Today I have an amazing guest. His name is Dr. Jeff Karp and he is a Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is also a Principal Faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and an affiliate faculty member at the Broad Institute and at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

I’m just getting warmed up, wait until you hear the rest of his background. This is a real special guy.

He works in the fields of drug delivery, medical devices, stem cell therapeutics, and tissue adhesives. He has published over 125 peer-reviewed papers, with more than 18,500 citations, and has given over 300 invited lectures. He has over 100 issued or pending national and international patents.

Several technologies developed in his lab have led to multiple products currently being funded, and he’s launched seven companies that have raised over $300 million in funding. These technologies include high-tech skincare, tissue adhesives and 3D-printed biomedical devices, immunomodulation with biologically responsive materials. We talked about small molecule regenerative therapeutics with an initial target of hearing loss and other aging therapies; as well as stem cells, cannabinoid therapeutics, biomedical devices to improve child safety, needles that automatically stop when they reach their target, and a bio-engineered luminal coating for controlled GI targeting.

Dr. Karp has received over 50 awards and honors. He has been recognized by Boston Magazine as One of 11 Boston Doctors Making Medical Breakthroughs’; The Boston Business Journal as a Champion in Healthcare Innovation’ and by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine (TR35) as being one of the Top Innovators In The World with three members from his laboratory also receiving this award.

I spent a lot of time talking to Jeff about how he builds his teams and how he empowers them to take on these projects. What he’s done is – he’s bridged academia and entrepreneurship and, that’s no small feat! I was interested to know – with the co-founding of six companies, how does he get research out into the world to really impact lives?

We also talked about mentor development. One of the biggest things that he targets is finding – and building mentors. He is always actively meeting people and he talks about this and why the power of meeting new people every two weeks. Another thing we talk about is reducing problems to their essence’. What I love is when I hear scientists talk about how they really place a lot of focus on this radical simplicity’ and the art and discipline of reducing problems to their essence so they can solve problems in the useful, practical solutions to real-world problems.

This is a really, really fun interview with a world-impact leader in medicine. And bringing cutting edge therapies to market with a team. A team of people really dedicated to changing the world.

So, with this, I want to welcome you to my great conversation with Dr. Jeff Karp.

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Today my guest is Paul Zak, scientist, prolific author and public speaker. Paul is – what I just love, he wrote the book, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity in 2012, and literally, he discovered oxytocin. Now what is oxytocin? This was a landmark neurochemical that he discovered was the driver of trust, love and morality. That was a key differentiation for our humanity, and so this made him very popular and he’s gotten the nickname Dr. Love. Now, what does this mean for his latest book called, Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies?

As a scientist, his decades of research have taken him from the Pentagon, to research with the three-letter agencies, to the rain forests of Papua New Guinea – all in the quest to understand the neuroscience of human connection, human happiness and effective teamwork. It’s through his lab and testing that he’s developed and deployed neuroscience technologies to solve real world problems experienced by people, especially in this today’s times of exponential technologies. What I love is that those things that we had a hunch about now, he’s validating through technologies.

Now, what’s this about trust? Because there’s a big thing going on now that this is the most disengaged workforce in a long time. Much of it is because of the lack of trust.

So, what is oxytocin? Experiments have shown that when you have a higher sense of purpose stimulates oxytocin production, as does trust. Trust and purpose, then mutually reinforce each other, providing a mechanism for extended oxytocin release, which produces happiness. So joy on the job comes from doing purpose-driven work with a trusted team.

I could go on and on, but I want to let Dr. Paul Zak do most of the talking related to this. Because I think that for leaders, that this is super important. Leadership now, especially for many of the CIOs and technology and digital transformation leaders, the imperative for leaders today is to create this engagement within their teams and within their people. I’ve had a pattern now with a couple of different podcast interviews talking with people that are top in their field. Here is one of the top scientists in the this field that is talking about how to do this.

One of it is creating this peak immersion. Creating an immersion can be contagious and leaders; of course can’t just bestow immersion on people. Leaders must embody it, they must be plugged into it themselves. This creates this factor, which allows an organization to take on this resonance, which differentiates you and your organization and your teams within the business and within the marketplace.

One of it is creating this peak immersion. Creating an immersion can be contagious and leaders; of course can’t just bestow immersion on people. Leaders must embody it, they must be plugged into it themselves. This creates this factor, which allows an organization to take on this resonance, which differentiates you and your organization and your teams within the business and within the marketplace.

Well, I want to bring you Paul today because Paul is going to give you practical examples, practical tools and really get you thinking about this topic deeply. So with that, I want to introduce you to my conversation with Dr. Paul Zak.

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Welcome back to the show, everyone. This is Bill Murphy, your host of the RedZone Podcast. So today’s the title of this episode is ‘Human Performance and the Benefits of Sauna’, in particular Finnish sauna. So how did this start?

A couple of years ago, I had Wim Hof on the show. He trains people on how to elevate their body temperature when they’re immersed in cold water and he always had a sauna off to the side. Now, he has an institute in Norway, and I trained with him in Poland. Wim Hof has talked a lot about the benefits of sauna, relative to cold, it’s called thermogenesis.

I have always wanted to learn more about the benefits of sauna; and there’s been a lot of research on how sauna can help with your cardiovascular system. It can help with a variety of different diseases and with just general health and well being.

So, I asked the leading sauna person in the United States, Glenn Auerbach, to come on the show. I met Glenn in Minnesota when I went to look at a sauna he put together – and that I was planning to purchase.

In Minnesota, it’s quite an ice fishing culture, so it’s not a big step for them to build these really great ice fishing houses. Now, they’ve moved into building these really custom saunas. You can see on Saunatimes, the website that Glenn runs, what people have done with saunas, these outdoor saunas across the country. We get into what the differences are between types of saunas, like Finnish saunas versus your 24-hour fitness type sauna, or an infrared sauna, and what the real differences are there between them. We talked about the kind of ‘sauna culture’ in Minnesota and Finland. We talked about, as I mentioned, the science of it and the psychological benefits in alternating between cold and hot.

We covered a lot of ground in this episode. So, if you’re interested in sauna, and potentially integrating that into your experience and learning more about it, this would be a great episode for you. With that, I want to introduce you to my conversation with Glenn Auerbach.

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My guest today is Kelley Steven-Waiss. This is a woman who’s really at the pinnacle of her career. What I love is that, as a leader, you will be able to see how Kelley is dealing with the human resource issues that we’re facing in the marketplace. That both of the skilled resource challenges, being able to find talent and train talent, and how you create engagement and a culture that is both powerful and profitable, and embraces the new workforce all the way from the oldest generation to the youngest in the workforce.

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Today my guest is Charlene Li. Charlene is a graduate of Harvard and of Harvard Business School, she’s been named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company, and she’s an expert in digital transformation and disruptive growth strategies. Charlene has just released a new book called, The Disruption Mindset: Why Some Organizations Transform Why Others Fail. Charlene is a founder of and a Senior Fellow at Altimeter, which is a Profit company. She is the author of five previous books including a New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership; and the co-author of the critically acclaimed book Groundswell.

I love how she explains that we’ve been approaching disruption backwards. In my conversation with her, we talk about how companies make disruption their goal, but they believe that if they develop the right innovation, they will disrupt the markets forever and drive the kind of growth worthy of what their Board of Directors wants. But, as Charlene explains to me that’s not how disruption works.

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