Writer, broadcaster, and researcher Dr. Aarathi Prasad visits Google to discuss her book “Silk: A World History.” In a tale that spans continents and millennia, Aarathi weaves together the complex story of the queen of fabrics. Through the scientists who have studied silk, and the biology of the animals from which it has been drawn, she explores the global, natural, and cultural history of a unique material that has fascinated the world for thousands of years.

Some four thousand years ago, humans began cultivating silkworms. With it came a growing obsession with unlocking silk’s secrets to understand how the strongest biological material ever known could be harnessed.

Explorers and scientists, including groundbreaking women who pushed the boundaries of societal expectations, dedicated their lives to investigate the anatomy of silk-producing animals. They endured unbelievable hardships to discover and collect new specimens, leading them to the moths of China, Indonesia, and India; the spiders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Madagascar; and the mollusks of the Mediterranean.

Rich with the complex connections between human and nonhuman worlds, the book not only peers into the past but also reveals the fiber’s impact today, inspiring new technologies across the fashion, military, and medical fields, and shows its untapped potential to pioneer a more sustainable future.

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Gary Small, a leading medical expert on memory and brain fitness, visits Google to discuss his book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. Never before has one generation experienced such rapid change in the brain's underlying wiring system, and the full consequences of this evolution has yet to be fully explored until now.

Gary explores the remarkable evolution of the human brain caused by today’s constant technological presence. The book separates the digital natives from the digital immigrants, and suggests that the Internet—with its virtually limitless wealth of news and information—is radically altering the way young minds are developing and functioning. In this era of social media, Gary Small’s iBrain is an important guide to understanding the astonishing impact of this new brain evolution on our society and our future, as well as a warning of its potential dangers—increased mental illness, social isolation, Internet addiction, and more.

Originally published in November of 2008.

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Samuel T. Wilkinson visits Google to discuss his book “Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply about the Meaning of Our Existence.” By using principles from a variety of scientific disciplines, Samuel provides a framework for human evolution that reveals an overarching purpose to our existence.

Generations have been taught that evolution implies there is no overarching purpose to our existence, that life has no fundamental meaning. We are merely the accumulation of tens of thousands of intricate molecular accidents. Some scientists take this logic one step further, suggesting that evolution is intrinsically atheistic and goes against the concept of the divine.

But is this true?

By integrating emerging principles from a variety of scientific disciplines—ranging from evolutionary biology to psychology—Yale Professor Samuel Wilkinson provides a framework of evolution that implies not only that there is an overarching purpose to our existence, but what this purpose is.

Nature seems to have endowed us with competing dispositions, what Wilkinson calls the dual potential of human nature. We are pulled in different directions: selfishness and altruism, aggression and cooperation, lust and love. When we couple this with the observation that we possess a measure of free will, all this strongly implies there is a universal purpose to our existence.

This purpose may be to choose between the good and evil impulses that nature has created within us. Our life is a test. This is a theory that has been espoused by so many of the world’s religions. From a certain framework, these aspects of human nature—including how evolution shaped us—are evidence for the existence of the divine, not against it.

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Amy Larkin visits Google to discuss her book, "Environmental Debt."

For decades, politicians and business leaders alike told the American public that today's challenge was growing the economy, and that environmental protection could be left to future generations. Now in the wake of billions of dollars in costs associated with coastal devastation from hurricanes, rampant wildfires across the West, and groundwater contamination from drilling, it's becoming increasingly clear that yesterday's carefree attitude about the environment has morphed into a financial crisis of epic proportions.

Amy Larkin has been at the forefront of the fight for the environment for years, and in "Environmental Debt" she argues that the costs of global warming, extreme weather, pollution and other forms of environmental debt are wreaking havoc on the global economy. Synthesizing complex ideas, she pulls back the curtain on some of the biggest cultural touchstones of the environmental debate, revealing how, for instance, despite coal's relative fame as a 'cheap' energy source, ordinary Americans pay $350 billion a year for coal's damage in business-related expenses, polluted watersheds, and in healthcare costs. And the problem stretches far beyond our borders: deforestation from twenty years ago in Thailand caused catastrophic flooding in 2011, and cost Toyota 3.4 percent of its annual production while causing tens of thousands of workers to lose jobs in three different countries.

Provocative and hard-hitting, "Environmental Debt" sweeps aside the false choices of today's environmental debate, and shows how to revitalize the economy through nature's bounty.

Originally published in August of 2013.

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Globally recognized investor Simran Kaur visits Google to discuss her book “Girls That Invest: Your Guide to Financial Independence through Shares and Stocks.” The book is a step-by-step guide to financial independence from the creator of the investing education podcast, Girls That Invest.

With only 15 to 25 percent of women investing, Simran founded Girls That Invest, a multi-million dollar media company that has amassed over six million podcast downloads and has become the world’s #1 investing podcast for women. As a Forbes 30 under 30, Global Cartier Women in Business Fellow and finalist for Young New Zealander of the Year, Simran’s work has been featured on TEDx US, Forbes, Vogue, Business Insider, and a billboard in Times Square where she rang the NASDAQ opening bell for International Day of the Girl.

Her mission is simple: Putting money into the hands of women. Simran spoke at the UK Houses of Parliament for International Women's Day in March 2023. Her best-selling book, Girls That Invest, has topped charts in the USA, Canada, UK and New Zealand and her podcast is listened to in over 150 countries, demonstrating the need for more investing education tailored to help tackle the wealth gap women are facing.

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Sarah Miller Caldicott, the great grand-niece of Thomas Edison, visits Google to discuss her book "Innovate Like Edison: The Five Step System for Breakthrough Business Success."

