LISTEN TO THIS | Liar, Liar

I’m a pod­cast junkie, and LISTEN TO THIS is a recap of my favorite tid­bits, sound­bites and short bursts of bril­liance that I have to share with every­one who will lis­ten. After digest­ing hours and hours of pod­casts, here’s the best 9 min­utes from this week.

PEOPLE SAY I’M GAGA OVER MERLIN

MAC POWER USERS | Work­flows with Mer­lin Mann III

This episode is the third annual work­flows inter­view with Mer­lin. The work­flow episodes pro­vide help­ful exam­ples of top pro­duc­ers and how they achieve and accom­plish so much. I find myself ask­ing a lot of peo­ple about their work­flows and some­times have to explain what I mean. Mer­lin does of nice of job of sim­ply defin­ing this silly word:

“Work­flow is under­stand­ing your job, under­stand­ing your tools, and then not think­ing about it any more.”

I picked up sev­eral tips for bet­ter uti­liz­ing my tools (for exam­ple, using loca­tion as a con­text in Omni­Fo­cus), and I think the 2-hour inter­view is worth every minute, but if you only have time for a quick snip­pet, skip to 1:32:01 and catch his com­ments on leav­ing a lit­tle of bit of capac­ity in your box.

LIAR, LIAR FIRST TIME CALLER

DAN PINK OFFICE HOURS | Dan Ariely

Dan Pink’s Office Hours is a new pod­cast for me. It’s an inter­view style pod­cast with big time authors and speak­ers. He broad­casts the show live old-school style, in that, to lis­ten live, you dial in to a con­fer­ence call where you have the oppor­tu­nity to ask ques­tions radio-talk-show like. It’s monthly mak­ing it an easy add to my sub­scrip­tions, and I’m eager to go back and lis­ten to a few older ones.

This week, Dan’s guest was Dan Ariely, author of The Hon­est Truth About Dis­hon­estly. He’s con­ducted some fas­ci­nat­ing research about when, how, and why we lie and cheat. The sec­tion to catch comes at 32:54 when Ariely explains three rea­sons for moral dete­ri­o­ra­tion: increased dis­tance from money, greater aware­ness of how much other peo­ple are cheat­ing, and more instances of feel­ing cheated.

BONUS: Check out Dan Ariely’s Con­science+ app. It takes the angel/devil approach to help­ing you jus­tify many decisions.

KIDS WILL TAKE A CHANCE

TED RADIO HOUR | How do Schools Suf­fo­cate Creativity?

Sir Ken Robin­son is a delight to lis­ten to speak. He’s witty, charm­ing, and a fan­tas­tic sto­ry­teller. We home­school our chil­dren, and I’ve recently been push­ing my youngest two to focus on punc­tu­a­tion. I’ve been meet­ing a lit­tle resis­tance, and at 5:48, when Robin­son talks about whether lit­er­acy or cre­ativ­ity should come first, it was the per­fect reminder that I need to ease up and let them keep writ­ing away punctuation-free for now. Lis­ten all the way through to his story about the lit­tle girl draw­ing God. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from his pre­sen­ta­tion that I used as a quo­to­graph on ObservationPaper.com.

Pod­cast Test Drives:

• When I was try­ing to sub­scribe to Dan Pink’s Office Hours, I down­loaded Office Hours pro­duced by The Soci­ety Pages instead. Back in the 80s, we hosted a con­fer­ence with the theme of “Let the Dream­ers Wake the Nation” which is a line from the Carly Simon song Let the River Run that was fea­tured in the movie Work­ing Girl. Our keynote speaker tried to prep for the con­fer­ence and thought watch­ing the movie might give him some insight. He acci­den­tally grabbed a dif­fer­ent movie with a sim­i­lar title — Work­ing Girls. This Office Hours is also an inter­view show and has me curi­ous enough that I plan to keep it around for a few more weeks.
• I also test drove the app Down­cast this week based on the rec­om­men­da­tion from Tom Silk. You can increase the lis­ten­ing speed on Down­cast to 3x (a lit­tle too fast for my taste). I’ve only lis­tened to two shows on it so far, and I’ll con­tinue to play with it this week. One big down­side, no book­mark­ing fea­ture which I use a lot for LISTEN TO THIS.

Unsub­scrib­ing from:

Sci­ence Fri­day. I enjoy the show, but I can’t give it two hours a week (even at dou­ble time). I’ll add the blog to my RSS feed and down­load any episodes that par­tic­u­larly catch my interest.

Other pod­cast posts you might enjoy:

• Work­flow of a PODCAST JUNKIE
• LISTEN TO THIS | Focus Groups

What about you? What pod­casts did you enjoy this week and what do you rec­om­mend? Leave your favorites in the com­ments below.