Info

Five Good Questions Podcast

Welcome to Five Good Questions. I’m your host, Jake Taylor. Fact: the average American watches 5 hours of television per day. What would the world be like if we dedicated one of those hours to reading books instead? I don’t know, but I’d like to find out. So to inspire others to read more, I ask five good questions of interesting authors and share the results with you every Friday. Let’s see if together, we can’t rescue some of those lost hours. In addition to author interviews, we also publish "The Hikecast." The Hikecast is a show where interesting people take me on their favorite hikes or walks and we talk about big ideas in an unconstrained format.  No planned agendas, just deep conversations, recorded out in nature. The idea is for you to put on The Hikecast and get outside to simulate taking a hike with us.  I want you to feel like you're there with us out in nature.
RSS Feed
Five Good Questions Podcast
2021
May


2020
September
August
April
March


2019
December
November
October
September
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2018
October


2017
August
April
March
February
January


2016
December
November
April
March
February
January


2015
December
November
August


All Episodes
Archives
Now displaying: January, 2017
Jan 27, 2017

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is the founder of The Restful Company and a visiting scholar at Stanford.   He spent more than a decade as a science and technology forecaster, most recently as a senior consultant at Strategic Business Insights. Alex received a Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

http://amzn.to/2jmwHcM

Five Good Questions:  

1. What’s Wallas’s four-stage model of creativity?

2.What’s the Default Mode Network?

3. Our society idolizes the 80-100 hour work week as a requirement for success.  How do you explain the paradox of the most productive and creative people working much less than that?  Also, what is this notion of “deep play” that a lot of creative people practice?

4. What was a Bill Gates’s “Think Week” and what can we learn from it?

5. How has your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly schedule changed based on what you learned writing a book about rest?  How has it impacted how you think about work and creativity?

Jan 20, 2017

Marko Dimitrijevic is the founder and chairman of Volta Global, a private investment group in venture capital, private equity, real estate, and public markets.  Marko Dimitrijevic has more than 35 years investing experience and has founded and managed two investment management companies with over $3 billion in assets.  He is the author of Frontier Investor: How to Prosper in the Next Emerging Markets.  Marko is a pioneer in conducting on-the-ground due diligence, particularly in frontier markets.

http://amzn.to/2jNNx0N

1. Can you give us a feel for how bad the home country bias is, and why it exists?

2. Let’s talk about some execution details.  Aside from a passport, how do you research frontier markets?  Would an individual’s best bet be country specific ETFs?  What are your thoughts about hedging currency risk?

3. Which investment style pairs best with frontier market investing?  Deep value, GARP, activist something else?

4. What’s the story of the evolution of Singapore and how does it illustrate the success of frontier market investing?  Where’s the next Singapore?

5. Economic progress has typically followed the pattern of farming to manufacturing to service / knowledge economy.  Is it possible that the disruption of robots and AI which are already displacing human labor will make it impossible for frontier countries to gain a foothold on the ladder?

Jan 13, 2017

Samuel Arbesman is a complexity scientist and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado and a Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation. In addition to Overcomplicated, he is the author of The Half-Life of Facts.

http://amzn.to/2iU3Mst

Five Good Questions:  

  1. I view this book as a beautiful blend of technology and philosophy.  What is the difference between “complicated” and “complex” in your view?    

  2. What is “the kluge” and how is becoming an impactful part of our lives?     

  3. How is a top-down, physics-inspired approach to technology losing ground to a bottom-up, biology-inspired approach?

  4. What are some ways we can fight the increasing complication we see in technology?  What’s a T-shaped individual?

  5. Is it just part of human nature to seek band-aid solutions which add to the eventual complexity and frailty of our systems?
Jan 6, 2017

Martin Ford is a futurist and the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm. He has over 25 years experience in the fields of computer design and software development. He holds a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan and a graduate business degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Martin is an expert on the subject of accelerating progress in robotics and artificial intelligence—and what these advances mean for the economy, job market and society of the future.

http://amzn.to/2iU3q5j

  1. The decimation of the value of human labor due to technology has been proclaimed and proven wrong for time immemorial.  Humans have always found new ways to contribute and avoid obsolescence, transitioning from hunter gatherers to farmers to manufacturing workers to service providers.  Why is this time different?    
  2. Why are white collar jobs the most at risk?  Are there any industries that may be a last stand for human labor?
  3. What are the investment implications of a world where robots allow for most of the gains to flow through to capital owners and there’s nothing left for labor?  Are we heading toward a type of technofeudalism?
  4. I lean libertarian in my views, but you convincingly advocate for a basic guaranteed income, which sounds very socialist on the surface.  I was surprised to see Friedrich Hayek was also a strong proponent.  Can you explain your reasoning, especially in the context as a technological dividend for society?  
  5. In your view, does the singularity look more like the movie Wall-E where humans become feeble and are cared for by benevolent robots, or more like The Matrix where the robots eventually want to enslave us to protect themselves from humans pulling the plug?  Or maybe a third option?
1