With sex and gender becoming such politicized and polarizing issues recently, what’s a common sense approach to sorting through all the information to better understand the issues at hand? How have different struggles for equal rights throughout history shaped and informed these common-sense positions?Doriane Lambelet Coleman is a professor at Duke Law School, specializing in scholarship on women, sports, children and law. She is also the author of On Sex and Gender: A Commonsense Approach and Fixing Columbine: The Challenge to American Liberalism.Greg and Doriane discuss the evolving landscape of sex and gender, highlighting the shift from traditional binary definitions to more inclusive yet controversial perspectives. Doriane advocates for a balanced, evidence-based approach that recognizes both biological differences and the rights of transgender individuals. The conversation also touches on the legal implications of defining sex and gender and the socio-political dynamics that shape current debates. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Fourteenth AmendmentThe Equality ActWomen's rightsCivil rights movementRuth Bader GinsburgEqual Protection ClauseBrown v. Board of EducationPauli MurrayThurgood MarshallAmateur Sports Act of 1978United States v. VirginiaJudith ButlerGuest Profile:DorianeColeman.comFaculty Profile at Duke Law SchoolWikipedia ProfileHer Work:Amazon Author PageOn Sex and Gender: A Commonsense ApproachFixing Columbine: The Challenge to American LiberalismEpisode Quotes:Balancing trans rights while acknowledging the reality of sex46:59: Trans people, including trans women, of course, have every right to the same dignity and respect as anyone else, and certainly, equal protection should attach to everyone, including trans people. I don't think we can resolve the impasses without recognizing the difference between sex and gender. I think that we can have trans rights, but not by way of denying sex. In other words, the strategy that requires sex blindness in order to achieve rights for trans people is not going to work for a lot of females. And so, leaving the political right aside that doesn't want to see any gender diversity and working with people who want to be inclusive but also recognize that there are differences between females and trans women, it's going to require that trans advocates take a step back and accept that, in some places, we need to see sex, and we need to be smart about it.What does it mean to be inclusive?49:25: Being inclusive means taking into account relevant differences and ignoring differences that aren't relevant. That's really important to do, and we shouldn't shy away from that.Confronting the provocative shift in our understanding of sex and gender40:31: I think it's just a really provocative challenge to something so fundamental about ourselves and our society. Like, if you grow up understanding how fundamental sex is to you or gender is to you, and then somebody says it shouldn't be, or we're going to throw it out, or we're going to change what it means, or you can't use that word for yourself anymore, which is all the stuff that's happening, right? People are saying that you've got to start calling yourself a cis woman or, I mean, lots of vocabulary policing, all that kind of stuff about things that are so fundamental. I think it's super provocative, and I think it's super interesting. It's intellectual. It's a phenomenal intellectual challenge. It's an extraordinary political challenge.Is sex difference an equality problem?20:27: I think we've made a mistake to put all of sex into equality as an idea. That is the prism through which we view sex. Period, right? That anything you say about sex or do with sex that automatically belongs in the equality bucket, we've automatically got to, like, push it through this increasingly; it's technically intermediate scrutiny, but it's increasingly perceived as strict because that presumes that sex differences are bad. That presumes that any distinctions we would make on the basis of sex are bad. And I think that's wrong. I don't think sex is all bad. I don't think we should presume that most of it is bad. I think a lot of it is great. And so I think that we've made a mistake to see all of sex and sex differences as an equality problem.

As we get better and better at training machines to emulate humans, are there certain aspects of human intelligence that artificial intelligence will never be able to copy?Neil D. Lawrence is a professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge. His new book, The Atomic Human: What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AI explores the meaning of intelligence as it relates to both humans and machines. Neil and Greg chat about the nuances of human intelligence and artificial intelligence, discussing how terminology affects perceptions and expectations of AI, pivotal technology advancements in history that paved the way for AI, and the insights Neil gained from his time at Amazon. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Centrifugal governorBletchley ParkTommy FlowersJoaquin Quiñonero CandelaDavid A. MindellPierre-Simon LaplaceRobert SolowJeff Wilke Geoffrey HintonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of CambridgeProfessional WebsiteHis Work:The Atomic Human: What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AIGoogle Scholar pageEpisode Quotes:The trade-offs of increasing automation and the moral concerns of AI25:16: As you increase automation, things that would have been moral judgments get moved into processes, whether that's courts of law or whatever; we tend to sort of codify what was a moral judgment, and it brings big advantages. It means we can live together at scale. It reduces the moral load we have if I can make a thousand employees redundant without having to worry individually about how many of them are single mums or whatever I'm worrying about. But, we lose something in that process. And one of the big concerns I have with AI is, yes, something like that's going to happen again. And I don't want to prejudge the future—what people will decide about where they want this technology automating decisions and where they want the human element in. But what I strongly feel is that, as a society, we're not being invited into that decision. And that decision is being made by very few companies and entities who themselves have proven themselves to have a very limited understanding of these subtle elements of society.On the great AI fallacy22:17: I think that the great AI fallacy was that we built anything that was going to adapt to us and accommodate us. When we hadn't, it was just more automation of things that humans had to do or could do in the past; but humans then had to accommodate this automation in order to make the best use of it.Debunking the myth of AI as infallible, all-seeing, and dominating31:38: One of the problems with the international conversation now is that it's conflating these two things. It's like the thing that appears intelligent is being intelligent through copying our own evolution, our cultural ideas, but then people are assuming that alongside that it has this characteristic of always getting things right, which is just not true because these shortcuts and heuristics it's using are our shortcuts and heuristics, which we know can fail in different circumstances.What’s the role of software engineers in the emergence of AI?55:09: So, this modern scribe is the software engineer in terms of the modern scribe, the person who can translate human ideas into things that can be on machines. So it's almost an advance in terms of the computer's powerful technology; it's actually an unpicking of the democratization of information technology.  Because as more and more of our understanding of the world is stored in machines, we're entering a world where it's harder for lawyers and accountants, etc., to access the machine. But this latest wave of technology offers the potential to put that right, because this latest wave makes it possible for a regular human to talk to a computer. 

Historically, how were narratives used around race, species, and the beliefs of Western civilization? What have been the contemporary implications for those earlier societal beliefs?Stefanos Geroulanos is the director of the Remarque Institute, a professor of history at New York University, and the author of several books. His latest book is called The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins. Greg and Stefanos discuss the complexities of defining human nature and the role of prehistory in understanding humanity's origins. Stefanos explores the ongoing debates about human progress, the impact of scientific discoveries like new fossils, and the culturally loaded interpretations of those findings. They also discuss how perspectives on indigenous populations and humanity's past are shaped by evolving scientific interpretations and narrative constructions, highlighting the intersection of science and politics in the research of human origins.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:TacitusCharles DarwinJean-Jacques RousseauThomas HobbesNapoleon ChagnonThe Dawn of EverythingJane GoodallMax MüllerMaurice OlenderRaymond DartNeanderthalThe Clan of the Cave BearGustav Victor Rudolf BornMemento moriOzymandiasAdam SmithGuest Profile:Stefanos-Geroulanos.comFaculty Profile at NYUHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human OriginsTransparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the PresentThe Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a ConceptAn Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French ThoughtThe Problem of the FetishThe Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great WarStaging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual HistoryThe Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of IdeasPower and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of HistoryWritings on MedicineKnowledge of LifeSelected Writings: On Self-Organization, Philosophy, Bioethics, and JudaismEpisode Quotes:Understanding who we are as humans is key to recognizing our differences47:37: If we can begin to admit that we are people who are culturally fundamentally, economically fundamentally different—our lemons come from half a world away, the meat that we consume from another half a world away, and so on. If we come around to understanding that our family structures, our relationships, our religious questions are structured in a different form, that our world is technologically bound, and that ultimately, one way or another, we have biological connections, but even our microbiomes must be fundamentally different from what ancient microbiomes were, then we will not end up having this need to say, "Here's where it's all begun."Recognizing fundamental problems in our story opens paths beyond human origins research54:49: Recognizing that there have been fundamental problems with a story is one path to recognizing that some of the things we believe in, and some of the hopes we want set, are not necessarily bound by that story entirely, nor were they ever necessarily or entirely bound by that story. I don't think that moral arguments would have ever utterly depended on human origins research.How human origins research helped overcome traditional views02:53: Human origins became really key at several stages, and at each of those stages, something absolutely current or something truly urgent was in play. Some of these moments had to do with overcoming traditional religious answers. Others had to do with an overcoming of ideas of human nature, so that certain kinds of stability of human nature and so on. Let's not pretend that they simply disappeared, but they did become secondary. And so human origins research came to fill that void. And in some respects, that's a real advance. And in some respects, that's a problem.Two stories that helped convince people about evolution44:40: I kept thinking, in some way, whether these stories of prehistory helped convince people about evolution. And I really thought that there were two of them that did. One was the bit that we were saying before about the thin veneer—that people came to use the expression so much and to believe there is a continuity between our antiquity and now. Not simply between another, meaning an indigenous person somewhere, but that person was a reflection of who we were. And that helped create the broader belief in human continuity. But the other one was this sense about a renaissance, that people would have to somehow come to this astonishing realization that their body is made of hundreds of thousands, millions of years, which is a story that they couldn't think of without these ruins within. 

The long-held dominant narrative about evolution is that it works like a tree. But as science has advanced in the last century, the idea of a family tree might not tell the full story anymore. Evolutionary biologist David P. Mindell is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the author of The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution which explores the concept of horizontal evolution alongside traditional Darwinian vertical evolution.Greg and David discuss the importance of creating an updated narrative for evolutionary biology, the intricate nature of hybridization and horizontal gene transfer, the ethical implications of gene editing, and horizontal evolution’s potential application in medicine, agriculture, and public health. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Charles DarwinRichard DawkinsÖtziSimon SchwendenerAndreas Franz Wilhelm SchimperFrederick GriffithGregor MendelGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteMuseum of Vertebrate Zoology WebsiteHis Work:The Network of Life: A New View of EvolutionEpisode Quotes:Why horizontal evolution matters for understanding life35:07: We really have to rethink what are the major mechanisms of evolution for all of life, not just what we see in animals or animals and plants. And this is why I think there's been some resistance to this idea that horizontal evolution really is highly consequential. It's just that we tend still to be human-centric, then animal-centric, and then maybe animal- and plant-centric. But if we really want to understand the evolution of all of life, then we can see that horizontal evolution is a big deal. There's both still vertical and horizontal, but we can't neglect the horizontal evolution from the basic, the most basic narrative, especially for the public, if we want them to understand how evolution operates.How important is an overarching narrative in making sense of new discoveries?07:37: Narrative is so important because, especially for the public, we understand stories. We're kind of wired to understand a story. And when you get the outlines of a story, you get a lot more information than just the basics of the story. You get new information, and you can plug it into the story as well. So having a narrative that is squared with our best science is valuable because it informs our understanding of evolutionary biology overall.The power of decentralized evolution in rapid change14:08: I talk in the book [The Network of Life] about inheritance when you're talking about how horizontal evolution can be decentralized. This is a powerful concept because they are supposed to have pros and cons of decentralization, but one of the advantages of it is its rapid change and rapid innovation. And this certainly can be advantageous for organisms, particularly when they're in a changeable environment, to suddenly get a new set of genes that have already been honed for millions of years in some other organism. If you can manage, if an organism can, if those can be expressed, and they are potentially useful, that's a way to get much faster adaptation than single base pair substitutions, which is what you usually see between parents and progeny.Can we use horizontal evolution to our benefit—wisely?41:50: Humans will be doing more and more forms of hybridizations or tinkering with life forms. If we can find some that carry particular functions that humans are interested in and talk briefly about bacteria that have the ability to remediate environmental toxins, this is something most everybody agrees could be a good thing, or bacteria that are capable of producing energy, and so we will eventually be using horizontal evolution to our benefit. You know, the question is, can we do it wisely enough?

When COVID-19 hit, many predictions were made about how the global pandemic would impact the macroeconomy. Some of those predictions were accurate, some of them turned out to be false alarms. But when business leaders need to make strategic decisions with macroeconomic forecasts in mind, how do they tell the truth from the doomsaying? Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak is the global chief economist at Boston Consulting Group. He also leads the BCG’s Center for Macroeconomics and regularly contributes to publications like the Harvard Business Review and Fortune.com. His book, Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk delves into strategic ways business leaders can assess macroeconomic risk in the face of events like a global pandemic, war, or even presidential elections.Philipp and Greg discuss the necessity for today’s executives to understand the macroeconomy, a new approach to judging macroeconomic risk, and why conventional models of the past might not be the best predictor for the macroeconomy’s future. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Ludwig von MisesFriedrich HayekJohn Maynard KeynesThe Phillips Curve Thucydides TrapGuest Profile:Professional Profile at Boston Consulting GroupLinkedIn ProfileHis Work:Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic RiskEpisode Quotes:Technology fuels productivity growth31:53: What's important to recognize is that technology is only the fuel of productivity growth. That's what we call in the book [Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms]; it's the fuel, but you also need the spark. You need firms to actually embrace the technology and put it to use. And the spark—that's the tight labor market. When the availability of labor is low or when the price point is too high, that's when you first nudge firms and later force firms to replace their labor needs with technology.How are leadership and macroeconomics connected?06:30: Most leadership is about coming to a conviction of what the future will be like and adjusting actions around that conviction. Macro is no different, and the more we treat macroeconomics as a science, the worse the outcome will be.How do we decide the optimal amount of history we ought to incorporate into our way of thinking about the world?25:40: History has great case studies. It shows often coherent drivers that illuminate important parts of the story. But history is always idiosyncratic, and so applying it, extrapolating, or copy-pasting from history is exceedingly difficult, all the way to the sort of inevitability of the great power war. It's simply not true that a rising rival power always leads to great power conflict. I mean, most obviously, Britain was displaced by the U.S., and it didn't come to a head, or like a war or conflict in that sense. So, if you look at the patterns of some of these predictions, it fails right there in the sense that there never is a sort of template-like use of history. All of it is rather idiosyncratic, and that makes it both beautiful and treacherous as an analytical tool.Navigating distractions with a strategic perspective49:19: It's so easy to be distracted and go down every rabbit hole the financial press will lay out for you. Every data point is spun into disaster. For every true crisis, many false alarms. And how do we learn to navigate that with more calm and, frankly, a better experience? Well, it's by learning about that more strategic picture of how the thing works.

How is technology disrupting on-the-job learning? What do we lose from outsourcing the work of novices to technological tools, and what do we gain? How do some surgical students make surprising decisions about where to do their residencies?Matt Beane is an assistant professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also the author of The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines.Greg and Matt discuss the impact of technology on work and tacit knowledge transmission, exploring topics like the economics of knowledge transfer, the necessity of Matt’s 3 C’s - Challenge, Complexity, and Connection - for skill development, and the implications of AI and remote work on learning. Matt also discusses his extensive field research and offers his ideas on improving learning and mentorship.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:TechneMontessori educationThe Coddling of the American MindMachine learninghttps://www.oneusefulthing.org/Nicholas BloomThomas MertonEthan MollickGuest Profile:MattBeane.comFaculty Profile at UCSBLinkedInSocial Profile on XProfile on Thinkers50His Work:The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent MachinesWild World of Work SubstackDon't Let AI Dumb You DownEpisode Quotes:​​Is connection strictly required for human connection?40:28: Connection is the third of the three C's, strictly required for healthy skill development. And it is a warm bond of trust and respect between human beings, which we don't often think of as integral to developing skill, but that's integral in two ways. Practically, one is access. If you want to get better at something and I'm an expert, you have to earn my trust and respect to get a shot. I have to give you the job. I have to allow you in the room, whatever. But the other one is motivation, right? Yeah, humans like to produce effects in the world, and that's part of the motivation for skill, but part of it is status. Part of it is feeling like you fit in the social order. And so it is just intrinsically meaningful for us to earn the trust and respect of people who are better at something than us.The novice is critical inflow for the expert29:19: The novice is a critical inflow for the expert, a disturbing force. It's annoying, but it's also necessary to keep that expert sharp and ready to deal with today's challenges, not yesterday's.How does healthy skill development occur?23:38: Healthy skill development makes you robust to circumstances for machine learning and for human learning. The way that occurs is that as you progress towards skill in a particular area, you digest and consume collateral work. You make sense of your environment, the other jobs, tasks, skills, and data that are flowing through what you're doing.On rules and discretion25:39: Rules are useful, and this has to do with this complexity bit, like when and how. It's not just, do I engage with complexity? It's when and how. Before game time? During the game? Definitely not. But even in advance, there are numerous fine-grained different ways of, when is the right time to consume conceptual knowledge, including formalized rules and guidelines for how to do the work. The answer is, basically, don't read the manual before you start to try to use the VCR. You know, minimum exposure. Go try. That's a better time to rock back towards the conceptual.

How important is creative thinking and the fusion of business and art in today's ever-evolving business landscape? What are the challenges of navigating uncharted futures with the role of AI?Amy Whitaker teaches Arts Administration at New York University and is also the author of three books, including Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses and Economics of Visual Art: Market Practice and Market Resistance.Greg and Amy discuss the value of integrating artistic mindsets into business environments. Their conversation delves into blockchain, NFTs, and the democratization of art, alongside anecdotes about the resilience and resourcefulness required for creative endeavors. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Saras SarasvathySylvain BureauLeonardo da VinciNina KatchadourianJulia CameronJenny OdellKatalin KarikóRoger BannisterDonald WinnicottDavid Foster WallaceJohn MaedaSol LeWittChristo and Jeanne-ClaudeGuest Profile:AmyWhitaker.netFaculty Profile for NYU SteinhardtCreative Leadership Guild InstituteSocial Profile on InstagramSocial Profile on XLinkedInHer Work:Amazon Author PageArt Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and BossesEconomics of Visual Art: Market Practice and Market ResistanceMuseum Legs: Fatigue and Hope in the Face of ArtEpisode Quotes:Can you be an artist in today's world without having to think about monetization and becoming part of the market?11:21: I think that as a person, you have to think about being a citizen, and you have to think about being an economic actor. And I think that's true for artists. And I think it's that much more challenging for artists because artists are in a particular position of being both producers and investors, where they have to cover their day-to-day expenses, but they also have to take risks and show us things that are possible, where we are not able to perceive value until many years later, and that value is contestable. We wouldn't all agree on what it is.Art and sustainable value creation 10:24: We have to assume that everyone is an artist and that everyone has the potential to be an artist and think that that sort of dignity position has a lot of legs for us in terms of what our society can do. And what it means to have real sustainable value creation in our economy. I think it also is the most hopeful thing that I can come up with, with regard to the body politic as well.The intersection of business and personal expression45:25: I think that there's a way that people can understand business through their own ethos, as a person, and, in parallel, can relate to art and creativity without feeling like they have to be, you know, wearing a beret, the letter sort of like bringing your whole self to work and showing up in your particular way. And the envelope is doing that structurally.

Much of the field of economics derives its theories from a subset of Adam Smith’s philosophy found in the Wealth of Nations. But are economists overlooking other parts of Adam Smith’s teachings that could explain more about human behavior and economics?  Nobel-prize winning economist Vernon L. Smith is an emeritus professor of economics and law at Chapman University. His books like Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms and Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century explore how human behavior shapes economics.Vernon and Greg discuss the role Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments plays in understanding behavioral economics, Vernon’s early supply and demand experiments, and how his work shaped the field of experimental economics. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Adam Smith StoicismAlfred MarshallEdward ChamberlinMilton FriedmanKevin A McCabeCharles HoltBetsy HoffmanGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Chapman UniversityNobel Prize Winner BioHis Work:Economics of Markets: Neoclassical Theory, Experiments, and Theory of Classical Price DiscoveryRationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological FormsHumanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century A Life of Experimental Economics, Volume I: Forty Years of DiscoveryA Life of Experimental Economics, Volume II: The Next Fifty YearsEpisode Quotes:Do humans learn economics through experience, not theory?39:09: People don't get the economics right by thinking about it. They get it right by actually participating in markets and getting a feel for what's going on. And I argue that humans are very good, once they do that. Sure, they can be fooled. And they do a lot of crazy things in a new market before they've acquired experience, but they adapt very well. And so, that equilibrium concepts are relevant. But the behavior is very much experience-oriented. And so, they get there through experiential learning. You see more than just abstract analysis and thinking about it.Perspective is at the foundation of the theorem of moral sentiments12:29: [The relationship] Perspective is at the foundation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. That's what he's [Adam Smith] talking about—sentiments. An important part of it is fellow feeling.Gratitude influences sacrifice and motivates cooperation48:16: Gratitude creates indebtedness. And so people may have self-interested motivations, but they also have this motivation to get along with others. And so this proposition predicts, in the trust game, that people are sacrificing; they're taking less reward in order to do what they believe is right, to treat this person.Why is Vernon championing Adam Smith’s principles in the modern way of thinking about economics?56:45: So that's why I'm a champion of trying to get that pattern of thinking and Adam Smith's principles into the modern way of thinking in economics. Economics and psychology, and in economics, because the Theorem of Sentiments was a contribution to social psychology that just never took hold. It was another hundred years, you see, before psychology started to do anything. And it was the beginning of the 20th century before psychology became very prominent. And then it was individual psychology, not social psychology. I think Adam Smith would find that strange.

Just like all people, scientists have their own morals and political ideologies. But how do those values influence their work? What are the potential ramifications of science mixing with politics? John Staddon is an emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and the author of numerous books. His works like Science in an Age of Unreason and Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work, and Pretends to Work examine the history of the scientific field and the challenges it faces today from becoming overly entangled with politics. John and Greg discuss the importance of distinguishing facts from values in scientific inquiry, how scientific consensus is often mistaken for truth, and the need for scientists to maintain objectivity despite societal pressures. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is modern society abandoning the distinction between balance and fact?04:59: Science itself cannot be racist. A fact is either true or false. There’s no moral element to simply a fact. There are younger people now, who simply cannot accept that a fact is just a fact. Now, you may react to it one way or another depending on your value system, but the fact by itself is not racist or not racist. So, this is a very serious problem, I think, in modern society because a lot of people have completely abandoned this distinction between fact and value. And it's wrecking, not nuclear physics or electronics, but it's wrecking the human sciences. Suppressing a fact can be just a harmful as promoting a lie07:04: Logic tells you suppressing a fact can be just as harmful as promoting a lie, and indeed, suppressing a fact will often lead to promoting a lie as a substitute for it. So, you've just gotta keep them [emotions and judgment of the truth or falsity of facts] separate.When uncertainty is the only honest answer in science13:54: One should be more skeptical of social science because it's much harder to obtain a definitive result. [14:13]: So the really only honest response is to say, "I don't know." The problem is that society doesn't want to say, "I don't know." Are there too many scientists and too many scientific journals, with too much effort invested in the sciences?22:19: Success in science, a lot of it's luck. You happen to be in an area where there's a problem that can be solved, and the opportunity comes, and you solve it. But it's certainly not true that by sheer effort you can find a fertile area. So that's one problem. The other problem, well, there are a number of points to make. One other one is that science is not a manufacturing process. It's like widgets, you know. If you want to double the number of people making widgets, you've got to double the number of widgets. Science is not like that. It has to be solvable problems. But if you double the number of scientists and the number of available problems is not doubled, you've got a problem because they've got to find something to do, and so on, and you're liable to generate as much noise as knowledge. Show Links:Recommended Resources:J.D. Bernal The Art of Scientific Investigation by William Ian BeveridgeThe Descent of Man by Charles DarwinTrofim LysenkoJerry CoyneRichard DawkinsAlvin WeibergB. F. SkinnerQueen Victoria by Lytton Strachey Alan GreenspanGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Duke UniversityHis Work:Science in an Age of UnreasonThe New Behaviorism: Second Edition Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work, and Pretends to WorkUnlucky Strike: Private Health and the Science, Law and Politics of SmokingThe Englishman: Memoirs of a PsychobiologistAdaptive Dynamics: The Theoretical Analysis of Behavior The Malign Hand of the Markets: The Insidious Forces on Wall Street that are Destroying Financial Markets – and What We Can Do About it

Ellen J. Langer is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She is also the author of several books, including The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, Mindfulness, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, and The Power of Mindful Learning.Ellen and Greg discuss the profound influence of mindfulness on decision-making and work-life balance, while challenging the illusions of control, certainty, and predictability. Ellen also breaks down the extraordinary world of placebos, illustrating how mindfulness can have a placebo-like effect on health, and how our beliefs and thoughts can significantly impact our physical health. They also talk about mindfulness in education and healthcare, underscoring its invaluable benefits for patients, doctors, and individuals in general.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On the importance of showing-up07:34: If you're going to do something, you should show up for it. And when you do show up for it, everything is better. So as you're actively noticing, you look alive. People find you more attractive. When you're being mindful, people see you as charismatic, authentic, and certainly attractive. Not only that, it makes you healthier, it's fun, and people are going to find you more appealing, but it actually leaves its imprint in the things that we do. They're just better. So if you're painting, playing a musical instrument, writing a report, no matter what you're doing, if you show up for the activity, you're going to produce something better. To my mind, there's no reason, once people truly understand what this work is about, that you would not try to change your ways in some sense and be mindful virtually all the time.Mindfulness is a way of being03:24: People need to understand that mindfulness has nothing to do with meditation. Meditation is not about mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you engage in to result in post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness, as we study it, is immediate. And it's not a practice. It's a way of being.Why is going from being mindless to mindful is hard?24:31: Going from being mindless to mindful is hard because when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. So that's why the instruction is, "Stop and smell the roses and be in the present." It's sweet but empty because when you're not there, you don't know that you're not there. So you can't fix it, but if you were to throw yourself into some new activity without worrying about being evaluated, and you feel how good it feels to be totally engaged, then just don't accept anything less than that.On being mindful of shifting point of view11:48: When people are mindless, they're more or less acting like automatons. And when you're mindful, you have a general sense of what you want to do. You can have goals and routines, but they're guiding what you're doing. They're not overly determining what you're doing. So I say to my students, "Okay, let's say, on your way to class today, you run into Michelle Obama. And she takes such a liking to you for who knows what reason. And she says, 'Do you want to go have a cup of coffee?'" It would be crazy for you to say, "No, I have to go to class." All right, but I think mindlessly, especially the A students, that's just what they would do, rather than say, "Well, circumstances now are so unusual, I should take advantage of it." And so when you're mindful because you're there, you get to take advantage of opportunities to which you'd otherwise be blind, and you avoid the danger that has not yet arisen.Show Links:Recommended Resources:SocratesEpictetusPrimingThe Counterclockwise StudyFrank A. BeachGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at HarvardEllen J. Langer's WebsiteEllen J. Langer on LinkedInEllen J. Langer on XHer Work:The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic HealthMindfulnessCounterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of PossibilityThe Power of Mindful LearningOn Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity

There’s a significant mismatch between our ancient brain's capabilities and the rapid advancements in technology. Simply put, our brains just can’t keep up in the digital age. But what does that impact look like from the brain’s point of view? What’s really going on with the neurotransmitters when we take in all that information? Richard Cytowic is a professor of neurology at George Washington University. His books like Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload and The Man Who Tasted Shapes examine the effects of technology on the brain and explore the rare but very real phenomenon of synesthesia. Richard and Greg chat about the energy economics of brain function, the inherent limitations of multitasking, and the benefits of a digital detox. They also explore synesthesia, how human neurology is uniquely wired for metaphor, and how babies might all have some form of synesthesia early on. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why multitasking is exhausting your brain04:05: Our brains today are no different from those of our distant ancestors. I mean, they have not evolved one iota, whereas technology has been advancing ten thousand, a million times more than that. So I do think we've reached the point where we're asking it to do what it simply can't do anymore. The brain has a fixed level of energy that it can use, and no amount of diet, exercise, supplements, or Sudoku puzzles can possibly increase that. So when you're asking it to multitask or to keep switching attention from one thing to another, you're asking it to do things that it was never designed to do, that it can't do very well, if at all. And so that's why people are burned out and fatigued.Why are people so concerned about what they put in their bodies, but not about what their mind consumes?35:13: People are so concerned about what they put in their bodies—non-GMO, vegan, no sugar, no artificial colorings. But why aren't they as picky about what they ingest through their senses? I mean, the mental garbage that we take in is certainly less harmful than the occasional cheeseburger and Twinkie. So people just don't think in terms of, "What is my sensory diet?" And again, I'm so unusual because I'm thinking neurologically and neuropsychologically, and most people never have the opportunity or the inclination to think about the way that they think—this metacognition kind of thing.Quiet is an essential nutrient 15:03: Quiet is the antidote to everything. I call it an essential nutrient. We need it to give ourselves space to think. And part of it has to do, I think, with people feeling that they don't like solitude. They think being alone is an odious, difficult state. But I say that solitude has. Loneliness wants. And so if you can distinguish between the two—that here, sitting in a park with a tree and a green space, and I'm quite happy, eating my lunch here in solitude—then this is a positive experience for me. I'm giving myself a nourishing experience. But if I'm thinking, Oh my God, I'm all alone. There's nobody to talk to. I don't know what to do; you're doing a number on yourself and freaking yourself out.The iPad as babysitter29:52: The iPad is the worst babysitter in the world. Look at a baby when they get to be on the move and start crawling. They put everything in their mouths. They're touching, feeling, and having a visual apprenticeship with the world. And when you put this screen full of mediated images in front of them, those characters, if they're Disneyfied or not, don't engage with the child in the same way that a real human being does. They talk at a child. They don't talk with a child. Whereas an adult who's playing peek-a-boo, and "so big," and other kinds of things like that, they're speaking to the child in normal adult language. And these kids are picking things up like sponges, believe me, and that's what they need to have. They need to have that one-on-one interaction.Show Links:Recommended Resources:What percentage of your brain do you use? | TED-EdWilliam JamesClifford Nass Her (film)Bernard-Henri LévyThe Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David SaxDaphne MaurerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at George Washington UniversityProfessional WebsiteLinkedIn ProfileHis Work:Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory OverloadSynesthesia The Man Who Tasted ShapesWednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia

When does predicting the future become a science and not a fantasy? What can be learned from forecasts throughout the ages and across different industries? What does the future of energy look like, given certain unchangeable limitations of physics themselves?Mark P. Mills is the founder and executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics and the author of the books The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s, Digital Cathedrals, and Work in the Age of Robots. Greg and Mark discuss the complexities and pitfalls of forecasting, why we often get it wrong, and the various types of forecasters. Mark explains the interconnectedness of energy, computing, and infrastructure, arguing against a simplistic view of an energy transition and highlighting the intricate dance of innovation and efficiency across centuries. He also touches on the future impact of AI, the importance of complementary investments for technological growth, and the profound phase changes society is currently undergoing. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On forecasting and the future of technology06:04: In the book [The Cloud Revolution], what I chose to do was a framing of a forecast with technology that was very specific, and which I think can be highly predictive and accurate. And this is not about how much money people will make or what company will succeed, but if you want to forecast the next decade on technology, not about human nature, not about wars, not about who gets elected, those things all matter because the world is dynamic, and these things interact. Economies matter; they affect our ability to build things, fund things. So, an economy that's shrinking can delay the forecast of a new product or service because if the new product or service requires new capital, new infrastructure, and capital's expensive, then the actual emergence of that system might take longer than you thought, but it'll still happen. It'll just happen later.Efficiency fuels demand, not reduces it44:15: The idea, which we can find better and implement better through compute communications and AI, means that we have not tapped all the efficiencies, systems, and supply chains. There's enormous efficiency to be had. But efficiency creates demand; it doesn't kill demand…This complete misunderstanding of efficiency is a failure to understand how humans operate, how we live our lives, and what we like to do.Why big airplanes won't fly on lithium batteries40:39: When the technologies are new, there are two things about them: we haven't figured out how to make them at physics limits yet. Our knowledge is weak. We haven't refined the engineering because it's a new technology. So, as you do that, you approach physics limits. And this is what's going on now with batteries. You can't store more energy in a lithium battery than exists in the lithiated chemicals. You can't. I mean, it's the lithium atom. It's one of the most energetic atoms on the periodic table. But lithiated chemicals have one-fifth the energy per pound that hydrocarbons do. So, hydrocarbons start with a 50-fold. That's a pretty big advantage in energy per pound. So, what you would do then is make machines to extract the energy per pound, which is why big airplanes are not going to have lithium batteries. They'll carry them, but they're not going to fly with them. Little ones can because the advantage that the hydrocarbons have in the physics of the universe we live in is so much greater. So, it doesn't matter how cheap the lithium is. If it were free, it wouldn't change the fact that the fuel for the airplane would weigh more than the airplane because it's not dense enough.Systems have inertia33:48: Systems have inertia, economic systems, and financial systems. Physical systems all have inertia. It's a physics term, but it's anchored in how the universe really operates. You can't change big things quickly, except by explosions, right? In social economic terms and physical terms. You can change things quickly and explosively, but explosions are destructive, whether it's a financial, economic, or physical system. So, the velocity of change first begins with the size of the system you're trying to change. Show Links:Recommended Resources:1939 New York World's FairFuture ShockPeter DruckerIrving FisherKenneth J. GergenMalthusianismSimon–Ehrlich wagerFirst Jewish–Roman WarRobert SolowThe Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic ProgressGuest Profile:LinkedInProfessional Profile on National Center for Energy AnalyticsMark P. Mills Tech-Pundit.comProfile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020sDigital CathedralsWork in the Age of RobotsForbes Articles

How do you measure the quality of management at a company? And how much do management practices impact a firm’s overall performance? Nicholas Bloom is a professor of economics at Stanford University and co-director of the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research on working from home and management practices has been published in numerous scientific journals, including the Journal of Political Economy and Nature. Nicholas and Greg discuss the historical trends of productivity growth, why management is often overlooked as a technological advance, and the challenges of measuring and improving management quality. Nicholas also shares some of his key management tips from his years of studying firms across the world. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is high uncertainty an opportunity for big returns?43:42: High uncertainty is where the money is. When life's uncertain, that's where the profits have been made. Kind of Warren Buffett/VCs. A good example of that would be the dot-com boom. So, in the dot-com boom, everyone knew in the early 2000s, look, the internet's going to be a big thing. And it turns out it was a big thing. You just don't know which bit and when and how. And so the view is, look, if we invest in the internet, we have a lot of these implicit options on it. And if it takes off, these are valuable. If they’re not, we wasted our money, but no more. And so, there's also kind of what I call exploratory investment when demand or markets are uncertain. You do, on the other hand, want to spend some kind of R&D-ish type money or open subsidiaries or open up a website or whatever. And it's like placing a bet. It's like investment in equity, if you think about it. And if it works out well, great. You've 10x your money. And if it doesn't, you've lost your cash.The key for hybrid work is coordination35:53: Hybrid is coordination. So, it sounds obvious, but if you're on a hybrid plan, whereby, say, you've got to be in the office three days a week, you want to make sure it's the same three days as your team because the thing that sends people mad is coming in and then spending all day on Zoom because everyone else is at home.Why do owners struggle to recognize great management?23:12: So, part of the problem why management isn't great is that owners don't appreciate it or aren't aware of it. The other hard part of it is that it's intangible, so it's hard to buy it. So, you have ten candidates; they all claim they're great managers. How do you know? It's a tough thing to actually turn. Ten consulting firms—every consulting firm claims that it will make you so much money, but whether they do after the event is much less obvious.Do government-owned organizations struggle with managing underperformance?16:34: You find in the data, on average, government-owned organizations tend not to be very well managed, and where they're particularly poor is what I'll call dealing with underperformance. So, if you look at our data, government organizations can be reasonably good at collecting data and having targets, and they can be—they're okay but not great on incentives if you perform well. They're just terrible at dealing with underperformers, and it's partly just politically—it’s painful for politicians; partly they're heavily unionized; partly there's typically also a reason why a government owns a firm.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Frederick Winslow TaylorGeorge StiglerDanaher CorporationunSILOed episode with John RobertsunSILOed episode with Lynda GrattonunSILOed episode with Gene Kim & Steven SpearEconomic Policy Uncertainty IndexRobert PindyckWorld Management SurveyGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityProfessional Profile on LinkedInNick Bloom on XHis Work:The Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research Research papersGoogle Scholar page

Women have been systematically marginalized throughout history. However, new research shows a growing gender gap in the other direction. Today, men may face many disadvantages regarding education and the workforce. So, how should society address the disadvantages of both women and men in a nuanced and inclusive way?Richard Reeves founded the American Institute for Boys and Men after writing the book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. His work on class and inequality can also be found in publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic. Richard and Greg discuss the current disadvantages faced by men, the historical context of gender inequality, and potential solutions like “redshirting” boys in education to better serve their developmental needs. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Zero-sum thinking undermines gender progress for all03:41: It feels to some people like it is zero-sum, and that, somehow, to acknowledge the problems of boys and men is to dilute the necessary work that still needs to be done for women and girls. You sort of have to choose, pick a side, or certainly this was the experience that I was warned about, which is that it's just really hard to elevate the problems of boys and men without somehow falling into the trap of being seen as anti-women and girls or anti the progress that they need. And so that zero-sum thinking around gender is a big part of the problem too.Nature matters, but nurture is key in expressing our differences49:14: The thing I find most frustrating about this whole ridiculous nature-nurture debate is that acknowledging some role for nature doesn't make nurture less important. It makes it more important because that is how we learn how to express these natural differences.Are women excelling more educationally?12:26: I think a lot of women have inherited this message: that if you want to get ahead, you're going to have to work even harder. It's almost like an immigrant mindset. It's like, you're going to have to be even better, work even harder. And so that message, I think, has really affected at least one or two generations of women who just seem to have much greater aspiration educationally than boys and men do. And that's playing out in the data.Not a lack of rights, structural shifts leave men unmoored and vulnerable14:25: There are real problems facing boys and men in different areas, but it's not because of a lack of rights, and it's not because of discrimination; it's a result of a series of quite big structural changes in the economy and society that have left a lot of men kind of feeling unmoored, uncertain, and vulnerable, and that problem is just a different problem.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Claudia Goldin | unSILOed Joseph HenrichDavid DemingManhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs by Josh HawleyJordan Peterson The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael YoungDarrin McMahonGuest Profile:Fellow Profile at Brookings InstituteProfessional WebsiteAmerican Institute for Boys and MenHis Work:Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about ItDream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About ItRedshirt the Boys | The AtlanticStop Pretending You’re Not Rich | The New York Times

Is there a secret recipe for start-up success? Probably not. But if you take a close enough look at some of the massive success stories like Twitter and Lyft, patterns start to emerge. Venture capitalists Mike Maples, Jr. and Peter Ziebelman pull back the curtain and examine how start-ups go from seedling ideas to billion-dollar companies in their book, Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future.Mike, Peter, and Greg discuss the roles that insight and implementation play in determining a start-up’s chance at success, how investors distinguish between genius and crazy, and why the best founders are like artists.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Distinguishing idea vs. insight25:33: [Mike Maples Jr.] A lot of people confuse risk and uncertainty. And so, like, I might have an idea in an existing market that there's a clear need for, but it's a bounded upside idea. But I can connect the dots between the idea, customers wanting it, and a successful business. I might, on the other hand, have an idea that's like Justin TV, right? Which is a reality 24/7 streaming TV show, which is crazy online. But it embodied a lot of inflections and insight. It was a terrible idea, but a great opportunity. And so what we're interested in is not certainty about the future, because if we're going after a non-consensus idea, if we have real insight, we can't know we're certain yet. All we can know is that we're non-consensus. Just because we don't know how the dots will forward connect doesn't mean they won't forward connect. And it doesn't mean that the expected value of the upside isn't higher. So that's what we kind of encourage people to say: just because you don't know how success will happen doesn't mean that it's not way better to pursue that path.The crucial elements that contribute to startup’s breakthrough06:10: [Peter Ziebelman] There's still a lot of luck and perhaps intuition and guesswork to determine whether you're going to find a breakthrough or build a breakthrough. But having said that, we do believe there are elements that can tip the balance—inflections. Another element is seeing that the entrepreneur has insight, something they know to be true that others do not yet believe, and we believe insights are one of the things that explain a lot about startups.Being a founder is like being an artist52:34: [Mike Maples Jr.] A lot of people think about what type of business person is an entrepreneur. And what I've come to believe is that the right way to think about it is they're more like an artist than they are like an engineer, a salesperson, or anything else. [53:06] And by that, I mean two things. First of all, artists notice something that other people don't notice, right? And then the other thing that artists do is convince people to abandon their logic. And so, like, no rational employee would join a startup. No rational customer would buy from a startup. No rational investor would invest in a startup. [53:45] So the founder has to convince all of us to abandon logic and go on a journey where we're 85 percent likely to not succeed. And so the best founders I've ever met have those. Attributes of the artist, and they have the artistry to notice from their sensitivity, and they have the artistry to persuade and convince people. They have the artistry to notice from their sensitivity, and they have the artistry to persuade and convince people. How does a founder balance persistence with openness to new data and insights?21:06: [Mike Maples Jr.] If you have the right insight, when we talk about pivoting, your insight, like in basketball, is like your pivot foot. You hold it planted firm, and you move your body by either modifying your implementation, modifying the audience that you talk to, or some combination. But if you have to leave your pivot foot, you're no longer attached to anything as a startup, right? You might as well start over. You might as well try a new idea or just give up. And so that's where I think you reconcile it. You want to be flexible in your experimentation of navigating your insight to the desperate, but you want to be fixed about what you believe is different about the future.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Hamilton HelmerVilfredo Pareto Reed HastingsScott Cook Justin.tvFounders FundVinod KhoslaGuest Profile:Mike Maples, Jr. Professional Profile at FloodgateMike Maples, Jr. Podcast, Pattern BreakersPeter Ziebelman Professional Profile at Palo Alto Venture PartnersPeter Ziebelman Faculty Profile at Stanford Graduate School of BusinessTheir Work:Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future

How does drawing from experiments and scientists on the fringes of science help all of science and strengthen the core? How does luck actually work? How did the early members of NASA treat scientists who made mistakes in the quest to reach the moon?Richard Wiseman is a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, a magician, performer, and the author of several books. Two of his latest titles are Moonshot: What Landing a Man on the Moon Teaches Us About Collaboration, Creativity, and the Mind-set for Success and Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives.Greg and Richard discuss Richard's unique career path, his popular books, and how psychology can have real-world applications. The conversation delves into various topics such as the public's fascination with luck, the importance of empirical research, and the psychology behind the successful teamwork that achieved the Apollo moon landings. Wiseman also shares insights from his background in magic and how it has influenced his understanding of human perception and deception. The episode highlights the need for applying psychological research to improve everyday life and the significant role of creativity and open-mindedness in both science and education.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why conservative thinking limits scientific innovation34:01: Organizations, I think, have become very conservative in terms of risk-taking, which is sort of sad for the next generation of students within science. I think we want to encourage people to be expansive thinkers, to have crazy ideas. Obviously, you need to find out whether they're true or not. But again, even within science, I think we're quite conservative. We want to encourage students to think in a certain way, to do science in a certain way, and so on. And I'm just rather pro the more maverick approach in some extent; the only students we have are those people that are good at passing exams. And I often think, I wonder what talent is out there that just happened to not be so good at passing exams—that maybe who have had creative, amazing ideas that would have changed the world, and they don't sit in our labs or in our universities because they're not the sort of people who want to sit in a hall and write something on a piece of paper.Why is creativity important in science?37:56: I'm so pro-creativity in science and getting people to think differently because that's where your good ideas are going to come from, and sometimes those people are not the ones that perform best in an exam hall. They're the ones who just want to get out there and change the world.What magic taught Richard about psychology50:47: Magic is incredibly important, and it shows you, fundamentally, that you can be very, very confident and very, very wrong. You know, when a magician shows you an empty box and makes something appear in it, the audience has to be 100 percent certain that there's nothing in that box. And they are 100 percent wrong because an object is going to appear in that box. So it should teach us a bit of humility as well.How Quirkology was born from a disappointing psychology experience21:06: Quirkology came about because psychology broke my heart a bit. People are astonishing—when you think of your friends, partners, and family, they're amazing, complex, and fun to talk about. They experience emotions, behave differently in crowds, do things that surprise you, do things that disappoint you, and so on. That kind of buzzy energy of humanity, which was the reason I got into psychology, I really just loved it. Then I'd open a psychology journal, and I just saw this dusty old paper that reduced that buzzing humanity to a number that wasn't very interesting, and I thought, there must be some interesting psychology out there; there has to be. And that was the path into quirkology, where it was all the quirky psychology that I love, some of which I've carried out myself.Show Links:Recommended Resources:William JamesNeo-FreudianismBayesian inferenceMalinowski, the Trobriand people and the Kula (anthropologyreview.org)Glynn LunneyApollo 1Apollo 11Christopher C. Kraft Jr.Inattentional blindness - WikipediaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of HertfordshireRichardWiseman.wordpress.comWikipedia PageSocial Profile on XSocial Profile on InstagramQuirkology YouTube PageHis Work:Amazon Author PageMoonshot: What Landing a Man on the Moon Teaches Us About Collaboration, Creativity, and the Mind-set for SuccessQuirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday LivesRip it Up: Forget Positive Thinking, it's Time for Positive ActionThe As If Principle: The Radically New Approach to Changing Your LifeThe Luck Factor: The Four Essential PrinciplesParanormality: The Science of the Supernatural59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a MinutePsychology: Why It MattersMagic in Theory: An Introduction to the Theoretical and Psychological Elements of ConjuringDeception & Self-Deception: Investigating Psychics

Are we a more addicted society now than ever before in history? And if that’s the case, is it because there are more things to be addicted to or has the thinking around addiction simply shifted in the last century? David Courtwright is an emeritus professor of history at the University of North Florida. His books like, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business and Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World examine the history and proliferation of drugs and addiction in society. David and Greg discuss the expansion of addiction from substances like alcohol and hard drugs to today's digital vices such as gaming and social media, how “limbic capitalism” is perpetuated by not only the manufacturers of these products but governments as well, and the history of society’s quest for pleasure. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is the rise in addictive behaviors more of a supply or demand phenomenon?08:27: I try to tell the story of “The Age of Addiction" in the context of a larger, big history story of the quest for pleasure. Because that's where this really comes from. I mean, human beings have always been looking to expand their repertoire of pleasures. And nothing wrong with that. Life is hard. Life has been hard. Life was even harder for our distant ancestors. And so that people should discover brewing, that they should discover tobacco, that they should discover psychoactive plants, and that they should use those for both pleasure and ritual purposes—none of this is surprising. And, in fact, the first chapters of the book show how there was a kind of expansion, throughout time, in the pleasure resources that were available.Addiction begins with exposure46:57: Nobody becomes addicted to anything unless they're exposed to it. And exposure varies with social and cultural circumstance...[48:35] So, social circumstance is a key variable in determining exposure to potentially addictive products.Are we living in the age of addiction?44:22: Addiction is socially constructed. It's something that expands over time, but it turns out there is a biological foundation for this. I was initially skeptical. [02:11] And I started looking into it, and the question was basically, is this just hype, or is this real? And the more I looked into it, and the more I studied the neuroscience behind it and the economics and the sociology of it, I became convinced that, yes, we are living in an age of addiction. Addiction is becoming more conspicuous, more commonplace, and more varied.Is there a historical parallel in American susceptibility to addiction, particularly with things like the internet?45:38: Vices are more likely to flourish in what I call bachelor societies. So, if you have a bunch of young, unmarried men congregated in a place—whether it's an army camp, frontier mining town, or cattle ranch—their behavioral patterns are going to be very different from a male of the same age who's, say, living in a residential neighborhood, married, and has a family. I mean, the indulgence in vice—the likelihood of indulging in what contemporaries would have called vice, like consorting with prostitutes, getting drunk in a saloon, et cetera—is much higher for the people in the unsupervised, unparented, competitive masculine group.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Volstead ActHarrison Narcotics Tax ActMichael MossSteven PinkerPareto PrincipleGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of North FloridaProfessional WebsiteHis Work:The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big BusinessForces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern WorldViolent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City

What factors influenced the development of early democracies, the role of technology in governance? Who came up with the concept of fairness in taxation, and the evolution of democratic institutions over time?David Stasavage is in the department of Politics at New York University, and also the author of several books. His latest book is titled The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today.Greg and David discuss the historical divergence between Europe and China in both economic and political terms. They explore themes such as the emergence of representative assemblies in Europe, the necessity of rulers to obtain consent and information, and the contrasting ability of Chinese rulers to tax without broad-based consent due to their developed bureaucratic systems. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is democracy on the rise, or on the decline in today's world?50:32: We're still in a position today, I think, where there's certainly a lot more people living under democracy than was the case in the early 19th century, right? And that's a very significant thing because, in the early 19th century, of course, we had sort of proto-democracies in some cases, and it then spread in Western Europe, but the rest of the world had been conquered by Europeans. And, pushed into having conqueror Europeans, colonizers weren't particularly eager in early stages to promote democratic institutions in areas that they colonized. In fact, sometimes they did away with indigenous democratic institutions. So that is why the book does say decline and then rise because, yes, there's some backtracking going on; it's serious, it's important, but there's been a pretty big rise all the same.The more you expand democracy’s meaning, the less meaningful it becomes26:59: The important thing to recognize about democracy is that the more you load on to the term, the less meaningful it becomes.The ripple effect of a bond default43:26: I think with today's economy, everybody recognizes that if you have a default—like, say, something on U.S. Treasuries—that's going to have massive, obviously massive, negative economic consequences. Whereas, if you think of England with those first few loans they issued in 1688, if they had been defaulted on, things wouldn't have been great in London, but it's not like there would have been some massive negative economic shock.England's balancing act—bureaucracy and democracy32:36: Chapter 9 of the book (The Decline and Rise of Democracy) is called "Why England Was Different," and different in the sense of having simultaneously pursued this sort of consensual route of governance, while also seeing over time a bureaucracy develop. So that today, when we think of democracy, we don't think in a modern democracy that bureaucracy is, I mean, apart from someone that wants to say, "Oh my God, we have to abolish the IRS because otherwise we'll be in, you know, a dictatorship," that we don't think of these two things as being opposites. We think, of course, we need a bureaucracy to run things because who else is going to do this on a daily basis in such a large republic?Show Links:Recommended Resources:Song dynastyMancur OlsonTacitusCharles I of EnglandCharlemagneMissus dominicusJames C. ScottYu the GreatDomesday BookQing dynastyTlaxcalaDanegeldQ.O.Tl A Romano-Canonical Maxim, ‘quod omnes tangit,’ in Bracton | Traditio | Cambridge CorePlena Potestas and Consent in Medieval Assemblies: A Study in Romano-Canonical Procedure and the Rise of Representation, 1150–1325 | Traditio | Cambridge CorePostal Service ActGuest Profile:Stasavage.comLinkedIn ProfileX ProfileWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to TodayStates of Credit: Size, Power, and the Development of European PolitiesTaxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and EuropePublic Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain 1688–1789The Political Economy of a Common Currency: The Cfa Franc Zone Since 1945Google Scholar Page

The fear of AI taking our jobs has been buzzing for years, but it’s not a new conversation. Technology has been shaking up industries and displacing workers since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.In this episode, Greg sits down with Carl Benedikt Frey, the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute, to dive deep into these shifts. As the Director of the Future of Work Programme and author of The Technology Trap, Frey sheds light on the historical and current impacts of automation, the Industrial Revolution, and the role of political power in technological progress. Together, they explore who wins and loses in the AI era and what history can teach us about the future. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Will AI drive long-term productivity or just short-term automation?46:21: If all that AI is about is automation, then the future of productivity simply depends on the potential scope of automation, so to speak, and that will then eventually peter off. Whereas if it's about creating new tasks, new products, and new innovations, then it can be more sustained, right? And I think that's a key reason that the second industrial revolution lasted for a very long period of time: it created a host of entirely new types of economic activities. And so I think a key question going forward is: can we design our institutions to help make sure that AI is more being used to create new activities? I think it's likely to have a much more sustained impact on productivity growth going forward.Starting from the past to predict the future03:07: If you want to say that the future is likely to be very different from the past, then at the very least, I think we should be able to state why. So I think history should always be our starting point. On the race between technology and education39:18: The race between technology and education is a world in which everybody is better off, right? That has not been the case. So we need to somehow modify that model of the world, and what we've seen since the 1980s, in particular across advanced economies, but also in some emerging economies, is labor market polarization and the decline of middle-income jobs, right? And so the race between technology and education and the view of technological change does not explain that part of the story, right? That's sort of the task-based view, and things like replacing versus enabling technologies do have some explanatory power.Should we be thinking of this new revolution as being more like the first  than the second?44:22: I think it is more like the first industrial revolution. And I still think that I can't think of a single AI application that is not about automation or doing something that people are already doing a bit more productively, whether it's writing, coding, or image generation. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Engels' pauseLudditesGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Oxford Martin SchoolCarl Benedikt FreyCarl Benedikt Frey (@carlbfrey) / XHis Work:The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation

Discover how the American dream of meritocracy, rather than being a ladder to success,  may actually be fueling inequality, eroding the middle class, and even harming the elites it was meant to reward.Our guest today is Daniel Markovits, the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law. Markovits publishes widely and in a range of disciplines, including law, philosophy, and economics. Greg LaBlanc sits down with Daniel in this episode to discuss his influential book, 'The Meritocracy Trap.' Listen as they inquire into the historical and structural reasons behind this phenomenon, the heritability of elite status through education, and the challenges of reconciling societal norms with economic realities. They also touch upon the precarious status of non-elite workers in the face of technological advancements and the cultural shifts needed to address these systemic issues.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How leisure took priority over income before the 17th century23:30: This idea of seeking to maximize your income and viewing your wage as the price of your leisure is quite new historically. Until the 17th century or so, people thought of their income as, in some sense, secondary to their virtue. And they wanted to earn enough money or make enough money to be able to fund socially appropriate consumption. And after that, they preferred the combination of less money and more leisure over the combination of less leisure and more money. And you see this because when wages went up, the labor they yielded went down.What did the founding fathers fail to foresee in this new type of aristocracy?02:43: Meritocracy allocates income, status, and general advantage based on accomplishment. There are two obvious inputs into a person's accomplishment: their natural talent and their effort. But there's a third input, and this is the one the founders, I think, didn't really foresee. The third input is the extent of the person's training.Is inequality more transmissible than it was in the past? 12:08: I think it's more transmissible for two reasons, maybe three. First, human capital might survive the war, whereas physical capital gets destroyed. Second, this mechanism of elite transmission has a happy side effect if you're a dynasty: the way in which you give your children wealth also gives them the skills and character to keep their wealth. Whereas if you just give your children a bequest, when you die, they could be wastrels and free it away.[12:47] And then the third, which I think is really important, and this matters a lot to what we do about this, is that because we still in some way associate labor income with merit and virtue, elite labor income is extremely resistant to political redistribution.Are the economic elites using DEI for their own economic privilege?16:38 [Daniel Markovits]: The DEI is, in a fundamental way, consistent with the meritocratic vision.16:43: [Gregory LaBlanc]: Right. I mean, that's why elites can all agree that diversity is a good thing and that we need to knock out any kind of remaining obstacle to achievement. 16:53 [Daniel Markovits]:  The darker side of this. And the thing that I think when populists, including right-wing populists and some sort of nativist populists, complain about elite commitments to DEI, the thing I think that they're not wrong about is that economic elites use their commitment to diversity. Partly, they genuinely believe in it for the reason that it's morally required, but at the same time, they use it instrumentally to justify their own economic privilege.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Alexis de TocquevilleGini coefficientGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Yale Law SchoolHis Work:Yale Law School Center for Private LawThe Meritocracy TrapA Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic AgeContract Law and Legal Methods

Why have historians often overlooked childhood despite its significance in shaping culture and political views? How did trends in family demographics and child-raising change across the country as new research became popular or new technology became widely adopted?  Paula S. Fass is an emerita professor of history at UC Berkeley and also the author of a number of books. Her latest books are Inheriting the Holocaust: A Second-Generation Memoir, Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization, and Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America.Greg and Paula discuss how American childhood has evolved distinctly due to factors like land availability, mother's roles, and the education system. They explore the impact of historical figures like Locke, Rousseau, and de Tocqueville and how post-WWII global changes influenced childhood. The conversation also touches on contemporary parental practices, the effects of smaller family sizes, and whether the unique characteristics of American childhood are fading in the modern world.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How distinctive has American childhood actually been?06:42: We in the United States, becoming aware of the fact that we're no longer so unique, have become much more conscious about not giving our children as much leeway as we used to have. What I call the managed child, helicoptering, and a variety of things like that have now become a very common American experience, precisely because we're worried that the kind of mobility—both geographic and social—and,  as a result, economic—that we used to have is now no longer a given. We are competing in a very different world than we were competing with before. And so trying to give our children a leg up, and the fear that, in fact, their mobility will be downward mobility, has led American parents to organize their children's lives much more than they have ever before.The pressures of parenting are driving a sharp decline in birth rates in the U.S55:11: We are now in a situation where parenting is so fraught that young people just don't want to do it. And given effective contraception, the birth rate has declined radically. On the intersection between politics, economics and they way children are raised in America57:58: One of the realities that we talked about at the very beginning is the intersection between politics and economics and the way children are brought up. And certainly, the way American children were brought up in the 19th century and even in the 20th century led to an emphasis on  entrepreneurial innovative spirit. that the American economy has prided itself on. And it's not clear to me—I'm not an economic historian, and I'm not an economist—whether we are any longer providing children with the kind of home structures that would pivot them into those struggles. It is certainly possible that we've come to the point where what we prided ourselves on as Americans will no longer be the dominant form of American enterprise and American life. Yes, it's possible. And that would be related to childhood.Can heightened awareness of children's needs lead to both overindulgence and overcontrol?49:57: I won't describe that as an overindulgence. It is different than what happened in the 19th century, where there was not that much room for worrying so much about what your children were doing, worrying about what kinds of things they were playing with, and making sure they had appropriate reading material. Again, I won't call that overindulgence. Child consciousness, awareness of what you think children might need—yes. At the same time, that can lead to, and often does lead to, overcontrol becShow Links:Recommended Resources:Ulysses S. Grant - WikipediaLenore SkenazyAdam GurowskiClaudia GoldinBenjamin SpockJohn B. WatsonUnited States Children's BureauAmy ChuaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC BerkeleyWikipedia ProfileHer Work:Kidnapped: Child Abduction in AmericaChildren of a New World: Society, Culture, and GlobalizationThe Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (Routledge Histories)Inheriting the Holocaust: A Second-Generation MemoirThe End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child

How was the financial world changed by the structured use of wooden sticks with dents in them? Why did silver coins disappear from England as soon as they were minted? How did one country that aimed to eliminate money ultimately end up creating the most stable currency in Europe?Paolo Zannoni is  Executive Deputy Chairman at Prada, and the author of the book Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the World. Greg and Paolo discuss Paolo’s career choices between academia and banking, his research into the history of financial systems, and the key historical figures and places that have shaped modern banking practices. They also delve into the importance of trust in finance, the transparency of early banking methods, and the pivotal role Italy played in the origin of modern banking.Zanoni and Greg discuss the significance of historical financial transactions and their transparency, comparing them to present-day financial technologies like blockchain. They also cover the interesting evolution of financial instruments such as the bill of exchange, public finance systems, and the impacts of these systems on the state and society.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Common debt before common currency34:07: It was cheaper issuing debt in Écu than issuing debt in your own national currency. That was the beginning of the common currency and could have been the beginning of the common debt. But the first part went fast, reasonably fast, and reasonably far. The second did not take off. And that shows the areas in which the Continental Congress of the United States was much superior to the EU. The Continental Congress of the United States had common public debt because before having a common currency. That I found is so marvelous, so innovative, and so great. They did not have a common currency, but they had common debt.When banks fail, they turn to financial history45:55: When banks go bad, they start confronting that particular crisis of the past, and depending on how good the financial history is, they go back in time. How an orderly banking system preserved centuries of financial history27:44: Bank debt was a combination between a registered IOU and a banknote. And so when the bank was making promises, they were issuing these pledges of credit, but the pledges of credit afterward, to be deposited in a bank account, had to be entered into a special ledger by bank employees. And when that ledger, when that pledge of credit was entered into the ledger, was returned, all hundreds of years of pledges of credit are neatly stacked on the shelves. That's how you can find how much Caravaggio was paid for his painting. Isn't it amazing? With enough time and knowledge, you can find almost every big transaction.On Venice's early banking transparency09:49: They had two features. The first one was that they were public, and banking was transacted. The banker opened up his ledger, and the two parties, maybe not at the same time, appeared in front of him. And the second was that the government was checking those ledgers. I mean, Venice had magistrates that were required to supervise the ledgers of the bank. At the ledgers of the bankers, and they did supervise the ledger of the bankers, and the only place where you find those ledgers today are in the part of the archives that comes from those magistrates and from the senate.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Luca PacioliFibonacciLiber AbaciPhilip II of SpainTally stickÉcuFerdinando Galiani - WikipediaAlexander HamiltonRudolf HilferdingGresham's lawunSILOed - William Goetzmann - How Finance Made Civilization PossibleBernardo DavanzatiPolymathGuest Profile:Board of Directors page for PradaHis Work:Book - Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the WorldArticle - Fortune - The government using taxpayer money to bail out banks will unavoidably continue. Here’s why

The thing about sovereign debt is that if a country defaults on its loan, there are no international bankruptcy laws in place to ensure the creditors get their money back. So what happens then?Gregory Makoff, a physicist turned banker, is a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and the author of the book, Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina's $100 Billion Debt Restructuring. In this debut, Makoff tells the gripping story of Argentina’s years-long court battle in the U.S. to settle a massive debt. He and Greg chat about the tricky nature of sovereign debt, the inner-workings of the Argentina case and why it took more than a decade for the debt to be settled, and the lasting impact the case has had on sovereign debt law. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is the IMF failing broke countries?01:06:51: The biggest problem with most countries, for me, is going to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) too slowly because you're in a deeper hole. You have more debt. It hurts the debtors more. You need a bigger adjustment. So, for me, the IMF isn't the problem. It's countries hearing all this negative IMF theory and politics and that anti-IMF view hurts them. And so, I think they do as well as they can. They're a member organization. Are they perfect? Nobody's perfect. You work with them. That's why you need countries to understand IMF programs, how they work. They need to do their own economic models. They need to be proactive with the fund and say, we need this and that. We don't want to do this and that.Bridging differences and highlighting the role of arbitrators through 'Default’31:34: The book (Default) is really about two things. One is good-faith negotiation—getting people to settle their differences and not letting the partisans far on the left or far on the right dominate the solution. And the other one is the role of arbitrators.Why is it that we don't have an orderly process or system for sorting out government debt?102:10: The answer is the word sovereignty. And you can ask the same, similar question: well, why isn't there an international court that makes wars not happen? And it's, a country wants to go to war, you can't stop it. My country doesn't want to pay its debt. In fact, when you buy a security, a bond, or a loan from a foreign country and they don't want to pay, there's not much you can do about it.Can Argentina break free from its debt trap?33:39: What does Argentina do? It's got a big debt load again. Does it just keep defaulting? Or does it wake up someday and say, We're going to start honoring our debts? We're going to live within our means. And they elected Javier Millie. He came with a chainsaw. He said, We're going to honor contracts. It's going to hurt. But the people are exhausted by crisis of the 80s, crisis of the 90s, crisis of the 2000s, crisis of the 2010s. And they're like enough. We value financial stability more than we do short-term increased pension, increased wages. And how that plays out is incredibly important, and it's unchartered territoryShow Links:Recommended Resources:Anne Osborn KruegerInternational Monetary Fund (IMF)Elliott Investment ManagementCristina Fernández de KirchnerGuest Profile:Fellow Profile at Harvard Kennedy SchoolSocial Media Profile on XBook WebsiteHis Work:Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina's $100 Billion Debt Restructuring

In what ways is England’s imperial past connected to its present? What of that past is reflected in the schools and schoolwork of students? Are there ways to acknowledge and repair things from the past in a way that moves society forward?Sathnam Sanghera is a journalist for The Times of London and the author of several books. His latest two are titled Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain and Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe.Greg and Sathnam discuss Sanghera's unexpected transition to writing about history, the complexities of British imperial history, and its nuanced impact on the modern world. The conversation digs into topics such as the perception of British imperialism in modern education, the contradictions within British history, and the ongoing struggles with racism in the UK. Sathnam also highlights the enduring influences of British rule in former colonies and the evolving discussions around reparations and historical reckoning.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Nuance is a useful concept for history07:29: I would say balance is not a very useful concept for history in general. Nuance is what you want to aim for. But the reason I think we've always struggled to talk about British Empire, except in this way of trying to balance the positives against the negatives, is because this is how empire was discussed at the time. In the 19th century, there are endless arguments about whether we should hold on to our empire, whether we were making money out of it overall, whether overall it was a good thing or a bad thing. And this continues to be the way we discuss empire. We continue trying to weigh the miles of railway we built in India against the millions of lives that were lost in the potato famine in Ireland. It's an absurd way of trying to understand history, because how do you balance railways against death? And how you might balance slavery against anti-slavery? And I guess my ultimate conclusion after five years of studying this is that you can't come down on any side.On arguing for sophistication45:15: As writers and historians, we always argue for sophistication. Politicians will always try to simplify things.Are people more comfortable with nuance journalism than they are with history? 09:22: Social media is now just setting people up against each other all the time. And politics is becoming highly polarized. Everything is turning into a football match. Where you have your side, and the other side is evil, right? And history is just as it makes it. Trying to understand imperial history through that prism, it's like saying, I want to understand the history of the climate, but I'm only going to study the sunshine, or I'm only going to study the rain. It's not going to give you a very sophisticated sense of the climate, is it? You want to study the weather in between. And that is the same is true for history. On the phenomenon of indentured servitude33:52: One of the main reasons, you see, Indians, wherever you go in the world, is because the British, after they abolished slavery, realized they needed workers, and they didn't seem willing to incentivize the formerly enslaved to do the work. So they decided to send one million Indians around the world to places like Mauritius, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana to do the work that the enslaved formerly did. And often they were treated as badly as the enslaved. Not quite as badly, but pretty badly. But this led to all sorts of phenomena... And so, all these phenomena exist around the world, and the way in which the British Empire changed the demographics of the planet. I don't think we think about that enough.Show Links:Recommended Resources:H. G. WellsJallianwala Bagh massacreRishi SunakNarendra ModiMughal EmpireBritish EmpireSikhsRudyard KiplingWolverhampton Wanderers F.C.Enoch PowellThomas ThistlewoodWardian caseMalayan EmergencyBrexitJames StephenGuest Profile:Sathnam.comWikipedia ProfileInstagram ProfileTwitter (X) ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageEmpireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern BritainEmpireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the GlobeMarriage MaterialStolen HistoryIf You Don't Know Me by Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in WolverhamptonThe Times Articles

How did the teachings of the great Greek and Roman moral philosophers shape America and its founders? How has the shift away from studying those teachings had an impact on the modern political landscape? Jeffrey Rosen is the CEO of the National Constitution Center, a law professor at George Washington University, and the host of the podcast We the People. His recent book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America delves into the ideas of personal self governance and the historical and contemporary implications of virtues like self-mastery, moral philosophy, and happiness.Jeffrey and Greg discuss the transformation of happiness from virtue-based to pleasure-seeking, the role of deep reading and character education, and the timeless struggle between personal gratification and civic virtue.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is there a connection between evolving definitions of personal happiness and political changes?07:24: Sometime in the 60s, the definition changed from being good to feeling good. It had something to do with the change in the understanding of happiness in pop culture and during the revolutions of the 60s, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the new emphasis on seeking pleasure rather than seeking self-mastery. Both the popular understanding of happiness and what was rewarded in the political system changed. And the founders saw a connection between the need for personal self-government and political self-government, understanding that unless citizens could moderate their unreasonable emotions like anger, jealousy, and fear, they wouldn't choose virtuous leaders, educate themselves about the basic principles of liberty so that they could defend it when it was under threat, compromise, and deliberate with those who had different points of view.An emphasis on deep reading in today’s online world50:24: Citizens have an opportunity and a duty to read the primary sources, both the majority opinions and the dissents, so they can make up their minds. The same goes for news. We can always go back to the primary sources and make up our own minds. It is much more important to inspire these habits of deep reading and engagement so that we can take advantage of this marvelous world where all the primary sources are online.When culture stopped valuing virtues, politics reflected the change09:01: Once the culture stopped valuing things like self-mastery, moderation, temperance, prudence, courage, and justice to use the four classical virtues, then it became more acceptable to express this in the political arena.What inspired Jeffrey to launch his recent book?05:13: So, during COVID, I followed Jefferson's schedule. I got up early. I read the moral philosophy for two hours. I watched the sunrise. I wrote these sonnets, sort of summing up the wisdom, which is a weird practice until I learned that a lot of people in the founding era also wrote sonnets of virtue. There's something about this material that kind of inspires poetry. And what I learned after a year of reading this remarkable literature—it changed my life. It changed my understanding of how to be a good person and a good citizen.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Cicero’s Tusculanae DisputationesXenophon’s SocratesMaking the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Walker HoweSeneca’s Letters from a StoicThe Columbian Orator Guest Profile:Bio at National Constitution CenterFaculty Profile at George Washington UniversityWe the People podcastHis Work:The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined AmericaThe Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America (Institutions of American Democracy)The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in AmericaThe Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious AgeWilliam Howard Taft: The American Presidents Series: The 27th President, 1909-1913Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet (Jewish Lives)Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and LawJeff Rosen | New Republic 

Does modern society have too many laws? Have we complicated legal codes to the point where we’re suffocating under them and grinding the government to a screeching halt? Lawyer and author Philip K. Howard is the founder of the nonpartisan coalition, Common Good, which works toward legal and government reform. He’s the author of numerous books like, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America and most recently, Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society. Philip and Greg discuss the balance between rigid rules and human discretion, the importance of human judgment in law, and how legal micromanagement and excessive regulation curtails individual agency and practical wisdom.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Freedom does not exist without the authority of law02:42: Freedom does not exist except within a framework of the authority of law. And the authority of law requires human judgment by the people in charge of law, judges, officials, and others. What's a safe workplace, etc.? Whether a seesaw is a reasonable risk? Whatever it is, they have to make those judgments so that people have a sense of where they stand. And then you get freedom back, and people can act again. You no longer have gridlock. But right now we have law, not as a kind of outer fence of a corral of freedom. We have law interceding in daily choices. There's almost nothing you can say in the workplace that doesn't have legal implications. Well, is that a free society? I don't think so. Has law become counterproductive?05:53: Today, the law has become, in many areas, counterproductive. I mean, it doesn't make people feel more free; it makes them feel less free, right? And the point of the law is to provide a framework to enhance everyone's freedom, so we're not worried that the water we drink is polluted, that we feel comfortable, that we have free speech, and we can say what we think without getting into trouble. Well, that's not true anymore.The role of law is to enhance freedom32:06: We need to have a clearer sense of what the boundaries of our freedom are, and that requires the enforcement of norms that judges and others were not doing. So we have both too little and too much law. Ultimately, my goal—I think the role of law is to enhance freedom—everyone's freedom, freedom from abuse, freedom from dirty water, and to do what humans are good at doing.Law doesn’t work without judgment01:01:23: Law doesn't work without the judgment of the people—of the people in charge applying the norms of law. Law is not a speed limit sign that says 55 miles an hour. It's principles like the reasonable person standard or whatever. It's unreasonable search and seizure, free speech. All these things are principles that have to be interpreted by somebody. They're not self-executed.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Daniel KahnemanMike Rose Alexis de Tocqueville The American Law Institute podcast Joe Klein | Time MagazineIkiruVaclav HavelJeremy WaldronGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia UniversityProfessional WebsiteCommon GoodHis Work:Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing SocietyThe Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating AmericaThe Collapse of the Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions Try Common Sense: Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and LeftThe Lost Art of Drawing the Line: How Fairness Went Too Far Life Without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America

Out of all the ancient moral philosophies, which one feels most applicable to how we live our lives in the modern world? As today’s guest would say, we are all Epicureans now.Catherine Wilson is an emerita professor of philosophy at the University of York. She’s written many books on the subject of ethics and philosophy, including How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well and Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory.Catherine and Greg talk about Epicureanism’s relevance in the modern world, how it contrasts with other ancient philosophies like stoicism, and debate the role of prudence in the  pursuit of pleasure.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why should we all be thinking about getting up to speed or at least exposing ourselves to ancient moral philosophy?02:42: Epicureanism has been underappreciated relative to the other ancient philosophies. As we all know, Stoicism has become incredibly popular. Epicureanism is, in many ways, the foil to Stoicism. And frankly, I wouldn't go to Aristotle or Plato, particularly for moral advice. Some good parts of it, but I think Epicureanism needed a fresh look. And so what I tried to do in the book was to draw out some ways, possibly more fetch than they needed to be, some lessons or some implications that we could use now, taken directly from Epicurus and Lucretius. So that was the idea, and I think Epicureanism is really a breath of fresh air in many ways.What makes Epicureanism appealing?31:11: One of the most appealing features of Epicureanism is that because nature is always making new combinations and presenting you with new experiences, you're constantly having to update your beliefs and rethink your assumptions.Epicurean perspective on meaning41:01: The epicurean perspective is cosmological. It says you are here for a very short amount of time in the history of the universe. You came from dust; you're going to end up in dust. What you should do in that short time is have a nice life. Do the things you enjoy doing. And learning, teaching, figuring things out, and taking part in family life—those are the things that usually give people the most satisfaction in life. As human beings, that's what we like to do. So, you don't have to go to excess.What accounts for the renewed success of stoicism? 39:10: Stoicism says, well, you are you, and you are a fortress in yourself, and you have to not be so worried about what other people are doing that is making you miserable and believe that it's under your control whether you're miserable or not. And this seems to me completely on the wrong track when other people in other situations are making you miserable. You ought to try to change them. Speak up, or get out of there. "Don't Suffer in Silence" was, I think, the title of one of the chapters. And I think I referred there to Albert Hirschman. How do you respond to bad situations? Exit, voice, or loyalty?Show Links:Recommended Resources:EpicurusLucretiusRené DescartesJohn LockeExit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and StatesGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of YorkHer Work:How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living WellMoral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral TheoryEpicureanism at the Origins of Modernity

Shame and the classification of people have always been with us, but new technology can amplify the harmful effects of both. What can be learned from a careful study of algorithms at play in pivotal places in society?Cathy O’Neil is the founder of an algorithmic auditing company called Orca, a research fellow at Harvard University, and the author of two books, The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation and Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.Greg and Cathy discuss what algorithmic auditing is and how it comes into play when we talk about using algorithms to affect decision-making in different businesses. Cathy explains how algorithms amplify and scale issues in the human auditing system without necessarily some of the failsafes, particularly how algorithms have modified the behavior and thinking of children and teens. Cathy also talks about the intersection of shame with these powerful algorithms in the seductive form of social media for teens and adults alike, and how they are geared toward and successfully generate outrage and arguments for their own profit and the ultimate detriment of the user. Explore more of her data-driven research positions in this conversation that can change the way you look at shame.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What’s the goal of shame?38:35: Conformity might seem like the most obvious goal of shame, and I guess in useful examples of shame, like when you shame your child for beating his little brother, that's a great example: “You can't do that to their little brother. Shame on you.” That's a great example of pro-social. There are other goals of shame, and it should be said because it'll make more sense as to why it's gotten out of hand. And one of them is setting an example, like setting an example, like look at this person; look at what they did. It's too late for them to not do it. They did it, right? But we're going to use them as an example for everyone to see what's going to happen to you if you do it. So it's more like a signpost than a conformity thing. It's, I guess, sort of like trying to get other people to conform in the future rather than to that person's behavior.Shame is required for a functioning society03:49: Shame is not new. Shame is as old as social interaction, and it's absolutely required for a functioning society. We have to know how to sacrifice our personal goals and selfish desires for the sake of the group, which I think is the fundamental rule around shame.How does social media amplify shame?40:44: The social media platforms have done something really extraordinary. They've built a new business model. It's no longer necessary to implicitly and explicitly shame someone and make them buy a product from you. That's the old business model. What they've done instead is built a world, which is the online world, a platform where they get you to shame each other. You are doing it, like you're co-opted, if you will. You profit from the existence of shaming. Fights on your platform because the longer those guys engage in those shaming, the cross-shaming, let's call them shame trains, the longer they get on those shame trains and ride as hard as possible, the longer people are on your platform. And ultimately, you're selling their attention. And so they're there. So they're paying attention to the ads around them, which is really, really the business model, as we all know.Finding the balance between shame and persuasion52:18: Don't overestimate the choice involved. If you're shaming someone, you have to really be explicit about: is this really a choice? And if it is, then instead of shaming somebody, try to persuade them. And the way you persuade somebody of something, which is typically more successful than shaming them, is you appeal to a universal norm, which is to say you appeal to a norm that you both know you agree on.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Randomized controlled trialBloomberg Article about OpenAICui bono?2007–2008 financial crisisMark ZuckerbergSam AltmanChatGPTAlice MunroMeToo movementGuest Profile:CathyOneil.orgProfile on WikipediaHer Work:Amazon Author PageThe Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of HumiliationWeapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens DemocracyDoing Data Science: Straight Talk from the FrontlineThe era of blind faith in big data must end

In order to study the science of success, you have to also study the science of failure. How much is performance connected to success? How do you leverage networks in your domain successfully?Albert-László Barabási is a professor of network science at Northeastern University and the author of books like, Linked: The New Science Of Networks Science Of Networks and The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success. Albert and Greg chat about the evolution of network science, measuring performance vs. success, how to strategically network in your field, and the surprising findings about creativity and age.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Distinguishing success vs. performance14:24: Performance is really about you, and your success is about us. And what do I mean by that? If we look very carefully, everything that is performance typically links to individual qualities. How fast can you run? How good of a research paper can you write? And how good of a speaker are you? And so on and so forth. However, every measure of success is really given by the community, whether that's feedback, acknowledgment, adoration, money, whether that’s likes, it's always a communal measure, right? You don't pay yourself; you don't like yourself—or you could do that, right, but not at the scale that really leads to success. It's really the community that provides that to you. Therefore, if you want to understand success, at the beginning, we do need to distinguish these two things, and you need to ask yourself: How do you measure performance? How do you measure success? And when and how is the relationship between them?The social nature of success32:42: This is the distinction between performance and success because success is a collective measure. We give success to you, so you need to come to us and make sure that we understand what you do. We can compare it to others who do different, similar things, and ultimately, we can acknowledge you and reward you for that. This is a collective phenomenon, and you have to work with the community; it's not a lonely journey any longer.Is performance really measurable?16:33: Performance is not a one-dimensional quantity. There's so many dimensions of performance when it comes to teaching, when it comes to having a podcast, when it comes to curing people, right? And hence, it becomes virtually unmeasurable. Yet, success is not unmeasurable, right? So, in most of us, the vast majority of humanity lives and works in professions where there is not an objective measure of performance, but there are very clear measures of success. And so really, all of the formula is really about how and when do these connect.On understanding how success emerges30:00: If you understand the forces that act on how success emerges, then you can actually start thinking about that in the domain where you are. What really matters, and where do you put your focus? I always think of these roles not as a way to manipulate the system—because you can't manipulate the system, right?—but rather as guidance on where to put your efforts.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Black-Scholes modelAlessandro VespignaniDashun Wang The Science of Science by Dashun Wang and Albert-László BarabásiGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Northeastern UniversityProfessional WebsiteHis Work:Linked: The New Science Of Networks Science Of NetworksBursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from Your E-mail to Bloody CrusadesThe Formula: The Universal Laws of Success

In a world challenged by the politicization of data, contradicting evidence, and an onslaught of information, could the key to more effective and informed decision-making be as simple as, thinking like a scientist? Professor of physics Saul Perlmutter, professor of philosophy John Campbell, and professor of psychology and law Robert MacCoun combine their interdisciplinary minds in the book, Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense. The book explores the essence of scientific thinking and how it can be applied to practical societal issues. Saul, John, and Robert join Greg to chat about the genesis of “third millenium thinking,” the role of values in scientific judgment, and the importance of teaching probabilistic thinking and experimentation.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why is it so hard to just walk the Humean line and to be very explicit about sorting out these differences?09:03: [John Campbell] The message of the book is: keep the Humean line as far as we can, separate the facts and values. Scientists, we all know, have a lot to tell us about the facts, but we, the people, are the ones who tell you about the values. And then, I think, that has to be anyone's first brush, sort of partitioning off the boundaries of science, to keep that Humean line. But then it does get complicated when you think about things like mental illnesses and so on, where you're asking not just, Is this condition that a person had? Is this a real thing? But you're also asking, Is this a bad thing? Is it a bad thing for a person to be like that? So with autism, is that just neurodiversity that is not really within the sphere of medical treatment at all? There are boundaries there as to where science is authoritative and where the people have a voice. And this kind of issue clearly has to be a debate, it seems to me. It's not something for professionals only.To what extent must we trust the processes within the expert community?37:04: [Saul Perlmutter] I think that there's a difference between really understanding a field enough that you don't need the expert and having some understanding of how science works so you can recognize which experts you are more likely to trust.They myth of lone genius47:26: [Robert MacCoun] This mythology of the lone genius, I think, is very much the antithesis of third-millennium thinking, this notion that it's because I'm brilliant that you should listen to me. And that's really not where we think the authority of science comes from. It's not from the IQ of the scientist. It's from the procedures—the hoops you have to jump through to make your ideas work. And it's those procedures that give you credibility, not just brilliance.If you hold to the Humean line, why would your value judgments about what's good or bad for society impact your causal arguments?32:25: [Robert MacCoun]  The role of standards of proof when you're dealing with probabilistic evidence, you need to weigh two kinds of errors: false positive errors of claiming a hypothesis is true when it's not, and false negative errors of saying the hypothesis is wrong when in fact it's true. That is not a scientific matter. That is a matter of values. We can't avoid it. In dealing with uncertainty, we have to impose some sort of standard of proof. And so, under the Humean model, you take values very seriously. I don't think we would argue that values are simply outside the domain of science.Show Links:Recommended Resources:David HumeNeil deGrasse TysonSupreme Court overturns ChevronArticle: Supreme Court strikes down Chevron, curtailing power of federal agenciesGuest Profile:Saul Perlmutter’s Profile at UC BerkeleyJohn Campbell’s Profile at UC BerkeleyRobert MacCoun’s Profile at Stanford UniversityTheir Work:Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense

Can you truly build exceptional relationships in a professional setting? What are the secrets to effective communication and the role of social psychology in fostering strong connections?David Bradford is a Senior Lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, having taught the legendary “touchy feely course for decades, and the author or co-author of several books. His latest work is called Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends, and Colleagues.Greg and David discuss the practical benefits of Stanford's T groups, where participants develop crucial skills like clear communication and conflict resolution. David explains the importance of seeing feedback as the start of a conversation rather than a critique, emphasizing the need to understand the impact of our behaviors on others. Explore the contrast between how children and adults handle conflicts and learn why genuine curiosity is key to bridging communication gaps.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are we building organizations to build friendships?35:08: I think more and more leaders in an organization are realizing that building collaboration is important. Now there is a danger with building friendships, which I said before, because there are many organizations that need to cut back, are too big, are facing adverse times, and have to do cutting. So it has to be clear that we're building a relationship to get the job done. That's the purpose of an organization. We're not building an organization to have warm and fuzzy friendships; that's the means to an end, not an end in itself. And we have to realize that there are going to be times in which we're going to have a reduction in force. There are going to be times in which we get rid of people.Organization are held by network of relationships02:49: Organizations are held together not by the organizational chart, but by the network of relationships that people have in the organization.On vulnerability in leadership37:41: The research on vulnerability shows two things: leaders who are vulnerable about their core competence lose power…[38:12] So leadership, which questions your basic competence, does lose power and does lose influence, but vulnerability, which shows your humanness, is different.Do you have an understanding of human psychology, social psychology, and cognitive psychology to have a good relationship?08:56: In general, the more that we know, the more we can start to see them as an individual, as a unique person, which is, I think, what all of us want and which all of us are. There is no rule that applies equally to all people. So I think that the broader our knowledge, the more we can find out. What approach allows me to understand you as an individual, you as a person, and we can move beyond me treating you like an object, which you don't want and I don't think I want.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Neo-FreudianismGallup, Inc.Jeffrey PfefferPetrarchGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford GSBProfessional Profile on LinkedInHis Work:Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends, and ColleaguesInfluencing UpInfluence Without AuthorityPower Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership

