The Dumbest Guy in the Room

Apr 25 2024 24 ep. 48 mins 1
The Dumbest Guy in the Room Podcast artwork

The Podcast Where Data Meets Life

  Business
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Girl Power – Making Winning Bets on America's Most Influential Consumer

Apr 25 2024 53 mins  
Young women are changing entire categories of retail. Take cosmetics, for example. Gen Z women have decided that beauty is a gesture of self-care, and they’re willing to spend their money on it despite economic headwinds. The smartest person in the room today is Kory Marchisotto, the trailblazing CMO of e.l.f. Beauty — the fastest-growing company on the NYSE for the past five y

Too Big to Succeed: How to Make Government Work | Diego Piacentini

Apr 27 2023 53 mins  
Innovation gets harder the older, larger, and more complex an organization becomes. Government agencies that have been around and expanding for hundreds of years are nearly impossible to evolve. And it doesn’t help that modernizing government services seldom grabs big headlines, leading politicians to focus on the biggest problems — even though it could take years before the so

Welcome to the Wellness Era | Dave Kimbell, CEO of Ulta Beauty

Mar 16 2023 45 mins  
It's no surprise that CivicScience data show that Americans' levels of stress are still running high after the coronavirus pandemic. So, people are taking matters into their own hands. Acts of self-care, "revenge travel," and splurging of all kinds are hallmarks of U.S. consumerism right now. Nowhere has this trend been more evident than in the beauty and cosmetics industry. Throug

Minding What Matters | Chris Cuomo of NewsNation

Mar 08 2023 55 mins  
How are we supposed to know what really matters anymore? That used to be what the news was for. Reporters would uncover the things we couldn't see, work diligently to surface the truth, and deliver it to us in a newspaper we read cover to cover. But all that changed with the 24-hour news cycle, the internet, and the competition and fragmentation they created. We used to only read o

Politics and Tech: Why Can't We All Just Get Along | Congressman Mike Doyle

Sep 22 2022 52 mins  
Our elected leaders used to set the tone of political discourse. Today, politicians take cues from their tribe, gleaning their talking points from whatever's trending on social media that day. And because legislation can't be written in 140 characters, there's a huge disconnect between the soundbites that voters want to hear and the substantive policies the country actually needs.

Leading from the Bottom: How Systems Thinking Can Revitalize Everything From the Ground Up | Jeff Wilke, co-founder and chairman of Re:Build

Sep 14 2022 47 mins  
This week on The Dumbest Guy in the Room, host John Dick welcomes Jeff Wilke, who played a major role in building Amazon into the company it is today. After his retirement from Amazon in 2021, Wilke co-founded a company called Re:Build to help revitalize American manufacturing. John and Jeff talk about how short-term, quarterly earnings-driven corporate decision-making in America h

Did COVID Save Retail? The Painful But Essential Lessons of the Pandemic | Shelley Bransten of Microsoft

Sep 08 2022 52 mins  
It's no secret that the pandemic changed everything that businesses knew about their customers overnight. But old habits – and big systems – are hard to break, especially in big corporations where innovation is expensive and "risk" is a swear word. On this week's episode of The Dumbest Guy in the Room, host John Dick welcomes Shelley Bransten, Microsoft's corporate vice preside

Remaking Media: How to Build Trust in an Ever-changing Landscape | John Battelle, co-founder of Wired and The Recount

Aug 31 2022 58 mins  
Like many things in our country, media is broken – badly. It's hard to know where to start to fix it. Media outlets who once prided themselves on rigor and objectivity are now forced to pander to the biases of their tribal audiences, lest they lose viewers and advertisers to the countless other things vying for our attention. Algorithms help to promote the most sensational and di

Bringing Economics to the Masses: Finding Hope in Today's Economic Uncertainty | Michelle Meyer of Mastercard

Aug 24 2022 46 mins  
The U.S. economy is absolutely massive. It’s also extremely complex, and that makes it difficult from the political perspective. You can’t thoroughly explain globalization and supply chains in a meme. We need to make economics more approachable and more relatable for the average person, and stop talking about the US economy like it’s one big monolith. In this episode of The D

Failing on Purpose: Changing the Way We Think About the World's Biggest Problems | Astro Teller, CEO of X

Aug 17 2022 52 mins  
It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the crises in America today. There’s inflation, energy costs, drug prices, mental health, supply chains, inequality, and so much more. Even COVID is raging again. Meanwhile, we’ve just kind of accepted the political animosity. Then there are the existential catastrophes on the horizon: climate change, food shortages, geopolitical cri