The Mindset Economy

Winston Churchill packed one and a half working days into every single day of World War II and still made time to reflect. In episode 8 of The Mindset Economy podcast, guest Nicholas Wright walks through a handful of historical examples that sharpen the point: Eisenhower building a wide base of knowledge thanks to a mentor who forced him to read widely, Stalin outperforming Hitler partly because he ran the war by committee instead of alone, and Nelson Mandela reading and thinking his way through decades in a prison cell the size of a small desk. 

The practical takeaway: build a wider range of reference points, get honest feedback from other people, and watch out for the false confidence that comes from being fluent in something.

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

In 2026, AI is mostly being used to retrieve information faster, and during his conversation with Jean Gomes on The Mindset Economy podcast, Dr. Leo Anthony Celi shares that that's a massive waste of what the technology could actually do. He wants AI built to make us more creative, more humble, more curious, and less gullible, and explains why training it on nothing but the internet's corpus leaves out centuries of moral wisdom from religious and indigenous traditions.

Leo reminds us of AlphaGo's famous move 34 against Lee Sedol, the move nobody expected, making a case for why creativity needs a mix of different bodies of knowledge, not just more data from the same sources. He also talks candidly about the pushback he gets from people building these systems, and why he thinks the answer isn't to lecture them but to warm up the room a couple of degrees at a time.

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

"People are not excited about the future anymore." 

That's the opening line of design futurist and guest on The Mindset Economy podcast Sarah Housley's book Designing Hope, and it's where this conversation starts. She talks through why the big visions of the last century, fossil fuels and plastic among them, delivered real progress and real damage in the same breath, and why nobody's replaced them with anything new.

In conversation with co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, Sarah also discusses how the constantly refreshing newsfeed on your phone has trapped everyone in a permanent present, unable to think properly about the past or the future. Her answer isn't utopia and it isn't dystopia either. It's something she calls protopia, a future that's a little better than yesterday, built by people willing to be ambitious without pretending it'll be perfect.

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

Forget fascism and communism for a second. Leor Zmigrod studies ideology as a way of thinking, not a specific set of beliefs, and that reframe changes the whole conversation.

On The Mindset Economy podcast, Leor explains what actually makes someone ideological: a rigid system of rules they refuse to question, and a habit of sorting the world into who belongs and who doesn't. It has nothing to do with which side of a political debate you're on. Leor pushes back hard on the idea that unshakable convictions are admirable, arguing instead that they narrow how you think in every part of life, from your job to your family to your hobbies, and that this rigidity leaves a mark on the brain itself.

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

Leaders are being asked to solve problems from this century with mental models built for the last one, and talking on The Mindset Economy podcast futurist, innovation leader and co-author of SuperShifts Steve Fisher tells us that makes that point often. Steve raises a question worth sitting with: when AI spots a pattern humans can't see, who actually makes the final call?

Steve argues that we're moving from a world built on knowing to one built on sense-making, and explains why so many AI initiatives fail even with a huge budget behind them, because organisations are upgrading their tools without upgrading their beliefs. He also draws a sharp comparison between the shift from Windows to web development in the early 2000s and what's happening now, except this time the change is faster and it's hitting everyone at once.

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

'Whatever you do, don't turn up and be yourself.' 

That line got Chris Hirst plenty of grief on social media, but he stands by it. Appearing as a guest on The Mindset Economy podcast, Chris tells us that he can't stand the phrase 'authentic leadership' because he's watched too many senior people use it to excuse bad behaviour. His actual advice is simpler: show up as the best curated version of yourself, not whatever version happens to be easiest that day. Chris breaks career progress down into aptitude and attitude, arguing aptitude gets you in the room but attitude gets you the job, because there's always someone else with your exact skill set waiting behind you. There's also a sharp point on why so many people say they want to work in strategy, when he thinks execution is actually the harder and more valuable skill.

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

Your brain isn't a muscle, but we've been running our workplaces as if it were since the 1950s. Neuroscientist Mithu Storoni traces that mistake back to the Industrial Revolution, when the idea of efficiency got applied to assembly lines and then, without much thought, to knowledge work.

In a conversation with Jean Gomes and Scott Allender on The Mindset Economy podcast, Mithu explains what happens inside the brain when you push through sustained attention for twenty or thirty minutes past its limit, why that feeling of boredom at eleven in the morning is actually a signal, and what alpha waves have to do with clearing mental clutter. Her point lands hard for anyone stacking back-to-back meetings all day: a brain forced to behave like a machine ends up performing like a very basic AI.

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

Psychological safety isn't about being nice, it's about permission for candour. In this short extract taken from The Mindset Economy podcast, Amy Edmondson (who built her career studying psychological safety) explains why. Learning is never comfortable. You're taking a risk every time you admit you don't know something or that you got it wrong.

Amy walks us through why hierarchy makes this harder, what leaders can say to open the door for honest input, and why asking a genuine question is one of the most powerful things a leader can do. She also makes the case that anyone on a team, not just the person at the top, can practice this kind of leadership.

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

How much of global conflict is driven by our own biology? In this episode of The Mindset Economy, we are joined by Dr. Nicholas Wright to examine the "brain-war" connection through the lens of neuroscience and military strategy.

We explore the neuroscience of war, how our evolutionary wiring influences modern battlefields and how the experience of conflict fundamentally reshapes the human brain. Nicholas breaks down the cognitive biases that lead to escalation and shares insights on how understanding cognitive psychology and military psychology can help us navigate a more stable future.

In this episode, we discuss:

- The biological origins of human conflict and aggression.
- How war physically alters brain function across societies.
- Overcoming cognitive pitfalls in high-stakes strategic decision-making.
- The future of neuro-influence and its role in international relations.
- The impact of AI on warfare and autonomous drones.

Resources Mentioned: Nicholas Wright's book, Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and How War Shapes the Brain, is available now.

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender: 

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023) 
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:

Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy
 
The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

AI is not failing because of bad technology. It is failing because of bad questions.

Dr. Leo Anthony Celi, critical care physician and researcher at MIT, has spent years exposing a problem that the machine learning community would rather not face. The datasets training our most powerful healthcare AI do not just underrepresent certain populations. They reflect, and quietly reinforce the inequalities already baked into our systems. Building bigger models on broken foundations does not fix medicine, it scales the dysfunction.

In this conversation with Jean Gomes and Scott Allender, Celi makes a counterintuitive case; that AI could become a Trojan horse for genuine transformation, not because the technology will save us but because confronting its failures might force us to ask better questions about who gets seen, who gets studied, and who gets to shape the tools that increasingly govern our lives.

Dr Celi shares why he is bringing musicians, indigenous philosophers, and religious communities into rooms usually reserved for data scientists, what a basketball game and a tangled net reveal about who actually solves hard problems, and why the four qualities most needed from AI are the same ones most needed from leaders: creativity, humility, curiosity, and a healthy scepticism toward easy answers.

For leaders navigating the AI era, this is a conversation about what it really means to build systems worthy of human trust.

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender: 

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023) 
 The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:

Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy
 
The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.