More than four years after the pandemic began, a source for COVID-19 still eludes scientists and public health officials. The mystery has given rise to a slew of hypotheses ranging from natural zoonotic transmission to lab leaks. But to get to the bottom and find the real source of the virus, you have to start with the evidence. Alina Chan is a scientific advisor at the Broad Institute and the co-author of the book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. She and her co-author Matt Ridley follow one evidence thread to the next in order to get closer to the truth. Alina joins Greg to chat about the two dominant hypotheses on COVID-19’s source, the challenges and methodology of identifying a virus’ origin, and why it’s crucial we find out where COVID-19 came from. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The debate over studying high-risk pathogens43:50: There are definitely people who think that all of this research should be banned, but I think that there should be a certain amount allowed to continue. Again, this sort of research, where there's actually any pandemic risk, constitute an extremely small fraction of virology. So, I would say, like, less than even a percent, maybe even less than that. So, most virology doesn't even concern animal viruses. And those that do often do not pose a risk to cause outbreaks in people. But there are these types of research projects that are now becoming more and more trendy around the world, following in the footsteps of U.S. leaders to take these pathogens that could cause outbreaks in people and study them in the labs. And it's unclear where the risk is because some of these labs are doing it at such low biosafety levels. Or is it because there are so many of these high-biosafety labs now, and the work is increasing, yet in these labs there's still room for human error.Public vs. scientists51:56: Your political affiliation doesn't determine anymore whether you think this virus was natural or came through a lab. I would say that the difference between the public and scientists is that scientists, especially experts, tend to lean on priors very heavily, as well as peer-reviewed literature. Is the focus on avoiding retroactive blame or preventing future research constraints?43:03: I think it's both. So, since then, and over the past few years, you've seen so many letters by virologists. Dozens of them have signed letters saying we are totally fine in the U.S. We do not need any more oversight or regulation. We are good at self-auditing and self-inspecting. We don't need any external oversight over our work. So, there's a clear fear amongst virologists that if this pandemic was started by a lab accident in Wuhan, they would become constrained as well, and that people would also perceive them to no longer just be the good guys but to be a source of risk and danger.Why bats carry so many viruses24:45: I think bats, aside from humans, are probably the most interesting mammalian species out there for virologists. It's because these bats have been found to carry so many different types of pathogens, many of which can jump into people. So, like Ebola, coronaviruses, both MERS and SARS were found to have come from reservoirs, for example, but they're quite similar to humans in the context that they live in large groups. So, you go into one of these caves, easily millions of bats in there, but actually, they're quite different. So, they can fly, and so their body has to adapt to handle that really high heat that happens when you're flapping your wings at such a high speed. And that is related to traits in bats that help them to coexist with so many of these viruses. So, these viruses, while they cause very severe diseases in people, in bats, they just live mostly in the gut and don't cause any severe disease. So, bats have this invulnerability in a sense to all these very dangerous pathogens.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Dr. Peter Daszak - EcoHealth Alliance Wuhan institute of VirologyRalph S. Baric“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” | Nature MedicineGood Judgment case studyGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Broad Institute Her Work:Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19

What if the key to managing stress and finding meaning lies in the simple rituals we perform daily? How can engaging in rituals can be a potent tool for combating anxiety and fostering a sense of community?Michael Norton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and an author. His latest book is titled The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions.Greg and Michael discuss Michael’s groundbreaking research on the distinctions between rituals, habits, and compulsions, and delves into how these practices—whether ancient or self-created—provide essential structure and purpose in our lives.Michael and Greg dive deeper into the impact of rituals within organizations and relationships. Learn how companies can use simple, coordinated actions to bolster unity and core values, and why rites of passage are crucial for marking life's transitions. Michael also highlights the strong correlation between shared rituals and relationship success, emphasizing the importance of mutual participation. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Do successful companies leverage rituals to foster a sense of belonging and a common purpose?24:45: Very often, the rituals that companies have are really intended to reflect a specific value that the company cares about. I was just talking to someone who told me at their company, what they do is every Friday: It's a smallish company, so they have an all-hands  every Friday, and each group says something that another group did that they're grateful for. Somebody on another team helped me out with this thing I was working on, and they do it every Friday. Now, they could do anything—they could say, "Think of another group that made you laugh this week. Tell us about that." But they don't laugh; they do gratitude. And they're trying to show in that moment one of the things that we care about in this place is helping and gratitude. You can have a silly mission statement that says, "Gratitude and all these platitudes," or you can use these kinds of regular rituals to show repeatedly: This is the value that we really care about. And families, when they have rituals at dinnertime as well, they're very often communicating a value that they really think is very important.Rituals can bind us and separate us23:52: It's not that you do rituals and it's all warm and fuzzy; it's that they can bind us together and they can separate us from other people. So there's tension—it's like a risk-reward kind of relationship with ritual.Exploring how emotions drive action17:18: I think the way that humans are built, unfortunately for us, is that we can't change our emotions when we feel like it. So, in other words, it would be amazing if I felt sad, if I could snap and be happy, just automatically, just instantly; we could easily be built like that.Do we customize rituals according to our needs?08:17: In fact, even in our own lives, we're changing them—rituals—all the time. And the reason I say that is because if they stop working for you, you could say, "Rituals obviously don't work. I'm never doing them again." Or you can say, "I must have the wrong ritual. It seems what people are likely to do is say, 'I must have the wrong ritual.' Let me mix it up a little bit and see if that will help." And it really, to me, speaks to how deeply ingrained they are in us because we are, in a sense, ignoring evidence from the world that not all of them work, and we continue to do them, modify them, and shape them as though if we keep doing that, we'll get to the optimal one.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Clifford GeertzBronisław MalinowskiDisenchantmentSerena WilliamsRafael NadalThe Pianist and the LobsterHedonic treadmillStanford marshmallow experimentGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Business SchoolMichaelNorton.comLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia ProfileHis Work:The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions365 Ways To Change the World: How to Make a Difference-- One Day at a TimeHappy Money: The Science of Happier SpendingTed Talk - How to buy happiness

Humans are creatures of habit. It’s even wired that way in our brains. But what impact does habituation have on personal happiness?Tali Sharot is a professor of neuroscience at University College London and researches habituation, adaptation, and other cognitive biases. Her latest book, Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There co-authored with Cass Sunstein explores how habituation leads people to stop noticing both good and bad things they’re accustomed to and the benefits of breaking free from those habits. Tali and Greg discuss why people are more likely to feel less excited about good things over time, how taking breaks from those habits can restore the good feelings, and optimism bias discrepancies in stressful environments.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What is optimism bias?20:41: Optimism bias is our tendency to expect to encounter positive events more on average than we do and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing negative events in our lives. So, underestimating our likelihood of going to prison, getting a divorce, being in an accident, and so on. It is not necessarily how we will react to those events. So, it's not that I think if I get divorced, then I won't feel bad. It's mostly, at least in my studies, about what is the likelihood of the event.Can bad news be good news?41:07: Bad news doesn't necessarily mean that it results in a negative feeling for you. It can result in a positive feeling, and that's why it seems like people are attracted to bad news when, in fact, it's not really bad news. So, all this is like celebrity breakups; to some extent, it can make people feel good because, well, everyone has problems. So now I'm feeling better about my own life.Three main motives for searching information40:12: It's instrumental utility, cognitive rewards, and affective rewards. So, that's our tendency to want good news over bad news. Now, all three will drive your decisions on whether to seek information or not. So, you will for sure seek a lot of negative information if the cognitive reward is high and instrumental utility is high. But all three things matter together. And there are ways for us to tease them apart and show that all of them matter. So, that's why, despite the fact that you feel like you go after bad news, you still have the tendency to want good news.The difference between optimism about our own lives and pessimism about the external world33:39: What we see is that people are optimistic about their own future, the future of their family, and the future of their kids, but they're not optimistic about the world at large. In fact, they are somewhat pessimistic about global issues and about the abilities of the leaders. And let me give you a few examples. Let's take AI. So, people say AI will take more jobs than it will create, and 75 percent of people say that. It's three out of four, but only one out of four, 25%, say their job is at risk. Out of every four people, three say that they're very optimistic about the future of their family; again, 75%, but only 30% say that the next generation will be doing better than the current one.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Daniel GilbertLaurie SantosAaron HellerDaniel DennettMilgram experimentGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University College LondonHer Work:Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always ThereThe Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain

Despite the Hippocratic Oath of “do no harm” that all physicians take, a dark side exists in the medical field.  Carl Elliott is a professor of philosophy who teaches bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His latest book, The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, shares the stories of some of the most egregious cases of medical abuse in history and the whistleblowers who tried to stop it. Carl and Greg chat about his own experience blowing the whistle after a psychiatric study went awry, the factors present in the medical field that lead to unethical and abusive studies, and the cost of deciding to take a stand.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On protecting vulnerable populations in research19:16: One of the things that you see running through, I would say, at least 90% of the scandals that we look at in the class that I teach on research scandals, is that you're dealing with research subjects who are vulnerable in some way. They're often poor, they're uneducated, they're institutionalized, they're mentally ill, they're children, they're mentally disabled, they're unable to look out for their own interests in the way that an ordinary competent adult is. And those populations are easily exploitable. We should have protections for those people—serious protections. We have, in our honor code, the Common Rule; there are federal guidelines that say this: you need to take special care with vulnerable populations.Is an honor system enough for medical research?14:18: In other businesses out there, factories, restaurants, mines, fisheries, and so on, you have a regulatory system, like a full-blown regulatory system with inspections, safety rules, and so on. There's nothing like that in medical research. The oversight system is an honor system. Medical researchers are just trusted to behave honorably and honestly. And I think there are real questions about whether an honor system is up to the task of overseeing and doing the regulatory, quasi-regulatory job of managing what is now a multinational global multi-billion dollar industry.Do we sometimes confuse the organization's purpose and the people in the organization? What and how does this idea of organizational loyalty play out?32:22: It's really institutional loyalty, at least in academic medicine, and not loyalty to some higher mission—in the case of academic medicine, to the sort of humanitarian effort of doing medical research. Because I do think that there is this sense of physicians who have chosen to work in academic health centers rather than do like the vast majority and work out in the community somewhere, there's a reason for that. And the reason is science and medical advances and the many people that you could reach by developing new and better treatments, right? I mean, it's that tension between those humanitarian goals of the enterprise as a whole and the interests of individual patients that needs to be balanced.The toxic mix of research funding and authoritarian hierarchy13:46: There's a very rigid status hierarchy; it's extremely authoritarian and competitive. The coin of the realm is not patient care; it is research, particularly now research funding. In fact, research funding is more important than the actual research. And so, you can see, when you put all these things together, you have a very toxic mix.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Nuremberg CodeTuskegee StudyWillowbrook State School Cartwright InquiryPaolo MacchiariniListening to Prozac: The Landmark Book About Antidepressants and the Remaking of the Self by Peter KramerAlexis de TocquevilleGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of MinnesotaProfessional WebsiteHis Work:The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying NoWhite Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of MedicineBetter Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream

What if you could understand why rational people sometimes believe the most irrational things?Dan Ariely is a Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, the Center for Advanced Hindsight, and is also the author of several books including his most recent work, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things. His work is also the subject of a new TV show called The Irrational.Greg and Dan discuss many aspects of misbelief and irrationality. Dan describes his own journey of finding himself at the center of different conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic where he unexpectedly found himself accused of being part of a sinister plot. This shocking experience spurred him to delve deep into the phenomenon of misbelief, and he shares his invaluable field research and insights on this perplexing topic. Dan also explains the concept of "Shibboleth" as a social marker in political discourse, examining how language and terminology often signify group membership rather than convey actual beliefs. Dan and Greg discuss the critical role of maintaining transparency and trustworthiness in scientific communication and reflect on the evolving role of academia in addressing societal issues. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are we in a period of low resilience?19:25: We are at a period of high stress and low resilience. Why do we have low resilience? Because we spend less time with friends. We spend more time with our nuclear family. We have less good friends for all kinds of reasons, but, you know, for example, one of them is that we're not allowed to have friends at work anymore. And what I mean by that is that there are topics that you can't talk about at work. It’s frowned upon to talk about sexual issues. It's frowned upon to talk about politics. We spend lots of time with those people. It used to be the place where you got new friends. Now it's not anymore, right? There's not that much going out with friends after work to drink. And you don't know much about the people that we work with.Redefining misbelief06:14: Misbelief is not just about believing in something that isn't so; it's also about adopting it to such a degree that it colors everything we look at. And that's the dangerous thing, right? Because the moment you have some belief…[06:37] it becomes a central tenet in the way you interpret the world; it becomes much broader than that because you start being suspicious and so on.Why does replication matter in social science?52:20: I think there are lots of reasons why things don't replicate. I think that intention is a very small subset. And my hope is that we will grow as a science. We need to be more careful, and so on. But we also need to understand that lack of replication sometimes is just asking another question of what was different between those two things rather than saying, "Oh, it must mean that the first one was not correct. And the second one is correct."The high cost of incorrect beliefs23:43: We live in a world in which some wrong beliefs can have very large consequences. So I don't know if people believe in more incorrect things; probably we believe in less incorrect things, but I think that the cost of believing in incorrect things can be much higher.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The IrrationalBronisław MalinowskiShibbolethFriedrich SchillerCui bono?Richard ThalerCass SunsteinDiederik StapelGuest Profile:DanAriely.comThe Center for Advanced HindsightProfile on LinkedInWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author WorksMisbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational ThingsDollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend SmarterThe Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone--Especially OurselvesThe Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying LogicPredictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our DecisionsTED TalksDan’s Youtube Page

Travis Rieder, a professor of bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, is fascinated by the world’s ethical dilemmas.His work sits at the intersection of medicine and philosophy, but also draws from his own life experiences like in his book, In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids. His latest book, Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices, delves into moral decision-making in the context of climate change and other pressing ethical challenges.Travis chats with host Greg LeBlanc about his harrowing experience with opioid withdrawal following a motorcycle accident, historic societal shifts in opioid perception, and how much one’s individual decision-making truly impacts structural problems like climate change or the healthcare system.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How did we get to the place where we have conflicting attitudes about opioids?09:53: How did we get to the place where we have conflicting attitudes about opioids? Because some people seem to think that they are, worth giving out like candy, and some people seem to think that they're like the devil's magic or whatever. And that story is old. That story is 200 years old plus, and it involves basically North America's attitudes just swinging back and forth from one extreme to the other. Every once in a while, we're like, "Oh, we really need to take pain seriously. Let's take opiates all the time." And then it predictably leads to a drug overdose crisis, an addiction crisis. And so the politicians freak out, and they slam on all the brakes, and they introduce new legislation. And then the country gets scared, and medicine gets scared. And we talk about how terrible these drugs are. And then we withhold them for 50 years. And then everyone's like, "Hey, maybe we should take care of cancer patients who are dying." And we start using the drugs again, and so on. And so we've done that move since the 1800s.Risky handoffs in medication management16:03: When it comes to pain medicine, when it comes to addiction management, when it comes to managing all sorts of difficult-to-manage medications, those handoffs are some of the riskiest places because they require care, and our system is not set up for that care to be there. Basic moral structure is everywhere41:00: The main contribution that I wanted my book to make was to make clear that same basic moral structure, that we are contributing in very small ways to all sorts of goods and bads, good moral projects and bad moral projects, all the time. That basic puzzle is everywhere.If someone argues that individual behavior doesn't matter, why would anyone bother trying?33:44: Our actions have been decoupled from the consequences that make us worry. And so climate change is bad because it harms people. And so my classic moral brain says, okay, harm, that means don't do it. So, everything that I do that contributes to climate change, I'm like, okay, I shouldn't do that because climate change harms. But the thing is that the principle was don't cause harm, and your individual action doesn't cause harm. Your individual action does this other thing, which is it infinitesimally contributes to this massive, complex system that is so big and so complex, we can't really comprehend it. A trillion metric tons of greenhouse gasses accumulating in an atmosphere and cycling through a carbon cycle that is just unimaginably complex. And so there is no hurricane that is even a little bit worse because of what I did. That's just not how any of this works.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe Michael E. MannDavid Wallace-WellsMary Annaïse HeglarSiddharth KaraArthur SchopenhauerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins UniversityProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on XHis Work:Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough ChoicesIn Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids

Ever wondered how to truly bridge the gap between technical expertise and practical business implementation? How did the terminology shift from "data mining" to "predictive analytics" and revolutionize the business world? Eric Siegel, Ph.D., is a leading consultant and former Columbia University professor who helps companies deploy machine learning. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series and the author of several books. His latest work is titled, The AI Playbook: Mastering the Rare Art of Machine Learning Deployment.Eric and Greg discuss what motivated Eric to leave academia to see real-world applications of his machine learning models. Eric explains the pressing challenges organizations face when deploying machine learning projects, and provides an insightful look at the cultural and incentive-driven barriers that often lead to failed projects and unmet expectations. By focusing on collaboration from the outset, Eric reveals how businesses can align machine learning initiatives with their core needs to foster successful integration and operational change.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Ramping up on a semi technical understanding of data03:46: Prediction is the most actionable thing you get from data, and the way you get it is with machine learning. Learn some data to predict. That's basically what it is. So, will the world wake up to this? Are they going to forever see it as arcane? What does that mean? So, be careful what you wish for, because flash forward to now, and everyone's all over this stuff in a way that's overzealous. We fetishize the core technology as the most awesome thing. We're more excited about the rocket science than the actual launch of the rocket. That is, getting it deployed, getting into action, making a difference in terms of actual business operations. And we're stuck there. Most new machine learning projects fail to reach deployment. So, still, there's a skill gap. Still, there's a kind of data literacy that's greatly needed across the non-data science community. But it's not foreboding once you actually dip your toe in. As a business stakeholder, you got to get your hands dirty, or your feet will get cold, and you won't get to the point. But that dirty hand stuff, it's only semi-technical. It's totally accessible.Demos don't equal human intelligence36:21: Generative AI is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. But that's the problem. A great demo doesn't necessarily mean valuable, right? I think it's probably about five percent as valuable as the world seems to think, right? So, I mean, I spent six years in the Natural Language Processing Research Group at Columbia, where I was subsequently a professor during graduate school. I never thought I'd see what I can see today, but we need to recognize there's a big difference between something that's seemingly human-like and human.On recognizing change34:53: Do change management because the basic idea is so often overlooked. Again, we're fetishizing the core technology. More excited about the Rock Advanced Launch, but the launch is changed, right? You need to manage that change. The project needs to be reframed. It's not just a technology project. It's not a machine-learning project. It's an operations improvement project that uses machine learning as a core component but ultimately involves improvement, that is to say, change.How do you drive a successful machine learning project?56:38: We need to get everybody on the same page. We need to get those to speak in business terms, and for the business people to be interested in some of those concrete details. Business people might say, "Hey, look, I don't need to get involved in details. I don't need to pop the hood of my car to drive it, right? I don't need to know how the engine works." And that's true. Like, I personally have no idea, right? I know the general principles of internal combustion, but I don't know where the spark plugs are. But I'm totally an expert at driving. I know momentum, friction, the rules of the road, how the car operates, and the mutual expectations of drivers. The analogy holds: to drive a machine learning project successfully through to deployment, you need, analogously, those kinds of semi-technical understanding of what it means to run the project so that it will succeed.Show Links:Recommended Resources:MoneyballArtificial general intelligenceRexer AnalyticsChange ManagementGuest Profile:LinkedIn ProfileMachine Learning WeekGooder.aiHis Work:www.bizML.comMachineLearning.coursesAmazon Author PageThe AI Playbook: Mastering the Rare Art of Machine Learning DeploymentHBR Guide to AI Basics for ManagersPredictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or DieStrategic Analytics: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business ReviewData Science and Business Intelligence: Advice from important Data Scientists around the WorldForbes Articles

The study of economic growth is a modern phenomenon. In fact, economists didn’t get serious about measuring it until the mid-20th century. So what brought growth into focus and are the ways we measure it today adequate for a technologically-advanced world? Daniel Susskind is an economics professor at King's College London and a senior research associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University. His books like The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts and Growth: A History and a Reckoning explore the impact of technology on work and the economy. Daniel and Greg discuss the history and circumstances that led to the creation of the GDP and its modern limitations, the moral and environmental challenges associated with a relentless pursuit of growth, and the need for societies to rethink the meaning and value of work in an increasingly automated world.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The modern economic thought about the origins of growth10:22: Growth doesn't come from the material world. It doesn't come from the world of tangible objects, but it comes from the intangible world of ideas. And ideas have all these interesting properties: they're nonrival, they're nonexcludable. But the key point is that whereas the world of finite material resources is finite, there's only so much material stuff out there. The world of ideas is unimaginably vast, for all intents and purposes, as good as infinite. And so if growth comes not from using more and more finite resources, but from discovering new ideas about how we can make ever more productive use of those finite resources, then the kind of constraints, the bottlenecks to growth, aren't to be found in the material world of those finite resources but it's to be found in our inability to discover enough new ideas about the world.What do we do about growth?11:23: If we want more growth, we need to become societies that discover new and more interesting ideas about how we can use the resources that we have.Two big problems when it comes to GDP measure14:40: ​​One is technical failings, which is that it's meant to be a measure of the activity that takes place in the market, and it's not a particularly good measure. Many of the things that we use today are free. Think about the search engines we use, the sort of email browsers, and so on, the sort of first generation of generative AI systems, whatever it might be; we don't pay a price for them in the market. And so they're not captured by traditional GDP statistics. The other thing, of course, that GDP is very bad at capturing is quality improvements. And if you think about particular technologies that we use, something like an iPhone today might have the same price as an iPhone X many years ago. All the different dimensions on which the quality of that technology has improved just aren't captured.On the relationship between work and meaning56:38: Although people say there's a strong relationship between work and meaning, actually, there's a lot of heterogeneity. Actually, a lot of people do not get meaning from their work. If they could get an income without working, they would. And you can see this in the simple polls that are done. Lots of people do not get meaning and purpose from their work. They don't think they're making a meaningful contribution to the world. I think it's often the people who write about this stuff are sometimes confusing the meaning that they get from their work as a kind of generalizable insight. I just don't think it's true.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Big Push ModelHarrod Domar ModelJohn Maynard Keynes Simon KuznetsJoel Mokyr | unSILOed LinkRobert J. Gordon | unSILOed Link Sam AltmanDemis HassabisGarry KasparovNicholas SternGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at King's College LondonFaculty Profile at Oxford UniversityProfessional WebsiteHis Work:The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human ExpertsA World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond Growth: A History and a Reckoning

Humans have lived with a changing climate  since we’ve been on this planet. But what archaeology and anthropology is able to reveal now, is how well civilizations have adapted to changing climates over the course of human history. Brian Fagan is an emeritus professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara and the author of more than 50 books including, Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors and Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations. His work focuses on the history of human culture and our relationship with the climate, using ancient artifacts to piece together the story. Brian and Greg discuss how humans have historically adapted to climate change, the role climate has played in the rise and fall of civilizations, and the importance of understanding our past to prepare for future climate challenges.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why has climate and other big global physical things been underappreciated as historical causes?07:12: You've got a situation now where climate change is among us. We live with it every day. And every time there's a major storm, up come the media with the old climate change thing, which is all very well, but the fact of the matter is that we've lived with climate ever since we've been on this planet. The real immediacy of it has been in the last 10,000 years, particularly with the development of agriculture and herding, because then you're really getting into a situation where you've got the whole scene of climate changing rapidly.Looking at climate as a player in history09:12: We're looking at climate as a player in history, not necessarily a cause. But a major player, which it was.On the dynamics of herding and the breathing of deserts20:42: The dynamics of herding are very simple. In the final analysis, an awful lot of history, I think, is probably very simple. You get rainfall in the desert. Large, shallow lakes develop, water holes form, and a whole bit of vegetation comes up. What happens? Animals and, ultimately, humans and cattle move in. Then it dries up, and they move out. It's like lungs in and out. There's no question that there's movement of deserts, the lungs, or the breathing of the deserts.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Mortimer Wheeler Hubert LambGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC Santa BarbaraHis Work:Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our AncestorsThe Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850The Long Summer: How Climate Changed CivilizationFloods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of CivilizationsThe Intimate Bond: How Animals Shaped Human HistoryFishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization

What if the institution of marriage holds the key to societal well-being? How does marital status correlate with happiness, prosperity, and positive outcomes for children? Why do some elites downplay marriage's importance in public, even as they themselves often lead marriage-centric lives? Brad Wilcox is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, director of the National Marriage Project and an author. His latest book is titled Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.Greg and Brad discuss contemporary views on marriage and how shifting societal norms around education, career focus, and individualism have impacted the timing and meaning of marital commitments. Brad Elaborates on what he calls the "soulmate myth" and how this quest for perfect partnership can delay or complicate marriage decisions. They draw intriguing comparisons between Western and arranged marriages, exploring how cultural expectations and extended family involvement contribute to marital success. Brad also dives into the evolving gender roles within marriage and their implications for marital stability and happiness.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What needs to be done to strengthen marriages in general?39:15: We have to help our elites understand that marriage benefits not just them, but people in general. And so, insofar as they're school superintendents, professors, journalists, C-suite executives, they could be taking steps in Hollywood, at Netflix, heading up a school district's approach to relationship education, a New York Times journalist to just do a better job. And I'm not even asking for like a rose-colored take on marriage, but just like a truthful take, so that our ordinary kids out there who are watching a Netflix show or, exposed often indirectly to some kind of major media coverage just come to appreciate more how much marriage matters for them and for any kids that they have down the road. That would be, I think, part of the answer. But we've also got to recognize and realize that there's a financial piece to all this, and that's why addressing things like the marriage penalty and also giving people a more generous child tax credit would be helpful as well.Can the people around you help you choose a better partner?13:48: As we begin to get more serious or think about getting more serious about someone, I think we should pay attention to how our friends and family members react to a potential boyfriend or girlfriend to make a better decision about our future.Is there a way in which your ability to manage conflict within the marriage helps you to manage conflict elsewhere?16:00: Selection effect is part of the story, yes, but having the counsel of a spouse, having the perspective of a spouse as you navigate both work and social challenges of one sort or another, has been invaluable for me, and I think for a lot of people, and we do see when it comes to men, for instance, that guys who are married earn markedly more and make more strategic choices professionally than their peers who aren't married, even controlling things like race, education, profession, and age. So, I do think that being married often endows us with extra benefits, including the counsel and support of our spouse as we navigate life.Should your spouse be your best friend? 14:41: One of the key challenges for contemporary couples is to not rely on their spouse for all of their social support and all of their emotional connections and to recognize that oftentimes, a good girlfriend, a mother, a brother, a guy friend, or a friend is going to be a better place to turn than your spouse. Not putting all of your emotional eggs in the marital basket paradoxically tends to make your marriage more resilient rather than less important.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Robinson CrusoeCapstones vs. CornerstonesIndividualismLimbic CapitalismBowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American CommunityAndrew TateHannah Pearl DavisMelissa KearneyRobert NisbetÉmile DurkheimGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of VirginiaHis Work:The Awfulness of Elite Hypocrisy on MarriageGet Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save CivilizationSoul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and LatinosSoft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Morality and Society Series)

Despite periods in history when evolutionary biology has been misused, there’s no denying that the study of biological human nature is intrinsic to the study of social and cultural human nature.   David Barash is an emeritus professor of psychology and evolutionary biology at the University of Washington, and a prolific author. His books like, Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are and Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents explore many different corners of human nature and why it should be incorporated into the field of social sciences. David and Greg discuss why there’s a resistance in the social sciences to study human nature, why it’s important to understand differences between the sexes, and why relying too much on deterrence could be a dangerous game. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How social darwinism warped evolution03:33: The unfortunate truth is that evolutionary biology in the past has been misused, especially shortly after Darwin—the whole time of social Darwinism. At which time, particularly right-wing zealots and supporters of imperialism and colonialism, were intrigued by the notion that somehow it was a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology, but they loved the idea that because of evolution, certain people notably, the "white races," were superior, that they were produced that way by natural forces, and hence it is appropriate for them to go ahead and conquer the world—conquer as many people as they can. Moreover, not just with regard to colonialism, but also with regard to the way things are at home. The wealthy are wealthy because they were biologically made superior, and we shouldn't argue with that. So there was that, and that's very much a misunderstanding of evolution and how it works.Natural doesn't always mean good12:44: The fact that something is natural doesn't mean that it's good, or that we have to succumb to it, or go along with it necessarily... [13;07] all sorts of feelings that one may have that may be "natural." That doesn't mean we have to go along with it. And by the same token, the differences that we observe in various human societies or between various individuals within society, the fact that it exists even, doesn't necessarily mean that's natural. It's a consequence of any number of things. And even if it was natural, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's good.Why do male-female differences become problematic?23:02: I think the reason male-female differences have been controversial has to do with something similar to why biophobia, in general, has existed, which is to say that recognition has been used in the past as a way of buttressing socially inappropriate distinctions. The notion that, well, men are more aggressive than women, men are more pushy than women, hence men are likely to become leaders, business leaders, political leaders, and that's all well and good; that's normal; it's natural; there we're back again to the naturalistic fallacy. And so, to some extent, that's, I think, a big part of the reason why male-female differences have become not quite toxic as an issue but really problematic.Understanding infanticide19:57: When we talk about such things as infanticide, I think we have a real obligation to make it clear: a.) that certainly, in the human case, it's extremely rare, and b.) the fact that it does happen in some cases, it's not uncommon among nonhuman animals. We need to make it very clear that that's not, in any way, a blueprint for how human beings ought to behave. There are lots of things in the natural world that are "natural." That's why we call it the natural world, but those aren't worth emulating. In fact, that is so important that we don't.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Max Planck Stephen Jay GouldDavid HumeDavid AttenboroughRichard DawkinsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of WashingtonProfessional WebsiteHis Work:OOPS!: The Worst Blunders of All TimeThrough a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really AreThreats: Intimidation and Its DiscontentsMyth of monogamyOut of Eden: The Surprising Consequences of PolygamyHomo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human NatureThe Survival GameNatural Selections: Selfish Altruists, Honest Liars, and Other Realities of Evolution Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at LiteratureHow Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories: Evolutionary Enigmas

What happens when the relentless pursuit of optimization backfires? What ethical dilemmas and hidden complexities exist inside of this obsession? How does our fixation with efficiency and quantification come at the cost of essential human values and spontaneity?Coco Krumme is an applied mathematician and the author of the book Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization, where she lays out how optimization has stealthily transformed from a technical tool into an all-encompassing philosophy driving various fields, from economics to personal decision-making.Greg and Coco discuss the fundamental pillars of optimization: quantification, abstraction, and automation, and question their impact. Coco sheds light on whether optimization is avoidable, and they evaluate the ethical trade-offs, especially in crucial sectors like healthcare where lives hang in the balance. They also reflect on the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic with regards to optimization. Enjoy this engrossing conversation that ends up questioning the very fabric of modern living.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*  Episode Quotes:Looking at optimization as a game13:57: There are ways to enjoy optimization. It's a game, and you can see progress, and I think that's something humans enjoy. We like seeing ourselves or seeing the world get better. I do think it's pathological at the kind of Silicon Valley elite level. You know, I think there are varying degrees to which these different people that you mentioned and, beyond, right, actually, to what extent that belief in optimization is, very deeply rooted versus an intellectual exercise of posturing to justify whatever investments they're making or whatever success they've had. It's a very curious thing. And I do feel like in the last however many years, I'd be curious what you think as well, but maybe five years or so, we've, as a general population have become more skeptical of those kinds of techno-utopian proclamations.Does optimization cause unhappiness?10:38: I think part of our modern unhappiness is that all we have is optimization, and we are able to question it. We are able to say, "Well, maybe it should be working better," and then where do we reach if we don't have that alternative of a cultural or religious mooring that's been passed on for generations?Breaking optimization into a components15:46: I break optimization into a few sorts of necessary requirements or components, and one of them is quantification, or, specifically, atomization of the world into seeing things in terms of self-same units that can be tallied up. The other two sorts of necessary requirements that I see are abstractions. In order to optimize, we need to be able to think in terms of models with these atomized units as building blocks. What structures are we building? The third is automation, which is popular, or it's a term on the tip of many tongues these days, but to optimize, we need to be able to scale those abstractions up in a kind of hands-off way, so I do think quantification and optimization are certainly related. You can quantify without optimizing, though, right? You could simply count things up without seeking to improve or make things better.On navigating modern modernity28:53: I do think that's the struggle that, as modern Westerners, we face for the next number of years. We are aware that some of these ways of thinking and these systems are failing, both in the material world and in our intellectual and spiritual world. We don't feel happy. We feel we're going too fast. We feel we've lost track of some of the important things, and I think the question that we face is: how do we continue to live in the modern world with its many conveniences and its many fruits of optimization, and at the same time expand our ways of seeing that world and of being in that world, and expand our belief systems and our way of knowing, to hopefully a place where we feel more at ease in it.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Herb SimonSatisficingJohn Stuart MillJames MillUtilitarianismSam AltmanTautologyMarie KondoGuest Profile:Cocofolio.com Personal WebsiteLinkedIn ProfileHer Work:Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization

Historical research on the development of states and political systems typically focuses on the role of war or economic class, but what about the influence of religion?Anna Maria Grzymala-Busse is a political science professor at Stanford University. Her books, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State and Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy emphasize the role religious institutions have played in shaping politics.She and Greg discuss how religious authorities wielded power over emperors and kings, the role religion played in the creation of taxes, and how religion continues to influence politics in the modern world.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is there something different about the way religion and politics relate in America?40:40: The United States is different. It's a religious marketplace, which means that people can move within churches without actually leaving religion. Or they can even sort of continue to view themselves as religious, even when they don't attend churches. And in this religious marketplace, there are all kinds of individual religious leaders. There's no one central authority that speaks for religion in the United States, but there are multiple leaders, all of whom are trying to maximize their market share, right? And when they do so, you know some will claim they're conservative Christians, some will claim they're more liberal ones, and what you see basically is a lot of churn, where a lot of people move between, to some extent, Christian Catholic congregations rather than leave religion altogether. In a monopoly, if you're disgusted with religion or disappointed with your religious leader, you don't have that choice, right? You're in or out. In the United States, you just move to a different church that you find more acceptable and attractive. And I think that's part of the reason why there's so much more resilience in the United States.Do contemporary social scientists sometimes fail to appreciate the impact of ideas, moral arguments, and religious beliefs?44:11: I do think that we, as disciplines, tend to overlook religion because it's so unfamiliar. It's such weird territory. For many people, the idea that you can believe in God and for that to mean something is just so foreign. But I think we ought to remember that, for the vast majority of people on this planet, both now and then, this was actually really important. And if it's that important, it probably shapes how they think about politics and what they expect from politics, and we ought to include that.What did Anna learn from doing both contemporary and historical work?42:26: Doing both contemporary and historical work has taught me that humanity has changed very little. We know everything; the things that we tend to think of as shibboleths are now contested, much as they were back then. People have petty concerns, public opinion matters, and the sort of pettiness and unintended consequences and unanticipated consequences of decisions can make all the difference. And fundamentally, people were no better or worse than they are today. They were just as prone to violence. They were just as prone to love. They were just as prone to seeking justice and fairness. They just thought about them in different terms.The power to deliver salvation shaped history42:46: The ability to deliver salvation, the ability to basically be able to promise people that if you do these things, you can have life eternal, and if you don't do them, we have the power to withhold our own salvation. This sort of path to salvation from you is an enormous authority that I think mattered a great deal. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Charles Tilly ContractarianismTimur KuranGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityProfessional WebsiteHer Work:Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy

Over the course of history, human nature hasn’t changed a great deal, but culture and institutions are another story. And a key way of explaining those l shifts in history is through the lens of evolutionary economics.Geoffrey Hodgson is a professor at Loughborough University and has written numerous books including Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution and How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science. His work examines the crucial role economics plays in explaining the history of everything.Geoffrey and Greg discuss the evolution of legal and financial institutions, why traditional economic theories, like general equilibrium models, don't quite pan out when explaining complex social systems, and how the key to finding a general theory for the social sciences may be Darwinism.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On the theory of firm33:04: Our argument is really, firms are historically specific. Human cooperation in production is back to the primates. We've banded together and hunted things together, but they aren't necessarily firms in the sense that business school students understand firms or want to apply that knowledge to understanding how firms operate. So we do have teams, groups, and hunting bands in different species, but the firm is something more. It's something long-lasting as mechanisms, which means it can outlive the lives of everyone within it—all employees, all owners, all shareholders—it can all be outlived by the firm. We have several firms which have literally existed for hundreds of years, and that's really important.Focusing on the systems behind the memes25:19: Rather than arguing about the definition of the meme, I think look more concretely at the psychological, organizational, legal, and other cultural rule systems that are involved.Collateralization is also a very old concept, but it's underdeveloped46:44: Mortgage is an old word. I mean, with the pawnbroker shop, they had pawnbroker shops in ancient Rome, so if you had a gold ring or something, you put it in, and that's a form of collateralization. You deposit the ring, a good bit of gold, you get the money out, and then you either repay it and get the gold back or you use the money. You don't. So collateralization is also a very old concept, but it's underdeveloped.Is the issue with business people using evolutionary metaphors a lack of precision? 20:13: Precision isn't everything. It's important. I would emphasize conceptual precision because often when people say we need more precision, they go off and try and build a mathematical model, but then they assume out of some of the problems and difficulties that were there at the beginning that the discussion about what should be done in terms of research is ruled out.Show Links:Recommended Resources:General equilibrium theoryGame theoryJohn DeweyThorstein VeblenThe Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins Adam SmithRonald CoaseOliver WiliamsonAlchian and DemsetzViolence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History by Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. WeingastFirst Bank of the United States Joel MokyrDeirdre McCloskeyGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Loughborough UniversityProfessional WebsiteHis Work:Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic EvolutionFrom Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities: An Evolutionary Economics without Homo economicusHow Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, FutureThe Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism“Social Darwinism Revisited: How four critics altered the meaning of a near-obsolete term, greatly increased its usage, and thereby changed social science” | Journal of Evolutionary Economics

Through navigating the intricate world of play behavior we can dissect how animals, from rambunctious rat pups to the majestic meerkats, use this seemingly frivolous activity as a critical tool for survival. Explore the fine line between amusement and aggression, and discover how young creatures use play as a classroom for the lessons of life, playing a part in everything from social hierarchies to practicing recovery.David Toomey is a Professor and Co-Director of the PWTC Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also the author and co-author of several books, including Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself and The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics.David and Greg discuss where humor meets hierarchy, where verbal jousts and jests reveal much about the social fabric of our own species and the animal kingdom – Play Behavior. David discusses the evolutionary parallels between the spontaneous nature of improv and the unpredictability of life itself, proving that being adept at handling the unexpected may well be hardwired in our DNA. Then they examine the broader implications of play throughout life, challenging the separation of creation and judgment and considering the profound implications of play for our sense of self and the wider world.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why is play the defining characteristic of life?33:49: Play and natural selection seem to have quite a lot in common. They are both provisional and they both balance competition and cooperation, and so on and so forth. All the many features of natural selection are also features of play. And you could push this, and I do push this a bit further, and say natural selection is the defining feature of life. You can say, well, life is something that grows, consumes, and dies, but the same can be said of stars or candle flames. You can say that life reproduces, but the same could be said of crystals. But the thing that characterizes life that does not characterize candle flames, stars, or crystals is that it evolved by natural selection. So, if natural selection and play share features, then I don't think it's going too far to say that life is fundamentally playful.Exploration vs. play04:32: One way to separate exploration from play is an animal exploring its environment or exploring something will conclude its exploration and decide that's all I'm going to do, that's all. Now I'm comfortable; I've sufficiently explored it, and we're done with that. But there's no clear endpoint to play. An animal stops playing only when it's tired of playing or becomes interested in something else. So all of that together may be sufficient to define play.Natural selection is improv21:48: Natural selection has many features, and one feature of natural selection, and Darwin noted this: it seldom works from scratch. It takes an existing feature and changes it—maybe improves it. So, for instance, the bones of a paw, if you will, if they are lengthened, and lightened, and hollowed, become the bones of a bird's wing, but the fundamental structure is the same; they're the same number, they are the same relation to each other, or they become the bones of a whale's fin, same thing, same number, same relation between them. So, natural selection doesn't invent things from scratch very often. It just changes things, and that's exactly what improv does. We all know the rule of improv is yes and. And that is, it seems to me, its natural selection is also yes and.On the evolutionary purposes of play06:59: This is what anyone would answer you if you asked the question right on this play. One is that it's training for adult behavior. That is, we're learning how to explore, hunt, or mate in our play. The other is that it's socialization. That is, for social animals, and consider wolf cubs. Wolves need to play together if they are to learn to cooperate, and they need to cooperate if they are to take down an animal larger than themselves, like an elk. A wolf can't do it alone. Thus, play is necessary for the survival of the individual animal. It's also essential for the survival of the pack itself. So those are the two long-standing hypotheses.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Potter StewartGordon Burghardt BooksHerbert SpencerSergio Pellis Google Scholar PageNatural selectionGeorge RomanesDavid HumeFrans de WaalLamarckismOrganic SelectionJohan HuizingaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of Massachusetts AmherstDavid Toomey on LinkedInHis Work:Amazon Author PageKingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life ItselfThe New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of PhysicsAmelia Earhart's Daughters: The Wild And Glorious Story Of American Women Aviators From World War II To The Dawn Of The Space AgeStormchasers: The Hurricane Hunters and Their Fateful Flight into Hurricane Janet

Constitutions are often thought of as the agents of change for monarchies and empires, usually it spells doom for them. But the history of constitutions is far more complicated than a revolutionary tool, in fact some of them were penned by monarchs themselves. Linda Colley is a professor of history at Princeton University. Her latest book, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World is a deep dive into some of the most notable constitutions, how they came to be, and the impacts they have in today’s world. Linda and Greg discuss how constitutions often borrowed and plagiarized constitutions before them, how the purpose of the documents has evolved over time, and how a constitution-less Britain still influenced so many other constitutions. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Do constitutions borrow from each other?05:16: Publishers started producing not just the text of one constitution; they started bundling together the texts of multiple constitutions. And these compendia became very useful for governments wanting to initiate or amend a constitution, particularly if they had to act quickly. Because they could say, "Oh, I really like that bit in Argentina's constitution." Or, "Oh, that Hawaiian constitution hits it on the spot." And if you analyze the makeup of some constitutions, the Norwegian constitution of 1814 is an extreme example. You can see them adopting sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs, because Norwegians had to act quickly before a Swedish army was moving in. So they had to do this in a matter of weeks. So they bought and acquired all these compendia of constitutions, and they just cut and pasted.The evolving role of constitutions21:37: So, constitutions, because they go into print and now go online, can work as advertisements and proclamations to foreign audiences—not just something that caters to domestic and legal purposes.The british identity49:51: In the British case, power and success have notably receded since the Second World War. There's been more uncertainty, therefore, about national identity and British identity. Hence, the independence movement in Scotland in part. And so, that's another factor that might influence future constitutional thinking. Given that some of the old props of national identity no longer work, would a statement of constitutional unity and definition be helpful?How lockdowns hurt the poorest countries48:15:The poorest countries reorganize their economies to fit in with the West. That's what brought a billion people out of poverty. The lockdowns essentially were a violation of that promise, right? What the West basically said was, "We're going to pull up the drawbridge because we're scared." And all of those trade promises we made to you were gone. The markets that we promised to you are gone, and the people at the lowest rungs of world society, meaning the poorest of the poor, became even poorer, and millions died as a consequence of that. On the first day of the lockdown, Prime Minister Modi of India ordered half a billion people to walk, bike, and find some way to go back from the city centers where they were working, migrant workers, to their home villages. And a thousand died en route that day. The life savings of those half a billion people were crushed overnight.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas Babington MacaulayEric Foner“The United States’ Unamendable Constitution” by Jill LeporeGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Princeton UniversityProfessional WebsiteHer Work:The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World HistoryActs of Union and Disunion

Discover the untold stories behind pandemic decision-making in COVID-19 responses and their seismic effects on society. Hear how early prevalence studies contradicted widespread measures, challenging the effectiveness of lockdowns and calling into question the ethical boundaries of public health compliance.This conversation is as much about ethics as it is about health policy.Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford Medical School and also in the economics department at Stanford University. He co-wrote an opinion piece entitled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?”Jay and Greg discuss the lab leak theory's influence on global policy and the issues faced by leaders in real-time crisis management. Jay weighs the stark health economics versus public health trade-offs, highlighting the profound yet often ignored consequences that lockdowns had on global poverty and social well-being. Greg points out the unprecedented speed of vaccine development, and they reflect on what seen and unseen effects of that time were really caused by the pandemic response and not the pandemic.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The real costs of flattening the curve59:45: People died at home with heart attacks, they would've lived. And, of course, who faced tremendous pressure on hospital systems – in New York and Bergamo, and and during the pandemic, a few other places experienced that. But the modal hospital system in this country did not experience that, right? They were empty. And a lot of people who should have gotten care didn't get care for other conditions. Cancer screenings went down, heart attack treatment went down, diabetes management went down, stroke management went down, basic fundamental care that happened didn't happen. And, the cost of flattening the curve was exactly that, right? This suppression of fundamental care that ought to happened. We decided we were going to refocus all of healthcare just to manage COVID rather than all of the myriad health conditions that people are really subject to.The longitudinal effect of the vaccine rollout57:59: The vaccines, I think, were good, but they were not an unmitigated good. And I think the aftermath of that, of the tremendous mistakes public health made in the rollout of the vaccines, and that governments everywhere made in distinguishing clean and unclean on the basis of vaccine status, are going to be with us for a very long time to come.Did the lockdowns help prevent COVID?49:51: No matter what you think about how bad long COVID is, it does not justify lockdowns because the lockdowns do not prevent long COVID. I'm not even sure; the evidence is that the vaccines prevent long-term COVID, but it's very equivocal. So, the question of long COVID is not germane to the question of whether lockdowns were the right or wrong thing to do.How lockdowns hurt the poorest countries48:15:The poorest countries reorganize their economies to fit in with the West. That's what brought a billion people out of poverty. The lockdowns essentially were a violation of that promise, right? What the West basically said was, "We're going to pull up the drawbridge because we're scared." And all of those trade promises we made to you were gone. The markets that we promised to you are gone, and the people at the lowest rungs of world society, meaning the poorest of the poor, became even poorer, and millions died as a consequence of that. On the first day of the lockdown, Prime Minister Modi of India ordered half a billion people to walk, bike, and find some way to go back from the city centers where they were working, migrant workers, to their home villages. And a thousand died en route that day. The life savings of those half a billion people were crushed overnight.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Space Shuttle Challenger disasterCoronavirus disease (COVID-19)London BreedCOVID-19 lockdownsGavin NewsomAnthony FauciFrancis CollinsDeborah BirxScott AtlasMax PlanckWorld Trade OrganizationAustan GoolsbeeBarry MarshallVariolationAndrew CuomoGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford School of MedicineProfile on WikipediaProfile on XProfile on LinkedInHis Work:Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? - WSJHealth EconomicsGoogle Scholar PageResearchGate Page

How complex are the dynamics of employer-based insurance? Is the time ripe for a radical transformation towards universal basic healthcare—a move that could potentially curb the spiraling expenses and offer stable access to care?Amy Finkelstein is the John & Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at MIT and the author and co-author of several books including We've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care andRisky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It.Greg and Amy discuss the truth behind America's healthcare conundrum. Amy peels back the layers of the nation's healthcare system, exposing the patchwork structure that's left millions without stable insurance and grappling with soaring costs. Amy lays out the progression of medical practices and the government's shifting role in health insurance. Greg asks about the effects of cost-sharing in systems with universal coverage, and they weigh the pros and cons of mandates versus automatic health insurance provision*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why did insurance get so highly insecure and highly uncertain?05:59: Almost everyone who's privately insured, which is about half the population as you said, is getting their insurance through their employer. And that actually can create a fair amount of this uncertainty, this insurance turnover. If you lose your job, change your job, retire, become ill (and therefore lose your job), you can lose your health insurance. And that's not a particularly sensible way to design a health insurance system. The very purpose of health insurance is to provide some modicum of economic and financial security in an insecure and uncertain world. So it's quite perverse from our perspective that health insurance is itself highly insecure and highly uncertain. And you asked, why did it get that way? I think because, there was never a "let's start with a clean slate and figure out how to build a coherent system" moment.The true purpose of universal health coverage48:15: We're arguing that we wouldn't have to raise taxes to provide universal basic coverage that fulfills sort of our commitment to access to essential medical care, regardless of resources. But we're not arguing, nor do I think it would be true, that this is actually going to save money. But again, this notion: when people advocate, we're going to do something to save money. So often, that's both a bit of a stretch, but it's also, I think, a bit of a distraction in the sense that the purpose of most policies is not to save money. It's to accomplish an objective, and we pay for that objective. We don't say we're having national defense to save money. We're having it to be secure. Similarly, the purpose of health insurance is not to save money; it's always nice if you do, but it's to ensure access to essential medical care, regardless of resources.Why do people find it hard to invest in preventive care?52:02: In general, there's a sense that it's hard to get people to take their statins to lower their cholesterol after a heart attack, even if those statins are free – so it's not about financing. And why? One of the theories is, well, you've got a lot going on in your life, and when you don't take the statin, there's no immediate feedback loop. You don't immediately have a heart attack. And so you don't see the benefit, and that makes it harder to remember…[52:48] Part of the reason it's hard to get people to invest in preventive care is because the returns are not so salient or obvious. You have to believe the evidence and remember it all the time, as opposed to seeing with your own eyes what's happening when you change your behavior.What does health insurance really mean?08:53: The term health insurance is a bit of a misnomer. Health insurance doesn't actually insure your health. It's not providing the fountain of youth. Instead, it provides economic or financial protection against the medical costs of poor health.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Gross Domestic ProductAn Act for the relief of sick and disabled seamenFriedrich HayekMassachusetts Health Care ReformCharles MurrayAlexander HamiltonAffordable Care ActGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at MITProfile on WikipediaProfile on NBERHer Work:Amazon Author PageWe've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health CareRisky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About ItMoral Hazard in Health InsuranceGoogle Scholar PageMIT Economics Publications List

While Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is still the most widely accepted, it may be missing a key component: cooperation. And how can mathematical equations help us understand this fundamental piece of evolutionary biology? Martin Nowak is a professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. His books like, Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life and SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed use the intersection of mathematics and biology to delve deeper into our understanding of evolution theory. His latest book, Beyond, is an exploration of how mathematics and religion are intertwined.  Martin and Greg discuss the five mechanisms of cooperation including direct and indirect reciprocity, how game theory evolved from economics as a way to explain strategic decisions of humans, and the role of religion and spirituality in promoting cooperative norms.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:To what extent is punishment necessary to keep cooperation going?27:38: ​​Punishment, if you really think about it, is a terrible idea. Because, in most cases, punishment is not done for any noble reason. In most cases, punishment is just an act of violence. And every well-ordered society absolutely wants to make sure that people don't take the law into their own hands — that they just don't punish others. This is, for me, the principle of a functioning society: that we do not punish each other. So, for me, cooperation often means to refrain from punishment. And punishment is a very dangerous weapon. And I think many people have actually understood that critique — that punishment between individuals is a bad idea. And then they are still out there to say that it could be more useful if punishment is done by institutions. But also here, I'm very cautious. Because institutions are also not necessarily the best players all the time. They are the powerful players, and they could also use it inappropriately. So, I think that punishment is extremely problematic.Does mathematics lead us to God?43:47: It is not true that science explains everything. And now you should pause and ask yourself, so there is something which is independent of science, which is deep truth, which is absolute truth, which is unchanging truth. Where does that live? You know, where is that actually, if it's not in the atoms, if it's not in this, in the material world? So, this leads us to mathematical platonism. So, for me, mathematics is a step toward spirituality. It's a step toward the divine, as you say. And so, does mathematics lead us to God? Yes. The answer is yes, in my opinion, because it leads to a platonic heaven. And that is already the step of God. Does biology lead to God? Yes. Also because, in biology, the best understanding of evolution is mathematical. And so again, you need mathematics in order to understand evolution.What is the mechanism of direct reciprocity?15:12: The idea here is that, yes, interactions are repeated, but not necessarily between the same two people. So, I might help somebody who is a complete stranger. Or, in my class, I often talk about the New York subway hero, this brave man who saved another person who fell in front of the train. And, sort of, this isn't really the beginning of a long, repeated game. So, the question is, why do we have this instinct that we want to help? Even if it is with somebody we don't know, presumably a direct interaction is unlikely. And here, the proposal is that this works because of reputation. So, you help somebody, and that gets you the reputation of a valuable member, which is a person who receives help. Or, you refuse help to somebody, and that then will earn you other refusals in the future.Transcending the ego to unveil the nameless self50:05: Once you start to love the divine, you treat people differently; it becomes embracing. And so, if you also start to learn the difference between the ego and the self, there's this shell, and we are enslaved by the shell. And this shell has a name. And that name—we want to make that name famous. Then, we are sad if other people are against us. But inside us, there is the self. And the self is nameless, and the self is untouchable. The self can only be touched by us, not by othersShow Links:Recommended Resources:Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar MorgensternJohn Maynard SmithEvolutionary Games and Population Dynamics by Josef Hofbauer and Karl SigmundW. D. HamiltonNoam ChomskyWesley Autrey“Winners Don’t Punish” by Anna Dreber, David Rand, Drew Fudenberg, and Martin NowakError catastropheGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard UniversityProfessional WebsiteHis Work:Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of LifeSuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to SucceedBeyondVirus dynamics: Mathematical principles of immunology and virologyEvolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation

Why might our brains be keeping us in the dark about our own motives? What's the reason humans give to charity? How do cultural norms lead to continual efforts to signal to our potential allies?Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University . His latest two books are titled, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, and The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.Robin and Greg discuss the discrepancies between what we say and our true intentions.Robin shares how human interaction within our discussions is less about the content and more about social positioning and signaling. Robin talks about the intricate dance of conversations, where showing status, expressing care, and signaling allyship are at the forefront. They also wrestle with the concept of luxury goods and their role in consumer behavior, challenging the conventional wisdom about why we buy what we buy and the messages we're really sending with our choices.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On conscious mind and social norm23:39: Humans have rules about what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do, especially regarding each other. And we really care a lot about our associates not violating those norms, and we're very eager to find rivals violating them and call them out on that. And that's just a really big thing in our lives. And in fact, it's so big that plausibly your conscious mind, the part of your mind I'm talking to, isn't the entire mind, you have noticed. You've got lots of stuff going on in your head that you're not very conscious of, but your conscious mind is the part of you whose job it is mainly to watch what you're doing and at all moments have a story about why you're doing it and why this thing you're doing, for the reason you're doing it,isn't something violating norms. If you didn't have this conscious mind all the time putting together the story, you'd be much more vulnerable to other people claiming that you're violating norms and accusing you of being a bad person for doing bad things.Our individual doesn’t care much about norms20:25: Sometimes norms are functional and helpful, and sometimes they're not. Our individual incentive doesn't care much about that. Our incentive is to not violate the norms and not be caught violating the norms, regardless of whether they're good or bad norms, regardless of what function they serve.Why do people not want to subsidize luxury items, but they do subsidize education?46:34: So part of the problem is that we often idealize some things and even make them sacred. And then, in their role as something sacred, we are willing to subsidize them and sacrifice for them. And then it's less about maybe their consequences and more about showing our devotion to the sacred. In some sense, sacred things are the things we are most eager to show our devotion to. And that's why people who want to promote things want us to see them as sacred. So, schools have succeeded in getting many people to see schools as a sacred venture and therefore worthy of extra subsidy. And they're less interested in maybe the calculation of the job consequences of education because they just see education itself as sacred.On notion of cultural drift47:55: So human superpower is cultural evolution. This is why we can do things so much better than other animals. The key mechanism of culture is that we copy the behaviors of others. In order to make that work, we have to differentially copy the behavior that's better, not the behavior that's worse. And to do that, we need a way to judge who is more successful so that we will copy the successful. So our estimate of what counts as success—who are the people around us who we will count as successful and worthy of emulation—is a key element of culture. And that's going to drive a lot of our choices, including our values and norms. We're going to have compatible and matching with our concept of who around us is the most admirable, the most worthy of celebration and emulation.Show Links:Recommended Resources:François de La RochefoucauldMicrosociologyPatek Philippe WatchesConsumptionParochialismThe Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and MoneyEvolutionGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at George Mason UniversityBlog - Overcoming BiasPodcast - Minds Almost MeetingProfile on LinkedInSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday LifeThe Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth

What patterns can connect and unify biology, society, and the environment? How do cities outlast empires and survive unimaginable destruction? Why do buildings and trees have natural height limits?Geoffrey West is a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and also the author of the book Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Geoffrey and Greg discuss the intricate tapestry of complexity science, where the life of cities and the corporate world intertwine with the principles of biology. Geoffrey's expertise is in linking these seemingly disparate realms in a panoramic view of the universal laws that govern growth, innovation, and sustainability. Geoffrey explains how scaling laws inform everything from the rhythm of every heart in every animal to the pace of city life.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why is it that companies die more quickly than cities?52:57: ​​If you look at the biology and most of the scaling curves, the points lie very close to the scaling line. Cities, there's some variance; you know, there's much more variance, but it's still pretty good. Companies, it's much broader, a much bigger band of variance. Not surprisingly, because animals have evolved over hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years, cities for hundreds of years to maybe a few thousand, possibly, and companies are tens of years, if you're lucky, in some cases, it's not surprising that you get tremendous variance. So, if you believe that the scaling laws are a tendency towards optimizing something to be decided, it's not surprising that companies will have a lot of variants because, if they haven't been around very long, everything's still sort of evolving and adapting.Social interaction and the urban pace48:26: Giving rise to more social interactions, more ideas; and so on also leads to the increasing pace of life in a systematic or predictable way, as distinct from biology, where that economy of life is the slowing of the pace of life. Everything slows down the bigger you are; you live longer, and everything takes longer.The classic agglomeration effects of what city does40:36: The fundamental structure of a social network is that A talks to B, B talks to C, C talks back to A, and we build on each other. We keep building on these ideas; I mean, effectively, they may be stupid ideas, and they may be wrong, and no one gives a damn about any of it, but we forget them afterward, so in almost all cases, it's irrelevant. On the other hand, the thing that's extraordinary about that is that dynamic is what produces a theory of relativity or a Google or a Microsoft or UC Berkeley or whatever, you know, produces; that's what it does. That's what we're here for. So these are the classic agglomeration effects of what a city does, and this is just putting it into a network language; it's the interaction within these networks and the structure of those networks. The scale of life’s capillary networks20:11: The thing that distinguishes you from a whale is that, in this context, we have the same capillaries, but the network is so much bigger. So that's the idea. And there's this shrew; you can barely see it's less than a millimeter, but the whale is like, you could drive a car through it, and so, but down at the capillary end, but the other end. of the network when they're the same. So that's the idea because you build up and use those as building blocks.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Economies of ScaleDiseconomies of ScaleCharles DarwinIsaac NewtonMax KleiberBrian J. EnquistMaxwell's equationsInvariantOptima for Animals: Revised EditionD'Arcy Wentworth ThompsonGalileo GalileiSigmoid FunctionLewis MumfordJane JacobsJack WelchMalthusianismGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the Santa Fe InstituteWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageScale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and CompaniesGeoffrey’s TED Talk

Business leaders face uncertainty everyday, it’s unavoidable. But one of the most important things leaders can do to help their companies thrive is to confront uncertainty and reframe it as an opportunity for growth. Rebecca Homkes is a lecturer at London Business School’s Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, a faculty member at Duke Corporate Executive Education, and the author of the book, Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times.Rebecca and Greg discuss her three steps for growth strategy and how the pandemic shaped these ideas, the significance of utilizing uncertainty as an advantage, and why agility must be aligned with strategy if you want to avoid chaos.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Agility without strategy is chaos44:45: What I hear often, and I'm sure you've heard something similar is, strategy is great. But we're not going to do strategy this year because we want to be more agile. And you have to pause, smile, and say, the definition of agility is making good decisions quickly aligned with strategy. Lacking a strategy, you cannot have agility. You have speed, but it's not aligned speed. And that's the key words you're looking for: aligned speed. Alignment without speed is too slow to matter. Speed without alignment is chaotic. You're building aligned speed, which comes from the true definition of agility: making good decisions quickly aligned with strategy. But you can't do that lacking a value-creating strategy, because then I don't know what's most important and why. And I might be making great decisions, and you're making decisions, but if they're not aligned with each other, we're not rowing in the same direction as an organization.Directions give teams alignment25:04: Directions are okay. And the direction gives the team the alignment they need from leadership while preventing you from falling into that delusion trap that you've got. Because as soon as you've communicated a firm message, you will also be less likely to be heads up looking for any information that might go against it.What's the advantage of really surfacing uncertainty as one of the key things that leaders need to focus on?02:30: If you want to grow consistently and successfully through every market cycle, you've got to start by reframing. The definition of uncertainty is a series of future events which may or may not occur. Whether or not those events are good or bad depends on what we're trying to do and how we're set up. So if you see your role as doing that, figure out what we're trying to do, and then get set up rather than reducing uncertainty, you've just opened the opportunity set to an order of magnitude more than others you're competing against.The best pivots are changes38:15: The best pivots are changes, not these big, massive "we're doing A, and now we're going to do B." It's about these small micro-changes and micro-adjustments as we're learning, and not necessarily tactical, right? But these micro-changes and adjustments—you know, this was one of my muscle memories and battles—you know, I'm going to kind of shift, like, you know, of these two sub-things I'm resourcing, I'm going to go from one to the other. And I'm doing that because I've got my belief tracker up.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric RiesOODA loopPorter’s Five ForcesGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteHer Work:Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times

In recent decades, economic theory has made inroads into the study and practice of law, mainly in the domain of commercial transactions and corporate organization. But economics may also have a lot to say about how our governments are organized and how political actors engage in bargains and exchange.Professors Robert Cooter and Michael Gilbert are leading experts in the field of economics and law. Robert is the Herman F. Slevin Professor of Law at UC Berkeley and the co-author of the textbook, Law and Economics. Michael is the vice dean of University of Virginia’s law school. He and Robert’s new book, Public Law and Economics, explores the impact economic scholarship has on the study and practice of public law like the separation of government powers and elections.Robert, Michael, and Greg discuss why the disciplines of economics and law go hand in hand, how economics can inform the behavioral impact of legal rules, and how economic theories play out in a judicial context.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why law and economics has become so important in law schools02:40 First of all, much of economics is about incentives, that is to say, the reasons why people are motivated to do things. For example, if the price goes up, there's an incentive for people to buy less of the good. It turns out that the law can be regarded as an incentive system. For example, if the speed limit is increased from 55 to 65 miles an hour, that provides incentives for people to go ahead and drive faster. Furthermore, if the fine is increased from 100 to 150 dollars for exceeding the speed limit, that's an incentive for people not to exceed the speed limit. So, it turns out that many of the laws can be regarded as incentives to change people's behavior.  How economics can often be applied to humanistic practice of interpretation that lawyers are involved in52:58 My impression is that a lot of interpretation, especially in the hard cases where there's room to maneuver, it ends up being a function of people's intuitions. And sometimes, their intuitions are good, but sometimes they lead us astray. And economics isn't about a single person's intuitions; it's programmatic, it's general, it's built on a set of tools and assumptions that you can pinpoint. It isn't just myths in one person's mind. And I think that can be very helpful for interpretation.Understanding what efficiency means15:23 People equate efficiency with money and profit. And that's not what efficiency is, as any economist will tell you. Efficiency is about the satisfaction of people's preferences, and economists place nearly no limits or constraints on what the content of those preferences are.Is having more judiciary independence always better?43:51 You need independence in order to free the judges from outside influence and allow them to apply the law correctly and objectively, rather than taking bribes or deciding based on threats or whatever else. On the other hand, there's something a little perplexing about this. So, if you give them too much independence, you're empowering them to decide the law objectively, free from influence, and that's good. But you're also empowering them to do anything they want. Maybe they'll ignore the law. Maybe they'll read their own preferences under the law. Where's the constraint now? (44:36) The other thing I'll say about this is that almost every state elects judges in one capacity or another. And when I've talked to people, especially non-US citizens, they just across the board think this system is absolutely crazy because it just cuts too much into the independence of the courts. And maybe it does. And yet, I think most states are perceived to have the rule of law and have for decades and decades. So we’re constantly navigating this trade-off.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Richard Posner Coase theoremGuest Profile:Robert Cooter’s faculty profile at UC BerkeleyMichael Gilbert’s faculty profile at University of VirginiaTheir Work:Public Law and EconomicsRobert's Work:Law and EconomicsSolomon's Knot: How Law Can End the Poverty of NationsThe strategic constitution

How are our fates in society like hikers on a mountain, climbing together? In our ever increasingly interconnected world how can one balance the rewards of a connected planet against the perils that come with it?Ian Goldin is an Oxford University Professor of Globalisation and Development, Senior Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, and the author of several books. His upcoming book is titled, Age of the City: Why our Future will be Won or Lost Together.Greg and Ian discuss intertwined nature of global connectivity and the systematic risks it poses. Ian explains how pandemics, like COVID-19, highlight these vulnerabilities, emphasizing the need for global cooperation and resilience. Greg and Ian explore modern urbanization, emphasizing how the future is increasingly urban and the challenges and opportunities this presents for sustainability and community within cities. At the end Ian leaves us inspired to adopt global stewardship in our daily lives, in a lesson he learned working with Nelson Mandela.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is the future more urban?39:55:  Cities are going through a transformation, but one thing I would bet on is that the rate of urbanization will not decrease, and that's true in the U.S. and it's true elsewhere around the world. Where the most growth of cities is in developing countries with big challenges, the pandemic posed a big challenge, climate is a massive challenge. Cities are hotter than other places, so how they cope with heat stress, with water stress, with flooding becomes important. Ocean rise is a massive challenge for seaboard cities…So, big challenges, but the future will be more and more urban.Cities are the future40:55: Cities are the future, but making them livable and sustainable is a massive challenge; getting to zero carbon will make them resilient to climate pressures.Why do people flock to urban Centers for choice and community?45:37: People want to be near other people who are like them, creative, and where they'll have high efficiency. What we find in cities is that we have many more options. We can choose the lifestyle we want, whether you are young or old, have sexual preferences, religious preferences, fashion preferences, music preferences, or food preferences. All of these things can be satisfied in a city, which they never could in a small town, let alone in the countryside. And so, the more that we move into a world where our own preferences become important and we can be anywhere, we're going to be in a big city because that's where we're going to satisfy our preferences.Is there always going to be a trade off that when we increase connectedness, we are necessarily  increasing risks?03:12: Entanglement is the underbelly, the other side of connectivity, and I think it happens at all dimensions. If you think about it, one's own life, the more you get to know other people and get involved in them, it brings great joy and many benefits, but it can also bring great sadness. And I think it's like that at a macro scale as well, that we now increasingly recognize that we are entangled around the world in multiple ways. And that means that we can benefit enormously. A vaccine can be developed in one place and be around the world, or the worldwide web can join us all. We can hear new music or fashion, go to other places, meet incredible people, and benefit from incredible ideas, but we are also more vulnerable as a result. And so the great challenge of globalization, I think, is how does one harvest the upside and manage the downside.Show Links:Recommended Resources:GlobalizationSuez CanalHenry PaulsonDeregulationWorld BankOECDGiovanni Pico della MirandolaRenaissanceNiccolò MachiavelliHouse of MediciGirolamo SavonarolaMartin LutherJohn CalvinSocratesAristotleHumanismNelson MandelaGuest Profile:IanGoldin.orgFaculty Profile at the University of OxfordWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageAge of the City: Why our Future will be Won or Lost TogetherThe Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do about ItRescue: From Global Crisis to a Better WorldAge of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New RenaissanceExceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our FutureDevelopment: A Very Short IntroductionIs the Planet Full?Divided Nations: Why global governance is failing, and what we can do about itThe Pursuit of Development: Economic Growth, Social Change and IdeasGlobalization for Development: Meeting New Challenges

What is the mindset that's reshaping how companies and investors forge paths to success from beyond the balance sheets? How are the staunch principles of Net Present Value giving way to strategies that are as nimble and adventurous as the startups they finance?Ilya Strebulaev is a Professor of Private Equity at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Director of their Venture Capital Initiative, and the co-author of the new book The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth with Alex Deng.Ilya and Greg discuss the layers of a dynamic business landscape, revealing how traditional corporate strategies are being outpaced by those who dare to think like venture capitalists. Ilya describes how top venture capitalists operate and why embracing their methodologies is critical in a world where change is the only constant. Ilya shares tales of contrarian investment decisions, the growing presence of corporate venture capital, and the converging paths of institutional and corporate VCs.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The venture mindset42:02: The venture mindset doesn't mean that you have a perfectly crystal ball recognizing these great founders and great ideas. The venture mindset means that you, in an organization, build structure, build decision-making process, what we also call it, build racetracks, so that again and again and again, you will be able not just to spot but also to realize those unusual contrarian investment opportunities. And I think that most successful VC firms that I studied—well, actually all successful VC firms that I studied that have been successful for quite a bit of time, all follow these principles.How having a prepared mind helps you to invest right away16:27: In fact, the smartest decisions are never fast. You just prepare yourself for this decision. Institutional VCs vs. Corporate VCs25:50: Institutional VCs have, first, much larger LinkedIn profiles. Larger meaning, not just that they have more information there, but have more connections. Their network is much, much larger. 26:10: Corporate VCs' LinkedIn are much, much smaller. But there's something else: if you look at corporate VCs' LinkedIn profiles, very likely, in fact, their connections will be within their four walls. Or maybe if you come from another organization, there will be these two four walls. So that there will be fewer organizations where their connections are coming from. And you could see it if you map them. But for institutional VCs, it's not just that you have three times more connections. But they're very different. 26:53: Because I think the diversity in constructive networking, as I call it, also brings a lot of new opportunities. And again, you need this, and this is a part of the venture mindset.Is dissenting from the consensus important in the venture mindset?35:20:There is something else, which I think is a huge part of the venture mindset, that if everybody invests and there's a craze about it, obviously, it means there are also going to be crazy valuations. That also means that you're likely too late for the party. It's likely that even if everybody is right, your return is going to be right. And as a result of that, I think the best way those who follow the venture mindset think about this is that we have to be right, but there should be a lot of disagreement. If there is consensus that you know, crypto is going to be the next craze. Well, right now, generative AI is going to be the next craze, okay? If everybody is right, then, in fact, you're going to be right, but your returns are going to be relatively small. You would like to be right when you are what we call in the book Mr. Contrarian—somebody who goes against the crowd.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Net Present ValueOpen InnovationBlue Ocean StrategyJensen HuangLouis PasteurDrew HoustonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford GSBProfile on LinkedInWikipedia PageIlyaStrebulaev.comHis Work:The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary GrowthGoogle Scholar PageCornerstone Research Page

Are there reasons to doubt  the conventional wisdom of greenery as the cure-all for urban ills. What are the roots of the Garden City movement, and how has the reality of it been different than the theory?Des Fitzgerald is a professor of medical humanities and social sciences at University College Cork Ireland, and also the author of a recent book titled, The Living City: Why Cities Don't Need to Be Green to Be Great. (released in the UK with a different title: The City of Today is a Dying Thing.Greg and Des discuss how urban landscapes aren't just about aesthetics; they're intricately linked to our national identity and cognitive functions. Des helps us uncover how architecture influences our sense of place and impacts our brains, and explores the role of culture in shaping our environmental perceptions. The conversation spans everything from peat briquettes to Georgian-style facades. Des also guides us through an enlightening discussion on the burgeoning field of medical humanities and the innovative concept of green social prescribing within the NHS.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The transformative shift in environmental neuroscience39:32: Something that is becoming really interesting in this space is the emergence of environmental neuroscience, as I think a relatively new, increasingly interesting, and powerful discipline. Environmental neuroscience exists for a whole bunch of reasons, but certainly the increasing sense that we're able to take a brain measure while a person moves around the space in three dimensions. That's, I think it's something that can be done imperfectly now. It's still very much in progress, but at least we have a horizon in which that's going to become pretty possible at kind of high-resolution research grade relatively soon. And that is transformative, actually, if the three dimensions of a space become truly available as a variable for brain measurement. Then something does happen, and something does change in that moment.What’s wrong with planting a lot of trees?43:13: What concerns me about urban tree planting is what we're not talking about when we're talking about urban trees, right? So the amount of social and public problems that trees are meant to solve is ridiculous. It's everything from mental health to youth crime to skills in some parts of England, where they're planting trees in an English town because it's like the people of the town have low skills for some reason. It just seems to go for not tackling boring social problems, right? So, for instance, it's very real that there are major mental health problems in cities. I think there is something very serious about the way we have constructed the contemporary city—that it has bad effects for lots of people.We need to stop centering urban discourse on charismatic megafauna of global urbanism45:37: We need to stop centering urban discourse on the kind of charismatic megafauna of global urbanism, right? And look at the kind of, what I would genuinely call the crap cities, right? The kind of second-tier, slightly stronger places, like places like Cork, Cardiff in Wales, where I used to live. I'm not sure what your go-to North American examples would be, but I'm still in those kinds of, like, lower-tier, maybe Poughkeepsie, Peoria, these kinds of places. That's your kind of modular urban experience, I think. And those are places I think we need to take much more seriously culturally and socially.Interdisciplinarity in medical humanities49:09: I think what folks in the field are trying to do is do something a little bit more collaborative and a little bit more imaginative, and not just have the philosopher who will sign off your ethics forms, but try to think seriously about how philosophy can inform experimental design. How philosophical work can itself be informed by stuff that's happening in biology and the life sciences. I'm trying to really get at the kind of complex space between those things where you're doing work that is not quite humanities or science but some kind of magic third thing.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Le CorbusierGarden city movementFrederick Law OlmstedEbenezer HowardJohn MuirPlan VoisinEdwin LutyensPort SunlightWilliam LeverSamuel SmilesNeomEdward C. TolmanGeorges-Eugène HaussmannNapoleon IIIMedical humanitiesWellcome TrustGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University College CorkHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe City of Today is a Dying ThingThe Living City: Why Cities Don't Need to Be Green to Be GreatThe Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital CityRethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and NeurosciencesGoogle Scholar Page

Is modern communication leaving us more divided than ever? What can the writings of ancient philosophers teach us about persuasion? How can ancient wisdom illuminate today's polarized political discourse?Robin Reames is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is also an author and co-author. Her latest book is titled, The Ancient Art of Thinking For Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times.Robin and Greg discuss the topic of spontaneous speaking. Robin's expertise leads us through the historical corridors of Grecian sophists, as we ponder whether a meticulously scripted statement can ever match the raw resonance of impromptu oratory. Together, Robin and Greg examine the power dynamics embedded in everyday language, underscoring the transformative potential of rhetoric to foster critical thinking and elevate public debate. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes: How studying rhetoric makes you a toughest customer41:58: One of the effects of studying rhetoric is that you become a tougher customer, but not because there's something you're clinging to, not because there's some idea that you've decided is absolutely correct, fixed, and immovable, but because you can see how the sausage is made in the language. You can see how the persuasion is attempting to gain your credence and your conviction, and it makes it harder for you to persuade. That was the whole idea of creating an art where those techniques and moves are given names, and we can learn the names, and when we learn the names, we can identify when they happen in the language. Well, all of a sudden, it just demystifies it. I'm noticing that the language is making me feel angry, right? And rather than just assume that that's because the language is telling me something that's true in the world, I'm noticing, oh, this is the language that made me feel angry. Why did that make me feel angry? What in the language provoked that response, right? Those are the sorts of things that happen when you learn to identify the skills of rhetoricLanguage can never give you reality25:09: Language can never give you reality itself. It can only package it in a way that makes it recognizable to you.Language on autopilot46:17: To be a language user is, in many ways, to be on autopilot, but it is possible also, as a rhetorical language user, to be on autopilot and also to recognize the effects of that, to see how the effects of that work their way into our way of seeing and viewing the world and understanding and responding to it.Analyzing arguments as arguments, not political alignments32:02: It is possible, through using a mechanism like rhetoric, which was designed to have great utility in political discourse, to think about arguments as arguments and language as language, political arguments and political language as political arguments and political language, as opposed to thinking of them entirely in terms of whether they originate from the right or the left, whether I agree with them because I'm on the right or the left. Rhetorical thinking is about thinking language in other terms, in the terms that are supplied by the rhetorical tradition. The way the rhetorical tradition developed over the course of its long, centuries-long, millennia-long life was by noticing, cataloging, and naming the moves that happen in language.Show Links:Recommended Resources:TechneAristotleRhetoricPlatoSocratesSophistAlcidamasGorgiasProtagorasHomerKenneth BurkeStephen ToulminHannah ArendtAspasiaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of Illinois ChicagoHer Work:Amazon Author PageThe Ancient Art of Thinking For Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized TimesSeeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical TheoryThe Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present

Where do the lines lie between nature and culture within humanity? How can our human social practices affect and shape our biology? The answer is within the concept of niche construction, showcasing how human activities, much like those of other organisms, actively shape our environment, which in turn influences our evolution.Joseph Rouse is a professor of philosophy and also science and technology at Wesleyan University, and also the author of several books. His latest work is titled, Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction. It's a deep dive into the cultural and ethical practices that have co-evolved with our species.Greg and Joseph discuss the idea of a world where cultural evolution and biological evolution are not two disparate processes but intricately connected facets of human life. Joseph  illustrates how these have evolved to support a sophisticated network of social justice, individual freedom, and political democracy. Joseph also makes the case for human life as a complex network of practice-interdependent existence, contrasting the more simplistic view of human behavior as merely a quest for reproductive success. Enjoy this new angle on the ideas of evolutionary biology.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The interconnectedness of human biology and social culture08:16 The anthropologist would happily tell you, culture includes material culture, right? And we live in built environments that have been massively transformed, niched constructively, and so seeing that part of what we think of as our social world, as on the one hand, always accommodating our biological capacities but then also recognizing that those needs and capacities have been transformed by this built environment that has been repeatedly transformed and complicated and diversified over millennia because, after all, one of the distinctive biological features of human beings compared to other organisms is that we don't live in the same way as other human beings.Understanding what philosophers mean when they talk about practice26:16 As we know from watching the role of the courts, once you have a rule or a law, what it actually means in each case is open to further interpretation and new issues that hadn't been initially considered and once you adapt the rule or the norm to those issues, it reverberates back on the earlier cases. And so you've got a constant dynamic of normative change in which what is normal enables one to make judgments about how to continue in the same way.Defining biological normativity11:35 In its basic form, biological normativity is the way in which an organism and a lineage are a process that's goal-directed. Organisms do all sorts of things and adjust to conditions in order to sustain the very process of their being alive.The problem in talking about and measuring the complexity of social life36:38 We tend to assume complexity is one thing and can be measured along one dimension. But in fact, there are many different kinds of complexity. I mean, someone living in what an earlier generation of anthropologists would have called a more primitive society, which we rightly no longer talk about, in fact, hasn't negotiated an extraordinary range of local knowledge and relationships, and so forth. Now, we have, in part, delegated more things to more practices, and that has allowed increasing specialization. It's also enhanced some limitations.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Evolutionary biologyNiche ConstructionNormativityImmanuel KantJohn RawlsLudwig WittgensteinE. O. WilsonWilfrid SellarsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Wesleyan UniversityPhilPeople.com ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageSocial Practices as Biological Niche ConstructionArticulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific ImageKnowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of ScienceEngaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices PhilosophicallyHow Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism

Could the secret to organizational success be as simple as going back to basics? Gene Kim and Steven Spear’s new book, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification presents practical, grounded research on organizational management and design. Gene is the chair of the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit and Steven teaches at MIT Sloan.Gene and Steven walk Greg through the three mechanisms of successful organizational design: slowify, simplify, and amplify. They also discuss how the field of organizational design has evolved and what still needs to evolve with management education. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Three mechanisms of a successful organizational designWe now have everything we need to be able to describe the three mechanisms that must be in place in any high-performing system. You got to slowify, meaning we move the most difficult problems from production into planning and practice, where work can be redone. We can do experiments. We can learn where we can simplify where we actually divide up the problems. We partition them so that they are easier to solve. And there's three dimensions of that. And then there's amplification, this overlay of how do we create a system that can amplify even the weakest signals so that when someone needs help or when there's danger that we can quickly detect and correct or ideally prevent from happening again. What the term ‘slowification’ means38:39 The reason why we had to create the word ‘slowification’ is that we have a lot of adages for slow down to speed up or stop sawing to sharpen the saw, and the absence of the word prevents us from doing it or thinking it. (38:46) But the whole notion is creating time to be able to solve tough problems not in production but in planning and practice. To solve architectural problems, not during the normal sprint or what have you, but actually making time for the architectural spike or the period of technical debt reduction to enable people to do their work easily and well.The wrong way to measure successA lot of these metric-driven organizations, the pit they fall into is they don't account for the return on investment of discovery. They measure activity but not accomplishment.The great advantages of technology in management educationAnd now, because we can do education at a distance, we can do asynchronous education, we can have education which is interspersed with either structured experiences or just natural experiences that people have. We can now actually teach one by one as needed as ready situation where information is pulled from the instructor to time and place and situation where it's needed, rather than being forced by the instructor in a formulation that the instructor thinks is right but may have nothing to do with the readiness of the student.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System | Harvard Business ReviewChristina Maslach on unSILOed Gary Klein on unSILOedDr. Richard ShannonRon WestrumKim ClarkNyquist–Shannon sampling theoremGuest Profile:Gene Kim’s WebsiteSteven Spear’s profile at MIT SloanTheir Work:Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and AmplificationGene's Books:Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology OrganizationsThe DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business WinThe Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of DataSteve's Book:The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition 

Do our genes have an impact on how many friends we’ll have in life and the kinds of people we gravitate towards whether our friends are connected to each other? How can the study of social networks help us better prepare for the next pandemic? Nicholas Christakis is a professor of natural and social sciences and directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. His research focuses on social networks and biosocial science, all of which are central points in his books like, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live and Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. He and Greg discuss how genes can influence our social networks, the dynamics of social contagion, and why the arc of human evolution bends towards goodness. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why even minds as brilliant as Isaac Newton's succumb to financial manias01:01:41 Our ability to function in groups depends, in part, on our ability to copy the mood of others around us. And all of us have had this experience. (01:02:20) It's to build group solidarity. And the other is it's efficient in terms of learning. In other words, rather than having to learn something yourself, you just copy what others are doing. And that's extremely efficient. So rather than having to do your own research and figure out what stock really has good fundamentals, you're like, well, I'll just buy what everyone else is buying that sometimes leads to really over-the-top, frothy bubbles that are quite dangerous for all involved.The spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas23:07 One of the reasons we affiliate with each other and live in groups is to avail ourselves of this process of social learning, but in so doing, we expose ourselves to other risks—for example, the risks of infection, the risks of violence, and so on. So natural selection over time has balanced these costs and benefits and yielded, I argue, a structure of networks that obeys the principle that the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. Otherwise, we would live separate from each other. We wouldn't form networks.Network science in a 21st-century approach06:45 Network science offers a 21st-century approach because it connects the collective and individual layers. It explains how individuals become members of collectivities, become members of groups by identifying the pattern of connections between people. It's kind of a structural approach.Do modern technologies influence human social interactions?17:17 There's no question that new technologies are affecting our social interactions in a number of ways. But the fundamental reality of our desire for social connection and our susceptibility to technology's social influence is not changing over a hundred-year time span. This has been shaped by ancient and powerful evolutionary forces.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Lumpers and splitters Adam Smith Émile Durkheim Karl MarxFrancis GaltonDiffusion of Innovations Thomas Valente Richard DawkinsSteven Pinker Gemeinschaft and GesellschaftGuns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared DiamondStumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Yale UniversityHis Work:Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We LiveBlueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good SocietyConnected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do

