Our must-listen podcasts from 2018

Cathy O’Neil on The Future, This Week

Mathematician and algorithmic activist, Dr Cathy O’Neil, joins Sandra and Kai on The Future, This Week to shine a light inside the black box thinking that hides the biases, flawed design and sometimes ill intent that can twist a program into a weapon of math destruction.

The trust shift

Rachel Botsman is a best-selling author, her TED Talk views are in the millions, she lectures at Oxford University on the sharing economy, and her new book “Who can you trust?” wants to change our perception of trust and understanding of how traditional ideas of banking, media, politics and consumerism are being radically transformed.

Rachel joins Sydney Business Insights to discuss whether we are on the cusp of one of the biggest social transformations in human history.

The power of followership

Melissa Carsten, a leadership researcher, studies what most of us are – followers. There can be no leaders without followers, so we ask her – what makes a good follower? By using real life examples from the Australian Defence Force, potentially one of the most extreme examples of the leader-follower relationship, we explore how understanding this concept can strengthen an organisation when implementing change, facing a crisis, executing strategy or creating innovation. A must listen episode.

Uber, money and monkeys with Keith Chen

Keith Chen has studied how monkeys and people including Uber drivers react to financial incentives. He has interrogated grammar rules and savings rates and identified that what language you speak inherently makes you a better saver – or not. If these seem like widely disparate intellectual domains it’s because Keith is a behavioural economist which kind of makes him a bit of a David Attenborough of the business world.

His work offers insights into: what makes some language groups natural savers; how much money will it take to nudge Uber drivers out to work on a cold dark night and even how far away from our jobs we are prepared to live. Keith investigates our most base emotions to find out what will humans do for how much money and why sometimes money does not matter at all.