In this episode, Paul talks with Richard Florida, delving into themes Florida discusses in his new book, The Great Reset. They talked about the cultural, economic and geographic factors influencing innovative time periods and places. They also wrestled with topics like: "Should cities be allowed to fail?" and "Why are college towns such hotbeds of innovation?"

Florida is Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He also heads private consulting firm the Creative Class Group. Florida's research provides unique, data-driven insight into the social, economic and demographic factors that drive the 21st-century world economy. is author of the international bestsellers The Rise of the Creative Class and Who's Your City?  Florida is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and a regular columnist for The Globe and Mail. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The Harvard Business Review. He has been featured as an expert on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, NPR, and CBS.

He is a sought-after speaker on global trends, economics, prosperity, competitiveness and growth. 

Previously, Florida has held professorships at George Mason University and Carnegie Mellon University and taught as a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT. Florida earned his bachelor’s degree from Rutgers College and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. 

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In this episode, Paul talks with Paul Romer, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. They discussed Romer's path as an academic turned entrepreneur, who returned to Stanford to explore how the startup dynamic could potentially be applied at the level of developing countries.

Romer's contributions to the field of economics include being the primary developer of New Growth Theory, which reduces the traditional emphasis on the scarcity of objects and directs attention to the power of new ideas. His theory has brought renewed optimism about the potential for growth in both advanced and developing economies.

For his work on the economics of ideas, Romer was named one of America’s 25 most influential people by TIME magazine (1997), elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000) and awarded the Horst Claus Recktenwald Prize in Economics (2002). He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Prior to his current Stanford University position, he taught in the university’s Graduate School of Business as the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics and was honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award (1999). Before moving to Stanford, Romer taught economics at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

In addition to his career in teaching and research, Romer founded Aplia, Inc., which is now part of Cengage Learning. Aplia, which develops and applies technologies to improve student learning, grew out of his conviction that it is possible to use information technology to raise productivity in education. This lesson has important implications for how societies keep up with the growing demand for highly educated workers—a demand that is driven by the use of new technology in all other sectors of the economy.

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