Humans have always had the propensity to be irrational. In fact, humans may be as irrational today as they were centuries ago. But with a more educated and technologically advanced society, why does this level of irrational thought and behavior persist? Steven Nadler is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. His books like When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves and Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die encourage readers to examine their lives through a philosophical lens.He and Greg discuss how social media has contributed to the perpetuity of irrationality in society, why more education doesn’t necessarily lead to more rational thought, and why philosophy should be more widely integrated into our education systems. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Exploring Spinoza’s determinismNobody can be truly free from external influences because we have to live in the world. But you can liberate yourself insofar as your life is guided by reason and not by passion. Now, for Spinoza, the world is deterministic. Everything happens because of its antecedent causes. And this is as true as much for leaves falling off trees and rocks rolling down hills and for our bodies, which respond to the physical influences of the world. But it's also completely true with respect to the human mind. Our mental states, our thoughts, our beliefs, our desires also exist within a deterministic system.Where do irrational beliefs come from?02:46: I don't think that human beings are necessarily more or less irrational now than they were centuries ago. However, the difference is that irrationality can flourish more easily now with the advent of social media internet sites that traffic in irrational beliefs that encourage irrational thinking, and that make it very easy for a person to be overwhelmed by misinformation and thus form beliefs without any evidence and never really be exposed to counter-evidence.Two kinds of bad thinking07:08: In the book, we distinguish between two kinds of stubbornness or two kinds of bad thinking. We call the first, epistemic stubbornness, and the second, normative stubbornness. Epistemic stubbornness is where you adopt beliefs without sufficient evidence in favor of their truth. (08:19) What we call normative stubbornness is more a matter of behavior. And maybe here, temperament plays a bigger role. A person who is normatively stubborn applies rules without thinking the actions they choose and the courses of behavior that they adopt.What Nadler says is one of the root causes of persistent bad thinking11:46 Very often we know what the right thing to do is, we know what is good, but we act contrary to our better judgment. That's not just something that's a matter of our actions and behavior, but even in our minds, sometimes we know that a belief is not probably the right thing. It's probably not true, and yet somehow through peer pressure, for example, we feel compelled to go with the crowd, and we find ourselves believing things that we have no evidence for believing, and in fact stand in the face of contrary evidence.Show Links:Recommended Resources:PlatoEthics by Baruch SpinozaMeditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume  Immanuel KantSocratesConatusApology of Socrates by PlatoClytemnestraAchillesStoicism AristotelianismThomas HobbesGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of WisconsinHis Work:When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from OurselvesThink Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to DieA Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular AgeThe Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil

The problem with the business mindset of “move fast and break things” is that what often gets broken is people. But how can companies take care of their employees without sacrificing accelerated growth?Frances Frei is a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School. She’s spent decades researching operational design and leadership and has co-authored numerous books like, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems and Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. She and Greg discuss the importance of fostering a culture of curiosity, why moving fast and breaking things is not worth it, and how inclusion can be an organizational superpower. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Can you do layoffs with dignity?27:01: When Elon Musk famously bought Twitter, he did layoffs and maybe a caricature of how to do everything wrong. But on the same day, he did layoffs, Stripe did layoffs. And so we got the two. Like on the same day, you could see the transcript of what Elon said to his employees and what Stripe said to their employees. So now Stripe didn't anticipate the layoffs, but the guy took responsibility for it in a way that I think strengthened the organization. That's what I mean. Either anticipate it so you don't have to do it or take responsibility that you did it and you learn the lessons…[28:02]I'm not sure we code layoffs as the management failure as they mostly are. And so I treat it, and I'm not saying this with any extra judgment; just learn from it like we do everything else. Like, great, yeah, you went through a layoff, what went wrong, learn from it so that you can avoid it the next time.Curiosity is a cultural artifact11:42 Curiosity is a cultural artifact; it's a cultural behavior. It's a cultural mindset, and when you have it, the symptoms are delightful to you because you're going to get curious about it. So many organizations have the "don't bring me a problem unless you bring me a solution," which is the opposite of curiosity. It's guaranteed not to have very much improvement.Inclusion as an operational superpower41:22: Inclusion, to me, the reason I like it so much, is I know of no other thing that can get me achievement, sentiment boosts, and performance with no new people and no new technology. I find inclusion to be an operational superpower. No new people, no new technology, and business performance and employee engagement skyrocketed.Speed vs. sensibility22:41: When people were writing code, and the code didn't influence individuals, I don't care if you got the code wrong and you wanted to move fast and fix things, and that somehow helps you do faster iterations of code. But when it's humans, personally, it's a worldview. I personally have a problem with it. That's the first thing. The second thing is it seduces you into thinking you are going faster, breaking things along the way, but when you factor in the collateral damage and the rework that you have to do, you're scarcely going faster; you just that somebody else had to pay for it later, and you got the advantage of it today. So, I think it's also misguided.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Little’s LawTravis KalanickKarim R. Lakhani | unSILOedServiceNowValerius MaximusThe No-Stats All-Star by Michael Lewis (New York Times)Chris ArgyrisAmy Edmondson | unSILOedAnita TuckerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Business SchoolProfessional WebsiteHer Work:Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard ProblemsUnleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around YouUncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your BusinessFixable podcast

How can an interdisciplinary approach to the study of our past help our understanding of history? How transformative was the Spanish Empire’s global influence and how did they accomplish it?Felipe Fernández-Armesto is the William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and the author of several books including How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400-Year History, 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided, and Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food.Felipe and Greg discuss the hunger for simple, moral narratives in history, a stark contrast to the reality of multifaceted characters and events that shaped our world. They scrutinize the legacy of Cortez and the Spanish conquest, challenging notions that have influenced our moral judgments of history. Felipe also takes on some myths surrounding the technological prowess of the Spanish Empire.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What did engineers contribute to the political functioning of an empire?24:02: What did engineers contribute to the political functioning of the empire? And I think that was crucial as well. Because if you've got an empire, especially if you've got a pre-industrial empire like that of Spain, and you're trying to manage this vast enterprise from a very small country with a very small population, a very restricted domestic resource base, a poor, small country, in order to do that, you need indigenous collaborators. You mentioned the Black Legend, of Spanish cruelty and oppression. No matter how cruel or oppressive you are, you can't run an empire of that sort with pre-industrial technology unless you can reconcile sufficient indigenous people to it.What can we learn about hatred from history?41:22: One of the lessons I've learned from history is that hatred is an intractable emotion that has extraordinary enduring powers, and people tend to change their friends a lot. The history of international relations is basically the history of shifting alliances. People always change their friends, but they keep the same enemies. I think, for all the good intentions of the Spaniards, they never quite created the sort of Pax Hispanica, which might fully deserve the name. Of course, Pax Romana didn't deserve the name either.History isn't a science51:08: For me, history isn't a science. It's an art; it's a humanistic discipline. I make no apology for that revel in it. That's what makes it fascinating, because the problems of science are fundamentally solvable; if they're genuinely problems of science, they're fundamentally solvable. When scientists take on subjects beyond their province, like, you know, "What's the origin of the cosmos?" or "Does God exist?" all those sorts of questions. Now, science—that's rather foolish and ambitious on the part of a scientist; if a question is genuinely scientific, then it's in principle answerable. If a problem is scientific, it's, in principle, solvable. Whereas a problem in the humanities is, in principle, insoluble because you can never have a completely objective assessment of the evidence.The nature of truth in historical narratives07:27: A very important truth about history is that we don't know what the truth is. We know only the truth of what the sources say, so we know what particular people who've left us sources wanted us to think. And to some extent, I suppose we can corroborate that against archaeological evidence or dispassionate statistics if they happen to be available. But essentially, the problem of being a historian and telling the truth is that the evidence is not present to our senses, so we cannot test it in the same way that we can test the truth of assertions that are made by things that are happening in our own time.Show Links: Recommended Resources:R. G. CollingwoodLeopold von RankeHistory of the Conquest of MexicoPax RomanaPax AmericanaPax HispanicaReconquistaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of Notre DameWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageHow the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400-Year History1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth CollidedCivilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of NatureOur America: A Hispanic History of the United StatesA Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change — and the Limits of EvolutionThe Oxford History of the WorldAmerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to AmericaThe Conquistadors: A Very Short IntroductionThe Americas: A Hemispheric HistoryStraits: Beyond the Myth of MagellanNear a Thousand Tables: A History of FoodPathfinders: A Global History of ExplorationOut of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think ItThe World: A History, Volume 2Truth: A History and a Guide for the PerplexedApproaches to Global History: To See the World WholeBefore Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492ColumbusSo You Think You're Human: A Brief History of Humankind

Without the Dutch revolution of the 16th century, England may never have taken its place as a world superpower and there could have been no such thing as the American Revolution. Yet, the pivotal role the Netherlands played in the development of the modern world seems to go overlooked and under taught in history courses. Why? Jonathan Scott is a professor of history at the University of Auckland and the author of numerous books, including England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context and, most recently, How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution 1500-1800. He and Greg discuss how the Netherlands' geography played a crucial role in its rise to dominance in the 17th century, why that power eventually shifted to favor England, and how the Anglo-Dutch influence has permeated throughout history. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What inspired the American revolutionaries?30:46 The people by whom the English Republicans and revolutionaries of the 17th century were themselves inspired, who were the Dutch revolutionaries of the 16th century, were very important for the American revolutionaries of the 18th century. So, I think the most important influence in America is the Anglo-Dutch. And the Dutch part of that has been forgotten in America. Why exactly is, again, complicated, but one reason might be that when England ends up dominating, the Dutch component of the American founding and of the American revolution is just quietly forgotten.Was the Anglo-Dutch Revolution seminal to the success of England?03:52 What happens in 17th and 18th century England, which is remarkable and of global importance, derives very substantially from competition with the Netherlands, a competition during which the Netherlands is initially dominant and during which they're eventually overtaken.The complex alliance and rivalry between the English and the Dutch04:43 Not just rivals and frenemies, but they were also very close allies and dependent on each other for the survival of their Protestant religion and political regimes. So, they were close military allies in the war against Spain during the Elizabethan period in the 16th century. Then, they were equally close military, political, and religious allies from the Glorious Revolution in 1689 against France in the nine-year war until 1697. So the framework is one of close alliance, but between those two dates, between the Elizabethan and that end of the 17th century, that is, during the 17th century itself, there's an increasingly bitter rivalry between the merchants of these two countries, which ends up involving three very bloody naval wars between 1652 and 1673.The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution33:12 The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution in the early modern period is a series of political revolutions which put in place a new kind of state, which is federated and the product of parliamentary representation and parliamentary votes. And so the United Provinces of the Netherlands is the first one established in the 16th century, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain is the second established in 1707. Then, the United States of America is the third. Each of these is conscious of its place in a sequence where there is copying and adaptation going on.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Hanseatic LeagueMark Kurlansky | UnSILOedNavigation ActsJohn LockeMontesquieuBaruch SpinozaHugo GrotiusGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of AucklandHis Work:England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European ContextWhen the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500–1800 How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution 1500-1800

Our guest today suggests that law is the cloth from which capitalism is cut. And lawyers are the tailors! From the enclosure movement to the financial crisis, law has been the engine of capital accumulation.Katharina Pistor is a Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School and the author of the book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, about how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else.Katharina and Greg discuss the nuanced ways in which legal coding privileges certain groups. Katharina lays out the path of capital developing from land ownership and its metamorphosis into powerful financial instruments. Katharina and Greg analyze the legal frameworks that have contributed to the economic tapestry of today. They conclude with a discussion of the intricacies of global legal systems and their sway over commerce and society. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The unseen impacts of legal innovation36:32: Under our civil procedure rules, not everyone has access to the courts. Not everyone has the justiciable interest. Who does or who does not, who has standing in a court of law, determines already who can bring a case to court. So, there was this wonderful debate in the 1970s about the efficiency of the common law. So, if you litigate and relitigate, the best rules will come about. But even at that time, people pushed back and said, "But this is not randomly selected, which rules will be even litigated." There are other conditions that have to be in place. So, I think if we were able to completely reverse those or change those conditions to make sure that everyone has access to the courts; remember how long women couldn't litigate for their own rights or Black people couldn't litigate for their own rights. And now that has changed, but there's still certain interests that you can't bring. Typically, individual rights have a better chance than collective rights. And so, there are lots of "if we could change all this, you can make your own rules," and there's some umpires that sort of sometimes create a balance between this. Then, I think we would be in a different world, but that's not the world we have.Is common law taking over the world?31:47: When I say capital is coded in law, I named the law, and it's actually domestic private law. We don't have a global private law, and we don't have a global state that could enforce it. So the question could be, how can global capitalism exist without that global law? And what I'm basically saying: global capitalism can exist in theory with only one legal system, as long as all other legal systems are willing to respect the rules that are made and enforce them in their own courts. That's what the config of law rules do.Lawyers and the art of asset coding11:42 You can see that a lot of private wealth is held in different types of assets over time. And that's actually what fascinated me so much: the same legal institutions were first used to code ownership in rural land for the landlords. The same mechanisms can be used to create complex derivatives today. And the shift from asset to asset is something that the lawyers can maneuver because they know how to code different assets. It also allows, and this is important to recognize: it allows different types of groups to come forward. So it's not necessarily that you have only the aristocracy that wins all the time.Looking at the cumulative power of capital08:19: If you look at the cumulative power of capital and the agency that certainly corporations have, or also agents have through their patron rights over others, sometimes you really have the feeling that these are actors in their own rights that actually can exert power over others, in particular over humans, in a way that might not have been anticipated when we created these institutions, but that's the real effect that we feel and experience today.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Amartya SenMartha NussbaumLehman BrothersThomas PikettyHernando de SotoKuznets curvePaul CarringtonPierson v. PostGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Law SchoolProfessional Profile at Institute for New Economic ThinkingProfile on LinkedInHer Work:The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

Doctors and scientists have been studying how our diet affects our health since the 18th century. But despite technological advancements and varying hypotheses over the years, there’s a chance that the wisdom of the 1700s might be more accurate than more recent beliefs on how food contributes to our overall health. Gary Taubes is an investigative health science journalist and the author of books like Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments and Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. For decades, he’s studied the history of diabetes and obesity research and found instance after instance of faulty science that’s led to some of the most widely accepted beliefs about metabolic health.Gary and Greg deep dive into the centuries-long history of diabetes and obesity research, including some of the major moments and breakthroughs like the discovery of insulin. They also discuss what makes some science bad science, modern misconceptions about obesity and its causes, and the surprising impact WWII had on obesity research. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What is an allegiance bias?38:59: It's the first hypothesis that tends to have such an advantage over all those that follow. That the others have to then try and replace that, and then more and more people buy into that first hypothesis and believe it, and they base their treatments on it, and they write papers and textbooks about it. They've become more and more biased. I was just speaking to a nutritionist 80-year-old tremendous nutritionist the other day who used the phrase allegiance bias. So you develop an allegiance to what you believe, to the technologies you're using, to the therapies you're giving, and to what your colleagues believe. And all of these reasons are why scientists are supposed to express hypotheses with such humility. You get an idea of what's working and what's not, and you voice it with incredible humility because the worst thing that can happen is that it be wrong and be embraced. And it's the easiest thing to have.Rethinking conventional wisdom in health01:09:16: The internet took away the gatekeepers. So for anyone who's suffering from obesity or diabetes, if the conventional wisdom works for you, then you're fine, right? You eat a little less, you exercise, and you don't live with obesity anymore—end of story. You don't need blood sugar medications, but if you've tried the conventional wisdom, as I think most people do, and it fails, then you start looking for alternatives.What makes a good scientist?24:34: When you do an experiment, you learn how you screwed up if you're a good scientist because, by definition, you're always doing something no one's ever done before because it's boring to do stuff that people have done before. So you're always doing something new. You're always working at the limits of what your apparatus or your observational equipment can do. And 99 times out of 100, you're going to screw up that first time out, and then you're going to learn how you screw up and you're going to fix it. And you iterate your way toward what you hope is truth.Show Links:Recommended Resources:CERNBradford Hill criteriaJohn RolloElliott P. JoslinOskar MinkowskiAncel KeysCarl von NoordenGustav von BergmannJulius BauerLouis Harry NewburghJeffrey M. Friedman AtkinsEric Westman Virta HealthBittersweet: Diabetes, Insulin, and the Transformation of Illness by Chris FeudtnerGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteHis Work:Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful TreatmentsWhy We Get Fat: And What to Do About ItGood Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat EatingThe Case Against SugarBad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie (New York Times Magazine) 

University professors have to become good at doing the intricate dance between research and teaching, as institutions have to help their faculty navigate this balance as well as maintain a good experience for the students in the institution.Nicholas Dirks is the president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences, the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, and the author of several books. His latest book is titled City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University.Nicholas and Greg discuss how universities have dealt with and should deal with current issues and challenges with faculty governance, and the evolution of student activism while maintaining academic freedom. They discuss the challenges of maintaining relevance, fostering interdisciplinary study, and adapting to the 21st century's demands while preserving the essence of academic freedom and intellectual debate.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are universities too unique for outsiders to manage?46:32: The difficulty you have when you bring somebody in from outside of the university to have a senior administrative position is that there's just so much about the university that is, only really possible to learn if you've been in it. And for the most part, in the corporate world, when somebody is running a company, they've worked in either that company or they've worked in that field. I've never been offered a job running Goldman Sachs or Google, but I have been offered a bunch of jobs running universities. Well, I say that because I think the presumption that universities are badly managed and therefore they need to have somebody who really knows about management doesn't fully take on board what the impediments to managerial success are in the university. And in part, it's about precisely the things we've been talking about—the kind of resistance to change on the part of the most senior, the most valuable faculty that you have, certainly as much as it is about the failure of the imagination of the administrator.Modeling prompts institutional change 45:20: You can't change an entire institution, and you can't do it even in the corporate world. It's a little more [difficult], particularly for a long-established institution, but you can begin to change things on the edge. And as you do so, you can model how things might actually be better.What can we learn from history and anthropology that’ll help reinvent liberal arts01:00:25: One of the things I learned from history and anthropology is how much things change over time. And so what today are the appropriate ways for one to both justify and organize a liberal arts curriculum that would inherit some of the things that I think were so important about earlier modes of doing this, reinvent it for the modern moments, and be more appropriate for the world that our students are in and about to enter. [01:01:14] I believe that we can find something that might not be the same, and I might not have it exactly, but we'll continue to carry on the tradition of a certain kind of knowledge that doesn't become confined to either disciplinary or professional modes of knowledge that can enlighten and enable one's disciplinary and professional education in time but can also address these issues about what it means to be human.Rethinking institutional change47:32: It's really critical to find new ways to think about institutional change in higher education. And I do believe that we risk serious problems in the sector if we don't take it much more seriously and then need to make this kind of collective commitment to know ourselves and think differently about who we are, how we function, who we're here for, how we contribute to society, and how we survive in the long term.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Clark KerrThe Uses of the UniversityFranz BoasMario SavioMax Planck Institutes and ExpertsAndrew DelbancoDavid Starr JordanArthur Oncken LovejoyAmerican Association of University ProfessorsLeland StanfordJohns Hopkins UniversityPell GrantJohn HagelJohn Seely BrownFrantz FanonGuest Profile:NicholasBDirks.comProfessional Profile at The NYASFaculty Profile at UC BerkeleyLinkedIn ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageCity of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the UniversityCastes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern IndiaThe Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial BritainCulture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social TheoryThe Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom

To our guest today, the current American healthcare system feels less like a means to get well and more like a gigantic racket. We’ve gone from hospital visits in the 1950s costing five dollars a day to getting billed for everything from the oxygen reader on your finger to the IV bag. So how did we get here?Elisabeth Rosenthal is the senior contributing editor at KFF Health News and the author of the book, An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back. Before her career in journalism, she spent some time practicing medicine at an emergency room in New York City. Elisabeth and Greg discuss the puzzling economics behind healthcare pricing, how medical bills balloon because of too many hands in the honey pot, and some practical advice for people heading to the hospital. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Private equity goes with where the opportunity is, and it's in health care04:32: One person told me, when I was writing my book, between the hip manufacturer, the implant manufacturer, and the patient's bill, that there are 13 people taking a cut of the price of that implant. 13 middlemen, and we just keep adding middlemen who take more money from the system. So the interesting thing is how much of that, now 3.5 trillion dollars that we spend on healthcare, how much of that is actually going to care, and how much of that is being siphoned off for profit, for executive salaries, for investor profit. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's like a Rube Goldberg machine for extracting money. And the poor patient is, well, what about me? You're just kind of an ATM; it’s really sad. Private equity goes where the opportunity is, and it's in healthcare.Which side are the insurers truly on?11:48: People have this misguided thinking that, ‘Oh, my insurers are in my corner’ They're not in your corner. They're like, ‘They take in premiums, and they pay out claims.’ And if they can raise the premiums and raise the copays and deductibles, they don't really care if the prices go up. Plus, they have these very sophisticated deals with big hospital systems.Are we regulating the wrong things in healthcare? 39:33: We regulate all the wrong things. Yes, putting stitches in your hand is fine. You don't need a doctor to do that. A tech can do that fine. But in the U.S., you are going to be billed as if a doctor did it, whether a doctor did it or not. You might be billed for the physician assistant who did it too. You might be charged for both because the doctor might have come and looked at it and said, "Yeah, that needs stitches." So it will be billed in this crazy way, but I think on the other hand, the physician assistants and nurse practitioners are looking for independent licensing. Mostly everything they do is billed as if the doctor did it, even if the doctor was 50 miles away. So that's why some of the bills are so high.Navigating consumer rights and prices50:23: When you go to a hospital, and they give you that clipboard to sign 20 forms or even a tablet, I always cross out the part that says I will pay for anything that my insurance doesn't cover because that's in one of those forms that are always in there. And people should never sign that; you can shop for the electives, small-dollar items. You can get estimates, and to me, this is where the government should come in.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Uwe ReinhardtWillie SuttonRube Goldberg machineNo Surprises ActDiagnosis: Debt (KFF Health News)March of DimesJuvenile Diabetes Research FoundationGuest Profile:Professional Profile at KFF Health NewsHer Work:An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back How Your In-Network Health Coverage Can Vanish Before You Know It (KFF Health News)

Historical, moral judgment can be a difficult thing to navigate in the context of colonialism. Have you ever pondered the role of truth in history and its impact on today's political culture? Nigel Biggar is a p theologian, ethicist, and the author of several books. His latest work is titled,  Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.Nigel and Greg discuss whether historical accuracy should bow to political objectives or stand resolute in the face of revisionist pressures when it comes to European culture and the history of Western civilization. They reflect on the delicate balance between preserving facts and fostering reconciliation in a politically charged world. Nigel also talks about the Ethics and Empire Project's ambitious undertaking to assess empires across cultures and times and offer a deeper view that challenges historical judgments.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Historians and their moral judgements about colonialism05:22: The problem with activist historians making moral judgments is, as it were, historians make moral judgments about colonialism, slavery, etc. They do so with the mantle of the authority of historians, but their moral judgments, from my point of view, really have no more moral authority than that of an ordinary person.Why do we value understanding other cultures more than understanding other time periods?32:11: An indiscriminate blanket condemnation of another culture is usually wrong and unwise because it is rare that every culture has got it right and every culture has got it wrong. So, we need to be open to the possibility that other cultures sometimes have something to teach us.Considering context in moral judgments:10:42: We can look back and judge certain instances where, let's say, European colonists were excessively violent, and the case of the Puritan attack on the Native American village of Mystic in Connecticut or Massachusetts in the 1600s. Fellow Puritans and Native Americans who were present were appalled at the excess and violence. So even at the time, people recognized excessive violence, but compared to our circumstances, theirs were very insecure and recourse to violent self-defense and often, of course, self-defense, will take the form of aggression. We need to put ourselves in those shoes before we judge what violence was excessive. So it's partly a matter of taking into account very different circumstances, and any good judgment, moral judgment, needs to do that, whether we're judging something that happened 200 years ago.Is it possible to do history that is not presentist to some degree?50:23: When it comes to making moral judgments about the past, which I think sometimes is perfectly appropriate, some people say, as you suggest, that one shouldn't use the norms of the present to judge the past. Well, when we're in the business of making judgments, we can't help doing that.Show Links:Recommended Resources:ColonialismPresentismNdebele peopleCecil RhodesFrancoist SpainRepublican factionGarret FitzGeraldEaster RisingBantu peoplesRaja Ram Mohan RoyAmerican Colonies: The Settling of North AmericaEthics and EmpirePascal BrucknerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Oxford UniversityNigelBiggar.ukWikipedia ProfileSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageColonialism: A Moral ReckoningWhat's Wrong with Rights?Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian EthicsThe Ethics of War and Peace Revisited: Moral Challenges in an Era of Contested and Fragmented SovereigntyBetween Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the NationThe Future of Christian Realism: International Conflict, Political Decay, and the Crisis of DemocracyAiming to Kill

Since the pandemic, the term “burnout” seems everywhere. But is burnout something that’s always existed at work, or is it a modern phenomenon? Have jobs changed or have workers' expectations and needs shifted?Christina Maslach, an emerita professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has pioneered research on burnout. For decades, she’s studied its causes, effects, and potential remedies. Her work has led to many books on the subject, including The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs. Christina and Greg chat about the history of the term “burnout,” how it’s not merely a result of heavy workloads but also stems from the quality of work and the surrounding work environment, and the six core needs essential for employee well-being. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is it burnout or are you just exhausted?33:41: People often assume that if they're exhausted because of long hours and lots in a big load, is that burnout? And I'll say, "No, you're exhausted, but do you still like your job?” Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a great job kind of thing. How do you feel about the work you're doing? Oh, I'm good at this. I said, "You're not burned out. You are what we call overextended, and it's the exhaustion, and it's often a high workload and unable to get enough rest and recovery and stuff like that.” But that's what we call job burnout when the other two things kick in as well. It's not just that you're highly stressed. There is more than that. If you still love what you do and still feel good about what you're doing, there's all these other things about the work that are positive; you'll be more willing to cope with that and figure out how to deal with it, and so forth. It's just not another word for stress, and it's that negative, cynical response to the job that is, in a sense, more the hallmark of burnout. That's really what makes it job burnout, as opposed to people use burnout for everything.Components of a burnout response10:21: These are the three components of a full burnout response: The exhaustion of the stress response, the cynicism, the negative distancing from the job, and the negative self-assessment of my own effectiveness in this job. What can help in dealing with burnout in the workplace?37:59: Often, when I've asked people if you could have something that you think would help, in terms of dealing with burnout, they will say, "Somebody who is a mentor, somebody, a safe harbor, somebody I can go to, or some people that I can go to and talk to, and we work out problems, or I get advice, or they help me out, and I do the same for other people, it's reciprocal, and that kind of thing," and if I feel I can't ever trust anybody that has been, a real cause of, I could do this work somewhere else. But if people talk about colleagues, they're like gold.People do not recover as well from chronic stressors as they do from occasional stressors07:09: Chronic job stressors—that means they're there all the time. They don't go away. You think you've dealt with something, and here I am all over again dealing with this. What we know from decades of work on stress and coping is that people do not recover as well from chronic stressors as they do from occasional stressors.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Harrison Gough “The measurement of explained burnout” | Journal of Organizational Behavior Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon” Frederick Winslow TaylorDying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance―and What We Can Do About It by Jeffrey Pfeffer“Globally, Employees Are More Engaged — and More Stressed” | Gallup, 2023Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC BerkeleyHer Work:The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their JobsThe Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It Banishing Burnout: Six Strategies for Improving Your Relationship with Work

Prepare to have your notions of nature vs. nurture thoroughly examined as we navigate the intricate web of genetics, environment, and well-being. What is more impactful than parent influence on children’s development?David Myers is a professor at Hope College and the author of many books, including Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith, How Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind, and The Pursuit of Happiness: Discovering the Pathway to Fulfillment, Well-Being, and Enduring Personal Joy.David and Greg discuss the captivating terrain of psychology's overlap with philosophy. The transformative power of active educational engagement. We also delve into the 'religion factor' in personal happiness, contemplating whether secular institutions can replicate the community and meaning often found in religious congregations. David also explains the delicate balance between intuition and analytical thinking, inspired by an amusing interaction with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The science of happiness9:31: Most people say they're pretty happy; three in ten Americans say they're very happy; six in ten say they're pretty happy; only one in ten say they're not very happy. But what does that really mean? Well, it turns out that people that say they're very happy or that describe their life as deeply satisfying rather than unsatisfied, in fact, they look happier to other people. They smile and laugh more. Their friends rate them as happier. They're less vulnerable to disabling depression, and so forth. So, I think there is a lot of evidence that those subjective well-being measurements by which people assess their own happiness and life satisfaction have validity. And they're connected to other things that are also indicators of well-being. And that's why we have a science of happiness and a whole field of positive psychology now.Impact of religion on one’s well-being10:37: We know that actively religious people who worship regularly with a faith community are much likelier to say they're very happy than are people who are religiously disengaged. These people are connected to other people in a communal experience where there's mutual support. Religion is also a meaning system, and people who live with a sense of meaning and purpose in life report greater happiness than others.A shocking finding on the effect of parental nurture on children’s development16:27: Behavior genetics research has also had an even more spectacularly shocking finding: the effect of parental nurture on children's developing traits, such as their intelligence and personalities, is, assuming we're within the normal range of parental variation, excluding abuse and neglect. Parental nurture is a surprisingly small variable. Parental nurture matters for values, politics, and the religious faith of children as they're growing up, but their basic traits are not much influenced by parental nurture. What does matter more than we've calibrated in the past is peer influence. Particularly as kids grow up into middle and high schoolers. They're really much more attuned to and adapting themselves to the ideas and the lifestyles and so forth of their peers than they are of their parents.Do genetic factors play a role in one's personality, subjective well being and, and social factors?13:17: I would say that I have been amazed by the results of behavioral genetic studies, which we now have on many millions of twins, for example, both fraternal and identical twins, and also comparing biological and adoptive siblings with their biological and adoptive parents. About 50 percent of the person-to-person variation in various important traits, like intelligence, extroversion, and even physical characteristics—psychological trait characteristics—are especially attributable to genetic differences. Note that that doesn't mean that 50 percent of my intelligence, yours, or your extraversion is attributable to genes. You are 100 percent the product of your genes in your environment. However, if we want to understand individual variation, the differences among individuals, genes are very important. Show Links:Recommended Resources:TalkPsych.comEudaimoniaJudith Rich HarrisCarol DweckDaniel KahnemanAmos TverskyWilliam JamesBlaise PascalIsaac NewtonJonathan HaidtJean TwengeGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Hope CollegeDavidMyers.orgWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PagePsychology Through the Eyes of FaithHow Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human MindLoose-leaf for Social PsychologyThe Pursuit of Happiness: Discovering the Pathway to Fulfillment, Well-Being, and Enduring Personal JoyThe American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of PlentyPsychology in Everyday LifeIntuition: Its Powers and Perils

Democracy stands as one of humanity's most treasured institutions, but what if the very foundation it’s built upon is less solid than we believe? What is an epistocracy and how could it work better as a form of government?Jason Brennan is a professor at Georgetown University and the author of several books. His latest work is titled Against Democracy.Jason and Greg discuss how voting, often romanticized as the pinnacle of civic duty, hides a twisted web of irrational loyalties and tribal instincts that can lead us astray. Jason explains the historical context of political discord and the role of expertise in an era where trusted figures become polarizing symbols. They scrutinize the influence of political factions and social signaling, the curious ways in which political interests align across different cultures, and whether deliberation in democracy genuinely elevates decision-making or merely intensifies division. Jason concludes by revealing the hidden trials and tribulations of pursuing a PhD, and the emphasis on research productivity over teaching, the financial realities of academic life, and the necessity of guidance for non-academic careers.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why don't voters admit their ignorance and defer to experts in policy matters?16:37: You're right that even in markets when we do a lot of delegation, however, we still have a kind of check on this, right? So, I know only the most basic plumbing. So if I have any big problem, I'm going to have to call the plumber in. But when the plumber leaves, I can tell if there's still a leak underneath the bathtub, right? It's like, well, the water is still dripping, so he must have done a bad job. I couldn't fix it myself, but I can check to see whether he fixed it. [17:09] We don't have that same ability when it comes to politics. If a person implements a policy, I put in the Cares Act; did that make things better? How would you know? How would you measure that? That takes expert ability, not just to sort of know what's happened in the past five years as a result of it, but to disentangle the effects of that policy from all the other confounding things. I mean, you and I see policy papers where people try to do this, and it's extremely difficult. So the average person doesn't know how to do that. They do, however, defer to experts in a way, but the experts they defer to are people like comedians on late-night TV who make fun of the other side.Politics as Social Signaling28:46: A lot of what we're doing with politics is this kind of signaling to one another: we're the right kind of person, we're good, we're virtuous, we're kind. Please like me, be my friend, etc. I think that's what's happening in politics. We're using our vote as a way of getting social benefits for ourselves.Why does Europe's political landscape look different?23:21: One of the reasons why I think political distances, or differences, are less pernicious in most of Europe than they are in the U.S. is partly because when you have proportional voting systems, you have more viable political parties. And as a result, it's like your neighbors are all going to be people at different parties. It's really hard for you to segregate yourself in terms of your work, where you live, whom you date, and whom you befriend, because there's just so much variation. So, you can't afford to make that the same kind of signal that you do in the U.S., we have a first-past-the-post voting system that predicts there's going to be two major parties, and I think we get this behavior as a result.In politics, you don't get the same kind of reward-punishment system that you get elsewhere15:42: When it comes to politics, there are only two major parties, and so you can afford and get rewarded for excluding a bunch of people and just playing along with your team. So I think the incentive structure of politics is worse than the incentive structure we have in most other aspects of our lives.Show Links:Recommended Resources:EpistocracyJeremy WaldronAlexis de TocquevilleVoltaireJean-Jacques RousseauThomas ChristianoJohn RawlsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Georgetown UniversityWikipedia PageProfile on PhilPeople.orgHis Work:Amazon Author PageBusiness Ethics for Better BehaviorAgainst Democracy: New PrefaceDemocracy: A Guided TourCracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher EducationGood Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in AcademiaPolitical Philosophy: An Introduction (Libertarianism.org Guides Book 1)Injustice for All: How Financial Incentives Corrupted and Can Fix the US Criminal Justice SystemLibertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know?Why Not Capitalism?When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State InjusticeWhy It's OK to Want to Be RichIn Defense of Openness: Why Global Freedom Is the Humane Solution to Global PovertyA Brief History of Liberty (Brief Histories of Philosophy Book 1)Compulsory Voting: For and AgainstGoogle Scholar Page

What can we learn looking back on the paths of influential thinkers like Popper and Kuhn today? How are the motivations and passions of scientists left behind in the pursuit of scientific progress??Micheal Strevens is a professor in the Philosophy department of New York University and the author of several books. His latest work is titled, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science.Michael and Greg discuss the unspoken motivations and aesthetic judgments fueling the progress of science. They explore the delicate balance between rigorous empirical data and the broader intellectual landscape in which it resides, offering insights into the irrational but inherently human elements of scientific inquiry. Michael shares his own experiences and the profound joy found in understanding causal models in a field where explanation often trumps prediction. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The rule of science10:11: I think science has its problems at any point, but it's in reasonably good shape in the sense that there's a sort of an agreed set of rules for playing the game, the iron rule, as I call them. I mean, even something like p-value null hypothesis testing, that has its downside, of course, but it is a rule for doing science. And if you just think of it as a kind of a set of boxes you have to check to have research that you can stick into a journal, then I think it mostly actually does what it's supposed to do. It's possible to game it and for things to go south in certain kinds of situations. But as long as you don't take it too seriously, it's actually telling you something about the intrinsic quality of the data. Basically, really just formal threshold the data has to pass. It's like a legitimate move in chess. Okay, a move can be legitimate and also a really crummy move, and likewise, data can satisfy these rules and still be terrible data.Michael's motivation to tackle motivation in the world of science03:46: Perhaps the most important things about modern science were more connected to the psychological or the sociological, to the institutional framework of science, rather than to the kind of thing that, more traditionally, stood out for philosophers of science—stuff to do with the method in a kind of logical, intellectual sense, a reasoning sense. And so it was a kind of switch in my thinking from arguing and logic to questions more subtle and background questions about motivation.Diverse attitudes in science11:34: I think there's a huge range of attitudes in science. There are a lot of scientists who it's just their daily job almost, and so they go and do the job and don't spend a lot of time worrying about it otherwise. And then there's some scientists who really feel like they want to make some breakthrough and come up with some revolutionary discovery. All of them have to, as it were, play the same game. And the game works ultimately independently of their personal motivations, simply by generating enough facts with enough systematicity and attention to detail that if there is some problem with the big framework, science will ultimately find it.How do we optimize research efforts for maximum ROI on the frontier?41:10: In a world where doing science costs millions and millions of dollars, it's not so easy to just leave it up to the judgment of scientists as a whole. It's a tough problem, but on the whole, I think it's good not to try to pick out just a few projects and funnel everything towards those few projects. I'm afraid I don't have too many good ideas about the alternative, apart from that, except to allow diversity to flourish in one way or another. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Karl PopperThomas KuhnNewtonian DynamicsQuantum MechanicsArthur EddingtonAlbert EinsteinIsaac NewtonRené DescartesRobert BoyleBruno LatourPhilosophy of ScienceP-ValueCase MethodGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at New York UniversityStrevens.orgPhilPeople.org ProfileProfile on the Guggenheim Memorial FoundationHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern ScienceDepth: An Account of Scientific ExplanationBigger than Chaos: Understanding Complexity through ProbabilityTychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal StructureGoogle Scholar Page

Unlock the mysteries of human connections as we share a compelling dialogue with the man behind ‘Dunbar’s Number,’ the number of connections that humans can and do maintain across different cultures and time periods. What evolutionary forces have sculpted the essence of friendship and religion, also impacting our well-being and longevity?Robin Dunbar is emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford. He is also the author of several books, including Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures, and The Science of Love and Betrayal.Robin and Greg discuss storytelling and its influence on religion, probing how our cognitive prowess has enabled us to imagine unseen worlds and foster expansive social networks. Robin explains the transformative power of religious rituals and their ability to engender deep community bonds and emotional transcendence. They also examine the practical applications that our ancestral social constructs hold for the contemporary world. From the role of HR departments in nurturing community to the competitive edge ingrained within the collegiate system, they dissect the building blocks of successful organizational cultures and also what it looks like to cultivate meaningful relationships in an increasingly digital world.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is religion what makes humans unique?10:11: Of the things that distinguish humans from all other animals, birds, mammals, whatever: religion is certainly a key one, but I would probably want to argue that religion itself is derivative of something else that's more generally important; that is, actually storytelling. It's the ability to tell stories, as it were. And stories are about thinking about and concocting tales about worlds that we can't physically see. So if you like invisible worlds, things that, as in a sense of fiction, is the classic case, but all the kinds of many different kinds of stories you tell—fictional and even factual stories about places far away, metropolis tales, are all about things that we can't physically see. We have to imagine in our minds, and religion is part and parcel of that spread.Friendships affect your lifespan07:10: The single most important factor affecting your mental health and well-being, your physical health and well-being, and even how long you're going to live into the future from today on is the number and quality of friendships you have. And the optimal number seems to be about five.Storytelling is a key component of religion39:10: A key component, I think, of religion, storytelling seems to play a very strong supplementary role in bonding communities. So if we want to bond large-scale communities of the kinds we have now and then, one of those is having a shared history of that we are here, not necessarily as the favored sons and daughters of God, but that we are here because of a certain kind of history.Is there a way to create a sense of belonging in an organization?46:15: There's no silver bullet that applies to every organization; you have to look at the particular local culture and think about what kind of works in that kind of environment. And given the fact that these days people have families, they want kids, they want to get home to put to bed, and they have other friends that, outside, as it were. So you've got to design it around people's natural lives as we live them these days.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Theory of MindNew Zealand National Rugby Union Team (All-Blacks)HakaMultinational CorporationThe Increasing Importance of a Best Friend at Work - GallupAmazon’s Two-Pizza TeamsDunbar's NumberGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at OxfordWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful GroupsFriends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important RelationshipsHow Religion Evolved: And Why It EnduresPrimate Social Systems (Studies in Behavioural Adaptation)Evolutionary Psychology: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides)How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary QuirksGrooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of LanguageEvolution: What Everyone Needs to KnowHuman Evolution: Our Brains and BehaviorThe Science of Love and BetrayalHuman EvolutionGoogle Scholar PageResearchGate Publications

Have you ever considered the transformative power of a simple hello or the profound effect of asking someone about their day? Why might our attempts at perspective-taking be inadequate compared to  the straightforward solution of ‘just ask.’Nicholas Epley is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science, and Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research, at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is also the author of a book titled, Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want.Nicholas and Greg discuss how social nuances influence every aspect of our lives. Nicholas’s expertise, combined with Greg’s teaching experiences, bring to light the nuanced dance of cross-cultural social engagement and the impact of technology on our interactions. This episode isn't just about making more friends or being likable—it's about harnessing the often overlooked science of social cognition to enrich every interaction you have. Discover why the 'superpower' of social cognition might be the most underutilized tool in your personal and professional arsenal.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Conversation is an entirely cooperative process 16:25: Conversation itself is just an entirely cooperative process that tends to pull us together with somebody else. So, for us to have a conversation, we have to start by establishing some common ground with each other, figure out what we're going to talk about.That's inherently cooperative. We're going back and forth. We're taking turns. We're cooperating, right? And cooperation tends to pull people together. Reciprocity is, without question, the dominant social norm in social interaction. So, if I were to punch you in the face, you would probably punch me in the face back, right? That'd be a bad interaction. But if I reach out and say hello to you with sort of authentic kindness, you tend to respond back in the same way. And, it's those iterative social processes—those complicated social processes—that people tend to really underestimate the power of.Deep talk is better than small talk, but small talk is better than no talk25:43: Small talk is better than no talk in a given moment; deep talks are a little better, or not as bad as you might think it is. But when you see people reporting that having a really deep conversation with somebody is better than a shallow one, it's typically when they have both and can compare them on their own; the small talk is actually pretty good. How our social thinking keeps us from getting feedback07:50: I think a bigger problem with a lot of our social thinking is that it can create reality, which then keeps us from getting the feedback we need. So Greg, if I thought you wanted to talk to me, I'd have a conversation with you, and I'd figure out if that assessment was right. So I'd get feedback on that because I would approach you and would find out if we're in a coffee shop, I didn't think you want to talk to me or didn't look very interesting, whatever. I decided, nah, I'm not going to have this conversation. Notice I wouldn't have anything to learn from. So when it comes to social thought, sometimes, particularly when it's about whether doing engage with somebody to connect with somebody or not, our beliefs are self-fulfilling, and they can keep us from getting the feedback we need.The truth about our fear of social engagement28:05: Our fears about how social engagement is going to go, particularly when it's positive, just tend to be a little off, a little overly pessimistic, in part because we don't seem to fully appreciate that when you reach out positively to others, they tend to reach out positively to you in return, and people are happier to be seen and have somebody take some notice of them. That's just very powerful—surprisingly powerful.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Juliana SchroederEinfühlungLiz Dunn - UBC Cell Phone ResearchGuest Profile:NicholasEpley.comFaculty Profile at the University of Chicago Booth School of BusinessLinkedIn ProfileHis Work:Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and WantGoogle Scholar Page

How did higher education come to be dominated by academics on the ideological left, and what are the potential consequences of this monoculture on diverse fields such as literature and engineering? What’s the mechanism behind this shift, and where did it originate?John Ellis is Chairman of the Board of the California Association of Scholars, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books. His most recent work is titled, The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.John and Greg discuss the transformative changes happening in higher education. John questions the sustainability of the ideological shift towards political correctness and identity politics within humanities departments. Together they examine the impact of the marginalization of traditional scholarly perspectives and the wider implications for society's dialogue.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What happens when one political ideology dominates the campus1:00:01 The more you get a group of people in one room that agree with each other,  the more you ban from that room any contrary opinion, the more those people will descend into stupidity because there's nothing to check them. What keeps people like you and me alive intellectually is that if we say something that has a flaw in it, someone is going to see those, spot the flaw. And in a thriving university, there are enough bright people around you, that if you say something with a weakness in it, there'll be someone who'll point it out to you, and you'll be better off. Because now, when you have a group of people that  all agree with each other, that discipline, self-correction is gone. And so you'll descend into greater and greater irrationality and stupidity, and that process is still ongoing.Do universities only appoint people like themselves58:48 The universities will not change. They are, at the moment, peopled by a sect, a minority sect, a political sect that is extraordinarily tenacious and unwilling to compromise. Extraordinarily intolerant and intemperate, and they will go on appointing people like themselves. And we're still seeing the grip on this. The grip of the radical left is growing ever tighter, day by day. People don't seem to grasp this, but it is true.The idea of objectivity in sciences and engineering40:25 There is definitely an assault on the idea of objectivity in sciences and engineering. I mean, you've heard about black mathematics and so on, which is a nonsense ideal. My favorite saying is, "Only an engineer can build a bridge that will stand up. It will only just stand up. anyone can build a bridge that is overbuilt." These standards are seriously under assault now. No one quite knows how far they'll go. Certainly, there's some good work still being done in the sciences.DEI as a reflection of the values of a radical faculty56:14 The reach of the radical faculty, its grip on American academia, is extensive. It is pervasive. It is everywhere.  And one of the things that I've found is very odd. What I don't understand is the fact that what was happening on one campus was replicated on almost every other campus,  and yet it seemed so, you know, irrational to me, and yet the whole country, the universities in the whole country were exhibiting the same kind of directionality.  And I still marvel at this. That there weren't more holdouts,  but, no,  the DEI is a reflection of the values of the radical faculty. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Michel FoucaultJacques DerridaMcCarthyismStudents for a Democratic SocietyDavid LodgeLawrence SummersGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UCSCLinkedIn ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be DoneThe Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical AnalysisAgainst DeconstructionLiterature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the HumanitiesLanguage, Thought, and Logic

What does the changing value of salt over history tell us about the future of oil? How are the views around milk and dairy products connected to class politics? Prolific author and journalist Mark Kurlansky has written 39 books with more on the way. His work has ranged from historical nonfiction to children’s literature to deep dives on food like his latest book, The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food―Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes.Mark and Greg chat about the underestimated historical value of cookbooks, the evolution of dietary habits, and Kurlansky's work on nonviolence. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On the birth of the idea of his book “Salt”03:03: In my Cod book, I realized the importance of salt because you couldn't have a fishery if you didn't have salt. And my publisher was very interested in me doing something on salt and really pushed me to do it. And I kept saying, "But where's the story?" And then I realized that the story is that there was this ingredient, commodity, mineral, that was of tremendous value that nations would go through…. I mean, they founded colonies, went to war, and went to all these lengths to get this salt, and then salt lost its value. So what was it for? And I believe that is the trajectory of oil.The role of salt and cheese in the international economy22:35: You have to think about: Before the Industrial Revolution, if you wanted to have an international economy, what did you trade? Mostly food. And you couldn't trade food unless it was salted. So basically, if you didn't have salt, you didn't have an international economy. And as far as dairy farmers go, your possibility for trade was to make cheese.Do we need to reprioritize our food?43:19: The way I think commercial fishing should go, fish aren't going to be cheap. They can't be cheap. Cheap fish is the enemy, because if you're going to tell a fisherman to catch less fish, you better get more money for it, or he's going under. So does that mean that poor people can't eat fish anymore? This is a real question. It's a question about improving agriculture, improving beef and dairy, and everything that you do to improve it ends up making it more expensive.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Waverley RootJacques PépinFrederick DouglassWilliam Lloyd GarrisonMario SavioE.O. WilsonDavid DellingerGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteHis Work:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the WorldSalt: A World HistoryMilk!: A 10,000-Year Food FracasThe Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food―Featuring More Than 100 Historical RecipesThe Food of a Younger Land: A portrait of American food from the lost WPA filesNonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Modern Library Chronicles)1968: The Year That Rocked the WorldBIG LIES: from Socrates to Social MediaBirdseye: The Adventures of a Curious ManThe Basque History of the World: The Story of a NationThe Big Oyster: History on the Half ShellSalmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common FatePaper: Paging Through HistoryThe Unreasonable Virtue of Fly FishingThe Food of a Younger Land: A portrait of American food from the lost WPA filesThe Last Fish TaleHavana: A Subtropical Delirium

Our healthcare system is a complex dance of costs and inefficiencies, yet it's one we can't afford to sit out. What results have flowed from shifting the cost of healthcare to employers, and how have attempts to change that system sometimes backfired in unexpected ways?Vivian Lee is a healthcare executive, an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, and an author. Her latest book is called, The Long Fix: Solving America's Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone. Vivian and Greg discuss the disconnect between healthcare consumers and payers and dissecting the employer-based insurance model. They scrutinize payment models and incentives, discussing the stark consequences of shifting healthcare costs to employees and the resultant avoidance of crucial preventive care. Vivian talks about the financial motivations of health providers versus patient demands, creating a landscape where escalating costs and quality care seem to be in constant conflict.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why we need to know where our dollars are going in healthcare22:19: I think it's very important that everyone really understands a little bit about healthcare and where their dollars are going. When you look at the graphs, all of us would be doing a lot better if our healthcare expenditures were lower. It's just hidden from us because it's taken out before we even get our paychecks, because our employers are using those dollars that should have been going to our pay raises for the last 20–25 years and using it instead to pay for healthcare costs. I think we need to know it for a number of reasons. One, because we need (we need was deleted in the audio-perhaps restore) the public to move forward to be able to improve healthcare payment policies in this country. We have to act through the way in which we vote. We also need it because we need to understand better our own actions. What of our behaviors are most important for our own health outcomes? And so having a more nuanced understanding of what we can do in terms of our daily behaviors that can impact our own health, I think, would be also really, really important.The US lacking universal healthcare for everybody is a key factor in its healthcare economy05:28: In health care, we are responsible for caring for people when they show up to us, and we can't decline people just because they don't have health insurance. So, as a result, we also have this strange subsidization model within health care where we have to overcharge some people in order to cover the costs of care for those who aren't covered.Money affects change in healthcare16:49: Any time we want to change the system, it's going to be hard. It is hard because there's already so many dollars in healthcare and there's so many vested interests who, naturally, if they're doing well, want to maintain the status quo. So change is always hard, especially in healthcare, because of how much money is already involved.How can we maximize the data from digital health systems37:11: Increasingly, we have the opportunity to use the data from all the operating rooms that are going on in the country and in the world every single day, where we have information about how surgeons are doing things in particular ways with different kinds of patients. We know about the different patients, we know about what the surgeons are doing, and we also know about the outcomes that happen six months, a year later, two years later. We've been collecting these data with our digital health systems for a long time now. What we haven't been doing is using the data to create more evidence to say, "Oh, actually, we really do know that doing it exactly this way with this artificial hip provides really good outcomes," and that would be the evidence that you would need to talk to the surgeon or convince everybody to go to that standard approach.Show Links:Recommended Resources:RAND Study: Skin in the GameKFF Study: Health Care Debt In The U.S.: The Broad Consequences Of Medical And Dental BillsGuest Profile:VivianLeeMD.comLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia ProfileHer Work:The Long Fix: Solving America's Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for EveryoneCardiovascular MR Imaging: Physical Principles to Practical ProtocolsGenitourinary MRI, An Issue of Magnetic Resonance Imaging ClinicsSelect Topics in MR Imaging, An Issue of Magnetic Resonance Imaging Clinics

Curiosity isn't reserved for the elite thinkers; it's a fundamental part of being human that propels us from the cradle to the cosmos. But what is the evolutionary necessity of curiosity, its manifestation in children and adults, and its intimate relationship with all of our personalities?Mario Livio is an astrophysicist formerly at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the author of several books. His latest works are titled Galileo: And the Science Deniers and Why?: What Makes Us Curious.Mario and Greg discuss the educational systems and societal attitudes towards curiosity, with insights into Galileo's legacy and the synergies between science and art. Mario talks about the increasing tide of science denial and affirms the vital role of curiosity in perpetuating awe. Mario takes Greg deep into the concept of curiosity, and they explore the diverse ways in which curiosity is expressed and how it correlates with creativity and knowledge.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What’s the difference between perpetual and epistemic curiosity?05:30: Perceptual curiosity is the curiosity we feel when something surprises us or when something kind of doesn't agree with what we know or think we know. And it is that curiosity which, when studied on the neuroscience side, they find that the areas in the brain that are associated with conflict, or sometimes with hunger or thirst, are the ones that are activated also when you have that type of curiosity. Epistemic curiosity, on the other hand, is when we really want to learn something new or we want to understand something we didn't understand before. And there, actually, the area in the brain that's activated is the one that's activated for anticipation of a reward. You know, it's like when you sit in a theater for a play you wanted to see for a long time or when somebody offers you a piece of chocolate. So that's the one that we want people to really have more of, to be more curious epistemically. Is curiosity necessary for creativity?11:43: Curiosity seems to be a necessary condition for creativity, even though it is not always a sufficient condition for creativity.Is there a universal approach to curiosity?28:19: The best idea that I can think of is that you start with something that you know for a fact that this person is already curious about,  but you find an ingenious way to move from that to the topic that you are interested in to begin with.Science and arts can be intertwined41:05: Scientists try to understand the universe and make predictions about it, while artists give a human, emotional response to the universe. So, in some sense, these two things are complementary to each other. That's how I see this. But I would be very sad if we had one and not the other, so I really like this complementarity.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Kate ChopinMark TwainLeonardo da VinciRichard FeynmanMihaly CsikszentmihalyiGalileo GalileiWilliam BlakeGuest Profile:Mario-Livio.comSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageGalileo: And the Science DeniersWhy?: What Makes Us CuriousBrilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the UniverseIs God a Mathematician?The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of SymmetryThe Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World's Most Astonishing NumberThe Accelerating Universe: Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant, and the Beauty of the CosmosStories in Scientific American

There’s a great misunderstanding surrounding government debt and its economic implications. Many view it as a financial burden that will be passed down to the next generations. But what if, in fact, government debt is a critical component to how money gets made? Paul Sheard is the former vice president of S&P Global and the author of The Power of Money: How Governments and Banks Create Money and Help Us All Prosper. He’s got decades of experience analyzing global financial markets and was the chief economist at Lehman Brothers during the 2008 financial crisis. Paul and Greg chat about the common misconceptions around how money is made and injected into the economy, government debt, and the role of quantitative easing.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The hidden costs of cutting government spending20:04: This is a very widespread idea that the most virtuous thing is a balanced budget. Government deficits are somehow bad. This mountain of government debt is this bad thing and a burden on the future population. Well, that's like saying we have this expanding bathtub, and we need water. The water level in the bathtub to keep expanding as well. But we want to turn off one of the taps. The tap, the government spending tap, the government deficit tap. If you do that, you're going to need to turn on bank credit creation, tap much, much more. So much more water comes out of that.The important thing about government spending20:48: Government debt, government spending, has various elements, but one of the very important things that it allows is for money to be created and for purchasing power to be transferred through time.Monetary and fiscal policy intertwined05:00: We've sort of, for good, understandable reasons, developed this world where we think of monetary policy as being one thing, that's the preserve of independent technocratic central banks, and we have this fiscal policy, but that's the stuff that's separate, and that's the stuff that politicians have to deal with, where in actual fact they're actually very, very closely intertwined.The canonical misunderstanding of how money come in our economy09:05: Most people, if you ask them that, "Where does money come from?" they would think they understand. They'd give you some answers. And they'd say, "Central banks create money." Or they would say that banks collect savings, and that's the money that is in the economy, or they talk about governments borrowing money. All of those things are actually wrong or not really accurate descriptions.Show Links:Recommended Resources:S&P Global Japanese asset price bubbleQuantitative easing Modigliani-Miller theorem John C. Williams Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Ben BernankeFederal Reserve ActTroubled Asset Relief Program Guest Profile:Paul Sheard bioHis Work:The Power of Money: How Governments and Banks Create Money and Help Us All Prosper

The acceleration of research in science, comes with an increasing number of flawed resultsparticularly in the medical sciences, where misapplied statistical measures and the relentless pursuit of publishing create a breeding ground for Type I errors. What is the role of the humanities in medicine, and what other revelations did the COVID-19 pandemic ultimately reveal?John Ioannidis is a professor, writer, physician, and researcher who studies scientific research. John and Greg discuss the current state of scientific research and the challenges researchers face, including uncertainty in statistics, the prevalence of flawed findings, and the need for effective hypothesis testing. John also highlights the need for collaboration, transparency, and accuracy in research. John and Greg also explore the intersection of science, politics, and empathy, advocating for a more humane healthcare system that honors the arts and literature.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How incentives drive scientist 22:19: Incentives are a core feature in driving what we want to get out of science. Scientists are very bright people, very smart, and they will do their best to try to fit whatever orders are given to them. So if they're told, "You need to get extreme, extravagant, extraordinary results," they will come up with them because that's what will allow them to continue doing what they enjoy and what they love. I'm not saying that they're criminals in doing it. They just want to do science and continue to do science. So, we need to find ways that our reward and incentive system is aligned with the expectation not being spectacular but flawed results, but accurate results.What can medicine learn from A/B testing?35:34: Medicine could learn a lot from the massive scale that A/B testing is conducted in some other fields, mostly commercial, but pretty effectively. What we have learned from A/B testing is that, first of all, our prior beliefs are not very solid or not very accurate. So if people try to make guesses of what will be effective and what will not, probably they're better than chance, but not much better than chance.Science vs. politics01:01:49: Scientists are not trained to be politicians. They're not trained to be taming beasts, and it's a very different job. And it's very unfortunate when people who are those who tame beasts and are in the political sphere, instead of trying to find ways to bridge divides and close differences, find a way to have a societal response that is more understanding and more empathy, sympathy, and love for each other. It leads to just a split and division and even situations of disruption in a sense of the social fabric.Is science self-contained?01:07:17: Sometimes we tend to think that science is self-contained, but science is about humans, especially medicine; it is about humans who suffer, have emotions, have beliefs, and face big dilemmas in their life and in their deaths. And I don't think that you can answer all of that just with either equations, biological samples, or with very fancy analytical methods. We need something more than that to struggle with our inadequacy. I feel very inadequate all the time, just trying to cover that inadequacy as much as I can.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Ronald FisherP-valueP-hackingReplication crisisDaryl BemBayesian statisticsInfection fatality ratio and case fatality ratioOperation Warp SpeedManhattan ProjectWilliam Carlos WilliamsJohn KeatsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford MedicineFaculty Profile at Stanford UniversityWikipedia PageHis Work:Google Scholar Page

Unlock the secrets to commanding any room with the power of influence and persuasion. Imagine ascending the corporate ladder with ease, your words leading the way—this episode will get you started.Zoe Chance is formerly a creative force behind the Barbie brand at Mattel, currently teaching at the Yale School of Management, and author of the book Influence Is Your Superpower: How to Get What You What Without Compromising Who You Are.Zoe and Greg discuss why finesse in influence is not just for marketers but a universal key to professional success across a wide range of jobs including teaching and education. Zoe explores the power behind the art of saying no, a skill that builds resilience and carves out space for personal growth, and the counterintuitive truth that a well-placed no can magnetically lead to more affirmative responses. They talk about the cultural conditioning that shackles us to a relentless cycle of yeses, and Zoe gives some techniques that allow the softer voices to echo through boardrooms and beyond. Find out also how to use the ‘Kindly Brontosaurus’ to get what you really want.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why paternalism and materialism work well with behavioral economics53:39: Behavioral economics allows freedom of choice, and still, it nudges or encourages people towards certain outcomes. And the reason that paternalism or maternalism works well with behavioral economics is that if people feel that you are nudging them in a direction that's consistent with their best interests, they tend to not mind the nudging and the influence that you were doing. If they feel that you are trying to manipulate them to do something in your best interest but not theirs, then there can be tremendous backlash. So, this maternalism, paternalism piece is important. And when somebody feels that you're trying to influence them to do something that they don't feel bad about the possibility of doing, and it's not you just being this selfish, manipulative person, it feels pretty good on both sides. So, I like influence that feels good on both sides.The magic of “no”13:36: The magic of "no" is that when we're more comfortable saying no to other people, we're more comfortable with them saying no to us. And that means that our requests lose this edge of neediness that can be repulsive. So, practicing saying no leads indirectly to other people wanting to say yes to you.The concept of “behavioral introversion”26:56: There is the "what we do" and the "who we are" piece of introversion, extroversion. So the behavior and the traits, and we're probably not going to do anything about our traits, at least not in the short run. And we have a bit of control over our behavior. And then, as teachers or leaders in environments where we have a wide range of introverts and extroverts, we may not be thinking about how there are people who are extroverted in some contexts that show up as introverts in the domain in which we see them.Influence is part of the job04:19: Influencing other people, for most people in most jobs, is a huge part of our job. And it's definitely a bigger part of our job as we rise in an organization and levels of increasing responsibility. And I used to think that if you're the boss, you just get to tell people what to do, and they're going to do it. We know it's totally not like that, becoming less, but I think it has probably always been not that effective.Show Links:Recommended Resources:John G. LynchSusan CainThe Kindly BrontosaurusBernard RothLibertarian paternalismCompetent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks350.orgGuest Profile:ZoeChance.comFaculty Profile at Yale School of ManagementLinkedIn ProfileProfile on XProfile on Psychology TodayHer Work:Influence Is Your Superpower: How to Get What You What Without Compromising Who You Are

How can tempting kids with an extra allowance for extra chores cause them to lose interest in helping out at all? How do incentives work and fail on each level from knave to king? What can be learned from examining the intersection of economics, preferences, and morality?Samuel Bowles is an economist, professor, and the author of several books on economics and related topics. His latest work is called The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens.Samuel and Greg discuss how our modern service and information economies pose unique challenges to traditional market principles. Sam shares studies that illuminate the intricate relationship between intrinsic motivation and external rewards. They also debunk misplaced beliefs in equilibrium and Sam emphasizes the need to align economic education with the challenges of climate change. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:A mistake economists make when it comes to the functions of law28:59: Here's a mistake that economists sometimes make: When we think of people acting, we think that we're acting to get stuff. When we make a decision about saving, investment, getting a job, working hard, whatever, shopping, we're getting stuff. Now, we know, you and I, that when we act, we're acting to get stuff, and we're also acting to be something. So, it's not just getting we're talking about; it's becoming. Now, we know, you and I, that when we act, we're acting to get stuff, and we're also acting to be something. So, it's not just getting we're talking about; it's becoming. Now, yes, we want to be someone. We want to be a particular kind of person. Now, if you add becoming to getting, then you have a better view of what humans are like. Now, what is this becoming? Are we just being generous so as to impress other people? Yes, probably; that's part of it. But, speaking for myself, but also on the basis of a lot of psychological research, we're also signaling to ourselves,  we're reaffirming to ourselves that we're that kind of person.Do we treat people as selfish when it comes to policy-making?05:12: If you design policies that treat people as if they're self-interested, you're more likely to get people to act in self-interested ways. So, it's not only that these policies are going to be misguided; they may even be counterproductive and backfire. And they may produce a citizenry which requires increasing regulation and increasing coercion. Because if you generate an increasingly self-interested population by treating people as if they're selfish, well, then you're going to end up with a very, very authoritarian society or chaos.Exploring the relationship between markets, generosity, and rule of law in European history51:52: One of the ways you transact goods when you don't have markets is gift, but another way is theft. Now, I think that the really key idea and my explanation of why Europeans tend to be more generous than people who have less contact with markets, historically talking about Western and Northwestern Europeans most. I think the reason for that is that we've had markets under the rule of law for a long period of time. In a rule-of-law society, you can actually take a chance on trusting somebody. And the reason is the worst possible outcome isn't so bad. They're not going to take your kids. They're not going to burn down your house. Maybe you're going to get cheated once or twice.Embracing incentives, constraints, and community to create change10:46: We'll never solve the problems facing us, whether it's economic injustice, how to handle new innovations, or how to handle climate change. We have to have a combination of incentives and constraints of the traditional kind and appeal to people's desire to be members of the community and to actually do something that they'll be proud of because they're good human beings.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Adam SmithCeteris paribusDavid HumeJohn Stuart MillAlexander HamiltonFriedrich HayekArrow–Debreu modelThomas SchellingWendy CarlinVoltaireJeremy BenthamAlbert O. HirschmanCORE EconGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Santa Fe InstituteFaculty Profile at UMass AmherstProfile at The Institute for New Economic ThinkingProfile on CEPRWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good CitizensAfter the Waste Land: Democratic Economics for the Year 2000Notes and Problems in Microeconomic TheoryA Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its EvolutionThe New Economics of Inequality and RedistributionMicroeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and EvolutionUnderstanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and ChangeGoogle Scholar PageMoral economicsMachiavelli’s Mistake: Why Good Laws Are No Substitute For Good Citizens

How did a breakthrough in understanding how humans make split-second decisions and how did studying firefighters unlock the key piece of understanding expertise?Gary Klein is the President of ShadowBox LLC who researches decision-making and is the author of several books. His latest book is Snapshots of the Mind, a compilation of essays that span his career. Also recently published was the 20th Anniversary edition of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions which explores the ways in which expertise factors into decision-making in ways you may not have realized initially.Gary and Greg discuss the complexities of decision-making, covering the importance of experience, expertise, and the role of mental models. They also explore concepts such as positive cognitive psychology and the idea of implementing positive aspects of decision-making as opposed to focusing on flaws. Gary discusses his innovative ShadowBox method used for training decision-makers by providing simulations of expert decisions. He also talks about the role of insights in successful decision-making and the challenges organizations face in fostering a culture of insights.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Can you have an optimal error path?46:24: So, you want people to learn from feedback. But it's not that trivial because a lot of times, I see people say, "Yeah, we're going to provide feedback about whether you succeeded or not," but that's just the beginning. You also want to help people diagnose why they got it wrong, what they were misinterpreting, what they were missing that they should have been watching more carefully. And so there's that diagnostic part, which gets into the tacit knowledge, which sometimes people can do by themselves. Sometimes, you want to bring in another pair of eyes, somebody with more expertise, to help you unpack: "Why did I get that wrong? Or was there something I could have done that would have prevented this?" So you want to have that kind of opportunity for diagnosis to help get richer feedback rather than just, "I got it right or I got it wrong."Should you trust your intuition?19:25: People ask me, "When should you trust your intuition?" And the answer is never because intuition can mislead you. But that doesn't mean you should trust analytical methods either because they can mislead you as well. So, you need to be able to use both for intuition. You don't want to totally trust your intuition, but you want to at least listen to your intuition because your intuition may be telling you some things that aren't captured in the analyses.Distinguishing experts from journeymen28:26:  One of the hallmarks of humans, and particularly experts, is to engage in speculative reasoning when you've gone beyond what they've encountered before. And that's one of the ways that we distinguish experts from journeymen: you throw something at an expert that the expert hasn't seen before, and their eyes light up, and they say, "What can we do about this?" Whereas a journeyman says, "I don't know. I'm going to have to call somebody else in." And they get uncomfortable rather than enthusiastic. So yes, as people become more skilled, they love the challenge of having to engage in speculative reasoning. That's human capability and a human source of power.How experts navigate mistakes47:55: Some people, if they make a mistake, say, "Okay, I'm putting it behind me." But the real experts don't put the mistakes behind them. They're really upset about these mistakes, and they keep mulling about it until they can come up with some idea. "Here's what I could have done. Here's what I should have done." And then they can start to relax. And that's one of the ways we distinguish the real experts from the ones who are just pretending: you ask people what's the last mistake they made, and the real experts know the last mistake they made because they're still processing it.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Martin SeligmanDaniel KahnemanAmos TverskyArab oil embargoBilly BeaneBen ShneidermanCase methodKnowledge shieldingGuest Profile:Gary-Klein.comShadowboxTraining.comWikipedia ProfileLinkedIn ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageSnapshots of the MindSources of Power: How People Make DecisionsSeeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain InsightsStreetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision MakingWorking Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task AnalysisIntuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You DoLinking Expertise and Naturalistic Decision MakingResearchGate ProfileResarch.com ProfileGoogle Scholar Page

When people are told a statistical claim, particularly about risk, the most important follow-up they can ask is about magnitude. How big of a number or impact is this? But many lack a basic understanding of statistics and how they fit into our world. It’s not baked into the fundamentals of education. David Spiegelhalter is an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge. His books like The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data and Covid By Numbers: Making Sense of the Pandemic with Data help contextualize the importance and impact of statistics in everyday life. He and Greg discuss the vital role of data literacy, how concepts like 'micro-mort' and 'micro-life' can measure risk, and the ramifications of faulty statistical interpretation during crises like COVID-19. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:You can't talk about risk without talking about its magnitude04:31: To talk about risk without talking about magnitude, I think, is an abominable thing to do. It's manipulative. It's always manipulative. If someone's going to talk about risk, they are trying to worry you, and they're trying to manipulate your emotions. Most of the time, we talk about increased risk and the risk (delete the ‘of” )without having any idea what the magnitude is. And even if we do, it's quite difficult to know: is that a big number or not? So, I think that this is absolutely essential: whenever people are told something, a claim, they should ask, "How big is it? And is this really a big number? Is this really important?"Risk as analysis is very often dominated by risk as feeling21:22: Risk as analysis is very often dominated by risk as feeling, and you've got to have risk as feeling, I think, in there as well. But it's when one of them takes over. And I think the real problem with this is that if you just operate on risk as a feeling, it's so easy to be manipulated by people. "Oh, this is awful. This is awful." You've got to be really careful of this. And you think, "No, it's not bad," or understating what the risks of some things are. So I think that if you're very vulnerable, if you only operate on risk as a feeling, you're vulnerable to manipulation.How do you gain micro life?38:40: You can gain micro-lives by exercising and stuff like that. And so, but that's highly nonlinear. The benefits from the first 20 minutes of exercising are considerable. It's about 40 minutes. So it's about a micro-life and a half, or something like that. After that, it's about the past. So, if you exercise for half an hour, you live an extra half an hour. So you better enjoy exercising because that's the extra bit you're living. And it's like time, and I quite like this image that while you're exercising moderately, your aging stops. You're not aging that half hour.COVID's positive impact on public interest in data47:00: During COVID, it was amazing. The popular interest in statistics, data, and graphs—I was on the media all the time trying to explain stuff. And that's carried on. It's even good. Is there any good news about COVID? One of the small things I think might be the greater public tolerance for an interest in data and graphs and more subtle ideas being used.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Ronald FisherRon HowardPaul SlovicGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of CambridgeHis Work:The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from DataCovid By Numbers: Making Sense of the Pandemic with DataThe Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger and DeathSex by Numbers: What Statistics Can Tell Us About Sexual Behaviour 

The current debate over corporate Governance depicts a conflict between shareholders and stakeholders. But what if their interests were aligned?Alex Edmans is a professor at the London School of Business and an expert on the impact of ESG factors on firm performance. His latest book is called Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit. Alex and Greg discuss the pervading discourse on ESG factors and fiduciary duty. Alex compares the benefits and challenges of long-term versus short-term activism. Join us as we debunk the stereotypes of activist investing, asserting its potential to spark long-term value through a lens that values genuine insight over raw data. Greg and Alex also navigate beyond the surface of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion metrics, drawing a parallel with the flawed educational policy of No Child Left Behind. Alex also gives his personal reflections on the importance of research in real-world business applications and leveraging purpose statements for strategic decision-making both in business and life.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why is it difficult to craft a statement of purpose for companies?36:03: So why is it difficult to come up with a mission statement, either for a company or for a person? To mean anything, it has to be selective. You can't be all things to all people, and that's why it's difficult to come up with such a statement because there's certain things that you miss out. So when I say to use rigorous research to influence the practice of business, that rules out just doing research for purely intellectual purposes, only to be published in top academic journals and be applauded by fellow academics. Instead, it's something where I'm doing this because I want to influence the way people think and act.Is shareholder capitalism bad for companies?11:42: Shareholder capitalism is actually not a bad thing as long as we correctly recognize that shareholder value is long-term shareholder value.Reforming companies by improving it for the long-term16:34:  Some of the most valuable companies today, such as the tech companies in the US, are worth far more than their quarterly earnings. Because investors are valuing the future, indeed, the most successful activist investors are the ones that will try to improve a company's productivity and innovation, and indeed there was some nice academic research which looks at the source of the value creation from activist shareholders, and it's not value extraction, value capture, it's indeed things such as improving productivity and improving innovation.Pursuing action, not profit08:46: So, one of the messages of the book [Grow The Pie] is actually the best way to pursue a goal. Let's say it's profits. It's not actually direct. If you go in with the mindset, and you're right to highlight the mindset, can I make money from this? There are many good things that do make money in the long term, but because that monetization is unexpected and difficult to predict, if you have the mindset of, I'm only going to do something if it makes me money, then I might not actually take that action.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Pareto principleM-PesaMichael PorterMilton FriedmanESG - Environmental, social, and corporate governanceDEI - Diversity, equity, and inclusionSASB - Sustainability Accounting Standards BoardNo Child Left Behind ActMcKinsey & CompanyBlackRockCSR - Corporate social responsibilityProject Last MileDoctors Without BordersBob IgerGuest Profile:AlexEdmans.comGrowThePie.netFaculty Profile from the London Business SchoolProfile on LinkedInSocial Profile on XWikipedia PageHis Work:Amazon Author PageGrow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and ProfitMay Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do About ItGoogle Scholar Page

Is it better to suppress our negative emotions? How do we feel things like anger, envy, or spite without letting them take over and impact our relationships? Do these so-called negative emotions serve an important purpose in how we perceive the world and ourselves? Krista K. Thomason is a philosophy professor at Swarthmore College. Her books, Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good and Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life, deal with the philosophy of emotion and examine why negative emotions are a key component of life. She and Greg discuss the history of philosophical thought when it comes to emotions, why bad feelings don’t always need to be turned into something productive, and why a life free of negative emotions wouldn’t actually be fulfilling at all. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The price you pay to master your emotions49:52: We pay a price for the kind of control that I think we often want when we're trying to master our emotions. I think that's oftentimes what we're looking for. We're looking for safety and security, and we're looking for inner peace. We're looking for a life that is, as they say, frictionless and stress-free and all that. But I think what kind of life do we end up with if it's a kind of life where we have absolutely everything under our thumbs, and nothing escapes the boundaries of our will? What have we done? What sort of life is that? Is life in the comfortable, easy chair a life worth having, even if it never comes with any pain?The role of emotions in self-discovery08:24: Understanding and paying attention to your emotions is part of self-discovery. It's part of figuring out what are these things that matter to me. And sometimes your emotions will show what you're invested in and what matters to you, maybe before you fully realize it yourself. So there's this way that they can kind of point us in certain directions and help us learn things about ourselves that we may not initially realize.Are negative emotions good?05:45: We have this tendency to think that positive emotions are good, helpful things in our lives and that they're sources of information, but the negative emotions are somehow built on false positive beliefs. They are fundamentally irrational. They are seeing the world in the wrong ways, whereas positive emotions are seeing the world in the right ways.On self-maturity18:59: Emotional maturity doesn't have to mean reason controls the emotions. Emotional maturity can mean I am good at identifying what I'm feeling. I'm good at accepting that this is how I feel about something, and I'm also good at recognizing that this is how I am experiencing this situation that may or may not be reflecting how the situation actually is. But also, I'm good at just feeling my emotions without necessarily feeling like I have to do something with it.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Baruch SpinozaStoicismFriedrich NietzscheMoral Saints by Susan WolfReflections on Gandhi by George OrwellThe Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du BoisOn Solitude by Michel de Montaigne Lisa Feldman BarrettGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Swarthmore CollegeProfessional WebsiteHer Work:Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life GoodNaked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life

What is the difference between politeness and civility? How do you show respect for others during difficult discourse instead of siloing yourself away in only like-minded company?Alexandra Hudson is an author and writer of the book, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, and also the creator of the Civic-Renaissance newsletter. Alexandra and Greg discuss Alexandra’s views on civility and humanity. Alexandra also recounts the wisdom of historical figures like Augustine and Pascal, shedding light on the balancing act between self-interest and societal harmony and why civility remains crucial, even when it's challenging. This episode not only offers a profound examination of civility's role in healing society but also provides actionable insights for integrating these timeless principles into the fabric of everyday life. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are we overdoing democracy?38:36: I argue in the final chapter of my book [The Soul of Civility] that we've made idols out of democracy, out of public life, out of our national public discourse. When we have an unhealthy love, unhealthy addiction to something, we know that we've made idols. We have an unhealthy addiction to this because it's invaded all areas of our lives. Things that were historically apolitical now have a profound political dimension and valence to them, like sports, schools, and education, and what newspaper you read, what area of town you live in, all of these historically apolitical decisions now, like you can assess a person's political dimension based on these decisions. And we do that all the time. That's not good—not good for our souls, not good for democracy. Democracy is a beautiful, important, and wonderful thing, but there's such a thing as too much of a good thing, and we're overdoing democracy by making it part of every aspect of our lives, and we're undermining it as a result.Civility is inherent good04:15: We need to realize that even when the stakes are high, we still owe the other some basic baseline of respect. That is civility. Even when it might be costly to us and even when it's inconvenient, that's just the right thing. Inherently, that is the right thing to do. And it's an obligation we have.The essential distinction between civility and politeness19:21:  I also realized this essential distinction between civility and politeness. That politeness is manners; it's etiquette; it's technique; it's external. It's the stuff where civility is internal. It's the disposition of the heart. It's a way of seeing others as our moral equals who are worthy of respect. And crucially, sometimes respecting others requires being impolite, telling hard truths, and engaging in robust debate. What are the foundational questions you ask yourself to be considered truly educated?44:51: This is the dialogue about foundational questions that every single human being should have the opportunity to ask and answer for themselves in order to be considered truly educated. Questions of origin, purpose, and destiny: Who are we? Why are we here? What is the best way to live? These are thoughtful questions that thoughtful people across history and culture have reflected on and offered answers to. And we do ourselves a profound disservice if we don't grapple with these questions in the context of how other thoughtful people before us have answered them.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Augustine of HippoSigmund FreudBlaise PascalChimeraRamayanaGiovanni della CasaPetrus AlphonsiDistichs of CatoAlexander PopeGeorge Bernard ShawSlow HorsesRobert D. PutnamErasmusHannah ArendtAlexis de TocquevilleGuest Profile:AlexandraOHudson.comFaculty Profile from Indiana UniversitySocial Profile on XLinkedIn ProfileHis Work:The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and OurselvesCivic-Renaissance.com

How do you reach the goal of a balanced brain? What will the future of mental health treatments look like, and how do we find the line between psychology and physiology? Camilla Nord leads the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge and is the author of the new book, The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health, which explores several scientific developments that are revolutionizing the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events—and treatments—can affect people in such different ways.Camilla and Greg discuss how phobias, immune responses, and learning intertwine, painting a picture of a brain that wields a direct influence on our physical states. They also examine the role of dopamine, unveiling its true colors in motivation and the intricate dynamics of mental health treatments from Cognitive Behavior Therapy to the uncharted territories of psychedelics and chore therapy. And finally Camilla lays out her view of the shifting landscape of mental health research. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Brain disruptions happen in the brain, whether neurological or physiological 05:21: If you look at the history of psychiatry, lots of conditions that are now considered neurological conditions, because we understand to some degree their physiological basis, something like epilepsy, were not long ago called psychiatric conditions because we didn't. And it's sort of like every time we understand the basis of a brain disorder, it gets sucked up into a different category, into this neurology category. When in reality, these are all brain disorders that we have a better or worse understanding of the origin for. And often, we know less about neurological disorders than people might think. And we might know more about psychiatric disorders than people might think, but they are all disruptions happening in the brain. Awareness isn’t enough to fix mental health36:58: Mental health is something that we all experience. Mental illness is not; it is something that some of us experience sometimes. In those times, it's critical to get those people the resources and treatments that they need. And sometimes, mental health awareness campaigns get in the way because it makes something like anxiety seem like a universal phenomenon, rather than anxiety disorders as a specific phenomenon that some people really suffer from and need help for.Brain disruptions happen in the brain, whether neurological or physiological32:05: I think often, one assumption is that dopamine just feels good. And whenever you experience something that kind of feels good, that must be dopamine. That's actually a mischaracterization of dopamine…[32:30] Dopamine, what it really is closer to is when you want something, when you're motivated to get something. And then it also is, of course, involved in how you learn about that thing. So it has a couple of different functions, different roles in the brain. But the motivational role of dopamine is a really fascinating one because it means you could be motivated to get something that isn't even necessarily pleasurable.Unmasking dopamine30:21: I think if you asked people who experience pain, they would say the optimal amount of pain is zero. But that's because we forget just how much we've learned about the world through pain. So if you look at a toddler in pain at some point every single day, and that's how they learn what things not to do so that they don't injure themselves, so they don't walk into a table, so they, you know, catch themselves when they fall over and don't just smash their face, so adapt to the world, they fit themselves in the world, partially via those painful experiences.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Hedonia and EudaimoniaAmy EdmondsonBayesian statisticsPlaceboDr. Caitlin HitchcockBipolar disorderGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of CambridgeMental Health Neuroscience LabLinkedInSocial Profile on XPsychology Today ProfileHer Work:The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental HealthGoogle Scholar PageResearchGate

The family household is a fundamental unit of economics, and by extension – a fundamental unit of society. But the amount of research and study on the family within the profession of economics is still developing. Melissa Kearney is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, and the director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Her book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, examines how the makeup of families can determine a child’s economic success. She and Greg discuss the success gap between children from two-parent homes vs. one-parent homes, the role families play in the overall economic state of our country, and what needs to be done to bridge that inequality and address poverty.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why does family structure matter in economic success and social mobility?03:43: When you look at all of the research that economists have done on poverty, inequality, and social mobility, family structure is important and determinant of all of that. And so what I'm doing is not uncovering something that isn't there in all of the academic evidence. I just think it doesn't get the attention it deserves when we then say, so what should we do about inequality, threats to social mobility, or poverty? We take family structure as a given in all of our research, and so it matters because it is so determinant. Even if we wish it were otherwise, it is so determinant. We just see that over and over and over again that kids from one-parent homes are less likely to graduate high school, graduate college, go on to achieve high earnings. It's really determinant of all of these markers of what we might think of as economic success.The real constraints of higher educated parents vs. economically constrained parents36:58: Higher-educated folks, married parents; they have more resources that allow them to be the kind of parents that they want to be. And more economically constrained parents have less; they have fewer resources, allowing them to be that.The impact of diverging structures on social disparities08:02: We don't just want to think about single moms and their kids being more likely to live in poverty, but I think the right way to think about it now is that the divergence in family structure between the college-educated class and everybody else is perpetuating inequality. It's exacerbating inequality precisely because these gaps are really large.Shared income and time are key for positive child development14:46: As an economist, my earnest wish is that this shouldn't be such a third-rail topic to talk about because nobody is blaming single parents for not doing an awesome job and putting in the hard work. But when there's a second parent in the house, there's more income coming in; there's more time coming in; there's more supervision; and there's more bandwidth. And we see that all of that collective input yields better outcomes for kids.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Gary BeckerRaj ChettyClaudia GoldinNicholas EberstadtLouisiana Fathers Form 'Dads on Duty' Group to Help Stop Violence at Their Children's High School (People Magazine)Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of MarylandDirector, Aspen Economic Strategy GroupNonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings InstituteHer Work:The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling BehindParental Education and Parental Time with Children

What do biology, religion, philosophy, and economics all have in common? Well, to some degree, they can all be grounded in the theory of evolution. David Sloan Wilson is a professor emeritus of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University at the State University of New York. He’s written a slew of books on a wide range of topics, all dealing with evolution like, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior and Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives. David and Greg discuss how everything can be explained by evolution, why the last 50 years of science have been groundbreaking, and Darwinism’s shifts over time. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What are the dominant narratives in the management field?42:34: So you have two things that are dominant narratives in the management field: laissez-faire and centralized planning, command and control planning, and neither one works. What does work is a process of managed cultural evolution. It's where we have a whole field of management that could not be more important for human affairs, which are suffering under these faulty ideas and just waiting for this in a series of essays or print conversations, this third wave, a managed process of cultural evolution... These two things don't work, and only one thing that can work emerges and is what practitioners typically converge on. So if you look at people that are not driven theoretically but have a lot of experience, they've typically become pragmatic cultural evolutionists. They try a bunch of stuff out. They have some systemic goal. They stick with what works, and then they repeat.On Darwin's impact on human understanding04:11: It is still the case that Darwin's theory of evolution is the unrivaled explanatory framework for all living processes. It is indeed true that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Now, when we go to humans, the very concept that humans are not part of biology is weird, but there's a historical reason why this framework, for all of its explanatory scope within biology, was constricted and was not applied to humans, especially human cultural evolution, until the closing decades of the 20th century. But now, that is taking place.Does selfishness beat altruism in groups?20:57: All natural selection is based on relative fitness. It doesn't matter how well you survive and reproduce in absolute terms; only compared to other organisms in your vicinity. And because of relative fitness, any behavior or trait that is oriented towards the welfare of others or one's group as a whole has a disadvantage—an inherent disadvantage compared to a more self-serving trait. So, that's why selfishness beats altruism within groups.The Intersection of genes and symbols in shaping our worldview45:05: The concept of a symbotype is the cultural equivalent of your genes, both for your symbotype and your genotype. There's quite a bit of flexibility in the way you see the world and your genes; they actually provide you with a repertoire of behaviors. So, you respond to your environment, but it's a limited repertoire, and if you want to go beyond that repertoire, you need to change something. You need to change your genes; you need to change your symbols. So, to an extent, in order to change the way we see the world and act upon the world—in other words, what takes place on the outside, we must change what takes place on the inside.Show Links:Recommended Resources:On the Origin of Species by Charles DarwinNothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution by Theodosius DobzhanskyWhy is Economics not an Evolutionary Science by Thorstein VeblenWilliam JamesCharles Sanders PeirceHerbert SpencerSociobiology: The New Synthesis by E.O. WilsonAdaptation and Natural Selection by George C. WilliamsThe Selfish Gene by Richard DawkinsChaos: Making a New Science by James GleickThe Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley by Victor HwangElinor OstromGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Binghamton UniversityProfessional WebsiteProSocial WorldHis Work:Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of SocietyEvolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our LivesThis View of Life: Completing the Darwinian RevolutionThe Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a TimeDoes Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others (Foundational Questions in Science)A Life Informed By Evolution: A Memoir Atlas hugged : the autobiography of John Galt III

