Meikles & Dimes is a podcast dedicated to the simple, practical, and underappreciated. Monologue episodes cover science-based topics in decision-making, health, communication, negotiation, and performance psychology. Interview episodes, called Layer 2 episodes, include guests from business, academia, health care, journalism, engineering, and athletics.
Episodes
Monday May 27, 2024
Monday May 27, 2024
Joseph Grenny is the coauthor of four New York Times bestsellers, including Crucial Conversations, Crucial Accountability, Change Anything, and Crucial Influence. His work has been translated into 28 languages, is available in 36 countries, and has generated results for more than half of the Forbes Global 2000.
Joseph is also a globally sought after keynote speaker, and has shared the stage with Jack Welch, Brené Brown, Jim Collins, and General Colin Powell among others.
In addition to his writing and speaking, Joseph serves as chairman of the board for the Other Side Academy, a peer-run residential school for people with long histories of crime, homelessness, and addiction.
In this episode we discuss the following:
- At the heart of most disappointment in organizations are conversations that people are either not holding or not holding well, in part because many of us think that there are just some conversations that we can’t have.
- But Joseph’s work shows that you can talk with almost anyone about almost anything as long as you create enough safety. If people feel safe, and that you’re motives are appropriate, then they’ll let you say almost anything you need.
- Joseph witnessed this firsthand when he intervened during a fight at the airport. By showing the aggressor that he understood and cared for him, Joseph was then able to deliver the truth that the man’s behavior was unacceptable. In seconds the man moved from aggression to apology.
Follow Joseph:
X: https://twitter.com/josephgrenny
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-grenny-a89081b/
Follow Me:
X: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/
Monday May 20, 2024
Monday May 20, 2024
Nathan Tanner is an executive coach who helps CEOs, founders, and leaders scale themselves and their companies. He has coached leaders at Silicon Valley startups and bellwether companies including DoorDash, Google, Autodesk, Electronic Arts, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, and Lyft.
Prior to becoming a full-time coach, Nathan was the VP of People at Neighbor, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup disrupting the storage industry. Prior to Neighbor, Nathan spent half a decade at DoorDash where he was hired as the head of HR and scaled the company from 250 to 5,000+ employees. There he built the company’s first leadership development program and coached more than half of the executive team. Prior to DoorDash, Nathan held several roles on the HR team at LinkedIn. He started his career on Wall Street at Lehman Brothers where he had a front-row seat to the largest bankruptcy in history.
Nathan is also the author of two books, Not Your Parents' Workplace, and his new book, The Unconquerable Leader. Nathan has been an advisor at Y Combinator and writes for Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, and other publications. He's an IRONMAN triathlete, holds an MBA from BYU, and was trained as an executive coach at the Co-Active Training Institute.
In this episode we discuss the following:
- When Lehman went bankrupt and Nathan struggled to get back into investment banking, he told himself the story that he wasn’t smart enough or talented enough. But then he realized that this story wasn’t serving him. He changed the story from, “I can’t do this” to “I haven’t done it yet, but I can figure it out.”
- Rather than tell ourselves the limiting story of, “That’s just who I am” we can aim to become the best version of ourselves.
- Identify the self-limiting stories we tell ourselves and reframe them into stories that serve us.
Follow Nathan:
X: https://twitter.com/nhtanner
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathantanner/
Follow Me:
X: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/
Monday May 13, 2024
Monday May 13, 2024
Taya Cohen is a Professor Organizational Behavior and Business Ethics at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on honesty, moral character, negotiation, and conflict management. Taya is frequently featured in prominent media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, BBC, NPR, and TIME magazine.
In 2020, Taya was recognized as one of the Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors by Poets & Quants, and she is a Past-President of the International Association for Conflict Management.
Taya earned a B.A. in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon, Taya spent two years as a postdoc at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.
In this episode, we discuss the following:
- When we do something wrong, we can feel guilt for the bad behavior, or we can feel shame for being a bad person. If we feel guilt, we can apologize and try to be better in the future, which can give us hope. But feeling shame, feeling like we’re fundamentally flawed, can make us feel less optimistic about the future and can be much harder to deal with.
- When we provide feedback to others, it’s generally more effective to focus on people’s behaviors as opposed to more generalized statements about who they are as a person.
- Guilt tends to be a much more healthy, positive emotion than shame.
Follow Taya:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taya-cohen-478381104/
Follow Me:
X: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/
Monday May 06, 2024
Monday May 06, 2024
Bryan Porter is a Portfolio Manager at the hedge fund MIG Capital, and he’s been a hedge fund analyst since 2013. Earlier in his career, Bryan spent three years at The Carlyle Group in the $14B US Buyout fund, and was an Investment Banking analyst at Goldman Sachs.
Bryan earned his B.S. in Accounting from the University of Southern California and his M.B.A. from Stanford Business School.
But before all of that, Bryan was working at McDonald’s and sleeping on couches, in closets, and in cars.
Bryan’s incredible story borders on unbelievable.
In his words, if you ran the experiment of his life 1,000 times, you’re going to get 999 gutter balls.
But in this in-depth interview, Bryan shares his playbook for how achieved a most improbable comeback.
In this episode we discuss the following:
- In high school Bryan was sleeping on friends’ couches. He took a job at McDonald’s. He graduated high school near the bottom decile. He slept in closets and in cars.
- When a close friend committed suicide and Bryan got kicked out of his house, he made a change.
- “If you realize you’re heading in the wrong direction, even if you’re 95% of the way there, you turn around.”
- Bryan took control of his health. He served a church mission. He earned a 4.0. And eventually he made his way to Goldman, Carlyle, Stanford, and the hedge fund world.
- And along the way, Bryan learned crucial lessons:
- Study to learn, not to pass tests.
- Make game day easier than practice.
- Persistence is one of life’s biggest differentiators. People are not patient and want results now.
- An orchid requires just the right amount of water and sunlight. But a weed can grow in bad dirt, with little water and sunlight, and can punch through concrete. Do you want to be an orchid or a weed?
- You can’t outrun your diet. A Big Mac meal is 1300 calories. And an hour at the gym burns just 300 calories.
- Find your limiter and train it until it’s no longer a constraint. Then find your next limiter and repeat.
- And maybe the most important takeaway of all was Bryan’s playbook:
- Set some ridiculous goal that's far out in the future. And then embody that reality with perfect clarity and become it. Smell it, taste it, live it, and your brain won’t know the difference. And then just persist. People overestimate what they can do in a six-month time frame, but underestimate what they can do in a six-year time frame, if they persist.
Follow Bryan:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryandporter/
Follow Me:
X: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/
Monday Apr 29, 2024
Monday Apr 29, 2024
Cory Sanford is the Vice President of Culture and Talent at Guidant Financial, where he led the transition of the entire organization to remote work. He has also helped two different companies win #1 best place to work honors.
Cory is both a graduate of and an instructor in Cornell University’s Executive Master’s in Human Resource Management program. His book HR You Kidding Me? Surprisingly Simple Steps to Unlock the Power of People is a #1 best seller on Amazon.
In this episode we discuss the following:
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It’s impossible to dive deep while wearing a life jacket. The things that helped us in the past can be the same things that hold us back today.
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Cory has found power in the words, “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure, let’s look together” or “What do you think?” By being okay with not having all the answers, Cory has accelerated his own learning.
Follow Cory:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-sanford/
Website: https://www.guidantfinancial.com/about-us/leadership-team/
Follow Me:
X: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/
Sunday Apr 28, 2024
Sunday Apr 28, 2024
In this episode Tozer and I talk with Jake Garn, an international law attorney at Garn & Graber, who is Nate Garn's younger brother. We discuss how Jake became Tozer’s first friend and co-tenant, and how Jake set the stage for all of the youth who came after him.
Follow Me:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/
Sunday Apr 28, 2024
Sunday Apr 28, 2024
In this episode we continue our discussion with Nate Garn. We discuss how Tozer helped Nate’s friend from Guatemala (Luis) come to the United States and how Tozer picked out Nate’s future wife.
Follow Me:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/
Sunday Apr 28, 2024
Sunday Apr 28, 2024
In this episode we bring in Nate Garn, the current president of Sizzling Platter, which owns and operates more than 650 restaurants, and we learn how Tozer supported Nate in both high school and college.
Follow Me:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/
Monday Apr 22, 2024
Monday Apr 22, 2024
Ann Tenbrunsel is a business ethics professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her research examines why employees, leaders and students behave unethically, despite their best intentions to behave ethically. Ann is the author, co-author, or co-editor of six books on this topic—including Blind Spots (with Max Bazerman), Behavioral Ethics (with David De Cremer), Codes of Conduct and (with David Messick)—and she has also published 50 research articles and chapters.
Her research has been covered in the New York Times, NBC, ABC, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, US News and World Report, the Associated Press, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Huffington Post, Washington Post, NPR, and in blogs for Psychology Today and Freakonomics.
Ann was also my advisor when I was a postdoc at Notre Dame, and she is, in a word, awesome.
In this episode we discuss the following:
- No one is immune from behaving unethically. And sadly, over and again we tend to overrate our own ethics.
- When facing an ethical dilemma, we predict we’ll behave ethically, and after making our decision we recollect that we’ve behaved ethically. But at the time of decision, we all too often feel unexpected pressure, make some excuse, adopt some rationalization, and behave unethically.
- We’re in a constant battle with our want self and our should self. And all too often we give into our wants, rather than standing by our shoulds.
- To improve our ethics, we need good sleep, continued education, and practice. Just as we wouldn’t expect to perform well in a meeting without preparing, we shouldn’t expect to perform well in an ethical dilemma if we haven’t prepared.
- Study ethics. Take a class, read Ann’s book, learn about the ways that power, pressure, and circumstances can lead us to unethical behavior. And then check your ethics with other people, conduct a pre-mortem, and let your “should-self” win.
Follow Ann:
Ann's Book Blind Spots: https://amzn.to/4cVxgSH
Website: https://mendoza.nd.edu/mendoza-directory/profile/ann-tenbrunsel/
Follow Me:
X: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/
Monday Apr 15, 2024
Monday Apr 15, 2024
Gretchen Rubin is one of today’s most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature. She’s the author of many bestselling books, such as The Happiness Project, Better Than Before, and The Four Tendencies, which have sold millions of copies in more than thirty languages. Her most recent book is Life in Five Senses.
She’s also host of the popular podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and founder of the award-winning Happier app, which helps people track their happiness-boosting habits.
Gretchen has been interviewed by Oprah, eaten dinner with Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, walked arm-in-arm with the Dalai Lama, had her work reported on in a medical journal, been written up in the New Yorker, and been an answer on Jeopardy! After starting her career in law, she realized she wanted to be a writer while she was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Raised in Kansas City, she lives in New York City with her family.
In this episode we discuss the following:
- There is no magic. one-size-fits-all solution for happiness
- No one can tell you the best way or the right way to be happy, just as there is no one best way to cook an egg.
- One thing that was really hard for Gretchen to learn was what she enjoys versus what other people enjoy.
- Samuel Johnson: "Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance is difficult."
- Yogi Berra: "If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him."
Follow Gretchen:
X: https://twitter.com/gretchenrubin
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gretchenrubin/
Website: https://gretchenrubin.com/
Follow Me:
X: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/