Ilya Zaritskiy arrived in Los Angeles as a refugee from Ukraine. He was a child, in middle school, perhaps. There were tanks on the streets in LA – the 1992 Rodney King riots were happening. Neither he nor his family spoke any English. This podcast is the story of how one immigrant kid used the […]

Life of the Mind with Akshay Birla

27 | Ilya Zaritskiy built a PE firm from credit cards

Rohit Chopra is the co-host of the podcast India Explained and Associate Professor at Santa Clara University. We talk about journalism in India and it’s evolution from the days of Doordarshan to the cornucopia of (mostly bad) options available today. Through our conversation I was introduced or reintroduced to a number of people and bodies […]

25 | Rohit Chopra and the history of Indian media

Jim Tanner founded Just Good Advice with the goal of providing sound financial advice to ordinary people. In the story that takes him to Just Good Advice, we talk about his first fin-tech company from when the best way to transmit data was the fax machine; Morningstar, where Jim ran the sales team; and the […]

24 | Jim Tanner

Adam Greenberg shares his journey to become a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia via AmeriCorps and other random travel. For someone so young, he’s certainly lived in a lot of places by his own choosing; this conversation was great. We need to all think more about the impact of student debt on the labor market […]

23 | Adam Greenberg on the Peace Corps, Zambia, and Living

Dr Jon Peeples takes us behind the scenes into the world of psychiatry for a fascinating conversation around mental health, being a smarter consumer of psychiatric care, and public health. We talk about encounters in the ER and serving some of the poorest and most vulnerable populations. As he observes, Prozac is not going to […]

22 | Jon Peeples on Psychiatry, Public Health, and Writing

Brian Hart is the co-founder of Lighthouse DC, a non-profit that helps people transitioning from homelessness in turning empty spaces into homes that are welcoming and functional for their families. We talk about homelessness in the capital of the world’s richest country, how to talk about homelessness to people with a spectrum of views on […]

21 | Brian Hart Explains Homelessness in America

Tova Levin has worked closely with two of the most prominent economists of our generation – Steven Levitt and John List – serving as Levitt’s Chief of Staff for several years before joining Humana as a leader in their behavioral economics division. We nerd out about so much in economics – Gary Becker (read the […]

Episode 20 | Tova Levin on Experimental and Behavioral Economics

Katy Dickinson has been around the tech-block. Hired by Eric Schmidt at Sun Microsystems, she literally wrote the book on the software development lifecycle that Sun used for release of almost 10,000 releases. She is a technologist, entrepreneur, mentor, and writer. In our conversation Katy talks about her work as a technologist on creating processes: […]

Episode 19 | Katy Dickinson on Technology, Mentoring, and Religion

Phill Keene builds insides-sales organizations for companies that are selling to other companies (“B2B”). We jam about what it takes to build a successful inside sales organization, staying relevant in a world that’s changing quickly because of technology, podcasting (he co-hosts a very successful podcast, #RealSalesTalk), and what I’d think of as flourishing or living […]

Episode 18 | Phill Keene on Building Sales Teams

I stumbled upon Avi Patchava because of his recent post, “The 5 unexpected reasons why Indians make it as CEOs of global companies,” and I was surprised that it was so sincerely reasoned. Avi graciously agreed to jam with me  and we talked about his journey from London/McKinsey to InMobi, the tech scene in India […]

Episode 17 | Avi Patchava on India’s Future with Artificial Intelligence

Jodi Kovitz. I didn’t realize this at the time I invited Jodi to be a guest on this show, and I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have even tried to have her on the show if I did, but Jodi was named as one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada this year because of […]

Episode 16 | Jodi Kovitz – One of 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada

Kathryn Hume is a technologist and philosopher. She’s the VP of Product at integrate.ai, Venture Partner at ffVC, and writer at Quam Proxime. If you’re nerdy enough, she’ll talk about her PhD research on the 17th and 18th century version of “fake it till you make it” which she does here (score!). In this episode […]

Episode 15 | Kathryn Hume on AI, 17th Century French Philosophy, and Intellectual Curiosity

This week I jam with Srishti Handa on her journey as a solopreneur woman in India, and talking about her experience in starting, and then closing, The Temperamental Chef, a frozen food business in India. If you’re not familiar with India, you might find this surprising, although it did make me wonder on how frequently […]

Episode 14 | Srishti Handa, on being a solopreneur woman in India

This week’s guest, Jim Dickie, has had a front-row seat in the changing sales landscape, and after years of skepticism he’s convinced that a world of AI-enabled sales is here. We jammed on sales, technology, the future, and privacy in age of an advertising-driven anti-privacy arms race. The sales process is there for one thing […]

Episode 13 | Jim Dickie forecasts a revolution in B2B sales

My guest this week is Kurt Metzger, the Director of Sales Operations at Walgreens. We talk about what sales operations is, how this function supports the sales team, what sort of business problems sales operations professionals (sales operators?) help solve, and how to recruit and retain for this role. I was also surprised to learn […]

Episode 12 | Kurt Metzger explains sales operations

Life of the Mind with Akshay Birla is for the intellectually curious who are looking beyond their own professional field to engage with and learn from others who are thinking deeply, reflecting sincerely, and engaging deliberately. Guests span careers in the military, public service, business, finance, academia, and politics.

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Life of the Mind with Akshay Birla

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