how to avoid it, what we can learn from architectural design, how to think about planning, the philosophy of science and the beauty we can find in it, and we even dive into the art of motorcycle maintenance.

Like complexity itself, this episode is wide-ranging,  and extremely relevant to our daily lives. Joe's timeless insights will give you a new lens to see the world with.

Matthew May is an independent innovation strategist who works with senior executives and their teams to be more innovative and creative. With a strategy and design background, he's heavily influenced by the eight years he spent as a fully-retained advisor to Toyota, which sparked the idea for his first  book about their innovative methods, The Elegant Solution. Since then, he’s written four more books and recently released a new one - Winning the Brain Game - last year. 

In this episode, Matthew May discusses his adventures as an independent innovation strategist, his unique viewpoint on failure, and why he's built his career around elegance. May shares a wide-ranging mix of stories from Toyota's manufacturing line, to Holland's traffic design. He discusses the difference between the biological mind and the conscious mind, why mindful thinking is a creative edge, and time-tested strategies for better thinking.

In this episode she discusses her journey, and shares stories her first jobs out of college at Time Magazine and CNN in New York City. Then, Kara moved to San Francisco where she became the Vice President of E-Commerce and Shopping at AOL, before founding Hint in 2005. 

In this episode, Kara tells the story of how she went from consuming 10-12 Diet Coke's per day to founding Hint, a lifestyle company delivering a healthy alternative to sugary beverages. The idea behind Hint is simple: pure water, accented with a hint of natural flavor. She is also launching the KaraNetwork, with tools to help entrepreneurs grow purpose-driven businesses, healthfully. 

Kara shares business philosophies, such as her obsession with solving problems for customers, and why she likes to hire young people. She also talks about why Phil Knight's (the CEO of Nike) memoir, Shoe Dog, impacted her so strongly. 

At the end of the episode, she tells a story about building a bookshelf with Jeff Bezos (the CEO of Amazon) in Seattle when the company had only 50 employees.

Brent Beshore is the CEO and founder of adventur.es, a family of companies that invests in family-owned companies looking towards retirement and/or expansion.

At just 34 years of age, he's produced impressive results, building a portfolio of five private companies. He lives in Missouri and has built adventur.es with no outside investors.

In this episode, Brent Beshore shares his winding journey, what he’s learned from it, and specifically the concepts that have impacted his life the most - mental models, opportunity cost, antifragility, market inefficiencies, margin of safety, and time horizons.

Brent discusses how he thinks about role models, and specifically, how Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have impacted his thinking. Later in the episode, Brent gives thoughts on networking, building a personal brand, and how he achieves intellectual honesty.

There’s a lot to admire about Brent and I hope you enjoy this episode.

In this episode, Seth Godin discusses the importance of failure, dancing with the fear of it, and his unique perspective on education. He is the author of 18 books that have been best sellers around the world. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything.

In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth founded both Yoyodyne and Squidoo. His blog (which you can find by typing "seth" into Google) is one of the most popular in the world. 

Recently, Godin once again set the book publishing industry on its ear by launching a series of four books via Kickstarter. The campaign reached its goal after three hours and ended up becoming the most successful book project ever done this way. 

His newest book, What To Do When It's Your Turn, is already a bestseller.

"Work worth doing involves changing people. That's what we do. What change are you seeking to make?"

On this episode, I welcome Tiago Forte whose ideas have transformed my worldview and particularly, how I approach my work and define productivity. He believes that the goals of companies and their employees are fundamentally aligned around human-centered productivity. This belief guides his work as the founder of Forte Labs, creator of the Productive by Design™ methodology, and editor of the Praxis online publication. Tiago draws on his background in design and technology to help knowledge workers apply design thinking to day-to-day productivity challenges.

"Designers are practical philosophers. When you go deep into design, you go really deep! You're talking about what is the nature of reality? What is the nature of what it means to be human? What does it mean for a tool to have a use? This goes back to the most philosophical and ancient questions that we have and at the same time the philosophy of design is totally practical. 

The deepest philosophy can be (and should be) expressed in the design of a door handle, a tea cup, or the way you design a button in a software program. That's really the ultimate test. You can talk a big game and be very intellectually entertaining in the philosophical concepts that you talk about, but it doesn't really make a difference in the world, or more importantly have a positive impact on people's lives until it is something useful - until it has a practice and a function - and that's what design is. It's the joining of the philosophical and the practical with a long tradition of people that have been thinking writing and practicing what it means to design tables, chairs, and more recently, software programs and devices. 

Anytime I'm stuck of trying to solve a problem, I jump into the world of design because design is so powerful that it can be abstracted to anything. If you can define or describe how to design a database, that can be abstracted to how do you design any kind of information. And we can use that to design our blog posts, a piece of artwork, a conversation, or a dinner. Everything is information. If you have the powers of abstraction and learning from diverse fields, keeping track of your knowledge, self awareness, and self understanding, you can learn from the diverse fields and pull together that knowledge you've obtained and implement it with design."