The Mindset Economy

Trust isn't just a feeling. According to Dr. Paul Zak, it's a measurable neurochemical process and it might be the strongest predictor we have of whether a person, a company or even a country will thrive.

In this episode, host Jean Gomes talks to Paul Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, the founder of neuroeconomics as a field, and one of the most cited scientists in the world. They dig into 25 years of research on the biology of trust: how his early work linking oxytocin to trusting behaviour changed the conversation around leadership and culture, why trust tracks so closely with a country's GDP, and why social media might be quietly wearing it down.

The conversation covers a lot of ground: how to build accountability without micromanaging, why open-plan offices and flattened hierarchies actually work, and how ‘peak experiences’ can pull a stale team or relationship out of a rut. Paul and Jean also get into AI: the research agent Paul built to help him write, the risk of burning yourself out managing a fleet of AI tools, and what's left for humans to do well once the machines can handle the rest.

In this episode:

• Where the oxytocin-trust discovery came from, and what it actually showed
• What's happening in your brain when you trust someone (and when you don't)
• Building a high-trust culture without losing accountability
• Why trust is one of the best predictors of national prosperity
• The ‘well-being paradox’ and why thriving is rarely a solo activity
• How to engineer a peak experience for your team or your marriage
• Paul's take on AI agents, ‘AI vampires’ and where human value goes next
• An experiment you can try this week to break out of autopilot

Read more from Paul in his book Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies

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What do you do when your chatbot understands you better than the people in your life?

Dr Charlotte Blease is a health informaticist and philosopher who's spent the last decade surveying doctors about how they actually use AI, not how they're supposed to use it. She holds positions at Harvard Medical School, the University of Melbourne and Uppsala University, and she's the author of Doctor Bot. Her research keeps landing on the same uncomfortable point: medical error is far more common than we like to admit, and AI is already changing what "good care" looks like, whether the medical profession has caught up or not.

In this conversation, Scott and Jean talk to Charlotte about:

• Why between 5 and 20% of primary care visits involve a diagnostic error, and why that number is probably too low
• Why more than half of UK GPs are now using tools like ChatGPT, most with zero training on how to do it safely
• The strange finding that doctors sometimes make AI less accurate when they try to work alongside it, because their own instincts get in the way
• Why written responses from ChatGPT have been rated as far more empathetic than responses from human doctors, and what that says about the "art of medicine"
• The rise of a shadow health system, where patients turn to chatbots for grief support, therapy and diagnosis before they ever see a doctor
• What Charlotte would tell a young person trying to build a career in a world where the machines are getting better at the things we thought were uniquely ours

Further reading can be found in Charlotte's book, 'Doctor Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us - and How AI Could Save Lives'.

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Raising kids to handle failure matters more than teaching them any specific fact about how the brain works, and our guest on episode 8 of The Mindset Economy podcast Nicholas Wright makes that case using his own family history. His Great Uncle Sydney fought through World War II as a tank commander, one of just three from his officer training class to survive without death or serious injury, and lived to a happy old age surrounded by family. That story anchors a bigger point about human resilience being far greater than most people give it credit for. 

Nicholas also puts a number on the future his kids are heading into: roughly a one in three chance of a global catastrophe on the scale of a world war by the end of the century, but he balances that with an optimistic read on where humanity has been, arguing the world is measurably better now than it was fifty years ago.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

Dr. Leo Anthony Celi thinks half the deans at universities and half the seats in health ministries should go to young people, and he's got a story to back it up. Back in 2022 during a basketball game that was taking place at the Moda Center in Portland, Oregon, the basketball net got tangled. The men on the court kept trying to out-jump each other to fix it, but it was the women's cheering squad who solved it in under a minute by forming a pyramid. 

During his conversation with Jean Gomes on The Mindset Economy podcast, Leo draws three lessons from that: competition kills the kind of collaboration complex problems actually need, homogenous rooms can't see a problem from more than one angle, and the people who caused a mess rarely have the fresh eyes needed to fix it. He also makes a case for rebuilding medical school curriculums around problems that can't be solved by AI, instead of testing students on the ones that already can be.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

COVID forced fast, sweeping change in a way almost nothing else has, and design futurist Sarah Housley says the reason why is worth understanding properly. 

Talking on The Mindset Economy podcast, Sarah explains the Overton window, the range of ideas a politician can propose and still keep their job, and how it flew wide open during the pandemic because there was one clear problem and one clear solution.

Today's crises don't work that way. We're dealing with a plurality of problems and a plurality of solutions at once, which makes the message far harder for leaders to land. Sarah argues that periods of uncertainty like this one actually create more room for ideas that once seemed impossible, for better or worse, and she talks through how those ideas actually move.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

Leor Zmigrod won't hand you a five-step plan to become a more flexible thinker, because that would just be another rigid system to follow. Instead she offers two things worth sitting with: question the rules and routines that quietly narrow your life, and chase creativity that actually breaks the mould instead of following a recipe.

Earlier this year, Leor was a guest on The Mindset Economy podcast during which she also talks about her research on people who left comfortable lives to join ISIS, and what she found wasn't what the media assumed. It wasn't poverty or lack of education driving most of them. It was brains tuned toward rigid ideologies that offered a clear identity, especially in adolescence, when the need to make sense of the world is at its peak.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

Five years from now, organisations will look smaller, portfolio careers will be normal again, and your employer will have a far better read on your mood than you'd probably like. If you listen to episode 5 of The Mindset Economy podcast, you’ll hear Ja-Naé Duane and Steve Fisher lay out where they think work is heading, from agentic technology replacing whole roles to digital twins reshaping what collaboration even looks like.

The conversation then takes us through the nine "super shifts" as described in their book SuperShifts, deep systemic changes like generational drift, techceleration, and intellifusion that are reshaping authority, identity, and decision-making all at once. None of them arrive on the same timeline, which is exactly why people feel exhausted and confused without being able to name what's actually happening to them.

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Complaining feels productive right up until you realise it's getting you nowhere, and during his conversation with Mindset Economy co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, guest Chris Hirst breaks down what he calls the ROI of complaining. His argument is blunt: the vast majority of what happens to you, your team, or your business sits outside your control, from the economy to your competitors' next move, so obsessing over it just moves the focus away from where it actually belongs.

Spotting a problem is trivially easy. Anyone can do it. What separates people worth having on a team is a willingness to go and fix the thing, not just describe it accurately in a meeting. 

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

Mind wandering isn't a sign you're slacking off. On The Mindset Economy podcast, Mithu Storoni explains it's actually your brain telling you it needs a break, and reaching for coffee instead of listening to that signal has consequences you won't notice until later.

Mithu breaks down her three-gear model of the brain, from the floaty, unfocused state of gear one to the locked-in focus of gear two to the frantic, creativity-killing state of gear three that caffeine and stress push you into. Get stuck in gear three all day and your brain can defend but it can't create, and you'll pay for it that night when you can't wind down. This is a practical look at why working with your brain's natural rhythm beats forcing it into a fixed schedule.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy

Most conversations inside your organization don't meet a basic bar for quality according to Amy Edmondson, and during episode 4 of The Mindset Economy podcast she'll tell you exactly why. Amy lays out three things that separate a genuinely useful conversation from one that just fills time: everyone's either contributing or listening, there's a real mix of statements and questions, and people leave feeling like they actually learned something.

She talks through what a healthy ratio of advocacy to inquiry sounds like in practice, and how AI might eventually help teams score their own meetings against these criteria. There's also a sharp point in here about the difference between being nice and being kind when a colleague is talking too much, or not enough.

If you enjoyed this extract, find the full conversation on Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindsetEconomy