Smart People Podcast

Almost everyone in America felt the effect of the latest financial crisis. From foreclosures to lay offs, many of us have tried to come up with a solution to our financial woes. The government tried to do it's part with a bailout, but the majority of Americans didn't think this was the right solution.  As we look to our government for help, Dr. Woods offers  a different opinion in his book, Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse. He believes we are on the verge of a financial collapse unless we completely change our understanding of government. Dr. Woods is a New York Times-bestselling author. He graduated from Harvard and has a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University.

What is the one thing you dread when going on an interview? If you've prepared for the interview and updated your resume, you are probably pretty confident that the interview is going to go well.... up until the salary negotiation that is. How many people have been taught how to negotiate salary? I know that we here, at Smart People Podcast have not been. You're in luck because that is exactly what Jim Hopkinson's new book, Salary Tutor: Learn The Salary Negotiation Secrets No One Ever Taught You (also available in paperback for pre-order) is about. Head on over to Amazon and check it out! Jim Hopkinson lives in New York City and is a Marketing Director overseeing the online marketing and social media strategy for Wired.com. He hosts a popular marketing blog and podcast called The Hopkinson Report, which mixes entertaining coverage of new media marketing trends, interviews with entrepreneurs, and analysis of companies driving the growth of the digital age. His energetic and passionate approach has been called “audible caffeine.” Jim is also a contributing writer to Wired.com’s “Epicenter” business blog, and teaches a class on social media strategy at New York University. He enjoys serving as a mentor for young business professionals, and was named one of min’s “Top 21 Social Media Superstars” in 2009.    

Please donate and help those in Japan! Thanks! Red Cross - Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami Relief Here in the Western Hemisphere, we tend to believe that we have all of the answers.  We make ourselves feel that with our large brains, our frontal lobes and our fancy laboratories we can solve any sickness, illness or problem with a little white (or sometimes perhaps yellow) pill.  However, the rest of the world realizes that humans have been treating most of these problems for thousands of years with a combination of medicines, therapies, etc.  Although I am a firm believer that Western medicine has played a major role in increasing life expectancy and decreasing sickness, I do think that a combination of numerous approaches is always going to be the best.  For this reason, we here at Smart People Podcast are always keeping our calendar open to speak with educated professionals in various medical fields.  This week's guest is Dr. Anodea Judith - one of the country’s foremost experts on the combination of chakras and therapeutic issues and on the interpretation of the Chakra System for the Western lifestyle.  She is the founder and director of Sacred Centers, and holds Masters and Doctoral degrees in Psychology and Human Health, is a 500 hour registered yoga teacher, with lifelong studies of healing, history, sociology, and systems theory. Expand your knowledge and culture yourself a little with this week's episode! Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System As a Path to the Self

Fact: Your body is comprised of matter from old stars. Fact: The universe is expanding. Fact: This week's guest, Dr. Lawrence Krauss, is smart. Dr. Krauss is an American Theoretical Physicist who is Professor of Physics, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Director of the Origins Project at the Arizona State University.  He is the only physicist ever to have been awarded the highest awards of all three major US Physics Societies: the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Institute of Physics. Dr. Krauss' research covers numerous topics in the field of physics including the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, where his studies include the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity and neutrino astrophysics. Now, I know a lot of this may just sound like mumbo-jumbo, but Dr. Krauss is able to break a lot of his research down so that the average podcast hosts can understand it.  We even had a chance to ask him if he believes in aliens, but you'll have to listen to the episode to see what he thinks! He also has numerous extremely interesting lectures available on iTunes (our favorite, and his most popular, is shown below). He is the author of several bestselling books, his most recent books is titled Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science.  You can click on the picture to the left to take a look at the book on Amazon.

First, we at Smart People Podcast wanted to say welcome!  Many of you may be listening to us for the first time due to this week's fantastic guest.  If you want to expand your mind and hear all of our incredible interviews in the future, you can subscribe to us on iTunes here. Thanks for checking us out - feel free to contact us via the tab at the top of the page with any questions, comments or suggestions! This weeks guest sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 MILLION when he was just 24 years old.  After dabbling in poker, day trading and venture capitalism he eventually went to work for a little known start up called Zappos.  This week's guest is Tony Hsieh - CEO of online shoe and clothing shop Zappos.com. In 1995, Hsieh (pronounced Shay) graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Computer Science. After college, Tony worked for Oracle but quit within 5 months to found a company called Link Exchange.  After just over a year creating Link Exchange Tony sold the company to Microsoft for $265 million.  Soon after, in 1999, Nick Swinmurn approached Tony with the idea of selling shoes online. Tony was initially skeptical, and almost deleted Swinmurn’s initial voice mail. After Swinmurn mentioned that "footwear in the US is a 40 billion dollar market and 5% of that was already being sold by paper mail order catalogs," Tony decided to invest. Two months later, Tony joined Zappos as the CEO and within 10 years, Tony helped increase sales from virtually nothing to over $1bb annually while at the same time making Zappos one of Fortune Magazines best places to work for.  On July 22, 2009 Amazon.com announced the acquisition of Zappos.com in a deal valued at approximately $1.2 billion. Zappos differentiates themselves by being incredibly dedicated to delivering the best possible customer service.  Their incredible corporate culture and kindness was evident in every and all conversations we here at Smart People Podcast had with the company.  We can promise they at least have 2 more customers for life! Tony's book is Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.

"Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second-order one at best. Unlike many of life's other delights - chocolate, surfing, kissing - it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts.  And yet, the thrill of being right is undeniable, universal, and (perhaps most oddly) almost entirely undiscriminating.  We can't enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything." -Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error Admit it, you HATE being wrong.  You will go out of your way to try to prove that you are right, even when you know you aren't! But why is that? Why do humans take such pride in being right and feel so defeated when proven wrong? You often hear that there is much to be learned from our mistakes, but I know personally, often times I am too stubborn to care to learn from my mistakes. I would rather emphatically insist that I, in some way, am correct.  So when I stumbled across this weeks guest, I wanted her to explain to me the art of being wrong.  This week we interview Kathryn Schulz, the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.   Kathryn Schulz is a journalist, author, and public speaker with a credible (if not necessarily enviable) claim to being the world's leading wrongologist.  Her freelance writing has appeared in theNew York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, the Boston Globe, the "Freakonomics" blog of The New York Times, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications.  She was a 2004 recipient of the Pew Fellowship in International Journalism (now the International Reporting Project), and has reported from throughout Central and South America, Japan, and, most recently, the Middle East.   A graduate of Brown University and a former Ohioan, Oregonian, and Brooklynite, she currently lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

When Wall Street veteran Gordon Murray told his good friend and financial advisor, Dan Goldie, that he had only six months to live, Dan responded, "Do you want to write that book you've always wanted to do?" The result is an incredible book titled, The Investment Answer.  This week we interview the co-author of this book and founder of his own Financial Services Company, Dan Goldie.  In this episode Dan shares some of his financial wisdom so that the rest of us won't be so lost. Dan discusses his take on where to put your money, investing in international markets and if you should invest in gold or other precious metals. For nearly two decades, Dan has devoted his professional career to helping individual investors and their families realize their investment and financial goals.  A former NCAA singles champion, Dan began his investment career as an independent financial advisor in 1991 after retiring from the men's professional tennis tour, where he was ranked as high as 27th in the world.  Today, Dan is one of the leading independent advisors in the wealth management industry. He has been recognized by the San Francisco Business Times as one of the top 25 Bay Area independent advisors, and by Barron’s Magazine as one of the top 100 independent financial advisors in the United States. Dan holds an A.B. in economics from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the Walter A. Haas School of Business, at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the CFA Institute and the CFA Society of San Francisco and has earned the Chartered Financial Analyst designation, and is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ certificant. For more information on Dan's book: http://www.theinvestmentanswerbook.com/ For more information about Dan's services: http://www.dangoldie.com/index.html A Banker's Final Financial Advice My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-155b67db508663fee6e78866c8553da9}

Our lives are full of stress and anxiety... but have you ever taken the time to talk to someone about it? This week's guest, Rita Schulte, is a licensed professional board certified counselor, who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders, anxiety disorders, and bereavement. We take the time to discuss a matter that is close to both hosts of the show... anxiety and panic attacks. Both Jon and Chris suffered from panic attacks shortly after graduating college. In this episode, we ask the questions of why it happens, what is really going on, and what you can do to help move past the attacks. Rita is also in the publishing stage of her book, Sifted As Wheat: Finding Hope and Healing through the Losses of Life, which focuses on the losses of life and how they affect us. You can get more information on Rita's book at her site: http://www.siftedaswheat.com/.

