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Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

Auteur(s): Phil McKinney
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 Step into the world of relentless creativity with the Killer Innovations Podcast, hosted by Phil McKinney. Since 2005, it has carved its niche in history as the longest-running podcast. Join the community of innovators, designers, creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who are constantly pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo. Discover the power of thinking differently and taking risks to achieve success. The podcast covers a wide range of topics, including innovation, technology, business, leadership, creativity, design, and more. Every episode is not just talk; it's about taking action and implementing strategies that can help you become a successful innovator. Each episode provides practical tips, real-life examples, and thought-provoking insights that will challenge your thinking and inspire you to unleash your creativity. The podcast archive: KillerInnovations.com About Phil McKinney: Phil McKinney, CTO of HP (ret) and CEO of CableLabs, has been credited with forming and leading multiple teams that FastCompany and BusinessWeek list as one of the "50 Most Innovative". His recognition includes Vanity Fair naming him "The Innovation Guru," MSNBC and Fox Business calling him "The Gadget Guy," and the San Jose Mercury News dubbing him the "chief seer."See http://philmckinney.com Économie
Épisodes
  • Numerical Thinking: How to Find the Truth When Numbers Lie

    Numerical Thinking: How to Find the Truth When Numbers Lie
    Dec 2 2025
    Quick—which is more dangerous: the thing that kills 50,000 Americans every year, or the thing that kills 50? Your brain says the first one, obviously. The data says you're dead wrong. Heart disease kills 700,000 people annually, but you're not terrified of cheeseburgers. Shark attacks kill about 10 people worldwide per year, but millions of people are genuinely afraid of the ocean. Your brain can't do the math, so you worry about the wrong things and ignore the actual threats. And here's the kicker: The people selling you fear, products, and policies? They know your brain works this way. They're counting on it. You're not bad at math. You're operating with Stone Age hardware in an Information Age world. And that gap between your intuition and reality? It's being weaponized every single day. Let me show you how to fight back. What They're Exploiting Here's what's happening: You can instantly tell the difference between 3 apples and 30 apples. But a million and a billion? They both just feel like "really big." Research from the OECD found that numeracy skills are collapsing across developed countries. Over half of American adults can't work with numbers beyond a sixth-grade level. We've become a society that can calculate tips but can't spot when we're being lied to with statistics. And I'm going to be blunt: if you can't think proportionally in 2025, you're flying blind. Let's fix that right now. Translation: Make the Invisible Visible Okay, stop everything. I'm going to change how you see numbers forever. One million seconds is 11 days. Take a second, feel that. Eleven days ago—that's a million seconds. One billion seconds is 31 years. A billion seconds ago, it was 1994. Bill Clinton was president. The internet was just getting started. That's how far back you have to go. Now here's where it gets wild: One trillion seconds is 31,000 years. Thirty-one THOUSAND years. A trillion seconds ago, humans hadn't invented farming yet. We were hunter-gatherers painting on cave walls. So when you hear someone say "What's the difference between a billion and a trillion?"—the difference is the entire span of human civilization. This isn't trivia. This is the key to seeing through manipulation. Because when a politician throws around billions and trillions in the same sentence like they're comparable? Now you know—they're lying to your face, banking on you not understanding scale. The "Per What?" Weapon Here's the trick they use on you constantly, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. A supplement company advertises: "Our product reduces your risk by 50%!" Sounds incredible, right? Must buy immediately. But here's what they're not telling you: If your risk of something was 2 in 10,000, and now it's 1 in 10,000—that's technically a 50% reduction. But your actual risk only dropped by 0.01%. They just made almost nothing sound like everything. Or flip it around: "This causes a 200% increase in risk!" Terrifying! Except if your risk went from 1 in a million to 3 in a million, you're still almost certainly fine. This is how they play you. They show you percentages when absolute numbers would expose them. They show you raw numbers when rates would destroy their argument. Your defense? Three words: "Per what, exactly?" 50% of what baseline? 200% increase from what starting point? That denominator is where the truth hides. Once you start asking this, you'll see the manipulation everywhere. Let's Catch a Lie in Real Time Okay, let's do this together right now. I'm going to show you a real manipulation pattern I see constantly. Headline: "4 out of 5 dentists recommend our toothpaste!" Sounds pretty convincing, right? Let's apply what we just learned. First—per what? Four out of five of how many dentists? If they surveyed 10 dentists and 8 said yes, that's technically 80%, but it's meaningless. Second—what was the actual question? Turns out, they asked dentists to name ALL brands they'd recommend, not which ONE was best. So 80% mentioned this brand... along with seven other brands. Third—scale: There are 200,000 dentists in the US. They surveyed 150. That's 80% of 0.075% of all dentists. See how fast that falls apart? That's the power of asking "per what? The Exponential Trap This is where your intuition doesn't just fail—it catastrophically fails. And it's costing people everything. Grab a piece of paper. Fold it in half. Twice as thick, no big deal. Fold it again. Four times. Okay. Keep going. Most people think if you could fold it 42 times, maybe it'd be as tall as a building? No. It would reach the moon. From Earth. To the moon. That's exponential growth, and your brain cannot comprehend it. Here's why this matters in your actual life: You've got a credit card with $5,000 on it at 18% interest. You think "I'll just pay the minimum, I'll catch up eventually." Your brain treats this like a linear problem. It's not. It's exponential. That $5,000 becomes $10,000 faster than you can possibly imagine,...