What happened when El Salvador made Bitcoin an official currency? Who uses cryptocurrency the most? How does the blockchain both help and hinder would-be scam artists and criminals?Zeke Faux is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News, a National Fellow at New America, and the author of Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.Zeke and Greg discuss crypto bubbles, the crypto space, and the memorable characters Zeke encountered, such as Sam Bankman Fried. Zeke explains his investigations into Tether, the mass scamming compounds in Southeast Asia, and his personal experiences within this fluctuating industry when he bought his own Mutant Ape NFT.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why crypto investors overcome risks18:25: If you are making a crypto investment and your money is on some DeFi exchange or some centralized exchange, that seems pretty good. What kind of yield would you want just to let them hold your money? It'd have to be a pretty high-yield investment just to get over the risk that something unforeseen will happen, right? There's some chance that even if it seems great, that's something you didn't think is wrong with this because it keeps happening again and again in crypto. And I think what makes these people overcome is that they're not dumb. They know that these risks are there, the crypto investors. But they think, okay, maybe there's a 10% chance that something goes wrong here…[19:22] That's what makes people overcome everything: this desire to get rich quick, in this sense that it's possible because they've seen a lot of other people do it and get rich.The difference between internet and crypto bubble07:29: In crypto, the crypto guys do use crypto, but only to buy it. It's not serving any purpose other than just buying it, trading it, and doing things within this crypto world. Whereas with the internet, it was clearly a lot of fun, and it was affecting a lot of parts of real life. The internet bubble got way ahead of what could be justified by how much money these companies were making. But to me, there was never any doubt that the internet was a powerful innovation that was going to change our lives.Exploring 'Number Go Up' psychology in blockchain03:29: The key to it is psychology, and the title "Number Go Up" comes from this saying that I heard at my first crypto conference in 2021. I flew down to Miami. I thought I would hear more about technology. I thought I'd see bankers or fintech entrepreneurs who had ideas about how they're going to disrupt the financial system with this new technology, replace intermediaries, and make global transfers faster and cheaper. And instead, I heard this guy on stage saying, "Our technology is called number go up, and number go up technology means the price goes up, and that makes people excited, and they buy more, and the price goes up more, and then more people get excited, and pretty soon, Bitcoin is going to be at a million." And I just couldn't believe it. I was like, "Is that what it's really all about?"The treatment of crypto wallet transactions vs. traditional banking in stablecoins37:25: I can open a PayPal account, and I send money to PayPal. And now I have PayPal dollars that I can zap to your account. And that's not so different from a stablecoin. However, PayPal wants to know who I am. They follow all the banking rules and regulations about knowing your customer. They want to know who you are. You can't hold PayPal dollars without disclosing your identity. However, if I have a crypto wallet on my phone, like Metamask or any of the tons of other options, I can hold tethers on my phone and send them to your phone without disclosing any identifying information. And it seems like it's a very similar transaction that's treated very differently by regulators right now. And I just wonder if that will continue, especially if stablecoins keep growing.Show Links:Recommended Resources:BlockchainBitcoinDogecoinDecentralized financeSam Bankman-FriedTetherBitfinexCantor FitzgeraldGuest Profile:ZekeFaux.comProfile at NewAmerica.orgLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering FallBloomberg Articles

Why are humans the only species on the planet that’s been able to cooperate on such a massive scale and continuously reinvent our culture? Andrew McAfee is the co-director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy and a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His books, such as the Machine trilogy and The Geek Way, examine how technology and cultural evolution have shaped the modern workplace.He and Greg discuss what has allowed humans to evolve to be these super collaborators, how that evolution translates to organizational culture, and why the education system might be in need of an overhaul. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What does science do with overconfidence?27:00: What science does that is brilliant is it says to us, overconfident human beings, "You're going to win. You're so smart. Your evidence is going to be right. Go collect the evidence; you're going to be right," and we over overconfidently march off and go do all that. So the amazing thing that happens, the jiujitsu that happens, is that science takes our overconfidence and channels it exactly where it should be. Which is doing the hard work to gather evidence and then confidently getting up in front of your peers and presenting it and have them kick you in the teeth over and over again. It ain't fun, but that's what we signed up for. And what I think is going on at geek companies is they're importing that ground rule to make their decisions. That's why their batting average is higher.What is it that allows humans to do this thing unique on the planet?05:12: We human beings, this weird species, have two superpowers. One of them is that we come together and cooperate intensely with large numbers of individuals who we are not related to and who are not our kin…[05:34]The other one is that we evolve our cultures much more rapidly than any other species on the planet.Navigating disagreement and safetyism in higher education33:53: If we're not training people about how to debate, disagree, argue, and do it without being jerks or without being completely thin-skinned about it, we're not doing people a service. We're doing them a real disservice. So I think there has been increased safetyism, especially on college campuses. And I think that is not serving young people well for a whole bunch of reasons.Is our politics and bureaucracy complements or substitutes?45:53: We want status, and that's where bureaucracy comes from. I'm going to figure out a need to be involved in this work. That gives me status. I honestly believe that's the deepest reason for this stultifying bureaucracy that we come across. The CEO of most companies, if they look at what the processes are like inside their company, they go, "How did things get this bad? What is going on here?" This is not anything close to what I want, but that's because the people in the organization create that encroachment or that encumbrance all the time.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Amy EdmondsonAmy Edmondson on unSILOedChris ArgyrisThe Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-WilliamsThe Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph HenrichThe Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael StrevensFinal Accounting: Ambition, Greed and the Fall of Arthur Andersen by Barbara TofflerMaria MontessoriGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at MITProfessional WebsiteAndrew McAfee on TEDxBoston 2012His Work:The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary ResultsThe Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital FutureRace Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the EconomyEnterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest ChallengesMore from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next

For centuries, the health of the body was the province of doctors while the health of the soul was the domain of the clergy. What happened with the discovery of a concept of mind as thinking matter? In this episode, we trace the emergence of mind and mental health as a new aspect of what it means to be human.George Makari is a psychiatrist, historian, and the author of three books: Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, and Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind.George and Greg discuss the transformation in the way we perceive the mentally ill, thanks in part to the contributions of Philippe Pinel and others who dared to challenge the status quo. They explore the early intersection of sensibility, vitalism, and literary movements that have shaped modern mental health practices. They also dive into xenophobia, where it came from, and how it persists.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Do people in the world of intellectual history need to spend time thinking about medicine and the history of medicine?02:38: When you went in search of the history of mind, what you found was maybe a history of the mind through the lens of philosophy. Charles Taylor wrote a good one like that. But the more and more I looked into it, it became so clear that the notion of the mind was highly implicated in science, medicine, politics, and broader social change. And that a lot of our 21st-century categories apply back to a time where they didn't really exist…[03:38] The argument in the book is that claims about these major human essences—the soul, the mind, the brain—have very important socio-political ramifications and, not just downstream, but can be affected by socio-political cultural beliefs. So, I tried to tell that bigger story—medicine being part of science, being part of politics—and trying to piece out how these different kinds of things interacted in the creation of the kind of state that we're in now, thinking about soul, mind, and body.Are we all a little mentally ill?26:32: Sensibilities getting disrupted, causing depression or something like that. We are all, potentially, the victims of that. So, there is this notion that the mind is a fragile thing. It's not simply that God gave us one, and it's fine. It's part of the body; it's part of the physiology; it's part of this sensible creature who the environment can deeply impact and who can deeply impact the environment.On the origins of xenophobia33:12: I did a little bit of etymology and whatnot and found that the Greeks actually, in antiquity, had never used the word xenophobia. And that was critical because phobos in antiquity is just fear. It doesn't mean anything medical. But by the time the term gets invented in the late 19th century, phobia was a medical term, and there were a multiplicity of phobias that had emerged in the late 19th century, up to 75 different ones. And xenophobia was one of them, so that it was now an irrational fear, and that makes all the difference, that adjective. It's an irrational fear; it's a mental illness; it's not just a fear. And so, when you talk about the irrational fear of the stranger, that becomes one of the origins of the concept of xenophobia. As it kind of makes its way.The "Other Anxiety" of encountering difference48:03: Bringing people from foreign worlds together works to some extent, and I call that other anxiety. I was like, we shouldn't call that xenophobia because we all have that. If I meet someone who looks different than me, who speaks a different language than I do, and who worships differently than I do, I am going to have some anxiety about what goes on with that person and how they're different and how they're thinking about me. So that's almost universal, and we should think about that as the easiest part of the problem: bringing people together.Show Links:Recommended Resources:René DescartesJohn LockePierre GassendiBaruch SpinozaFrancis WillisPhilippe PinelBethlem Royal HospitalCharenton-le-PontSensibilityVitalismFranz MesmerFranz Joseph GallG. Stanley HallGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Weill Cornell Medical CenterFaculty Profile at Yale UniverstyGeorgeMakari.comWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Of Fear and Strangers: A History of XenophobiaSoul Machine: The Invention of the Modern MindRevolution in Mind: The Creation of PsychoanalysisAcademic Publications

Math is all around us. When you’re debating when to cross the street to avoid oncoming traffic, you’re doing math. When you sing in the shower and you notice how your voice bounces and sounds, that’s math. Kit Yates is a professor of mathematical biology at the University of Bath. His books, How to Expect the Unexpected: The Science of Making Predictions―and the Art of Knowing When Not To and The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives look at real-world applications of scientific and mathematical concepts. He and Greg discuss why the idea of math needs to be reframed, what it takes to scientifically predict the future, and why it’s more important than ever to have basic math skills in this world. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Math is a creative discipline40:52: Maths is a creative discipline. Sometimes, it involves stewing and thinking about things, and in my case, it involves applying mathematics to the real world and building models of the real world. It's a really creative process because you've got to decide which bits you want to keep and which bits you can throw away, which are the most essential parts. And that's not a thing that you do in 10 seconds. This is something that you have to think really hard about and try and do trial and error and get things wrong, right? We don't encourage people to get things wrong enough. Getting things wrong is the way that you learn how to get things right. And in modeling, we go around in these cycles. When I'm doing a mathematical model of the biological process, we go through this process: model, predict, test, and alter. And then you go back. So you build your model, make a prediction, and then test it against biology, and it's not right. And that's good because you've learned something, and you go and change your model, make a new prediction, and go around the cycle. And this is how mathematical modeling works in general. But it's a really creative process.You don’t need to be good at math to understand it32:09: We don't need to be mathematical geniuses, but we do need to be aware of the places where mathematics can have an impact, and those are increasing in frequency over time. We're increasingly presented with more and more data.On thinking of math in form of stories and narratives03:09: We’re seeing the products of mathematics all around us all the time, and I think that I wanted to share that through the medium of stories because people connect with that. I wanted to tell the stories of real people's lives where they've been impacted by mathematics, perhaps without even being aware of it, so that other people who read the book can then be aware of what's going on and spot those situations when they start to come up.It's better to be uncertain about a prediction than to trust a hundred percent in a poor prediction05:56: We are so convinced that we're right; we fail to check the possibility that we could be wrong. We fail to ask the question, "What if I'm wrong?" And actually, we can get into trouble with that. It's much better to be uncertain and to admit and acknowledge that uncertainty about a particular prediction than it is to be 100 percent certain with the risk that the prediction is wrong.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Bayes’ theoremPonzi schemeGoodhart’s lawStreisand effectMonty Hall problemJohn Forbes Nash Jr.Independent SAGEGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of BathProfessional WebsiteHis Work:How to Expect the Unexpected: The Science of Making Predictions―and the Art of Knowing When Not ToThe Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives

In some neighborhoods in the US, life expectancy is lower than in some developing countries. How do poverty, inequality, and the uneven distribution of healthcare resources contribute to this problem? Dr. David A. Ansell is a professor of medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. His books, County: Life, Death, and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital and The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills examine the aspects of inequality that lead to a decline in life expectancy among marginalized groups. He and Greg discuss Dr. Ansell’s experiences working in hospitals in some of Chicago's poorest communities and why the current healthcare systems are leaving vulnerable populations behind.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The impact of capital extraction on communities and social cohesion30:09: So this idea of when you extract capital out of a neighborhood, meaning the Sears leaves, the Western Electric leaves, the Zenith leaves—the big companies leave because white people have left. The bosses now, the ones who run the factories, said, I'm not going to rebuild it here. Why do I want to drive into a black neighborhood? When you take that capital out, it's not disinvestment; it's extraction. And then people are left devoid of work that's meaningful. But look at the South and globalization. Then what happens is what sets in: Grandma gets depressed, but the uncles now are off doing something else, and they don't look in on her. So you begin to erode that social cohesion, and when it erodes to a degree, that is now something that you could measure as concentrated disadvantage.The destructive role of holding companies in healthcare44:51: It's not just capitalism; it's the toxic form of capitalism that we have in this country that's allowed our healthcare delivery systems to be overly endowed with profit-making machines—holding companies, not healing companies.How our ahistorical thinking hinders progress16:05: One of the challenges that we have in our world is that we're ahistorical. We have this myth of meritocracy. There are ways in which ideology, built into a society, blinds us to the structures and realities of the world that we're in.Rethinking healthcare in a broken system33:39: So, I think we need universal healthcare because this idea of cherry-picking that goes on – that's racialized because white people, in general, have better, or people who have been assigned to whiteness have better, insurance – drives the behavior of healthcare delivery. It needs to be eliminated by some form of universal healthcare.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisis Coates (The Atlantic)Raj ChettyPaul FarmerMichael MarmotSecond Bill of RightsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Rush University Medical CenterHis Work:County: Life, Death, and Politics at Chicago's Public HospitalThe Death Gap: How Inequality Kills

What’s the difference between a lie and deception? How does cheating show up in nature? And is it always a negative thing? Dr. Lixing Sun is a professor of animal behavior, ecology, and evolution at Central Washington University. His books, The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars: Cheating and Deception in the Living World and The Fairness Instinct: The Robin Hood Mentality and Our Biological Nature explore the idea that not everything is as it seems in this world and seek to answer the question of why? He and Greg discuss the differences between lying and deceiving, examples of where you can find cheating in nature, and why humans have gotten so good at cheating and deception. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The substantial reality of female cheating39:34: Recently, studies show that female cheating actually is substantial, and there are lots of benefits associated with that. In my book, I talk a little bit about it, but now there is more to know why cheating is a good strategy among female animals, including humans. Data do not lie, especially about us. I have this data that's from studies; for men, 22 to 25% in their lifetime, they do cheat. And women, 11% to 15% cheat in their lifetimes as well. So, it's quite substantial.Self-deception in cheating09:20: Self-deception is for better cheating because when your consciousness is shut down, you can cheat fluently without finding any conflict.Cheating without conscious thought16:47: So as to how or why you don't need a brain to cheat, that's relatively simple because, as long as you have a niche—the ecological niche or, no matter what economical niche—the organisms can always take advantage of it. Basically, you have a niche and this adaptive evolution to fit the niche, to take advantage of it. So that's the evolutionary process. It did not require conscious thinking, sort of like in the psychology approach; in humans, you need conscious thinking.Lying vs. deception33:39: Lying is referring to communication. A boy crying wolf is lying because he is sending the wrong information to take advantage of being killed by others. So, that is lying. He should say there's no wolf when he cries for a wolf. He is lying because there's no wolf. That's the reality; that's communication. Deception is different. Deception is not necessarily communication, but deception is a take advantage of our cognitive bias.Show Links:Recommended Resources:John Maynard SmithCuckoo birdKingsnakeCoral snakeHenry Walter BatesViceroy butterflyMonarch butterflyRandy ThornhillBernie MadoffFrank AbagnaleGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Central Washington UniversityHis Work:The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars: Cheating and Deception in the Living WorldThe Fairness Instinct: The Robin Hood Mentality and Our Biological Nature

Today’s episode is a historical feast, unraveling the entwined roots of food, philosophy, and the essence of self. But it isn't just for the history buff; it's a banquet for anyone curious about the rich tapestry that flavors our modern approach to nutrition and identity. Steven Shapin is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard University and also the author of several books. His upcoming book is titled Eating and Being, A History of Ideas About What We Eat and Who We Are.Steven and Greg discuss dietetics far beyond mere sustenance, uncovering how health and moral virtue were historically seen as two sides of the same coin. They delve into the complex relationship between age-old folk wisdom and medical authority, and discover how our ancestors' understanding of well-being still simmers beneath the surface of today's nutritional discourse. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On exploring the relationship between food, identity, and modernity06:06: The book could be considered as a kind of gloss on the expression "you are what you eat" because at the end of the day, what I'm interested in is what's the relationship between what we think of the stuff that we put in our mouths and who we are. And that, so it's a story about some quite recent changes in answering that sort of question. So it's a story about how we became modern, and are we indeed modern?Balancing nutritional expertise and common sense in food choices31:43: You could tell a story about the way in which nutritional expertise trumps common-sense sensory experience. But that, as it were, aura of expertise doesn't illuminate all of our lives. And there is pushback to that, and it's from people who said we've had enough of this scientific inspection of what's on our plate.You cannot got from the scientific to the moral11:33: You cannot get from an is to an ought. In other words, you cannot get from the scientific to the moral. But it's precisely the occupation in dietetics, in what counts as the scientific medicine of past centuries, that's placed the is and the ought in the same field. So that what was good for you would guarantee health and a long life also constituted virtue. Moderation is a virtue. It's one of the seven cardinal virtues. I found it tremendously interesting, so I found myself telling a story about, in a way, how we think about food and ourselves, which is also a story about the modern moment.The multi-faceted considerations of healthy eating33:39: When you're eating, you have a mind of what's good for your body, insofar as you know what's good for your body. You might know it through past experience. You might know it from the Nutrition Facts label. You might know it from medical expertise. But you also have in mind what is good for conviviality: a nice meal with friends, have a drink—you don't have to get drunk, but have a drink every now and then—what's good for the environment, what's good for the agricultural laborers that produce your food, and what's good for the people who produce your package and transport your food. All of these belong in this pushback to the nutritionally modulated desire to consume only what's good for your body and live forever.Show Links:Recommended Resources:G. E. MooreMax WeberHenry V of EnglandJustus von LiebigScientific RevolutionRobert BoyleGalileo GalileiRené DescartesIsaac NewtonRobert HookeFrancis BaconThomas KuhnJames B. ConantGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard UniversityWikipedia ProfileHarvard Bio/CVHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe Scientific RevolutionLeviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental LifeA Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century EnglandNever Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and AuthorityThe Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late ModernNew Yorker Articles

What is the aftermath of a global pandemic and its impact on public consciousness? Will the surge in awareness about infectious diseases lead to sustained interest and funding, or is it merely a transient response to recent events?Dr. John S. Tregoning is a Professor in Vaccine Immunology at the Imperial College of London and the author of the recent book, Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them.John and Greg discuss the evolution of the war against pathogens, the complexity and significance of vaccines and the impact of pandemics on public health awareness. John lays out the role of scientific advances in diseases prevention, the potential of RNA vaccines, and future strategies to ward off pandemics.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On clinical trials48:49: The clinical trials and the burden of proof for the vaccines was the same as it was outside the pandemic. There was nothing different. It wasn't done quicker; the gaps between the trials was shorter. So normally, you do the first part, you pause, you publish, you get more money, you do the second part, and it was the pause and publish that disappeared. So, all the trials were done as stringently as they would normally do. The big challenge was that suddenly, you had this drug that was being given to a billion people. And if you gave apples to a billion people, some people would get sick. If you give aspirin to a billion people, a lot of people would get sick. If you gave paracetamol, anything to that many people that quickly, some people are going to get sick. And I think that communication of like, yeah, it's hard, right? Say for most of you, this is fine, but for some of you, and we don't know who, some of you are going to get very sick, and that's quite a tricky sell.Science is an imperfect answer08:28: That's all science ever is. It's an imperfect answer. There's always doubt, there's always questions, and we're just using the tools we have at the time to interpret the world around us.How do we know in the world of public health, where we should be investing our resources?18:49: The basic measure is that more public health, the bigger; every pound spent on public health saves two pounds later down the line. So, if I had the big pot of money, I would be investing in people's basic underpinning health, so make sure trying to reduce obesity, try to reduce smoking, try to reduce drinking—all of the things that make it worse when the pathogen gets to you—all of that investment is going to pay double because it pays you in. Not getting infected pays you in overall general health as well. The earlier you can nip it in the bud, the better. And so that goes for prevention. It probably goes for thinking about surveillance, investing money in making sure that we're catching the pathogens early, and then having high containment units.What happens when a new virus emerges?38:37: When a new virus emerged, it gave us insight into what would happen when a new virus emerged and the people most at risk. It doesn't have to be particularly pathogenic. There are people who have frail, damaged lungs, and if you put a virus into that, it's going to cause disease and death.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Antonie van LeeuwenhoekJohn SnowLouis PasteurRobert KochWalter ReedIgnaz SemmelweisSmallpoxSARS-CoV-1Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection (RSV)mRNA vaccineGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Imperial College of LondonLinkedInSocial Profile on XHis Work:Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight ThemGoogle Scholar PageImperial College of London ArticlesResearchGate Page

Understanding the origins of species and the evolution of our planet has really become a multidisciplinary field. In order to understand how birds evolved to fly or fish evolved to walk on land, you have to look at fossils. But you also need to think about the molecular biology part of that story. Neil Shubin is a professor of biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago. He’s the author of numerous books, including Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA and Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. Neil and Greg discuss the importance of understanding both biology and geology when looking at evolution, the mysteries that still exist in our DNA, and what Neil was doing with thousands of dead salamanders in his lab once. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Evolution is not designing things for a blueprint11:10: Evolution is not designing things from a blueprint; there's not a blueprint, and everything's designed from scratch, fit for purpose. No, what you're having is you have ancestors that are being modified to make new things. So you're modifying ancient genes to make new structures. That means history is very important; history provides constraints because you're not starting from scratch, but it also creates opportunities because you’re in a particular environment with particular genes, you may be in the right place at the right time.Does evolution happen at variable speed?10:41: Evolution happens, by all accounts, very gradually from generation to the next. But when we look at it over geological time—which is the window we have as paleontologists—it may look rapid, but it's probably very slow if you were on the ground watching it and measuring it year to year.Evolution is not about rewiring, but about rerouting15:14: When you think about these molecular switches—what we're looking at—is that you can look at not only where a gene is active in the body, but you can also look at the sort of almost the genetic software that tells the gene when and where to be active. And it turns out a lot of the big changes in evolution are not as much about evolving new genes—they're about using old genes in new ways: that is, changing when and where they're active. That's where those switches—the genetic regulatory elements—come into being. In part, there's a lot to that story, but the crazy thesis is right there.How is it possible to be both broadened and specialized at the same time?40:13: So collaboration is the answer to that. So, what we try to foster is a culture of collaboration among scientists. That is, when I train scientists in the lab, I don't ask them to be experts in both paleontology and development. I ask them to be experts in the empiricism of one field, particularly in parts of the fields that are relevant to them. But I insist that they be able to have critical thinking. And creative thinking across the fields, but their empiricisms, the way they do their work, whether it's lab work or field work or sometimes both, they have to specialize there.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Charles DarwinSt. George Jackson MivartErnst HaeckelGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of ChicagoProfessional Profile on National Academy of ScienceNeil Shubin on XHis Work:Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and PeopleYour Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

What is the correct balance between short-term profit and long-term resilience as far as healthcare is concerned? How does the 'panic, neglect' cycle underpin our societal and managerial flaws?Bethany McLean is a journalist, editor, and author of several books. Her latest book, co-authored with Joe Nocera, is titled The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind. Bethany and Greg discuss the paradox of America's healthcare system—immense spending that does not equate to superior care, a disparity made glaringly obvious during the global COVID crisis. They dissect the financial interventions of recent administrations and biases that tip the scales in favor of the affluent, leaving small enterprises and the vulnerable in the lurch. Bethany gives a critical examination of the swift mobilization that birthed vaccines under Operation Warp Speed, an emblem of successful government-industry collaboration amidst a turbulent political backdrop.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:“I don’t know” isn't a weakness, it's a skill48:42: The ability to say, "I don't know," in a way that isn't weak is a skill I hope our leaders can start to learn: "I don't know, but here's what we think. Here's what we're trying to do." I think, for all of us, not resorting to ideological divides as quickly as we do, and to really try and understand that where different people are coming from. I mean, I remember this whole ugly thing at the start of the pandemic: that you were a really bad person if you cared about the economy; that meant you cared about money over people's lives. And I was like, "The economy is people's lives.” I mean, what functioning society doesn't have a functioning economy? It doesn't happen there intimately bound up together. Is the healthcare system failing to deliver value for its costs?17:52: I sometimes think our healthcare system just needs to be ripped out by the roots and replaced because everything we do jiggers around the edges, just ends up making matters worse and creating more loopholes that financial players come and take advantage of. And none of it seems to do anything for either lowering the cost of health care or actually keeping people healthy.Science isn’t the truth, it is a method of ascertaining truth25:59: There was a fundamental misconception, stoked by people who said, "Follow the science," as to what science actually is, and as well as I do science, it's a method of asking questions. It's formulating a theory and then gathering evidence and seeing if the evidence supports or disproves the theory. And then, if it disproves the theory, you adjust the theory. But science isn't truth with a capital T. It's a method of ascertaining truth, of arriving at truth. And we wanted to believe that there was truth with a capital T. And I think that was one portion of the damage done.Is the government short-sighted when it comes to looking at crises?09:38: The government is shortsighted, and part of it goes back to the issue that the government only knows how to look at the last crisis, not how to prevent the next one…[10:16] I think our government has become fairly incompetent and unwilling to lead. And that's partly because we are so divided as a society that it's difficult to lead, but partly because people would rather score ideological points than actually exercise leadership.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Bernie MadoffBen BernankeAnthony FauciCenters for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)Gavin NewsomRon DeSantisBill de BlasioAndrew CuomoGuest Profile:Bethany McLean on LinkedInBethany McLean on XVanity Fair ArticlesHer Work:The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves BehindSaudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the WorldShaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage GiantsThe Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of EnronAll the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis

As we wrestle with the notion of humans as complex biological machines, we confront the unsettling idea that our behaviors might be preordained by genetics and our environment rather than a result of conscious choice. How do we walk the tightrope of acknowledging scientific revelations while grappling with our innate need to assign blame and praise?Robert Sapolsky is a professor in the neurology department at Stanford University and the author of several books. His latest is Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will.Robert and Greg discuss the neurological underpinnings of punishment and question whether our justice system is in line with our evolving understanding of human behavior. They examine the dynamics within societies that prioritize rehabilitation over retribution, as seen in the Norwegian criminal justice system, and ponder if mercy and forgiveness should be more central to our own.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On exploring religious perspective on free will 40:32: If you've spent a hell of a long time thinking about where human goodness comes from, the human capacity to do evil, where its meaning from, what does pain mean and all of that, and it basically doesn't matter if you conclude there's a loving God or if you conclude it's an indifferent universe or if you conclude I am the captain of my fate or if you conclude we're just biological machines. If you've done that hard work, you are going to come out much, much more ethical than average. It's the people who say whatever in between where they are most easily malleable.Is our brain prepared for adversity?29:43: What we often view as a brain distorted by adversity early in life is a brain that was doing exactly what it should be doing for preparing for a world in which there was going to be nothing but that adversity, and it's only when you put someone in a different setting that you see the dramatic mismatch there.The dopamine drive behind punishment and moral dilemmas15:45: When I see some barbarian advocating some horrible, punitive, vicious, dripping with viscera sort of thing to do to some poor bastard or any such scenario like that, I got to remind myself of something that is a very, very reliable way of getting primate brains to release the neurotransmitter dopamine, and a sense of reward and good feeling is to get to punish someone, to get to punish someone when you feel in the right. That's an incredibly strong thing in us. That's a feature of how we're wired. Culture comes in; we can feel a sense of righteous justice being served by locking away somebody for life without parole, rather than in a town square, like using pincers to take out their eyes and then burn them in front of everyone, are shifting standards.Where do we get our free will from?18:19: I spend six chapters in the book going through the world of people who say, "Ooh, we get our free will from quantum indeterminacy. We get our free will from emergent complexity. We get our free will from chaoticism." Those are three totally cool areas, and they're amazing and all. That's not where you can get free will from, and the models they put up always require, at some point, things to work very differently from how they actually do.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Benjamin LibetJohn SearleCarol DweckDeterminismGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at StanfordRobert Sapolsky on LinkedInHis Work:Determined: A Science of Life without Free WillBehave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and WorstThe Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human PredicamentA Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the BaboonsWhy Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and CopingGreat Courses

The word “creativity” as we understand it today didn’t become popular until the mid-20th century. So, what changed around 1950 that led to this mainstreaming of creative thought? And how was creativity described before that? Samuel W. Franklin at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands charts the recent history of creativity in his book, The Cult of Creativity. He and Greg discuss how the meaning of the word “creativity” has shifted over time, the invention of brainstorming, and why engineers and scientists of the mid-20th century were drawn to creative thinking.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Creativity as a cognitive ability and natural human process11:48: When we want a creative job, it's often because it's something that we think is going to allow us to become our truest selves but also make a living creating economically valuable novelty. It was this thing that allowed people to have it both ways, to see economic and psychological goods as being aligned.Creativity's constellation of concepts03:32: Creativity isn't necessarily a totally new concept. It's a new term that allows us to pull together a constellation of different concepts, connotations, and vibes that allow us to say new things. So in that sense, it is a new concept because it's a new handle. So I think what it does is allow us to name some theoretical attribute that is a human attribute.On individualism versus group work 26:41: The debate in business seemed to be: when you're trying to come up with something new or trying to solve a problem, should you get people together to do it? Or should you send people off on their own to do it? This is a debate that is perennial. It goes on to this day. There are people who have methods that are elaborations of brainstorming, improvements to brainstorming that they swear are good for group work, and I'm sure they do serve their purposes quite well, given the right context. And then there's people who just swear that there's no way to do it. I don't think we'll ever resolve it. I think that it's probably all about context.Changing the way we view creativity47:55: We see creativity as a psychological thing—something that happens in the realm of brain work. And so I think that when we say that we should all be teaching our kids creativity, maybe that could be a good thing. It could result in educational policies that I like. But what it also does is it expects all of those kids to go on and be entrepreneurs and tech people. And I don't necessarily think that's what we should be training our kids from. Not because I want them all to be working in factories, but because I think that's not the role that education should serve.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Joseph SchumpeterWilliam WhiteHarry BravermanScientific management and TaylorismApplied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking by Alex OsbornTorrance Tests of Creative ThinkingAbraham MaslowGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Delft UniversitySamuel W. Franklin on LinkedInSamuel W. Franklin on XHis Work:The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

The financial world has to grapple with the complexities of climate change just like everyone else. Bob Litterman is an esteemed figure in risk management and investment and the author of the book Modern Investment Management: An Equilibrium Approach.Bob and Greg discuss the dawn of quantitative finance and the integration of academic theory into the bustling trading desks of Wall Street. Bob sheds light on the intricate dance between market intuition and the precision of quantitative models, with the pivotal Black-Litterman model's influence on investment decisions. Bob helps peel back the layers of asset allocation conundrums, correlated assets, and financial forecasts. The conversation takes a deep look at the potential of carbon pricing, the inertia in climate policy, and the financial sector's crucial role in a sustainable future, highlighting the nuances of navigating investment strategies amidst these global challenges.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why everybody hates taxes, but love subsidies52:12: Incentives come in all different forms, and the IRA is a bunch of subsidies. People do love, and it is creating a lot of movement and a lot of investment. But, we just can't afford it. Like the subsidy to fossil fuel in the U.S. is an order of magnitude bigger than our piddling subsidies to low-carbon investments. And then you say, "Well, why don't we do more?" It's because who's going to pay for it? Ultimately, it's the taxpayers. And so that's why people don't like taxes. And that's why we can't subsidize our way out of this. We've just got to create the incentives. If you ask people, "Should polluters pay?" You know, it gets an 80% or 90%  approval rating. So, I'm sure we're going to get there. But, it's a tough political hurdle to get over; that's the problem.Risk is covariance with marginal utility21:57: Most people think about risk as volatility…We think of risk as covariance with marginal utility. I've probably lost half the people out there, but it means that money in good times is not as valuable as money in bad times.How can we get the price of carbon tax right?26:41: We don't have good models, and those models have a lot of uncertainty as to what the right parameters are and so on. I think we just have to buy into that and recognize that we aren't going to have the right answer. There is no right answer. And so the uncertainty means you have to err on the side of caution. We have to have a price that's high enough today that we react very strongly, and then we have to respond to new information. We shall see if things are worse than we expect and have to raise that price. The price should be high enough, though, right today, that we expect to solve the problem. And we expect the price to come down as the uncertainty is resolved over time. That's how high it should be, that we expect it to come down over time. Are economists helpful on climate risk?26:28: I remember reading an IPCC report, probably ten years ago, that said economists aren't very helpful on climate. They tell us that the damage from another ton could be anywhere from $2 to $200 a ton. What good is that? The answer is risk management. That's risk. Yes, it could be all over the place. So the right question to ask is, "What does your model say it will be? $100 a ton." The right question is, at what price are you highly confident that we're not going to go off the cliff, run into those tipping points? And that's a different question.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Fischer BlackSalomon BrothersGoldman SachsBlack–Scholes modelBlack-Litterman Model: Definition, Basics, and ExampleCapital asset pricing modelIntergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangePigouvian taxTreasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS)Guest Profile:Wikipedia PageProfile on FIASIWWF ProfileStanford Energy ProfileClimate Central ProfileHis Work:Modern Investment Management: An Equilibrium ApproachCFTC ReportPresidential Report

In the 20th century, the multidivisional firm was born. It quickly redefined business strategy and the way our world runs. Now, as the digital age advances and AI continues to become more and more critical to the way industries operate, a new kind of firm is emerging. Karim R. Lakhani is a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and co-founded the Digital, Data, and Design Institute (D^3) at Harvard. His book, co-authored with Marco Iansiti, Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World, looks at the ways corporations have attempted to restructure in the digital age. Karim and Greg discuss what it takes to adapt a business model to the age of AI successfully, some of the missteps companies have made when trying to go digital, and what should be deemed proprietary knowledge when it comes to AI. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Rethinking the multi-divisional model06:02: Over the last hundred years, the multi-divisional firm has enabled this built environment that we live in, right? All the accoutrements of, I'm using such a technical term, accoutrements. All the features of the modern world, what we take for granted: the fact that our plumbing works, our electricity works, our subway systems work, our transportation systems work mostly. But the modern world we live in, the built environment that we live in, has come about because the multi-divisional firm, the firm was established; the multi-divisional firm was established, and we were able to marshal capital, technology, and people to do productive things. And so this is a massive achievement, right? And the shadow of that lives on today. Most of us live in these multi-divisional, siloed firms.Is your organization mirroring your technology?03:21: The mistake that most incumbent companies make—the companies that aren't coming from Silicon Valley or aren't born natively digital—is that they think it's just an add-on. They just think, "We'll just sprinkle this on top, and it'll be business as usual." When, in fact, Conway's Law basically says there's a mirroring hypothesis, right? The structure of the technology mirrors the structure of the organization. And if you're going to have a new architecture for your technology, you need a new architecture for your organization.Is innovation still an afterthought?24:31: Innovation was often an afterthought in most organizations because, once you figure it out, you've stumbled into something good and just milk the heck out of it for a while. And then you were like, okay, let's acquire something else, right? And because the rate of change was very slow, while there were lots of innovation scholars back in the fifties and sixties writing stuff, it wasn't viewed as a core strategic imperative for most organizations.Balancing openness and advantage in the data age51:40: Now that this new tool is available, why would we stop it from being available? But you can imagine the discussions in the dean's offices, the provost's offices, and the board of directors for these presses about, oh my god, all of our knowledge is being stolen. The same dilemma is going to happen inside and outside of companies. And what is your data strategy? What will you select and reveal? What will you keep private? What will give you an advantage or not?Show Links:Recommended Resources:Conway’s LawAlfred ChandlerAlfred SloanThe API Mandate from Jeff Bezos The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI by Paul Leonardi and Tsedal NeeleyThe Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results by Andrew McAfeeGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Business School Digital, Data, and Design Institute (D^3)His Work:Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World

Ever wondered why marriage, one of the most common themes in literature, is largely ignored by philosophers? What about the complexities of present-day marriages, with political differences, and even the dynamics of arranged marriages today?Devorah Baum is a Professor of English at the University of Southampton, a filmmaker, and the author of several books. Her latest book is called, On Marriage. Devorah and Greg discuss the insights of philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche who saw marriage as an obstacle to philosophy. They also examine the post-nuptial life depicted in Beckett's works and the story of Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights. Greg asks Devorah about romcoms, the role of parenthood in marriage, and the rise of pornography. This episode promises a wealth of insights into the institution of marriage. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The hidden economics of marriage19:31: Marriage is about marshaling a certain kind of resources. It's about orderly inheritance. It's about making sure that what the state would have to pay for, like the labor of social reproduction, is made private, brought indoors, and a lot of care work that goes on there, and so on. And then you overlay that with the language of love, altruism, and duty in the family, and you get away with stuff. So we can see that these are the conditions that have allowed. The private life of the marriage to keep the state or society well-oiled and running without having to pay some people or even recognize their labor because it's what they want to do naturally, and so on, and that's love.One of the great malaises of contemporary culture is self-righteousness48:13: One of the great malaises — I would even say diseases — of contemporary culture is a culture of self-righteousness, of people feeling that they have to be right all the time and about everything. And I think there's no pleasure in it. They can be reminded by these cultural productions that being in relationships with others isn't about being right all the time. In fact, you can't be, and just to be in perpetual agreement with the people you hang out with isn't to be in any relationship at all.Why do our romances imagine two against the world?07:31: Our dream and our great romance of love is Romeo and Juliet, whose love affair is incompatible with a sanctioned, approved marriage. They marry, but the world doesn't approve of their marriage. And so they die, as though that marriage has no future, that love. And so I think something about our idea and our dream of love is distrustful of marriage because marriage, to be successful and to be sustained, is the sort of third. The world says, "Yes, you two can be together. We can get along with you." The world gives its blessing to the couple and says, "Yeah, we can work with you." So, something about that pollutes the ideal purity that the lovers imagine they have with each other, sort of two against the world. And that is our vision of romance.Why are conflicts sometimes beneficial to marriage?40:41: In the romantic mythos, we have this idea, this dream of marriage where you can be opposite, and you can make peace with your differences. Sort of, the conclusion of a romantic comedy, ideally, or the kind of romantic comedies I have, is not one where there was a master-slave sort of battle going on, and then eventually one triumphed, and the other one said, "No, you were right all along, and I was wrong all along." What makes it feel romantic and alluring is that we imagine the argument continuing after the wedding, too, because we saw how much pleasure it brought them beforehand. So you can make peace with your differences, which isn't a piece that doesn't have conflict in it, but it's a piece in which the conflict can be not only endured but to some extent enjoyed and is a source of respect and mutual education and, indeed, edification.Show Links:Recommended Resources:One Thousand and One NightsHappy Days (play)Exhibition (film)Norman RushGiambattista VicoEmmanuel LevinasJavier MaríasStanley CavellWesley Morris“Marriage is like a cage…”Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of SouthamptonHer Work:Amazon Author PageOn MarriageFeeling Jewish: (A Book for Just About Anyone)The Jewish Joke: A Short History-with PunchlinesIMDB ProfileHusbandThe New Man

Despite our culture of rugged individualism, it’s widely accepted among psychologists today that we need social connections to thrive. And neuroscience may be the key to understanding how relationships impact us on a physiological level.Amy Banks is the founding scholar at the International Center for Growth in Connection. Her book, Wired to Connect: The Surprising Link Between Brain Science and Strong, Healthy Relationships, delves into the neuroscience of social connections and provides a toolkit for bettering the relationships in our lives. Amy and Greg discuss why connection is fundamental to humans, Amy’s brain pathway acronym CARE, and how to repair relationships in your life so that they are more fulfilling.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is there something that we can do to make people less anxiety inducing?17:19: In a relationship that ranks pretty low on the Calm scale, it could be you, it could be them, and it could be some confluence of both of you. But what's important is having a snapshot of that. If it is the relationship actually that doesn't feel supportive, safe, where there's not a lot of mutuality, where there's not a lot of listening in addition to talking, when it doesn't have those qualities, then in order for your health and well-being to thrive, if you will, you got to have some other people. You got to have some other people to offset it, you know, we're heading into the holidays, and it often happens around families, right? Where you might be demanded or need to be someplace with people that maybe necessarily aren't on the same wavelength that you are, right? How can you assess the emotions you make others feel?13:28: When do we ever ask people, 'How do I make you feel?' That actually would be a really fruitful conversation to have with a friend or relative. Or, 'You look anxious. Do I make you anxious? Is there something I do that makes you anxious?' We don't have those kinds of relational conversations.Where did we ever get the notion that relationships were secondary? 02:54: Our entire culture was built on this notion of separation, individuation, stand on your own two feet, and we have such a robust history, literally, politically, and psychologically, developmentally, of believing that to be the case. We've created an economic system around capitalism. That's all about competition and the survival of the fittest. There's so much that's still Darwinian in the way that we think human beings work.The untapped potential of marginal relationships40:41: There are a lot of marginal relationships where, once you begin to understand what the qualities of a healthy relationship are, you can begin to try to have conversations that point in that direction and see who's open to trying to interact differently. There's a lot that you can do with marginal relationships that is really more out of social ignorance, not being taught, and not malevolence when I talk to people about this. And when I do my teachings, people by and large are just relieved to hear this news about relationships, and it gives them some guideposts to begin to think about how they might try to shift, change, or grow the relationships that maybe aren't as satisfying as they would like them to be.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jean Baker MillerStephen PorgesBrain Lock, Twentieth Anniversary Edition: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior by Jeffrey M. SchwartzGuest Profile:The International Center for Growth in ConnectionProfessional WebsiteHer Work:Wired to Connect: The Surprising Link Between Brain Science and Strong, Healthy RelationshipsFighting Time

Why does there seem to be such a struggle to get things done in some organizations? How can you unlock the mystery behind the persistence of bad management practices? What is the problem of inaction, and how are workplaces impacted by the human tendency to add rather than subtract?Robert Sutton is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the author and co-author of several books, including his latest book, The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt, and his upcoming book The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.Bob and Greg discuss practical examples of organizational friction, examining the story of Larry Page and Google, observing the transformative leadership of Satya Nadella at Microsoft, and even sharing his personal triumphs and trials. Greg questions the place of assholes in positions of power and the impact they have on organizations. Bob talks about time management and its crucial role in the daily operations of organizations, sharing stories from companies that have triumphed and those who stumbled. They also discuss the potential of AI and textual analysis in identifying bottlenecks within a company. Tune in, learn, and transform your workplace.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What are the factors that contribute to an individual being considered a workplace jerk?21:58: So, what are some of the characteristics that lead people to turn into jerks? One is being in a hurry. The pressure to rush, rush, rush, even when it doesn't make any sense in many organizations, has increased, or at least stayed the same. Another one is sleep deprivation. I mean, if people are exhausted, they're tired. It's not like those things have gone away. And then the other thing that happens, in the other problem with assholeness is, and these are all things that can be produced in the lab easily, and it’s very contagious. Negative behaviors are more contagious than positive behaviors. And, by the way, when there are power differences in organizations, when people are powerful, objectively powerful, or feel powerful, they focus more on their own needs. They focus less on the needs of others, and they act like the rules don't apply to them.Does being a jerk help you get ahead?13:28:  On the whole, we can have some arguments about when being a jerk helps you get ahead. And it depends on the game: old Microsoft versus new Microsoft. I think that the jerks get ahead in the old system, but not in the new system. But when you're working for somebody like that, there's just no evidence that it helps the underlings or yelling at customers, except in some, maybe very rare, situations.Generalists vs. specialists51:43: Everybody doesn't have to be a generalist. You just need enough generalists to glue the thing together. And actually, great specialists are absolutely fabulous, as long as there's somebody there who understands how the system fits together. So I'm not completely opposed to specialists who don't care about anybody else. I just want them to be in a system that glues their behavior together.Does gossip have a function in an organization?55:11: Gossip actually has a function in an organization, and the function is that it brings out information that is not captured by formal systems and being in touch as a leader with the gossipers. It's Scuttlebutt. And, so one of the CEOs I know said what she used to always do—that she did somebody who did very well getting ahead in situations where women didn't always get ahead—was try to make friends with the people who were known gossips and complainers. She said it for two reasons. One, they tend to give you the negative information first, and the second one was a little bit more, maybe insidious, she said. Well, if you could give that person a different perspective that everything didn't suck that sometimes you could actually even change the gossip in the system.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Satya NadellaEdwin CatmullLarry PageDeborah H. GruenfeldDacher KeltnerTodd ParkMelissa ValentinePaul S. AdlerAmy EdmondsonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford GSBProfessional Profile at StanfordBob Sutton's WebsiteBob Sutton on LinkedInThe Friction PodcastHis Work:The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things HarderThe Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like DirtGood Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the WorstThe No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn'tWeird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative CompanyScaling Up ExcellenceHard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based ManagementThe Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action

Management oftentimes can be a difficult and precise artform. How does leadership at a company decide how the organization should be structured? What divisions should be created? And how will the inevitable problems that arise be handled? John Roberts, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, is one of the leading thinkers on organizational economics and has written numerous books on the subject like The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth. John and Greg discuss how the discipline of organizational economics came to be, why some organizational structures are more effective than others, and why the transmission of knowledge from academic to management can be tricky. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is it essential for leaders to step back from the daily grind and adopt a broader perspective to effectively formulate strategy?38:43: Opportunities for senior managers to get away from things for a while are important and underdeveloped. My guess is that classroom education isn't the right way because the tendency is to prepare for the class. You've got more time than usual, but you don't really have a chance to sit back. But it might be an element of it. So, some combination of small group class activities where there are a bunch of your peers, and you're talking about big ideas, coaching where you have somebody who asks good questions.Is culture the most important thing in an organization?13:56: I've come to the position that probably the most important thing in an organization is the culture...If you have a strong culture that really determines the way people think, the way people interact, what things they'll do and what things they won't do, what they'll put up with, how much they focus on today versus tomorrow, and a whole range of things, that can be much more important than the formal architecture or the established routines.Differentiating information and communication technology29:16: People didn't see communication technology and information technology as separate things. They just saw them as the internet. One of them encourages centralization. The other encourages decentralization. But that was a big part of what was going on—that we weren't asking the right questions. We were just talking about technology. We weren't talking about the specific technologies that were involved.Navigating the complexities of decentralized decision-making in a dynamic Environment21:04: You can't run a centralized, top-down, hierarchic organization of any size. Even if the technology weren't changing on you, the environment is changing on you. Even with the best communication technology and the best information technology, you can't get the information from here to here. So you have to make a lot of decisions within the bowels of the business. And that means you have to make sure that the system is set up so that these decisions here are compatible with the other guy's making. That's a delicate thing to do. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Ronald CoaseJohn Browne of BP“Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries?” by Nicholas Bloom and John Van ReenenOliver E. Williamson“Does Management Matter? Evidence from India” by Nicholas Bloom, Benn Eifert, Aprajit Mahajan, David McKenzie & John RobertsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityHis Work:Economics, Organization and ManagementThe Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth

How can economics shape our understanding of healthcare? How can cognitive biases lead even seasoned doctors into harmful errors, and what potential does machine learning have to mitigate these mistakes? Anupam B. (Bapu) Jena is a professor of Health Care Policy and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Associate Physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, host of the Freakonomics M.D. podcast, and the author of the book Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health. He has an MD in medicine and a PhD in economics. Bapu and Greg discuss the impact of timing on healthcare. From the intriguing effect of birthdate on ADHD diagnosis and how patient outcomes in medical care correlate to how recently a physician was in residency to the puzzling improvement of cardiology patient outcomes when there are fewer cardiologists present. They discuss the lessons learned from Covid through both medical and economic lenses and why the effectiveness trajectory of surgeons differs from that of other physicians. This is a fascinating dive into the data side of medicine, with several surprising takeaways for any listener.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On the intersection between medicine and behavioral economics25:30: One of the things that I've thought about the intersection of behavioral economics and medicine is that it may not be surprising that the types of things that behavioral economists will often study show what they do, right? Because when the stakes are not high, it's not hard to sort of rely on that autonomous part of your brain that tells you that someone who's 40 is different than someone who's 39. Why does it matter? You go to the grocery store, something $7.99 versus $8, and yes, you're more likely to buy it when it's $7.99 versus $8. But you wouldn't think that if that applied to life-saving chemotherapy, you'd be more likely to buy the chemotherapy that's $7,999 versus $8,000. You would think, wow, life-saving chemotherapy. I'm going to figure out which therapy I need. I'm not just going to let a mind trick or heuristic move me in one way or the other.What do we need to do in order to do medicine better?47:20: What you really want to train doctors to do is be able to create differential diagnoses, like clinically problem solve, and understand that when things aren't lining up the way they should, to know that they need to search further to figure out the answer. In that aspect of problem solving, I think economists do very well because the nature is, the work is different in that respect in medicine; I think we rely too much on pattern recognition to sort of help us understand answers to questions. And there's like a reasoning that is sometimes not taught.Do we demand too much from our doctors?28:48: It's easy to miss things, right? And it's easy to not realize what's the big thing that you need to be looking for versus the small thing. And you get that with experience. I think with experience, you do better there, but it's certainly the case that even with experienced doctors, they still miss things, and I think that's where computers can be really helpful. They can be in the background, as they see. The data that is generated on a daily basis for a person, seeing what the past medical history of that person is, seeing the trajectory of all of those things, like how are the labs looking over time, what is the imaging looking like over time, what are the nurses' notes saying about delirium or agitation, are there more mentions of that as we're going on? A computer could see all that information and put it together in a way that a human being might not be able to. And at the very minimum, I think it could offer us some good insights that can help us consider things that we weren't considering.On the origins of Anupam's study18:21: It was another data point to tell people that sometimes less is more, but what I think it did more of, and probably what most of my studies do more of, instead of moving the needle in terms of one specific clinical practice, is just getting the medical world more in tune with these ideas of natural experiments and trying to just be a little bit more curious and innovative when we come up with approaches to studying questions because a lot of what we study in medicine is critically important. I mean, it matters for our health; sometimes it matters for life and death. We have the ability to do randomized trials, and those are great, but sometimes we can't do them, or we don't do them. And we can't phone it in for those other types of analyses. We've got to be as curious, as intellectual, and as creative as we can be to try to figure out the right answer.Show Links:Recommended Resources:David O. MeltzerDevelopment economicsRandomized controlled trialWhen the Doctor’s AwayThe COURAGE TrialDaniel KahnemanAmos TverskyLeft Digit BiasMarcus Welby, M.D.The Norwegian breast cancer screening programGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Medical SchoolAnupam B. Jena Profile on Analysis GroupAnupam B. Jena on TwitterHis Work:Anupam B. Jena Amazon Author PageRandom Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our HealthFreakonomics M.D. PodcastGoogle Scholar PageArticles on National Bureau of Economic ResearchArticles on HealthAffairs.orgAnupam B. Jena Substack

Far from just making things pretty, design has become an essential part of strategy and now has a dynamic role in organizations. It’s not just about design; it's about the transformative power of design.Vijay Kumar is Charles Owen Endowed Chair and Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is also the author of 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization, a comprehensive toolbox that equips you with the understanding and tools to tackle your projects with a design mindset.Vijay and Greg dive into the complexities of design education, blending intuitive, collaborative, and scientific techniques, and how systems thinking is an absolute must-have for success. Vijay brings to light how top-down leadership, when married with bottom-up innovation champions, can shift mindsets towards innovation.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The levels of impact of innovation 14:04:  In my work, I think of these impacts in organizations at three levels: creating awareness, which is creating the basic awareness about how innovation happens, and looking at some examples and looking at successes and failures is good, that awareness gives you some basics to start your journey. But the next level is experience, awareness alone is not enough for you to practice. The experience level is: can we give people some experience, a hands-on experience? [15:27] Now, the next level is creating competence. Like creating competence, you have to go into a deeper level of understanding of all these methods, and it is a multi-year or perpetual activity that you need to engage and to absorb the competence of innovation methods and tools to make new things happen.Rethinking design innovation in a world of minimalism12:48: The idea of design innovation, on a minimalistic level, loses its richness; it loses the essence of the power of design. The simplification is that the whiteboards, post-it notes, and a one-day workshop. But the fact and the impact are so minimal in my understanding.How can we encourage innovative thinking?09:19: The executives or the leaders who have bought into the idea of the importance of innovation can make a big difference in influencing their team and the other folks working in the organization by constantly giving examples or demonstrations or talking about the impact the design of the innovation could have on the company's offerings. That's one direction—the top-down direction of influence.How do we foster ownership?29:08: Ownership of people's actions takes place when they first-hand experience the value of something. So the engineers that are doing research on the field suddenly become part of the field, doing interviews, talking to customers, and getting insights. So, they take ownership of that process by immersing themselves in that context. So ownership is a big part of my belief that, in order to give ownership, you have to make people participate in these diverse types of activities.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Larry KeeleyHuman-Centered DesignJames G. MarchCutting Cubes Out of FogChristopher AlexanderCharles Owen LinkedInAlfred P. SloanSix SigmaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Illinois Institute of TechnologyVjiay Kumar on LinkedIn101 Design Methods WebsiteHis Work:101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your OrganizationGoogle Scholar PageResearchGate Page

How do human senses compare to those of animals? In what ways are they similar, how are they different, and how do they help us make sense of the world?Ashley Ward is a Professor of Animal Behavior at the University of Sydney, Australia, and also the author of several books about animal behavior. His latest book is titled Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses.Ashley and Greg discuss the complex labyrinth of sensory perceptions, illuminating how vision, taste, and smell can shape our understanding of the world. Ashley dissects the extraordinary ways animals and plants detect threats and communicate, the surprising power of smell in social insect communication, and interesting theories about the evolution of human behaviors like kissing and hand-shaking. They dive into animal behavior and group decision-making, including swarm intelligence and the dynamics of animal hierarchies in this fascinating exploration of animal behavior and sensory experiences.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Can we train ourselves to smell fear and excitement?08:53: So, there's a huge value to interacting directly with other people, and an awful lot of cues are provided that go beyond the visual and hearing when we communicate by language. As to whether we can smell fear and excitement, the evidence suggests that we do produce different chemicals when we are in an aroused emotional state, such as when we're terrified by something or when we're thrilled about something. And those kinds of subtle cues can be collected by other animals. Dogs are an obvious example. And we might think that we're simply not capable of this. Our sense of smell, let's say, is not sophisticated enough to pick it up, but it does vary enormously from person to person. And there are people who have such an exquisite sense of smell that they can start to pick up these cues.Information is a vital currency to animals47:20: Information is a vital currency for all animals, and by pooling that information in whichever way, they can develop much, much better strategies. That applies to humans: If we're trying to make excellent decisions, then the best way to do that is to take a broad view of the information that's out there. Now, there are two ways of getting that information. You can either go out there and collect it all yourself, which is incredibly time-consuming. Often, in many cases, totally impossible, or you can use social information, which is readily available and relatively cheap, and as long as you get enough of it, it's very accurate. This is what the animals are doing. Decoding scents38:51: Our perception—our sensation of smell—is produced by a mosaic of different activations in the receptors. We have 400 different smell receptors, and each smell is a composite of different activation patterns. Receptor numbers 189, 157, and 14 might all be activated, giving you the smell of a tangerine. But if it's not 14, 15, then maybe that's a lemon or something. And that's the difficulty. There are so many different permutations of inputs that go into each smell. There's a very difficult matter to untangle that and find the exact right receptor activation pattern which corresponds to each different smell.Taste complexity across species43:30: The pattern is that the more carnivorous an animal is, the fewer the different kinds of tastes, the less sensitive its sense of taste is, and the more herbivorous an animal is, conversely. The more complex and sophisticated their sense of taste is. So cows have a much better sense of taste than we do. We sit somewhere in the middle. We have approximately the same complexity in our sense of taste as a pig does. We're more complex than cats and dogs. We're less complex than rabbits and cows.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Movie Theaters Smell Like People’s FeelingsHand Shaking and SmellQuorum Decision-Making in Foraging Fish ShoalsConvoy battles of World War IIJack the Railway BaboonAssateague IslandBayesian inferenceSynesthesiaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at The University of SydneyAshley Ward's WebsiteAshley Ward on LinkedInAshley Ward on XHis Work:Where We Meet the World: The Story of the SensesThe Social Lives of AnimalsQuestions and Answers on Saltwater Aquarium Fishes: Understanding Behavior for Successful FishkeepingQuestions and Answers on Freshwater Aquarium Fishes: Everything You Need to Know to Successfully Raise HealthyGoogle Scholar ArticlesResearchGate Articles

Ever wondered why allergies seem to be on the rise? How about the intriguing link between the industrial revolution and our own immune responses?Theresa MacPhail is an Associate Professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, a medical anthropologist, and author of several books. Her latest is called Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World.Theresa and Greg discuss the history of allergy research, the evolution of anaphylaxis, and the astounding revelations from her book, Allergic. Theresa talks with Greg about food labeling laws and the spike in pollen counts due to climate change. She also provides fascinating perspectives on how exposure to new pollutants, changing diets, and the advent of antibiotics have potentially disrupted our immune system's natural functioning. They dive into the importance of early investment in understanding conditions like asthma, food allergies, and eczema, alongside the potential dangers of overusing antibiotics. They also discuss what smarter societal immune responses would look like in preparation for future pandemics. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The Importance of early adrenaline intervention in anaphylaxis13:59: What adrenaline does is it stops that histamine process. So the earlier you get a shot of adrenaline, the better your survival rates, which a lot of people don't know. It takes only 30 minutes for somebody to go from perfectly fine to dead on arrival at the hospital if you don't intervene in some way. And they have a serious anaphylactic response. So time is of the essence, and doing everything you possibly can, which is something I've been talking a lot about when I'm talking about the book because that's something that's easy for people to know and can make a big difference just in the interim while we're trying to figure out the larger problem of can we help our immune systems adjust to this modern world that we're living in, that clearly our immune systems are not thrilled about.Debunking the germ theory47:20: We take it for granted that everything's bad—bacteria and viruses are bad. And it turns out that not really; some of those bacteria and some of those viruses are actually helpful, and we need them to function appropriately.On training our immune system28:38: Our immune systems need this training by age three. So, before around age three, our immune systems get set in their ways. And before that, they're pretty malleable, so they can be exposed to tiny amounts of things and learn to cope with it fairly well. But then, if you get massive changes after that, which is why you move from one coast to the other, through your immune system, because it was trained on the stuff that was around you when you were growing up. And then, if you transport yourself to a new area thousands of miles away, your body has to, in essence, decide about new things with a mature immune system that isn't as flexible.Can we develop an allergy later in life?30:347: The orthodoxy of immunology was that you couldn't develop an allergy later in life. And that has been turned on its head. So if you look at most of the modern research, there is an adult-onset food allergy. There just is. There are adult-onset, other types, and forms of allergy. And what you always had genetically was the predisposition.Show Links:Recommended Resources:AnaphylaxisHistamineFertile Crescent RegionVenomous AnimalsAlpha-gal AllergyAtopyAdult Onset AllergiesIGE AntibodyGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stevens Institute of TechnologySpeaker’s Profile on Penguin Random House Speakers BureauTheresa MacPhail's WebsiteTheresa MacPhail on LinkedInTheresa MacPhail  on TwitterHer Work:Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing WorldThe Viral Network: A Pathography of the H1N1 Influenza PandemicThe Eye of the VirusGoogle Scholar PageArticles on NoemaArticles on The Guardian

How do you measure the true productivity of a country’s economy? What gets missed if the only metric being examined is the GDP? Robert J. Gordon is a professor of social sciences and economics at Northwestern University. His work focuses on the history of labor and capital productivity and has written numerous books, including, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War. Robert and Greg discuss why the GDP doesn’t give a full picture of a country’s economic growth and productivity, why the years between 1929 and 1950 saw the most rapid growth, and whether or not we’ll see another growth spurt in the age of AI. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is our productivity running low?37:46:  If we compare the forecasts of productivity growth that are baked into the government's budget forecasts and economic forecasts, our productivity over the last nearly 20 years has been running somewhat slower than they're assuming for the future. So, there's room for productivity growth to improve by a substantial amount without really changing the overall outlook for this enormous increase in public debt. That is going to go together with higher interest rates and severely impede the ability of future governments to finance Medicare, Social Security, and the general operations of government.Understanding the US productivity growth09:39: The fact is that the economy was producing well under its capacity in the 1930s, and it's a black box to figure out how much the economy was capable of. But we were producing at full capacity in 1929, and we certainly were in 1948, and so the growth rate between those two years was by far the most rapid that we have had.On measuring total factor productivity09:19: One of the fuzzy dividing lines in measuring total factor productivity is how much of the innovation is attributed to the capital and treated as an increase in the quantity of the capital, thus diminishing that ratio I just expressed. And how much of it comes out as the difference between output and input growth, and that dividing line is somewhat the quality of capital.ChatGPT and the potential job losses for future productivity gains32:34: To interpret ChatGPT and the potential for job losses for future productivity gains, it helps to break down the economy into three groups of workers. One group produces goods in mines, in farms, in factories, and they're producing objects with other objects. They're not involved in creating textual or visual material. So, the impact in the goods sector is going to be fairly minor, certainly compared to the development of automation. Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible! by Otto BettmannAlexander J. Field’s workOpportunity Insights group at HarvardGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Northwestern UniversityProfessional Profile on National Bureau of Economic ResearchSpeaker’s Profile on TEDTalkRobert J. Gordon's WebsiteRobert J. Gordon on LinkedInHis Work:The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

In ancient times, debtors were treated with severe punishment, even sometimes being dismembered. So when did things start to shift towards debt forgiveness leading up to the modern-day concept of filing for bankruptcy?David Skeel is the S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He’s the author of several books that look at the history of corporate law, debt, and bankruptcy, including Icarus in the Boardroom: The Fundamental Flaws in Corporate America and Where They Came From and Debt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America. He and Greg discuss the origins of debt forgiveness in the world, how Christianity and the Bible played a role in that shift, and the proper amount of risk corporate leaders should take. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:A biblical perspective on debt and bankruptcy17:40:  There's a verse in the Old Testament that says you cannot take as collateral a debtor's millstone. And the idea there is that is the tool of the trade. There's another verse that says if you take the debtor's cloak as collateral, you've got to give it back at the end of the day. The idea being that the debtor's going to need that to keep warm. Even going back thousands of years, a sense that there needs to be a balancing. You need to make it possible for creditors to get repaid, but you also need to be aware of the humanity of the debtor and the needs of the debtor.Debt is like sex and fire09:28: Debt is like sex and fire; both of them were important in the ancient world and are important now, but they also have some dangerous downsides if they're misused. And that's the picture you get of debt: that people need debt is inevitable, but it's easy for people to get in over their heads, and there needs to be a way to deal with that possibility.How do you respond to risk-taking?29:43: One simple response to the risk-taking concern is to be mindful of regulations that create bad incentives in that respect, such as tax rules. And also, things like disclosure can make a difference.Sometimes lots of failures is an indication of a good economy or a good system, not a bad one23:32: There is empirical evidence that shows that in countries where you have a more generous bankruptcy system and more generous availability of a fresh start, you do get more entrepreneurship. There is a direct relationship between the two, but risk-taking can sometimes be problematic.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence by Bruce MannThomas H. JacksonBankruptcy Reform Act of 1978Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of PennsylvaniaDavid Skeel on XHis Work:Icarus in the Boardroom: The Fundamental Flaws in Corporate America and Where They Came From (Law and Current Events Masters)The New Financial DealDebt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in AmericaTrue Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World 

How much does venture capital actually have to do with finance? It turns out, not that much. Rather, venture capital has more to do with psychology, network theory, and organizational dynamics. Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He’s written numerous books, including The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future and More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite. He and Greg discuss how venture capital can be a form of finance without much finance, why governance plays such an important role in successful venture capital, and why other places have found it difficult to replicate the Silicon Valley model. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Embeddedness is essential for startup success 45:09: Most of the good GPs I wrote about in my book either had an engineering degree or some other skill which would add value to the portfolio company, maybe be an expert in go-to-market strategies. Secondly, they know something about business and finance; perhaps they have a business degree. Thirdly, they may have started a startup or been an early employee in a startup. So that experience from the inside of being an entrepreneur, and you don't need maybe all three of those things, but you probably might need two. That's the obvious thing. The less obvious thing is that You need to be what I call embedded. You need to be in a network which is going to be generating startup founders, and you need to have standing in that network. You need to have thought leadership such that the founders that emerge from this network are going to want to come to you for money because they're also going to want you as their advisor, and that embeddedness is super important.What VCs are looking for04:00: Credibility, storytelling, embeddedness in the network, a sense of vision, a sense of passion, and commitment from the founding team. These are what the Venture Capitalists are looking for.Is there any chance we could create a more factory-like system for identifying good investments and good founders and investing in them?41:42: I think fundamentally the things that AI will not cannibalize are things where human-to-human contact is super important, and that is true of venture investing because it is about a venture capitalist, a human being, meeting a startup entrepreneur. They have to agree that they're going to be partners together and that this is going to be something you can't exit very easily, and you're probably going to be meshed together if it goes well.Behavioral dynamics23:28: Behavioral dynamics are super interesting when you think about the question of whether solo venture capitalists—whether that's a good model—became fashionable in the last three, four, or five years. I think partly a function of the bull market leading up to 2021 because it was relatively easy to raise capital. If you had some decent claim to be embedded in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, you could go out as an individual and raise some money, and why not do it by yourself? But I think that when you're trying to make slippery judgments on early-stage ventures, which have no quantitative guidelines, as I began by saying, all you have is the ability to test your human judgment on a smart partner who will push back against you and say if they disagree. So I think the dynamics within venture companies like that Monday morning meeting when you decide what to invest in, you've got six or seven partners around the table. That's super important.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Ronald CoaseRegional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnaLee SaxenianSequoia CapitalKleiner PerkinsGuest Profile:Professional Profile for Council on Foreign Relations His Work:The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New FutureMore Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations

Why are only 8.5% of large projects completed on time and within budget? No matter what type of project you're involved in, whether it's home renovations or space exploration, this conversation promises a wealth of knowledge and insights.Bent Flyvbjerg is a professor at both Oxford University and the IT University of Copenhagen. He is also the author of several works, and his latest book is How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between.Bent and Greg delve into the influence of strategic misrepresentation on project outcomes and the often-overlooked power dynamics within organizations that wield considerable influence over a project's fate. They discuss fascinating case studies from the Sydney Opera House, Pixar's blockbusters, and Amazon's product development approach.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The more you allow your brain to work, the more biases you're going to have10:49: The more you allow your brain to work, the more biases you're going to have. If you're allowing your brain to work in this manner where it's trying to figure out things for this specific project, if you allow your brain to work in collecting data on similar projects, where it's an empirical fact that these data had the performance that they did and now you use this empirical fact as your base rates for what you're doing, then you're doing the right thing. Then you're thinking the right way. But if you're thinking the conventional way, where you're trying to understand things inside out, you understand your product from the inside without taking other projects into account that's when you open the doors for all these cognitive biases that we have—because you have to make everything up.11:31: The mind is very good at making things up, and that's what you have to be careful about when you are working on big investment decisions.The need for courses in power and politics 56:59: If you're working on anything big, you are going to be in an organization, even a small organization. There's power. Wherever people are gathering, there will be power issues. And if you haven't been trained in how to deal with them, I don't know how you can be effective in a power environment.Why is uniqueness bias dangerous? 09:40: Uniqueness bias is a pretty mean bias in the sense that it makes us ignore reality. If you think my project is unique, you have no reason to look at other projects and go out and search for knowledge about what happened in other projects because it's irrelevant per definition, as you think your project is unique, right? And that's really dangerous.On rationality and power54:25: I think that it's less legitimate to talk about power than it is to talk about rationality. So it's much easier. And, by the way, on a lot of the project types that we are talking about, including IT projects, there's a large dose of engineers, and of course, engineers are trained in rationality, talking about rationality, and making their projects rational. But on the big projects, engineers are actually working in political organizations. And again, whether they are private businesses or public government, there's politics in both kinds of organizations. And that means that there's pressure to do things in certain ways.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Cass SunsteinPlanning fallacyOptimism biasFalse-uniqueness effectFat-tailed distributionSkewnessKurtosisNassim Nicholas TalebDaniel KahnemanMandelbrot setSydney Opera HouseGuggenheim Museum BilbaoFrank GehryPixarSarbanes–Oxley ActAlbert O. HirschmanJørn UtzonAndrew WolstenholmeGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at OxfordBent Flyvbjerg on XBent Flyvbjerg on LinkedInHis Work:How Big Things Get DoneRationality and PowerThe Oxford Handbook of Megaproject ManagementMegaproject Planning and ManagementReal Social Science: Applied PhronesisPublic Sociology: Proceedings of the Anniversary ConferenceDecision-Making On Mega-Projects: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Planning and InnovationMegaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of AmbitionMaking Social Science MatterGoogle Scholar PageMedium Articles

In this episode, we unravel the misunderstood philosophy of Epicureanism. Don't be fooled by common misconceptions - Epicureanism isn't just about hedonism. It's about a balanced pursuit of tranquility, ataraxia, and the good life.Emily Austin is a Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and the author of Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life. Emily and Greg compare and contrast Stoicism and Epicureanism, two philosophies with differing views on virtue and happiness. Discover why modern Stoicism has drifted from its ancient foundations and how the life of Seneca may have twisted his philosophy. Emily and Greg also break down the significance of shared meals in Epicurean tradition, discussing the peculiar competition around extravagance and the possible elitism attached to it. They also discuss Epicurus' methods to mitigate the fear of death and the complexities of living unnoticed in our modern, hyper-connected world.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Allegiances are central to friendship32:37: As an adult, it's fascinating, right? When somebody starts to have some success, people basically almost pretend they don't know you. Will be like, “Hey, let's go out for a drink,” right? But given the finite amount of time and energy we have, you go out for a drink with that person, and you're neglecting a friend who's been trustworthy. And so you can start seeing some of this sort of shifting allegiances, even in adulthood. It's fascinating. So, those are the things that I think for Epicurus are central to friendship. But then once you have those things, you enjoy all these extravagances together, and those friends are there for you during times of need, and you have all these wonderful memories with them. Even when you find yourself dying, you don't feel like you're going to be abandoned.What sets Stoics and Epicureans apart?18:10: One of the big differences between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that the Epicureans avoid politics. And the Stoics think it's a demonstration of your masculinity, and your excellence to participate in politics.Friends don’t make friends anxious30:16: There is this kind of view about extravagances, and this way that we internalize kinds of status pulls us away from having meaningful relationships. It produces anxiety to see your friends, right? And then, I think that it is true for Epicurus too, like just in the general sense that friends don't make friends anxious. As I have it in the book, the two most important things for having a good friend are trust and a shared sense of fundamental values.Epicurus thoughts on desire24:13: One feature of a desire like that is that it's never satisfied because there's always more. And Epicurus thinks tranquility is a kind of satisfaction. It's being satisfied with having what you need. So if you have these desires, he thinks you're always going to be dissatisfied. Then they're competitive, so you're going to alienate people, and if you care a lot about them, then you're going to commit injustice, and that's going to cause anxiety. Or you'll become like a lackey or a bully to get them more, and that will again cause anxiety and alienate you. And so he thinks you should cut those out entirely. So necessary ones, get them, focus on them, their priorities, and then pursue the extravagances as they come along, and often those will be the most memorable experiences of your life. So, for various reasons, including the role of memory and his coping with misfortune, he wants you to pursue them the right way.Show Links:Recommended Resources:EpicureanismLucretiusHedonismAtaraxiaHedonic treadmillHyperbolic discountingStoicismSeneca the YoungerNeroLonesome DoveWakeAthenaeusGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Wake ForestProfessional Portrait by Wake ForestHer Work:Amazon Author PageLiving for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

Strategic Insights are everywhere, but they often go unnoticed by leaders. How can leaders of organizations harness the ideas around them by opening up their strategic planning process?Christian Stadler is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Warwick Business School and the author of the books Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-Suite (Management on the Cutting Edge), Enduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding Corporations, and the German book Krieg. Christian and Greg discuss the challenges of idea generation in established companies and champion mid-sized businesses for their ability to introduce fresh perspectives. Christian explains Open Strategy: promoting a culture of openness, reshuffling within an organization, and creating unexpected connections, all geared towards fostering an environment that thrives on change. They also take a look at how academia and organizations can build open environments that encourage lifelong learning and innovation.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How much of our business idea should we share with other people?30:38: You can control what you share and what you do not share when you open up, and try to get input from people. If it comes to that lot of details of formulating a strategy, then you probably have to reveal more. But for this, you can have a much more controlled setting where you bring people in who sign non-disclosure agreements, and then it's much more similar to what the consultant typically would do in this space. So here, you can contain that. If you talk about idea generation, you don't need to tell people much in order to get their ideas, and you don't need to share that much afterwards what you do with that information either.New ideas thrive even in stable environments47:25: Even if you have a stable environment, it doesn't prevent you from bringing in ideas on some dimensions, be it new product ideas, new markets, or opportunities where you can still engage larger groups of people in this. There are more opportunities when there's more radical change on the horizon.Who do you communicate ideas and problems in companies?23:33: Some companies develop this online culture where people constantly comment on things. To keep it alive, the top leadership needs to be visible in this space as well. And you need to have strong moderation. So, the illusion that this is somehow making less work and you can almost outsource this to somebody else is an illusion. You need somebody who sits on top of this, who moderates, who filters out things. There's crowdsourcing tools as well that can help you with this.Is it harder to generate new ideas in large companies?16:32: The other big problem you have in large companies, in particular, is silo thinking, where you have departments duplicating work and not talking to each other, where just being able to connect different departments sometimes would lead to this recombination of knowledge, which is a main kind of mechanism to create new ideas. But it's hard to do in large organizations.Show Links:Recommended Resources:VUCAMichael PorterHow CEOs Manage TimeInnovative Medical Products, Inc.Centre for European ReformInside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill GatesAdam M. Kleinbaum ArticlesThe Rise of AI-Powered CompaniesGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Warwick Business SchoolProfessional Profile on Winthrop GroupChristian Stadler's WebsiteChristian Stadler on LinkedInChristian Stadler on XChristian Stadler on YoutubeHis Work:Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-SuiteEnduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding CorporationsGoogle Scholar ArticlesForbes Articles

Is History driven by heroic individuals or by variation and selection? What determines the speed of innovation? Matt Ridley is a science writer, journalist, and businessman. His books include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and How Innovation Works.Matt and Greg discuss the integral role freedom, idea exchange, and trade play in driving innovation. They delve deep into the concept of creative destruction and how it's essential for large corporations to reinvent themselves to stay competitive or be allowed to cease to exist suddenly. Matt talks about the debate surrounding the origin of COVID-19, its implications for virology, and the spread of false information in our interconnected world. The discussion examines the controversial lab leak hypothesis and the impact of China's rise on global innovation.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why is it that evolutionary thinking is like the gift that keeps on giving?02:25: The message of my book, "The Evolution of Everything," is that we don't want to let this insight remain confined to biology. It's just as useful as a way of understanding human society in lots of different aspects. Not just economics, but social change as well. Because really, the simple idea that if there's variation, if there's trial and error, if there's experimentation going on, then some ideas are going to survive at the expense of others. And that's going to lead to progressive adaptation. That's going to lead to progressive improvement in some technology, in some social habits, whatever it might be.Innovation is more about rearranging the world14:20: Recombination of existing genes is the main way that innovation happens in evolutionary biology, much more common than de novo mutation, and that's true of us too. Most of the new products we produce in the world by innovation are actually just the same old materials combined in new and interesting ways. Innovation is more about rearranging the world than it is about coming up with completely new things.Crony capitalism extends corporate lifespans, stifling innovation27:41: Crony capitalism, corporate favoritism, is a tried-and-true and tested way to stay in the game. But it tends to come at the expense of innovation, and it tends to leave you more and more vulnerable to collapse when you do. Get to face real competition. It tends to leave the company vulnerable to disappearing. Everybody thinks they know innovation, but only few people can pin it down30:46: The main reason we're living lives of far greater comfort than we did 500 years ago is still somewhat mysterious. We can tell you things like it needs freedom, it needs trial and error, and things like that, but we can't switch it on and off, let alone tell you when and where it's going to happen. In that sense, it's a surprisingly slippery thing, innovation. Everybody talks about it. Everybody thinks they know about it, but surprisingly, few people can really pin it down. And as I say, you can't put it in a mathematical model, at least not in a very convincing way.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Intentional stanceGreat man theoryFrancis CrickInfinite Improbability DriveMemeGeoffrey WestLinear modelFrancisco MojicaCOVID-19 lab leak theoryZoonosisMichael ShellenbergerGuest Profile:Speaker’s Profile on Chartwell SpeakersMatt Ridley's WebsiteMatt Ridley on LinedInMatt Ridley on XMatt Ridley on YouTubeMatt Ridley on TEDTalk Matt Ridley on Talks at GoogleHis Work:Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity EvolvesHow Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in FreedomThe Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas EmergeThe Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human NatureGenome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 ChaptersThe Origins of VirtueNature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us HumanFrancis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic CodeClimate Change: The Facts 2017

How does one tell the story of knowledge through the centuries? And what kind of knowledge is being discussed when looking at its history? Peter Burke, a professor of history at Cambridge University, has written more than 30 books over the course of his lifetime and has taken a special interest in studying the history of knowledge and polymaths. He and Greg discuss a couple of his major works like The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag and What is the History of Knowledge? (What is History?). They also discuss how the history of knowledge can not come without a history of ignorance, whether or not polymaths are a thing of the past, and if the aggregate amount of knowledge is increasing today.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Decision-Making, where history of knowledge meets general history39:59: I got into decision-making, and the nice thing about it is it connects history of knowledge with general history more clearly than other studies in the history of knowledge. So it breaks down one more barrier because one great thing about history in the last couple of generations is the interest of different historians in different other disciplines: economic historians studying economics, social historians studying sociology. The great price has been that in having a fruitful dialogue with their colleagues in the neighboring discipline, they no longer speak to other historical colleagues, but this history of knowledge and ignorance has the potential for connecting things. All these different practical areas where decisions are taken that is influencing the history of the world, and knowledge is playing this crucial part, or the absence of knowledge is playing this crucial part.What unique insights do historians offer to understand knowledge creation and innovation?48:30: Historians are people who specialize in telling you that the problem that you think is unique is one that has occurred a number of times in the past. And that's the most specifically historical. Otherwise, I think historians are like sociologists and even more like anthropologists because they try to understand the mindset of people in other cultures, and this is an absolutely indispensable kind of knowledge, which we need more and more in a globalizing world where we're constantly living. Meeting people from other cultures, constantly misunderstanding them, and constantly being misunderstood by them.How does the brain of polymaths work?21:17: Polymaths need a great power of concentration. So, they're described by their families and friends as they pick up a book, and they somehow sort of suck the contents out in half an hour, but they do this because they've got this incredible concentration. But because they're concentrating on the problem, and they're living in the everyday world, what other people notice is their failure: The failure of the polymaths to notice what's happening around them, absent-mindedness. But their mind, if it's absent from ordinary everyday life, is extremely present next to the problem they're trying to solve.New knowledge is always associated with new ignorance42:33: New knowledge is always associated with new ignorance, and this is inevitable given that human beings still sleep for eight hours a night except for a few polymaths. And they don't spend all their time acquiring knowledge. So if they acquire some of the new knowledge, for example, about IT, and then they've got less time to acquire some of the old knowledge.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Karl MannheimEdward ShilsGottfried Wilhelm LeibnizPierre BourdieuThomas AquinasLewis MumfordCs lewis discarded image Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Cambridge UniversityHis Work:Ignorance: A Global HistoryThe Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan SontagThe Art of ConversationWhat is the History of Knowledge? (What is History?)French Historical RevolutionThe Italinan REnaissanceWhat is Cultural History?Social History of KnowledgeFortunes of the CourtierEyewitnessingCultural Hybridity

Nowadays, if someone wants to make a lot of money in finance, they don’t go and work for investment banks. The real money to be made is at private equity firms. With most of these firms controlling a huge percentage of the country’s overall GDP and doing so largely unchecked, is it time to take a hard look at the systems that protect and allow these actors to flourish?? Brendan Ballou is special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. His book, Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America, takes a hard look at the way private equity firms operate and the laws they exploit.  He and Greg discuss what sets private equity firms apart from other financial institutions in America, the ways private equity firms avoid liability when things go wrong, and what reforms are needed to the systems that essentially allowed private equity to become the beast that it is today. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Private equity as an institution is unique05:31: Private equity as an institution is unique for three reasons. One is that private equity owners tend to invest for just a few years, so you're talking about a three, five, or seven-year time horizon. Two is that private equity firms tend to load up the companies they buy with a lot of debt and extract a lot of fees. And the magic trick, as you probably know, a lot of these private equity deals is when they load these companies up with debt; for the acquisition, it's the company that holds the debt, not the private equity firm. So if things go badly, it's the company that's on the hook. It's not the private equity owners and investors. And then the third thing, and this is what really interests me as a lawyer, is private equity firms are enormously successful at insulating themselves legally from the consequences of their portfolio company's actions. So, if something goes wrong at a portfolio company, someone is hurt, or an employee is taken advantage of, whatever it happens to be, it's very hard to hold a private equity firm responsible.Is private equity an extreme version of capitalism?03:44:  Private equity is an extreme version of capitalism, for better or for worse...It's not an extreme form of capitalism. It's a deviation or a perversion of capitalism by the specific laws and regulations that we have that incentivize short-term term investing, reliance on debt, and insolation from liability. We've created these legal structures that allow certain people to capture all the upside of our economy if things go well, but walk away if they don't.Short-term gain versus long-term success12:17: The time frame that you've got for an investment changes your perspective on what you're going to do with it, whether you're going to jack up prices for the short term, even if it means that you're going to lose customers for the long term, underinvest in your employees and your innovation, even if it means that you might be scooped by the competition in a few years, and so forth.How are private equity firms compensated?31:00: Private equity firms are compensated on a 2-in-20 model: 2% of the profits above a certain threshold, 20% of the profits above a certain threshold, and 2% of the assets under management every year. The carried interest loophole says that both of those should be treated as capital gains rather than ordinary income, and capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. That's pretty much all the money that a private equity executive typically makes. So, leaders of private equity firms have historically paid a lower tax rate than the firefighters and teachers that they nominally serve.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Other People's Money And How The Bankers Use It by Louis BrandeisThe Modern Corporation and Private PropertyPeter Whoriskey’s story on the Carlyle Group for The Washington PostWorth RisesSIFIsGuest Profile:Brendan Ballou on LinkedInBrendan Ballou on X His Work:Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America

