Poets & Thinkers | Podcast Guru

Details

Poets & Thinkers explores the humanistic future of business leadership through deep, unscripted conversations with visionary minds – from best-selling authors and inspiring artists to leading academic experts and seasoned executives. Hosted by tech executive, advisor, and Princeton entrepreneurship & design fellow Ben Lehnert, this podcast challenges conventional MBA wisdom, blending creative leadership, liberal arts, and innovation to reimagine what it means to lead in the AI era. If you believe leadership is both an art and a responsibility, this is your space to listen, reflect, and evolve.

Recent Episodes

The Future is Feminine: On who gets to imagine the future with Graça Fonseca

What if we gave ordinary citizens the power to decide how public money is spent? Graça Fonseca did just that. With her pioneering vision, she built the world’s first national participatory budget, helped transform a crisis-era Lisbon into Europe’s entrepreneurial city of the year, and served as Portugal’s Minister of Culture through COVID. Now she’s asking an even bigger question: who gets to imagine the future? In this episode, Ben sits down with Graça Fonseca to trace a throughline fr...

51 MIN

Human Conservationism: On improv, creative play and developing negative capability as leadership practices with Gabriella White

What if the most important thing a leader can (re)learn now is to be silly and playful? In a world obsessed with optimization and yearning for certainty, Gabriella White makes the case for a radically different kind of readiness and skill building in the age of AI: one rooted in play, presence, and the courage to be ordinary. Gabriella is a trained actor turned interdisciplinary creative leader who calls herself a “human conservationist”. A deliberately playful provocation that names somethin...

42 MIN

Hollow Echoes: Why AI art will never have a soul with Sean Wolcott

What happens to art when the systems designed to replicate it at mass can’t actually feel anything? In this conversation, Ben sits down with designer-turned-composer Sean Wolcott who draws a sharp lines between technology, knowledge and lived human experience – and makes the case that no amount of computation can bridge the gap. Sean has lived at the intersection of visual art, design, and music for over three decades. From early days making cassette tape artwork in high school to shaping Mic...

41 MIN

Make Doing Good Look Good: On designing for belonging, moral ambition and the pitfalls of privilege with Harald Dunnink

Can designing a movement get the smartest people to work on the biggest problems instead of disappearing into what one author calls “the Bermuda Triangle of talent”: consulting, tech, and banking? In this episode, Ben sits down with Harald Dunnink, designer, serial co-founder, and advocate for moral ambition. Harald founded Momkai, a Dutch design agency “for people who give a damn,” co-founded De Correspondent (a member-funded journalism platform on a mission for “unbreaking news”), and most ...

40 MIN

For The Culture: On beauty, AI slop, and what lasts when software companies die with Andy Allen

What if the best business advice ever came from a five-year-old: “I think you should add some googly eyes and rainbow colors!” In this episode, Ben sits down with Andy Allen, co-founder of Not Boring Software, 2 times Apple Design Award winner, and former co-founder of the groundbreaking startup FiftyThree – makers of the Paper app and Pencil stylus. Andy challenges the dominant narrative of software design: While the industry has matured and systematized around efficiency and automatio...

55 MIN