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    17 min
  • The Clock is Screaming

    The Clock is Screaming
    Nov 25 2025
    I stepped out of the shower in March and my chest split open. Not a metaphor. The surgical incision from my cardiac device procedure just… opened. Blood and fluid everywhere. Three bath towels to stop it. My wife—a nurse, the exact person I needed—was in Chicago dealing with her parents' estate. Both had just died. So my daughter drove me to the ER instead. That was surgery number one. By Thanksgiving this year, I'd had five cardiac surgeries. Six hospitalizations. All in twelve months. And somewhere between surgery three and four, everything I thought I knew about gratitude… broke. When the Comfortable List Stopped Working Five surgeries. Three cardiac devices. My body kept rejecting the thing meant to save my life. Lying there before surgery number five, waiting for the anesthesia, one question kept circling: What if I don't make it this time? And that's when the comfortable list stopped working. You know the one. Health. Family. Career. The things we say around the table because they sound right. But when you're not sure you'll wake up from surgery… when your wife is burying both her parents while managing your near-death… when the calendar is filled with hospital dates instead of holidays… You can't perform gratitude anymore. You have to find out what it actually means. The clock isn't just ticking anymore. It's screaming. What Survives And that's when I saw it clearly. Not in a hospital room—at a lunch table with my grandson. Last month, Liam sat next to me after church. He's twelve. Runs his own business designing 3D models. And he'd been listening to my podcast episode about breakthrough innovations. He had an idea. A big one. "It would need way better batteries than we have now, Papa." So we went deep—the kind of conversation where you forget a twelve-year-old is asking questions most engineers won't touch. He's already thinking about making the impossible possible. And sitting there, watching him work through the problem, I realized something: This is what survives when I'm gone. My grandfather would take me to my Uncle Bishop's tobacco farm in rural Kentucky. When we'd do something wrong—cut a corner, rush through it—we'd hear it: "A job worth doing is worth doing right." Almost like a family mantra. I heard it on that farm. My kids heard it from me. Liam hears it now. And that line will keep moving forward long after I'm gone. Not because of the accolades. Because of the people. It's Not Just Liam But here's what hit me sitting there with Liam: It's not just him. It's you. Every week for more than twenty years, I've been putting out content. Podcasts. Videos. Articles. Not for the downloads. Not for the metrics. For this exact moment—where something I share gets passed forward. Where you have a conversation with someone younger who needs to hear it. Where you take what works and make it your own. That's what legacy actually is. Not the content I create. Not what's on a shelf. The people we invest time in. The effort we put into helping them become who the future needs. My legacy is Liam, yes. But it's also every person who's taken something from these conversations and shared it forward. That's you. That's the reason the clock screaming doesn't make me stop. It makes me keep going. Because you're going to pass this forward. And that's what survives. The Math I turned sixty-five in September. Both my parents died at sixty-eight. The math isn't encouraging. So when people ask me why I keep pushing—why I'm still creating content when I can barely type, when I've had five surgeries in twelve months— It's because I finally understand what I'm grateful for. Not my health. That's been failing spectacularly. Not comfort. That ended in March. I'm grateful I get to see what happens when you invest in people. I'm grateful Liam asks me about batteries over lunch. I'm grateful you're watching this and thinking about who you're investing in. I'm grateful for what the breaking revealed. What I'm Actually Grateful For That morning when my chest split open? I was terrified. Thinking about everything that could go wrong. Now? I'm grateful for what it forced me to see. Who shows up. What survives. Why it matters to keep going even when it would be easier to stop. This week on Studio Notes, I'm telling the full story. The medical mystery that took five surgeries to solve. The conversation with Liam that changed everything. What my wife actually thinks about me writing a second book while recovering from all this. And what gratitude looks like when the comfortable list stops working. Read the full story on Studio Notes: https://philmckinney.substack.com/p/what-im-actually-thankful-for-after Your Turn But here's what I really want to know: When was the last time you were grateful for something that hurt you? Not the easy stuff. Not the list you perform around the table. The thing that broke you open. The thing that forced you to see differently. Drop it in the comments. Tell me what ...
