A Politician and a B-School Instructor Walk into a Bar ...

A business school instructor and a politician walk into a bar. The bartender says, “what will you have?“ The politician says “gin, straight up.“ The B-schooler starts reeling out studies and statistics. The bartender quickly moves on, figuring he’ll get a better tip from the drunken couple at the end of the bar who are arguing over whether the actor who played Sam in Casablanca was really a pianist.

What’s the point? (Is there ever one, with this podcast?) Not surprisingly, we hardly know. But it surely seems that, despite what you may have thought about college psych, communications and business majors — the profs who teach those disciplines can be as nerdy as any academician.

Take the guest for our latest episode of Failure - the Podcast. (Yeah, it’s been a while since our last one, but we figured we’d try to drive our ratings up by not publishing episodes. Go figure.) Elaine Chen is an instructor on technology innovation, entrepreneurship and strategic management at Sloan. That’s MIT’s prestigious B-school. (OK, technically, she’s a senior lecturer at Sloan. We suspect the students don’t know the difference. Remember, this is B-school.)

Elaine is as nerdy as they get. She proudly admits it, and why shouldn’t she? We certainly are not going to be able to MAGA (make America great again) without MANA (make America nerdy again). (Oops, sorry. Our co-host Mic has admonished us not to stray into politics.)

So where were we? (These digressions are very distracting, even to us). Oh, never mind, just press the “play” button, and join the team from Failure - the Podcast in another wasted hour (sorry, Car Guys, we’ll make you regret you ever used the phrase) of banter with Elaine Chen, an expert on robotics (had to get that in for SEO), automation and business. You won’t regret it! (Well, OK, maybe you will ...)