Have you ever said to yourself, "Ya know, one day I'm gonna write a book"?  Most people have but they haven't the slightest clue on how to correctly form INTERESTING sentences.  Sure, you can put words together in a straight line, but if you really want to learn about the art of writing then you will love what this week's guest has to say.  Meet Stanley Fish.  Professor Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, as well as Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of 12 books. Professor Fish has also taught at the Cardozo School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Duke University.  He received his bachelors from UPenn and his PhD from Yale. Fish has also written extensively on the politics of the university, having taken positions supporting campus speech codes and criticizing political statements by universities or faculty bodies on matters outside their professional areas of expertise. You can find Stanley's book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, at Amazon and other book stores. As mentioned in the interview: The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion & The Pilgrim's Progress

Is man inherently good or is that just something comforting we like to tell ourselves? This week's guest is Dr. Anthony Daniels and he spent the majority of his professional career working as a prison doctor and psychiatrist. Due to his fascination with evil, Dr. Daniels (who's pen name is Theodore Dalrymple) sought out those who did evil so that he may better understand it.  His studies have brought him all over the world, from the slums of Eastern London to the huts of Sub-Saharan Africa.  His first hand experience with crime and murder have led him to some very interesting conclusions.  He goes in great depth on the subject in his most famous book Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, published in 2005.  Additionally, Dr. Daniels' work frequently appears in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, Salisbury Review, etc. and he has authored a number of books.  Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow.   Updated - Thanks to the listener Clint, for the website http://www.skepticaldoctor.com/

In the last episode of Smart People Podcast, Aubrey de Grey explained how he believes that if you can manage to keep on chuggin' for the next 30 years or so, there is a good chance you will live well past a few hundred years due to scientific advancements.  In this weeks episode, Dr. Joel Fuhrman explains how the "Nutritarian" diet can help you stay healthy so that you can make it at least those necessary 30 years.  Dr. Fuhrman specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. He has been practicing for more than 20 years and established the Center for Nutritional Medicine located in Flemington, New Jersey. His signature book Eat To Live: The Revolutionary Plan for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, first published by Little, Brown & Company in 2003 spawned multiple foreign editions and over 20 reprintings. Dr. Fuhrman has appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, Today, Good Morning America, the Discovery Channel, TV Food Network, CNBC and many more. You can find Dr. Fuhrman's website at http://www.drfuhrman.com/. You can also find Dr. Fuhrman's book, "Eat to Live" on Amazon.

Eat To Live, by Dr. Joel Fuhrman In the last episode of Smart People Podcast, Aubrey de Grey explained how he believes that if you can manage to keep on chuggin’ for the next 30 years or so, there is a good chance you will live well past a few hundred years due to scientific advancements.  In this weeks episode, Dr. Joel Fuhrman explains how the “Nutritarian” diet can help you stay healthy so that you can make it at least those necessary 30 years.  Dr. Fuhrman specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. He has been practicing for more than 20 years and established the Center for Nutritional Medicine located in Flemington, New Jersey. His signature book Eat To Live: The Revolutionary Plan for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, first published by Little, Brown & Company in 2003 spawned multiple foreign editions and over 20 reprintings. Dr. Fuhrman has appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, Today, Good Morning America, the Discovery Channel, TV Food Network, CNBC and many more. You can find Dr. Fuhrman’s website at http://www.drfuhrman.com/. You can also find Dr. Fuhrman’s book, “Eat to Live” on Amazon. The post Episode 8 – Dr. Joel Fuhrman appeared first on Smart People Podcast.

Can you imagine living a healthy life to the ripe old age of 1,000? How about a world without cancer, Alzheimer’s or diabetes? Our guest on this episode of the podcast believes we are only 25 years from making this dream a reality. This man is Aubrey de Grey, an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology, and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation (http://www.sens.org/). In 1999, Aubrey completed a book titled, The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging which prompted the University of Cambridge to award Aubrey a PhD. His most recent book titled, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime gives a much more in depth look at the subjects we cover in this weeks interview.  Enjoy!

Jamie Flam is a funny person from LA. You can find Jamie's work all across the internet. He is a host on The Long Shot Podcast and has written/starred in many internet comedy videos. He is also the creator of the Immaculata, which you can read up on at http://immaculatize.com/. You can find out more about Jamie and his comedy on his website, JamieFlam.com. If you're ever in the LA area and have a chance to check out any of his shows or The Long Shot Podcast, I highly recommend doing it!

He has been called a living miracle worker. He has been featured on Oprah, Fox, The Today Show and NBC’s “most memorable people”.  He gives people their lives back….one body part at a time.  Meet Mr. Bob Barron.  A 24 year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. Barron’s disguises have been used by American spies around the world.   However, Mr. Barron claims his greatest accomplishment has nothing to do with the CIA, but rather the many lives he has changed since then.  He created the company Custom Prosthetic Designs, Inc. where he uses his background in disguises to create unbelievably realistic prosthetic pieces for people who have physical disfigurements. Custom Prosthetic Designs, Inc