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The All Things Risk Podcast

The All Things Risk podcast explores the themes of risk, uncertainty and resilience as applied to sports, the arts, current affairs and just about any other domain. We feature long-form conversations with interesting guests who have loads of fascinating stories, tips and tools.
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Now displaying: October, 2019
Oct 30, 2019

We have a big-picture conversation today that is a fascinating look at social media, data protection, privacy, accountability and much more. Our guest is Paul-Olivier Dehaye. Paul is a Swiss-based mathematician who helped lift the lid on the Cambridge-Analytica / Facebook scandal. He has extensive expertise in and has conducted research on how social media platforms predict our behaviour and can create dangerous amplification patterns.

If you have seen the acclaimed Netflix documentary The Great Hack (and if you haven’t, I highly recommend you do), you will have come across Paul. He was instrumental in helping one of that documentary’s protagonists – New York-based media professor David Carroll - try to obtain the data Cambridge Analytica held about him. He had been looking at how Cambridge Analytica had been violating EU data protection rules well before both the Brexit referendum in the UK and the 2016 US elections. He has subsequently provided testimony to the UK parliament on this topic.

He has actually been looking at how social media platforms trade in and handle data for some time – not just by Facebook but several other firms. He is the founder of personaldata.io a non-profit that promotes digital rights and trust the digital world. It aims to help people control their digital identity.

We get into all of that and more in this fascinating conversation that covers:

  • Social media and behaviour prediction;
  • How amplification patterns work;
  • How Cambridge Analytica first came onto his radar, how he researched the firm and what he found (again, this is before the Brexit referendum and 2016 US elections);
  • Facebook – what the company is and is not doing well in light of all of this. How it is “shooting itself in the foot”. Paul had focused a lot on Facebook because it has been profoundly changing social dynamics around the world;
  • We also discuss other social platforms, particularly Uber and Tinder;
  • The “physics” of social media – and how we don’t really fully understand who this works;
  • Solutions and why many of these like in individuals’ rights to access the data companies have on them;
  • Generic risks we face as we move to an algorithmic society;
  • Much more!

Show notes:

Paul-Olivier on Twitter

                On LinkedIn

Paul-Olivier’s website

On Medium

Personaldata.io

Mydata.org

The Great Hack

The Snowden revelations

Privacy International

The OCEAN model of personality traits

Paul’s running dossier on Cambridge Analytica

Aleksandr Kogan

David Carroll   

Brittany Kaiser

Sockpuppets

“I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets”

Article on James Farrar: “The Londoner Who Brought Uber to its Knees”

Tom Watson

India’s approach to data protection

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Like what you heard?

Subscribe and/or leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/1PjLmK

Subscribe on Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/all-things-risk/the-all-things-risk-podcast

Subscribe on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ben-cattaneo

Follow the podcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RiskThings

Drop us a note: allthingsrisk@gmail.com 

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Our free course module “How to Set Up Any Decision for Success” from our upcoming course How to Make Decisions With Calm and Confidence

Oct 21, 2019

 

It’s no secret that open plan offices suck. This has been confirmed by a recent study from Harvard. Their only redeeming quality is that they’re cheap – great if the only thing that matters to the work that gets done in them is cost. For everything else, they’re terrible.

One of the things open plan offices seem to assume (in addition to assuming human beings are unaffected by distractions) is that all that matters is what happens from the neck up. This directly contradicts a basic truth about biology, decision-making and something that countless guests on the All Things Risk podcast have said – the mind and body are part of the same system.

In this short In-betweenisode, I offer some thoughts on how to do great work and make quality decisions in spite of the constraints open plan offices generate.

Show notes:

Article: It’s Official: Open Plan Offices are the Dumbest Management Fad of All Time

Article: This is Nuts: It Takes Nearly 30 Minutes to Refocus Once You’ve Been Distracted

The Pomodoro Technique

Article: How to Calm Your Mind Using a Simple Breathing Technique

Article: How to Calm Your Mind Using a Simple Breathing Technique 

Coffee naps / espresso naps - scientist agree that they work

Article: How Plants at Work Can Improve Wellbeing and Efficiency

What is a terrarium? Check out Leafage to find out a bit more

Music for concentration:

What are "Binaural Beats?"

Lo Fi beats for concentrating and studying

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Listener survey – Help us keep making All Things Risk better – take our listener survey here.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Like what you heard?

Subscribe and/or leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/1PjLmK

Subscribe on Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/all-things-risk/the-all-things-risk-podcast

Subscribe on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ben-cattaneo

Follow the podcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RiskThings

Drop us a note: allthingsrisk@gmail.com 

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Our free course module “How to Set Up Any Decision for Success” from our upcoming course How to Make Decisions With Calm and Confidence

Oct 10, 2019

This episode is all about risk awareness. And in many ways, it’s an unusual episode in that we get into risk management as a profession. I tend to stay away from this as a topic because I don’t believe risk should have its own jargon and rituals that only certain hallowed people can use. We all take risks, and as you will hear, the science of risk and decision-making has been around for a while.

My guest, however, isn’t your ordinary risk professional. He’s Alex Sidorenko and he has been on the show before. For the past several years, Alex has been disrupting the way in which organisations think about and practice risk management. Alex runs something called Risk Academy which offers counterintuitive and controversial views on risk management.

Next week (Oct 14-18 2019), Alex is putting together Risk Awareness Week – an online conference which offers some amazing speakers and content on risk as a management discipline – why it’s broken, how to fix it, and much more. Even if – and especially if – you are not a risk professional, you will get tons of value from my conversation with Alex and from Risk Awareness Week.

Alex is fun, and we cover a range of topics including:

  • Why risk management is all about probability theory, neuroscience and decision science – don’t let the marketing fool you;
  • Why so much corporate risk management is bullsh*t;
  • How to de-bias yourself;
  • Some great tips on decision-making;
  • How Alex and some of his colleagues beat the lottery;
  • Much more

Show notes:

Risk Academy

Risk Awareness Week

Alex on Twitter

Alex on Linkedin

On YouTube

Alex’s interview with Grant Purdy

Alex’s favourite risk management books

The Flaw of Averages by Sam Savage and Jeff Danziger

The Failure of Risk Management – Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It by Douglass Hubbard

Alex and colleagues' lottery experiment

My first episode with Alex on All Things Risk

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Listener survey - Help us keep making All Things Risk better – take our listener survey here.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Like what you heard?

Subscribe and/or leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/1PjLmK

Subscribe on Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/all-things-risk/the-all-things-risk-podcast

Subscribe on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ben-cattaneo

Follow the podcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RiskThings

Drop us a note: allthingsrisk@gmail.com 

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Our free course module “How to Set Up Any Decision for Success” from our upcoming course How to Make Decisions With Calm and Confidence

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