Ever wondered why some people seem to have an aversion to gesturing while speaking? Or did you know that even in the absence of sight, human beings instinctively use gestures to communicate?Susan Goldin-Meadow is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago and also the author of the books Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts, The Resilience of Language, and Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think.Susan and Greg take a deep dive into the integral role of gestures in language acquisition, especially during early childhood. They also discuss the striking similarity of key gestures across various cultures, indicating a shared linguistic heritage, the fascinating evolution of various sign languages, and the unique ways they convey information distinctly from spoken language. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On integrating gesture with speech34:21: What gesture is really good at is integrating with speech. It needs to be integrated with speech. It's one of the reasons co-speech gesture is useless for deaf kids because they can't hear the speech, and then they see all of these things that we do, and they think, and so what they come up with is quite different from co-speech gestures. So, co-speech gesture is co-speech gesture and needs to be thought about along with speech. So, taking away speech isn't going to do it. If in fact, you tell people, "Okay, shut up, don't say a word," but gesture to describe this, your gesture will look different from the way it looks when it accompanies speech.Gestures are not as sophisticated as sign language26:18:  You can do whatever you want in sign language, and it works. It's a language. Gestures are not as sophisticated as sign language or spoken language.Transmission is important for language to take-off12:40: Deaf individuals used to be pretty isolated in hearing homes. But at one point, they created a Deaf education system, and they brought a bunch of homesigners, essentially, together, and they interacted with one another. So, at that point, they started to develop lexical items that they shared, things like that. But the language took off when new little deaf kids came into the community and learned the system from these older ones. So, there's some evidence that real transmission helps the language grow. You may need to share it and communicate. But transmission is essential in order for the language to take off.Sign language is more than just Hand-in-Mouth31:00: Signers gesture, but their sign language is categorical, just like spoken language, and their gesture is more imagistic. So, sign language sign-gesture mismatches work in the same way that speech-gesture mismatches work: to predict. Learning it can't be about two modalities because the signers are using one modality, just hands, to represent this stuff—and that turns out to be true. So it feels like it's not just hand-in-mouth. Hand-in-mouth may help. It may do some work for us, but there's something more. It really is the way gesture represents information and language represents information co-occurring together.Show Links:Recommended Resources:List of GesturesFrench Sign LanguageFrench Sign Language FamilyPaul EkmanDance NotationLabanotationGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of ChicagoThe Goldin-Meadow LaboratoryNational Academy of Sciences ProfileSusan Goldin-Meadow on LinkedInSusan Goldin-Meadow on TEDxUChicagoHer Work:Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our ThoughtsThe Resilience of LanguageHearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us ThinkGoogle Scholar PageResearchGate Publications

Is democracy and the idea of citizenship deteriorating because of the state of our country’s education system? Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He’s written more than 25 books in the realm of classics, military history, and the American political system. His latest book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, explores what it means to be an American. Victor and Greg discuss the modern threats to citizenship, the disappearing middle class, and how America’s education system may be exacerbating the problem.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is the decline of classics and the decline of liberal arts education the same things?32:16: Classics is an intensification of a history or a literature major, but it's the foundation of it. It had a much greater burden because it required or centered on two difficult languages, which you can become an English major or a history major without that as an undergraduate. But they're the same thing. They were the idea that you had a reverence for the past. You didn't go back and try to use the standards of the present to judge people in the past necessarily. You made moral judgments, but that wasn't the intent of history per se. In addition, through the use of literature and historical examples and writing, discussing, and debating, you develop oral fluency. You learn how to write grammatically correct English and stylistically engaging English. You thought. You were inductive. You didn't go into a class where the professor said if you say this particular gender is evil, the subtext is, and then you deduce examples that prove that.On globalism51:21: Globalism is a synonym for American popular culture in many ways. We have the most dynamic culture that has very few prerequisites to participate in, as Europe does. But the more sinister thing is: it's an elite-driven phenomenon.The power of citizenship02:33: Citizenship is very rare in history. It's usually either the person ruled or is either a member of a tribal organization, a mere resident, a subject, a serf, or a slave. But the idea that a citizen is empowered to self-govern and to create the conditions under which government exists by the consent of the governed doesn't exist anywhere outside the Mediterranean or before the 7th century.The shifting dynamics of race, class, and gender17:33: We used to talk about race, class, gender, race, class, gender, but class has disappeared. When you hear that mantra, it's usually race and gender. And this was very brilliant on the part of the left because class is a mobile, fluid concept, and a very successful capitalist society. One generation does not guarantee, necessarily, that they're all going to be in the class of their parents. I can tell you from my own family that's true, both positively and negatively. Races, if you fixate on it, so if you say race is the entire definition of deprivation, bias, racism, and not class, then it's immutable; it's forever.Show Links:Recommended Resources:ThucydidesTacitusDemocracy in America by Alexis de TocquevilleHerodotusBattles of Lexington and ConcordMichel FoucaultWar! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots by Ian Morris High Noon (1952)The Searchers (1956)Guest Profile:Profile for Hoover Institution at Stanford UniversityProfessional WebsiteVictor Davis Hanson on XHis Work:The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of AmericaThe Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical GreeceWho Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek WisdomThe Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny Carnage and Culture Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power 

Ever wondered about the growing presence of asset managers in all aspects of our lives?Brett Christophers is a Professor in the Department of Human Geography at Uppsala University in Sweden and the author of several books. His latest work is titled Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, and next year, he has a new book coming out called The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet. Brett and Greg discuss the migration from public equity to private, the rise of large landlords and infrastructure providers, and the outsourcing of public services to the private sector. The conversation takes a deep dive into the realm of asset management in the housing sector. Brett offers an enlightening perspective on what it means for tenants when asset managers are landlords. They unpack the mixed bag of potential benefits and disadvantages that could arise in this scenario. Brett and Greg also discuss the rising trend of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing, and how asset managers are leveraging this wave.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are asset managers public service or a powerful rhetoric?40:43: One of the main lines of defense that these investment managers, asset managers, rely upon when they come under attack from the likes of me, but not only the likes of me, politicians from the likes of Elizabeth Warren and so on in the U.S., is they'll say, "Look, you don't want to be attacking us because we're providing a public service in the way you just outlined. If our funds perform well, then that's all to the well and good because the money we're investing through those funds is the money of the firefighters, the teachers, and the nurses." And that's a very powerful piece of rhetoric. It's that rhetoric which sustains the business model in large part because people buy that rhetoric, and therefore, the business continues on its merry way.The power of asset managers in infrastructure investments33:50: If governments have increasingly persuaded themselves that the private sector is the answer in terms of infrastructure investment, then almost by definition they've persuaded themselves that asset managers are the answer. Because asset managers have the command of the greatest surplus capital today, if you're looking into the private sector to invest, then, essentially, you're looking to asset managers because they're the ones that have all the dry powder.Are asset management companies publicly traded but still opaque?23:40: Public ownership entails a certain degree of scrutiny that is still lacking in the cases of these asset management companies, even if those asset management firms are themselves publicly traded. Many of them now are the likes of Blackstone, which would be a good example of that. So yes, the firms themselves are publicly traded, but much of what occurs through the funds that they established is obviously still very, very opaque in a way that is not necessarily true of publicly traded companies.Private equity and real estate investments use the same fee mechanisms and fund structures03:41: Whether you're talking about private equity or real estate investment, what you find is that they're often using exactly the same kind of fee mechanisms, fund structures, and so on. So that's why I use that terminology, because I think that the most important thing to really draw attention to is this fact that, at the end of the day, most of the money that they're investing is not their own. And that's a key feature of this. But even though, of course, they're using different investment strategies, different fund structures, and so on.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Pension fundKKR & Co. Inc.Blackstone Inc.The Carlyle GroupPensions in CanadaOMERSBrookfield CorporationMacquarie GroupSovereign wealth fundGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Uppsala UniversityHis Work:The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the PlanetOur Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the WorldRentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal BritainThe Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of LawBanking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in CapitalismEnvisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of TelevisionDavid Harvey: A Critical Introduction to His ThoughtEconomic Geography: A Critical Introduction (Critical Introductions to Geography)Google Scholar PageAcademia.edu ArticlesThe Guardian ArticlesTime Articles

Is it possible to simplify life without losing the comfort and complexity that enriches it? John Maeda, vice president of artificial intelligence and design at Microsoft, has been writing about the intersection of design, technology, business, and life for years. His book, The Laws of Simplicity, explores the question of needing less while still getting something more. He and Greg discuss some of the pivotal moments in John’s career, how his view of design changed over the course of writing The Laws of Simplicity, and the aspects of business education that could use some tweaking. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Traditional design is not the same as customer-centricity26:42: Business is about design thinking. It's different. It's customer-centricity. It's all the C words, whatever. But the way design is taught, like your microphone, is so beautiful. It's super cool-looking, right? That was created not just to be easy to use. It was also created to be "beautiful, stand out, et cetera," whatever—all these other factors that are not user-centered. They're ego-centered, which you could argue is like user-centered design, but it's different…[27:32] Traditional design is good at messing with your mind, your ego, and your wallet or purse. And it's fascinating. But it's not the same as customer-centricity. And that's what's so interesting about it and useful about it at certain times in a product's evolution.Understanding powerful concepts of computer science23:27:  There are certain concepts in computer science that are hard to understand because they're so powerful. So, I focus on what's powerful. And what's powerful is that it never gets tired. That's weird. It can loot forever. It is able to encompass large data sets at any scale and at any level of precision. So, it can handle infinitely large issues with infinitesimal accuracy. That is strange. And so, going through these properties helped me understand how weird it is. Two kinds of supply chain risks10:32:  There are two kinds of supply chain risk. There's physical supply chain risk and digital supply chain risk. And a physical supply chain – we know what that looks like in our heads, or optimized with Amazon robots, etc. But a digital supply chain is like building on top of Azure, and Azure goes down. Whoa, what do you do? Or you've built your organization's communication system on Slack, and it goes down. Like, what do you do? So that's an invisible supply chain that we're just starting to understand in business, and they're very similar. Unless you're cyber-equipped, it's just that you can't see the kind of analogy you could make between the two worlds.On being equipped to explain computation30:13: I realized how powerful computation is, and I realized that anyone can explain design better than me. What is something that I'm equipped to do? Oh, I can explain computation. So, I wanted to make a way to explain to any business leader what computation is. Because if they don't understand it, they can't digitally transform.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer JohnsonMoore’s LawDonald KnuthTraitorous EightGuest Profile:Automattic Advisory Council Profile at MIT Media LabProfessional WebsiteJohn Maeda on LinkedInJohn Maeda on TwitterJohn Maeda on YouTubeJohn Maeda on TEDTalk John Madea on Talks at GoogleHis Work:The Laws of SimplicityHow to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of UsRedesigning Leadership (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) Creative Code: Aesthetics + Computation

Will the subjects we debate in education still be relevant a century from now? There are enduring controversies and tensions in education that continue even today.Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and also the author of a number of books in the field of Education History. His latest work is Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools, and he is also the author of The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America. Jonathan and Greg discuss the dichotomy between research and teaching in the Higher Education system, unravel the implications of student evaluations, the necessity for peer review of teaching, and how the dynamics of teaching and learning, as relationship-based activities, leave a lasting impact on lives.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What is the most effective way of teaching?20:56: There's been a growing body of research about effective teaching, and there's a pretty strong and robust consensus about what's most effective, and the most effective teaching is the teaching that engages people in their own learning, right? It creates activities that very specifically require the students to ask and answer questions in the way the discipline does. So, the best history course makes people behave like historians, and the best chemistry course makes people behave like chemists. Now, if they've been socialized to sit there and do not a whole lot, they may bridle at that. That's life. Maybe I would, too, if I were them. But look, if our knowledge and professional authority means anything, it means that we know some things they don't, right? And one of the things we know is that they'll learn more if they are engaged in the questions of the discipline. And I think there are many good ways to do that, by the way.Is education always political?02:20: We're always going to have controversies around education because education is where we decide who we are. Education is the realm in which the people of a nation decide what the nation means and where they stand vis-à-vis it. So it's always political, it's always contentious, and we will always argue about it.History as a moral discipline59:09: I think history is a moral discipline. That's what it is: a bunch of stories, but these stories are morality plays in a very real way. And when these institutions we work at started, it was taken for granted that the faculty were in the business of trying to make better people. That was just a prima facie assumption.Why do we have to be in the same room?30:13: Why do we have to be in the same room? And I ask that of my students all the time. And I tell them, if I am just going to talk to you, I think I could just be on a screen. There's got to be something else. There's got to be some exchange. There's got to be some activity. If I'm just going to draw at you, you might as well replace me with a computer, but I think that should be the question that every single faculty member is required to answer. And there are many good answers, but you shouldn't be able to evade the question. Why are we in the same room? That should be the question in the frontal lobes of everybody, because we don't have to be.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Mark HopkinsMadrasaDavid RiesmanClark KerrLawrence SummersLies My Teacher Told MeEric HobsbawmJohn DeweyBruce lenthall - Center for Teaching & LearningGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Penn GSEFaculty Profile at Penn Arts & SciencesHis Work:Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public SchoolsFree Speech: And Why You Should Give a DamnThe Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in AmericaThe Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American SchoolsToo Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex EducationCampus Politics: What Everyone Needs to KnowSmall Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and MemoryInnocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American CenturyDistilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America's Public Schools, 1880-1925

What technological and societal factors led to the rise of the large corporation in 20th-century America?Richard N. Langlois is an economics professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of the book The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. His work examines the economics of organizations, business history, and theories of firm performance and innovation. Richard and Greg discuss the rise and fall of the managerial era in American corporations, common misconceptions about antitrust laws, and companies’ influence on the political system. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why does Schumpeterian innovation work?47:35: In the real world, you have to learn how to produce things. And that knowledge is private information most of the time. And so, you learn how to make a car a certain way… [48:09] So, if you're always spending your time looking for new ideas, you're not going to get good at the things you're doing, or you can focus on the things that you're doing and get good at them, but then you're going to be bad at looking around…But in the end, I think it's the case that if you get really good at one thing, like operating systems or big office computing systems, just the fact of getting good at that, it's going to make it hard for you to be good at other things, especially at other things that are different from what you're doing because there's a lot of barriers there. The threat of antitrust can influence organizational decisions34:57: The threat of antitrust or other public policies can influence organizational division decisions inside a firm, often in ways that are inefficient or that maybe aren't the best way to do things.Do big firms control the government?50:22: Companies are very good at influencing the government when some narrow thing really affects them, like a tariff on something. But influencing the government in some general way—what the results show is that companies don't care. They'll give money to whoever's going to leave them alone.On considering how exogenous factors influence organizations, not just internal factors.05:43: We need to think more about the ways in which these exogenous factors influence internal organizations instead of only thinking about organization from an internal point of view. So, how do we organize? How do we manage? How should we structure it? We also want to think about what the external constraints on organizational forms are. It may lead us to create organizational forms that aren't the kinds that we would have chosen in a perfect world.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Alfred D. Chandler Jr.Joseph SchumpeterRonald CoaseOliver WilliamsonSherman Antitrust ActThe Folklore of Capitalism by Thurman Arnold and Reeve Robert BrennerDesign Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity by Carliss Baldwin and Kim ClarkGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of ConnecticutRichard N. Langlois on LinkedInHis Work:The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy Firms, Markets and Economic Change: A dynamic Theory of Business InstitutionsOther Scholarly Articles

Do you find communication a necessary evil rather than a tool for success? How can you use communication as a fundamental key to success in both your personal and professional lives?Matt Abrahams is a Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, podcaster, and author. His latest book is Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You're Put on the Spot. Matt and Greg dissect the difference between rehearsed and spontaneous communication, demonstrating how mastering both is within reach and discuss the pivotal role of mindset and attitude in the journey to effective communication. Matt gives insight on both providing and receiving feedback, and they explore how communication styles and preferences change between eras and age groups. Matt reveals how stories and structures enhance communication and how anyone can get better at communication with practice.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is there a universally 'correct' way to communicate?16:52: There is no one right way to communicate. There are better ways and worse ways, but no one right way. And when you put pressure on yourself to do it right, however you define that, you actually almost guarantee you will do it more poorly. Why? Your brain is like a computer. It's not a perfect analogy, but for this, it works. You only have so much processing power. You only have so much bandwidth. And if part of your bandwidth is being exercised by evaluating what you're doing, as you're doing it, the entire time you're doing it, you have less bandwidth to focus on what you're saying. So, I'm not saying we don't judge and evaluate our communication—you must. But if we can turn that volume down a little bit and just allow ourselves to do what comes naturally, we will typically do better because we have more bandwidth to focus on what we're doing.A structure is not a script, it’s a roadmap37:11: Structure is not about memorizing and hitting certain points; it's about directionality, and that can be helpful. And I'm not saying every communication needs to be structured in this way. But for people who are nervous and are novice to the particular circumstances they're in, having a structure helps you get through that communication.On setting up an environment where people are comfortable communicatin19:17: I firmly believe that we need to hear from as many people as we can to make good decisions. So it is incumbent on those of us in leadership roles—those of us who are teachers, parents—to set up environments where people feel comfortable. And what that means is to encourage people speaking, to listen when they speak, and to make sure that you prize people exploring ideas so you don't shut them down. You don't make people feel bad when they make mistakes. We have to actually set those environments up, and it is incumbent on all of us in positions of status and power to do that, and you do that partially by saying it but, more importantly, by demonstrating it.What are the three parts of goals?15:163: A goal has three parts: know, feel, do. You should say, "What is it I want people to know? How do I want them to feel? What is it I might want them to do?" As an intention going into a spontaneous speaking situation, but I don't do as politicians and some business leaders are coached to just morph everything to my goal. I think that leads to some of this disingenuous interaction. So I think it is possible to be goal-driven. I think it is possible to be authentic and, at the same time, spontaneous, adjust, and adapt. But that comes with practice and a little bit of letting go of the pressure we put on ourselves to do these things so right. And it's that pressure that can also make it feel artificial and inauthentic.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Think Fast Talk Smart Podcast - Greg Leblanc EpisodeTrevor WallaceAdam TobinJeffery PfefferKim ScottCollins Dobbs - Space, Pace, and GraceDavid EaglesmanSusain CainGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford Graduate School of BusinessMatt Abrahams' WebsiteMatt Abrahams on LinkedInMatt Abrahams on YouTubeMatt Abrahams on TEDxPaloAltoNoFreakingSpeaking.comHis Work:Think Fast Talk Smart PodcastThink Faster Talk Smarter BookSpeaking Up Without Freaking Out

Many scholars and philosophers have taken the stance that empathy hinders the true pursuit of knowledge and justice. But our guest today takes the opposite approach.Heidi L. Maibom is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati and the University of the Basque Country. Her book, The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, argues that not only is empathy indispensable, but it's impossible to acquire knowledge about this world and ourselves without it. She and Greg discuss the place empathy occupies in philosophy, the different types of perspectives that go along with empathizing, and whether or not it's possible to have too much empathy. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Empathy is many things44:18: Empathy is many things, and that's partly why I find it distressing to read so many dismissals of empathy which focus on it as one thing. Either you have to understand the other person entirely—their entire history, their experiences, and so forth and so on. Of course we can't empathize in that way. Or you are empathizing with them as an act of "I know better than you," and so forth. We're empathizing with people for all kinds of reasons. It's important to appreciate that and also to then focus your empathy in the right way, depending on what kind of project you're engaging.Does empathy require identification?21:08: Empathy requires some amount of identification. But the identification is interesting because, in essence, what you're trying to do is map the other person's subjectivity onto your own. That's why you have to find a situation of your own that you have experience with to map that situation on. But at the same time, of course, you have to be aware of the ways in which you differ from the other person.Can you have too much empathy?49:05: People who are empathetic are more vulnerable to exploitation from others, to gaslighting perhaps, right? So, being empathetic comes with dangers and advantages. But I think that if we try to go back to this notion of the shape of subjectivity, being how I experience things as the one who acts and who thinks and so forth, then I think that when you then try to understand yourself, taking the perspective, as it were, from the inside, taking a perspective from the outside, as little engaged with yourself as you can be, as it were, and then if you are in a particular interaction with somebody else, the victim or the perpetrator perspective, in addition.How does philosophy of emotions tie with philosophy of empathy?36:02: There's a tremendous amount of information that we can derive from a successful act of emotionally empathizing with someone. And more information than from simply empathizing with a thought or thinking, okay, here is exactly what they're thinking. I think emotions are richer. It just gives us more information, and there's important aspects to an emotion, namely from the perspective of closeness with another person, from feeling understood, just seeing that another person is emoting. It's incredibly important, but there's also all this information that we shouldn't ignore that is really crucial and very helpful for understanding this. Show Links:Recommended Resources:VoltaireJean-Paul SartreRené DescartesGuest Profile:Heidi L. Maibom's WebsiteHeidi L. Maibom on TwitterHer Work:The Space Between: How Empathy Really WorksEmpathy (New Problems of Philosophy)The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy)

Does the financial world need a shake-up? By venturing into the minds of Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot, two outliers who challenge the status quo of modern portfolio theory and efficient market hypothesis, we can find groundbreaking theories with implications for the financial sphere, especially in the face of unpredictable "Black Swan" events.Scott Patterson is a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and also the author of Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis, Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market, and The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It, all of which factor into this episode.Scott and Greg discuss the financial ups and downs of the stock market and traders who tried to ride the wave or predict when bubbles were going to burst. Scott talks about covering climate change for the Journal and the way it complicates predicting what start-ups will end up on top. Dive into the subtle and sometimes blurry distinctions between investing and gambling and find out what can make a company shut off its computers on this episode of UnSILOed.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is climate change the big dog in the world of crises?42:12: Climate change is what I write about in the journal—that's my beat—so I wanted the book (Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis) to be not just about buying out-of- the-money options to protect your portfolio. I wanted it to be broader in terms of thinking about the risks that we face. And that's in the subtitle of the book, The New Age of Crisis, which I try to make an argument that we're entering a world of crises that are manifesting and overlapping more and magnifying the nature of the crisis. Some people call it the polycrisis, and climate, I think, is the big dog in that crisis world.On the risk of high-speed contagion across markets36:00: The risk of a high-speed contagion across markets is something we should be concerned about...[36:33] With high-speed trading, I was on the front lines there reporting it. It wasn't a well-known phenomenon. And I found it very alarming that the financial markets evolved into this race to trade microseconds faster than the next guy.The inconvenient truth of ignoring fat tails06:55: Nassim [Taleb] one time showed me an email that he'd gotten from a very well-known, respected academic in finance, who conceded to Nassim that, yes, we know that these fat tails exist, but our models don't work if we incorporate them into the models. And that's the problem: if you recognize that there is potential for three, four, five sigma events, then you have to put a fat tail into the model. And that's fine. But as long as the people running trading desks and executives understand that if you have a value-at-risk model, it's not capturing the real risk that you're going to be facing because it carves out 5 percent of the volatility, of the extreme volatility over a year.Is high-speed computer trading a threat to financial markets?38:32: In 2020, there were some extremely insane things going on in the markets, and I think probably negative oil prices and bonds. You couldn't buy a Treasury bond or sell a Treasury bond for a while at one point. Not normal. But I think a lot of that was not just an exogenous event: COVID was causing the global economy to seize up, and that moved into financial markets. Central bankers came in and threw a bunch of money at it, and cleaned out the pipes. But this idea of a high-speed computer-driven contagion is something I've always been concerned about, but I don't think we've seen that yet.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Nassim Nicholas TalebBenoit MandelbrotMark SpitznagelCalPERSUniversaRecency BiasEmpirica CapitalBlack Swan TheoryRobert LittermanFischer BlackGuest Profile:Professional Profile on Wall Street JournalScott Patterson on LinkedInScott Patterson on XHis Work:Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of CrisisDark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock MarketThe Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed ItWall Street Journal ArticlesMuck Rack Articles

As we navigate life's challenges, it's crucial we confront the subjects that often remain unspoken out of fear or misunderstanding. Both modern and ancient philosophers have had the wisdom to lead about the tough topics of suicide and addiction, and the nature of their complexities can be informed by both philosophy and science.Clancy Martin, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri Kansas City and also the author of several books in both the categories of fiction and nonfiction. His latest nonfiction work is titled How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind, and Clancy talks with Greg about this book as well as his previous nonfiction work Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love, and several of his fiction titles.Clancy shares his personal experiences with the complexities of suicidal ideation and its relationship with addiction, illuminating the power of narrative in preventing suicide and fostering understanding. They also dive into the Christian and Buddhist perspectives on suicide and suffering to examine these concepts from the lens of religion, and Clancy shares personal stories of how his work has directly affected the lives of others.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Distraction as a lifesaving tool17:42: When a person is in a moment of real crisis, right on the brink, I think distraction and busyness can be very helpful. The reason I think it can be helpful is that when you're really in that moment of crisis, where you're thinking about taking your own life and maybe about to do it…[18:18]your thinking at that point is not clear at all. So, in advance of that moment, if you know you're predisposed to this, you should have some strategies in place to distract yourself. And distraction at that point, I think, is a fantastic tool. You should get up and take a walk. You should text a friend. You should consider calling a number like 988, a mental health line. You need to recognize and you need to open your blinders a little bit so you can see that there are other options. You need to lessen the pressure a little bit and ease the pain a little bit, because you're not thinking clearly.Do we take our senses for granted until we lose them?20:39: You can't really love other human beings until you start engaging with these meaning-of-life questions, which require tremendous courage and do require you to turn away from constantly distracting yourself.Is addiction a way to escape intimacy and vulnerability?35:17: An addiction is just this way of running away, of escaping from the terrible, scary vulnerability that comes with intimacy, and ultimately, from the fact that your life really does have meaning and is really important. But it's a frightening thought, actually. The more you think about that thought, that your life is really, really important as a function of its interaction with other people's lives, that is scary, and maybe ought to be a little bit scary, but being willing to embrace that scariness.The truth about addiction17:42: The more we think about all of these little addictions we have, the more we might have a tendency to recognize that they are ways of running away from ourselves rather than ways of accepting ourselves. And the person who attempts suicide is just kind of on the extreme end of that scale.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Albert CamusAugustine of HippoFriedrich NietzscheAlcoholics AnonymousEmil CioranFyodor DostoevskyDalitThe Papageno EffectGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UMKCProfessional PhilPeopleClancy Martin on LinkedInHis Work:How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal MindLove and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic LoveHow to Sell: A NovelBad SexIntroducing PhilosophyHonest Work: A Business Ethics ReaderLove in Central AmericaEthics Across the Professions: A Reader for Professional EthicsThe Philosophy of DeceptionMorality and the Good Life: An Introduction to Ethics Through Classical SourcesSince Socrates: A Concise Source Book of Classic ReadingsGoogle Scholar PageThe Great Courses

Humans are creatures of habit. We have habits for talking, eating, walking, sleeping–we don’t question these habits; much of it happens on autopilot. But it’s through art and philosophy that allows us to take a step back from those habits and examine them in a meaningful way.This is the argument that Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, makes in his book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. He’s also written a number of books that tackle philosophical questions surrounding how humans interact with the world, like Action in Perception and Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World. Alva and Greg discuss how art and philosophy help us break free from the habits we’re saddled with, what’s really happening in the brain when we deem something “aesthetic,” and what it means to truly see the world. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Philosophy and life are entangled19:49: I think philosophy happens throughout our lives. It happens not only in the law, it happens in the laboratory, and it probably happens in your discussions with your partner at the dinner table sometimes. Art [and] philosophy is a moment in our thought processes. So, in a way, I want to say that there is all the difference in the world between business as usual and the work of philosophy and art. But outside in the wild of our lives, whether our legal lives, our political lives, our social lives, our family lives, there’s lots of opportunities for art and philosophy.There is no STEM without art and philosophy06:23: Art and philosophy are really important, and they are important in ways that the popular ideas in our civilization at the moment about the preeminence of science, technology, engineering, and math, this kind of STEM worldview really misses the point. There is no STEM without art and philosophy.Language isn't an automatic thing that we do following the rules blindly38:39: To be a language user is to have resources for coping with problems that arise in the course of that activity: misunderstandings, needs for clarifications, demands for repetitions, or justifications. So, to be a speaker is not just to do this kind of automatic thing. It's to be able to reflect on what we're doing. So, the ability to reflect is presupposed at the ground level. See, this is why I want to resist the hierarchy idea because there are two levels. There's the use of language, and there's the reflection about language. But it turns out that the ability to be a user of language presupposes that you're also able to reflect on language.Great philosophers start debates13:36: What makes a philosopher a great philosopher? Not that they landed on the truth, and we all know it, but rather that they started a debate that we're still having. That's what greatness is. So, as a philosopher, I'm very interested in what is the value of these non-utilitarian things that are so important to us. Why are they so important to us? And, that's where I want to say, actually, they are opportunities for us to finally grow and change and not just be trapped by the habits of culture, by the ways of doing things.Show Links:Recommended Resources:James BaldwinSeeing Through Clothes by Anne HollanderJohn RuskinP.F. StrawsonRoy HarrisHubert DreyfusIan HackingGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC Berkeley Alva Noë on WebsiteAlva Noë on LinkedInAlva Noë on TwitterAlva Noë on Talks at GoogleHis Work:The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We AreStrange Tools: Art and Human Nature Action in PerceptionOut of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of ConsciousnessLearning to Look: Dispatches from the Art WorldInfinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark

What if we haven’t unlocked the true potential of our senses because we simply don't pay enough attention to them? Writer and filmmaker Jackie Higgins explores human senses by comparing them to their animal counterparts in her book Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. Spoiler alert: Human senses are far more powerful than we give them credit for, and there’s a lot more than just five. Jackie and Greg discuss how culture impacts the way we perceive the world, examples of animals that have similar senses to ours, and certain case studies that show how humans could refine their senses to be much more powerful than previously thought.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On the two types of touch19:34: I split touch into two types of touch, two big headings of touch. One of them is the discriminative touch. This idea that you take a walnut and roll it around in your hand. And you can feel its roughness, and you can feel the corrugations, and you can feel the size of it, and you can feel the curves. And if you perhaps put it in your pocket, you can feel your fingers being stretched, the skin being stretched by it. Different senses for discriminative touch will be involved in that. But, there is another sense of touch called affective or emotional touch. And I was expecting touch to be quite a pedestrian story. I thought I knew a lot about touch, and I was completely blown away by how little we know about touch.Culture's influence on perception04:02: If your language and culture imbue a certain way to perceive the world, that's as important as the senses in our bodies firing and sending information to our brain.Do we take our senses for granted until we lose them?40:54: Our brain is scooting off in other directions. We're rarely present in the sensory information that the world is giving us at that moment in time...And that was part of the message of the book, which is when you take time, time out. I think if we take time out and focus on these senses, they'll surprise you.The relationship between our brain and smell perception10:21: Neuroscientists looking at smell would say that the brain is the place where we may have far fewer receptors, a little bit like the shrimp tail; it's a kind of echo of that. But studies have been done on how good we are at fine-dividing sense, recognizing sense, and following sense. Some scientists at your university had some students stand on their knees following a string dipped in chocolate to see how good they were at being dogs, so they were remarkably good. And we have fewer senses, but yes, our brain—there are very many areas in our brain that are dedicated to figuring out and creating smell perceptions.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan EklöfSelig HechtHelen KellerEşref ArmağanJoseph KirschvinkWhat Is It Like to Be a BatGuest Profile:Author’s Profile on Pan MacmillianJackie Higgins WebsiteJackie Higgins on XHer Work:Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human SensesArticle on Interalia Magazine

Can you imagine the brain's intricate dance that helps us maintain balance? How does this process connect with vertigo, cognitive decline, and even our emotions and decision-making?Paul Thagard is a professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo and the author of several books. His latest release is titled Balance: How It Works and What It Means, and next year his new book, Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It, will be published.Paul and Greg discuss Paul’s research into the brain and the way it handles certain tasks. Paul sheds light on how balance and nausea are linked and also how misinformation commonly weaves its way into our knowledge base. Learn about the surprising links between vertigo and nausea as he explains how our brains influence our lives in nuanced ways.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Cognition and emotion are constantly integrated19:09: So, the idea that cognition and emotion are separate in the brain is all wrong. They're constantly integrated, and it's a really good thing because it means that the perceptions that we're doing, the predictions that we're making, the explanations we're coming up, are all tied with the explanations of current ways in which our situation is relevant to our goals. So emotion, instead of just being something that somehow gets in the way of cognition or is extraneous to it, is actually tightly integrated with it, and that's one of the great powers of the human brain.Is balance conscious?10:32: Balance is mostly unconscious because almost all the things you do, when you're walking down the street or even just sitting in front of a TV, doesn't involve thinking about it. But when consciousness becomes important, balance breaks.Misinformation is a major issue in everyday life58:19: In decision-making and ethics in general, empathy is really important—that is, you've got to be able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and figure out why they're feeling the way they are. But the solution for this isn't just courses in critical thinking—I never thought of my book on misinformation as being a critical thinking textbook. It's not a textbook at all. But it's a book that I hope will make it clear to people that all these problems of information and misinformation are major issues in everyday life.Is there something wrong with the way that economists talk about goals?48:45: The economist's way of talking about goals is just ridiculous. But they think of values as preferences. Well, where do preferences come from? Preferences come from goals and emotions. And so the fundamental idea here is that goals and emotions and preferences are derivative.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Integrated information theoryBroadcasting TheoriesSemantic pointer competition vs. information integrationHow to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition (Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures) Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of WaterlooPaul Thagard's WebsitePaul Thagard on LinkedInHis Work:Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop ItPaul Thagard Amazon Author PageBalance: How It Works and What It MeansBots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?Mind-Society: From Brains to Social Sciences and ProfessionsNatural Philosophy: From Social Brains to Knowledge, Reality, Morality, and BeautyThe Brain and the Meaning of LifeHot Thought: Mechanisms And Applications of Emotional CognitionGoogle Scholar ArticlesPsychology Today Articles

Where does the concept of rules originate from? And how does that history inform the rules we use to organize society today? Lorraine Daston is the director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and a professor at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Her book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, takes a wide-encompassing view of rules throughout history, going all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman times. Lorraine and Greg discuss thick vs. thin rules, how recipes are some of the oldest forms of rules and the important and complicated role judgment and equity play in the system of rules and laws.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Do people perceive paradigms and rules as inconsistent?30:27: I think paradigms and models suffer from one problem, which is a political problem, which is the suspicion that discretion inevitably means either favoritism or corruption in the political domain. In the domain of knowledge, they suffer from being foggy. Nobody can explain how we think in terms of models and paradigms. We do it all the time. Our life would be impossible if we did not do it. So we know that we can do it, but we can't explain how we do it. And that makes the philosophically minded profoundly uncomfortable. Why are recipes an important genre in the history of knowledge?09:41: Recipes are amongst the oldest and most mobile of knowledge genres that we know. If you want a genre that travels across continents, centuries, and classes and breaks down the barriers between men and women, it's recipes.Thick vs. thin rules19:23: The thick rules are rules that anticipate a high degree of variability and unforeseen circumstances. So they come upholstered even in their articulation with caveats, examples, and exceptions. They warn you that you're going to have to use your judgment in applying these rules…[20:09] The thin rule, on the other hand, is short, usually short, peremptory, and imperative, and it does not anticipate exceptions. This is a rule which is made for a world which is predictable and uniform.Judgment straddles into two categories46:50: The problem is that we divide our world into the objective and the subjective, but judgment straddles those two categories. It's possible to give reasons—good reasons, bad reasons, and arguments—for why one judgment should prevail over another. And if we don't exercise that faculty, like any other faculty, atrophy. And my fear is that because judgment discretion is the faculty that dare not speak its name, we are in danger of becoming judgmentally flabby.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Nicolas Bourbaki Thomas KuhnThe Wealth of Nations by Adam SmithPascal’s Provincial LettersCritique of Judgment by Immanuel KantGuest Profile:Professional Profile at Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceProfessional Profile at University of Chicago’s Committee on Social ThoughtHer Work:Rules: A Short History of What We Live ByAgainst Nature (Untimely Meditations)

Technological progress drives productivity improvements and increases wealth, but the distribution of those gains depends on both technological and political factors. The debates we see now over the impact of AI on social welfare are not new: similar debates surrounded previous waves of innovation. One thing we have learned from those previous waves is that society and politics can dramatically impact the trajectory of technological change. Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. He has also co-authored several books, his latest being Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity with Daron Acemoglu.Simon and Greg discuss how technological advances had disrupted industries in the past, ranging from the industrial revolution in the English midlands to the mass production of Henry Ford in America. They discuss how some innovations can bring about catastrophe, as in the 2008 financial crisis, and the current landscape of disruptive technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in particular. Simon talks about how it may be deployed in business but how, in education, there will be an adjustment period before being incorporated.Listen in for insights on the past, present, and anticipated future of technology and prosperity with Simon Johnson.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:When workers became a cost, not a resource37:55: Managerial thinking, including what was taught at business school, shifted in the 1970s and 1980s, and the concept of shareholder capitalism, which I would contend has been around for a long time. In the 1970s and 1980s, there's a different concept that comes to the fore, and it's one which treats the workers much more as a cost to be minimized rather than a resource to be developed. And I think that wasn't just business schools; business economics played a role in that broader social discussion. That corporate thinking and corporate logic are very powerful, and that is part of what's propelled us in this particular direction that's led to a lot of job market polarization.The future of tech is too important to leave to a few42:07: We should be very careful about placing our technological future in the hands of a few individuals, even if those individuals have previously had great success in something that seems like it might be quite relevant for what comes next.How prepared ideas shapes history55:43: I don't think that books, ideas, or, I'm afraid, podcasts, change history. I think what changes history is events, but when you have an event, when you have a scandal, when you have a big problem, when you have something that is really in people's faces, it matters whether or not you have prepared ideas, whether or not you understand what the problem could be, and whether or not you are ready with solutions, not just solutions as something that I wrote a paper about; you should do what I say, but solutions that have been kicked around, debated, and hammered out.What’s the key point of the industrial revolution?04:23: The key point from the Industrial Revolution is that it did increase productivity. It did increase the surplus. That could be shared in some fashion, but it also increased the power of a certain set of people—the people who owned the mills, the cotton mills in particular, in the north of England, for example. And that change in the balance of power is part of what, of course, encouraged them to invest, as part of what gave them a good return on investment. But it also meant they didn't really care that much about the workers.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jeremy BenthamHenry FordFerdinand de LessepsEdwin ChandwickGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at MIT Sloan Management SchoolFaculty Profile at Peterson Institute for International EconomicsSimon Johnson on LinkedInSimon Johnson on XProfessional Profile at IMFHis Work:Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and ProsperityJump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American DreamWhite House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial MeltdownNBER PapersReuters ArticlesGoogle Scholar Page

The history of money isn’t just an Economics story, but it’s a cultural and philosophical one, too. Felix Martin, a columnist for Reuters, charts this history in his book, Money: The Unauthorized Biography – From Coinage to Cryptocurrencies, and argues that money as a social institution has always been wielded as a political instrument. Felix and Greg discuss the determining factors of money’s value, some of the key moments in the history of currency, and what could be done to improve modern financial banking systems.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Money as a credit relationship21:08: There is this great value in thinking about money as a credit relationship. And the real value is to think about two dimensions. One dimension is the creditworthiness of the issuer…[21:52] And another dimension I think conceptually, you can think of them as different. Some people like to think of them the same, but I think the difference is the liquidity question. Creditworthiness is about this bilateral relationship between you and the central bank. And then there's this question of how many other people in the network will accept this in payment of goods or services? And that's this sort of liquidity question. And, so these are two factors which are behind that. They're all subsumed under this (V) in the Fisher equation, but you can break them down a bit conceptually, I think, in terms of money as credit is useful to do that.Money is a social institution04:02: I believe that money is a social institution, a communal fiction, then a history of money is not a history of coins and notes and that kind of thing. It's an intellectual history. It's a history of these ideas and these institutions and where they come from.What is the whole point of banking?52:00: The whole point of banking and its historical origin is precisely the flexibility of the balance sheets of the banks. The whole way that the capitalist economy works, what is useful about banks and the reason they exist is precisely that they are able to expand and contract their balance sheets in line with the needs of trade.Theories around money are useful but contingent18:22: It's not that the Fisher equation or the quantity theory of money are not useful. All these theories of money are very useful for interpreting and predicting given points in time. But they are contingent.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah HarariJohn LockeThe Nature of Money by Geoffrey InghamWalter BagehotEcu de marcGuest Profile:Author Page at ReutersFelix Martin’s WebsiteFelix Martin on LinkedInFeliz Martin on XHis Work:Money: The Unauthorized Biography – From Coinage to CryptocurrenciesArticles on Financial TimesArticles on Muck Rack

As more and more humans came up against the edges of wilderness in American history, new laws were needed to help guide and shape what the process would look like. As time changed, so did the laws dealing with preserving nature and society’s view on its importance. Jedediah Purdy is a professor of Law at Duke Law and the author of several books. His latest work is called Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening―and Our Best Hope.Jedediah and Greg discuss the complex terrain of America's environmental laws, tracing the roots from the liberal tradition of conquering Fortuna to modern ecological movements. They also dissect the tension between preserving nature for human benefit and maintaining its mystical allure. They also talk about the often overlooked role of class in environmental politics, analyzing in-depth how this has influenced public debates over laws and public lands.Listen in and explore these intersections of politics, law, and nature with Jed Purdy.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On the four different visions04:02: There are definitely, even more than four kinds of ways of experiencing and relating to the natural world that exist in the broad shape of American life. And then, especially if we were to take account of the variety of indigenous ways of relating that continue to have a life and have their own kinds of futures, these are four that are really embodied in legal regimes. So, they're a way of trying to understand how environmental imagination has been very practical in lending a shape to the law's world making activity.Viewing nature as a spiritual source12:00: There is this very different way of seeing nature, which is as a spiritual source, as a way of connecting us with a meaning that goes beyond and, in a way, above our practical and material projects. And has a religious significance, whether understood theologically or in a romantic register, that replaces religion traditionally understood with aesthetic experience and mystical intuition of a sort of world soul.The paradox of political energy and political aversion35:00: The book begins with the observation that our political moment feels paradoxical and that it's extremely politically energized, but the mobilization often feels connected much more with fear and despair around politics than any real sense that it's a constructive or hopeful activity. So we're very political, but we're very, obviously, big and crude, inviting people to recognize some part of their own experience and observation. But we are also very anxious about and averse to it.Climate crisis is an everything problem, not just an environmental one54:17: I don't think anyone would want to make averting the climate crisis hang on our ability or willingness to change all of those things at once. In some ways, the environmental question finally refuses to be siloed, and it may lose some of its distinctiveness. It may even be a residual habit—that sort of category error—to think of climate as an environmental problem rather than an everything problem.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Alexis de TocquevilleJohn LockeThe Homestead Act of 1862National Park Service Organic ActThe Wilderness ActHenry David ThoreauThe Frontier ThesisGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Duke LawHis Work:Two Cheers For PoliticsAfter Nature: A Politics for the AnthropoceneFor Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America TodayThe Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal ImaginationJedediah Purdy Amazon Author PageThis Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New CommonwealthA Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American FreedomBeing America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American WorldNew Yorker ArticlesThe Atlantic Articles

Humans, as a species, are unique among the animal kingdom in a number of ways, but several of those involve how we have and raise our children. In a class of our own, even compared to other primates, humans spend an extremely long time in childhood and even longer until all parts of us, including our bones, fully mature.Brenna Hassett is a biological anthropologist and archaeologist. She is also the author of two books, Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death and her latest book, Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood.Brenna and Greg discuss the significant impact of cultural adaptations on reproduction, exploring the complexities of human birth and the uniqueness of human fertility. Brenna goes over the hurdles of breastfeeding in diverse societies, the sway of nutrition in modern societies and its tie to fertility cycles, and what unexpected correlation humans have to zebras.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The perfect parenting myth16:03: The idea that there is one true way to parent is insidious because it preys on every insecurity you have as a new parent, which is, "Oh my God, this machine that I have purchased from the store and brought home is glitching. I can't turn it off and on again; there is no helpline that is working. What on earth am I supposed to do?" And a lot of people look for answers in a sort of imagined past where, if the phone wasn't ringing off the hook, if the television wasn't on, if you didn't have to go back to work after three weeks or something, childrearing would be much easier. And a lot of that stuff is true.Are babies demanding?25:48: If you think about the signaling mechanism in a human pregnancy being much more baby-led than maternal-led, I think you start to see how our very demanding babies can take advantage of that.The challenges of balancing work and care34:44: The thing to remember with humans is that every single evolutionary adaptation that we've made, we have adjusted the levers of the adaptation with our culture. Our culture is essentially another mechanism by which we move our adaptations forward, backward, sideways, or whatever. So if you think about something that ought to be straightforward, like birth, and then you look at the actual mechanics of it for humans.The push for adulthood in our changing world47:47: We've set up a society that had some expectations and a culture that had some expectations, and then we changed them, and we are slowly allowing some people in our society to fit our changed expectations. We are pushing our expectations absolutely to their limit in some ways. And that's why fertility treatment and things like that are so important now, because people are waiting longer; it is harder to meet the sort of traditional adult milestones in the economy we have today.Show Links:Recommended Resources:r/K selection theoryCountess BáthoryThe Dutch Hunger WinterHolly DunsworthGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UCLANBrenna Hassett on XBrenna Hassett on Talks at GoogleHer Work:Growing Up Human: The Evolution of ChildhoodBuilt on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and DeathSapiens.org ArticlesResearchGate PublicationsOther scholarly articles

In the information economy, reading is an essential skill. How can competency in reading be measured, and how can it be improved? In the 19th century, there emerged a science of reading that led to the “reading wars” that are with us to this day.Adrian Johns is the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History at the University of Chicago and also an author. His latest book is titled The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America.Adrian and Greg discuss both the problems of literacy levels in society and the problems with measuring it accurately. Adrian goes over the central target that past literacy texts tried to hit or sometimes ignore and the missteps they make when they get it wrong. They discuss what has caused literacy panics and what those have looked like throughout the years. From the staccato rhythm of reading to the unexpected way people view images, our understanding of reading behavior has been transformed by technologies like the eye movement camera and the Tachistoscope. Adrian shares the ripple effect these tools have had on fields like marketing and user interface work.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Jerome Bruner’s idea of a good reader43:39: The people who are the best readers are the people who have a hypothesis-testing model for how they read. So, as you imagine this, as your eyes are moving across the line, you are all the time predicting what the next word is going to be. And the people who are really good readers are better at predicting this. So they're making hypotheses, and then they're experimentally seeing whether the hypothesis is born out really fast. And if it's not, then they go back and come up with another hypothesis.Does being a good text message reader mean you're also a good book reader?53:34: Being a really good reader of text messages is not the same thing as being a really good reader of Moby Dick, but they're both good things. They're both worth having, and we want to train people to be masters of all of those things, which in a certain sense is what the people were aiming for in 1900, but we're in a different world now, so we have to adapt to that.On looking at experts insights more than credentials06:17: There's a notion that, in application, the science of reading can tell us how to make our schools create the next generation who will be more efficient and more adapted to the world in which they live.Reading is not just about decoding words52:32: Once you're beyond that very basic level of phonics character-by-character interpretation, it's not actually clear that the target that you are aiming at is one thing. So we think of reading singular as one or would be a gerund. One verb, but if you look around empirically at what happens in the professional social world, this thing, if it is one thing, is carried out in lots of different ways.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Explanation of TaylorismTachistoscopePaul FittsUSS VincennesJerome BrunerHorace Mann BondFlesch-Kincaid readabilityBook: why johnny cant readGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of ChicagoAdrian Johns on LinkedInHis Work:The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern AmericaPiracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to GatesThe Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the MakingTime ArticleGoogle Scholar Page

Even well before the suffragettes of the 19th century, women had been writing, thinking, and pushing for equal rights for almost a hundred years. How did those early feminist activists inform policy and the way we view household and family politics today? Erika Bachiochi is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute. Her new book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, provides an intellectual history of the women’s rights movement going all the way back to the 18th century. She and Greg discuss the influential work of Mary Wollstonecraft on the women’s rights movement, how industrialization and the rise of capitalism shifted priorities in the movement, and the history of the abortion debate. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The effect of technology in reproduction37:43: What answers asymmetry now, what answers the fact that men and women can engage in sex but women get pregnant and men don't, is technology. So, you have contraception and you have abortion, and when technology fills in the gaps, again, you have this shift, so that's when you see the sexual revolution come about: more sexual risk-taking, more sort of casual sex as a sexual ethos that kind of takes over because we're relying now on technology instead of our development of self-mastery in the sexual realm.The big shift in the women's right movement19:28: With industrialization and the rise of capitalism, women started to become far more dependent, where they used to work together on the agrarian homestead. That dependency puts them at great risk because they now depend on men for a paycheck. So it's not just women's ambition that sent them into the workplace; it's a real desire to have some insurance against male vice in a lot of ways, which is what you saw in that first wave of feminism.The challenges of balancing work and care52:32: We need to listen more to those who would prefer to be in the home and prefer to be caring for their children, who would prefer to see the work of the home that both mothers and fathers engage in as having great value, as getting back to the Wilson crafting insight as kind, kind of underlying every social, political, and economic good. And that we've forgotten about that. And thinking about what children really need to become independent and mature—not only workers, not only citizens, but also spouses and neighbors—is a really important shift that needs to happen.On Ginsburg's fight for women's equality14:43: By really fighting for women to be understood as equal citizens, Ginsburg is constitutionalizing Wilson's craft's principle. What Ginsburg is fighting against in the 1970s as an advocate for the ACLU is that we shouldn't have these laws that basically confine women to maternity and expect that just because a woman has the capacity for childbirth and motherhood, she should be kept out of professions. And that was a really important gain and a really important underlying political philosophy.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Mary WollstonecraftA Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary WollstonecraftEdmund BurkeJean-Jacques RousseauJohn LockeCommentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William BlackstoneAlice PaulLochner v. New YorkVictoria WoodhullThe National Organization for Women’s 1966 Statement of PurposeWhy Women Still Can’t Have It All by Anne-Marie SlaughterWomen and Economics by Charlotte Perkins GillmanMary Ann GlendonGuest Profile:Professional Profile at Ethics & Public Policy CenterContributor’s Profile on The Federalist Society Erika Bachiochi on LinkedInErika Bachiochi on XErika Bachiochi on TED TalkHer Work:The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost VisionThe Cost of Choice: Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion

Even though central banks have become independent over the years, is it fair to say they still face political challenges? Could inflation be viewed as a political problem or a technical one?Stephen D. King is a senior economic adviser at HSBC and has been writing about global economics for years. His most recent book, We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years, examines the root causes of inflation through a historical lens. Stephen and Greg discuss whether inflation is inherently tied to politics, why deflation is not necessarily a scary thing, and the greatest challenge facing central bankers today. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Inflation tends to create a world for winners and losers07:00: So, inflation tends to create a world of both winners and losers. And it's a profoundly undemocratic process in that sense because that process of creating winners and losers is pretty arbitrary. But of course, the problem there is that if you happen to be a loser initially, you're going to want to push for your own wage increase or your price increase later on because your next-door neighbor has already had one of those, and you're waiting for your turn. So when you try to stop inflation, you are effectively trying to stop it when some people have already perhaps benefited from it. And other people feel quite rightly quite justifiably that they haven't; in fact, they're actually worse off in some sense. So stopping it once it's started becomes a lot more difficult.Have we forgotten the adverse consequences of inflation?05:47: With the advent of central banks becoming politically independent, I think there was a habit of thinking that inflation was a technical problem. It was a technical challenge for central banks, but not really a political challenge in any significant way. But actually, I think inflation is a huge political challenge.Does the central bank overestimate the degree of control they have over velocity?33:22: It's not just how much money you print; it's what the public thinks of what it is you're doing. Do they trust you? Do they think you're on the right track or the wrong track? In other words, the velocity partly depends on how the public rates you as a credible monetary institution. So, if you're doing stuff that seems to be overly experimental or peculiar, you may suddenly discover that what you thought was a relationship between money and the economy breaks down one way or the other.Will we be entering into a new era where the central banks reassert their independence and reestablish their credibility?57:27: I think that where inflation is relatively high and economic growth is relatively low, it's going to be a very interesting situation to monitor over the next three or four years to see whether central banks, first of all, are able to reassert their sort of independence. And secondly, whether, politically, they can get away with it and have the legitimacy to do so.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Hugo StinnesAdam SmithPaul VolckerArthur F. BurnsLawrence SummersJason FurmanMartin WolfGuest Profile:Professional Profile on BruegelSpeaker’s Profile on London Speaker Bureau AsiaStephen D. King on LinkedInStephen D. King on XHis Work:We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 YearsLosing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western ProsperityWhen the Money Runs Out: The End of Western AffluenceGrave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

Sometimes, the ideas that end up being the most revolutionary come from outside the scientific mainstream. People who can approach the problem with different eyes and thoughts and see solutions from another angle. For medicine, the idea that revolutionized trauma wound care came from a complete outsider and accelerated when he joined forces with another outsider to promote a new way to clot blood.Charles Barber is a professor at Wesleyan University and the author of several books. His latest book, titled In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took On the US Army, recounts the story of the unlikely development of Quikclot and the hurdles that were along its path to adoption. Charles and Greg discuss what doctors had tried before Quikclot came along and then the story of how Frank Hursey and Brad Gullong turned heads and changed minds with the effectiveness of their new product to clot blood quickly and save the lives of those who had wounds that would previously have been fatal.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How two outsiders and three combat veterans revolutionized medicine25:39: One of the reasons they don't go in for the very expensive things that the army went in—these high-tech blood-clotting things that eventually failed—is they just didn't have the budget. They didn't have the money for it. And the Quikclot that was produced out of the Zeolite, which, by the way, was deployed very early in Iraq war and saved a lot of lives, was like $15 a packet. And so it was this kismet of two outsider inventors with no credentials doing things that would allow them to lose their medical license had they had a medical license, putting a rock in the bloodstream, and then meeting up over a number of years with these three outsider medical people. What they all shared was combat, raw combat experience, and an intolerance for the bureaucracy if it got in the way of the phrase that they all used independently, saving the kids in the ditch.Prioritizing insights over credentials17:32: We live in this age of experts, where you have to have PhDs, MDs, and everything at the same time. And we don't pay attention the way we did even a hundred years ago to people who don't necessarily have the credentials but have the insight.Does our approach to medicine create fertile ground for pharmaceutical company marketing?46:22: If you were to pick one thing that changed the commodification of psychiatric drugs, it was the television advertising of drugs. And New Zealand and the US, then and now, are still the only countries that do it. And so, it's not far afield from this sort of American Wild West of grabbing highly potent, sometimes effective, often not effective technological solutions without going to the undergirding issues.Mental illness is complicated48:45: Mental illness is nothing if not extraordinarily complicated, and we've grown up with even advanced psychiatry. It's all this: either medicines or therapy, genes or character, environment or hereditary. And for some reason, we can't seem to understand that it's not that complicated.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Faculty Profile for Demetrios DemetriadesFrank HurseyBart GullongZeoliteJohn W. HolcombQuikclot WebsiteWilliam JamesGuest Profile:Faculty Profile on Wesleyan UniversityAuthor’s Profile on Penguin Random HouseCharles Barber's WebsiteCharles Barber on LinkedInHis Work:In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took On the US ArmyPeace & Health: How a group of small-town activists and college students set out to change healthcareCitizen Outlaw: One Man's Journey from Gangleader to PeacekeeperComfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Medicated a NationSongs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors (American Lives)

Humans have a tendency to see the glass as half full. What arguments can be made on behalf of the half-empty perspective? Whether it's evaluating your life or making decisions about becoming a parent, viewing things through a pessimistic lens could ultimately help reduce suffering in the world.David Benatar is a professor of philosophy and director of the Bioethics Centre at the University of Cape Town. He is also the author of several books. His latest book, titled The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions, explores the meaningfulness of life. David and Greg discuss optimism versus pessimism and the positive and negative qualities that they both possess. David talks about suicide and the historic and where our views on it have evolved from. David and Greg talk about the ethics of having children, what true immortality would really mean, and how to get the most out of our time on the hedonic treadmill of life.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:General broad pessimism is a product of the clear-eyed view48:48: General broad pessimism is a product of the clear-eyed view. If you look at the human condition realistically, you're going to reach unhappy conclusions about all the things I've said that you should reach unhappy conclusions about. But now the question is, "Well, what do you do with that information?" Do you just become morose? Do you withdraw? What do you do with this information? And one mistake would be to become overly morose about it, to derive no joy, because then what happens is there's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy there where you're making; there's another feedback loop. You're making it actually worse for yourself than it would be if you didn't have that kind of response to the pessimism. At the same time, I don't think you should fall into optimism because now you're going to lose the clear-eyed view. So, what I would say is preserve the clear-eyed pessimistic view but be pragmatic.Is there a feedback loop between the subjective and the objective?18:29: If you think your life is better than it is, it objectively becomes a bit better. That doesn't mean it reaches the level you think it's at. It doesn't completely eliminate the gap between the subjective and the objective, but the subjective view makes it a little better. And similarly, when we're speaking about negative evaluation. So, there is that feedback loop.Life’s meaning doesn’t have to be broad22:05: I don't think that we should conclude from the absence of that kind of meaning that our lives have no meaning. Because they do have meaning at more micro-levels, and we matter to other people. We can have a positive impact on people and beings around us. And I don't think we should pretend that isn't the case simply because our lives can't have a broader kind of meaning.On the relationship of quality and meaning of life13:29: There are different views about what the relationship is between quality and meaning. Some people want to treat meaning as part of the quality of life. Others want to separate it out. There is some value in separating them, but I don't want to be committed to that view. I don't think we need to be.Show Links:Recommended Resources:A. J. Ayer Wikipedia PageHedonic Treadmill Wikipedia PageGuest Profile:Faculty Profile from the University of Cape TownHis Work:The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest QuestionsBetter Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into ExistenceThe Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and BoysConversations about the Meaning of LifeThe Fall of the University of Cape Town: Africa’s leading university in declineDebating Procreation: Is It Wrong to Reproduce?New Yorker Article 

As risk-averse individuals, we tend to try to avoid failure at all costs. But failing is an essential part of learning. So, how can we get better at it? And how can organizations create psychological safety so employees are more willing to take chances, even if it may lead to failure? Amy Edmondson is a professor at Harvard Business School and studies psychological safety, organizational learning, and teaming. In her new book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, she guides readers through the art of failing. Amy and Greg discuss her psychological safety origin story, the taxonomy of failure, and the importance of learning how to fail right. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What does psychological safety truly mean?19:55: My least favorite misconception of what psychological safety is that it means a lack of accountability or a lack of high standards. It means anything goes, and we're just going to be soft and, you know, wrap everybody in bubble wrap. And it's not what it means. It means permission for candor, right? It means permission to take risks, and hopefully, most of those risks will be smart risks.Errors and failures are rich territory for learning07:51: You've got to learn, and you have to learn fast, and you have to keep learning—and errors and failures, which I do not believe are synonymous, are really rich territory for learning. Unfortunately, we don't often do it very well. There's a whole lot of room for improvement there.Leadership doesn’t exist without fellowship27:19: Leadership doesn't even exist without followership. So we've got to be as interested in what everyone does to co-create value. And some people are at higher levels of leadership than others, but we're all trying to create value for the customers. And we have an overemphasis on sort of the role of those at the top.At what level can you safely try to change the culture?25:49: We have this very deep instinct to pay attention to what's happening above us. And oftentimes, because we're a little judgmental, we will decide that what's happening above us is suboptimal, and they don't get it. And they're not doing their part to create a psychological safety or learning environment. And I say that may very well be true, and your responsibility is simply to take a look at what you can do. Look down or across instead of up.Shifting the way you look at leadership28:11: We need to think less about organizations and more about teams because organizations are just made up of teams, and if every team does its part, whether it's developing the strategy, deciding on acquisition, building a product, or designing tomorrow's products. Every team does its job in the most learning-oriented, ambitious way possible. Some of those activities will be pretty powerful.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Carol DweckTeaching Smart People How to Learn by Chris Argyris Charles PerrowGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard UniversityProfessional Profile on Thinkers50Speaker Profile on Stern Strategy GroupAmy C. Edmondson's WebsiteAmy C. Edmondson on LinkedInAmy C. Edmondson on TwitterAmy C. Edmondson on TEDxHGSEHer Work:Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and GrowthWorkplace Conditions (Elements of Improving Quality and Safety in Healthcare) Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector LeadershipBuilding the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious InnovationTeaming to InnovateA Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R Buckminster FullerScholarly Articles Articles on Harvard Business Review

Does the way we rank colleges prioritize status over educational quality or the public good? Colin Diver is the Charles A. Heimbold, Jr., Professor of Law and Economics, former dean at the University of Pennsylvania, and former president of Reed College. His book, Breaking Ranks: How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to Do about It, explores the methodologies of U.S. News and others to evaluate higher education institutions.Colin and Greg discuss the pitfalls of college rankings, how they fail to measure important aspects of education,  how they distort the incentives of college administrators, and what a better system could look like. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why are the SATs becoming less popular?27:43: I realized that in this day and age, the SAT is becoming less and less popular, and I understand why—it does tend to favor privileged students that are economically and academically privileged students. But I still think that it is a force for democratizing higher education. It's a way of identifying talented students from out-of-the-way places, unfamiliar high schools, maybe even kids who didn't have a high GPA for whatever reason, but still have a lot of raw talent.Do we have the capacity to opt out of rankings?26:23: Yes, we dislike the rankings. We may even hate them, but we can't afford to fight them. And we can't afford to pull out. I understand that calculation. It's like we depend on the rankings to signal our value to our primary constituency, which is potential undergraduate students.How does early decision admission contribute to economic inequality?27:43: If you apply early, we'll give you an answer early, but if we admit you, you've got to accept our offer. And so, that way, you drove up your yield rate because everybody who applied that you admitted was going to come because they had agreed ahead of time that they would come. And, well, what was wrong with that? What was wrong with that was that it favored the rich because the poorer students can't afford to commit early. They need to see what the competitive financial aid awards are. And so, it was well demonstrated in the literature that early decisions tended to favor rich applicants and disfavor poor applicants.The value of Ivy League education is a function of its exclusivity55:23: The apparent value of an Ivy League education is a function of its exclusivity. We want to be a club that only a few people can join, is the sentiment. And that is unfortunate. It's a reflection of the competitive conditions in higher education.Show Links:Recommended Resources:U.S. News Best CollegesBuild Your Own College Rankings (New York Times)NichePresident John F. Kennedy’s Frost Speech Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of Pennsylvania President's Profile on Reed CollegeColin Diver on LinkedInColin Diver on XHis Work:Breaking Ranks: How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to Do about ItArticle on The Chronicle of Higher EducationArticle on Los Angeles TimeArticle on The New York Times

The double helix of DNA twists in the heart of every human cell, and it comes with some editing software known as epigenetics that power what parts turn on and off and when. Scientists are still still working to understand exactly how genetics and epigenetics work, but we are learning more every day.Nessa Carey is the former International Director at PraxisUnico and the author of several books on genetics. Her latest book is titled Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures.Nessa and Greg discuss how genetics and epigenetics work and are related, with some concrete examples. Nessa discusses how genetics have been used to clone species and cells in laboratories and the differences between other animals and humans. Greg and Nessa talk about the uses and limitations of gene technology and the exciting possibilities of the gene editing technology CRISPR.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Not all scientists are the same01:00:39: We have to get better at recognizing that not all scientists are the same. Some are really good problem solvers, some are really good creative thinkers, and it's about finding the right ways to support those people to maximum effect. And we need both. We need the problem solvers as well as the genuinely, deeply creative people. And that is expensive, but on the other hand, you don't get the great breakthroughs. If we only had the problem solvers, all we would have now are better iron lungs for polio. We'd never have a vaccine. But sometimes you need those problem solvers to get other things done as well. So we need to be supporting all different types of research.On the complexity of biology17:27: The reality is biology is very, very complicated. All of those systems need to work. If any of them fall apart, the whole thing falls apart. But we're surprisingly tribal and surprisingly wedded to our own theories. I think in biology, we quite often don't realize we're constantly putting ourselves on Gartner's hype cycle, and everybody gets very invested in whichever bit they like and where it's in the cycle at the time.The beauty and cultural value of funding science01:01:52: It's a mistake to think we should fund science because, eventually, it'll fund us back. We should fund science because it's beautiful. We should fund it because it's a magnificent cultural activity that adds to the wealth of human gorgeousness in the same way that fine arts and great literature do. Stuff shouldn't just be funded because it has an economic imperative. Isn't it just beautiful to understand more about how the world works?Why is epigenetics a notable example of scientific paradigm shifts?14:49: Epigenetics has been a great example of how you get paradigm shifts in scientific fields. You get this situation where there's the prevailing theory, and it survives a lot of onslaughts. But then eventually, it crumbles, and the new theory emerges. So, it's been great both scientifically and in terms of the philosophy of science.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Waddington LandscapeThe Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of CancerGartner Hype CycleJohn Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka’s WorkAnne Ferguson-SmithGuest Profile:Profile on The Royal SocietyNessa Carey's WebsiteNessa Carey on LinkedInNessa Carey on XHer Work:Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futuresThe Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and InheritanceJunk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the GenomeHuffington Post Articles

When it comes to data privacy laws these days, it’s still sort of like the Wild West out there. There’s no federal agency holding software makers responsible for security holes, consumers don’t understand how much risk there is, and the laws that are on the books are inadequate.Daniel J. Solove is a leading authority on privacy law and is a professor at the George Washington University Law School. He’s written numerous books and articles on data security and privacy laws, including his most recent book, Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve it and his textbook, Information Privacy Law.Daniel and Greg discuss why current privacy laws are counterproductive, what a useful federal law regulating data security could look like, and why being forced to change your password regularly is actually bad advice. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The need for a human element when it comes to security38:32: Security does need to think about the human element. And that's a different kind of thinking than what might be best for security. And that's what makes security so tricky. There are good technologies and weaker technologies for security. I think two-factor authentication is good. There are a lot of things that people can do that will make very effective security. But there's also this human dimension, and that's a dimension that a lot of them are not trained on. It's just they're not experts in human psychology, human cognitive abilities, and what humans are likely or unlikely to do. But we need that expertise involved if we're going to create the right security framework for a company.Is the law focusing on data breaches so much that it's making them worse?13:25: The law, unfortunately, has focused way too obsessively on breach and failed to focus on things that could actually address this problem in a much more effective way. The role that companies play in data breaches32:51: If we had companies devise ways that they authenticated themselves to people, then we would be a lot safer, and fewer people would be falling for hacker tricks. And if the company is doing some practice that is miseducating, you should be penalized.Do we make exceptions for technology when it comes to security?17:40: There's a bit of exceptionalism when it comes to technology, where we accept the risks and dangers of technology and don't hold the makers of it accountable in ways we would never do with any other product. Show Links:Recommended Resources:TortBenjamin N. CardozoLouis BrandeisRalph NaderBruce SchneierKatz v. United StatesLoomis v. WisconsinOlmstead v. United StatesJohn Marshall HarlanGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at George Washington UniversityDaniel J. Solove's WebsiteDaniel J. Solove on LinkedInDaniel J. Solove on TwitterDaniel J. Solove on Talks at GoogleDaniel’s company: TeachPrivacyHis Work:Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve itInformation Privacy LawUnderstanding PrivacyThe Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information AgeNothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and SecurityThe Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the InternetThe FTC and The New Common Law of PrivacyThe Limitations of Privacy RightsMore scholarly articles

Is finance really just the economics of time and risk? How do you price things like time and risk?Edward Chancellor is a columnist with Reuters and is the author of the book, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, which delves into the history of lending and the interest rates that followed for the last five millennia. Edward and Greg discuss the history of interest and its connections to Greek philosophy, the potential problems with centralized banking, and financial repression in China and the US. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The overlooked aspects of monetary policy and central planning08:05: What I think happened is you have the support amongst some neoclassical economists for Hayek's ideas relating to the economy as spontaneous, complex, emergent order that is difficult to control centrally. And yet, at the same time, no one has any problem with taking the most important price in the system, the one that affects everything, namely the interest rate. And so it's somehow perfectly acceptable to tweak that for whatever your end.Insights from a finance journalist51:34: One of the things I've discovered about writing about finance for nearly 30 years is that it's hardly worth having new ideas, because the conservatism of the world is so great that it's very hard to get them taken up. So I prefer to describe, rather than create, solutions.Unraveling the complexity between the relationship between inflation and interest42:37: The relationship between inflation and interest is not as straightforward as people surmise. If a low-interest rate encourages leverage, then the more leverage you have, the greater the leverage tottering over an individual household or an economy as a whole, and the more potential deflation pressure there is.What’s an inevitable feature of a market-based system?13:23: The notion that a transitional rise in unemployment may actually be useful is complete heresy and is seen as being a sort of strange, perverted form of sadism. Which I didn't think it was. So it's an inevitable feature of a capitalist or market-based system that you'd have these periods of boom and bust.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Denationalisation of Money by Friedrich A. Von HayekMilton FriedmanJohn Maynard KeynesClément JuglarThe Nature and Necessity of Interest by Gustav CasselEugen von Böhm-BawerkIrving FisherGuest Profile:Author Page at ReutersSpeaker’s Profile on Chartwell SpeakersEdward Chancellor's Website Edward Chancellor on LinkedInEdward Chancellor on XHis Work:The Price of Time: The Real Story of InterestDevil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation

When the stock market emerged, everyone was foraging the path for the first time. The potential and problems engrossed the wisest minds in the world and the richest names in banking. Then came the 1720 South Sea Bubble, and people were met with a financial crisis.  Thomas Levenson is a Professor of Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also an author, and his latest book is titled Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made.Thomas and Greg discuss the circumstances of the South Sea Bubble and how it connected to famous minds like Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley. They relate the financial crisis to other bubbles, like the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Thomas draws out the fascinating parts of what happened with the South Sea Bubble and what lessons can be learned from it and applied to today’s financial markets.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Insights on the role of innovation and government purpose in bubbles33:51: The point of the bubble is that at the core of the bubble was a really good idea that actually served the government's purposes. In fact, served the government's purposes so well that one of the reasons you don't get joint stock companies going forward and in particular, you don't allow private companies to have access to the bond markets, the debt market, in the same way that the government has, is because the government wants to make sure it essentially has a monopoly on that form of finance so that it can continue executing its purposes. And you don't see a private bond market emerging, at least in Britain, until the second quarter of the 19th century.You can have truth in mathematics29:02: Mathematics is this sure and certain science. You can have truth in mathematics... The best that physics can be is demonstrated, and there's a difference. And so, if the mathematics work out, then, of course, this is a safe, sound, and perfectly acceptable way to spend your money until it isn't. So there's a rhetoric in the use of mathematical arguments that shouldn't be ignored. It was present in the 1720s bubble and in that era, and it was very much present recently.Humanities teach you to think about the future in ways that are simply useful01:01:24: If you try to train for the present, what you're doing is making sure that the future is going to catch you by surprise. And one of the things that the humanities do is teach you to think about the future in ways that are more flexible, more interesting, and, dare I say it, pragmatically, simply useful.A perspective on continuous evolution and profound shifts13:29: I see events as a continuous flow rather than as sudden, momentary revolutionary breakthroughs. But if ever there was a profoundly changing, rapidly changing sort of thing, you can experience it in your own lifetime. The late 17th century was remarkable.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Isaac NewtonEdmond HalleyCalculated Values by William DeringerThe South Sea Bubble of 1720The Financial Crisis of 2007-2008Tulip ManiaExchange AlleyHorace WalpoleGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThomas Levenson WebsiteThomas Levenson on LinkedInThomas Levenson on XHis Work:Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World RichMoney For Nothing: The South Sea Bubble and the Invention of Modern CapitalismThe Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the UniverseNewton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest ScientistEinstein in BerlinArticles from The AtlanticArticles from Aeon

Is the smartest person in the room also the wisest? Not necessarily. So what does it mean to be wise, and how do you go about finding that wisdom in life? Thomas Gilovich is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. His work in social psychology includes the key textbook in the field, and has written books that touch on topics such as behavioral economics and the fallibility of human reason.Thomas and Greg discuss what it means to truly be wise, whether or not more wisdom leads to more happiness in life, and how to train ourselves to see beyond our subjective perception of the world. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Should we start with an understanding of the self in order to gain a better understanding of other people?54:05: We have this great capacity to zoom in, zoom out, look at things from a variety of different angles. And, if you do that well, that's going to give you a better understanding of other people and a better understanding of yourself. So, let's look at it from my perspective. Let's look at it from their perspective, and so on. That is part and parcel of what wisdom is—turning things around to look at a hard problem from a variety of different angles. And, if that's a big component of wisdom, it would be surprising if wisdom was located in one area rather than the other.Wisdom is where rational understanding meets human insights03:45: To be wise and effective in this world means that you need to understand all that we've learned about rational choice, logic, etc., and combine that with knowledge of people.Why construal principle is a big component of wisdom25:26: One of the biggest principles of social psychology is the so-called "construal principle," which is that there's a reality out there. But we don't respond to that reality. We respond to how we interpret that reality. And knowing that's what we're reacting to is a big component of wisdom; it allows us to understand where other people are coming from, especially when their behavior on the surface immediately may not make sense to us. So, what does it mean to them that they're reacting that way? It's a big part of wisdom.Considering happiness as a talent, not just a trait34:35: We think of happiness as a trait, which at some level of description it is, but maybe it's better to think of it as a talent: happy people have the talent to make all these mental moves and arrange their lives in such a way that they will be happier.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Solomon AschGeorge Carlin - Idiot and ManiacLeon FestingerThe Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan HaidtHappy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles MontgomeryKurt LewinDaniel KahnemanThe Replication CrisisGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Cornell UniversityAuthor’s Profile at SageThomas Gilovich on LinkedInHis Work:Social Psychology (6th Edition)Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive JudgmentHow We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday LifeWhy Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral EconomicsThe Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful InsightsMore scholarly articles 

From an early age, students are taught the major academic disciplines like math, science, history, and art. But one thing that often gets overlooked or not formally taught is creative problem-solving. Why? And what would those classes look like? Tina Seelig, the executive director of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, teaches creativity courses to students around the world and in corporate settings. She’s written numerous books on the subject, such as Creativity Rules: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and into the World and inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity. Tina and Greg discuss some of the ways she unlocks creativity in her students, why there should be more of an emphasis on creative problem-solving at educational institutions, and how to cultivate curiosity. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Insights from 'What I Wish I Knew When I Was 40'41:02: You can start anywhere. The lane lines of the pool might be on top, but you can swim under them. And it's really, really important that you don't get a job. You get the keys to the building. So find the building you want to be in, figure out where you're going to get your foot in the door, and then figure out how you're going to really make an impact and create new opportunities for yourself.Failure is data for growth15:14: I deeply believe that failure is actually data and that you need to understand that every time something doesn't work as you expected, you have some really interesting data that is going to help you get to the next stage.Do we need courses for creativity?06:08: We teach math, science, history, art, and music. Why do we not teach creative problem-solving? And there are a very clear set of tools, techniques, and mindsets that are required that allow you to come up with really interesting solutions to problems that we face every single day.From boredom to fascination in pursuit of passion25:11: I'm a huge believer that before something is your passion, it's something you know nothing about. And so, something might seem boring and uninteresting, but if you have the right mindset, it's going to be fascinating.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed by Alberto SavoiaAlberto Savoia Talks on eCorner319. The Future Repeats Itself feat. Tom StandageWhat I Wish I Knew When I Was 40Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityContributors Profile on Psychology TodayTina Seelig's WebsiteTina Seelig on LinkedInTina Seelig on XTina Seelig on TEDTalkLeap! With Tina Seelig PodcastStanford Innovation Lab PodcastHer Work:Creativity Rules: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and into the World (US)inGenius: A Crash Course on CreativityWhat I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the WorldInsight Out: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and Into the World (UK)

Society’s view on fitness swings wildly from era to era throughout history. There were times when caring about your body was considered feminine, times when it was masculine, times when it was patriotic, and times when that was too close to how ideologies we don’t like behave - so not caring about your body was patriotic, but there have been many shifts in the last hundred years alone.Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a historian of contemporary American politics and culture, an Associate Professor of History at The New School, and the author of two books, the latest of which is titled Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession. Natalia and Greg discuss how fitness has become part of a broader wellness movement. They discuss how access to fitness and attitudes around it has become reserved for the wealthy or privileged. Natalia details how PE offerings in schools have changed over the years to line up with different political attitudes and the fine line between professionalizing fitness instruction and limiting access to the profession.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The imperative of certification and licensing for health and fitness instructors56:57: One of the biggest impediments to protecting people, both instructors and students, would be certification, real professional guidelines, and licensing. Because right now, fitness instructors and trainers are assuming this outsized role in people's lives with basically no guardrails, no instruction, or no laws governing that. You can sue if you hurt your neck in class, etc. But it's a wild west. And there's a lot of incentives for fitness professionals to actually be really zany and cross boundaries, because that creates this rapport in this very intimate relationship. You want that role in people's lives, but that can go wrong. And so, licensing and professional standards would help with that.The fitness industry and the dimension of inclusivity21:33: The gym evolves in how intimidating it becomes over time, but that remains a hallmark of a lot of people's gym experiences. And I should point out that in some ways, that's what the fitness industry is selling—a dimension of exclusivity.The interplay between American lifestyle and exercise trends05:58: One of the things that has really happened, that's emerged, that's helped propel this industry and this pressure to exercise, is that so many aspects of American life have become more sedentary. One of the reasons that we do have this class divide and who's thought to participate in exercise regularly is that the big moments when you have the expansion of the fitness industry always have to do with the expansion of the white-collar workforce.Fitness and community should go hand in hand51:15: We both know, coming out of the pandemic, that exercise is really good for you, but we know it was a big help with comorbidities and it's so important. But on the other hand, unfortunately, I think we hastened some of this privatization because we shut down parks and recreation centers. And we were like, "Oh, go do Peloton in your home; good luck with that," and that really isolated us and got rid of the community aspect, which is never perfectly inclusive, but I think it's really important.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Katie SandwinaCharles AtlasRichard SimmonsMuscle BeachVic TannyJim FixxJane FondaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at New SchoolNatalia Mehlman Petrzela's WebsiteNatalia Mehlman Petrzela on LinkedInNatalia Mehlman Petrzela on XHer Work:Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise ObsessionClassroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture NBC News Articles

A new era of technology brings about advancements that both thrill and concern society. Some see the oncoming innovations as the solution to our problems, others as the harbinger of the end, but one thing is certain: this isn’t the first time. Whether it’s the criticisms of social media, new vehicles meant to make communing easier, or industries disrupted by new technology, the present can look to and learn from the examples of the past. Tom Standage is the Deputy Editor at The Economist and the author of several books. His latest book, A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next, explores how personal vehicles have changed and shaped societies for millennia and continue to do so now with the onset of self-driving technology. Tom and Greg discuss how the present tech concerns echo panics of the past and the ways in which the discussion of self-driving vehicles today is following the discourse of other major shifts in society, like that from horses to vehicles. Tom gives a different take on the prevalence of smartphones and why it’s wise to take with a grain of salt both the prophets and the doomsayers of new innovations.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Curating information for readers who want to save time22:02: The Economist has always got most of its revenue from subscriptions. We have quite a high subscription price. Because basically, we have people who don't have much time but have enough money. They pay us to save them time. And getting up to speed quickly on what's happening in the world is the service we provide to our readers. And they pay us money for that information directly. And there isn't an intermediary. There aren't tech platforms, advertisers, and clicks in the middle. But the other thing they're paying us to do is curate what's happened. Tell them what's important. And very often, that's something like, "Have you noticed what's happened to the economy of Venezuela?" That's not a very clickbaity subject, but you know, essentially, that responsibility we have to our readers, which is tell you what's important that you didn't know you needed to know about. You are never going to get that with a click-driven model.Can journalists see things that professional historians can't see?18:42: Journalism is structured very differently from history and from academia because it's not generally about learning more and more about a thing. It's generally being able to pick things up quickly. What’s the problem with the click-driven model?32:33: The problem with a click-driven model is, firstly, it distorts those sorts of journalistic incentives. But then the other problem with it is that even if you can make a click-driven model work, you are mortgaging your future to the platform that is sending you the clicks.Can we fix misinformation?41:02: I think getting information in that direct way, directly from someone who you pay and who you trust, is something that we are likely to see more of, and swimming in the seas of misinformation is something we'll go and do sometimes, but we'll do it very aware.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Dangling ModifierPaul KrugmanFernand BraudelWhy 10 Year Plans are Wrong by Reid HoffmanGuest Profile:Professional Profile at The EconomistTom Standage on LinkedInTom Standage on TwitterHis Work:A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes NextA History of the World in 6 GlassesAn Edible History of HumanityThe Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line PioneersThe Mechanical Turk: The True Story of the Chess-playing Machine That Fooled the World Amazon Author Page for› Tom StandageArticles for The Globalist

In order to fully appreciate art, does one have to have first-hand experience creating art oneself? How does experiencing art help artists with their own work? Artist Lincoln Perry is the author of the book, Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others which aims to take the overwhelming and intimidating nature out of viewing and appreciating art. Lincoln and Greg discuss why experiencing art in person is paramount, the dangers of focusing too much on an artist’s biography, and the difference between a viewer of art and a participant. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What differentiates a participant from a viewer when encountering art?22:02: Viewing is a distancing implication. I enjoy implicating or trying to implicate the viewer. There are many numbers of ways you can do that. You can pull them in, say you have a tiny etching. Say you're Goya, and you have a tiny etching of the disasters of war, and you're holding it in your hand, and you're all of a sudden pulled into these horrors that are going on again. It's in the present. It's in your present, and you are participating, implicated. You have to wonder, Would I have been capable of this behavior? A viewer, somehow or other, does potentially walk through a space and not have an emotional reaction, but somehow or other, a participant will be answerable and also find enjoyment.Painting beyond accessibility16:37: I don't paint the way I paint to make it more accessible. I paint the way I paint because I can't do anything else.Paintings are more like music03:14: Paintings are more like music. They should wash over you, and if they pull you in and seduce you, you're motivated to read them at that point to figure out their content, their narrative, who's who, the iconography. But if you start with that, it's usually fairly intimidating and somehow off-putting to think that it's a quiz.Looking beneath art48:05: So what I'm advocating for in this book is looking beneath the surface of even touch. I don't talk about factors, but try to stress how you read art, how a sculpture carries your eye around, and how a painting guides your eye through depth and then back out again.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Delacroix at the LouvreJulian Barnes on the “Raft of the Medusa”The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space by John WhiteBarnes FoundationWhy Are Our Pictures Puzzles? by James Elkins Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings by James ElkinsGuest Profile:Professional Profile on The American ScholarLincoln Perry's WebsiteHis Work:Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of OthersMore scholarly articles

The prevalence of spending ample time indoors, engaging in screen-based activities, is narrowing our experiential landscape.As we constantly underutilize our sensory capabilities, we are missing out on the rich and vibrant information available from the colorful world around us.To thrive in a multi-dimensional world, reawakening our senses, enhancing our awareness of diverse experiences, and cultivating stronger connections with other species and nature are key.Charles Foster is an English writer, traveler, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister, and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel, theology, law, and medical ethics. His latest publication, Cry of the Wild: Eight Animals Under Siege, explores the complexity, beauty, and fragility of wild lives living alongside humans.Charles and Greg talk about our potential to unlock additional sensory experiences, how to increase our “empathy muscles” by studying other species, nurturing our ability to see otherness, and the need for cultivating humanity in education.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How should we think about reconstructing education to cultivate humanity in a more authentic way?42:47: We need to teach the principle that relationships are everything, not just human relationships, but relationships with the non-human world. We need to say that the relationship between things is the web and weave of the cosmos and that anything which defeats that insight—whether it's the atomism of modern sociology which asserts that everyone is an island unto himself or whether it's things which lock us up physically in our rooms or on our screens—we've got to say that those things strike at the very heart of the way the universe is meant to be and that radical measures are therefore needed to restore relationship to its central place, not only in our philosophical understanding of the world but also in relation to our personal lives.On the theory of mind11:53: Direct experience is what we should be after, rather than a cognitive set of conclusions about what another person is thinking. So the theory of mind is a specifically adult human way of appreciating what, if we were non-adult humans, we would be able to have naturally.Is there a way we could foster a better relationship with the non-human world and instill this connection in our children?43:59: Relationship breeds an appetite for relationship, and if we go out into green, we will learn to love green, and that green is better than the gray of the breeze blocks from which our houses are made. There also needs to be a part of the compulsory curriculum in which people just go out and lie in a field or climb a tree. If you have had a childhood marinated in greenness, not only are you far less likely to suffer from ADHD or depression, but you're also far less likely to become, when you are an adult, a major trasher of the natural law.The business of observing is a two-way conversation.11:53: The whole business of observing is necessarily a two-way conversation; that's what relativity is all about, and it seems to me that exactly that principle applies at the level of a human looking at the bird that he's studying or the human looking at the rock that he's studying as well. Unless we enter into a conversation which allows both the observer and the observed to be changed, our perspective is going to be distorted by the fact that we have fallen prey to the delusion that we can be objective.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Peregrine by J.A. BakerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of OxfordCharles Foster's WebsiteCharles Foster on TwitterHis Work:Cry of the Wild: Eight animals under siegeBeing a Beast: Adventures Across the Species DivideBeing a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of ConsciousnessThe Screaming SkyIn The Hot Unconscious: An Indian JourneyChoosing Life, Choosing Death: The Tyranny of Autonomy in Medical Ethics and LawA little brown seaMedical Law: A Very Short Introduction