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    12 min
  • Second-Order Thinking: How to Stop Your Decisions From Creating Bigger Problems (Thinking 101 - Ep 6)

    Second-Order Thinking: How to Stop Your Decisions From Creating Bigger Problems (Thinking 101 - Ep 6)
    Nov 11 2025
    In August 2025, Polish researchers tested something nobody had thought to check: what happens to doctors' skills after they rely on AI assistance? The AI worked perfectly—catching problems during colonoscopies, flagging abnormalities faster than human eyes could. But when researchers pulled the AI away, the doctors' detection rates had dropped. They'd become less skilled at spotting problems on their own. We're all making decisions like this right now. A solution fixes the immediate problem—but creates a second-order consequence that's harder to see and often more damaging than what we started with. Research from Gartner shows that poor operational decisions cost companies upward of 3% of their annual profits. A company with $5 billion in revenue loses $150 million every year because managers solved first-order problems and created second-order disasters. You see this pattern everywhere. A retail chain closes underperforming stores to cut costs—and ends up losing more money when loyal customers abandon the brand entirely. A daycare introduces a late pickup fee to discourage tardiness—and late pickups skyrocket because parents now feel they've paid for the privilege. The skill that separates wise decision-makers from everyone else isn't speed. It's the ability to ask one simple question repeatedly: "And then what?" What Second-Order Thinking Actually Means First-order thinking asks: "What happens if I do this?" Second-order thinking asks: "And then what? And then what after that?" Most people stop at the first question. They see the immediate consequence and act. But every action creates a cascade of effects, and the second and third-order consequences are often the opposite of what we intended. Think about social media platforms. First-order? They connect people across distances. Second-order? They fragment attention spans and fuel polarization. The difference isn't about being cautious—it's about being thorough. In a world where business decisions come faster and with higher stakes than ever before, the ability to trace consequences forward through multiple levels isn't optional anymore. Let me show you how. How To Think in Consequences Before we get into the specific strategies, here's what you need to understand: Second-order thinking isn't about predicting the future with certainty. It's about systematically considering possibilities that most people ignore. The reason most people fail at this isn't lack of intelligence—it's that our brains evolved to focus on immediate threats and rewards. First-order thinking kept our ancestors alive. But in complex modern systems—businesses, markets, organizations—first-order thinking gets you killed. The good news? This is a learnable skill. You don't need special training or advanced degrees. You need two things: a framework for mapping consequences, and a method for forcing yourself to actually use it. Two strategies will stop your solutions from creating bigger problems: Map How People Will Actually Respond - trace your decision through stakeholders, understand what you're actually incentivizing, and predict how the system adapts. Run the "And Then What?" Drill - force yourself to see three moves ahead before you act, using a simple three-round questioning method. Let's break down each one. Strategy 1: Map How People Will Actually Respond Here's the fundamental insight that separates good decision-makers from everyone else: People respond to what you reward, not what you intend. When you make a decision, you're not just choosing an action—you're sending signals into a complex system of human beings who will interpret those signals, adapt their behavior, and create consequences you never imagined. Your job is to trace those adaptations before they happen. This strategy has three components that work together: First: Identify ALL Your Stakeholders When considering a decision, list everyone it will affect directly and indirectly. Don't just think about your immediate team—think about: Your customers (current and potential) Your competitors (how will they respond?) Your suppliers and partners Your employees at different levels Your investors or board Regulatory bodies or industry watchdogs Adjacent markets or ecosystems Most executives stop after listing two or three obvious groups. The consequences you miss come from the stakeholders you forgot to consider. Here's what research shows: Wharton professor Philip Tetlock spent two decades studying how well experts predict future events. His landmark finding? Even highly credentialed experts' predictions were only slightly better than random chance—barely better than a dart-throwing chimp. But the real insight came when Tetlock discovered that certain people can forecast with exceptional accuracy. These "superforecasters" share one key trait: they relentlessly ask "And then what?" before making predictions. They don't just see the immediate effect. They trace the decision through the ...
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    23 min
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