The Innovation Show

Friends matter to us, and they matter more than we think. The single most surprising fact to emerge out of the medical literature over the last decade or so has been that the number and quality of the friendships we have has a bigger influence on our happiness, health and even mortality risk than anything else except giving up smoking. Our guest is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar's number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around 150 people. In today's book,he explores the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, and the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible - and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is. Working at the coalface of the subject at both research and personal levels, he has written the definitive book on how and why we are friends. We welcome evolutionary psychologist and former director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology and the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. His acclaimed books include How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language and so many more.

This episode is an intimate and inspirational exploration of Stephen Hawking— the man and the physicist. It is also a story of friendship, written by his friend also a physicist and renowned author of multiple titles including: Subliminal Elastic Euclid's Window Feynman's Rainbow The Upright Thinkers War of the Worldviews with Deepak Chopra and 2 books coauthored with Stephen Hawking. It is a pleasure to welcome author of Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics, Leonard Mlodinow. We discuss Stephen, the human behind the legend, his challenges and his strength. We discuss elements of Elastic thinking and the benefits of Neurodiversity. More on Leonard on twitter: @lmlodinow

Our guests are Silicon Valley design veterans: One created the first Apple mouse The other designed the award-winning Apple PowerBook and the original Hasbro Star Wars action figures! 13 years ago they founded the STANFORD LIFE DESIGN LAB The course - the most popular at Stanford - has led to a global franchise and a New York Times and worldwide bestselling book: Designing Your Life, published in 2016. Today they are here to discuss their follow-up book : Designing Your Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work We welcome Bill Burnett and Dave Evans More about the guys here: https://designingyour.life/

GRAMMY-recognized #1 hit songwriter, Cliff Goldmacher shares how to explore, shape and sell our ideas by teaching us how to write songs. Doing so helps develop the essential skills of: lateral thinking, creativity, communication, empathy, collaboration, risk-taking and the diffusion of ideas for better innovators. It is a pleasure to welcome the author of: "The Reason For The Rhymes: Mastering the Seven Essential Skills of Innovation by Learning to Write Songs", Cliff Goldmacher. More about Cliff and his workshops: https://www.thereasonfortherhymes.com/workshops/

One of my favourite episodes of all time. This genre-shattering attempt to answer the question of human behaviour by looking at it from every angle. Our guest starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance. And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. What goes on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happens? Then he pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell triggers the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones act hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli which trigger the nervous system? By now, our guest has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. But he keeps going—next to what features of the environment affected that person's brain, and then back to the childhood of the individual, and then to their genetic makeup. Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual. How culture has shaped that individual's group, what ecological factors helped shape that culture, and on and on, back to evolutionary factors thousands and even millions of years old. The result is one of the most dazzling tours de horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Wise, humane, often hilarious, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanising, and downright heroic in its own right. What a pleasure to welcome author of "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst" Robert M. Sapolsky

One of my favourite episodes of all time. This genre-shattering attempt to answer the question of human behaviour by looking at it from every angle. Our guest starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance. And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. What goes on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happens? Then he pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell triggers the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones act hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli which trigger the nervous system? By now, our guest has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. But he keeps going—next to what features of the environment affected that person's brain, and then back to the childhood of the individual, and then to their genetic makeup. Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual. How culture has shaped that individual's group, what ecological factors helped shape that culture, and on and on, back to evolutionary factors thousands and even millions of years old. The result is one of the most dazzling tours de horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Wise, humane, often hilarious, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanising, and downright heroic in its own right. What a pleasure to welcome author of "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst" Robert M. Sapolsky

Your business's success depends on how you prepare for the future. While business leaders of the past looked in the rear-view mirror to predict the road ahead, we must look at the greater forces affecting the social, business and economic world today—megatrends. Our guest today is here to share a fresh, holistic way to think about tomorrow by preparing for it today: He calls it DRIVE. The DRIVE framework examines five interrelated megatrends: • Demographic and social changes • Resource scarcity • Inequalities • Volatility, complexity, and scale • Enterprising dynamics It is a great pleasure to welcome Mark Esposito, the author of "Understanding How the Future Unfolds: Using Drive to Harness the Power of Today's Megatrends". Some great news as ever, Mark has kindly offered a copy of the book for the innovation show community, just sign up to our newsletter on www.theinnovationshow.io

When facing a rhino that's about to charge, doing nothing is seldom the best option. Yet all too often that's exactly what happens. Danger rarely comes as a complete surprise; instead, it follows many missed opportunities for taking precautions, reading and responding to warning signals. The impulse to freeze is hard to overcome. Sometimes the grip of denial is so strong that we do nothing at all; or, even worse, as in many market booms leading to bust, we do more of what was dangerous in the first place. We welcome the author of "The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore", Michele Wucker. More about Michele:https://thegrayrhino.com

The Nocturnal Brain: Tales of Nightmares and Neuroscience with Guy Leschziner You can survive longer without food than without sleep. The fact that sleep is fundamental to life is unarguable, but in modern society, at least until recently, we have taken for granted that sleep simply happens, and is a necessary evil to allow us to live our waking lives. Recently, however, there has been a shift in how we view sleep. Rather than being a hindrance to our working and social lives, a biological process that keeps us from being productive, the concept of the importance of sleep is percolating through. Its role in the maintenance of our physical and mental health, our sporting prowess, our cognitive abilities, even in our happiness, is slowly being appreciated. And rightly so. People are taking sleep seriously The normal expectation of waking up feeling ready for the day ahead is rarely found among our guests patients. Their nights are tormented by a range of conditions, such as terrifying nocturnal hallucinations, sleep paralysis, acting out their dreams or debilitating insomnia. The array of activities in sleep reflects the spectrum of human behaviour in our waking lives. Sometimes these medical problems have a biological explanation, at other times a psychological one, and the focus of the clinical work that He and his colleagues do is to unravel the causes for their sleep disorders and attempt to find a treatment or cure. More about Guy here: https://guyleschziner.com/

The Digital Age will raise the question of how humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviourally, and emotionally in ways that technology can't. Our guest believes, this requires us to become Hyper-Learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change. To do that, we have to overcome our reflexive ways of being: seeking confirmation of what we believe, emotionally defending our beliefs and our ego, and seeking cohesiveness of our mental models. Hyper-Learning requires a new way of being… and a radical new way of working. We welcome a great friend of the innovation show, hyper learner and author of "Hyper-Learning: How to Adapt to the Speed of Change", Ed Hess. More about Ed: https://www.edhess.org/