Susanna Harris is the Director of Community at Breakout Ventures. She is also the Founder of PhD Balance, a collaborative community empowering graduate students to build their personal and professional resilience and the 2023 recipient of the SAMPS Young Person of the Year Award.
This episode is a little different. For the last couple of years, I have interviewed the winner of that SAMPS award on this podcast. Susanna has been a guest before and although we’ve chatted a few times since and both live in the Bay Area, we had never met face to face. Susanna mentioned hiking in one of our calls so I thought this would be an opportunity try something new. I suggested we meet up for a hike and record some stuff along the way. Thank you Susanna for being game for one more experiment.
We had a free-flowing conversation covering our inspirations in science, science communication, marketing, career paths, longevity, mental health, and more. AI, psychedelics and The Andromeda Strain all came up as well. Give it a listen to find out the context.
I typically focus these episodes around a theme and try to point toward a specific takeaway. While there is a thread to the topics we discussed, the takeaway for me this time was simply about the value of conversation. I trust that the listeners to this podcast will learn something about each of us and may be prompted to think about something they heard from a new perspective.
As a listener, you don’t have to be part of a conversation to benefit from it. That’s the magic of this medium. You can listen in as if you were there. Taking that beyond podcasts, consider the value of people listening to your team members, executives and subject matter experts in their natural, unscripted style. Podcast listeners report (and I can verify this both as a host and a listener) that they feel like they know the people they hear from regularly. There is a level of know, like, and trust that is hard to replicate except face-to-face.
Finally, one never knows where having a conversation will lead in the long run. I don’t even remember how Susanna and I connected initially. Yet here we were, 3 years later, hiking the hills, sharing our experiences in science and creating unique content along the way. If we get a chance to help one another out in the future, that would be icing on the cake. It all started with a conversation.
Mentioned in this episode:
Books: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
The End of the World is Just The Beginning by Peter Zeihan
Movie: The Andromeda Strain (also a book by Michael Crichton)
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