Is the practice of making a company sustainable a performative act, one motivated by a company's true values, or a move made for profit? And furthermore, does it matter if the effects are all the same? Companies all over the world are starting to align with newer, greener trajectories, and they do it for a myriad of reasons.Andrew S. Winston is the founder of Winston EcoStrategies, and an author whose latest book, co-authored with Paul Polman, Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take, examines precisely these questions. Greg and Andrew discuss what sustainability really means and how it differs and overlaps with ESG. Andrew recounts how the company Unilever has solved problems of sustainability and implemented them on a multinational scale. Greg and Andrew talk about the problem of the terms ballooning to include things originally outside the original definitions, what the future looks like on the sustainability landscape for corporations, and why Andrew is so optimistic about it.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The impact of individual actions on the environmental footprints24:22: The reason an individual can only do so much on their footprint is because they can't control that the grid is 80% coal in their area or whatever. Like the way that they can impact that is how they vote, right? How they support companies that are promoting the right things are not like it's much bigger elements of their lives than just literally what are they buying day to day. They can vote with their feet, and they should, and there's a few things people can do that move their footprint noticeably like eating less meat is the most immediate thing you can do, starting right now. But there's actually not a thousand things that really have any impact. There's a few, there's a handful. What you eat, what you drive, how close to work you live, and a bunch of these decisions don't come every day. Does sustainability make a company outperform? 12:12: There's been a long correlation between doing well on sustainability and doing well as a business, and the correlation causation there is difficult and impossible to parse. And it's because companies that are good at most things are good at most things. Climate change and the inequality issue46:33: The poorest people on the planet are the least responsible for climate and are basically the ones getting hit the hardest. And the people producing all of the emissions over the last 50 to 100 years are the richest; the richest billion or so of us have created the entire problem.Is the CEO job harder today than it was before?48:45: I was speaking with a CEO group recently, and they said the CEO job is much harder than it ever was before. Well, clearly, look at what's going on, right? You have to chime in on an LGBTQ law if you're Disney. These are hard things. I can't say I feel too bad for CEOs. The average Fortune 500 CEO makes what, $10–15 million a year? Like they're getting paid a lot. Like they're supposed to deal with the hard problems, and they're now being put to the test. And I'm not saying these things are easy, but I have these debates all the time. People say, 'Well, how come my company doesn't respond to everything? ' They don't have to. But the hard reality is that if you don't say something about an issue, you're still saying something.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Paul PolmanESGGeorge Serafeim Faculty Profile at HarvardGuest Profile:Andrew S. Winston’s WebsiteAndrew S. Winston on LinkedInAndrew S. Winston on TwitterAndrew S. Winston on TEDTalkHis Work:Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They TakeGreen to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive AdvantageThe Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, and More Open WorldGreen Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top

It’s one thing to talk about the science and physics behind the notion of invisibility, it’s another thing to examine the cultural place that idea occupies in media and philosophy. Science writer Philip Ball wants to do both, and not just with things unseen. He’s written numerous books spanning a multitude of topics like the invention of color, how music works in the brain, and scientific rules of society. His latest book is The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens. Philip and Greg discuss the perks and pitfalls of interdisciplinary work, whether curiosity is a virtue or a vice, and different perspectives on the mind and consciousness. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Embodiment is a crucial aspect of the mind45:15: You can't expect a mind that is just computing in some abstract space to develop the kinds of resources and capabilities that the human mind has. The human mind is part of us as an evolved being. And the mind didn't evolve by itself. It involved in the body, for the body as part of the body. In fact, it's an organ. The brain is an organ. And so, we understand the world as embodied beings. And partly what I mean by that is that we have a sense of things that we can do and things that we can't do that are predicated on the kinds of bodies we have.Having a computer isn't enough to understand the nature of human minds47:07: The idea of the brain as a computer, sitting in a room somewhere doing computation, is not enough to understand the nature of our minds, let alone others.The importance of fluency in scientific Research33:18: That fluency, that ability to put on different lenses and to remain open to different ways of thinking about a problem, is not just a great thing to have in life in general, but it's a really valuable thing to be able to do in scientific research.Bridging Physics and Social Science through Critical Mass18:26: Critical Mass was a book that was looking at how ideas that were developed in physics, condensed metaphysics, in statistical physics for understanding things like gasses and liquids and how they switch between the two forms, the things called phase transitions, how those ideas are now proving useful for social scientists because we can find some situations where people en masse, taken in large enough body and large enough numbers, show the same kinds of behaviorsShow Links:Recommended Resources:Ring of GygesThe Invisible Man by H.G. Wells Thomas Hobbes Richard Feynman clipDan Wagner Christof KochMurray Shanahan The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience by Matthew CobbEpisode 283: Matthew CobbGuest Profile:Philip Ball's WebsiteHis Work:The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to AliensShapes: Nature's Patterns: A Tapestry in Three PartsInvisible: The Dangerous Allure of the UnseenThe Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without ItCuriosity: How Science Became Interested in EverythingBright Earth: Art and the Invention of ColorCritical Mass: How One Thing Leads to AnotherBeyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is DifferentThe Water Kingdom: A Secret History of ChinaHow Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

The future has a landscape that is navigated as it comes, but across industries, legacy firms, and newly formed start-ups will do that very differently. All companies will be used to having sound strategies in the product world but may miss ways to capitalize on their data streams and what opportunities they open up. Mohan Subramaniam is a professor of Strategy at IMD in Lausanne, and he is also the author of the book The Future of Competitive Strategy: Unleashing the Power of Data and Digital Ecosystems.Mohan and Greg discuss the operational and strategic differences between digital firms and legacy firms in business with Mohan’s research into how companies like Ford compare to a company like Tesla. Mohan talks about the value chains created by the utilization of data but also the real-time access to it for use by third parties that you may not have initially planned for, having its own set of risks and rewards.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How can legacy firms navigate digital ecosystems?04:38: My hypothesis is that increasingly legacy firms will have to find ways of expanding their revenue base beyond their product and service worlds into the data world. And if you want to compete with data, it requires different principles. You have to figure out what digital ecosystems mean for you. They're not the same as Uber's or Amazon's digital ecosystems. They're different, and you have to understand what those digital ecosystems are. And figure out how to expand your business scope beyond what is defined by value chains through digital platforms.What is the incumbency advantage in the digital world?12:25: The bigger your value chain infrastructure and the greater your product footprint, the more powerful your digital ecosystems can become. But, of course, it requires a different way of framing and thinking about competitive strategy.How do you look at your buyers in the digital world?10:58: How do you look at your buyers in the industrial world? Buyers are those who basically buy your products. But in this digital world, your customers, or buyers, are those who give you data. Now, that's a very different ballgame. Selling a product and getting data from customers. It's a very different proposition. I call them digital customers. These are customers who give you sensor data.Adapting to the new frameworks51:34: If you want to impact practice, you have to give frameworks that tell you that in your business what makes sense. What is the new value that data can give you? What's the nature of the digital ecosystems you can build? How does it influence your competitive advantage? Now, it may fit in with the theory of the firm. I'm not denying that. But we need to now move forward with more specific frameworks for the new world that we are in.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Michael PorterJeff ImmeltEric SchmidtGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at IMDMohan Subramaniam’s WebsiteMohan Subramaniam on LinkedInMohan Subramaniam on TwitterHis Work:The Future of Competitive Strategy: Unleashing the Power of Data and Digital EcosystemsGoogle Scholar Page

The significance of early childhood skill development and its influence on long-term income and success differentials is widely recognized today. However, there exists a reluctance within society to allocate substantial resources toward extensive research and development endeavors aimed at innovating and enhancing the effectiveness of this pivotal learning process.While discussions about educational inequality receive significant attention, it is important to note that formal education constitutes only a small portion of a child's overall time. This places the primary responsibility for child skill development on parents as a private obligation, without providing them adequate training or addressing unrealistic expectations.Nate G. Hilger is a researcher and writer with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He has worked as a professor of economics at Brown University and as an economist and data scientist in Silicon Valley. His book The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis exposes the true costs of our society’s unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform.Greg and Nate discuss how the limited political influence of parents leads to the lack of funding for child skill development research and how cultural discussion about gender and race in the curriculum distracts from more valuable and universally supported concerns such as financing childcare and extracurricular activities, as well as ensuring access to comprehensive health and mental healthcare for children.They also talk about how to close the gap between kids of lower and higher-income families by providing access to high-quality early learning environments before kindergarten for everyone.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Should we start investing in parenting?20:40: I think the reason why we don't have hundreds of large-scale clinical trials, testing what works and what doesn't work in parenting and, more specifically, child development every year is just because we're not choosing to invest in the development of this knowledge. And I think it's a huge mistake we're making as a society. Shifting perspective on childhood development02:39: Once we reframe how we see child development, it starts to become clear that asking parents to organize 90% of this complicated activity on their own, in their spare time, on their dollar, is not a realistic expectation.A promising direction for progressives to push on49:31: If we could all come together and agree that kids need more universal support from professionals, like tutors, teachers, counselors, and nurses in their local communities, that would help people reach adulthood ready to stand independently and not rely as much on government programs.A big shift into the broader portfolio of skills that feed into lifelong success09:52: Economists tend to fixate on what they can measure and do statistics with. So now economists are coming on board as well to realize the extreme importance of things like social skills, empathy, your ability to speak clearly and persuasively, communication skills, your ability to persevere when you suffer a setback or a rejection, and your ability to control your emotions and your impulses in hot situations. So it's this broader range of skills that we're talking about here in terms of the burden we place on parents and what schools can achieve given that they have such a small share of children's time.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life by Annette LareauRecoding America by Jennifer Pahlka Tiebout modelGuest Profile:Nate G. Hilger's WebsiteNate G. Hilger on LinkedInNate G. Hilger on TwitterHis Work:The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality CrisisArticles on Medium

The concern for human rights seems to be deeply rooted in history and based on longstanding moral concerns, but the modern human rights movement has very different motivations and concerns than previous rights-based movements. Samuel Moyn is a Professor of History and Law at Yale University and Yale Law School. He is also the author of several books, the most recent of which being Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.Samuel and Greg discuss common perceptions and misconceptions about the growth of human rights doctrine, how the modern human rights movement is anti-utopian, and the role of Christianity in human rights movements. Samuel points out that governments throughout America’s history and also that of the West have used Human Rights as a rallying cry from both the left and the right to justify invasion, destruction, and violence. Samuel zooms out to talk with Greg about what morality these rights have been latched onto and where that morality has derived its authority at different times, and they talk about the current state of politics and the use of human rights as a chess piece in a very divided political landscape.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Historians’ role in imparting knowledge for progress or correcting past misunderstandings52:48: Historians can play a powerful and useful role in challenging dominant narratives, especially when they leave a lot out. And I've tried to do that in my work—not because I know what we should do, but because I wanted to disrupt a consensus that has been earned through historical myth. And once that myth is cleared away or less distortion, to rarely lie, it would be a lot easier if we could just say, "Our enemies are lying." But it's clear that history is a war in politics, and there's no way to free history from politics, although hopefully, we can have some conventions that keep our stories, at least from outright propaganda.Christianity and its connection to the human rights movement21:26: We can't say that Christianity always leads to human rights; often it leads to opposing human rights, but at various pivotal moments, there's a connection that we have to recognize.Human rights can mean a lot of things to different people48:53: Human rights can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so I wouldn't rule out that there could be some movement that says it's a human rights movement that sets the world on fire. And after all, I'm claiming that human rights 1.0 - revolutionary human rights - did so. But if we take that for granted, then we have to ask: is the current version of the idea of human rights and the movement associated with it going to have that same effect without being radically reimagined? And I think the answer is no, especially if we care more than ever about the distribution of the good things in life.Is utopia a recipe for terror?38:03: Before the human rights movement, these Cold War liberals think utopia is a recipe for terror, and it's just people didn't get the memo for a while, but in our time, I think we've kind of embedded Cold War liberalism as our kind of second nature.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Universal Declaration of Human RightsPeter Benenson Amnesty International BiographyHuman Rights Watch WebsiteThe Church of The Left by Adam MichnikWikipedia for Jeane KirkpatrickWikipedia for Daniel RocheWikipedia for Invented TraditionGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Yale UniversityFaculty Profile at Yale Law SchoolSamuel Moyn’s WebsiteSamuel Moyn on TwitterHis Work:Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented WarThe Last Utopia: Human Rights in HistoryChristian Human Rights (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Available on August 29, 2023)The Right to Have Rights Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal WorldHuman Rights and the Uses of History: Expanded Second EditionOrigins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry) Google Scholar Page

The importance of the division between violent and non-violent crimes seems to have existed for as long as we’ve had laws, but in reality, its legal salience is much more recent. So what happened in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s that led to the increase in punishment for crimes designated as violent? And what effects has it had?David Alan Sklansky is a professor at Stanford Law School and also an author. His latest book, from earlier this year, is titled A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for Justice.David and Greg discuss what changes the division of punishments of crimes has gone through over the years, what makes a crime violent or non-violent, and how those labels can be misleading or have shifted over time. They talk about how the stand-your-ground laws have grown in popularity, taking over from the former philosophy of duty to retreat. David discusses how violent acts are looked at differently, whether they are committed by citizens vs. officers of the law, and what that can say about a society.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The perils of distinguishing serious violence54:37: It may seem like that's not a big deal to talk about serious violence rather than violence. But I think it is because the thing about the language of serious violence is it wears its ambiguity, its subjectivity, or its vagueness on its sleeve. Nobody imagines that the line between serious and non-serious violence is clear and sharp. The very language makes it obvious that we're going to have to draw a distinction. We don't know exactly where the line is, but when we talk about violent versus nonviolent offenses, it's easy, it's natural, and it's common to think that there's a sharp line here and that anybody who's convicted of a violent offense is obviously and categorically worse, and that has huge consequence.The law draws on popular ideas about violence12:34: The law draws on popular ideas about violence, but the law also clearly reinforces those ideas by treating violence as a formal category and a category that has clear boundaries.Recognizing the gravity of violent policing04:18: There are other areas where we don't pay enough attention to the distinction between violence and nonviolent conduct, and the most important of those has to do with policing, where the law and rules that have developed for police misconduct don't treat violent police misconduct as categorically worse or really as even different than nonviolent police misconduct. And I think that's a mistake.Is violence a result of someone’s deep-seated character?17:49: Violence was thought to be the kind of thing that often happened explosively. I think over the last several decades, the way in which the law has thought about violence has shifted, and it's become much more common in many, but not all contexts to think about violence as something that is the result of somebody's deep-seated character and not the result of the circumstances in which they find themselves.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jeremy BenthamGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford Law SchoolProfessional Profile on American Law InstituteContributor’s Profile on InquestDavid Alan Sklansky on TwitterHis Work:A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for JusticeEvidence: Cases, Commentary, and Problems (Aspen Casebook) Google Scholar Page

It’s 2023, and women still only make 83 cents for every dollar a man makes in the U.S. While that gender wage gap has shrunk over time, why does it still persist? And what would it take to close it?Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She’s written numerous books on women in the workforce and the history of labor. Her most recent book is called Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity. Claudia and Greg discuss the history of the gender wage gap, how women’s place in the workforce has shifted over time, and what steps employers can take toward true pay and gender equity. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What is a greedy job?24:43: The greedy jobs are the ones that pay the most for additional hours, maybe not even additional hours, but your weekends, your vacations, that demand that you be on the road, that you be up in the air. And so those are the ones that women, disproportionately and for reasons that have to do with social norms, can't take. And so, therefore, in different-sex couples, there is a decision that we're not going to have couple equity. I'm going to take the flexible job, and you're going to take the greedy job. And so, by removing the fact that we no longer have couple equity, we throw gender equity under the bus.Are people constrained by norms?56:12: Norms arise because they have a function and are often kept in place and enforced by generations of people, whom we often call our parents and grandparents. And it would be very, very good if these norms changed as fast as society is changing.The difference between norms and beliefs32:26: It's required for a norm that there be a set of arbiters outside that care about the norms and go like this when you're not following the norms. And when those people go away, then you can do whatever you want. Norms require that there be an enforcer. An arbiter, okay? Beliefs are different. Beliefs are things like religion. No one isn't necessarily enforcing that. It's something that you believe in and preferences. If we have a mental accounting of this, preferences as well do not require that there be orbiters, but norms require that there be orbiters.Reframing the way we think about leaky pipeline50:17: A better way of thinking about the pipeline is that it's not leaking. It's that it's been made so convoluted. It has twists and turns that it's impeding. It's not as if women are leaking out. They're just being impeded from going forward.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Simon Kuznets Pew Research: "Most dads say they spend too little time with their children; about a quarter live apart from them"The Rug Rat Race by Garey Ramey and Valerie Ramey Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard UniversityProfessional Profile on National Bureau of Economic ResearchClaudia Goldin on TwitterHer Work:Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward EquityWomen Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages The Race between Education and TechnologyThe Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth CenturyUnderstanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women

Where do our desires come from? Babies don’t come into this world with an inherent drive to found tech companies. How much do our environment and the people around us shape those wants? Luke Burgis is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at The Catholic University of America and is the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, which expands on the mimetic theory of René Girard's. He also co-authored the book, Unrepeatable: Cultivating the Unique Calling of Every Person, which explores how to find one’s true vocation in life. Luke and Greg discuss why so many of our desires come from imitating those around us, the difference between thick vs. thin desires, and how true vocations in life should transcend just a job. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The importance of developing the habit of being present 47:41: We need to learn that skill of being present because we're always on all the time, social media phones. And when I say on, I mean we live in a world where everything is recorded. Everything is on stage; all the world's a stage, as Shakespeare said. So stepping off that stage from time to time doesn't necessarily mean going on a silent retreat, as I have. I've been very lucky to have had the opportunity to go on those. Sometimes it just means stepping off that stage and just being alone with ourselves and the people that are close to us.The moving goalpost is a real problem for mimesis33:23: The moving goalpost problem is a real problem when it comes to mimesis, especially when we're not clear about what the objectives are.Social media and how it made all of us into internal mediators for one another26:43: Social media, it's called the town square. But in a sense, it's made all of us into internal mediators for one another. We can all interact. It's narrowed the space—the existential space—between us and just made it a lot easier to assimilate ideas. It seems like we're all kind of living in each other's heads.What does it mean to have a personal vocation that is unrepeatable?53:22: ​​A vocation is something intensely personal. And that, you know, is mine because of my unique, created nature because of my time and unique circumstances that I've been born into. My unique family, the people that I encounter on a daily basis, and my personal vocation will be different than anybody else's who's ever lived.Show Links:Recommended Resources:René GirardIgnatius of LoyolaChef Sebastien BrasI See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René GirardGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at The Catholic University of AmericaLuke Burgis' WebsiteLuke Burgis on LinkedInLuke Burgis on TwitterHis Work:Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday LifeUnrepeatable: Cultivating the Unique Calling of Every Person

What if the key to understanding the way other people behave is understanding your own behavior first? Author Thomas Erikson has spent decades studying how people communicate and function. Through his work, he outlines four basic behavioral types to help people understand each other better in the workplace and in life. His books include, Surrounded by Idiots, Surrounded by Psychopaths, and Surrounded by Bad Bosses. Thomas and Greg discuss the red, yellow, green, and blue archetypes of behavior, why this framework will help you understand yourself better, and the benefits and limitations of personality tests. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On why you shouldn't forget about your soft skills01:05:09: If you forget about the soft skills, you're going to get yourself in trouble because you will need other people throughout your life to cooperate with. But to anybody who's listening, you will never make it on your own. I'm a self-made man. No, you’re not. You didn't do it completely on your own. Maybe you're the strongest driver in your life. Sure. But you didn't make it on your own. That is actually not true. You use a lot of other people. And if you know the best possible way to motivate them and bring them on board, that is what you're going to need. People skills—that’s the magic.Knowing how to keep your word is crucial to any process47:26: The difference between what you say and what you do for me is the most crucial point in any process, really, when it comes to recruiting new staff members, finding business partners, or finding investors.Motivators vs. behaviors23:14: Motivators are even more important than behaviors. Cause behaviors are what's on the surface. You can see the behavior, you can see how he talks, how he walks, what he says, what he doesn't say. You can't see the motivators. I call them even drivers. Because motivational factors drive your actions, it drives your behaviors. And deeper down that, you have the personality which is somewhere beneath the surface.How do you recognize a psychopath?59:00: If it feels bad, then it is bad because your emotions don't lie. Maybe you don't know why you feel bad when you're around this person or that person, but if it feels bad, it's bad, and then you should listen to that. Try to observe why I feel bad when I'm working with him. What is it that he's doing that makes me feel like this? That could be the only answer you need for now, and maybe then you should Show Links:Recommended Resources:Myers-Briggs TestDiSC TestBig Five Personality TraitsWilliam Moulton MarstonGuest Profile:Thomas Erikson's WebsiteThomas Erikson on LinkedInThomas Erikson on YouTubeHis Work:Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life)Surrounded by Psychopaths: How to Protect Yourself from Being Manipulated and Exploited in Business (and in Life)Surrounded by Narcissists: How to Effectively Recognize, Avoid, and Defend Yourself Against Toxic People (and Not Lose Your Mind)Surrounded by Bad Bosses (And Lazy Employees): How to Stop Struggling, Start Succeeding, and Deal with Idiots at Work

Colleges and universities, especially ivy league ones, make a point of accepting the “best and brightest” students. But what if they’re missing a whole slew of the best and brightest because of socioeconomic barriers? Evan Mandery is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. He’s a leading expert on the death penalty but has also been an outspoken critic of elite college admission practices. His most recent book, Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us, looks at the social inequity created by some of these practices, like legacy admissions. Evan and Greg discuss the steps colleges could take to socioeconomically diversify their classes, why these inequities exist in the first place, and how public universities compare to their Ivy peers when it comes to admission practices. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The different buckets of college admissions27:44: The way I conceptualize college admissions is there are like these different buckets that are being filled. You have the athletics bucket, which I don't think people get this. It's huge. And you have the legacy bucket. You have the donor bucket and the children bucket, you know, children of staff and faculty. And so, what you're having is like a "fair competition" for like a third of the slots. And, that's why it's restricted. So the only way this is going to change is either they expand capacity without adding another alpine skiing team or something like that. Or they're going to have to diminish their commitment to those, to reduce the size of some of those inequitable buckets.The trade-off of increasing spending per student51:34: As we increase spending per student, we make it more expensive to let in socioeconomically disadvantaged students. This disparity is staggering.How elite colleges are selling the perception that they have the best and the brightest10:54: Elite colleges have done a great job of selling the perception that they've identified the best and the brightest. And that is a lot of what the brand is. It's very damaging because I always hasten to say that meritocracy is a double-edged sword. If you say Harvard, Yale, and Princeton students are the best and brightest, you mean everybody else is the worst and dumbest.What’s wrong about ranking?19:38: I don't think there's anything inherently wrong about rankings, but they make no effort whatsoever to measure what's actually going on in the classroom. Everything that they're measuring is a proxy for wealth.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jonas SalkAntonin ScaliaThe Tortoise and the Hare with Malcolm GladwellCatharine Bond HillAcceptance: A Memoir by Emi NietfeldMilliken v. BradleyGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at John Jay College, City University of New YorkEvan Mandery's WebsiteEvan Mandery on LinkedInEvan Mandery on TwitterHis Work:Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide UsA Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America Eyes On City Hall: A Young Man's Education In New York City Political WarfareCapital Punishment: A Balanced ExaminationThe ProfessionalThe Revised Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Stories of Neurotic ObsessionQFirst Contact: Or, It’s Later Than You Think (Parrot Sketch Excluded)More scholarly articles

In a society where our bodies are constantly scrutinized and judged, surrounded by filtered images and surgically-enhanced features, we face overwhelming commercial and social pressure to contort ourselves to fit into predefined notions of acceptability.But is body positivity alone sufficient to resist those societal expectations, or is there a need perhaps for a deeper cultural shift in our relationship with our bodies?Clare Chambers is a British political philosopher at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, a political philosopher specializing in feminist theory, contemporary liberal theory, theories of social justice, theories of social construction, and bioethics, In her most recent publication, Intact: A Case for the Unaltered Body, Clare explores the unmodified body as a fundamental element of equality.Clare and Greg explore the detrimental impact of cultural and commercial pressures that perpetually reinforce body dissatisfaction, resulting in notable mental health challenges, while also investigating our inclination to focus on altering the physical form rather than shifting the societal viewpoint on diverse bodies and offering strategies to liberate ourselves from oppressive forces that impose body modifications.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are we all anxious about our bodies?17:15: The message that your body is not good enough is absolutely ubiquitous. We receive that on every level about almost every body part. So each of us has a different personal history with our bodies. Each of us has a different understanding of how our bodies fit into our culture. But in talking to people about the arguments for Intact, what I have clearly seen is that everybody has a part of their body or an aspect of their embodied experience that they feel anxious about and often ashamed of. That shame is about the body is a deep and ubiquitous phenomenon, and it's actually so deep that I think if we feel we don't have that shame, we feel shame as well. There's a sense we expect people to have shame about their bodies.Is feeling bad about your body part of life?56:52: Our society, our economics, and our culture are set up in such a way as to try to make us feel bad about our bodies all the time. And so if you are feeling bad about your body as a kid, that is part of life. That doesn't mean that your body is wrong; it's something to recognize and notice but try to move past.On accepting our bodies and their limitations 38:49: The body is its limitation for all of us. There are things that our bodies will never be like and can never do. And so the language of kind of cure suggests we need to somehow get rid of this problematic body, and then we'll have fixed the problem. Whereas actually, what we need to do is deal with the social context.Trying to allow our bodies to be normal is not an easy thing to do34:53: So trying to allow our bodies to be normal is not an easy thing to do. Our bodies change, and we have to come to terms with them and re-inhabit them. And each time we are faced with this disruption. But it's that allowing our bodies to be normal that I think is and can be compatible with equality, rather than thinking that they must be normal in the sense of being like other bodies.Show Links:Recommended Resources: Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal by Heather WiddowsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of CambridgeClare Chambers' WebsiteClare Chambers on TwitterHer Work:Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified BodyAgainst Marriage: An Egalitarian Defense of the Marriage-Free State (Oxford Political Theory) Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of ChoiceMore scholarly articles

From social media disinformation and phishing emails to grand-scale scams such as multimillion-dollar counterfeit art, Ponzi schemes or scientific fraud, our world is full of deceptions.Surprisingly, it is our own intuition that can be our worst enemy. The tendency to blindly accept what we already believe in or trust what sounds too good to be true leaves us vulnerable to deception. So how do we find the right balance between blind trust and constant skepticism?Daniel Simons is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, and the co-author of several books. His latest book, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It, explores how our instincts lead us to fall prey to scams and how to spot deceptions. Daniel and Greg discuss how our limited attention resources result in a focus on specific tasks and potential neglect of other crucial elements, and how personally appealing information can easily lead us down the wrong path. They also talk about the need to parse the world more finely without succumbing to wholesale distrust by evaluating our assumptions and posing challenging questions.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The problem with attention09:52: This is the general problem with attention. We tend to focus on one thing well and need to do that. We need to be able to filter out those distractions. So you want people looking for the thing that they’re supposed to find, because most of the time, that's what you want them doing, right? You want them devoting their resources to the diagnosis that's most likely. It's just that every now and then, you're going to miss something that's sometimes rare and sometimes not what you're looking for.Looking at consistency in a different way23:48: We often take consistency as a sign of deep understanding and credibility when we really should be looking for noise and should take it as a red flag.How do you know what the optimal allocation of trust resources is?10:04: We have to trust, and we have to accept that what other people are telling us is true much of the time. Otherwise, you really couldn't function if you were perpetual, cynic and skeptic about everything. You couldn't get anywhere. You'd be checking the ingredients on every box of food you buy to make sure it truly is what it says it is. You couldn't function in society and be a perpetual skeptic. And there's going to be a spectrum of people who are going to be much more trusting and much less critical and skeptical, and others who are much more skeptical. But you have to find this happy medium.Considering how we can be deceived02:26: This book is more about how our patterns of thought and the information that we find appealing and attractive can lead us down the wrong path. (02:51) The problem for most of us is that we don't typically think about how we can be deceived. So in that sense, it's probably less likely to become a tool for scammers than for users and consumers. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. CialdiniThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanSelective Attention TestMax BazermanDon A. MooreDaniel KahnemanUri SimonsohnLeif NelsonDiederik StapelGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignProfessional Profile on Psychology TodayDaniel Simons' WebsiteDaniel Simons on LinkedInDaniel Simons on TwitterDaniel Simons on YouTubeDaniel Simons on TEDxUIUCHis Work:Daniel Simons on Google ScholarNobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

There has been an undeniable shift in priorities throughout Higher Education during the 21st century. As schooling gets more and more expensive, the pathways to making a good return on that investment grow increasingly steeper so students prioritize prestige and certification over education. At the same time, the competition among universities to recruit the best researchers and achieve the highest rankings marginalizes the importance of teaching.William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist, critic, speaker, and the author of several books, including Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, and his newest work, The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society.William and Greg discuss Williams’s background, the heavy emphasis on research over teaching in Higher Education, and how one can get cut off from academia. They talk about the ways in which educational institutions are lacking and why receiving good instruction may not be a top priority for students anymore. William reveals what he thinks is at the root of the main problems in higher education and also how the invention of the smartphone has exacerbated the situation.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is inequality the fundamental problem in everything?45:27: The more we sort society into a few big, big, big winners, and a lot of losers, the more parents are understandably going to want to get their kids into the few schools that seem to guarantee theirs are going to be one of the winners. If we had a robust middle class, if you could support a family and send your own kids to college with one middle-class salary, I think there would be much less of this mania. So that's obviously a very big thing to do, but it would also make everything else better. To me, this inequality is the besetting sin. It is the fundamental problem of just about everything in American life, including all of our political pathologies. That's what I believe.Students aren't choosing a school based on how good they think the teachers are13:25: Students are not picking their university or college based on how good the teaching is or how good they think the teaching is. They're picking it mainly—if we're talking about selective colleges and universities—they're picking it based on the name.Can you still thrive in today’s academic world?40:02: If a student is really a seeker, cares about learning, and is less worried about accumulating credentials, they can do it. But it's harder because college costs more because everything costs more. Some people still make that choice. And are happy having made the choice, even though it's a struggle, but it's a struggle that they're willing to put up with because they can stand their lives.People are looking for humanistic education55:02: There is a tremendous hunger among young people for guidance and among adults for this kind of humanistic education. This kind of wisdom, but not wisdom where someone's imparting it to you. Wisdom in the sense of, let's open this text together and see what it has to say to us. People want that.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jonathan Zimmerman book The Amateur HourSpecialization from Adam SmithGuest Profile:Speaker’s Profile on ABP SpeakersWilliam Deresiewicz’s WebsiteWilliam Deresiewicz on LinkedInWilliam Deresiewicz on TwitterWilliam Deresiewicz on TEDxMtHoodHis Work:The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and SocietyExcellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful LifeThe Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big TechEssays in The AtlanticArticles on The American Scholar

How do economists understand complex phenomena like selection markets and corruption? With frameworks often called toy models. These models often point toward unexpected consequences and help us to design better markets and incentives. Raymond Fisman is the Slater Family Professor in Behavioral Economics at Boston University and the co-author of many books, including Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations, The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office, and his new book Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It.Raymond and Greg discuss Raymond’s work and how it relates to industries trying to deal with the problem of selection through examples in the airline, film, and sports markets. Raymond also shares what he’s learned about corruption, as well as the perception of corruption and how little the difference between those may matter. They discuss the issue as it relates with examples in China, Indonesia, India, as well as the United States Congress and Supreme Court. Greg also gets Raymond’s opinion on whether there is such a thing as ‘good corruption.’ *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:A barrier to finding a solution to a democratic political system39:52: One real barrier to finding our way to a solution in the context of a democratic political system is that people see corruption; they just think, ugh, the whole system's rotten. They're all the same. And it’s made even harder by the fact that we have seen, in many instances, politicians run on anti-corruption platforms only to find out they're just as corrupt as the people they replaced. So it was very undermining to citizens' faith that they can be part of the solution.The government isn't a business48:48: The government isn't a business, and you wouldn't want to run it like a business because there are features of the government's job that are very, very different from the job of a business.What is a selection market?06:18: A market that suffers from a selection problem is one in which businesses don't just care how much they sell, but they care whom they are selling to.Do we need to spend more time convincing economists to take culture seriously?51:22: What economists push back against is not that culture matters but just using culture as a residual explanation. Once you've tried everything else and nothing else quite worked, you say, "Oh, that's just culture." That's why we get these differences across groups. As is surely almost always the case, the truth lies somewhere in the gray between the black and the white.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Explanation of Organizational EconomicsWikipedia Page for Edward LazearUnderstanding the Lemons ProblemAmerican Airlines AAirPass ProblemWikipedia Page for Jeffrey SkollWikipedia Page for SuhartoPaper on Growth Under DictatorsMonitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in IndonesiaStanford Profile of Mark GranovetterGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Boston UniversityFaculty Profile at NYUProfessional Profile on National Bureau of Economic ResearchRaymond Fisman on LinkedInRaymond Fisman on TwitterHis Work:Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About ItThe Org: The Underlying Logic of the OfficeThe Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them-And They Shape UsCorruption: What Everyone Needs to Know®Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of NationsRaymond Fisman on Google ScholarCEPR Page of Publications

Sentience lies at the core of the human experience, allowing us to experience conscious awareness, subjective experiences, and a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. But are these capacities exclusive to humans? And are future machines likely to develop these abilities as well?Nicholas Humphrey is a theoretical psychologist based in Cambridge who is known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. He has been a lecturer in psychology at Oxford, assistant director of the Subdepartment of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge, senior research fellow at Cambridge, professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, and school professor at the London School of Economics. His latest book, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, uncovers the evolutionary history of consciousness and the nature of sentient experience in various species.Nicholas and Greg talk about some examples of animals that are believed to possess sentience, how high levels of consciousness can exist in animals without the extra dimension of sentience being present, how phenomenal consciousness came into being, and why it's very restricted in the animal kingdom and why being sentient should not be the only criterion for protecting certain animals and plants.They also explore that while sentience is not expected to emerge in machines naturally, there are potential benefits in our future endeavors to develop sentient artificial intelligence.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:A theory on how phenomenal consciousness came to being19:28: Psychology is a very difficult thing to do—to understand another person with a brain-like mine. The brain is the most complicated mechanism in the universe, as has often been pointed out. Yet you and I can read other people's minds with relative ease. How do we do it? We don't do it by virtue simply of intelligence or being clever. We do it by using our own presence, our own sense of ourself as a model for what it's like to be the other person. We are introspective psychologists, and you can only understand what it's like to be someone else by putting yourself in that place if you first know what it's like to be you. So you have to have a sense of your own self in order to model the selves of other individuals. The essential ingredient in our psychological life 17:50: For creatures like ourselves who value our individuality and count on it in our interactions with other creatures like ourselves, whom we assume to be phenomenally conscious in the same way and to have the same sense of self, this presence, this groundedness of our psychic life, is crucial to the way in which we develop our notion of what it is to be ourselves and our role in the world.The distinction between perception and sensation34:58: Perception is how we represent facts about the world. You know, the apple is round, the chair is heavy, or whatever it may be, the weight is heavy. The sound is the middle sea; facts about the world out there; and sensation is how we represent our interaction with the sensory stimuli in our body and how we feel about those.Soul niche26:41: This phenomenal consciousness and sense of self opened up a new ecological niche for human beings. I've called it the soul niche, which is that humans live in the soul niche, which is, I think, a niche centered on the idea of our individuality based on our self-consciousness. We live in that niche in just the same way that trout live in rivers or bed bugs live in beds.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at CambridgeNicholas Humphrey WebsiteNicholas Humphrey on LinkedInNicholas Humphrey on TwitterHis Work:Sentience: The Invention of ConsciousnessA history of the mindSeeing Red: A Study in ConsciousnessSoul Dust: The Magic of ConsciousnessThe Inner Eye: Social Intelligence in EvolutionSoul searching: Human nature and supernatural beliefArticles on AeonMore scholarly articles 

What if brain chemicals like oxytocin and cortisol could predict how people will behave in social situations and the workplace? Does more testosterone lead to aggressive leadership? Paul J. Zak is the head of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Claremont Graduate University. His books, including Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies and The Moral Molecule: How Trust Works, examine the connection between brain functions and building trust and cooperation in social groups. Paul and Greg discuss why, 99% of the time, humans default to cooperation, how leadership roles can lead to more circulating testosterone, and a tool that determines exactly what we love based on our brain functions.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How do you sustain long-term profit growth?25:15: Right now, we are dying for good people. So, the number of high performers is scarce, and the number of overall performers is scarce. So let's create an environment where they can flourish and perform at their best. They have the freedom and accountability to do what they love once they're trained. Give them some discretion; let them make mistakes; let them learn. Let them innovate. And that's the way to sustain long-term profit growth.An amazing customer experience starts with a great employee experience28:32: It's a sacred duty to create an amazing customer experience. But that starts with creating a great employee experience.Effective work cultures have low turnover34:55: One of the best predictors we found for effective cultures is low turnover. So, it's well known that most people do not leave jobs for more money. They leave because they just can't stand where they're working. And can't stand means the culture, the humans, and the way humans interact. That's what culture is.On trust and human performance24:31: What I think about trust, about human performance is that employees want it, and organizations benefit from it. So it's a really nice win-win space. On the data, you know, people who work in high-trust organizations get sick less, they retain their jobs more. They enjoy their jobs more. They recommend their place of business to friends and family to work there. So all these good things.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Vernon L. SmithJack WelchPeter DruckerGood for the Money: My Fight to Pay Back AmericaunSILOed episode feat. Ben WaberGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Claremont Graduate UniversityPaul J. Zak’s WebsitePaul J. Zak on LinkedInPaul J. Zak on TwitterPau J. Zak on TEDTalkHis Work:Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance CompaniesThe Moral Molecule: How Trust WorksImmersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Source of HappinessImmersion Neuroscience (Website)Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the EconomyMore scholarly articles

There are levels to leadership, and at the CEO level, the leadership needs are many, but it’s important to strike the right balance. CEOs must think about strategy in both the short and long term but also must not lose sight of the culture they create. ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast,’ as Peter Drucker famously said, and a wise leader pays close attention to the culture in their organization. Ken Wilcox is the and previously served as its CEO. Ken is also an author, and his latest book, Leading Through Culture: How Real Leaders Create Cultures That Motivate People to Achieve Great Things, is a guidebook for leaders of all kinds on how to create culture and, more importantly, why it is so important. Ken and Greg discuss Ken’s history with Silicon Valley Bank, but also why he was so successful there because of his emphasis and attention to creating the right culture. Ken goes over some key parts of being a good leader and the characteristics of different types of people in the organization. Ken and Greg also discuss the current state of SVB and what happened, as well as the interesting history of SVB starting a joint venture with China. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:You cannot hire good people to help you build the culture04:35: You can hire good people to help you build the strategy. You cannot hire good people to help you build the culture. That's something that has to emanate from the CEO, I believe. And the other thing about that is that if you have a good strategy but a poor culture, you're not going to do well. If you have a great culture and maybe a poor strategy, you can always bring some strategic thinkers on board, either in the form of employees or consultants, and they can help you create a much better strategy.Great leaders have a vision09:30: Great leaders have a vision. They're not focused on the present. They delegate most of the responsibility for what happens today and tomorrow to their management team. But most of them are looking into the future and saying, "Where is it I would like us to go, and how will we get there?" and sharing that over and over again with the management team and with the entire corporation.What makes a great CEO?10:01: Great leaders realize they can't do it all by themselves. They build themselves a management team, and then they use that management team to inform them before they make a decision. And one thing that's key here is who makes the decisions. I think good CEOs delegate most decisions downward and focus on only the really big decisions that have to do with long-term direction.Choosing the right adults for your team13:38: The people on your team are adults who understand that adults have different opinions, that all opinions may be valuable to one degree or another, and that the way to solve problems with other adults is to have good discussions where people are being honest without being bossy. There are two kinds of people, or three kinds of people, that you could bring onto a management team that are adults, and those are the people you should seek.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Forbes article on ‘Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast’LinkedIn article on Leadership ShadowWikipedia article on Cyrus the GreatWikipedia article on Charles M. WilliamsGuest Profile:Professional Profile on LeadingThroughCulture.orgProfessional Profile on WildChina.comContributor’s Profile at Stanford UniversityKen Wilcox on LinkedInHis Work:Leading Through Culture: How Real Leaders Create Cultures That Motivate People to Achieve Great ThingsAmazon Author Page for Ken WilcoxStanford Lectures by Ken Wilcox

Has the word “democracy” become a catch-all for good government? At this point, the idea is so romanticized that it may go unnoticed that the way America is run today is somewhere between a democracy and an oligarchy.Garett Jones, associate professor of Economics at George Mason University, delves into those questions in his book 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less. He also studies the factors and foundations of economic growth in his book The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like The Ones They Left. Garett and Greg discuss the true meaning of the word “democracy,” whether it’s better to have a well-educated elite calling the shots, and how migration can actually determine how prosperous a country will be. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What we love about our so-called ‘democratic system” are its most undemocratic parts03:18: When people use the phrase "we're a nation of laws, not of men," that's a way of saying in the short run, democracy doesn't decide how this trial turns out; the voters don't get to rule on this. We have some rules we set a long time ago. We have some nerdy judges who oversee the system, and they're making the decisions. So a lot of what we love about our so-called “democratic system" are its most undemocratic parts.08:54: The closer a politician is to voters, the further the politician is from wisdom.How do we measure democracy?06:09: The modern methods of measuring democracy often make this mistake of blurring together, like actual voter participation in government with neutral rules that can't be manipulated in the short run. So the first part, to me, is truly democratic. The second part is pretty much judicial independence, which is not democratic.Can migration determine how prosperous a country will be?43:04: The most important channel through which immigration of people from places like China and Western Europe the way that ends up shaping broadly shared prosperity is through our old cliche in economics, which is institutions. So for reasons that are somewhat poorly understood, countries that wind up with a lot of migrants from Eastern Europe, Western Europe, or Eastern Asia tend to wind up with better institutions, better rules of the game. Better rule of law, lower corruption, and that by itself creates a better set of rules that help create broadly shared prosperity for everyone.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan CaplanPolitical Realism by Jonathan RauchIron law of oligarchyPolitical Parties by Robert MichelsTammany HallGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at George Mason UniversityGarett Jones WebsiteGarrett Jones on LinkedInGarett Jones on TwitterHis Work:10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little LessThe Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like The Ones They LeftHive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your OwnBanking Crises: Perspectives from the New Palgrave Dictionary of EconomicArticles on EconlibMore scholarly articles

If you start to dig into the origin story of cryptocurrency, don’t be surprised if you find the ideas and values of the American Libertarian movement all over it. Finn Brunton teaches science and technology studies at UC Davis and is fascinated by the historical narratives and subcultures behind modern technology. His books include Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency and Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Infrastructures). Finn and Greg discuss how spammers and scammers were actually some of the earliest adopters of cryptocurrency, the American Libertarian roots in the movement, and the dark future cryptocurrency pioneers worried about.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Cryptographic algorithms as a weapons of war39:50: Cryptographic algorithms were classified as munitions, as weapons of war. Like you needed a foreign export license for them in the same way you would if you were selling tanks or something. So, as people were figuring out these sort of cryptographic primitives and fundamental algorithms and things like that, they started doing stuff like getting them printed on t-shirts because then you could be like, if I wear this t-shirt on an overseas flight, I am doing the equivalent of selling crates of AK-47s. And most famously, people got this extremely laconic version of this algorithm in a programming language called “perl” tattooed on themselves. And then you could say, my body is classified as a deadly weapon. You know, it's like this military device. So that tension, I think, is a really good tension for us to bear in mind as we look at how cryptocurrencies developed because part of their heritage was this awareness that strong civilian cryptography was seen as posing a genuine threat to the safety and security of the state.American libertarianism as an ideological strain of the history of cryptocurrency09:08: All of these different agendas for what technology should do represent different threads in libertarian, ideological ideas about what money should be and how society should operate. So that's part of what makes it so fascinating—that it's this new technology.What crypto as a whole shows10:01: To get certain kinds of technologies off the ground ,you can't just build the tech. You have to tell people about the future in which the tech is going to do something of value for them. And that kind of storytelling that media work is for me, where the rubber meets the road of these new technological ideas. And I saw both of them in crypto.On the value of science and technology studies01:01:05: What STS (Science and Technology Studies) provided was a space where all of these different areas, which are all adjacent, could have like a common center in the Venn diagram to meet up and hang out there, and part of what I love is that it gives you a passport to go and meet and learn from really interesting people in all kinds of different zones.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Gadsden FlagBitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi NakamotoThe Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret AtwoodThis Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information by Andy GreenbergEnigma MachineExtropianismGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC DavisHis Work:Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Infrastructures)Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency

The future is (not entirely) digital - The notion that digital technology will overtake every existing aspect of our lives is an oversimplified assumption.The pandemic-induced revelations, alongside the growing affinity of a younger generation raised in a digital era towards analog media like vinyl records or books, provide compelling evidence to the intrinsic human longing for experiences that transcend the purely digital domain.David Sax is a Canadian journalist, award-winning writer for publications such as New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg Business Week, and The New York Times, a keynote speaker, and the author of several books. His latest work, The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World, examines why our future is not inevitably digital and how to reject the downsides of digital technology without rejecting change.David and Greg talk about the need in a tech-obsessed society to find the right balance between embracing digital advancements that can genuinely enhance certain parts of our lives and the grand human experiences like everyday social interactions, building authentic connections, and experiential education that cannot be replicated by digital technology.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The value of the analog experience isn't diminished41:55: The world is everything. And I think we're sort of losing sight of that, and I think we still continually have the risk of losing sight of it because we can get everything in one place, because the information's so much easier and requires so much less effort in this way. But the value of that greater experience—the analog experience, this more human experience—isn't diminished simply because you don't have to step outside. What is the core of analog?16:19: We lose sight of the fact that the world is analog. The world is not digital. The planet that we're currently on, depending on where you are, is this physical, tactile thing that's the core of what analog is. And the computers, the ones and zeros, play a big role in certain parts of it.Who's driving the growth and interest in all things analog?18:12: I think generational generalization is this great lazy misstep that we always make around technology. [18:34] You know who's driving the growth and interest in all things analog. It's younger people—people who've grown up with this technology, right? Whether you look at the sales and vinyl records, whether you look at the pinball resurgence, whether you look at whatever it is, book sales, you know, all this sort of stuff, it's not people of my generation or your generation. It's those younger than us.On consuming technology wisely25:41: Plunging forward into the newest technology because it's possible and reorienting our lives around it because that's something that seems attractive or maybe there's an economic advantage or something that someone can sell is not something that we should do lightly.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Inevitable by Kevin KellyGuest Profile:Speaker Profile on The Lavin AgencyDavid Sax WebsiteDavid Sax on TwitterDavid Sax on LinkedInHis Work:The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human WorldThe Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They MatterSave the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish DelicatessenThe Tastemakers: Why We're Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with FondueThe Soul of an Entrepreneur: Work and Life Beyond the Startup MythArticles on The New Yorker

Questions around the possibilities and potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence cover the headlines these days, but are these actually new questions?Computer scientist Peter Norvig has been writing about AI and the ethics of data science for years. Before he was a professor at Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute, he worked for NASA and held a major consulting role at Google. His books, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th Edition) and Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, Opportunities, explore the theory and practice of AI and data science.Peter and Greg discuss the cyclical nature of new technology mania, the misconceptions of modern AI,  and the different ways companies could monetize these systems in the future. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Open source and AI Systems27:56: One reason to open source is if you have a vibrant open-source community, it's hard for one individual company to compete against that. One of the places I worked was Sun Microsystems. They had their own version of Unix. But that wasn't sustainable. You know, one company couldn't compete against the entire open-source Linux community. And I think companies see that. That'll be the same kind of thing with AI systems; if you try to be proprietary and go it alone, you'll fall behind the rest of the open source. And so, it's much better to participate with the open source than try to compete against it.The difference between AI and machine learning02:25: AI is trying to write programs that do intelligent things. Machine learning is doing that by showing examples. And the alternative to that is an older technology we call "expert systems", which means you use the blood, sweat, and tears of graduate students to write down pieces of knowledge by hand rather than trying to learn them.Data science is the intersection of statistics, machine learning and programming03:00: I think of data science as a combination of statistics or machine learning, the ability to do some programming, but not necessarily be a professional-level programmer. And then expertise in the particular type of data you have, whether that's biology, economics, or whatever the data is. And so, data science is the combination or intersection of those three aspects.Is there a possibility of generating revenue through subscriptions for big social media companies?35:39: As a society, we still haven't really understood or adapted to how digital works. And people are super willing to say, “I'm going to spend $50 or even a hundred dollars per month for some kind of physical good that I pay to my phone or cable provider.” But when it comes to paying a few pennies to read something on the internet, it's, “oh, no. Information wants to be free.” And I think we might be better off in a world where these assets were all aggregated, and you just paid for a subscription.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Billy BeaneBusiness Insider: The lawyer who used ChatGPT's fake legal cases in court said he was 'duped' by the AI, but a judge questioned how he didn't spot the 'legal gibberish'The New York Times: Google’s Photo App Still Can’t Find Gorillas. And Neither Can Apple’s The New York Times: A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettledrobots.txtMassive open online course (MOOC)Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityPeter Norvig's WebsitePeter Norvig on LinkedIn​​Peter Norvig on TEDTalkHis Work:Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th Edition)Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, OpportunitiesMore scholarly articles

Conversation and communication with others is a natural human urge, as well as a skill that can be developed and honed like any other. The power of conversation has been long known in society, and still, there are regular efforts to preserve and maintain the spaces and opportunities for genuine conversation in today’s world of screens and distractions.Paula Marantz Cohen is the Dean of the Pennoni Honors College and a Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University. She is also the author of several books. Her latest, which is titled Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation, is all about the art of good conversation and examining how it connects us all. Paula and Greg discuss the connection with Sigmund Freud and her own book’s title, as well as the connections and differences between conversation and therapy. Paula sheds some light on good practices in conversation and how to carry on civilly on issues that parties disagree with or are controversial. Greg and Paula discuss dinner parties and the false idea that all professors were constantly having them. They discuss the differences between French and American culture and also the idea that there must be a conventional hero and villain in circumstances that may be more nuanced than that.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are we professionalizing conversation by hiring people to have conversations with us?35:15: We're outsourcing conversation to our therapist. Yeah, that's a sad thing to think of because it also reflects the isolation of the individual. We're alone in ultimately anyway. And this seems to reinforce it further and make it less and less necessary to reach out to other people if we have that weekly appointment with the therapist whom we pay to listen to us and not agree with us but make us the center of focus. So that reinforces the fact that we don't really need anybody else to help us.Conversation is about the exercise of the mind47:34: I think we could sell conversation if we said it was about exercise for the mind, but then we might defeat the purpose.On forging bonds with people through conversation35:15: Finding points of divergence is a lot of fun. As long as goodwill is involved, as soon as there's animus involved, it's not fun anymore, and as soon as it becomes a matter of winning or losing, which is detrimental to conversation, I know people who can only converse or only discuss things they disagree with if they can win. And I didn't realize until recently that I just don't want to do that anymore.Why is dynamic so inherent in our nature?28:59: Many young people are trying desperately to get out of that dynamic of othering because they find it not virtuous. On the other hand, for the sake of intimacy, there has to be a little bit of that we versus they.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Talking Cure by Sigmund FreudDale CarnegieThe Teagle FoundationSt. Johns Mathematics MethodGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Drexel UniversityProfessional Profile on Macmillan PublishersPaula Marantz Cohen's WebsitePaula Marantz Cohen on LinkedInHer Work:Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of ConversationOf Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About EmpathAlfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of VictorianismBeatrice Bunson's Guide to Romeo and Juliet: a novelSuzanne Davis Gets a LifeGetting Dressed: Confession, Criticism, Cultural HistoryWhat Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or Love, Death, and the SATsJane Austen in Boca: A NovelSilent Film and the Triumph of the American MythBlogs for The American Scholar

Courage is not a character trait that is limited to a select few but rather a skill that can be cultivated through deliberate practice.Unless we repetitively practice the high-stress, emotion-laden situations in which we aspire to be courageous, we will never magically become skillful in those moments.Jim Detert is a Professor in the Leadership and Organizational Behavior area at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration and a Professor of Public Policy at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. In his book “Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work” he explores how to be 'competently courageous' so that our courage pays off for us and for our organizations.Jim and Greg talk about how to instill a habit of courage, how to overcome the fear of potential negative consequences work-wise or socially, and how to create accurate risk assessments when it comes to choosing the right battles. They also discuss the prevalent inconsistency within organizations that profess to value individuals with courage while, in actuality, demonstrating a reluctance to embrace them and how to change the structural policy and behavioral conditions to truly facilitate courage in the workplace.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How do you power-through emotion-laden situations?35:25: If you're going to act skillfully in high-stress, emotion-laden situations, you have to practice in high-stress, emotion-laden situations. Practicing in a cognitively cool manner is what a lot of us do, and it's why most of us walk out of a room after and go 30 seconds later. Oh sh*t, I should have said this during the because what happens is your amygdala hijacks your executive functioning, and unless we practice repetitively trying to stay in the moment during that hijacking and tamp it down and act, we'll never just magically be skillful in those moments.In a true learning culture, nobody has to pretend they’re perfect19:27: In a true learning culture, nobody has to pretend they're perfect, and nobody has to pretend that they can't be corrected in public.The key to sorting out a troublemaker  23:42: If you were going to help a recruiter sort out the difference between a chronic troublemaker versus a legitimate truth-teller who simply wanted to draw its right and improve the organization, I think to me it's a matter of patterning. So if a person has had a pattern of successful jobs they've been in for some time and then has a single situation where they are able to explain why it didn't work out, that to me is different than a person who's had seven jobs in the last six years. And for whom every single organization has somehow been toxic and had a terrible boss. At some point, when you are the only consistent thing in a pattern of different situations, you're the problem.The role of leaders30:02: The role of leaders, particularly senior leaders, is to change the structural policy and behavioral conditions so that they get the learning behaviors they need without people thinking it's courageous.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of Virginia, Darden School of Business Professional Profile on Psychology TodayJim Detert's WebsiteJim Detert on LinkedInHis Work:Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at WorkJim Detert on Google Scholar

When scientists game the system to get publishable results, it undermines the legitimacy of science.. Data can be interpreted many different ways and sliced into an infinite number of shapes, but specifically shaping your results to make them fit restrictions leads everyone down the wrong path. This is called torturing data, and it can look like cherry-picking participants or results for a study or getting your results first and then reverse engineering your hypothesis after the fact.Gary Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He is also the author of several books on data and economics. His latest work, Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, explores society’s general and specific instances of distrusting science in different ways.Greg and Gary discuss what nefarious things go on when scientists focus on keeping low P Values. They discuss the distinctions between correlation and causation that an AI might not be able to distinguish and the work in that area of Diedrik Stapel. Gary discusses data mining and HARKing. Gary and Greg discuss the difference in importance and feasibility of both backcasting and forecasting with markets, what makes ChatGPT work under the hood, and the real advantage that Warren Buffet has in investing.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The future of education with large language models50:22: We may be going to a world where my ChatGPT talks to your ChatGPT, but I hope not. And in most jobs, you have to communicate, you have to write reports that are persuasive, coherent, and factually correct. And sometimes you have to get up, speak and talk. And in some of my classes, a lot of the things I do are group projects where they work on things outside of class, then they come into class, stand up, and present the results, kind of like a real-world business situation. And the large language models are not going to take that over. And I think if education switches more to that model, teaching critical thinking, working on projects, communicating results, education's going to actually get better. It's not going to destroy education.Underestimating our capacity as human beings29:27: The problem today is not that computers are smarter than us. But we think they're smarter than us, and we trust them to make decisions they shouldn't be trusted to make. Data mining is a vice23:02: The problem is these computer algorithms they're good at finding patterns—statistical patterns—but they have no way of judging, assessing whether it makes any sense or not. They have no way of assessing whether that is likely to be a meaningful or meaningless thing. And too many people think that data mining is a virtue. And I continue to consider it a vice.The danger of large language models46:53: The real danger of large language models is not that they're going to take over the world but that we're going to trust them too much and start making decisions they shouldn't be making.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Ronald FisherAndrew GelmanNYT article about Diedrik StapelP-Value HackingHARKing Wikipedia PageDaryl Bem Wikipedia PageChatGPTGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Pomona CollegeGary Smith's WebsiteGary Smith on LinkedInGary Smith on TwitterHis Work:Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on ScienceStandard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with StatisticsThe Phantom Pattern Problem: The Mirage of Big DataWhat the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday LivesThe 9 Pitfalls of Data ScienceThe AI DelusionMoney Machine: The Surprisingly Simple Power of Value InvestingYour Home Dividend: Why Buying A Home May Be the Best Investment You'll Ever MakeThe Art and Science of InvestingGary Smith on Google ScholarArticles on Discovery Institute Articles on Salon

While it is commonly assumed that prevalent health issues like heart disease, obesity, and depression are uniquely human experiences, they exist across multiple species.Despite the undeniable connection rooted in our shared animal nature, a perceptible barrier remains between human and veterinary medicine and psychology, often driven by the notion of human exceptionalism.Barbara Natterson-Horowitz is a cardiologist, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology at UCLA, a visiting professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, as well as a New York Times bestselling author. Her latest book “Wildhood” examines the surprising parallels of adolescent humans and animals in navigating risk and social hierarchies, how to connect romantically, and how to live independently.Barbara and Greg talk about the importance of removing the blindfold of human exceptionalism and a cross-species approach to medicine and psychology, which includes veterinary and evolutionary perspectives, to gain valuable insights from other species.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What are the core competencies of being an adult?54:24: Adolescence occurs across vertebrates, and even—we studied lobsters, crayfish, and so on—invertebrates. And that we decided to make the definition our own, and this was based on a number of studies that we did to figure out what are the core competencies of being an adult. And we said, "Okay, it starts with puberty. And it ends when an animal has mastered four core competencies, which are staying safe, learning to navigate social structures and hierarchies, learning to communicate sexually, not have sex because, as we say, copulation is easy, courtship is hard, and then finally learning to feed yourself and be independent.The connection between human and animal medicine57:47: If you ask physicians today what is the connection between human and animal medicine, they'll say infection; they'll say what is called zoonosis; and what they'll leave out are the connections around heart disease and psychiatry, which is mental health.What is most likely to kill wild animals?23:15: The risk of starvation is a clear and present danger when you look at what is most likely to kill wild animals. And there is some debate about what is the greatest danger. And it probably varies, but starvation, predation, and infection are definitely high up there. And the three interact. So starvation is a clear and present danger to survival.Recognizing biodiversity21:02: Part of biodiversity is physiologic diversity, and part of physiologic diversity is neurophysiologic diversity, and neurophysiologic diversity shapes behavior. So there's this continuity that I don't think most psychotherapists and psychiatrists are sufficiently aware of.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at UCLABarbara Natterson-Horowitz's WebsiteBarbara Natterson-Horowitz on LinkedInBarbara Natterson-Horowitz on TwitterBarbara Natterson-Horowitz on TEDMEDHer Work:Wildhood: The Astounding Connections between Human and Animal AdolescentsZoobiquity: The Astonishing Connection Between Human and Animal Health by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz & Kathryn BowersBarbara Natterson-Horowitz on Google Scholar

Life is all about solving problems—whether it’s what shirt to put on in the morning or how to solve a complex engineering question. And without problems, life wouldn’t have much meaning. But how do you master effective problem-solving skills? Bernard Roth is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University and is one of the founders of Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (also known as the d.school). It was at Stanford that he first noticed a correlation between problem-solving in engineering and problem-solving in life. So he integrated those ideas into his teaching and wrote, The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life. Bernie and Greg discuss the importance of embracing the problems in your life, how to become a more effective problem solver, and why reasons are bullshit. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Seeing problem as an opportunity14:54: I live with people who believe problems are opportunities. So the bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. And if you think about it, that's what life is about. Life is about problem-solving. Problem-solving is a great activity, and it's not necessarily frustrating. It's not like a disease, you know; it's actually an exercise.Redefining achievement17:30: To me, achievement is when you die, your friends don't have to lie about you. And you enjoyed life in a way that you found it to be a life forceUsing reasons as an excuse26:39: The big thing is reasons are often used as excuses. And that's for me the big “so what?” So “reasons are bullshit” is the truth, that they're not the truth of anything because there is no reason for one thing, and who cares? But the point is that if you use a reason, it's an excuse often and doesn't let you move forward.The idea of failing forward13:47: You have to do something. You have to take a step. You don't sit there and think and think and think about it; you're taking the step. You get valuable feedback, which you can then use to improve things. So that's our philosophy of this bias towards action and the idea of failing forward. And it seems to work.Show Links:Recommended Resources:John E. ArnoldWright BrothersGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityBernard Roth on LinkedInBernard Roth on TwitterBernard Roth on Talks at GoogleHis Work:The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your LifeMore publications by Bernard Roth

Here’s the thing about evolution: It’s really complicated. And there’s so much about how humans have evolved and what causes certain behaviors that scientists are still figuring out. It’s those unknowns that fascinate Marlene Zuk, a professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. She’s written numerous books on animal behavior and evolution, with her most recent publication being Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters. Marlene and Greg discuss common misconceptions about genes and heredity, how to even define “behavior,” and why humans have not evolved to be perfectly suited for our environment. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On the complexity of science04:14: Newsflash: Science is complicated. But I feel like if you can internalize that complication, it's really liberating because you realize that you do not have to come up with the sound bite, the click bait, or whatever you want to call it.Underestimating our capacity as human beings29:44: Mismatch is real, but what it illustrates is how evolution works, which is full of trade-offs and things that are just okay but functional. And evolution doesn't produce organisms that are perfect for their environment because it can't. Evolution can only produce something based on what's already there.Evolution shows your connectedness among living things20:44: One of the things that I think is super cool about evolution is that it shows you the connectedness among living things. How awesome is that? But to go from there to creating this scale of nature, this chain of being, and saying, "Okay, well, this one is next to me because it's better than the one that's behind it, and the ones that are next to me are better than the ones that aren't next to me," That just seems feudal.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Hamish SpencerWatson and Crick She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of HereditaryunSILOed episode featuring Daniel LiebermanGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of Minnesota Professional Profile on Association for Behavior Analysis InternationalHer Work:Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It MattersPaleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We LiveSex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect WorldRiddled With Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We AreSexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn About Sex from AnimalsScholarly Articles

How much did the religious beliefs of the Enlightenment Age influence the evolution of modern economic theory? Can widespread economic growth lead to an improvement in moral character across a vast population? Benjamin M. Friedman is a professor and former Chair of Economics at Harvard University. In his books Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, he explores the relationship between economic theory, religious thought, and views of moral progress.Benjamin chats with Greg about how the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular, became a hub for social scientific thought, what the belief in Calvinism had to do with the rise of capitalism and the correlation between economic growth and positive moral changes in society.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Predictable pathologies01:01:20: The fact that there's a lot of ungenerosity in our society, the fact that we have renewed racial tensions, the fact that there's a lot of antipathy toward immigrants, the fact that large numbers of people in our country are not particularly committed to the fundamentals of American democracy that we've had for a very long time—all these are not just pathologies. They are predictable pathologies. They are the symptoms that emerge whenever we go through a lengthy period, like 18 years, in which the broad bulk of society doesn't have any improvement in its living standard.The cause and effect of our acts and works34:26: The fact that people can and sometimes do make other people better off through actions, which are not self-interested behavior doesn't preclude the fact that people also can make others better off under the right conditions by acting in a way that's self-interested.Is economic growth consistent with the improvement of human moral character?58:33: I believe that economic growth, by which I mean rises sustained, increases improvements in living standards, broadly distributed among the population. That is the condition under which society is able to move forward in a variety of non-material dimensions that, ever since the Enlightenment, we've taken to be morally positive.Economics is a product of the Enlightenment06:09: Economics is a part of the Enlightenment, and we do normally think of the Enlightenment as a movement away from conceptions of a God-centered universe toward what we, in our modern vocabulary, would call secular humanism. And so I don't think people who have the conventional view are being stupid, obtuse, or ignorant, but I do think it is wrong. And that's what the book was about: showing that the conventional view, which excludes any role for religious thinking in the origins of modern Western economics, is seriously incomplete.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Adam SmithDavid Hume Newton’s Principia MathematicaDeism and Benjamin Franklin Charles DarwinThomas Robert MalthusAlbert EinsteinThe Fable of the Bees by Bernard MandevilleMax WeberFrancis WaylandJohn McVickarFrancis BowenGreg’s conversation with William BernsteinRichard ElyHenry Ward BeecherGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard UniversityProfessional Profile on National Bureau of Economic ResearchProfessional Profile on American Academy of Arts and SciencesHis Work:Religion and the Rise of Capitalism The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth More publications

It may be rational to be ignorant, and it might even be rational to be irrational! This is quite prevalent in our highly polarized and tribalized current political landscape. In fact, it is what gives politics its newfound religious flavor. In education it exists where we move everyone forward the same amount, no one has moved relative to each other, and it is considered progress. Bryan Caplan is an economist and a Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He is also an author whose latest book is titled Voters as Mad Scientists: Essays on Political Irrationality, and it is a collection of his very best essays published originally over the years on EconLog.Bryan and Greg discuss politics and voting. They discuss the value of voting in this democracy. They also talk about Bryan’s book and get into different instances of voter irrationality. Bryan discusses his political views, and they both ponder the question of how much educational investment is socially wasteful. Finally, they talk about parenting and schools and how to an economist, everything has an associated price.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:On deciding your family size52:03: I think that most people decide their family size based upon current exhaustion rather than weighing, "How many kids do I want now? How many kids do I want in 40 years?" But the main thing I tell people is that first, fix your parenting style to get in line with the facts, because it's just not true that your kid's future is in your hands. And then, secondly, once you do that, once you have relaxed to this level, that is when it makes sense to rethink the number of kids you want to have.Rational rationality gives politics its religious flavor11:21: The same incentives that give you very little reason to acquire information also give you very little reason to be intellectually honest and exert normal intellectual self-discipline. And those latter things are what I call rational irrationality. And this is really what gives politics its religious flavor.How do you know if you’re making rationally ignorant decisions?10:04: Rationally ignorance is something that has been talked about in social science for a long time. It's just the idea that when time is money, it is often not worthwhile to get information. And so you can rationally make a decision to be ignorant.Thinking beyond normal data sets can change your kids' outcomes49:59: If you want to change your kids' long-run outcomes, you have to do something weird. You have to do something that is literally off the chart, something that is rare enough that we don't see it happening in normal data sets.Show Links:Recommended Resources:10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little LessImmigration vs. Social Desirability BiasThe Case Against the Sexual RevolutionGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at George Mason UniversityProfessional Profile on Cato InstituteBryan Caplan’s WebsiteBryan Caplan on TwitterBryan Caplan on SubstackHis Work:Bryan Caplan on Google ScholarArticles on The Library of Economics and LibertyThe Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad PoliciesVoters as Mad Scientists: Essays on Political IrrationalityOpen Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You ThinkDon't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine JusticeHow Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on DemagogueryLabor Econ Versus the World: Essays on the World's Greatest Market

From the Silent Generation to Gen Z, different generations have distinct behaviors, values, and attitudes that were shaped by the events during their formative years.However, the most significant factor influencing generational differences is technology.While technological progress has led to more individualism, it also can have negative impacts on mental health, leading to depression and suicide.Jean M. Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, consultant, public speaker, and author of a number of books. Her most recent book “Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future” explores how different generations connect, conflict, and compete with one another.Jean and Greg discuss the most critical influences on different generations' experiences, such as parenting styles and technology, and the importance of understanding and respecting other generations' viewpoints.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The negative impact of social media on mental health19:35: Right around that time, 2012, teens also started to spend a lot less time with their friends in person. So that had been on a slow decline since about 2000, but it fell off a cliff in the age of the smartphone. Teens also started spending less time sleeping right around that time. So, basically, the way they spent their time outside of school fundamentally changed. They started spending a lot more time online. A lot less time with their friends in person and less time sleeping. And that's not a good formula for mental health. So that's one of the mechanisms. And there's all of the others—all of the negative content that people come across on social media. Cyberbullying, the social comparison because everybody else's life is more glamorous. Body image issues, which have been well documented, including by the company Facebook themselves, who owns Instagram, found that Instagram led to body image issues among teen girls and young women. So, it's all of these mechanisms that the end result is more depression.Depression isn't just about emotions; it's about cognition.30:15: Depression isn't just about emotions; it's about cognition. It's about how you see the world, and so when more people are depressed, then you'll get that, as we do between millennials and Gen Z, that shift from optimism to pessimism, and pessimism and negativity are not all bad. If they're channeled into action, they can be a good thing.One dilemma of individualism40:01: That's one of the dilemmas of individualism, particularly for young adults: There's a lot more freedom, not as much restriction, on what I mean, it's just one example, like what you're going to do for your career. It used to be that was, not exclusively, but certainly heavily influenced by your race and your gender, and that's not true as much anymore. So it opens up many more possibilities. It also means, though, that there's a lot of choices, and that can sometimes be overwhelming.To what extent are the rise in depression and the data simply an acknowledgment that it's okay to have mental health issues?41:49: We know for sure that just more willingness to admit symptoms or problems doesn't explain the rise in mental health issues. Because if it was just that, you wouldn't see the rise in emergency room visits for self-harm, suicide attempts, or completed suicides, and not only is there that rise, but the pattern is about the same as the reports of symptoms.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at San Diego State UniversityJean M. Twenge's WebsiteJean M. Twenge on TwitterJean M. Twenge on LinkedInJean M. Twenge on TEDxLagunaBlancaSchoolHer Work:Jean M. Twenge on Google ScholarGenerations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's FutureiGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for AdulthoodGeneration Me - Revised and Updated: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before

The science of economics can be an intimidating topic to understand, but it can be broken down into basic motivations and forces that are understandable to anyone. Supply, demand, and trade-offs are a part of everyone’s daily life and should be identifiable in any industry or market. Matthew Hennessey is a journalist who is the Deputy Op-Ed Editor for the Wall Street Journal. He is also an author, and his latest book is titled Visible Hand: A Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the Market, which is an accessible primer on economics for newcomers of all ages and explains the concepts of the market in plain and understandable terms.Matthew and Greg discuss how Matthew’s book works to support and inform all ages of readers. Matthew recounts a motto from a high school teacher that on a wall stuck with him and changed his life. They talk about the differences in the ways different generations act with respect to the market, and they discuss how a newsroom goes about keeping the news and opinion departments separate. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Bad ideas never really die20:54: Bad ideas never really die. They go to sleep for a while, and then they come, wake up, and come back to life to haunt us all. And people our age are living through something that we never thought could happen, which is a revival of a bunch of really bad ideas that everyone thought had been laid to rest long ago.14:29: The world is more filled with mystery than any one person can ever understand, and there's no reason why markets should be any different.The market is like gravity16:58: The market is like that. It's like gravity. You can't see it, but you know what it does, and don't mess with it. I don't mean that as a threat. Like, don't mess with the market. You can't take the screws out of the tires and expect it to do what it's meant to do. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Generations and years of themEconomics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic EconomicsRequiem for the Newsroom by Maureen Dowd James TarantoGuest Profile:Professional Profile on Much RackProfessional Profile on Manhattan InstituteMatthew Hennessey on LinkedInMatthew Hennessey on TwitterMatthew Hennessey on InstagramHis Work:Articles at New York PostVisible Hand: A Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the MarketZero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials

Is it a bad day that puts someone in a bad mood, or could it be the room they’re sitting in? The environments we place ourselves in function as much more than just mere backdrops, and the way spaces are designed can greatly influence how the people in them feel and react. A simple window can mean the difference between health and sickness, and the height of a ceiling may unlock creativity.Sarah Williams Goldhagen is an architecture critic and an author. Her latest book, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, is about how the environments we are in shape us in some ways we realize and in many ways that we don’t.Sarah and Greg discuss Sarah’s background and how she forged her own path to the field of environmental psychology. They talk about different known features of built architecture that affect humans in non-conscious ways, like higher ceilings, sharp angles, and the presence of windows. Sarah also introduces and explains how we experience a sort of ‘blindsight’ everyday.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The importance of attention management for designers13:54: I often say to architects part of your job is attention management. Don't make people pay attention when they're just trying to find their way. They've got better things to do. They're stressed anyway, unless they're going into a hospital, a classroom, or whatever. They want to get there. That's not where you want them to pay attention, but you do want them to pay attention in, for example, so-called “restorative spaces,” which are spaces that people can deliberately design in order to slow people down, let them notice, in a fascinated and intriguing way, what's around them, which is shown to lower cortisol levels, relax people, and make them less stressed. Neutral buildings don’t exist19:43: There is no such thing as a neutral building. If a building is not helping the people who are using it, it's probably hurting them. And you can do a bad building or a good building at any level of investment for the same amount of money.Do we have blindsight in our environments?28:15: Most of the time, people don't pay a whole lot of attention to their environments. They're busy. We're all busy. You're not thinking about your environment, but that doesn't mean the environment isn't affecting you. So in this sense, we're all blindsighted.Something to look forward to in the built environment42:53: The most interesting thing that is happening in the built environment right now is probably related to the workplace because nobody can figure out what the workplace is for, how to use it, what it should be for, how to reconfigure these monoliths that we have that were meant for a kind of work that most people don't want to do anymore. And I think that there is more data. Around the workplace and around healthcare than there is around anything else. Because, of course, those are two big money drivers in the economy, and it will be very interesting to see. And some organizations involved in this space are already beginning to incorporate insights from environmental psychology and other research?Show Links:Recommended Resources:Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and JohnsonThe Mirror Neuron SystemBlindsight BBC ArticlePeter Barrett’s Classroom ResearchAcademy of Neuroscience for ArchitectureGuest Profile:Professional Profile on Van Alen InstituteSarah Williams Goldhagen's WebsiteSarah Williams Goldhagen on LinkedInSarah Williams Goldhagen on TwitterSarah Williams Goldhagen on InstagramSarah Williams Goldhagen on Talks at GoogleHer Work:Sarah Williams Goldhagen on Google ScholarWelcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our LivesLouis Kahn's Situated Modernism 

Most Americans have had to do it at some point: check the box that most closely describes how you identify your race or ethnicity. But those categories can be limiting. How did America settle on the specific categories that are in use? And what does it mean for how the country works on a sociological level and a legal one? David E. Bernstein is a law professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. He’s written several books and scholarly articles dealing with legal history and legal interpretation, such as Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America and Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform. David and Greg discuss both of those books in a sweeping conversation about the history of race in America, why certain categories or groups were established, and how the idea of progressivism can look starkly different depending on the time period.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why are educated people so comfortable with simplistic narratives?01:04:15: For academics, I think that once a narrative becomes established, it's really hard to fight against it. You're a young academic writing your Ph.D. thesis, you're writing your initial articles. Yes, you might want to be the Dragon Slayer who proves the new thesis and everyone else was wrong. But you better do that really well. So if you do a half-baked job, don't persuade people that much. People can say, "Oh, you're just a nut; you're just someone on the fringe, and you don't know what you're talking about." It's a lot easier to go along with the accepted narrative, add your little piece to it, add your little extra research, get tenure, and live your happy life. So I think most people are go along to get along people, they're not especially independent-minded or interested in upsetting the apple cart.On the identity entrepreneur issue12:05: The identity entrepreneur issue—there are several layers to it. There are people who could choose one of many identities and choose whatever happens to be the most convenient for their particular purposes.Why are classifications so influential?16:13: One reason these classifications are so influential is that the census uses them. And it's not just that the census uses them. The census is the font of all data for researchers.Are Americans becoming less prejudiced?39:59: I think what we have in the long run is a cultural battle that's sort of beneath the surface that no one talks about between what's going on at the grassroots, where Americans are less prejudiced than they've ever been. 95% of Americans have no objection to interracial marriage, compared to 4% in 1958. That's quite a difference.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Rise of the Unmeltable EthnicsLochner v. New YorkBuchanan v. WarleyAffirmative ActionWhat Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America Rachel DolezalDesi ArnazTed WilliamsLefty GomezHank GreenbergJackie RobinsonDred Scott v. SandfordMichael Shermer and Skeptic Magazine Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at George Mason UniversityContributor’s Profile on The Federalist SocietyDavid E. Bernstein on TwitterHis Work:David E. Bernstein on Google ScholarScholarly Papers Article on Tablet MagazineClassified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in AmericaLawless: The Obama Administration's Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care CaseRehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform You Can't Say That!: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination LawsOnly One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (Constitutional Conflicts)

Throughout history, new advances in science, such as the advent of electricity, nuclear power, genetic engineering, or artificial intelligence, have often been met with fear and uncertainty. While novel scientific developments offer countless possibilities for improving our lives, they also come with ethical considerations and sometimes unintended consequences that must be carefully navigated.Matthew Cobb is a professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, where his research focuses on the sense of smell, insect behavior, and the history of science. He is also the author of a number of books, including As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age and The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience.Matthew and Greg discuss how even well-intended use of novel technology can lead to unforeseen repercussions, why certain research, such as the gain-of-function studies, might not be worth the risk, and how good international regulation can ensure the safe use of potentially hazardous technologies such as atomic energy.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Overcoming fears and diving deep into genetic engineering09:08: Partly, why I want to write the book because there are three things that do worry me, very much. At least maybe two of which people are aware, and the third one they're not. And I wanted to alert people, but also, I recognize that my fears are very similar to those that occurred in the mid-1970s, for example, when genetic engineering was first developed. And it turns out that those fears were, well, unnecessary or not. But certainly, they have not caused the catastrophe that some people feared. So I wanted to test my anxieties against the past and try and work out whether I'm making a fuss about nothing or whether I'm to be alarmed.On crispr33:30: There's a series of quantitative steps toward genetic engineering. But there's a qualitative difference when you know what you're going to do and what you're putting in. This gene does this, we're going to put it in to do that. And that's an element of precision and intentionality, which makes it different.New technology disturbs us06:49: New technology generally does disturb us. If it's very widespread. Look at all the fuss about screen time and our dopamine systems being hacked by our phones. And so, no, they're not. But that's what it feels like, because you can get addicted to this endless scrolling. So, technology always has this very dangerous aspect when it's introduced, and then gradually, it becomes slightly less alarming. And that's happened with nuclear power.Why do we have different views genetically modified food24:37: Food is not simply stuff you put in your mouth. It's actually cultural. It's part of you, it's part of your way of looking at the world. And that's one of the explanations why.Show Links:Recommended Resources:"Steve Jobs" by Walter IsaacsonPaul BergDavid LiuunSILOed episode feat. Beth ShapirounSILOed episode feat. Steffanie StrathdeeGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at The University of ManchesterMatthew Cobb on TwitterHis Work:Matthew Cobb on Google ScholarArticles on The GuardianGenetic Dreams, Genetic Nightmares (BBC Podcast Series where Matthew Cobb looks at the 50-year history of genetic engineering)As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic AgeThe Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of NeuroscienceLife's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic CodeSmell: A Very Short IntroductionLife's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic CodeThe Egg And The Sperm RaceThe Resistance: The French Fight Against the NazisEleven Days in August: The Liberation of ParisThe Genetic Age: Our Perilous Quest to Edit Life

Innovation is both extremely important to the life of a corporation and also extremely tricky to regularly achieve and maintain. There are certain strategies that tend to yield higher innovation, but at its heart are the people, the corporate explorers that drive things forward.Andrew Binns is the co-founder and manager of Change Logic, an advisory firm, and the author of several articles and books. His latest book, Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game, co-written with Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman, is about the differences in how corporations and startups approach encouraging innovation, and analyzes those efforts for how effective they are.Andrew and Greg discuss the innovation industry and the three stages of innovation. They talk about the differences between product-centric and customer-centric thinking, the paradox of limiting uncertainty and innovation, corporate explorers, and which ones end up succeeding. They discuss the concepts of feedback and it’s counterpart, ‘feedforward,’ and some examples of successful corporate innovation cultures. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:It’s all about passion, not process45:45: Corporations get wrapped up in thinking that the answer is about process, right? I can't tell you how many people ask me, "How do you make a repeatable process of this?" when they haven't even done it once. Have something to repeat, please. And then structure—how do we get the right organization structure around this? And we miss the importance of the individual with passion to solve a customer problem who is going to find that strong personal motivation. Because whether you're a corporate explorer or an entrepreneur, you are signing up for a really hard life. (46:37) And if you're going to live through that, you need passion. You need to be committed to solving the problem that you face. And that's what all of these examples in Corporate Explorer tell you about.18:32: The thing that we know about innovation is that you need to hold open your ability to learn and see multiple possibilities.How business logic kills the explorer in corporate innovation21:32: You've got to pursue your innovation to the scale of the opportunity, the scale of the market, not the scale of what you think can get past your manager or what you can squeeze through the stage gate process. That is exactly how exploit or core business logic kills the explorer in corporate innovation.Re-orienting ourselves when we talk about risks 25:23: This is a fundamentally important thing to re-reorient ourselves in terms of how we engage in talking about the topic of risk. Because one thing is for sure: in a traditional corporate career, you do not get rewarded by saying, "I don't know," right? That is counter-cultural. So unless you take it head-on, it's going to be hard to make progress.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational LearningFrancesco Starace Professional ProfileFrancesco StaraceCharles O’ReillyMichael TushmanunSILOed episode feat. Michael ArenaGuest Profile:Professional Profile on Change LogicAuthor’s Profile on the Corporate ExplorerAndrew Binns on TwitterAndrew Binns on LinkedInHis Work:Andrew Binns on Google ScholarWork in California Management ReviewWork in Harvard Business ReviewCorporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation GameThe Missing Discipline Behind Failure to Scale

Over the course of history, as human civilization has developed and advanced, so have our microbial enemies. This has led to a vast and diverse disease pool dating all the way back to the last Ice Age. Kyle Harper is a professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma. In his books, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History and The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, he examines the history of disease and its impact on the human race. Kyle and Greg discuss how Rome was both a rich and sick society, the common misconceptions about disease, and what history should have taught us about COVID-19. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The two basic problems of parasites16:05: Every microparasite has a couple of really basic problems. The two most basic problems are: how do I survive the immune system of a host? Because our immune system is absolutely amazing. I mean, it wins 99.99999% of the time. They're incredible at picking out foreign cells or particles and getting rid of them. And so that's a really hard problem. The other really hard problem that every germ has is: how do I get from one host to the next? Because if I want to pass on my genes to future generations, I can get a few generations inside a host, but I've ultimately got to keep going to the next host, or my children's, children's children have to go to the next host.The human body is responsive to things around it06:06: The human body is responsive to things around it, things we put into it. And so, the human body changes over time, and it can be a crude yet really, really powerful way of thinking about changes in human health.How can human societies bring infectious disease under control49:37: Human societies are able to bring infectious diseases under control through the deployment of a number of always-overlapping mechanisms. And so you need all of it. You need good nutrition; you need economic growth and development that give particularly children high levels of nutrition to survive infection. You also need good policy. This would include number one, clean water, and number two, mandatory vaccination.Infections hinder growth development07:58: If your whole childhood is fighting off nasty infections, your body doesn't have the energy budget to invest in growth. So it's not just what you eat—protein is one thing. It's also eating away your energy, like little microparasites that you're fighting off constantly. And then other things—social stress, the kind of work environment— So bones. Tell a big story.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Edward GibbonPlagues and Peoples Edward JennerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of OklahomaFaculty Profile at Sante Fe InstituteProfessional Profile on AcademiaKyle Harper's WebsiteKyle Harper on TwitterHis Work:Article on AeonKyle Harper on Google ScholarPlagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human HistoryThe Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an EmpireFrom Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late AntiquitySlavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 

