Award-winning author and historian Elizabeth L. Block joins Google to discuss her book, “Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing.” She explores the diverse history of women’s hair, from the cultural power of hair in 19th century America to the untold stories of business owners and trendsetters. Through her research, we see the places and spaces of hair that allow a new understanding of its immense cultural power. 

Elizabeth is an art historian and a Senior Editor in the Publications and Editorial Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She holds a PhD in art history from the City University of New York, an MA in American Studies from Columbia University, and a BA in English and art history from The George Washington University.

Watch this episode at youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle.

Mandy Len Catron is known for her wildly popular Modern Love essay in the New York Times, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This." She popularized the 36 questions that are said to make people fall in love. Mandy’s essay inspired her book of the same name.

In the book, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This," Mandy deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories through a series of candid and vulnerable essays. She dives all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she’d read about — where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions — and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship.

Originally published in July 2017. Watch this episode at youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle.

Doug Melville discusses his book, "Invisible Generals: Rediscovering Family Legacy, and a Quest to Honor America’s First Black Generals." The book takes us on a journey from post-Civil War America to modern-day Europe and Asia, introducing readers to prominent yet hidden heroes, inspired by Doug’s own story. 

In 2011, Doug was thrilled to be invited to an advanced screening of George Lucas’ “Red Tails,” a fresh take on America’s first Black aerial squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen. However, that excitement faded quickly when he realized the film had fictionalized the story to the point of omitting all of the names and details of the heroes from the story entirely, including Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the founding commander of the unit and the patriarch of Doug’s family. Inspired, Doug began investigating passed-down histories of his family and realized that America’s first two Black Generals – Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and Benjamin Davis Sr. – were not only a father and son, but had also raised Doug’s father. He then began unearthing stories of their incredible accomplishments, their perseverance and their trauma, and realized that even when living at the highest ranks of public service, they were treated as if they were invisible because of their race. Doug’s book celebrates the everyday heroes behind the scenes, reminding us to utilize our ancestors’ victories to broaden our vision of what is possible.

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Award-winning wine expert Karen MacNeil discusses her book, “The Wine Bible: 3rd Edition,” which offers the ultimate education in wine with expanded content.

Karen MacNeil is the only American to have won every major wine award given in the English language. TIME magazine has called her, “America’s Missionary of the Vine.” She is the author of the award-winning book, The Wine Bible, the only best selling wine book in the United States, and is the creator and editor of Wine Speed, the top digital newsletter on wine in the United States. She was the former wine correspondent for the Today Show on NBC, and was also the host of the PBS series Wine, Food & Friends with Karen MacNeil, for which she won an Emmy. Karen is also the creator and Chairman Emeritus of the Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies at the Culinary Institute of America, which has been called the “Harvard of wine education.”

Originally published in November 2022. Watch this episode at youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle.

Chances are, you’ve tried – and maybe succeeded – at the Rubik’s Cube. Patented in 1975, the Rubik’s Cube then made its international debut in 1980 at the New York Toy Fair, and quickly became the best-selling toy in history. But you may not know that Erno Rubik also patented many other successful toys and designs, including the Magic Snake and Rubik’s Magic. His book “Cubed – The Puzzle of Us All” has been published in several countries around the world.

Erno Rubik studied architecture and design in Budapest, Hungary. He is the co-founder of the Hungarian Engineering Academy, the Palace of Marvels, and more recently the Aquincum Institute of Technology (AIT) where his latest public sculpture is also on display. Erno also serves on the board of the Judit Polgar Chess Foundation. A recipient of numerous national and international distinctions, Erno has acted as Ambassador to the European Year of Innovation and Creativity and was a returning member of the European Inventor Award's international jury. He lives in Budapest, Hungary with his wife. They have four children.

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Are you drowning in information overload? Do you disappear down a rabbit hole of social media just when you need to focus? Productivity expert Graham Allcott can help.

Graham Allcott is the founder of Think Productive, author of 5 books, and the host of podcast "Beyond Busy." In this conversation, he talks about how to be a productivity ninja: how to work smarter, manage projects with confidence, and tame your inbox. 

Originally published in February 2019. Visit youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle to watch this episode.

When we let fear of other people's opinions take control, we play it safe and small because we're afraid of what will happen on the other side of critique. But what if the key to leading a high-performance life is to redirect our attention from the outside world to the world inside us?

Dr. Michael Gervais discusses his book, The First Rule Of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What People Think Of You. He reveals the mental skills and practices we need to overcome the fear of other people's opinions — the same skills he's taught to the top performers in the world, including sports MVPs, world-renowned artists and musicians, and Fortune 100 leaders and teams.

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We’ve all – hopefully – experienced what it’s like to fall into a sense of flow. It’s when everything happens easily. You have a natural sense of meaning and purpose without having to think or worry about it very much at all.

But for some of us, that’s harder to come by. That’s where Arjuna Ardagh comes in. Arjuna is the founder of Awakening Coaching, where he’s coached leaders for over 35 years across the technology field, the movie industry, writers, and innovators in public policy.

Arjuna maps out technology for shifting and managing consciousness. He shares how to access new dimensions of yourself to optimize creativity, dissolve roadblocks, and how to turn self actualization into tangible results in your work and the rest of your life.

Originally published in May 2014.

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Ravi Bapna and Anindya Ghose visit Google to discuss their book “Thrive: Maximizing Well-Being in the Age of AI” - the book explores how AI can positively impact many aspects of our daily lives, from health and wellness to work, education, and home life.

Artificial intelligence is a powerful general-purpose technology that is reshaping the modern economy, but misperceptions about AI stand in the way of harnessing it for the betterment of humanity. In their book Thrive, Ravi Bapna and Anindya Ghose counter the backlash by showcasing how AI is positively influencing the aspects of our daily lives that we care about most: our health and wellness, relationships, education, the workplace, and domestic life. The authors explain the underlying technology and give people the agency they need to shape the debate around how we should regulate AI to maximize its benefits and minimize its risks.

Bringing over two decades of experience with cutting-edge research, consulting, executive coaching, and advising to bear on the subject, Bapna and Ghose demystify the technology of AI itself. They offer a novel “House of AI” framework that encompasses traditional analytics, generative AI, and fair and ethical deployment of AI. Using examples from everyday life, they showcase how the modern AI-powered ecosystem fundamentally improves the emotional, physical, and material well-being of regular people across the globe.

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Erin Weed is the founder of Girls Fight Back, a women’s safety education company. After teaching live self-defense seminars to over 1 million people worldwide, she sold Girls Fight Back in 2013. Since then, she has been working as a speaker, author, and communication strategist who helps people seek their purpose and speak their truth.

Today, we’ll hear her Talk at TEDxBoulder about how to connect with one another by communicating authentically. On International Women's Day 2018, she joined Women@BLD to share a technique on how to lead and communicate authentically, from the head, heart and core.

Originally published in May of 2018.

Visit http://youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle/ to watch the video.