Business thinking for a changing connected world.
Thinking With Mitch Joel sits at the intersection of business strategy, technology, culture, and human behavior. Its conversations favor big questions: what AI changes, how brands earn meaning, why stories persuade, and where leaders find better judgment.
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Thinking With Mitch Joel is a long-running conversation show for people who think about business as a living system. Strategy is the entry point. The larger subject is change: how markets shift, how technology alters incentives, how leaders make choices, and how people explain the world to themselves. Recent episodes spend serious time with artificial intelligence, but not as gadget talk. AI appears as a force reshaping marketing analytics, brand decisions, knowledge work, organizational culture, and the distribution of advantage. The show also reaches backward to infrastructure, with conversations about broadband, cable modems, and the hidden engineering that made modern digital life possible. It is not only about machines. Episodes with Nir Eyal and Will Storr turn toward belief, motivation, identity, and the persuasive structure of story. Joseph Pine’s conversation pushes the question of value past products and experiences toward what customers hope to become. Bob Glazer’s episode treats values as decision tools rather than slogans. David Armano’s appearance frames AI as both a force multiplier and a possible source of new inequality. Cory Doctorow brings a sharper edge, connecting platform decay to monopoly, policy, power, and digital rights. The result is business audio with a wide aperture. It can move from brand strategy to public policy, from personal agency to institutional failure, without pretending those topics are separate. The pacing is conversational but packed. Listeners get book-driven ideas and pointed questions about what comes next. The show works especially well for founders, marketers, consultants, executives, product leaders, and intellectually restless operators who want more than trend-chasing. Its strongest episodes ask what people and organizations are becoming under pressure.
Made for: For founders, marketers, executives, consultants, product leaders, and curious operators who want serious conversations about technology, culture, strategy, and behavior. It also suits listeners who follow business books and big ideas closely.
What sets it apart: The show connects marketing, AI, storytelling, leadership, infrastructure, values, and platform power without treating them as separate lanes. Its strength is the way each guest’s book or body of work becomes a wider conversation about human and organizational change.
Six Pixels of Separation - Mitch Joel's weekly conversation with business leaders, thinkers, innovators and cultural icons. The show is about insights and provocations on brands, consumers, technology, business and how connected we've all become.
Mitch Joel keeps asking what happens after AI wins the boardroom argument - exactly where your questions begin.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sharp case for how platform decline follows policy, power, and design.
Cory Doctorow and Mitch Joel spend the hour on a blunt premise: the internet did not sour by accident, and the platforms that once felt useful now keep feeding their own growth and power.
AI, cognition, and a sideways look at how technology changes the way people think.
This episode frames Mitch Joel's conversation with David Armano around a useful question: whether AI is another technology cycle or something more fundamental because it reaches cognition.
Avinash Kaushik makes a practical case for brand as AI takes over more measurable marketing work.
AI's advance into marketing becomes a question of what human judgment is still worth as Avinash Kaushik argues that analytics and performance work is moving quickly toward automation, if it is not there already.
Health, work, and agency under pressure.
Science fiction thinking for a platform-shaped world
Mitch Joel interviews Avinash Kaushik, former Google analytics evangelist and current strategy consultant for Coach and Kate Spade.
Mitch Joel interviews David Armano, a digital transformation strategist and futurist, about navigating the current AI moment.
Leanne Davey, an organizational psychologist and author of Thought Load, argues that exhaustion comes from cognitive demands, emotional burdens, and depleted energy rather than workload alone.
Chris Bradley, senior partner at McKinsey and director of the McKinsey Global Institute, argues in A Century of Plenty that extraordinary human progress remains achievable.
Steve Brown argues that AI is not a software project but a business transformation that requires human judgment, machine intelligence, and an AI-ready data strategy.
Mitch Joel interviews Nicolas Darveau-Garneau, former Google chief evangelist and author of Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai, about profitable growth, marketing KPIs, and AI strategy.
Marcus Buckingham tells Mitch Joel that love is 'the most powerful force in business' because only extreme positive experiences ('fives') predict loyalty, advocacy and productivity.
Charlene Li, author of Winning with AI with Dr.
Sangeet Paul Choudary tells Mitch Joel that AI is an economic reshuffle rather than a productivity story, because "scarcity is where value sits" and AI changes what is scarce.
This episode features an interview with Joseph Pine discussing his evolution from the Experience Economy to the Transformation Economy, exploring how businesses can guide customers toward achieving their aspirations rather than just selling products or services.
This episode features a conversation with Avinash Kaushik exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming marketing by automating analytics and performance tasks, while emphasizing the growing importance of brand, culture, and redefining human value in an AI-driven world.
This episode features a conversation with David Armano exploring how artificial intelligence differs from past technological revolutions by impacting cognition and knowledge work, discussing its potential as a force multiplier for human intelligence while addressing concerns about an emerging intelligence wealth gap and societal adaptation.
This episode features an interview with Nir Eyal exploring how beliefs, rather than knowledge, are the real barriers to personal change, discussing his motivational triangle and the stories we tell ourselves.
This episode features an interview with author Will Storr about the psychology of storytelling, exploring how narratives shape belief and persuasion beyond logic.
Cory Doctorow says AI is a bubble built on "$600 to $700 billion" in capex and a "$2 trillion" bill to come.
This episode features an interview with Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard, known as the father of the cable modem, discussing his journey in developing broadband technology and his new book about the human story behind this transformative innovation.
This episode features an interview with Robert Glazer about his new book 'The Compass Within', exploring how values serve as decision-making tools for leaders and professionals in navigating work, life, and organizational challenges.
This episode features a conversation with Harvard educator Margaret Andrews about how self-awareness and managing oneself are foundational to effective leadership, drawing from her research, teaching, and new book.
This episode explores how code has evolved from a technical tool to the fundamental grammar of modern civilization, examining its impact on society, culture, and human agency with guest Sam Arbesman.
This episode explores how social status influences choices, opportunities, and hierarchies in society, challenging the notion of meritocracy through a conversation with author Toby Stewart.