Money is a mirage, and the harder and deeper you look into it, the hazier it can become. It is a human construct, a tool that we have all agreed to hold value in so that we can exchange it with each other for goods and services, but what is it really? How did we all come to agree on this abstract thing together, and where does it go from here?Frederick Kaufman is a journalist, professor of English and Journalism at the City University of New York, and an author. His latest book is called The Money Plot, and explores the story of how money has been developed and used in human cultures as a narrative, and uses that narrative to reveal a deeper understanding of this human construct we all use.Frederick and Greg discuss Frederick's connections and history coming through journalism to the areas of both food and money, as well as their surprising connections to each other. Frederick addresses some of the longstanding myths of the history of money and reveals some of the falsehoods and what the realities are instead. They talk about how looking at finance through the eyes of an English professor can show things that the typical finance-minded person would miss.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How is establishing a narrative the same as establishing a currency?31:41: Once you can establish the context for trading and establishing, this is our currency. That's where the money is. And that's precisely similar to establishing any narrative. Once we establish the grounds of a narrative, a Christian narrative, for instance, then we understand our basis for meaning. The same thing here. Once we understand that commodity narrative, that's where we make money. The problem is to make other people believe it.How Wall Street makes its living18:59: This is how Wall Street makes its living: through derivative trades and through understanding metaphors upon metaphors, upon metaphors. And they are, in my estimation, better poets than anybody out there today. I say the guy who's trading in derivatives, the guy who's an options trader, the guy who's using the Black-Scholes theorem to price options, really understands the ethereal realm of the sublime better than any other poet out there.What lies underneath the narrative of money02:17: I think, ultimately, the point of the book is that we have to remember that stories do define us, and we have to remember that it's about us. It's about humans, about human bodies, about human shelter, and about human need. All those things have to come first. We cannot be the victims of the stories that we tell.Public vs. private realm53:18: When everything that was in the private realm is now in the public realm, what the hell is it that we got? What do we have anymore that defines me? And the answer is increasingly, nothing.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Adam SmithAlfred KroeberRai StonesGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at CUNYFrederick Kaufman’s WebsiteFrederick Kaufman on TwitterHis Work:Articles on Men’s HealthThe Money Plot: A History of Currency's Power to Enchant, Control, and ManipulateBet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being FoodA Short History of the American Stomach

Is law an instrument of the state? Or is it broader than that? Fernanda Pirie is a professor of law and anthropology at the University of Oxford. Through her books like, The Anthropology of Law and The Rule of Laws: A 4,000-Year Quest to Order the World, she makes the distinction that law is a particular type of custom that doesn’t necessarily need a governmental system to exist. In this episode, Fernanda and Greg discuss the earliest iterations of legal systems in history, Fernanda’s view on what makes something a real law, and is the modern Western way of doing things really the best way. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Do we underappreciate and undervalue other non-state institutions and their role in resolving disputes?48:37: I think we underestimate how difficult it is to develop those institutions from scratch. We can't just take a model that's worked somewhere else and assume it's going to work in a different context. You know, it's all about understanding the local dynamics, which are different. Who are the powerholders? Who do people listen to? Who has respect? What are the tensions in the community? What are the prejudices? And all of that comes into the effectiveness of any local systems.Do we have a vague concept of the law?04:00: Our concept of law is very vague; the way we use it in everyday language, it covers all sorts of things. It covers the process of you going to the law to resolve our disputes. We talk about law in general ways: "Oh, the laws of these people." Meaning the customs we think about as law in the books. It's one of those words. It's slippery.A particular area where people approach disputes and the law is important53:18: When dealing with transnational aspects, the factor that a lot of international lawyers worry about is their enforcement. Are things democratic? They apply the ideals and ideologies of the modern nation-state to the legal processes that develop transnationally because they have to because they're transnational problems. And I think it's important not to assume that everything has to work. Like how state law works, it's important to allow that there can be effective ways of approaching disputes and making laws that might work in different ways.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Clifford GeertzAlexis de TocquevilleCourt of piepowders The StanneriesThe History of English LawCode of HammurabiJames WhitmanPersian LettersGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of OxfordProfessional Profile on Maitland ChambersFernanda Pirie on TwitterHer Work:Article on TIme MagazineThe Rule of Laws: A 4,000-Year Quest to Order the WorldThe Anthropology of Law Legalism: Community and JusticePeace and Conflict in LadakhLaw before Government: Ideology and Aspiration

Museums are centers for culture, for art, and for conversation. They are places where the far ends of the earth come together in the same place and expose people of all ages to things from across space and time. They also draw the past into the present and become centers for experiencing and understanding humans and humanity.Daniel H. Weiss is an art historian and president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York City. He is also an author, and his latest book is called Why the Museum Matters. It examines the roles museums have played in our culture, what their purpose is in the present, and their uncertain future. Daniel and Greg discuss Daniel’s experience with the Met and other museums, as well as the history of the Met and how it was created, what separates museums from universities, how to engage visitors and convert them into lifelong museum-goers, as well as Daniel’s take on protests in art museums and the economics behind the Met’s ‘pay what you wish’ policy.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The role of museums in creating meaningful experiences17:16: I think the role of museums is to present material, ideas, content in ways that engage people in meaningful learning experiences that sometimes might offend them, and there's nothing wrong with that. If our objective is to present programs that everybody likes and nobody ever finds challenging, we're not likely to teach them very much—we're not likely to go very far. So we need to be thoughtful about how we make clear the agreement we hope to have with our visitors.The art of doing museum work15:41: The art of doing museum work thoughtfully is reaching out to people in ways that invite them in that are not threatening or intimidating to them but also allow them to learn new things.How do museums make the world a better place?29:04: If you were to ask me how the museum makes the world a better place, I would say, ideally, it creates better global citizens because the more people learn about other cultures, the more respectful they are, and maybe they'll be less inclined to go to war with them, or they might be more inclined to try to learn more about why a point of view that they hear is different from their own because they're seeing something about this other culture. That might give them pause, and that might give them the opportunity for reflection and respect, so it makes for better global citizens.How museums differ from educational institutions02:33: Museums are places where materials—I'd say cultural materials—can be broadly real. It can be scientific materials or sports objects where we use objects to help us understand our own history, our own experience, and to connect us to ideas. And that can be in any number of ways.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Met Museum of ArtThe Louvre MuseumJohn JayThe Met removing Pay-As-You Wish ProgramProtestors Put Soup on Van GoghThe Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of TruthGuest Profile:Alumni Profile at GWUProfessional Profile on Wallace FoundationHis Work:Article about Daniel’s Tenure as Met DirectorWhy The Museum MattersArt and Crusade in the Age of St. Louis

Mental health disorders have become an epidemic in today's society. Yet, we often fail to recognize the critical impact of early childhood adversity and our relationships with our parents, especially our mothers, on the mental and physical health of adolescents.Erica Komisar is a psychoanalyst and also a contributor, contributing editor at the Institute for Family Studies, journalist, and author. Her recent book “Chicken Little the Sky Isn't Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety” explores how to raise emotionally healthy, resilient adolescents in a time of great stress.Erica and Greg discuss how the cultural emphasis, especially in the West, on individual success outside of the home often results in a reluctance to make necessary sacrifices in raising children and why dedicating time to establish a strong emotional foundation for the future generation is a significant and fulfilling responsibility for every parent.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What is attachment theory?14:52: Emotional security, meaning trusting that your primary attachment object is there for you from moment to moment to help you with what we call "regulate" your emotions, keeping them from going too high or too low and helping you through distress, provides you with the kind of security that says, "The world is a safe place. I can deal with the adversity that comes my way." That is attachment theory.Raising a child requires sacrifice08:19: Having children is the easy part; caring for them requires sacrifice. And we cannot raise healthy children if we're not willing to sacrifice.Humans and denial02:17: As human beings, we have a great deal of denial. It helps us get along, function, forget, avoid painful feelings, and avoid responsibility. So, denial is one of the most powerful human defenses. And that's not an accusation. That's just as a psychoanalyst. That is just a fact.Self-awareness is the cornerstone of mental health03:38: Self-awareness is the cornerstone of mental and physical health. If we're not aware that we're doing harm to ourselves, we end up sick. If we're not aware we're doing harm to our children, they end up sick.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy by Allan N. SchorePenelope LeachJudi MesmanBig Ocean WomenGuest Profile:Publisher Profile on Simon & SchusterErica Komisar’s WebsiteErica Komisar on LinkedInErica Komisar on TwitterErica Komisar on YouTubeHer Work:Erica Komisar’s ArticlesChicken Little the Sky Isn't Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of AnxietyBeing There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters

There are three necessary conditions for a fire to start – oxygen, heat, and fuel. The same can be said for financial bubbles. In order for them to happen, three conditions must be in place.In his book, Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, economic and financial historian William Quinn lays out what those conditions are in what he calls, “the bubble triangle.” At Queen’s University Belfast, he’s a senior lecturer in finance and researches historical stock markets, stock market bubbles, and market corners. William and Greg discuss the three sides of the bubble triangle, how narratives in the media shape bubbles, and historical bubbles that have gone overlooked. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The bubble triangle04:43: ​​We came up with this model, which we called the bubble triangle. And this is similar to the fire triangle in chemistry. (05:20) So it's also got three sides. The first side is now what we call marketability, which is similar to liquidity. So, how easy are assets to buy and sell? This is multi-dimensional. So, what are the laws surrounding how easy it is to buy and sell this asset? How divisible is it? Can you package it up and sell it in small quantities? What are the transaction costs involved? What are the legal costs involved? Does anything have to physically change hands to buy it? And what we find is that the more marketable an asset is, the less work you have to do to buy and sell an asset, and the more likely it is to experience a bubble.The two things you can take away from economics29:35: I love historians. I love history, and I love history books. What I think they could take from economics is rigor and formal reasoning. So, for an economist to say that one thing caused something else, they will need to set out a counterfactual.All markets are political31:43: All markets are political to some extent, and it's not enough to say, "Look, these prices are being propped up by the government; therefore, there's going to be a crash." You need to make the argument that that can't go on, that this political interference isn't sustainable. And that's why prices are going to fall, but it's very difficult.Looking at three sides of the bubble triangle22:40: We look at the three sides of the bubble triangle. So is there a lot of money? And right now, there is a lot of marketability. Is marketability increasing? There is a lot of speculation, and right now, these conditions are in place, so we're going to get a lot of bubbles in the near future.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Dot-com BubbleJapan’s Bubble EconomyRobinhoodThe Great British Bicycle BubbleTulip ManiaCharles Ponzi2008 Housing Market CrashCryptocurrency BubbleWall Street Crash of 1929Robert ShillerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Queen’s University BelfastAuthor’s Profile on Social Science Research NetworkWilliam Quinn on LinkedInWilliam Quinn on TwitterHis Work:Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

What do financial bubbles and religious millenarianism have in common? They both involve collective delusion. When Charles Mackey wrote a book on the Madness of Crowds in the 19th century, he could not have imagined that religious and financial bubbles will continue to reappear, but as Willam Bernstein points out, the world has not gotten any saner. William Bernstein is an investment manager and the author of a number of books including, The Delusions Of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups and The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created. And before his work in finance, he spent more than 30 years practicing medicine. William and Greg discuss the difference between intelligence and rationality, how human nature is rooted in imitation and mimicry, and the end of the world. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:When it comes to pattern recognition, who are the right people to listen to?47:23: ​​When I'm listening to an analyst or a commentator, what I'm listening for is not how eloquent they are or how smart they sound, because it turns out that the most eloquent people tend to be people who can get away with a lot of analytical sloppiness. What I'm looking for is nuance. I'm looking for someone who can see both sides of an argument and argue something from both sides.Who are the people you want to make decisions for you?06:37: Rationality and intelligence are entirely orthogonal. There are people who really aren't all that brilliant but are eminently rational. Those are the kinds of people you want making decisions for you.Are you a seller or consumer opinions?31:43: If you are a seller of opinions and want to sell opinions, then you tell stories. But if you are a consumer of opinions, you want to ignore the stories and focus on the data.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Late Great Planet EarthWilliam MillerDual Process Theory Daniel KahnemanAlex JonesExtraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Premillennialism David KoreshShiva Dome of the RockDr. StrangeloveGuest Profile:William J. BernsteinProfessional Profile on Literary HubProfessional Profile on CFA InstituteHis Work:Articles on Financial TimesThe Delusions Of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in GroupsThe Intelligent Asset Allocator: How to Build Your Portfolio to Maximize Returns and Minimize Risk The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in BetweenThe Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio Rational Expectations: Asset Allocation for Investing Adults (Investing for Adults) The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the Worldhttps://a.co/d/1Db5SrC

Does a strong state mean a weak market? This is a common misconception amongst economists. Many view the state as either taxing and regulating the market too much or too little. However, the truth is that state capacity is just not well conceptualized in economic theory.James A. Robinson is a political scientist, economist, and professor at the University of Chicago. His recent book, co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty,” explores the critical balance needed between state and society and how liberty can continue to thrive despite threats from both sides.James and Greg explore the correlation between inclusive political institutions and economic growth and prosperity and why the absence of state capacity in developing nations is a major contributing factor to their economic struggles. This highlights the necessity for a genuine debate on whether strong governments and effective state institutions facilitate or stifle independence and innovation. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The two dimensions to political institutions 27:45: ​​There's two dimensions to political institutions. There's this issue of the breadth of political power in society, and there's also the capacity of the state. So we say why nations fail. Well, you can have extractive political institutions if either or both of those things fail. Either if the state lacks capacity or you have narrow distribution of political power.19:25: You can't have inclusive economic institutions on the whim of some autocrat or dictator. It's who benefits from inclusive institutions. They have to be empowered politically to demand them.Building institutions is not an engineering problem31:43: Building institutions is not an engineering problem. It's an equilibrium between these different forces. And so the state is always trying to get out of control, and you can hem it in a bit with institutions and stuff, but it also needs society to do that.When it comes to giving helpful policy advice, the devil is in the details40:18: In order to give useful policy advice, you have to get into all the details of different cases, and at some point, these big social science generalizations don't help you much to know what to do. Maybe the idea of getting into the corridor is useful and institutionalizing the power of civil society and how you deal with all the problems that are different. (40:48) All those details are going to be very important in figuring out what to do.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History by Douglass C. North and Robert Paul ThomasMaster of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III by Robert A. CaroThe Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. CaroThe Confounding Island by Orlando PattersonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of ChicagoProfessional Profile on IGCProfessional Profile on National Bureau of Economic ResearchHis Work:James A. Robinson on Google ScholarArticles on Project SyndicateThe Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of LibertyWhy Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and PovertyEconomic Origins of Dictatorship and DemocracyNatural Experiments of History

In order to make an impact in the political world, we need to understand the science of politics, which means setting aside emotion and designing general models of strategic behavior and equilibrium drawn from game theory. These models may not only explain the past but predict the future.Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist, a professor at New York University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also an author, and his latest work is titled, The Invention of Power: Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West, where he argues that battles over power nearly 1000 years ago have had profound consequences for European history up to the present.Bruce and Greg discuss all of Bruce’s books, how to use game theory, and to look at political science analytically, just like any other science. They go over the emergence of Western Europe, the rise and fall of dictatorships, and the possible fate of Vladimir Putin. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What makes game theory such a powerful tool for predicting present and future outcomes?13:45: ​​People think about their own well-being. They're interested in making themselves, their families so forth, better off. They understand that rivals, competitors are thinking exactly the same thing about themselves. So you have to figure out what should I do? And how will people competing with me react to what I do. Will I be worse off if I do what I really want, or will I be better off doing what I really want or doing something else? Well, that's the domain of game theory. It is how entities—in this case, people—interact strategically.Why dictators keep their inner circle small23:41: Dictators depend on very few people to keep them in power, so they have to keep those people sufficiently happy that they don't find a rival who could do better by them.One of the unfortunate features of political science02:52: If you want to improve the way the world works, from whatever lights you have as to what is an improvement. You can't do that without understanding what makes it come out the way it is so that you can figure out how to incentivize, by rewarding or punishing people, to behave differently. That requires science. It doesn't require opinion. It doesn't require speculation. It doesn't require partisanship.Rationality doesn’t require that you’re right21:08: Rationality doesn't require that you're right. It just requires that your actions are motivated by your beliefs about what are the things that you should do now.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Perfect Bayesian equilibriumThe Concordat of WormsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at  NYUProfessional Profile at  American Academy of Arts and SciencesBruce Bueno de Mesquita on LinkedInBruce Bueno de Mesquita on TEDTalkHis Work:Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Google ScholarArticles for HooverArticles on The AtlanticThe Invention of Power: Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the WestThe Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good PoliticsThe Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the FutureWar and Reason: Domestic and International Imperatives

What are the limits to free speech in a university setting? And how does our society define what is permissible speech and what is not? When Ulrich Baer wrote What Snowflakes Get Right, his hope was to expand free speech on campuses and provoke a debate on the proper scope of conversation in the classroom.Ulrich is a professor of comparative literature at New York University and is the author and translator of multiple books of translation and criticism, including The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke and a novel, We Are But a Moment. Ulrich and Greg discuss the unique emphasis that Americans place on free speech, especially in a higher education context, and how free speech can sometimes be in conflict with other values.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What things should be up for debate? What should not be up for debate?50:33: We should allow everybody to debate: What is the true meaning of equality? Those things should have to be open for debate precisely because we don't want to impose that on people to say, this is the way our society is functioning.The importance of free speech9:43: If free speech is restricted, the first thing that goes is creative literature because it's obscene, offensive, or anything. But free speech is a value, and it's also federally mandated and enshrined in the First Amendment.The power of opening yourself up to other ideas and perspectives52:02: The most amazing thing is what happens in universities when people actually change their minds. Actually, as a teacher, I think about this a lot. I cannot change my students' minds. I cannot make them have an imagination. All I can do is give them moments and opportunities where that happens for them.Show Links:Recommended Resources:TikTok Congressional hearingsUnite the Right rallyUlrich’s press: Warbler Press Title IXDiversity, Inc: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at New York University Ulrich Baer's Website Ulrich Baer on LinkedInUlrich Baer on TwitterUlrich Baer on YouTubeHis Work:Ulrich’s podcast: Think About It Podcast What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of RilkeRilke on LoveWe Are But a Moment 

Philosophical problems are all around us. From economics to games and sports, most people in the world are philosophizing every day, maybe without even realizing it. David Papineau is a Professor of Philosophy of Science at the King’s College London. He’s written numerous books, including The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience and Knowing the Score: What Sports Can Teach Us About Philosophy (And What Philosophy Can Teach Us About Sports). David is also a visiting professor at City University of New York.David and Greg discuss how philosophy can be applied to virtually anything, even sports. They delve into questions around the role sports play in our lives, what sports can reveal about conscious control and the philosophical puzzles regarding fandom. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How our performance function differs in sports19:01: In sports, when you are competing, there's not much that can be left to unmonitored routine. I mean, there's a difference between somebody who's doing the vaulting horse in gymnastics or a hundred-meter sprint. There's a level of focus and intensity in competition that you can't reproduce every time in practice. And if you don't have it in mind now, we're competing. What's to tell your body that you're not in practice mode? You've got to gear things up and keep them there.A general point about conventions and morality29:01: This is a general point about conventions and morality. We need some rules to have all kinds of things that we benefit from and enjoy, but exactly which set of rules we have doesn't matter too much up to a point.How much control do we really have over our consciousness? 13:21: Many of my philosophical colleagues would say that if you are acting intentionally, your eyes are open, and you are awake, then your consciousness is playing a controlling role all the time. And that was the idea I wanted to resist by saying that in these fast sporting contexts, there isn't any time.Conventions are like contracts21:18: There are some sports where, maybe more so in the past, where it wasn't acceptable to say anything to distract your opponent. And then there are sports where it's acceptable. Everybody knows you might get inside somebody's head a bit, but that's part of the game. But you are allowed to make jokes and make certain kinds of comments, but you aren't supposed to be talking, making comments, or disreputable comments about their wives or mothers. And so, the way I think about it is that these conventions, which vary from sport to sport, are like a kind of contract or deal.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Great British Bake Off Roger FedererRafael Nadal2006 World Cup clip2023 Super Bowl holding callArsenal Football ClubTottenham Hotspur Football ClubRory McIlroySol CampbellRussell’s ParadoxContinuum HypothesisGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at King’s College LondonVisiting Professor profile at City University of New YorkDavid Papineau’s WebsiteDavid Papineau on TwitterHis Work:David Papineau on Google ScholarArticles on AeonThe Metaphysics of Sensory ExperienceKnowing the Score: What Sports Can Teach Us About Philosophy (And What Philosophy Can Teach Us About Sports)Philosophical Devices: Proofs, Probabilities, Possibilities, and SetsThinking about ConsciousnessIntroducing Consciousness: A Graphic Guide

What is attention, and how can we manage it? The new science of attention explores how our conscious and unconscious attention dictate how we interact with the world. With the proliferation of digital media and always being on digital devices, a proper understanding of attention is more important than ever. Gloria Mark is the Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California Irvine. Her new book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, explores what is going on with attention in today’s culture and environment as well as how to regain the ability to focus and pay attention for longer periods of time.Gloria and Greg discuss her new book and the ways in which attention is studied, as well as identify many real-world causes that may be in play for why the attention span of humans has been regularly getting shorter. Is there a cultural shift going on? Gloria links attention to sleep, health, and also even success in quitting unhealthy habits. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Attention is the currency of our time48:48: I would love it, especially for young people, if they could have the experience of building their attentional muscles because it's a lifelong skill, and attention is really the currency of our time. And we can't perform well unless we have good attention.Flow isn't for all situations or settings23:42: No one should feel bad if they can't get into flow because we use an analytical mindset when we're doing knowledge work. And that can be very rewarding and fulfilling. So, flow isn't for all situations or settings; it can happen, but we shouldn't expect it in knowledge work.Attention has different kinds of states28:18: We can be engaged in something and challenged where we're using some mental effort, and I call that a state of focus. We can also be very engaged in something without hardly any mental effort; I call that rote attention.Reframing our thinking about how we use technology43:48: The main point I've tried to express in the book is that I'd like to reframe our thinking about how we use technology to put well-being first. (44:03) Instead of pushing ourselves to the limits, which is what the current narrative is, let's use technology to be as productive as possible. Let's think about maintaining psychological balance and positive well-being. Because if we're positive, we will be productive.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Herb SimonStanford Entry for Bounded RationalityWalter MischelStanford Marshmallow ExperimentNeuro-ErgonomicsMihaly CsikszentmihalyiMihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 8 Traits of FlowAlbert BanduraBroaden-and-BuildGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC IrvineProfessional Profile on UC Department of InformaticsSpeaker’s Profile on Chartwell SpeakersGloria Mark’s WebsiteGloria Mark on LinkedInGloria Mark on TwitterGloria Mark on Talks at GoogleHer Work:Gloria Mark on Google ScholarArticle in Time MagazineAttention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity

Should we separate decisions related to love and money, approaching finance and career-related decisions solely in a rational way while relying more on our emotions in the personal domain? Perhaps it's time to start using both our heads and hearts together when making life's most significant decisions.Myra Strober is an emerita Professor at the Schools of Education and Business at Stanford University. She also sits on the board of the journal Feminist Economics and is the former president of the International Association for Feminist Economics 9. Abby Davisson is a social innovation leader and career development expert. She is a senior leader on global retailer Gap Inc.'s Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG) team and is President of Gap Foundation. She is also an alumni career advisor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.Together they wrote the book “Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life's Biggest Decisions,” exploring how to navigate life’s most consequential and daunting decisions.Myra, Abby, and Greg discuss the importance of incorporating decision-making into an interdisciplinary curriculum at an early stage for students to equip them with the skills to make optimal strategic choices while avoiding the need to compromise their professional or personal lives. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The similarities of finding a business and a life partner17:08: [Myra Strober] People who say that you need to make love decisions with your heart are not entirely wrong. Your heart surely needs to be part of the decision, or your gut, or however you want to think about it. And you may find a co-founder for a business who works well with you, but you wouldn't like to spend your evenings and weekends with them. You wouldn't like to go on vacation with them. And that all works fine, but it doesn't work fine if this is your life partner. So certainly, before you have any conversations of any depth, you need to be sure that you're linked to this person in some way through your heart, through your gut, that you're excited about this person in some way.On making decisions you won’t regret16:03: [Abby Davisson] What we advocate and why we have a whole framework around decision-making is to slow down and bring in other elements to that decision that can help you make a decision you are less likely to regret.The huge impact of your work decisions12:40: [Myra Strober] The work decisions that you make, which you might assume are only work decisions, have a huge impact on your family. And if you're going to make a major work decision, you need to communicate your ideas with the people who matter to you.Humans and their short-term bias39:38: [Abby Davisson] Humans have a short-term bias, and we are much more likely to overweight the positive or negative consequences of decisions in the short term.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Lori GottliebDaniel KahnemanGuest Profile:Myra Strober Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityMyra Strober on LinkedInAbby Davisson Author’s Profile on HarperCollins PublishersAbby Davisson’s WebsiteAbby Davisson on LinkedInAbby Davisson on TwitterTheir Work:Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life's Biggest Decisions - Myra Strober and Abby DavissonSharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught Me About Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others) - Myra Strober

In a world of either/or tradeoffs, it sometimes pays to explore the possibility of and/or. By changing our perspective and embracing paradox, we can see possibilities that were obscured by our tendency to see only tradeoffs.Wendy K. Smith is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Business at the University of Delaware and co-founder of the Women's Leadership Initiative. She is also an author, and with Marianne Lewis their latest book is Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems, about how to navigate the inevitable paradoxes and demands of life and the world.Wendy and Greg discuss Wendy’s book and what she has learned about paradoxes and the changes made possible when you replace ‘Either/Or thinking with ‘Both/And’ thinking. They discuss this approach and how you can learn from fields as diverse as philosophy, therapy, and improv, as well as Wendy’s three conditions of Change, Plurality, and Scarcity.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The power of listening24:24: Listening is a form of respect. It doesn't mean you have to agree. It means you have to engage, or it doesn't mean that you are agreeing. It means that you are respecting somebody, that they have a different point of view than you, and you're engaging and accepting that there is a different point of view out there. And sometimes, listening to hard things that we absolutely don't agree with with curiosity can be a really powerful tool to be able to get to a better point.Adopting a paradox mindset is two things29:40: Adopting a paradox mindset is two things: It's both experiencing the tensions that are out there and applying a both/and approach to those tensions.Navigating the both/and space21:02: In order to effectively navigate in this both/and space, we have to be able to pull apart the opposing tensions and do a deep dive into understanding each one in service of a more profound, thoughtful, creative, and understood holistic synergy.How do we understand the relationship between both/and inherent approach and a socially constructed approach?06:49: There is an inherent nature to our world that is paradoxical, and our understanding of the world, our social construction, our framing, our mindsets, and surfaces, makes that salient to us, which gives us the power or the tools, the possibility to navigate our competing demands in another way.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Faculty Profile for Marya BesharovKelly Leonard with The Second CityThe Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model ExplainedThe Ontology of Organizational Paradox: A Quantum Approach by Tobias Hahn and Eric KnightCharles A. O’ReillyEllen LangerThe Second CityExploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning by James G. MarchGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of DelawareProfessional Profile on Academy of ManagementWendy K. Smith on LinkedInWendy K. Smith on TwitterThe power of paradox: Dr. Wendy K. Smith at TEDxUDHer Work:Wendy K. Smith on Google ScholarBoth/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems

We often think of the self as something that exists independent of social relations, but without society, there would be no need for a self or any of the concepts that relate to the self, including morality, duties, belonging, or reputation. Roy F. Baumeister is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland and is known for his work on several areas such as the self, self-control, self-esteem, motivation, and free will. His latest book is The Self Explained which builds on previous books, including The Power of Bad: And How to Overcome It, where he explores negativity bias and Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength.Greg and Roy discuss how the notion of the self is used and why it evolved in the first place, along with the ways that humans are different from animals psychologically. Roy identifies a few key features of psychology and traces some of psychology’s concepts historically. In the end, they discuss the practicality and efficacy of different ways of building character and avoiding temptations. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What gets people to embrace morality? Why do they find it useful to do that? 16:48: We evolved to communicate and cooperate, that means your survival is essentially dependent on whether other people want to cooperate with you. So you need to figure out how to behave to keep cooperative partners in the future and to attract others. And morality is a blueprint for that. Morality is a set of rules: if you act this way and do the right things, other people will be glad to work with you and cooperate with you.35:50: You're not learning as fast if you're not being criticized or told that what you did is fine, even when it's not. It's essentially lowering the standards.On building up character46:07: If you want to build up your strength of character, you have to expose yourself to temptation and overcome it.Daily, regular exercise of self-control does make you stronger.45:59: So we think self-control works like a muscle. When you use it, it gets tired. That's the immediate depleted willpower—the ego depletion effect. But when it recovers, especially if you do it regularly, as with a muscle exercise, it becomes stronger.Punishment and criticism work better than praise and support30:35: I understand the education establishment has ambivalence about punishment. It can create resentment and other things, but purely in terms of learning, if you only have one or the other, the punishment and criticism work better than the praise and support. And certainly praising people and telling them they're doing great when they're not has to have some cost in the long run, although it feels good to all concerned. Informationally, the best thing is to get both praise and criticism.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Robinson Crusoe Ruth Bader GinsburgEdward E. JonesHarvey MansfieldJohn Tierney Guest Profile:Roy Baumeister’s websiteFaculty Profile at UPENNFaculty Profile at Florida State UniversityRoy Baumeister's WebsFaculty Profile at UPENNiteRoy Baumeister on TwitterHis Work:Roy Baumeister Podcast AppearancesRoy Baumeister on Google ScholarArticles on Psychology TodayThe Self Explained: Why and How We Become Who We Are (2022)The Power of Bad: And How to Overcome It (2019)Social Psychology and Human Nature, Comprehensive Edition 004 Edition (2016)Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength (2011)Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men (2010)Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making?: A Hedgefoxian Perspective (2007)Evil: Inside human cruelty and violence (2001)

Is poetry only for the elite? There are some who would reserve poems only for a specialized audience, but poetry can be found everywhere. Poetry is the language of heightened experience.Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and writer. Dana is a former California Poet laureate and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds a B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from Harvard. Dana’s latest book of poems is called Meet Me at the Lighthouse.Dana and Greg discuss the place of poetry in today’s society and how our relation to poetry differs from that of past eras. Dana goes over the different pathways to becoming a poet today and how his path differed from other poets. They talk about the advantages of being a poet working in business, and Dana also recites some of his poems for Greg. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Intelligence is in every profession17:03: Intelligence is in every profession. It's in every class. It's in every race. And poets are deluding themselves to think that if they try to engage a broader public, they're somehow lowering their standards. It's more difficult to write a poem which engages different people in different professions with different life experience. The magic spell of poetry19:59: Poetry allows us to talk to the dead, remember people, and renew our experiences. That's the magic spell of poetry.A big mistake academics make in poetry35:39: As a poet, you're trying to create something which has enough room for your reader. And that is the big mistake academics make. If they were writing this poem, they would give it to you, tell you how to interpret it, and then ironize it and go; then there's no room for anybody else to bring their interpretation into it.Poetry deepens your expression48:39:If you're trying to write poetry at the outermost extent of its possibilities, you are by nature wrestling with the mysteries of human existence. It clarifies and deepens your expression to have one of the great spiritual traditions behind you, underneath you, or in front of you.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Luise Glück Profile on Poetry FoundationYeats Reading His Own PoetryGuest Profile:Professional Profile on National Endowment for the ArtsProfessional Profile on Poetry FoundationProfessional Profile on  Poets.orgDana Gioia’s WebsiteDana Gioia on TwitterDana Gioia on YouTubeHis Work:Meet Me at the Lighthouse: PoemsPoetry Out Loud PageStudying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life99 Poems: New & SelectedPity the Beautiful: Poems Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American CultureInterrogations at Noon: Poems Disappearing InkThe Catholic Writer TodaySeneca and the Madness of Hercules

Every business wants to become a platform business, believing that network effects and first mover advantages will lead to market power and competitive advantage. Indeed, some investors think that the advantages that come from being a platform are the only ones that matter in the digital economy. But not every great business is a platform, and not every platform is a great business.Jonathan Knee is the Michael T. Fries Professor of Professional Practice of Media and Technology at Columbia Business School and the Co-Director of their Media and Technology Program. He is also the author of several books, including his latest, The Platform Delusion: Who Wins and Who Loses in the Age of Tech Titans, where he explores the business models of tech companies, large and small.Jonathan and Greg discuss business strategy and how it looks different in the modern era. Jonathan also emphasizes the importance of vertical specialization in a world of big data, what really qualifies as a platform, and also what, surprisingly, does not. They discuss the features of a platform and how things like Amazon’s Marketplace and the travel site Booking.com made use of platforms to gain market share on their competitors and scale quickly. They also look at the changing career paths of today’s business school graduates.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What is fundamental to being smart about strategy?02:49: The laws of economics and strategy, which are closely related, do not change just like the laws of gravity. But what does change, and what is fundamental to being smart about strategy, is industry structure. And industry structure drives strategy at the end of the day, and industry structure is extremely dynamic. And the key to being successful, in my view, is to overlay the timeless economic principles on top of the morphing industry structures.Defining platform16:44: What is the definition of a platform? It's essentially a business whose fundamental value proposition derives not from making something but from connecting, whether it's individuals, businesses, or otherwise.Something important to keep in mind if you have a network effect business23:33: If you've got a network effects business that has no significant fixed cost requirements and also has no real mechanism to have customer captivity, you're going to have a real shitty business.Why the merchant model is better in a hot market45:52: The reality is in a hot market, the merchant model is better because you bought a bunch of inventory cheap, and can sell it for a huge profit. And in a down market, you'd rather be an agency model. So you don't have a bunch of inventory on your balance sheet. So one isn't better than the other.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Harvard Business Review article Competing in the Age of AIGeneral Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets by Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean TiroleGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Business SchoolFaculty Profile at Yale Law SchoolProfessional Profile on EvercoreJonathan A. Knee on TwitterHis Work:Jonathan A. Knee on Google ScholarArticles on The AtlanticThe Platform Delusion: Who Wins and Who Loses in the Age of Tech TitansClass Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in EducationThe Curse of the Mogul: What's Wrong with the World's Leading Media CompaniesThe Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade that Transformed Wall Street 

As humans, we have undoubtedly dominated our planet like no other species before us.However, facing the sobering reality that our own actions could lead to our extinction demands the question: have the very traits that set us apart from other species also paved the way for our self-destruction?Justin Gregg is an Adjunct Professor at St. Francis Xavier University, a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project, a science writer, and the author of the book “If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity.”Justin and Greg discuss the unique features of human intelligence, such as causal inference, awareness of death, or the ability to make long-term plans, as well as its flaws, with our biology primarily focused on the present moment, leading us to make poor decisions for our future.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is there anything about humans that makes them worse than animals?26:35: Our biology is focused on the moment. So, when you're telling people how to invest properly, you have to bypass their natural inclination to not save money, to not put money away, like, have it happen automatically from their paycheck. Otherwise, they're not going do it. It's that disconnect between being able to know about the future and not actually doing anything about it and not caring. In some domains, that's a big problem. (27:27) That disconnect between how important the future feels to us and how important the moment feels to us causes all this trouble. And so, for that simple reason, because animals can't think about the future, they're focused on the here and now; they don't get into extinction-level trouble.Humans are designed to deal with the present, just as animals are.020:51: Humans can think about and plan for the future, but our brains are like animals designed to deal with the here and now. The power of causal inference06:20: Causal inference is something unique to our species that allows us to invent things like science. We can ask why things happen. We can design experiments to figure out whether or not the underlying proposed mechanisms are real or not, and that produces engineering and science and all of the stuff that we have. So, in that sense, It's very powerful.Distinguishing learned associations08:00: All of the intelligent behavior we see in other animals can be produced through learned associations, just as it is for you and me when we're going about our daily lives. So, it's hard to know, but you know it when you see it.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Friedrich NietzscheThe Mind of a Bee by Lars ChittkaPeter SingerStephen Jay GouldGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at St. Francis Xavier UniversityJustin Gregg's WebsiteJustin Gregg on LinkedInJustin Gregg on TwitterJustin Gregg on TED Audio CollectiveHis Work:Articles on Psychology TodayIf Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human StupidityAre Dolphins Really Smart: The Mammal Behind the Myth

The fear of algorithmic decision-making and surveillance capitalism dominate today's tech policy discussions. But instead of simply criticizing big data and automation, we can harness technology to correct discrimination, historical exclusions, and subvert long-standing stereotypes.Orly Lobel is the author of “The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future” and Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law. Lobel is one of the nation's foremost legal experts on labor and employment law. She is also one of the nation's top-cited young legal scholars.Orly and Greg discuss how collecting more data and adding more inputs into decision algorithms may be beneficial to expose disparities in current frameworks in the real world, and help us to right past injustices and ongoing inequities.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The idea of data minimization22:24: At the EU level, there's this term that is now coming into the federal policy and legislation before Congress, which is "data minimization." This idea that the default needs to be that we need to collect as little as possible and use the data that we collect to a very narrow channel of predefined use because that will protect our privacy. And the assumption also kind of the next step in this fallacy analysis that's really flawed is that when we collect more information, we're actually going to be harming the more vulnerable.Is the law counterproductive?15:21: I think that we've designed our laws in ways that are counterproductive by restricting the inputs into decision-making rather than checking on the outputs.Rethinking the role of public investment37:21: We're at a moment where there's going to be acceleration. There's always been a lot of changes. But right now, for sure, there's going to be a leap in speed in which some jobs are going to be annihilated and others are going to be available. So there's very much a role for public investment there for digital literacy and re-skilling that will not necessarily be provided by the market.What makes an employee do their job well?31:56: When they think about their careers and their human capital as their own, even from time zero, employees will invest much more in doing the job well.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Yuval FeldmanGary BeckerSilicon Valley ShowGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of San DiegoProfessional Profile at Harvard UniversityOrly Lobel’s WebsiteOrly Lobel on LinkedInOrly Lobel on TwitterOrly Lobel on TEDxUCIrvineHer Work:Orly Lobel on Google ScholarThe Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive FutureYou Don't Own Me: The Court Battles That Exposed Barbie's Dark SideTalent Wants to Be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding

What is art, and who gets to define it? Museums have long staked a claim on knowing what to show, but there has always been a wide range of how viewers engage with art. There is also a wide range of artists and what is considered art, from classical masters like Titian to modern conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp.Lance Esplund is an art critic, journalist, educator, and author. His book, titled The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art, is about telling the reader how to become a better viewer of art, what to look for, and how to engage with the works of more conceptual and modern artists.  Lance and Greg discuss how people can think when they engage with works of art, and the intentions that can be known from the artists. They discuss art history courses and what they get right and wrong, how art is always changing and yet still the same as the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, and Lance’s tips for how to go through a museum.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:  Art exists for art’s sake43:30: Art exists for art's sake. Art is only art, and I don’t think it has any job to help with social justice, change the world, help with climate change, or assist with starving people. It has no other purpose other than to be art. And to be in dialogue with other arts. Now, certainly, art doesn't exist without the people who make it and experience of it. But it is there and meant to be in relationship to other art. 47:48: The artwork doesn't care who made it or what the purpose was. Either it works, or it doesn't. And the only way to know if it works is for us to experience it on an aesthetic level and on personal, emotional, and intellectual levels.Art is a universal experience09:01: Great art gives you infinite ways to enter, and one was made just for you specifically. If it's great work, it can give you an entry point that works just for you. And that's one of the great things. It's a very personal but universal kind of experience.Developing your aesthetic judgment by asking the right questions27:07: We use our aesthetic judgment everywhere, whether we prefer this taste to that taste or this color to that color. And these are the things that you're doing with art too. It's just the human experience. That's all you're doing: bringing your human experience to it. It doesn't take any other skills than that, but it does require that you ask the right questions.Show Links:Recommended Resources:TitianPaul Klee Howling Dog by Paul Klee Marcel Duchamp Fountain by Marcel DuchampPiet MondrianMarina AbramovićHenri MatisseLascauxNew Yorker Article about Picasso visiting LascauxErnst GombrichGuest Profile:Lance Esplund on LinkedInHis Work:Lance Esplund’s ArticlesThe Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art

How does magical thinking help or hurt us in our everyday lives?? What would we lose if we removed the enchantment that it provides? Magical thinking is inherent in the human experience and persists even in an era dominated by the scientific worldview.Matthew Hutson is a journalist who writes for The New Yorker and other publications. Matt is also the author of the book The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane. He shows us how magical thinking is hardwired into our brains and how we use it to both our benefit and detriment depending on the circumstance.Matt and Greg discuss Matt’s book and his different examples of magical thinking in scientific and practical environments. They discuss different experiments and trials which include lucky golf balls and sweaters worn by Mr. Rogers and the feelings of those who were nearly struck down by lightning. Matt discusses how error management theory and conditioned response theory help illuminate the roots of magical thinking.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Pattern-finding enhances when you’re anxious20:08: Pattern-finding can be enhanced when we're anxious. When you feel out of control, when you feel scared, when you feel stressed out, you try to regain control. And one way to regain control is to look for patterns in the world to try to understand the world better so that you can predict what's going to happen next or find some way to gain leverage to control your fate. So there's a lot of evidence showing that when people are stressed out or anxious, they see various patterns.What is magical thinking?03:25: The way that I define it [magical thinking] in the book is by applying attributing mental properties to non-mental phenomena or non-mental properties to mental phenomena.Attributing your mind to things around is not necessarily magical thinking43:59: In order to make sense of the social world, you need to attribute your mind to the fleshy objects moving around you. You have to see them like yourself, as having thoughts, emotions, hopes, dreams, and fears, which is not necessarily magical thinking.What is the error management theory?19:20: The error management theory is the idea that if there are two opposing types of errors, like false positives versus false negatives, it's often better to make one kind of error than the other.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Bad Is Stronger than Good by Roy BaumeisterError Management TheorySkinner BoxGuest Profile:Contributor’s Profile on Psychology TodayMatthew Hutson on LinkedInMatthew Hutson on TwitterHis Work:Matthew Hutson on Google ScholarArticles from the New YorkerArticles for Science.orgTHE 7 LAWS OF MAGICAL THINKING: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane

Organizational leaders can use the power of behavioral economics to not only make better decisions themselves, but by leading their employees, their customers, and their stakeholders to make wiser decisions, make the company more effective, and also make society better off as a result.Max H. Bazerman is Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and the Co-Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. Don A. Moore is Professor in Leadership and Communication at Berkeley Haas and serves as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Their most recent book “Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices" deals with how successful leaders can maximize the potential of others by empowering them to make better decisions.Max and Don are joining Greg to discuss how thinking systematically can help leaders make better decisions and create an environment for more people within their organizations to make more deliberate, smarter, and more ethical decisions.They are also exchanging ideas about the importance of empowering employees and rewarding wise decision-making within organizations, even when that means taking a risk.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On helping leaders create better decisions for their organizations[Max H. Bazerman] 10:50: When we think about leadership, we often think about people moving heavy objects from one side of the factory to the other. That isn't what most of our leaders coming out of Haas and HBS are doing these days. They're guiding an organization to make better decisions. And that's where the decision factory idea comes from, and that's where our motivation comes from—to help leaders create better decisions throughout their organization.Encouraging decision-makers to have leadership perspective[Don A. Moore] 12:34: We want to encourage decision-makers to think broadly about their interests and the interests of those who are affected by their decisions. That is the leader's perspective—not just what serves my interests but the long-term interests of the stakeholders, the organization, and others affected by my decisions, those who depend on me, and those I influence.Everyone has the power to exercise leadership[Don A.Moore] 50:25: If leadership is about affecting the behavior of those around us, then each and every one of us has some power to exercise leadership. Now, by virtue of their structural location in the organization, some of us have more such influence than others. But it is common for people to make the mistake of underestimating how much influence they have to guide the thinking and behavior of those around them.On being a good mentor[Max H. Bazerman] 36:17: One of the things that made me good as a mentor, and probably what I've been best at in my career, is not just telling them what to do but benefiting from what they can do better than I can do and bringing that together in an integrated way.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Howard Raiffa “The Art and Science of Negotiation”Cass SunsteinDavid LaibsonMichael NortonDaniel KahnemanKeith StanovichRichard WestunSILOed - John List EpisodeunSILOed - Max H. Bazerman episodeunSILOed - Don A. Moore episodeGuest Profile:Max H. Bazerman Faculty Profile at Harvard Business SchoolMax H. Bazerman on TwitterDon A. Moore Faculty Profile at Berkeley HaasProfessional Profile on Psychology TodayAuthor’s Profile on HarperCollins PublishersDon A. Moore on LinkedInDon A. Moore on TwitterTheir Work:New Book: Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better ChoicesJudgment in Managerial Decision MakingMax H. Bazerman WorkMax H. Bazerman on Google ScholarThe Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders SeeBlind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do about ItNegotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and BeyondPredictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming, and How to Prevent Them (Leadership for the Common Good)Don A. Moore WorkDon A. Moore on Google ScholarPerfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely

Everyone loves a good story, but more than that, we as humans are programmed on a genetic level to share and learn all kinds of information through stories. When you tap into the power of that response you can use it to engage people on all levels, from customers to audiences to investors, and achieve a connection with them on a fundamental level.David Riemer is a lecturer at the University of California’s Haas School of Business and adviser at Berkeley’s Skydeck Accelerator, where He has been called the “startup whisperer” He has recently put his insight into a book, Get Your Startup Story Straight: The Definitive Storytelling Framework for Innovators and Entrepreneurs, which is all about how founders can use the power of stories to enhance their chances in business.David and Greg discuss how this response to story evolved, how to form your core product story, some examples where storytelling was the x-factor to success for different startups and founders, and other examples of storytelling in other industries like advertising and blockbuster movies tying together an audience through the shared understanding that makes us human. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Every story is different13:48: Every time you tell the story, it's going to be a little bit different. For the simple reason that there's a different player in the storytelling, and that's your audience. When the audience is different, people respond differently to different things, and it can lead you to different paths and down different channels. So it's always a bit of a dialogue.Best leaders are good storytellers41:26: One thing that separates a leader in their career is that the best leaders are good storytellers. And these folks want to grow in organizations, continue moving up the ladder, and have bigger jobs. And storytelling can be a great differentiator for them in their careers.The importance of human experience in storytelling34:10: If we're looking for ways for people to empathize and have something resonate with someone who may not understand the experience or the category, I always encourage people to look for that human experience. That helps explain the struggle of the customer so that, when you describe the solution, anybody can relate to what you're talking about.You can be authentic and a good performer16:53: Sometimes people think if someone is showing energy and their voice is showing vocal variety, they're using their arms, and maybe they're walking around and looking and making eye contact that they're not being authentic. They're being human. You can be authentic and be a good performer. One doesn't replace the other. And I always advise people that true stories are better than made-up stories.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Steve Blank - Get out of the BuildingSurbhi Sarna on LinkedInPixar’s 22 Rules of StorytellingGoogle ‘CODA’ advertisementApple Watch ‘Dear Apple’ advertisementKomal Ahmad on Solving Food WasteGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Berkeley Haas School of BusinessContributor’s Profile on ForbesDavid Riemer’s WebsiteDavid Riemer on LinkedInDavid Riemer on TwitterHis Work:Articles on MediumGet Your Startup Story Straight: The Definitive Storytelling Framework for Innovators and Entrepreneurs

Corporations are engines of progress and prosperity, directly influencing the quality of life of the general public while sometimes recklessly pursuing profit at the expense of us all.William joins Greg for a nuanced examination of the modern economy’s central institution, its origins in the Roman Republic, where corporations were designed to promote the common good, their role in mediating influence between the tyranny of government and the populace, their flaws, and the cultural shift to turn increasingly to corporations to solve society's biggest problems rather than the public sector.William Magnuson is an associate professor at Texas A&M Law School. Previously he taught law at Harvard, worked as an associate in Sullivan & Cromwell, and as a journalist in the Rome bureau of the Washington Post. He is the author of Blockchain Democracy: Technology, Law and the Rule of the Crowd, and has written for numerous leading publications including Harvard Business Law Review, Stanford Journal of Law, Business and Finance, and the Wall Street Journal.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Creating corporations then vs. now15:27: Today, if you want to create a corporation, I could log on right now and form a corporation within the next five minutes, and I could include in my charter a provision that would say my purpose is all purposes that are legal. Now that's a remarkable change. It used to be you had to go in front of a sovereign and ask them for permission and show why you were going to be good for the state. Nowadays, you can just create immediately.25:55: It's hard to deny that the sole, single-minded pursuit of profit sometimes, maybe even often, leads to harm to society.The cultural shift in the way we view corporations16:22: There's been a cultural shift in the way that we view corporations. It used to be, we thought of them as a tool, right? This tool would be used to promote the common good through the pursuit of commercial endeavors. All right? You had to justify yourself to the sovereign. Nowadays, we don't think of that.Who influences your life today? The government or corporations.12:00: You think about who influences your lives more today. Is it the government, or is it a corporation? Most people spend eight to nine hours a day working for corporations. Most people are not doing that for the government. That gives you a pretty clear indication of the importance of corporations today.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR NabiscoAdam SmithGiovanni di Bicci de' MediciLudovic PhalippouGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Texas A&M Law School Professional Profile on LinkedInHis Work:For Profit: A History of CorporationsBlockchain Democracy: Technology, Law and the Rule of the Crowd

Is our behavior truly our own? Or do our choices grow out of our environment? There are influences all around each of us, and often the walking talking version of influencers ends up shaping the behavior of the people around them in ways that are not always visible.Jon Levy is a behavior scientist and the founder of the Influencers Dinner. He is also an author. His latest book is called You're Invited: The Art and Science of Connection, Trust, and Belonging, and his previous work is titled The 2 AM Principle: Discover the Science of Adventure. Through the use of models, Jon has studied the science of influence and in what ways to both change what influences are affecting you, and how to use influences to affect a change in your behaviors.Jon and Greg discuss Jon’s work, how to level yourself up by surrounding yourself with the right people, how people become friends, and the surprising camaraderie that happens when you ask strangers to work and make food together. Jon also examines how behavior can become contagious, and the surprising reasons why you might not want your child to grow up to be an Olympian.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Adventure is a way to build a muscle for social skills09:38: Adventure is a fantastic process to live an interesting, exciting, potentially creative life. It's a fantastic way to bond with people that you adventure with, and more importantly, it is an incredible way to build the muscle of social skills and tolerance for discomfort, and social discomfort. These are skills that are essential in just about anything you'd want to do in life.03:08: If we can understand the mechanics of how relationship works, just like how an adventure works, suddenly things become possible that otherwise would be impossible.How do you establish meaningful interactions?41:33: Regardless of how introverted, extroverted, or shy you might be, just start gathering people or go and participate in other people's gatherings.On cultivating community39:39: If you want to be more active in cultivating community around you, you need consistent opportunities for people to engage with each other. So it's not just about me knowing you, me knowing your friend, and me knowing 20 other people. It's how do I get them to know each other.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jonah Berger Nicholas ChristakisJames H. FowlerBored Ape Yacht ClubGuest Profile:Jon Levy's WebsiteJon Levy on LinkedInJon Levy on TwitterJon Levy on InstagramJon Levy on TED Salon: Brightline InitiativeJon Levy on Talks at GoogleHis Work:Influencers DinnerArticles on ForbesArticles on Inc.You're Invited: The Art and Science of Connection, Trust, and BelongingThe 2 AM Principle: Discover the Science of Adventure

Live every day like it’s your last, or like it's the beginning of the rest of your life? The way we answer this question is closely tied to views on mortality, and how humans deal with the concept of their own impending demise. Death is the inevitable great leveler, and yet there are many different ways that humans think and live with the topic.Andrew Stark is a professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto. Andrew is also the author of several books. His latest is titled The Consolations of Mortality: Making Sense of Death and his other books include, Drawing the Line: Public and Private in America, The Limits of Medicine, and Conflict of Interest in American Public Life.Andrew and Greg discuss different views on death and mortality that have been present throughout history in different cultures and religions. They touch on the philosophies of Epicurus and of famous Stoics like Marcus Aurelius, and what more modern philosophers and literary figures have had to say about the subject of death, and explore how those more technologically-minded have set about to eliminate the threat of death and transform mortality almost completely. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On the resurgence of Buddhist and Stoic thinking26:57: If you're a Buddhist and you believe there is no such thing as the self, then there's nothing that can die, first of all, because there is no self to die. There is nothing that really has any attachments in the world such that you could be harmed if something happens to them. And so letting go is, if you can achieve it, something that might allow you to lead a life that's more tranquil, more realistic, and maybe more beautiful. Stoicism is similar. It doesn't say there is no self, but it says that we should put ourselves in a situation where the only things we care about are the things we can control. 29:28: Mortal or immortal, we'd still be temporal. We would still be creatures who lived in time, and time brings changes. Things are constantly changing in time. One implication of that is that even if we didn't die, we'd still have the motivation to get out of bed in the morning.Do we need to suppress some awareness of death to get the best out of us?37:17: My own hope is that we simply be aware that being mortal is better than any other option we might have had if we're going to live in time; that is, if we're going to be temporal creatures, which we have to be, then being mortal is better than being immortal.Even if we escape mortality, we're not going to escape time32:49: I see right now that the world is changing in all sorts of ways, and I'm not saying I disapprove or approve of them. They're strange to me. And even if I can acclimatize to them, it's not as if the changes are going to stop. They're going to keep going on and on. And if we think about that over hundreds of years, thousands of years, or tens of thousands of years, time is the problem, and even if we escape mortality, we're not going to escape time.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for EpicurusPoetry Foundation page for Friedrich HolderlinWikipedia Page for the 27 ClubOzymandiasMarcus AureliusRamses VII“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest HemmingwayDerek ParfitLeon KassHans JonasBernard WilliamsRay KurzweilMartin HeideggerNon-religious ConstellationsIt's a Wonderful LifeLife Is BeautifulGuest Profile:Faculty Profile University of Toronto-ScarboroughHis Work:The Consolations of Mortality: Making Sense of DeathDrawing the Line: Public and Private in America The Limits of Medicine Conflict of Interest in American Public Life

Emotions play a pivotal role in shaping our lives. They contribute crucially to the rationality of life, making us unique in our ability to reason and make sense of the world.Ronnie de Sousa is a Swiss-born Canadian philosopher, renowned for his outstanding contributions to the philosophy of emotion and biology, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and author of such books as  The Rationality of Emotion (1987), Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind (2007) and Love: a Very Short Introduction (2015).Ronald and Greg talk about how emotions enable us to create appropriate responses to situations we face in life and to what extent we can evaluate emotions themselves as being more or less rational. They also discuss the profound impact that language has on how we perceive and experience our emotions, and how our relationships are shaped by what we say about them and what others say about them.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Emotions contribute to the rationality of life25:31: Emotions are just attitudes, and value in the world is just the projection of your attitude. The world is completely devoid of any objective real value. It's just chaos. And what makes life meaningful is that we are interested in this, that, and the other. That's what creates goals, and that's why our emotions help us to respond in ways that are relevant to those goals. And so emotions contribute crucially to the rationality of life. 06:24: An enormously important point about rationality is that it often escapes people because they tend to think that the only options are, well, you're either rational or irrational.Teleology vs. rationality08:05: Teleology is just something that has to do with the adaptation of a strategy to a goal. And, of course, in the context of evolutionary psychology, the goal is essentially just the trivial goal of propagating DNA, but rationality has to do with how we conceptualize the relationship between goal and means. And once again, with language, how we can debate about that, consider different strategies, invent new strategies, and innovate.Why people shouldn't be so sure of themselves47:22: If there's anything I want to convince people of is that they shouldn't be so sure of themselves and that moral fervor is not, in general, something that will achieve any of the reasonable goals that a moralist might want to achieve.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas Hobbes “Leviathan” (1651)David HumeWhat the Tortoise Said to AchillesSharon StreetGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Toronto Ronald de Sousa on Linkedin Ronald de Sousa on TwitterAgainst Nature: Ronald de Sousa at TEDxUTSCHis Work:Articles on AeonRonald de Sousa on Google ScholarLove: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)Emotional Truth Why Think? The Evolution of the Rational MindThe Rationality of EmotionThe Humanities in Dispute

In the last decade, disruptive innovation has come primarily from startups like Uber, AirBnB, or not legacy companies. But Linda Yates argues that large companies can and should compete with start-ups by creating an internal innovation pipeline.Linda joins Greg to discuss her new book, The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed, which is a step-by-step guide for leading internal corporate innovation Linda Yates is the Founder and CEO of Mach49, which partners with companies to create their internal pipelines for new ventures and investments. The company helps its clients figure out how to disrupt their own market and innovate within their own industry.   Episode Quotes:Looking at funding like an onion44:26: If you think about Silicon Valley, we look at funding like an onion. Every layer of onion is a layer of risk. It could be a financial risk, technical risk, market risk, or, in the case of a large company, governance risk. You love it to death or you starve of oxygen. And every single internal entrepreneur must build a very rigorous business and execution plan designed to remove the greatest amount of risk on a least amount of capital.15:26: The only way you are going to drive growth that matters and have a financial impact on these large multi-billion dollar multinational public companies is if they can innovate at scale.The importance of understanding customer pain43:36: What's the fundamental underlying principles of what we do? Understand customer pain. Everything you have to do has to be customer driven. We say customer insights are the currency of credibility. Everything else is an uninformed opinion.The fundamental shift that created an existential crisis among large companies09:44: The large companies could be fat, dumb, and happy. They didn't have to innovate with the speed with which they have to do it now because they weren't facing that whole category of competitors, which are these startups fueled with billions of dollars of capital and zero orthodoxies and antibodies coming after them. That's the fundamental shift that has created a little bit of an existential crisis among these large. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Dreamers and Disruptors: How the Evolution of Silicon Valley is Reshaping Our World by Paul HollandOmniBridgeGuest Profile:Professional Profile on Mach49Professional Profile on Forbes | CouncilsLinda Yates on LinkedInHer Work:The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed

Food is much better and more interesting when it combines many cuisines. So too is economics more fruitful when it sources from different schools. While many countries have seen their diets expand, the profession of economics increasingly relies on “monocropping”, drawing only from the neo-classical school. In his latest book, Edible Economics, economist Ha Joon Chang uses the ever changing food culture to help readers understand how economic theories are also constantly evolving and merging. In this episode of unSILOed, Chang and Greg discuss Chang’s new ideas around economic theories and how food can guide us into that new way of thinking. Ha Joon Chang is an economist based at the University of London. He’s also taught at The University of Cambridge. He is the author of 17 economics books. Episode Quotes:The effect of free trade in the long run42:46: Free trade is good actually in the short run for everyone. Trouble is that if you keep doing free trade, the economically backward countries will be basically stuck where they are. So, you need different medicines for different people. But since most economists these days believe that there's only one correct policy for everyone, they keep giving the wrong medicine.Is economics the supreme logic?06:38: By saying that economics is the supreme logic, we are actually forcing all these other things to be secondary to the calculations of the profit, the prices, and so on. And I don't think that's a healthy thing.We cannot have economics the same way with physics & chemistry13:54: The world is too complex and too uncertain, and human beings are so unpredictable that we cannot have economics that is scientific in the same way that physics or chemistry are. Just think about it. Subatomic particles do not say, “According to the theory, I’m supposed to behave this way.” I’m not going to do that because it’s unethical. Chemical molecules do not say, “Well, we always have been moving this way, but wouldn’t the world be a better place if we went the other way?” You know, that’s what humans do.What can we learn from rich countries about good economic development?31:25: In the last 40 years, the prevailing view has been that pre-trade, deregulated markets, and the prevalence of private ownership are things that are good for economic development. When you look at the history of today's rich countries, you find that they use almost the exact opposite of what they're recommending.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Joseph SchumpeterThorstein VeblenJohn R. CommonsWesley Clair MitchellReport to Congress on The Subject of on The Subject of Manufactures by Alexander HamiltonCharles P. KindlebergerFriedrich ListGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of LondonProfessional Profile on Center for Economic Policy and ResearchProfessional Profile on The GuardianHa-Joon Chang’s WebsiteHis Work:Ha-Joon Chang on Google ScholarEdible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains The WorldEconomics: The User’s GuideReclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual (Critique Influence Change) 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About CapitalismBad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of CapitalismThe East Asian Development Experience: The Miracle, the Crisis and the FutureReclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual (Global Issues) Globalisation, Economic Development & the Role of the State Restructuring 'Korea Inc.': Financial Crisis, Corporate Reform, and Institutional Transition (Routledge Studies in the Growth Economies of Asia)Kicking Away The Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective

No matter what industry we all work in, productivity is key. Not only is managing our time properly good for getting all of our tasks done but also spending time doing things we love. In this episode of unSILOed, Robert Pozen shares methods to creating priorities for your time, ways to protect your time, and making sure you’re spending each day addressing your priorities.Robert Pozen is the author of Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours as well as Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work…Wherever You Are. He teaches at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Episode Quotes:Is a billable hour system a bad idea?07:22: A billable hour system is an input system, and in a knowledge-based economy, the idea that counting the inputs is the way to look at it is just crazy because people shouldn't be congratulated for spending more hours on something if they have a bad result.08:56: The only way to get organizations off hours and into a results-oriented output system is to provide them with an alternative system of accountability.What increases job satisfaction and productivity?11:33: It's that flexibility and autonomy that increase job satisfaction and productivity. So, that's a long way of saying we've got to get off hours and inputs. We've got to move to outputs and results, and we've got to show managers and bosses that we can have a system of accountability that's based on results.Hybrid setups will always be the dominant way to work46:03: Hybrid will be important because certain work, certain teams, certain aspects of jobs are always going to be done better in person, where people get together, and others are not. And that's why the hybrid is going to be the dominant form.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Edward Johnson IIIGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at MIT Sloan School of ManagementProfessional Profile at Brookings InstituteProfessional Profile at Harvard Kennedy SchoolProfessional Profile at IFRS FoundationRobert Pozen’s WebsiteRobert Pozen on LinkedInRobert Pozen on TwitterRobert Pozen on FacebookHis Work:Articles on Harvard Business ReviewArticles on CFO MagazineRemote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work…Wherever You AreThe Fund Industry: How Your Money is Managed (Wiley Finance)Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your HoursToo Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial SystemThe Fund Industry: How Your Money is Managed

Sometime in the 18th century, the world began to grow at much faster rate. Economic Historians have debated the reasons for this Industrial Revolution, but it almost certainly has to do with the growth of technology and a culture of scientific inquiry. Joel Mokyr is both an economist and a historian. He is also a professor of both Economic and History at Northwestern University. In addition, Joel has authored several books on history and the economy over the years. His latest book, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, is about how science and technology evolved in ways that reinforced each other.Joel and Greg discuss the connections between the industrial and scientific revolutions and between scientific discovery and technological adaptation. They discuss the decline of the guilds in England and the subsequent diffusion of English artisans and mechanics accross Europe They also discuss Darwin not being a darwinian, and how Caldwell’ss law leads to the decline in growth.Episode Quotes:Apprenticeship in Britain42:07: Engineers, mechanics, chemists, and technicians of any kind, whether they're carpenters, blacksmiths, or millwrights, are not produced in schools. They are not produced in universities. They're produced by other artisans through personal contact, which is called apprenticeship, and apprenticeship is all over the world. This is how people were trained, and what happens in Britain is, for historical reasons, apprenticeship worked much better than anywhere else.What makes the study of society complicated?28:15: The study of society is infinitely more complex and difficult because we humans are damn complicated creatures, and our minds have some level of complexity that defies anything that the quantum theorist can think about. So, in principle, we can, and we've made some progress in understanding certain things about society. Where it gets difficult is utilizing that kind of knowledge. Our power over natures keeps on increasing but our wisdom in handling that power is not26:30: There's something we can learn from the evolutionary people, which is yes, there is progress in certain dimensions and not others. And part of the problem is that these dynamics are not in sync with one another. And that creates these equilibria. It creates all kinds of trouble. And that is, to some extent, the great dilemma of the modern age: power over nature keeps increasing, but our wisdom and benevolence in handling that power is not.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Francis BaconRobert GordonStephen Jay GouldSteven PinkerDouglass NorthBarry R. WeingastFriedrich HayekMilton FriedmanJames WatsonCardwell's LawThe Narrow CorridorGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Northwestern University (Department of Economics)Faculty Profile at Northwestern University (Department of History)Profession Profile at The British AcademyProfessional Profile on NobelPrize.orgProfessional Profile on CIFARHis Work:Articles on AeonThe Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic ProgressThe British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective (American & European Economic History) 2nd EditionA Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Graz Schumpeter Lectures)The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge EconomyThe Economics of the Industrial Revolution (Routledge Revivals) The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (The New Economic History of Britain seri) Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800-1850 (Economic History)

When most historians set out to write a book, they choose a particular point in history to dive deep into. But Ian Morris prefers to write about history from the 10,000-foot view- or in some cases, the 10,000-year view. He calls it big history, and on this episode of unSILOed, Greg and Ian talk about some of the Big History topics Ian has tackled in his writing career such as: the evolution of human values over thousands of years, how war has shaped our various cultures, and how Britain’s recent choice to the leave the European Union is actually rooted in 10,000-year-old history in the country. Ian Morris is a historian and archaeologist and teaches in the Stanford Classics department.  Episode Quotes:Fairness is a fundamental human value40:15: There are certain things that unite all human beings, just as part of our biology. You can talk about such thing as human nature, and part of human nature, which is actually not that different from many other animal natures, is this idea of fairness that we all want to be treated fairly. And this is something you find, whether you're in a hunting gatherer society, or an ancient farming society, or in your modern California: fairness is a fundamental human value.52:24: Life for many people in the wealthier parts of the world is being transferred onto a digital platform. We're living in different ways from people in the past, and we're able to do that because we consume so much more energy than they have.The mechanism that led to diffusion of values across the world42:43: We are completely free to devise whatever moral system we want. But if you devise an inefficient system of cultural values and live next door to somebody whose system works much more efficiently, they're going to steal all your food and kill you. And this is the mechanism that led to the diffusion of values across the world in different periods.Are people the same all over the world?20:09: People are pretty much all the same in the sense of, say, large groups of people are pretty much all the same. You'll get about the same proportion of selfish, mean-spirited ones and same proportion of generous, kind ones, hardworking ones, and lazy ones wherever you look around the world, and the culture does inflect these biological forces, but it's the biology that's really in the driving seat.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Francis BaconJared DiamondJames WattJules VerneH.G WellsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityProfessional Profile at The British AcademyProfessional Profile on World Economic ForumContributor’s Profile on Foreign Policy Research InstituteHis Work:Ian Morris on Google ScholarGeography is Destiny: Britain and the World, a 10,000 year historyForagers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve War! What is it good for? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of NationsWhy the West Rules- For Now: The patterns of history, and what they reveal about the futureThe Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford Studies in Early Empires) 

Humans respond to incentives just like any other animal, but it’s important to make sure to use the right incentive to get the results that you desire because sometimes incentives can lead to unintended outcomes. Uri Gneey holds a chair in Behavioral Economics and is Professor of Economics and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. He is also an author and his latest book, Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work will be released in March. Uri is also the co-author of The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life with John A. List.Uri and Greg discuss the differing ways in which Psychologists and Economists look at incentives, and go over examples of companies like Coca Cola and Toyota using incentives that led to surprising outcomes. They discuss the difference between incentives for quantity versus quality, and how to incentivize the right things in the right way. Uri reveals the results of money incentives in paying people to go to the gym, take tests, or even paying them to quit their jobs. It all revolves around Uri’s axiom that if you understand the signal behind the incentive and can control it you gain a large advantage.Episode Quotes:The advantage of understanding signals32:07: Gifts are really signals of something, right? They're extremely inefficient. Imagine how much time and money is wasted on people going around before Christmas looking for gifts and trying to find something that will match, and then other people have to return it. Just give cash─but it signals what you think about the other person, and the signals, controlling those signals─that's my argument: if you understand that incentive sends the signal, and you control it, you can get a big advantage.Knowing the right questions will help you get the right answers. 49:34: The problem is that today there is so much data that people think that it's all out there, but they don't know how to get interesting answers because there are lots of people who know how to answer questions. You have very few people who know how to ask questions.Should we incentivize quantity?18:29: Very often, people incentivize the quantity instead of the quality dimension, and economists call it multitasking. Turns out that in such situations, what you'll get is exactly what you pay for. (19:38) The quantity versus quality is a really important thing. Don't just incentivize quantity because people are just going to produce more. The quality will go down.Show Links:Recommended Resources:More Information about PISA TestsGary BeckerAwards: Tangibility, Self-Signaling and Signaling to OthersAdam SmithFriedrich HayekJohn List unSILOed episodeGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UCSD Rady School of ManagementFaculty Profile at UCSD Policy Design and Evaluation LabProfessional Profile on  Gneezy.comProfessional Profile on The Decision Lab Uri Gneezy on TwitterUri Gneezy on LinkedInHis Work:Uri Gneezy on Google ScholarMixed Signals: How Incentives Really WorkThe Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life

When we think about the greatest innovators of our time (Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright) we often hear about their work ethic. But one thing that all of these innovators have in common is their ability to walk away from the work. They nap, they garden, and they go shopping to give themselves a break from the problem they are working on and look for inspiration in the real world. They gave themselves space to let inspiration come to them, rather than trying to force it. In this episode of unSILOed, Greg talks with Stanford professor Jeremy Utley about his new book Ideaflow, which gives readers a strategy to come up with better ideas and determine which ones are worth pursuing.Jeremy Utley is a Director of Executive Education at Stanford's renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school) and works with leaders around the world to untap their abilities to innovate better and more effectively. Episode Quotes:How you perceive your problems matter02:44: Inspiration is the disciplined pursuit of unexpected input. And every one of those words matters, but being disciplined in your pursuit of input is the way to solve problems. When you think about problem-solving as the big problem, we believe that idea flow can solve the problem of solving problems for good. Because you realize it's actually about how you think about the problem that matters.04:02: The most innovative individuals have this instinct to go and seek input, that drives fresh thinking when they're stuck.39:16:Our default assumption is to think that the majority of ideas we have are good, commercially viable, and successful. The opposite is true.Problems have solutions when you choose to find them30:15: Just because you don't know how to solve a problem doesn't mean it hasn't been solved in the world more broadly. And a lot of times, if you're thoughtful about where you go looking, you stumble upon novel solutions that you never would've seen in your own industry.What is the right way of thinking about idea flow?50:33: When you think about idea flow, it's not a measure of how many good ideas you can generate at any moment. That's an output metric. It's a measure of how many ideas you can generate at any moment and how many ideas are being generated.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Dean Keith Simonton, PhDAstro TellerThe Need For Closure Scale by Arie W. KruglanskiDonald M. MacKinnonA Technique for Producing IdeasDan M. KleinAndrew HubermanScott GallowayPhilippe BarreaudGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityJeremy Utley’s WebsiteJeremy Utley on LinkedInJeremy Utley on TwitterJeremy Utley on Talks at GoogleHis Work:Jeremy’s BlogArticles on MediumThe Paint & Pipette PodcastIdeaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters

Can ordinary symbolic human behavior be analyzed through the lens of game theory the same way that the economic behavior can?? What similarities show up in both economics and culture??Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli are both research scientists at MIT, lecturers at Harvard, and authors of the book Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior. In the book, Moshe and Erez use game theory to examine human behavior and provide an insightful way to explain seemingly irrational human behavior, along with some fascinating real-world examples.  Moshe, Erez, and Greg discuss their book and Greg’s common interest in game theory as a teacher of it. They talk about evolutionary rewards. They touch on symbolic behavior and group identification behavior, as well as how aesthetic taste has a cost, and what that is. Moshe and Erez use game theory to link to motivated reasoning, and Greg goes over the differences between being charitable and feeling charitable with an example from his real life.Episode Quotes:The central role of coordination18:04 [Moshe Hoffman]: I guess what we're trying to highlight, the central role that coordination plays, and many situations involve coordination. So norm enforcement involves coordination. You only want to punish norm violators if you expect others to agree with you that they violated the norm, and maybe they'll punish you if you don't punish it, or they'll reward you for punishing the norm violation.35:56 [Erez Yoeli]: We'd like for at least people to question whether, when they see something that seems irrational, they have simply failed to understand. The reason it's there is because they're thinking about it the wrong way.On creating pragmatic impact40:27 [Erez Yoeli]: In order to really have a pragmatic impact, you have to work a little bit harder. You have to draw the connection for people.People’s altruistic sentiment has a spillover effect32:45 [Moshe Hoffman]: People's altruistic sentiments and how much they're willing to give is like a dictator's game. It is a spillover effect. It's really shaped by the outside of the lab environment, that tends to be where norms get enforced and where you can build up a reputation, and in those kinds of settings, what the norm really matters, and how things are framed very much tells you what the norm is.When charity donations are given for reputation rather than for impact31:03 [Erez Yoeli]: If you try to force everybody to constantly give in very particular ways that they don't find intuitive, that don't help them build up a reputation that they care about, that don't help them show off certain sets of values that they want to show off, you're just going to cut them out of charity entirely. And it's not clear to me which is better, having them give to ineffective charities or not give to effective charities.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Selfish Gene by Richard DawkinsEmic v EticGiveWellMichael A. SchwarzGuest Profile:Moshe HoffmanProfile at Max Planck InstituteProfessional Profile at Harvard UniversityMoshe Hoffman on Google SitesMoshe Hoffman on TwitterErez YoeliFaculty Profile at MIT Sloan School of ManagementErez Yoeli’s WebsiteErez Yoeli on LinkedInErez Yoeli on TwitterErez Yoeli on TEDxCambridgeTheir Works:Moshe Hoffman on Google ScholarHidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior

The evolution of Networks has been characterized by periodic technological revolutions that result in accelerated dispersion of information and new ideas. By examining these moments and the conditions that caused them we can learn new things about the nature of networks.Tom Wheeler is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Center and also an author. He has an upcoming book called Techlash: Who Makes the Rules in the New Gilded age. His previous book is called From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future, and he is also the author of Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War. Tom is also the former FCC Chairman appointed by President Barack Obama. Tom and Greg discuss what constitutes a network, and what Tom would surprisingly classify as the first high-speed network. Tom relays the history of telegraphy, and the debt the telegraph owes to the printing press. Tom explains where some companies made huge blunders, passing on the chance to control important networks and the nefarious ways in which some ‘inventors’ actually came to be remembered for the inventions of others.Episode Quotes:What can we learn from the previous revolutions?50:04: Napoleon used to tell his generals: “Study the campaigns of the past.” It wasn't so that you will do the same thing. It was that, so you internalize those experiences. So when your leadership moment comes, you can say, "Aha, I've got an approach," and I think that's what's lacking right now in our discussion of what has been created by this third network revolution.51:54: What fascinates me about military history is the leadership moment. When you have a clear-cut decision, you have clear-cut winners and losers, and it happens in the public eye, so you can learn from it.How can regulators stay ahead and maintain environments that allow continuous disruptions?43:53: Regulators need to get their heads out of the cockpit. And the trap that you fall into that is easy to fall into is to rely on the incumbents and those that they fund, because the current technique is that the incumbents fund "independent groups" to keep feeding information into the regulators, the public media, and Congress. And you've got to get your head out of the cockpit and have an understanding of what's going on, or at least be seeking what's going on.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Charles MinotGeorge B. McClellanThomas EckertSamuel F.B. MorseAlfred VailJohn Vincent AtanasoffGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at The Brookings InstitutionProfessional Profile on Federal Communications CommissionTom Wheeler on LinkedInTom Wheeler on TwitterHis Work:Articles on Time From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our FutureMr. Lincoln's T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil WarLeadership Lessons from the Civil War: Winning Strategies for Today's Managers

Psychiatry has been called the stepchild of medicine, experiencing far less progress than care of the body. Andrew Scull, a sociology professor at the University of California at San Diego, chronicles the history of Psychiatry in America in his latest book, Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s turbulent quest to cure mental illness. In this episode of unSILOed, Greg and Andrew discuss this history including the rise and rapid fall of asylums, and the procession of remedies that offered false hope to the afflicted. Andrew also shares his research on the pharmaceutical industry and how the reliance on drugs to treat mental illness has grown. Andrew Scull has written multiple books on the history of psychiatry, including Madness, a very short introduction and Hysteria: The Biography. Episode Quotes:How asylums first started35:30: We build asylums to rescue people from the gutter, the prison, and the jail and put them in a therapeutic environment. The therapeutic environment deteriorates and indeed becomes anti-therapeutic in many ways, but then, beginning slowly in the late 1950s but much more expeditiously from the late 1960s onwards, we empty these hospitals out and don't put anything in their place.20:12: Mental illness, more generally, it's not just the desperation of the patients we're talking about; it's the desperation of their family members and everybody close to them in the face of the disasters.Neglecting the voices that caused the bigger problem45:21: There were enough voices being raised in the late seventies, early eighties about the defects that we should have addressed those issues now, but it was politically inexpedient.Are drugs the only way to treat mental illness?1:00:27: I doubt drugs will ever be the whole answer. It's also important to consider all sorts of environmental things and ways in which we can provide the kinds of levels of social support that can mitigate the problems that come with this.Show Links:Recommended Resources:A Beautiful MindHenry CottonBedlam AsylumDorothea DixAsylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other InmatesThe CATIE StudyThomas R. InselLeon EisenbergGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC San DiegoAuthor’s Profile on SAGE Publishing Andrew Scull on LinkedInHis Work:Andrew Scull on Google ScholarArticles on Psychology TodayDesperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental IllnessMadness: A Very Short IntroductionHysteria: The Biography

Competition drives down prices, makes it hard to collude on prices, and keeps any one company from taking excessive profits, but the fewer players there are in the game of free markets, the more power and control each one has, and consumers are ultimately the ones who lose. Thomas Philippon is an economist, a professor at New York University in the Stern School of Business, and the author of the book The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets. In his book, Thomas investigates the paradox of America having trended away from the free market dominance they were once known for, and how while American companies have been consolidating across every sector, European free market forces are very robust and stronger than those in America by a wide margin. Thomas and Greg discuss the shifts in the ways America’s markets used to operate versus how they do now, and why. y. Thomas lays out several instances of consolidation in American sectors such as the airline industry, health care, and telecoms over the past 20 years.Episode Quotes:The political game of lobbying39:41: The reason we elect officials is precisely because we don't have the space in our brains to deal with all of the issues. We elect people to take care of it. That's their job, so we can go about our business. But as soon as you do that, you will never have the full information. And therefore, it's possible for players to take advantage of their insider knowledge and insider power to tilt the outcome in their favor. And so the political game of lobbying is always, like any market, trying to find the balance between these two.45:51: These are the three pillars: a strong competitive market, consumer protection, and antitrust, universities, and one big integrated market. Over the past 20 years, the EU has made very good progress on the first one to the point that today it's at least as good, and in some cases, better than the US, at enforcing consumer protection.Is lobbying bad?34:41: There's no reason to think that lobbying is bad in and of itself. And in fact, there is no reason to think that the political system is not operating like any market. We have supply demand, competition, and it's not obvious that the outcome is going to be bad just because we call that politics.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Mancur OlsonThe Third ManJoel MokyrDodd-FrankMilton FriedmanJean MonnetGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at NYU Stern School of BusinessProfessional Profile on National Bureau of Economic ResearchProfessional Profile on Centre for Economic Policy Research Contributor’s Profile on World Economic ForumThomas Philippon on LinkedInThomas Philippon on TwitterHis Work:Thomas Philippon on Google ScholarFeatured Works on BruegelThe Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets

The classic image of evolution everyone knows is the man who goes from apelike body to tool using biped. But the bigger, story would include families, groups of humans who worked together, including women, children, and people of all ages, which means division of labor and culture.Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson are a Research Associate and Professor Emeritus, respectively, in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California Davis. They are also authors, and their newest book is A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution. Detailing far more than earlier works about the lives of the women and children of these societies, and the ways in which human culture has been shaped over time.Lesley, Peter, and Greg discuss the surprises and wonders that their deeper dive into the evolution and the history of ancient cultures have produced. They detail how the use of tools and the stacking of technologies set humans apart from other animals. They discuss humans in relation to other animals. They also go over the transitions our primate ancestors had to make to evolve, and how modern cultural roles affect and inform and explain current human birthrates.Episode Quotes:What kept the birth rate high for most of human history?[Peter Richerson] 59:21: The rising importance of teachers, non-relative colleagues, military officers, and bosses in our lives meant that much cultural transmission came from people who had achieved social roles that didn't involve being parents. You don't have to be a parent to be a teacher. You don't have to be a parent to be a charismatic boss. And so, the support for pronatalist norms that kept birth rates high throughout most of human history came because your relatives and people in your community were the most important influences on your values. You weren't really an adult until you married and had children in many communities. So the whole status system revolved around reproduction.On language, culture, and stories[Lesley Newson] 24:02: There's no way of telling a story without having language, and knowing the same stories binds people together. Believing the same stories binds people together, which is one of the most important things for any culture.Why is culture good for adapting on a certain time scale?[Peter Richerson] 10:01: What culture is good for is adapting to spatial and temporal environmental variation on a certain timescale. If the fluctuations are on a very short timescale, then the only thing that is useful is individual learning.On complex culture[Lesley Newson] 25:51: Culture got more complex and language got more complex once more and more groups got together and found ways of reconciling their different stories, beliefs, and that kind of thing, it made it possible to have a more complex culture.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Major Transitions in EvolutionDr. Richard W. WranghamJulian JaynesGuest Profile:Lesley NewsonFaculty Profile at UC DavisProfessional Profile on The View of LifeLesley Newson on TwitterPeter RichersonPeter Richardson at UC DavisProfessional Profile on The Center for Academic Research and Training in AnthropogenyAuthor’s Profile on the American ScientistTheir Work:Peter Richerson on Google ScholarLesley Newson’s Research PapersA Story of Us: A New Look at Human EvolutionNot by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution First EditionThe Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition) Culture and the Evolutionary Process 

How did we get to the financial crisis of 2008? Where were the signs, and what did we miss? For these questions and more, we turn to the person who wrote a book on the subject. Dr. George Cooper is an author and the chief investment Officer of Equitile investments. He has 27 years of investment experience including with JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and BlueCrest Capital before. His first book, The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles, and the Efficient Market Fallacy, has an updated version out, and his latest book is called Fixing Economics: The story of how the dismal science was broken - and how it could be rebuilt. George and Greg talk about the limits of neoclassical economics, the importance of systems thinking, and they go into the origins of financial crises. George and Greg talk about the ideas of Keynes, Minsky, Marx, Maxwell,  Kuhn, and Brahmagupta. George introduces his view of dynamic equilibrium and his perspective on Modern Money Theory and other alternative schools of economics.Episode Quotes:Recognizing the role of credit creation system11:18: When you understand the connection between asset inflation, profit formation, and credit creation. When you realize that all three of those are intimately entwined, then you can no longer believe in an equilibrium model anymore because asset inflation leads to credit creation. And interestingly, the creation of credit also leads to a boom in corporate profits.49:21: When we talk about money creation, we need to also think about anti-money creation, which is debt. So debt and money combined are literally created and destroyed.Are we analyzing the wrong side of economic theory? 16:07: We tend to analyze the economy only from the private sector side, but there are no successful economies in the world that are 100 percent private sector. Every successful economy in the world has a public sector that is comparable in size to the private sector.Finding important truths and valid insights in economics25:51: Many social scientists, even today, talk about emotions as if it were one great category, but emotions to their work by virtue of their specificity, that is, by their community entities and action tenses that are also very specific or different from the different emotions. So if you are angry, you want to make the other person suffer. If you hate, then you want other person to disappear from the face of the earth.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Hyman MinskyJohn Maynard KeynesParadox of ThriftAustrian SchoolLehman BrothersWilliam HarveyAlfred WegenerCharles DarwinJames MaxwellBrahmaguptaLuca PacioliBenoit MandelbrotThe Structure of Scientific RevolutionsunSILOed EP #12 | Understanding Carry Trades feat. Kevin ColdironGuest Profile:Professional on Equitile InvestmentsAuthor’s Profile on  Penguin Random House ProfileSpeaker’s Profile on Specialist SpeakerGeorge Cooper’s WebsiteHis Work:Articles on EvonomicsThe Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles, and the Efficient Market FallacyMoney, Blood and Revolution: How Darwin and the doctor of King Charles I could turn economics into a scienceFixing Economics: The story of how the dismal science was broken - and how it could be rebuilt 