Thomas Edison is counted among the greatest innovators in American history. Edison's focus on practical accomplishment set the stage for America's global leadership in innovation. Now, for the first time ever, "Innovate Like Edison" translates the best practices of this supreme American inventor into contemporary terms to help today's leaders harness their own innovative potential.

With her unique insight and expertise, Caldicott introduces a carefully researched, easy-to-apply system of five success secrets inspired by the creative methods of Edison himself. Presented in a step-by-step fashion, "Innovate Like Edison" provides the tools and strategies you need to compete and win in the business world and in everyday life. Whether you're an amateur or an executive, "Innovate Like Edison" is a powerful tool that will enable you to revamp and revitalize your own creative genius and thrive in today's culture of innovation.

Originally published in February, 2008.

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Professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao visit Google to discuss their book “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.” This book is a useful guide to eliminating the forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations.

Every organization is plagued by destructive friction. Yet some forms of friction are incredibly useful, and leaders who attempt to improve workplace efficiency often make things even worse. Drawing from seven years of hands-on research, Sutton and Rao teach readers how to become “friction fixers.”

Sutton and Rao unpack how skilled friction fixers think and act like trustees of each others’ time. They provide friction forensics to help readers identify where to avert and repair bad organizational friction and where to maintain and inject good friction. The heart of the book digs into the causes and solutions for five of the most common and damaging friction troubles: oblivious leaders, addition sickness, broken connections, jargon monoxide, and fast & frenzied people and teams.

Sound familiar? Sutton and Rao are here to help. They wrap things up with lessons for leading your own friction project, including linking little things to big things; the power of civility, caring, and love for propelling designs and repairs; and embracing the mess that is an inevitable part of the process.

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Sara Mednick visits Google to discuss her book, "Take a Nap! Change Your Life."

Imagine a product that increases alertness, boosts creativity, reduces stress, improves perception, stamina, motor skills, and accuracy, helps you make better decisions, keeps you looking younger, aids in weight loss, reduces the risk of heart attack, elevates your mood, and strengthens memory. Now imagine that this product is nontoxic, has no dangerous side effects, and, best of all, is absolutely free.

This miracle drug is, in fact, nothing more than the nap: the right nap at the right time. Sara Mednik’s book Take a Nap! details a scientifically-based breakthrough program that shows how we can fight the fatigue epidemic through a custom-designed nap. The book explains the five stages of the sleep cycle, particularly Stage Two, or Slow Wave Sleep, and REM, and the benefits each one provides; how to assess your tiredness and set up a personal sleep profile; and how to neutralize the voice in your head that tells you napping is a sign of laziness.

Using the unique Nap Wheel on the cover and interior graphs and charts, it shows us exactly when our optimal napping time is, and exactly how long we should try to sleep—even how it’s possible to design a nap to inspire creativity one day, and the next day design one to help us with our memory. There are tips on how to create the right nap environment, a 16-step technique for falling asleep, a six-week napping workbook, and more.

Originally published in November of 2007.

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Neuroscience specialist Stefanie Faye visits Google to discuss neurophysiology and its connection to mental health, drawing from her book Biomechanics of Human Communication: Neurophysiology, Regulation, and Systems Thinking.

Stefanie Faye is a neuroscience specialist with expertise in optimizing learning, performance, attentional control, cognitive flexibility, and emotional regulation using biofeedback, neurotechnology, cognitive training and frameworks that integrate childhood experiences and family systems. Her graduate degree from New York University focused on neuroplasticity, empathy and emotion regulation. She has worked as a counselor, cognitive trainer, reading therapist, research analyst, coordinator of learning programs, and has analyzed many physiological aspects of nervous system states and brain functioning including electric conductance of the skin, facial electromyography, heart rate variability and quantitative electro-encephalography. She integrates all of this with her experience training in monasteries with meditation masters from Vietnam, India and West Africa.

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Major General Tammy Smith discusses her background as a member of the LGBTQ+ community in the US military, her experience as the highest ranking and first out-and-proud Major General, and what her leadership means to the LGBTQ+ community at large. 

Tammy Smith is a recently retired Army Major General. At the conclusion of her 35 year career, she was serving at the Pentagon as the Military Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of the Army, the US military’s largest service branch with over one million personnel in the Active, National Guard and Reserve force. Upon her promotion to Brigadier General in 2012, mere months after the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, Smith gained unexpected visibility as the US military’s first openly LGBTQ+ General Flag officer. Rather than downplaying the significance of this unanticipated status, Tammy leveraged her role by promoting inclusion and diversity in the Army and Department of Defense, contributing to a culture of acceptance and trust in a post-Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell military.

Originally published in July of 2021.

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Professor of psychology and neuroscience Charan Ranganath visits Google to discuss his book "Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters." The book reveals the powerful role memory plays in nearly every aspect of our lives, from recalling faces and names, to learning, decision-making, trauma, and healing.

A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. Memory is not quite the repository of the past that we can tap into as we wish. It is actually a highly transformative power, active at all times, that shapes our present in often secretive and sometimes destructive ways.

We are in many ways creatures of memory and only when we understand the mechanisms of memory can we truly understand ourselves and our motivations, and use our knowledge of those mechanisms to our advantage while avoiding their pitfalls. Why We Remember teaches the principles behind memory storage and retrieval, and explains how our memories are always changing. It reveals how these processes affect what we think we know about ourselves and how we make decisions.

Memory is designed to be selective, meaningful, and malleable. When we understand how memory works, we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can not only remember more—we can remember better.

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