Most history books explain the details of events and provide well-researched context to these events. But history isn’t just about what happened, it’s often about why. The root of any social change is often complex, human emotions.In his new book, France before 1789, Jon Elster explores the circumstances leading up to the French Revolution and the limits of rational choice theory in explaining collective action. In this episode of unSILOed, Greg and Jon talk about how human emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, and hope can motivate entire populations of people to change history.Jon Elster is a professor at Columbia University and the author of a wide range of books exploring Marxism, Social Science, Choice Theory, Constitutions, and Addiction.Episode Quotes:What can we still learn about Aristotle about emotions?35:04: Many social scientists, even today, talk about emotions as if it were one great category, but emotions do their work by virtue of their specificity, that is, by their cognitive antecedents and action tendencies that are also very specific or different from the different emotions. So if you are angry, you want to make the other person suffer. If you hate, then you want other person to disappear from the face of the earth.11:43: Emotions have a short half-life and various other features that don't actually form a formal model but form a complex of features that we can find in many situations where emotions are at work.Self-interest and rationality are not the same thing10:04: Self-interest and rationality are not the same thing, but people act against their rational self-interest under the influence of emotions with respect to vengeance, revenge is often a pointless, sterile act, but it's undertaken under the impulse of very strong emotions.What’s the problem with studying leadership?13:55: The problem about studying leadership is that you can identify good leaders only by their results. There's no way of identifying good leaders ex ante to pick them. That would be good. Of course, if we could, but we can't.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Rebellion FrancaiseGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia UniversityHis Work:Jon Elster on Google ScholarAmerica Before 1787: The Unraveling of a Colonial RegimeFrance before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist RegimeSour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) Reissue EditionSecurities Against Misrule: Juries, Assemblies, ElectionsReason and RationalityUlysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and ConstraintsStrong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior (Jean Nicod Lectures)Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the EmotionsNuts and Bolts for the Social SciencesExplaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences

In recent decades there has been a major restructuring of the economy from capital-intensive manufacturing to knowledge-intensive, innovation-driven fields which increases the demand for high skilled workers. But why is it, that the US is producing a lot more innovation than other parts of the world?Edward W. Conard is an American businessman, author, and scholar. He is a New York Times-bestselling author of The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class and Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong; and a contributor to the book Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality. Conard is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Previously, he was a managing director at Bain Capital, where he worked closely with former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.Edward and Greg talk about how information technology led to increased productivity and how the vast majority of the benefits generated by these technological advances go to the consumers and only a tiny fraction is captured by the people that are in the business of producing it. They also discuss why the argument that the middle class is being hollowed out is wrong, and Edward’s strategy for increasing wages for the middle and working classes.Episode Quotes:The constraint to growth in the world04:52: We can't afford to waste our talent because we have a lot less of it. And we have a lot more need from our population in terms of the economic help they need in order to live a happy life and in our economy. Because we have a lot of talent, a lot of it is not properly trained, and ultimately, we have to get the properly trained talent to take risks. (05:20) Because if all we do is our doctor or lawyer, they're not going to increase productivity. They're not going to produce innovation. And so that is the constraint to growth in our economy, it’s probably the constraint to growth in the world.41:41: The lack of talent is a real constraint in trying to get things done. Not only find the ideas but reduce the risk. And so that's a very important piece of it. This whole risk with our savings gives the impression that capital's really cheap.How ideas affect taxes07:22: If you have great ideas, the tax rate is going to matter a lot because you're multiplying by the tax rate. If you don't have good ideas, it doesn't matter if you have zero times in a high or a low tax; then we're still going to be zero.Two effects of properly trained talent 39:41: Properly trained talent has two effects. One is that it goes out and finds the ideas because, without talent, you don't find the ideas. But the second thing it does is reduce the risk of implementing those ideas. So it has this risk-reducing function.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas PikettyEquality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by Arthur Okun Guest Profile:Professional at American Enterprise InstituteEdward Conard’s WebsiteEdward Conard on LinkedInEdward Conard on TwitterEdward Conard on YoutubeEdward Conard on FacebookHis Work:Articles in National ReviewThe Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong The Economics of Inequality in High-wage Economies By Edward Conard

The brain is a curious thing, but how does curiosity happen in it? Where does curiosity begin, and what does that process look like? Curiosity does quite a lot inside the brain, from connecting dots of knowledge to shaping entire architectures of thought and organization. Understanding the underpinnings of this motivating force can allow us to harness its power for our own advancement.Dani Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. They are also an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Perry Zurn is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy Department of Philosophy & Religion at American University in Washington D.C. Bassett and Zurn are also twins, and co-authors of the new book, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, about the nature of curiosity, where it originates from, and how it functions. Dani, Perry, and Greg talk about curiosity as it relates to both Perry’s specialty area of Philosophy and Dani’s specialty area of Neuroscience. They discuss lessons they learned from researching and writing their book and get into some of the discoveries they made inside. They talk about how people can be subdivided into busy bodies, hunters, and dancers and the traits of each. They discuss early school experiences that allowed them to chase and foster the power of curiosity in their own childhoods, and they touch on what a collective curiosity would entail. Episode Quotes:Curiosity is a connective process[Dani Bassett ] 06:39: We argue that it's that connective property of information gathering, information seeking that is what curiosity does. And it provides us with a full, interconnected knowledge base that allows us to reason from our past and make new decisions in the future. It allows us to understand the mental processes of another person, and it also allows us to connect among people themselves.[Perry Zurn] 47:01: Creativity along the way, as fundamental to what it means to be educated, would change the entire structure of education. The practices of attunement[Perry Zurn] 13:04: When we're curious, we direct our observational skills—our capacity to notice or be attuned to certain things or be attuned to particular dynamics, for example. That's something that's at the core of what curiosity does. That's how it does some of its connecting work.The role of a teacher in a child’s curiosity[Dani Bassett ]13:04: Teachers are in this very tricky situation where they have an opportunity to model and to say, "Here, look at how my mind moves." You could try this too. And they also need to be quiet and not forecasting their own curiosity sometimes so that they can notice, hear, support, value, and encourage the kind of curiosity that the child has.Show Links:Recommended Resources:David Lydon-Staley, Ph.D.Center for the EdgeGuest Profile:Dani BassettFaculty Profile at University of PennsylvaniaFaculty Profile at Santa Fe InstituteDani Bassett on LinkedInDani Bassett on TwitterPerry ZurnFaculty Profile at American University Perry Zurn’s WebsitePerry Zurn on LinkedInPerry Zurn on TwitterPerry Zurn & Dani S. Bassett on Talks at GoogleTheir/His Work:Dani Bassett on Google ScholarPerry Zurn on Google ScholarComplex Systems LabCurious Minds: The Power of ConnectionCuriosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry

Growth is good but creates losers as well as winners. The Economics profession has far too often failed to provide insight into how to design policies that protect those negatively impacted by forces such as technological change and globalization. There’s a lot riding with how we address the economic ‘losers’, and it matters because the two main ways to engage with this problem have dramatically different consequences.Glenn Hubbard is an author, economist, and also Professor of Economics as well as Dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business until his retirement in 2019. Glenn was also the Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Glenn’s latest book is The Wall and the Bridge: Fear and Opportunity in Disruption’s Wake, and he tackles the two main ways to assist the ‘losers’ in life. Governments and establishments try to wall off the affected areas and protect them from further harm, but at great cost to and minimal benefit for those people affected. Glenn promotes the second strategy of building bridges out from the areas of loss in different directions as lifelines, serving to assist in whatever transition needs to be made to reach a working position.Glenn and Greg talk about the two approaches to disruption, walls, which seek to keep change at bay, and bridges, which make change easier to accept. They discuss how Lincoln and Roosevelt built bridges through Land Grant Colleges and the GI Bill and how current policymakers could build new bridges to opportunity. . Glenn explains the role of community colleges and labor mobility and local development initiatives in places like Pittsburgh, PA, and Youngstown, OH.Episode Quotes:Why business leaders should step outside their comfort zone41:18: Many business people think that there's enormous and widespread support for business in the system. And so we can just tinker around the edges and ignore the social support. (41:48) I do think business leaders have to step outside their comfort zone a little. I don't think social support is given, and I do think they have to think of themselves as somewhere, not anywhere.On being optimistic about the future of economic growth49:07: Markets and the market for ideas have a great capacity to solve our problems. Where we trip over ourselves is when we don't notice the consequences of things, but a perfectly alert group of economists, businesspeople, public policymakers, and citizens—real people as well as economists—can make this work.Growth and economic development03:16: Imagine in my hand, I had a coin, and the head side of that coin is called growth. Now, who wouldn't be for that? Here's the problem: There's no modern theory of economic growth that doesn't entail a tail side of the coin, which is disruption. Every modern theory of growth has it. There's no such thing as growing a little bit each year smoothly, and everybody's incrementally better off. That's not how economic growth happens.Why isn't the congress the political realm where deals take place?26:56: Elites, whether they sat in boardrooms, congressional halls, or, dare I say, the economics profession, weren't noticing that we were speaking more to people who won. And not enough the people who lost and the anxiety that creates for individuals and communities. So I think noticing is a big element of it.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Robert D. PutnamAdam SmithThe Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our TimeKaldor-hicks efficiencyMancur OlsonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Business SchoolProfessional Profile on National Bureau of Economic ResearchProfessional Profile on Committee on Economic DevelopmentGlenn Hubbard’s WebsiteGlenn Hubbard on LinkedInHis Work:The Wall and the Bridge: Fear and Opportunity in Disruption's WakeBalance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern AmericaThe Mutual Fund Industry: Competition and Investor Welfare HEALTHY, WEALTHY, AND WISE: Five Steps to a Better Healthcare System (second edition)Seeds of Destruction: Why the Path to Economic Ruin Runs Through Washington, and How to Reclaim American ProsperityThe Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty

In the last 30 years, there has been an explosion in the diversity of cuisine. But while there are more diverse and healthier food choices available than ever before, and people are becoming more aware of what they are actually eating, the science of taste is still underdeveloped compared to our other senses.John McQuaid, is a journalist and author, most recently of the book "Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat," which explores the biology and history of flavor from the origin of life to the modern food system. While working for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, he was the lead reporter on a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper series about market-driven fisheries collapses around the world and co-writer of a series that anticipated the city’s near-demise by Hurricane Katrina. He has also written for other publications including Smithsonian magazine, The Washington Post, and Scientific American.John and Greg talk about the interplay of the natural, genetic and neurological aspects of taste and how this sense has evolved in our culture in the last decades. They also discuss the limitations of industrial manufacturing and artificial flavors and the obstacles to using machine intelligence to come up with new recipes.Episode Quotes:Food is a product of a particular time and place28:36: Food is very much a product of particular time and place. And to experiment radically with it is both exciting, somewhat dangerous; if you do it right, can be a real revolution. And so that's a lot of what's going on now. In flavor, they're starting to manipulate these processes, which have cultural roots, but nobody really understands how it works in terms of the flavors it produces because flavors are so complicated. Just the biochemical makeup of them, in addition to how we experience them, is very poorly understood.12:02: Over time, we learned to integrate and create more complicated experiences around food that could turn bitterness into something that was a plus rather than a minus.Can we use machine intelligence to come up with new recipes?44:15: To create new cuisine, you need to build on existing traditions and experiment, and it's a constant, never-ending process that's underway. And it's a live process. It requires human beings trying different things and tasting different things. And they might get some clues from looking at how computers would suggest putting certain flavors together. But until you actually do that in a kitchen, you're not really going to know what works and what doesn't.Show Links:Recommended Resources:“Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat” Book by John McQuaidGuest Profile:Professional Profile at the Wilson CenterJohn McQuaid’s WebsiteJohn McQuaid on LinkedInJohn McQuaid on TwitterHis Work:Articles on Scientific AmericanArticles on ForbesTasty: The Art and Science of What We EatPath of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms 

When is clean too clean? And what science connects how we treat our skin with common skin conditions? While the virtues of cleanliness may seem to flow from modern scientific findings about germs, there are deep cultural and economic factors that have shaped the evolution of hygiene.James Hamblin is a physician who specializes in public health and preventative medicine. He is also a journalist, author, and lecturer at Yale University. His latest book is titled Clean: The New Science of Skin, which was named an editor’s choice by The New York Times Book Review, and Vanity Fair named it among the best books of 2020. James and Greg discuss James’s book and the counterintuitive way we sometimes think of clean and healthy skin. They touch on the history of marketing by the soap and beauty industry and the relationship between status and cleanliness. James discusses new insights into the skin biome, how doctors blur the lines between the medical and the cosmetic, and unlocks some of the mysteries around various small body parts.Episode Quotes:How marketing manipulated us to things we don't really need11:26: You have to create a need in someone. You have to make them believe that they are lacking something, that they previously were fine. The term "body odor" didn't exist before people trying to sell deodorant. People didn't worry about fine lines before certain beauty soaps started saying they could prevent them—a soap for preventing wrinkles. They just were using every possible marketing strategy, and that's what’s really unfortunate about it. It didn’t have to go that way.On the concept of cleanliness03:54: The concept of cleanliness goes back far, far beyond germ theory, and it's always been a stand-in for purity, whether it's religious purity, ethnic purity, or sexual purity, and these are arbitrary concepts, but it's been used as this sort of idea of what is right and wrong, essentially.The information constraints faced by doctors26:56: All kinds of different psychological stressors require constant work, help, and support. It's not that doctors don't know. It's just that we don't have a healthcare system that makes those things part of the toolkit.Show Links:Recommended Resources:James’s Newsletter: The BodySocial Distance PodcastGuest Profile:Professional Profile at Yale UniversityJames Hamblin on LinkedInJames Hamblin’s WebsiteJames Hamblin on TwitterJames Hamblin on InstagramJames Hamblin on TEDxYaleHis Work:Stories on the AtlanticClean: The New Science of Skin If Our Bodies Could Talk 

Fear is a common and important human emotion that we’ve all experienced at some time. But have you ever paid attention to how you react to fear in others? Your response may say a lot about your moral compass. Neuroscientist Abigail Marsh studied two groups of people, psychopaths and altruists, and how they interpret fear and other emotions in others. The psychopaths have trouble identifying fear in others, while the altruists respond immediately with empathy. The result of Marsh’s research is her book The Fear Factor: How one emotion connects altruists, psychopaths & everyone in between. On this episode of unSILOed, Abigail and Greg talk about her research and how these findings apply to all of our lives and interactions with people. Abigail Marsh is a professor of psychology at Georgetown University. She runs the Laboratory on Social & Affective Neuroscience which conducts research on human behavior and interaction. Episode Quotes:Fearlessness is a core part of a psychopathic personality39:07: People with psychopathy are really bad at recognizing when other people are afraid. And the reason we think that is because they don't feel fear strongly themselves. Fearlessness is a core part of the psychopathic personality. And so the idea is if you don't really know what fear feels like, and some people with psychopathy report not ever feeling fear, you don't have the empathic reaction to it in the brain that, I think, is what allows you to then identify the emotion that you're witnessing in somebody else.30:59: Being good at fear and recognizing when other people are afraid is a really strong individual difference predictor of altruism. The violence inhibition mechanism45:47: The idea is that, in typical people, the amygdala is a key part of the brain that, during development, is sort of neurobiologically prepared to respond to other people's distress and to learn from other people's distress, such that when you learn that a particular behavior results in another person looking highly distressed, for example, afraid, you very quickly learn not to do that thing again. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Daniel WegnerThe Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So Called Psychopathic PersonalityMilgram studyDaniel BatsonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Georgetown UniversityContributor’s Profile on Psychology TodayAbigail Marsh WebsiteAbigail Marsh on LinkedInAbigail Marsh on TwitterAbigail Marsh on TEDTalkHer Work:Abigail Marsh on Google ScholarThe Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between (US)Good for Nothing (UK)

Whether we are talking about food, clothing, or financial products, the supply chains which convert the raw materials to finished goods are getting more and more complex, giving rise to a wide range of intermediaries, ranging from the Walmarts and Amazons of the world to the Etsys and the Kickstarters. Increasing complexity often means increasing opacity. Regardless of the industry, understanding where our stuff comes from requires an understanding of intermediation design. Kathryn Judge, a Columbia law professor who researches financial markets, explores the complexities of our modern economy and supply chain systems in her new book Direct: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source. She joins Greg on this episode of unSILOed to talk about consumer habits in our modern economy, how convenience changed the world, and the sociological impacts of this convenience. Kathryn Judge is the Harvey J. Goldschmid Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Her academic work focuses on financial institutions, innovation, and banking. Episode Quotes:Defining the middleman economy03:31: When I talk about the middleman economy, it's really two phenomena that build off each other. One, are they increasing the scale of intermediaries? Whether it's large banks, Walmart, or Amazon. And then how the scale of those largest intermediaries justifies changes in the process of production quite often where it becomes more disaggregated so you get the longer and the complex supply chains, and then how these two patterns feed off of each other.38:09: Even though we're seeing a shift in consumer and investor demands, conscious consumerism is not going to solve the structural challenges we're facing right now. There is always somebody on the other side of your transaction.28:34: There are people and places behind all of the goods that we're bringing into our lives. And once you start to reawaken that awareness, that becomes a mechanism for also helping to build a political will to think about, "Well, what do we want those structures to look like?" And what are the tradeoffs we're willing to make, and what are the tradeoffs we don't want to make?Using technology to enable disruption to intermediation schemes21:58: We are seeing technology being used in different ways. On the one hand, you do have these large intermediaries, like Amazon and Walmart, that we think about that are doing an incredible amount with data in ways that are helping to strengthen their position. At the same time, we are seeing technology come in and enable a disruption to some of the largest and most entrenched intermediation schemes and enable a different type of exchange.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Law SchoolKathryn Judge’s WebsiteKathryn Judge on LinkedInKathryn Judge on TwitterHer Work:Kathryn Judge on Google ScholarArticle on Time MagazineArticle on GreenBizDirect: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source

What happens when two sides are in disagreement and both think they are right? How do you change a mind? Some tactics can be persuasive, but others can backfire and result in no movement or even extra resistance. There are things that can be learned from these disagreements, and tools that can be used to resolve them.David McRaney is a journalist, podcaster and author. His latest book is How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion where David explores different methodologies for changing both one’s own mind and the minds of others, exploring what works, what does not, and what was surprising along the way. He is also the author of the books You Are Now Less Dumb, and You Are Not So Smart, which shares that title with his podcast.David and Greg talk about David’s experiences researching his books and what he found out about changing minds as he was studying how minds change. They talk about experiments with coin flips and card colors where seemingly arbitrary decisions are motivated by unconscious thought processes. They also discuss the social phenomenon of ‘The Dress’ and what science could tell us about people on either side of the color line. Episode Quotes:Why do we tend to make decisions that are easier to justify?22:52: If you deny people the information that they will use to justify their decision, they won't make the decision because they can't. We do not make decisions unless we’re allowed the opportunity to justify them. And the other side of that spectrum is unfortunately, that means we'll also tend to only make the decisions that are easiest to justify, not the ones that are "best" or have the most factual evidence underpinning them.19:10: When it comes to arguing about facts, figures, politics, hypotheticals, and abstractions, the facts often remain inert. They stay the same, and the reasons don’t change. Your motivation to search for reasons changes.An important part of how we flow from acting to thinking21:42: You have people and put them in situations where they have to rationalize and justify their decisions. They will always choose the option that is easiest to justify, and if you deny them the opportunity to justify their decisions, they just stop. They just don't make anything. It's such an important part of how we flow from thinking to acting.Defining an epiphany47:58: An epiphany is the moment you realize you have changed your mind. It's not the moment you change your mind. It's the moment you realize you have already changed your mind. And it's a shocking, thrilling, visceral experience. And it needs to be. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Marshall McLuhanThe Enigma of ReasonThe Bruner Postman ExperimentDisagreeing about Crocs and socks: Creating profoundly ambiguous color displaysThe DressGuest Profile:Speaker’s Profile at the Harry Walker AgencyDavid McRaney’s WebsiteDavid McRaney on LinkedInDavid McRaney on TwitterHis Work:You Are Not So Smart PodcastHow Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and PersuasionYou Can Beat Your Brain: How to Turn Your Enemies Into Friends, How to Make Better Decisions, and Other Ways to Be Less DumbYou Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, an d 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

All multicellular organisms face the risk of cancer cells developing and growing. When these cells work together and cooperate they can create new problems that require novel approaches to solve. Healthy cells also cooperate with each other in the effort to eliminate the cancer as the two sides battle for territory in the body. Athena Aktipis is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, the Director of ASU’s Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative, and a member of the Center for Evolution and Medicine. Athena is also the author of The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer. She is a cooperation theorist, theoretical evolutionary biologist, and cancer biologist working at the intersection of these fields, and she searches for general principles of cooperation that manifest across diverse systems. Athena and Greg discuss the world of cancer cells, and the way in which they cooperate with each other. They go over different theories for cellular evolution that relate to cancer and Athena shares some surprising strategies to deal with cancer when it evolves in a body. They also discuss ways to deal with evolutionary management, and the different approaches that some disciplines have that lend themselves well to interdisciplinary study.Episode Quotes:How should cancer intervention be approached?33:24: If we think about cancer as an evolutionary system, as an evolutionary problem, we think of cancer as fundamentally being a process, right? It's a process of evolution happening inside the body in a way that is favoring cells aligned with our interests as beings. Then that allows us to really shift the question about intervention to, how we could, instead of targeting cancer and trying to kill cancer, which, you know, sometimes that makes sense. But we can instead think, "How can we actually shape the process of evolution in the body?"23:03: One of the dirty tricks cancer cells have up their collective sleeves is that within their genomes are all of the genes that allow cells to cooperate really well to make our bodies functional.Our bodies are a vast ecosystem for cancer cells24:00: Our bodies are a vast ecosystem for cancer cells. And there are so many sub-habitats, regions, and places where cancer cells and groups of cancer cells can be early in the evolution of cancer before you can even detect anything like invasion and metastasis. There could very well be these microscopic populations of these groups of cancer cells that are, in all these little niches, that may be competing with each other.The trade-off with treating cancer18:49: In order to have a body that would be not susceptible to cancer at all, the ways that evolution could select for that include shutting a lot of things down that are important for other functions.Show Links:Recommended Resources:[Andrew Read] How to use antibiotics without driving the evolution of antibiotic resistanceGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Arizona State UniversityProfessional Profile on This View of LifeAthena Aktipis WebsiteAthena Aktipis on LinkedInAthena Aktipis on TwitterAthena Aktipis on InstagramHer Work:Athena Aktipis on Google ScholarArticles on SlateArticles Scientific AmericanZombified: Your Source for Fresh Brains PodcastThe Cheating Cell

In February 2020, Mark Woolhouse, a UK epidemiologist, called the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland. Mark wanted to talk to the leader about what the country was doing to prepare for the inevitable arrival of a virus that was spreading through China. Thus began Mark’s years-long critique and study of the worldwide system failure in reaction to COVID-19. On this episode of unSILOed, Greg and Mark discuss some of the things Mark thought we did wrong (lockdowns), what we might do going forward (bring medicine outside of hospitals) and how epidemiologists, journalists, and politicians need to communicate better during moments of public health emergencies. Mark Woolhouse is a Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is The Year The World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir. Episode Quotes:On the failings on the pandemic response57:38: It's very hard to pin the failings of the pandemic response in the US and the UK and elsewhere on a single section of that overall response community, as it were. It's not just the scientist's fault. It's not just the advisor's fault. It's not just the civil service's fault, the politician's fault. It's not just the healthcare worker's fault. All of us were at fault in some ways. So I described that as a system failure. Our system was challenged with this particular event, which wasn't that different from what we planned for; it wasn't massively different from pandemic influenza, but it was different enough that it flew threw our system into complete disarray.04:03: There's a lot of humility needed in the public health and scientific community to try and understand that preparedness and vulnerability are different things, and they're different things to a virus.Lockdowns should be implemented with greater caution21:22: We better take a long, hard, critical look about the evidence, strengths, and weaknesses of the lockdown approach before we wholeheartedly embrace it as part of the next generation of pandemic preparedness plans. I think there's a real big danger there that we'll just jump into lockdown again the next time anything comes along to threaten us.Doesn't lockdown protect everybody?37:30: There was this rather naive argument that, well, doesn't lockdown protect everybody? Well, it's true to a degree. But it demonstrably doesn't protect all of those vulnerable people…(37:56) So whether you are against lockdown or somewhere on the fence, clearly, we needed other strategies, ones that did a better job of protecting the people who were most vulnerable.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of EdinburghProfessional Profile at The Academy of Medical SciencesHis Work:Mark Woolhouse Academic Research The Year The World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir

When we read fiction, our brains are able to suspend our awareness of the fiction so we can fully immerse ourselves in the story we’re reading. When this happens, we are able to think about our own lives and personal beliefs in the context of the story. That’s the power of great art- the themes of a text should transcend the particulars of that story, its setting, or those characters. Leonard Barkan, professor of literature and classics at Princeton, has had this experience over and over in his life when it comes to the work of Shakespeare. His new book, Reading Shakespeare Reading Me, details the different personal revelations he’s had throughout the course of his life through reading or watching Shakespeare’s play. Leonard and Greg discuss the role of art in modern society, how we should all approach our personal reading practices to get the most out of it and the power of seeing Shakespeare’s plays performed on stage. Barkan is also the author of The Hungry Eye: Eating, Drinking, and European culture from Rome to the Renaissance, which explores the role of food in European culture and art through the years. He teaches comparative literature at Princeton. Episode Quotes:How arts & literature shape who you become as a person43:19: My choice is great art. I can't make it, but I need to embrace it and figure out how it reads me. What is there in me that has some chance of growth, of development of responsiveness, beyond what my ordinary experience gives me? These are fields of experience that I am allowed to have, say Shakespeare. Not only as good as a real experience but better, more complicated, more troubling, more thrilling. That makes me more complicated, troubled, and thrilled than all those other things.38:59: Aesthetics is about the validity of beauty and the study of what makes something beautiful, how to produce the beautiful, how to recognize the beautiful, and how to take pleasure in the beautiful.What's the difference between watching a play versus simply reading it?24:26: What happens in a theater, of course, the text is narrowed down. Let's not forget that it's narrowed down to a particular trajectory that the director and the actors chose, but ideally, that trajectory is life itself. It is happening for real. The actors look like certain things. Their expressions are saying something. The way they listen is important. Novels don't have that. Their bodies on a stage- beautiful, ugly, fat, thin, whatever, and their voices are a certain way.Show Links:Recommended Resources:King Lear Winter’s TaleAby WarburgGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Princeton UniversityProfessional Profile at The American Academy in BerlinLeonard Barkan’s WebsiteLeornard Barkan on LinkedInLeonard Barkan on TwitterHis Work:Reading Shakespeare Reading MeThe Hungry Eye: Eating, Drinking, and European culture from Rome to the RenaissanceBerlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century CompanionMichelangelo: A Life on PaperMute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Essays in the Arts)Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome

What drives fertility? What drives mortality? What drives migration? These are some of the questions that drive the field of demography. Paul Morland is the author of three books: 'Demographic Engineering: Population Strategies and Ethnic Conflict' which looks at the links between demography and conflict, 'The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World' which charts the last two hundred years from a demographic perspective, and his most recent, 'Tomorrow's People' which examines current and future population trends.Greg and Paul analyze how economics and cultural values affect fertility in a society, population size & productivity, the political attitudes to demography, the relationship between demography and power, and what sort of future current trends may bring.Episode Quotes:Demography has a unique insight to history02:05: Demography has indeed a unique insight into history. It's a field of its own. So, apart from history, people are studying: What drives fertility? What drives mortality? What drives migration? It can be a very contemporary study. It can be a highly mathematical, highly statistical study, but thinking of it historically, it is a window on history, and there are many windows on history, and to see history properly, we need to look through all those windows.Defining postmodernity 08:34: Your fertility rate is going to be driven hugely not by how much you earn or even the level of education you have, but by your beliefs.Who controls fertility12:15: Control of fertility tends to start at the top and work its way down. So access to contraception, it was often quite expensive or you needed to know about it, you needed education. So very often in societies it's the wealthier that start using contraception and it filters down.  Show Links:Guest Profile:Speakers Profile at Chartwell SpeakersProfessional Profile on Pan MacmillanPaul Morland’s WebsitePaul Morland on LinkedInHis Work:Tomorrow's PeopleThe Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern WorldDemographic Engineering: Population Strategies in Ethnic Conflict

Design is the science of the artificial, but what makes for good design? Everything designed is man-made, but not everything man-made is designed. There are ways to study and teach good design theory, but implementation and human use is needed to refine and inform the field to make things more efficient and intuitive. Donald A. Norman is a professor emeritus at the University of California San Diego, who has also taught at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He is the founding Director of the Design Lab and was a member of the Nielsen Norman Group. Don is also the author of several books. His latest book on design, Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered, will be released in early 2023 and joins a large library of other notable books he has written on the subject, including The Design Of Everyday Things, Living with Complexity, and Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things among many others.Don and Greg discuss Don’s work at Apple and how design thinking has evolved over time. They talk about what it means to think of design in human-centered or people-centered ways and how optimal design can be different depending on the user and the needs of the space. They talk about how design has spread from product design to service design to even business model design. Don recounts resistance to design thinking in his business school classes and why the students have difficulty reframing the way we all think of this essential element of the world.Episode Quotes:On the integration design doing and thinking55:38: The problem was design thinking was good in the sense that it taught people that design is not just making it look pretty. It's much deeper than that. But it also made it look too easy because these courses were so much fun, and they say, "Oh, now I understand." No. In fact, the hard part is design doing not design thinking. And if you try to implement or do things, you discover your thinking wasn't complete. So you need to integrate doing and thinking.23:15: Simplicity is in the head, not in the world. If you understand something, it's simple, and if you don't understand, then it's complicated.The trade-off between costs and service quality45:35: Most people who look at productivity and cost look at the short term. They don't look at the long term. And the long term includes, yes, everything is more efficient and faster, but you make and get errors along the way, and the cost of repairing the error more than makes up for all the savings.The important component of humanity-center20:25: Human-centered is an important component of humanity center. It's just that it isn't enough. We have to worry about climate change, the environment, the loss of species, the loss of natural habitats, and the way we've treated all the disadvantaged people in the world. And what does "disadvantage" mean? It means we've treated them badly.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Tesler’s Law | Laws of UXGuest Profile:Professional Profile at Nielsen Norman GroupDonald A. Norman’s Website Donald A. Norman on LinkedInDonald A. Norman on TwitterDonald A. Norman on TEDTalkHis Work:Donald A. Norman on Google ScholarDesign for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity CenteredThe Design Of Everyday Things Paperback – IllustratedThings That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the MachineLiving with ComplexityThe Design of Future ThingsEmotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday ThingsThe Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the SolutionTurn Signals Are The Facial Expressions Of Automobiles

Bankruptcy law and laws that govern corporate restructures play an important role in our economy. How a business moves forward after declaring bankruptcy is determined by these laws and the judges who uphold them – but how this all works can be somewhat of a mystery to many people. Doug Baird is the author of the new book ‘The Unwritten Law of Corporate Reorganizations,’ which explains these laws and how they impact our modern economy. Doug and Greg discuss the history of bankruptcy laws (this was an important topic to the Founding Fathers!) and how the first large businesses in the U.S. used them. Baird is a professor of law at the University of Chicago and focuses a lot of his work on bankruptcy law. He’s written one of the foremost textbooks on the subject, The Elements of Bankruptcy Law, which is one of the most heavily used texts on the subject. Episode Quotes:US has always been a debtor nation18:00: We've always been a debtor nation. And indeed, if you look at debates over the Bill of Rights, I think people who aren't lawyers or aren't familiar with this history would be surprised that a big issue about the Bill of Rights was basically protecting debtors.One fundamental principle of bankruptcy07:58: Bankruptcy takes non-bankruptcy rights as it finds them. And it doesn't create new substantive rights. If you're a debtor in bankruptcy, you have to obey the law just like anyone else.What bankruptcy judges shouldn't do08:45: Bankruptcy judges shouldn't invent new substantive rights. They shouldn't give you a right; you never had before. But that's different. These substantive rights are different than the rules that govern the bargaining, you know, these meta rules. What are the conditions and the norms of the bargaining environment? And, you know, it's not a question of the deal, but rather who gets a seat at the table and how we figure out the agenda and all these other things.The relative priority rule 47:41: Relative priority says, "Look, we have a company; we need a new capital structure." But it's not a day of reckoning. It's like an exchange offer. There's no reason to cash out interests, even if they'd be out the money in a day of reckoning because it's not a day of reckoning. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jerome FrankWilliam O. DouglasAnn KruegerThe Folklore of CapitalismGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at The University of ChicagoProfessional Profile on American Academy of Arts & ScienceHis Work:The Unwritten Law of Corporate Reorganizations Reconstructing Contracts The Elements of BankruptcyGame Theory and the Law

What can the study of animals tell us about beauty? How can the mate choices of birds or frogs give us insight into human attraction? As a part of the animal kingdom, humans share more than we think with the ways of other animals, and by studying how they assess and reward beauty, we can unlock truths about our relationship to beauty as humans, too.Michael J. Ryan is a biologist and author of several books. He is a Senior Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and a professor of Zoology in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. Michael is an expert in the fields of animal communication and sexual selection. His latest book, A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction, examines the ways in which animals display, enhance, and evaluate beauty in choosing mates.Michael and Greg talk about Michael’s famous work with Túngara Frogs in Panama, as well as the mating preferences and selection habits of several other animals, from fish to birds, as well as bats and bees. They discuss beauty in the wild and how it drives natural selection. They go over some discoveries of surprising factors that enhance or decrease attraction and how adding a third choice can resolve a stalemate in preference.Episode Quotes:The female brain as agents of selection10:50: The female brain, they're agents of selection because they generate selection on the males. They determine who gets to mate, who gets to pass on their genes. But they're also the target of selection because if those preferences backfire, for instance, if they mate with the wrong species, then usually they're not going to have any offspring. So then there's going to be evolution of female preference. So it becomes the target. And that is very unusual, if not unique, that one aspect of a phenotype can both generate selection and be the target of selection.3:00: Natural selection favors traits for you to survive, but if you survive and you don't reproduce, then you're not passing your genes on to the next generation.Is sexual selection a subset of natural selection?01:53: Some people consider sexual selection as a subset of natural selection, a type of natural selection. And Darwin clearly proposed it as a parallel theory, but if you consider it within the realm of sexual selection, that's fine too. The important thing is that we understand that selection is acting on different functions.Why do people in biology don’t worry about nature vs. nurture?31:00: Most of us in biology don't worry about nature versus nurture anymore. We don't think that's conflict because we think that everything has some kind of gene-by-environment interaction. So nothing is purely nurture, and nothing is purely nature. But these genetic predispositions, even in animals that are learning, can be very important in having a genetic disposition to learn some things more easily than others.Show Links:Recommended Resources:University of Texas at Austin’s Influential People in BiodiversityGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of Texas AustinMichael J. Ryan on TwitterHis Work:Michael J. Ryan on Google ScholarThe Michael Ryan LabAn Introduction to Animal Behavior: An Integrative ApproachA Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction

Imagine yourself at a dinner party filled with people you don’t know. As you head to the appetizer tray to get another snack, there’s someone already standing there. You have two options: one, you could make boring small talk by asking how they know the host or what they do for a living. But according to Christian Busch, this is also a moment where you could create a serendipitous event. You could ask that stranger what their biggest passion in life is, what kinds of challenges they are facing, and the answers might lead the two of you to create a personal, professional, or creative relationship. Christian Busch is the author of the books The Serendipity Mindset and Connect the Dots: The art and science of creating good luck, which outlines the psychology behind creating your own luck by opening yourself up to new experiences. Christian is a professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and also teaches at the London School of Economics.Christian and Greg talk about how we can all create these serendipitous moments for ourselves and how the most successful business leaders and entrepreneurs embody this desire for serendipity. Christian explains how creating luck is like a muscle we need to exercise. They also discuss real world examples of organizations embracing change and instability as a way to learn and find success.Episode Quotes:Do you need to work hard to get more luck?10:48: The traditional approach to luck is either luck or hard work. Or this idea that there's a tension between, if you're a hard worker, then you created that yourself, and you were in control to do that. And then luck is the thing that happens. And you know what our research shows: no, a lot of people work extremely hard to have more luck, and that's in a way in itself then a skillset. A skill set that you're able to cultivate serendipity.02:32: Serendipity is really about smart luck. It's about the luck we create by how we react to the unexpected end, and how we can create the positive unexpected. Informed vs. uninformed experimentation15:23: There's informed experimentation, where you learn from mistakes and build on it. And then there's uninformed, which is just naive, and you kind of spend money. And that's what we all want to avoid in some way or the other.It’s not a bad thing to cultivate serendipity07:40: The old-school leadership style tries to legitimize this illusion of control that you pretend to always be in control. You think you get power by pretending that you know everything and do everything. But the shift is essentially saying, "No, it's not bad if you cultivate serendipity."Show Links:Recommended Resources:Viktor FranklPsychology Today- Creating meaningful connections in a disconnected worldGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at New York UniversityFaculty Profile at London School of EconomicsProfessional Profile on Psychology TodayChristian Busch on LInkedInChristian Busch on TwitterChristian Busch on InstagramChristian Busch on ​​TEDxConnecticutCollegeHis Work:The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck (US Version)Connect the Dots: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck (UK Version)

Most people fail to realize how much the process of what we regard as normal, healthy, or sick is influenced by social, cultural, political, or financial factors.Dr. Allan Horwitz joins Greg to talk about how the public’s perception of many common conditions, such as depression, anxiety or PTSD, has evolved over time and no longer involves the stigmatization they once had. Dr. Horwitz also shares how "psychiatry's bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM, consciously or unconsciously shaped the general public’s view of many conditions.Dr. Allan Horwitz is an American sociologist who is Board of Governors Professor in the Department of Sociology and Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University. He was trained in psychiatric epidemiology at Yale and is the author of over one hundred books, articles, and chapters in the mental health area. Dr. Allan Horwitz has studied a variety of aspects of mental health and illness, including the social response to mental illness, family caretaking for dependent populations, the impact of social roles and statuses on mental health, and the social construction of mental disorders. Episode Quotes:What makes something a mental disorder? 33:51: To be a mental disorder, any condition has to have two components, not just one. And one would be dysfunction, which is analogous to a physical disease. That is: some psychic mechanism isn't working in the way that nature designed it to work. So that's a necessary but not sufficient condition. You also have to have the cultural judgment that dysfunction negatively harms the individual. Those definitions differ tremendously from culture to culture. A mental disorder requires both some dysfunction and a negative cultural judgment.The distinction between psychiatry and medicine3:29: There are some distinctions between medicine and psychiatry, and in particular, for most medical conditions, there are objective tests. You have X-rays and blood tests, and there certainly are judgments that are involved, but at least there are some biological baselines you can use. Psychiatry does not have any physical test for their condition, so psychiatry is completely reliant on the diagnostic criteria. Is there a way that we can objectively measure mental illness?21:04: The purported increases in conditions like anxiety and depression, and PTSD are not entirely, but for the most part, artifacts of the way that we measure them. With these symptom-based questions that ask you, "Well, have you been anxious in the last two weeks?" Or "Have you been depressed?" or so on, as the meaning of the questions changed over time.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Robert SpitzerEmil KraepelinGuest Profile:Faculty Profile on Rutgers UniversityProfessional Profile on PsychwireAllan Horwitz on LinkedInHis Work:DSM: A History of Psychiatry's BiblePersonality Disorders: A Short History of Narcissistic, Borderline, Antisocial, and Other Types Creating Mental IllnessAnxiety: A Short History (Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease)All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental DisordersThe Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder

What does it take for a developing economy to grow and thrive? There are many obstacles that stand in the way, but they can be overcome with the knowledge of where to apply efforts for best results. To understand another country or advise their government on how to grow economies takes someone who has been to the places, spoken to the people, listened to their needs, and can communicate the challenges. Stefan Dercon is a professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Economics Department at Oxford University, a Fellow of Jesus College. And the Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. His newest book, Gambling on Development: Why Some Countries Win and Others Lose, deals with his research into what keeps some people and countries poor: the failures of markets, governments and politics, mainly in Africa, and how to best affect change in the different countries there.Stefan and Greg talk all about development economics, the differences between developing economies in Africa and elsewhere, and what successes and mistakes have happened in that region so far. They discuss what pitfalls to watch out for when dealing with planning and action coming from abroad. Stefan talks about the difficulties of foreign organizations understanding the needs of these countries and the ways to use local help to make aid more effective, and help developing economies to flourish.Episode Quotes:Why you can’t wait until perfection in anything16:10: You're not going to first spend all your time building good foundations because then you're totally wet, and you don't sleep ever any night. You probably build something that's not quite perfect, but actually make sure that it has a roof that doesn't fall off entirely. So now, after a bit, if you don't put in some things, you have a very weak floor. We put a few more things that you need to strengthen that floor as well. And I'm a strong believer that the more I worked on development, there is agency here and now to already do something. You can't wait until perfection in anything.A framework that we can use for political markets31:51: The best way to be taken seriously by the central state is by starting an armed uprising. And so, for political entrepreneurs, the only route was to create more chaos. So you want to create enough opportunities that new elites can come in as well. And that's political markets thinking about entry and exit, entry deterrence. Learnings from the policy space over the last 20-30 years11:38: It doesn't help to be very ideological. You need to be pragmatic about what you're doing in your own country. Do common sense, and there are certain things we know more in economics about the things we shouldn't be doing than actually the things we should do. So we know that in a particular moment in time, a massive tax cut is probably not a good idea. In other moments, well, maybe it's okay. We don't know. And so it's like that—sensible macro policies and so on. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Ashraf GhaniGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of OxfordStefan Dercon on LinkedInStefan Dercon on TwitterHis Work:Stefan Dercon on Google ScholarGambling on DevelopmentGambling on Development Amazon Listing 

We use evidence in many areas of our world: courtrooms, scientific laboratories, and legislative bodies that create policies. But the evidence in these different arenas is used in very different ways. For example, how lawyers present evidence in a courtroom varies from how historians use evidence to write about past events. University of Virginia law professor Frederick Schauer joins Greg to talk about the different ways we use evidence and how in some situations, we are too rigid and, in other ways, too lax when it comes to evidence. His new book, The Proof, dives into the topic of evidence and how it’s used across our society. He also shares some insights from his older book, Thinking Like A Lawyer, which lays out how people outside of the legal profession can adopt some of the mindsets lawyers do (like cross-examining ideas we already believe and questioning people we tend to automatically trust). Frederick Schauer is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. He has previously taught law at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. He’s written numerous books about the law, ranging from the topics of evidence, free speech, and how philosophy plays a role in the legal system. Episode Quotes:Can the probabilities be reduced to numbers?20:40: Can the probabilities be reduced to numbers? One view is by reducing them to numbers, you make something appear more certain than it actually is, but there's another view. And actually, there are distinguished judges on both sides of this debate that say, "Yes, it's hard to get it exactly right," but trying to translate very fuzzy terms, like "clear and convincing evidence," "balance of the probabilities," or "proof beyond the reasonable doubt," into numbers can clarify things, however uncertain the numbers might be. Maybe they're a bit more certain and a bit more clarifying than just using the fuzziness of language. 05:59: To understand the law of evidence, you really have to understand exclusions. To understand the science of evidence, you have to understand inclusions—how everything might be relevant.Law is heavily dependent on testimony33:04: Law, except in very rare cases, doesn't do direct observation, doesn't do direct experimentation even when it could. So it relies even more heavily on what somebody has said. It's like history, but unlike a lot of science. It's unlike a lot of empirical inquiry. It's unlike a lot of experimentation.The different view of the law in criminal law15:26: One of the important issues in evaluating evidence is what turns on it. And if we have a criminal law model, what turns on it is that someone is going to go to prison for a long time or possibly even be executed. We are really worried about making a certain kind of mistake. And because of that, the law, especially in criminal law, has a different evaluation of false positives versus false negatives than other people.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of VirginiaContributor’s Profile on The Federalist SocietyHis Work:Frederick Shauer on Google ScholarThe Proof: Uses of Evidence in Law, Politics and Everything ElseThe Force of LawProfiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes Thinking Like A Lawyer

What is free will, and how can it be both tested and defined? How do you know where the line is between what is your choice, what is compelled, and what is inevitable? What are the limits on the will, and how do you study them?Alfred Mele is a ph professor of philosophy at Florida State University. He also served as director of the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project and the Big Questions in Free Will Project. Alfred has written thirteen books and over 250 articles. His latest book is Free Will: An Opinionated Guide. Alfred and Greg talk about the definitions of free will, and how different schools of thought define it differently. They discuss different views on the subject of determinism, the case of Martin Luther, and about the connections between free will and willpower.Episode Quotes:Is the problem of self-deception similar to the problem of self-control?23:38: There is a connection between self-deception and weakness of will. And so, between self-deception and self-control, too, because weakness of will and self-control are two sides of the same coin. So in cases of weakness of will, you judge it better to A than B, but you do B instead of A because you're more strongly motivated to do that. So it's a kind of motivated irrationality. And it looks like self-deception involves motivated irrationality too.37:10: Behavior is in general driven by the stronger desire, but the stronger desire isn't always in line with what you think is best.12:19: If we're thinking, "Well, you're not morally responsible for doing a thing unless you do it freely," then the low bar for moral responsibility becomes a low bar for freedom too.Different features of desire18:14: There are desires that you have, and they have different features. They have a causal power, which is the power to cause a corresponding action, and then they have your ranking of it in terms of value or goodness.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Another of Alfred’s books they discuss - Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free WillGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Florida State UniversityContributor’s Profile on Psychology TodayContributor’s Profile on Closer To TruthHis Work:Alfred Mele on Google ScholarFree Will: An Opinionated GuideManipulated Agents: A Window to Moral ResponsibilityAspects of Agency: Decisions, Abilities, Explanations, and Free Will Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free WillA Dialogue on Free Will and Science Backsliding: Understanding Weakness of WillEffective Intentions: The Power of Conscious WillFree Will and LuckMotivation and AgencySelf-Deception Unmasked

Does competition always make you stronger, or does it subtly shape far too much of life throughout childhood and beyond. Society is now shaping itself around newly competitive fields in school and academics while contorting students and their families in different directions to keep up in today’s environment of education.Matt Feeney is a writer whose latest book, “Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competative Age” dissects the benefits and detriments that competition of all types has on our families and our children. He holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Duke University and a B.S. in English teaching from Central Michigan University. A former teacher at Duke, George Washington University, Texas A&M, and Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, his writings have also appeared in The New Yorker online, Slate, and other publications.Matt and Greg discuss the benefits and drawbacks to putting so much emphasis on competition for children in schools and in sports. They look at ways in which families have been enlisted to raise children that suit the needs of the knowledge economy and the preferences of college administrators.Episode Quotes:The effect of optimizing your kid's competitive viability31:07: There's a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that suggests that as parenting has intensified, the children of this intensified parenting are becoming more fragile and have a hard time achieving independence. It doesn't seem the healthiest way to raise your kids, basically.17:04: Your kid is your kid. You have a job as a parent to cultivate your child's virtues and abilities. But there's a point at which optimizing that kid is an injury to spiritual integrity and autonomy.The competitive process is actively influenced by parents42:19: Parents are not passive agents of ideology or passive victims of ideology. They're more active agents of a competitive process that extracts and insights their competitive output. And it turns it into an elaborate kind of institutional system.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Matt Feeney’s Book - https://www.mattfeeney.com/little-platoonsGuest Profile:Contributor’s Profile on Basic BooksMatt Feeney’s WebsiteMatt Feeney on LinkedInHis Work:Articles on The ChronicleArticles on The New YorkerLittle Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age

How do you motivate yourself? What works in motivating others? Do you turn to the stick, the carrot, or a combination of both? These age-old questions are at the root of humans trying to turn what they need to do into what they want to do and manage complex slates of desire and obligation.Ayelet Fishbach is a professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She is an expert in the fields of motivation and decision-making and the author of Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. Ayelet’s human motivation research has been recognized via many international awards, including the Society of Experimental Social Psychology’s Best Dissertation Award and Career Trajectory Award, and the Fulbright Educational Foundation Award.Ayelet and Greg talk about motivation on all levels and from all angles. They discuss the similarities and differences between employers motivating employees, teachers motivating students, and parents motivating children. Ayelet sheds insight on what common mistakes doom the best of intentions and how to set up tasks to properly harness your natural motivational triggers and improve your self-control.Episode Quotes:The difference between willpower and self-control08:33: Willpower is the power you use to motivate yourself, get yourself to do something. But they're different in the sense that we often think about willpower in the literature, as well as in lay language; self-control is overcoming yourself as doing something you don't want to do, but you can somehow get yourself to do. Self-control is required when you have a goal conflict. When there is a goal that you want to pursue, but there is something else that stands in the way that you want to do. What are the barriers in learning from negative feedback?19:21: There are two specific barriers to learning from negative feedback. One is that it hurts. And the other one is that it's often hard, just cognitively, to learn from negative feedback.What’s wrong with avoidance goals?13:14: The problem with avoidance goals is that they make us rebels. They point to mind the things you should not do and are just not fun to pursue. To find another hobby is better than to stop obsessing on your current hobby.One of the problems with goals43:37: We set goals that are ambitious. We set goals that we don't know if we can reach this specific target. We don't know if we can do this much by that time. And we did that on purpose—the challenging target is better than the target we know we can achieve. But the problem is that once we fail on that target, we might give up.On setting goals06:21: How to best set a goal? I would say it's the same for setting a goal for others and yourself, and there are a few principles. We want the goal to be enticing, something we aspire to achieve. That seems more like a goal and less like a chore.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at The University of Chicago Booth School of BusinessContributor’s Profile on Psychology TodayAyelet Fishbach WebsiteAyelet Fishbach on LinkedInAyelet Fishbach on TwitterAyelet Fishbach on FacebookHer Work:Ayelet Fishbach on Google ScholarGet It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of MotivationThe Motivation-Cognition Interface: From the Lab to the Real World: A Festschrift in Honor of Arie W. Kruglanski

The world seems to be moving faster and faster but there is always a need to plan for the longer arc of life. Having a strategy lets you set short goals while achieving progress toward your longer ones. Now more than ever people need to be intentional about the strategies they use in creating a career. Building these strategies in different areas of your life is what today’s episode is all about.Dorie Clark is a teacher at Duke and Colombia University’s business schools, a speaker who has given lectures from Harvard Business School to Google HQ, and a prolific author of the books Stand Out, Reinventing You, Entrepreneurial You, and her newest book The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. Dorie and Greg talk about playing the long game, and what that means in your business life and personal life. They also talk about what it looks like to think long term in a world where short term needs are always pressing, and how to think about time allocation for the important things in life.Episode Quotes:The power of stories for behavioral change24:08: A story is a really good way to get in the side door. So that it's essentially evading people's objections because if you're telling somebody: “research says…”, "Do this or do that," there's often just a lot of backlash that people have:” I couldn't do that.” But if they're hearing a narrative, which is not, "Oh, you have to do this," but it's, "Well, here, let me tell you about somebody you know, like you, who did that thing," And they realize, it's a lot less threatening of a way to present information, and it lets it roll around in people's brains and say, "Oh, I'm not that different from that person. Maybe I could try it.’ And that can become really powerful.02:48: There's almost no one in the world that thinks that strategy is a bad thing. It's not like there's an anti-strategy contingent arguing against it. Everybody thinks it's good. Everybody pays lip service to it. But the problem is that almost no one does it.Why do we need a coach?25:38: The answer is we don't always. Sometimes a book is perfectly sufficient for what you want to do. It depends on how important the issue is to you and how detailed of an instruction you require.Overweighting our short-term thinking can be a liability17:50: If we're investing money, if we're investing our finances, everybody understands that if your portfolio is overweight in a certain asset, that may be great while that asset is performing well, but it is extremely dangerous over the long term because there probably is going to be some reversal.Show Links:Guest Profile:Instructor’s Profile on UdemySpeaker’s Profile on TEDTalkSpeaker’s Profile on WeSpeakersDorie Clark's WebsiteThe Long Game: Your Stretegic Thinking Self-AssessmentDorie Clark on LinkedInDorie Clark on TwitterDorie on YoutubeDorie Clark on YoutubeDorie Clark on TEDXBostonTrajectory MastermindHer Work:Articles on Harvard Business ReviewThe Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term WorldReinventing You, With a New Preface: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your FutureEntrepreneurial You: Monetize Your Expertise, Create Multiple Income Streams, and Thrive

Economists have been harshly criticized for their response to the recent financial crisis and the pandemic. Yet, they are willing to adapt to changing environments and take on new ideas but sometimes don't do it rapidly enough.Paul Andrew Ormerod is a British economist, best-selling author, a partner at Volterra Partners consultancy, and a founder and director of Algorithmic Economics. Additionally, he is a visiting professor at UCL’s Department of Computer Science.Paul writes a weekly opinion column on economics and related topics for City AM, a newspaper aimed at workers in Central London.  Since May 2020 Paul Ormerod has been Chairman of the Rochdale Development Agency (RDA), responsible for economic development in the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale, which is in Greater Manchester.Greg and Paul discuss why misguided incentives can lead economists to turn a blind eye to shifting environments and fail to anticipate the chance of rare events which can be actually much bigger than predicted in economic risk models.Episode Quotes:Economics is not an empty box10:02: Mainstream economics is not an empty box. It does contain powerful insights. And so, the idea that agents or decision people respond to incentives is very powerful. And in particular, I think it's often caricatured that people think incentives must mean price, but in fact it could be a whole range of factors that people respond to. And if the incentive set changes, then behavior changes.06:44: Economics portrays a richer and more realistic portrait of how people behave –more grounded empirically, but at the macro level, it's really gone backwards.What’s wrong with big data?42:36: Big data, one of the problems is the way it's often used. It might be very good at fitting particular circumstances, but it may not generalize very well. That's always a problem with any form of statistical analysis.As the pandemic unfolds, economists step out14:23: Economists do dominate public policy discourse. Whether it's at the national, state government, or international bodies, everything is filtered through the lens of economics. And on this one, they said, "Oh well, you know we pass; we'll step out."I think initially, because most of them didn't know anything about the models the epidemiologists were using, and now that they have done it, it's starting to appear.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Joseph SchumpeterFriedrich HayekArmen alchianHerbert simonLeonid kantorovicGuest Profile:Professional Profile at Volterra Partners LLPProfessional Profile at Rochdale Development AgencySpeaker’s Profile on Chartwell SpeakersPaul Omerod’s WebsitePaul Omerod on TwitterPaul Omerod on TEDxLSE 2013His Work:Article on EvonomicsArticles on City A.M.Against the Grain: Insights from an Economic ContrarianPositive Linking: How Networks Can Revolutionise the WorldWhy Most Things FailWhy Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and EconomicsButterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior

The trauma of loss is inevitable, but there are things that can be done to consciously prepare for and deal with things we lose in life. They are also connected deeply to the concepts of discovery. Death and love both hold mysteries that have always captivated the mind.  Kathryn Schulz is a writer at “The New Yorker” and is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error and her newest book Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness was just released this year. She won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for “The Really Big One,” an article about seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. Her writing can also be found in “The Best American Science and Nature Writing,” “The Best American Travel Writing,” and “The Best American Food Writing.”Kathryn and Greg talk about losses of all sizes, from the inconsequential to the greatest loss imaginable, and how loss of life is treated across cultures and time, how humans and religion have responded to the trauma of death and loss. Likewise, they talk about the flip side of the coin in finding and discovery, both the trivial and profound - specifically finding a loved one to be one’s partners in life. Episode Quotes:Having the inability to admit your mistakes can make a relationship fail31:12: How do you make a relationship work? One way not to make it work is to be unable to admit that you're wrong. And it's hard, when you're in the midst of a fight or friction with your partner. It's very difficult to not inhabit your own in that moment, extremely narrowed field of vision, your sense of woundedness, and your narrative about what happened or whatever may be going on. But you just can't. You have to develop a kind of bifocal vision where, clearly, there are exceptions to this. People are genuinely wronged in relationships as in other things, but in a basically happy relationship where that's not the case, you have to be able to, at some point, step back and say, "Well, what's actually going on here?"21:32: At the heart of existence, for whatever reason wildly beyond our control, is the fact that everything in our lives is wildly impermanent.Can we learn to be better in relationships?29:33: Your first move just has to be to pick the right person. And some of that is compatibility, but some of it is just this deep conviction that they're right for you and you love them because in stressful or difficult moments in a relationship, you have got to be grounded in this sense of this is the one.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and HappinessBeing Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of ErrorGuest Profile:Contributor’s Profile on The New YorkerKathryn Schulz’s WebsiteKathryrn Schulz on TwitterKathryn Schulz on TEDTalkHer Work:The Really Big One ArticleLost & Found: A MemoirBeing Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

The behavior of business practitioners is often driven by the defunct theories of economists. But to some extent all theories and models come with limitations and both the financial crisis of 2008 and the recent pandemic have made those limitations hard to ignore.Sir John Kay is one of Britain’s leading economists. He was the first dean of Oxford’s Said Business School and has held chairs at the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, and London Business School. His interests focus on the relationship between economics and business. His career has spanned the academy and think tanks, company directorships, consultancies, investment companies and media. For twenty years, he wrote a regular column for the Financial Times and has authored an astonishing number of books. He was awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s 2021 Birthday Honours List for services to economics, business and finance.Greg and John discuss how to navigate a complex environment, which we can only imperfectly understand, why we should embrace uncertainty and how to create strategies that are resilient to unpredictable events.Episode Quotes:On why we're not going to get predictability in economics10:02: The world we're dealing with, in economics, business, and finance is not stationary. There are not underlying models in the way we talk about the motion of the planets, which has remained unchanged for several centuries. And not only has it remained unchanged for centuries, but actually we know what these equations are, and they're not affected by what we do or think about them; Venus does not care what we think about its equations of motion. But the people who work in organizations and financial markets do care what we think about. And that world is affected by our interaction with it.Why you shouldn’t take models too seriously05:01: To understand economics, to understand social science, we absolutely need models. The mistake is to think that the models we're building are true descriptions of the world. And they're not. I think models and economics are best regarded as parables; they're stories.An observation on how people use models14:07: You can use models to say, "This is what might happen to an unchecked pandemic." You can use a model to say, "This is an indication of the effect we might have if we introduced lockdown measures or vaccinations of the like." You can use models to illustrate scenarios and tell stories. If you think you can use models to predict, then I think you are attempting a kind of pseudoscientific position that is simply not available.Show Links:Recommended Resources:George E. P. BoxJohn Maynard KeynesBlaise Pascal“The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?” by Michael SandelGuest Profile:Professional Profile at London School of EconomicsFaculty Profile at St. John’s College, Oxford UniversityProfessional Profile on Financial TimesJohn Kay’s WebsiteJohn Kay on LinkedInJohn Kay on TwitterJohn Kay on FacebookJohn Kay on Talks at GoogleHis Work:Greed Is Dead: Politics After IndividualismRadical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the NumbersThe Long and the Short of It: A guide to finance and investment for normally intelligent people who aren’t in the industryOther People's Money: The Real Business of FinanceObliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved IndirectlyThe Truth About MarketsThe British tax system

It’s remarkable,how driven we are to set goals for ourselves that we're incapable of attaining. But we're not doomed to be disenchanted; Instead, we can make some incremental and meaningful progress toward their attainment.Anthony Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. A former Dean of Yale Law School, Professor Kronman teaches in the areas of contracts, bankruptcy, jurisprudence, social theory, and professional responsibility.Among his books are Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, Max Weber, Contracts: Cases and Materials (with F. Kessler and G. Gilmore), Lost Lawyer, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, and After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity, and Joy.Greg and Tony talk about parallels between science, philosophy and literature, the search for an understanding of the nature and amplitude of substance and how to re-enchant the world.Episode Quotes:What causes some people to view lawyers negatively?45:10: People often have a pretty low opinion of lawyers because they meet lawyers when they need them, and they need them when they find themselves in the jaws of the law, and that is formidable. And many people experience it as an unpleasant, if not destructive power. And the lawyers who inhabit the precincts of the law so comfortably are just inevitably associated in people's minds with the awfulness of law itself.Two remarkable things about humans31:02: Here are two remarkable things about us: We set goals we can never reach, one. And two, that even though we can't reach them, we can make some incremental and meaningful progress.On illustrating progress34:52: Learning new things, adding to the stockpile of your knowledge or expertise. That is one familiar way of illustrating progress in an enterprise or a discipline.Making progress in sensibility35:51: Developing capacity to recognize and appreciate what is distinctive and worth observation and, perhaps, even close study in another human being—who you may not like all that much or feel an immediate personal rapport for, but who you can see as an individual of a striking and interesting to be able to do that more regularly, more emphatically, and with a greater investment of curiosity and patience. And even at the end of the day of fellowship or fellow feeling, that is making progress in sensibility.Show Links:Recommended Resources:“Democracy in America” by Alexis de TocquevilleSpinozaAristotleGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Yale UniversityContributor’s Profile on The Federalist SocietyHis Work:After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity, and JoyConfessions of a Born-Again PaganEducation's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of LifeThe Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal ProfessionThe Assault on American Excellence

It’s no secret that the nature of our food has been changed quite dramatically by big food companies in the last 50 years. This is just one of the things that has contributed to a nation of overeaters. Michael Moss is the author of “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us,” and “Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions.” He is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist formerly with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.So what has changed in those 50 years? Listen as Michael and Greg talk about the evolution of processed foods, the biological science behind addiction, how food memories develop, Lunchables, and the business of cigarettes and smoking.Episode Quotes:Memory as a tool in food industry25:26: What the food companies have realized is that the more we experience something, the deeper those memory channels are. And so the easier it is for them to use what psychologists call cues to get us excited. I mean, two people driving down the road, right, see the golden arches. And they could have completely different reactions to seeing those arches depending on what their memory bank is, what their experience is from eating. t a person's been eating there a lot and has deep memory channels for McDonald's is going to get all excited and pull off the highway as soon as they can to, to go there where the other person's going to, they're not even like seeing the golden arches if they're not somebody who eats there, doesn't have that memory for it. So, besides speed, memory is hugely powerful for the food industry to us to kind of keep coming back to its products.Speed is the hallmark of addiction8:42: Speed is a hallmark of addiction, so the faster a substance can hit the brain, the more apt we are to lose control, react, and act compulsively to that substance. Educating the young about eating habits12:21: I would love to see going back to prioritizing children, focusing on them to help them develop good eating habits before they can develop bad ones. Teaching them how to cook and schools would be a fabulous sort of thing to do, and you could do it, and you could do it in a way that's not preachy too.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Dana SmallEdward Slingerland episodeGuest Profile:Professional Profile at New York TimesProfessional Profile at Pulitzer PrizeProfessional Profile at Food Future CoSpeaker’s Profile at Harry Walker AgencyMichael Moss WebsiteMichael Moss on LinkedInMichael Moss on TwitterMichael Moss on InstagramHis Work:Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our AddictionsSalt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Innovation is a crucial part for organizations to stay ahead of their competitors, adapt to changing circumstances in the environment and create long-lasting businesses. Yet, many big corporations eventually stagnate and become obsolete while a lot of groundbreaking ideas come from small companies.Safi Bahcall is a second-generation physicist, a biotech entrepreneur, former public-company CEO and author of the highly acclaimed book “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries”.Safi advises CEOs and leadership teams on strategy and innovation, and has delivered keynote presentations at industry conferences, investor events, leadership retreats, medical meetings, and leading academic institutions around the world.Greg and Safi discuss how organizations can borrow from science to implement systems and incentives that nurture innovation, risk-taking and experimenting which ultimately lead to radical breakthroughs.Episode Quotes:Having a chief incentive officer will help you grow your organizational scale49:29: You have a chief revenue officer whose role is strategic, given a marketing budget. How many dollars can we make? You have a chief technology officer whose role is strategic, given a fixed technology budget. How do we ensure the optimum technology use across the organization? Why don't you have a chief incentive officer? You have a fixed compensation. You try to stick within a fixed budget of cash and options. Why aren't you trying to have someone who's focused on maximizing the return that you get from that? It's pretty obvious. Which would you rather have, a force that has the latest smartphone gadgets or a force that's the most motivated in the industry? I'd rather have the latter.On increasing innovation10:38: If we want to increase innovation, risk-taking, and experimenting, we can't use the same systems. We have to use an opposite system, metrics, and rewards.Two helpful frameworks for every CEO08:19: It's a helpful framework to keep in mind if you're a CEO that addresses real-world topics or leading a group, or even managing a small team; you need to have two phases in your mind. One, we just need to deliver stuff on time, budget and spec consistently with quality to our customers. The other, we need to think of wild, crazy, new ideas on the one we're reducing risk on the one we're increasing risk. Show Links:Guest Profile:Safi Bahcall’s WebsiteSafi Bahcall on LinkedInSafi Bahcall on TwitterSafi Bahcall on YoutubeSafi Bahcall on FacebookHis Work:Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

In today’s world, corporate lobbying is everywhere. Corporations wield immense power over our economy and use their economic clout to influence policymakers, politicians and regulators in a way that can lead to corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Luigi Zingales is a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of two widely-reviewed books, “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists” and “A Capitalism for the People”. He is also a faculty research fellow for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economic Policy Research, and a fellow of the European Governance Institute. He is also the director of the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.Luigi Zingales' research interests span from corporate governance to financial development, from political economy to the economic effects of culture. He co-developed the Financial Trust Index, which is designed to monitor the level of trust that Americans have toward their financial system.Luigi and Greg talk about the problematic revolving door policy of politicians and lobbyists, why the conceptual distinction between being pro-market and pro-business has dissolved, and how we can practically enforce some kind of social norm around corporate lobbying.Episode Quotes:How could we enforce some social norms around corporate lobbying?46:51: My first step would be disclosure. Today, we know a little bit of the money that technically is registered as lobbying, but we don't know the donations. We don't know all the other ways in which companies spend our money. Okay. So the first one would really be some disclosure. The second is I think that these days we shame individuals for everything, even for not capitalizing the B in black, and I think that we should take a step back and focus on what is really important. Intellectual circles use groups and group dynamics to isolate dissenters. 32:15: Intellectual circles use groups and group dynamics to isolate dissenters. So, what you're trying to do is if you make a criticism that is dangerous, then you are immediately labeled something that is unacceptable. Is there any hope for the rescue of populism? 55:13: The biggest problem is that we don't talk to each other. And even if we don't understand each other, it is very rare to see two opponents having a spirited debate, because I'm not saying we should all agree. In fact, the fun is when we don't agree, but at least we agree to have the same set of rules and not to insult each other every three words.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Colin Mayer EpisodeGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at The University of ChicagoSpeaker’s Profile on HiCue SpeakersProfessional Profile on The Centre for Economic Policy ResearchLuigi Zingales on TwitterLuigi Zingales on LinkedInHis Work:Luigi Zingales on Google ScholarCapitalisn't PodcastA Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American ProsperitySaving Capitalism from the Capitalists: Unleashing the Power of Financial Markets to Create Wealth and Spread Opportunity

When it comes to nutrition, conventional wisdom suggeststhat we are at the mercy of an unhinged appetite and an addiction to calories. But as science shows, we're much smarter when it comes to eating than we previously thought.Mark Schatzker is an award-winning writer based in Toronto and author of such books as “The End of Craving, rediscovering, or Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating”. He is also a writer-in-residence at the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center at Yale University, and a frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Condé Nast Traveler, and Bloomberg Pursuits.Mark and Greg talk about regaining our body’s lost nutritional wisdom as the secret to a healthy diet and why the way food tastes is not some frivolous pleasure disconnected from nutrition but rather an essential part of how the brain understands food, and how it guides metabolism.Episode Quotes:The relationship between socioeconomic status and obesity44:48: There's a relationship between socioeconomic status and obesity. And right there, there's a material uncertainty in people's lives. And more interestingly, that connection becomes more solid when they look at actual food uncertainty when they look at whether people have difficulty paying the bills. Sometimes it looks irrational. People will think lower-income people, and it just seems so crazy. Why would you consume too much food? You can't afford it. You're giving yourself health problems. But it's a brain response that when there's times of scarcity, it's built-in by evolution, I should want more.How did we lose sight of the idea of homeostasis concerning food?27:50: Our brain is like a paranoid accountant. It is fixated on measurement and measures food as it comes in. That's what we experience as taste and aroma.Pleasure as a universal currency that drives human action17:43: The most interesting thing about pleasure is that he ( Michel Cabanac) described it as the kind of universal currency that drives human action. Whether it has to do with thirst, temperature, itchiness, all these things are driven by pleasure. It is the language through which all the body's needs and requirements are understood and mediated by the brain.Obesity is a disease of desire35:49 One of the most interesting things about obesity is that most people think it's an indulgence and pleasure that people with obesity lose themselves in the joy of eating. And neuroscience tells us this is, in fact, not true...(36:31)It is a disease of desire, of motivation, and this is what we see with reward prediction error with uncertainty, that you provoke a motivation response.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Michel CabanacMalcolm Gladwell Ted Talk “Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce” Dana SmallsKent Berridge Guest Profile:Speaker’s Profile at Leigh Bureau Ltd.Mark Schatzker’s WebsiteMark Schatzker on LinkedInMark Schatzker on TwitterMark Schatzker on TEDxBostonHis Work:Articles on The AtlanticWorks on Condé Nast TravelerThe End of Craving - Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor Steak: One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Beef

While wars and other violent conflicts dominate the news, it is easy to overlook that the majority of conflicts are actually resolved peacefully. In his highly acclaimed book “Why We Fight The Roots of War and The Paths to Peace”, author Chris Blattman draws on his expertise in economics, political science, and history to explain the five reasons why conflicts (rarely) turn violent and how to interrupt that deadly process.Chris Blattman is an economist and political scientist who uses field work and statistics to study poverty, political engagement, the causes and consequences of violence, and policy in developing countries. He is a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.Greg and Chris discuss what can be learned from the commonalities and differences of conflicts of all levels, from interpersonal disputes to street gang violence to warring states and how peacemakers can avoid emotional and strategic mistakes to develop non-violent conflict solutions that last.Episode Quotes:There’s no 10-step plan for peace48:11: There's no 10-step plan for peace. I think there is a pretty simple set of ideas that can help us diagnose better, but then it's like being a doctor... (49:03) When we are asking our leaders to solve problems of development, change our cities, solve racism, or solve conflict, which is much more complex, we have this different set of expectations. We kind of want them to come to us and promise that Tylenol and radiation therapy are the answer and all we need is more of them, and all situations are alike. Tylenol and radiation therapy worked for that country, or this city, or that people. So it must work for us. And I don't know why we have that, why we accept that, and why we're like that in these two different spheres of life. And I think we just have this amazing ability to forget how hard and complex a problem is in a lot of social change.What makes a good mediation?12:37: Everything that helps resolve conflict or keep us from not breaking out into violence, which we avoid most of the time, is something that helps us pay attention to the costs and not go down one of these paths that made us choose this—the costly worst option, which is to try to bargain through bloodshed.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas SchellingAmong the Thugs by Bill BufordGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of ChicagoProfessional Profile on Center for Global DevelopmentChris Blattman’s WebsiteChris Blatmman on LinkedInChris Blattman on FacebookHis Work:Chris Blattman on Google ScholarWhy We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace

Clinical psychologists like Todd Kashdan are in many ways the philosophers of our time, digging into what it is that makes for a fulfilling and happy and comfortable life.Awarded the 2013 Distinguished Early Career Researcher Award by the American Psychological Association, Todd Kashdan is among the world’s top experts on the psychology of well-being, psychological strengths, mental agility, and social relationships. As a Professor of Psychology at George Mason University, and a leading educator to the public, Todd translates state-of-the-art science for practical application to improve our everyday lives. He is well-known for his energetic and disarming communication style. Todd is the author of five books, including “Curious?”, “The Upside of Your Darkside,” and “Designing Positive Psychology.” In his latest book, “The Art of Insubordination,” Todd synthesizes decades of psychological research to show how we can improve the health of organizations and our society. He sits down with Greg in this episode to discuss the positive psychology movement, how people are getting happiness wrong, the benefits of boredom, and fostering a spirit of insubordination.Episode Quotes:Training yourself to be comfortable with discomfort28: 15: There's something really powerful about training yourself so that each moment during your day when you feel discomfort, you can sit with it, take another perspective, and do something with it as opposed to trying to escape it. Because this will make you a better human being to deal with other humans, with setbacks and difficulties in your life.Anxiety doesn't kill curiosity14:47: The only way you get curious is if you believe that you can handle the uncertainty that you don't know what the answer is going to be. And that doesn't mean you don't feel a sting if that person looks at you for a second, shakes their head, and walks away. So you still can experience rejection, but you're willing to take a step forward despite the presence of anxiety as part and parcel of what it means to be curious in the moment.Why people are defensive to new ideas19:18: If there is more power and potential for you as an individual to benefit from being receptive to someone, you have a leaning toward that person's ideas. And if someone's a dissenter and they can be pigeonholed as disagreeable or disgruntled, it's harder for them to make sure that they actually get a receptive audience for their message.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Daniel Berlin Paul SylviaNathan DeWall at University of KentuckyTwo Narcissists is Better Than One studyGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at George Mason UniversityProfessional Profile at Psychology TodayTodd Kashdan’s WebsiteTodd Kashdan LinkedInTodd Kashdan TwitterTodd Kashdan at TEDxUtrechtHis Work:Todd Kashdana on Google ScholarThe Well-Being LabThe Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy EffectivelyThe Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self--Not Just Your "Good" Self--Drives Success and FulfillmentMindfulness, Acceptance, and Positive Psychology: The Seven Foundations of Well-Being (The Context Press Mindfulness and Acceptance Practica Series) Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling LifeDesigning Positive Psychology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward (Series in Positive Psychology) 

Recognized as a national thought leader in early language development, Dr. Dana Suskind has dedicated her research and clinical life to optimizing foundational brain development and preventing early cognitive disparities and their lifelong impact. She is founder and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health, which aims to create a population-level shift in the knowledge and behavior of parents and caregivers to optimize the foundational brain development in children from birth to five years of age, particularly those born into poverty.Dana is a pediatric otolaryngologist who specializes in hearing loss and cochlear implantation. She currently directs the University of Chicago Medicine's Pediatric Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implant program and is an author of a couple books as well , including “Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child's Potential Fulfilling Societies Promise,” and the controversial “Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain.”Dana joins Greg on this episode of unSILOed to talk about how we view parenting in the west, societal support, SIDS, how child rearing tips spread, and good vs. bad early childcare and education.Episode Quotes:How can companies make it easier for people to be both parents and employees?35:53: The first step is understanding that employees are also parents, and supporting them in both roles is actually good for the bottom line. And in terms of how to support parents, there are many different ways. In general, I think of them as flexibility, reliability, help with childcare, and just an acknowledgment that they are also parents.Parents and caregivers are the guardians of our society’s future13:49: One of the most important jobs is raising the next generation. Parents and caregivers, as I say, are the guardians of our society's future. The impact of poverty on children's development16:09: All children are born with their own individual promise. But for so many, that promise is ripped away because of the vacuum of support for families, et cetera. And one of the most insidious impacts of poverty is on the developing child.Show Links:Recommended Resources: Joan Luby, who wrote an article actually, who stated poverty's most insidious impact is on the developing brainGuest Profile:Professional Profile at The University of ChicagoSpeaker’s Profile at Penguin Random House Speakers BureauDana Suskind on LinkedInDana Suskind on TwitterDana Suskind on InstagramHer Work:Dana Suskind on Google ScholarParent Nation: Unlocking Every Child's Potential, Fulfilling Society's PromiseThirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

If exercise is so healthy, then why do many people dislike or avoid it? So much of our modern lives is sedentary, it’s more important than ever to get our bodies up and be active. Daniel Lieberman is a Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences at Harvard University. He is also a member of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. At Harvard, he teaches a variety of courses on human evolution, anatomy, and physiology, and has published several books including “The Evolution of the Human Head,” “The Story of the Human Body,” and “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding.”Daniel and Greg talk all about moving our human bodies today, including the evolution of running in humans, transitioning to the modern industrial world and its effects on us, and speed versus endurance.Episode Quotes:Developing lifelong habits through physical education48:29: We need to look outside the medical system to make these kinds of shifts. And it's a public health issue.It's really a political issue. It's an educational issue. It's a social issue. It's a corporate issue. And I think one of the places to focus on is schools, right? Because we also know that a lot of the habits people develop in college are the ones they keep for the rest of their life. And that's one of the reasons why universities, like mine and yours, really are doing an enormous disservice to their students by not promoting more physical education, because they're also missing out on this important window to help people develop lifelong habits.We evolve to be physically active for two reasons09:51: We evolve to be physically active for two reasons and two reasons only: one, it's necessary, and one, it's rewarding. How sports and play teaches human not to be reactively aggressive32:29: I think that one of the ways in which humans have evolved play and sport is to help teach skills for hunting and fighting and all the other things that are really important. Cause that's obviously a key element in playing in sports, but also to help teach humans not to be reactively aggressive. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Gerontologist at Stanford, James Fries - The extension of morbidity. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined By Steven PinkerDr. Richard W. Wrangham Guest Profile:Professional Profile on Harvard UniversityHis Work:Daniel Lieberman on Google ScholarExercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and RewardingThe Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and DiseaseThe Evolution of the Human Head

Martha Minow has taught at Harvard Law School since 1981, where her courses include civil procedure, constitutional law, fairness and privacy, family law, international criminal justice, jurisprudence, law and education, nonprofit organizations, and the public law workshop. An expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities, she also writes and teaches about digital communications, democracy, privatization, military justice, and ethnic and religious conflict.She has written: “Saving the News: Why The Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve the Freedom of Speech,” “When Should Law Forgive?,” The First Global Prosecutor: Promise and Constraints,” “In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Constitutional Landmark,” and “Government by Contract.”Martha sits down with Greg to discuss bankruptcy laws & forgiveness in the US and restorative justice.Episode Quotes:A need for jurisprudence of forgiveness14:38: One of the contrasts between forgiveness and ordinary law is that law tries to be regular, predictable, have general rules announced in advance, and apply equally across people regardless of their circumstances. Forgiveness is the opposite of all of that, which is not to say that it's necessarily subject to abuse or inconsistency. So President Obama developed a set of rules and rubrics for when to give a pardon. It's very possible to develop something that looks more law-like when we talk about the exercise of forgiveness. And we need that. If you will, we need to develop a jurisprudence of forgiveness.Forgiveness does not call for forgetting25:11: It is striking that there are not just different words but different social practices associated with forgiveness and forgetting. To forgive is a process that has rituals, religious or otherwise. And it does not call for forgetting. It may be precisely to remember that forgiveness is possible.Letting go of justified resentment11:40: I don't think it's by accident that we use the word forgiveness in the context of debt, just as we do in the context of crime, as we do in the context of somebody bumping into someone else saying: Forgive me. These all fall under the general category of letting go of justified resentment. It's not forgiveness, if there isn't a justified resentment. There is a real violation. These are real. Forgiveness can, however, be built into not only human decency but also systems.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Sweet Hereafter by Russell BanksGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Law SchoolProfessional Profile at Boston University Center for Antiracist ResearchProfessional Profile at CarnegieMartha Minow at TEDHer Work:Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech (Inalienable Rights) When Should Law Forgive?Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and RepairBetween Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence

How can you be both interdisciplinary and be a contributing specialist in your discipline in this day andage? It's a core theme of this podcast, as well as our guests' research. Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her latest book is “Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be” on how economics needs to change to keep pace with the twenty-first century and the digital economy.Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council. Diane joins Greg to discuss the shifting dynamics of economic measurement’ over and underestimating GDP’ mathiess; and why the public has such a skewed perception of what economists do.Episode Quotes:Why is the public's perception of economists skewed?20:51: It's partly what they see on the news when they turn on the TV in the evening, and often it's somebody who works in the financial markets talking about the kinds of things that financial markets are trying to predict second by second. That's very dominant. I've done some work in schools over the years to try to encourage young women to go into economics because it's a very male-dominated profession. Both they and the boys in the class take away the idea that what economics is about is going to work on Wall Street or in the City here and making a lot of money. They think it's about money. And I think that's the dominant perception that people have. Money is a metric—we use it quite a lot. But it's not really what economics is about.Data are social contracts08:54: Data are not things that are given. They're things that are made—they’re social constructs.How do you identify what’s happening in a market?41:07: If you want to identify what's happening in a market, going and talking to people who participate in the market is a great way to find out about it. And you have megabytes of data. It's just text, and you can analyze that in a very systematic way. Diane's aspiration for economist30:08: I would like, as us economists, to pay more attention to other insights from other disciplines from people who think differently to ourselves, that basic intellectual hygiene thing of talking to people who disagree with you so that you understand why you might be wrong. But I suppose my ultimate dream is we manage to make economics consistent with the human sciences. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much - Book by Eldar ShafirBob Schillers book on narrativePaul RomerVegra Lickus (?) paper in 1994 in the American Economic Review ??Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of CambridgeProfessional Profile at Enlighten EconomicsDianne Coyle on TwitterDianne Coyle on LinkedInHer Work:Enlighten EconomicsDianne Coyle on Google ScholarCogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should BeGDP: A Brief but Affectionate History - Revised and expanded EditionThe Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters - Revised EditionSex, Drugs and Economics: An Unconventional Introduction to EconomicsParadoxes of Prosperity: Why the New Capitalism Benefits All Governing the World Economy (Themes for the 21st Century)

No one will accuse our next guest of doing philosophy in an isolated fashion. Julian Baggini is a writer and philosopher, and currently the Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. His latest book is titled “How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy.” Julian is also the co-founder of The Philosophers' Magazine and has written for numerous international newspapers and magazines.  Julian and Greg discuss the legacy of Hume in this episode, while also diving into how someone can stay a generalist in the modern philosophy world, the scarcity of common sense and the sincerity of moral arguments.Episode Quotes:The most objective way of seeing the world33:16: The most objective way of seeing the world is purely through your own eyes, your own sort of words with reference to nothing else. Your view becomes more objective the more you can see the world in ways that can be shared with other people and perhaps ultimately with creatures that have very different perceptual apparatus to us and so forth.A little critical thinking is a dangerous thing09:22: People say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A little critical thinking is a dangerous thing if you don't do it very well.Why is it that philosophers still disagree about everything?15:29: So you've only got two explanations:. One is that some people are more intelligent than others. Some philosophers simply are better philosophers than others. They've got the right answer and the people who disagree with them have got the wrong answer. Or that people of equal intelligence, knowledge, and skills and all these things can make different judgments about which way to jump on something. That's the uncomfortable but honest answer.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Sam Harris, Moral Landscape bookPatricia ChurchlandDavid HumeThomas Nagel, A View From Nowhere bookGuest Profile:Professional Profile at The GuardianSpeaker’s Profile at VBQ SpeakersJulian Baggini’s WebsiteJulian Baggini on LinkedInJulian Baggini on TwitterJulian Baggini on FacebookJulian Baggini at TEDxYouth@ManchesterHis Work:Julian Baggini on AeonThe Godless Gospel: Was Jesus A Great Moral Teacher?Babette's Feast (BFI Film Classics) Life: A User’s Manual: Philosophy for Every and Any Eventuality How the World Thinks: A Global History of PhilosophyA Short History of Truth: Consolations for a Post-Truth WorldHume on Religion 

Since its initial publication, “The Business of Venture Capital” has been hailed as the definitive, most comprehensive book on the subject. In its upcoming third edition, this market-leading text explains the multiple facets of the business of venture capital, from raising venture funds, to structuring investments, to generating consistent returns, to evaluating exit strategies.Mahendra Ramsinghani is the founder of Secure Octane, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, which invests in cybersecurity among other sectors. He is also the author of multiple books including “The Resilient Founder,” and “Startup Boards” co-authored with noted VC Brad Feld.Greg and Mahendra dig into everything that makes VCs work in this episode, including what fund managers think about venture capital, betting on humans over ideas, characteristics of a good GP, and the mental health of founders. Episode Quotes:The single biggest problem with venture capital10:51: I think that's the single biggest problem in our businesses: Markets don't evolve or adopt technologies fast enough. Or if they adopt certain technologies, they don't adopt every technology. They’ll pick one, right? So you end up saying: Okay, in this scenario, I was the winner and in this scenario, I lost. And so this is a business where you're constantly being humbled and constantly being reminded that you cannot logically plan the outcomes.What are the key characteristics of a successful venture capitalist?39:06: The fundamental attributes that play out well are curiosity and openness to learning about new trends. And then the second, and the more important, is the ability to take risks within a shorter period of time and make our decisions quickly as opposed to trying to belabor over how the future might play out five years from now. Two metrics in measuring fund performance27:03: What fund managers do, you know, people like me, are giving them the two metrics they want to look at before they start the conversation. So, your IRR, you know, is a time-based sort of metric of your performance. And then the second is your cash on cash, whether you're TVPI (Total Value to Paid In) or multiple of investor capital. So those two tend to have now become industry standards.Show Links:Recommended Resources:John Hagel episode Guest Profile:Contributor’s Profile at ForbesContributor’s Profile at TechCrunchMahendra Ramsinghani on TwitterMahendra Ramsinghani on LinkedInHis Work:Secure Octane InvestmentsStartup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors The Resilient Founder: Lessons in Endurance from Startup EntrepreneursThe Business of Venture Capital: The Art of Raising a Fund, Structuring Investments, Portfolio Management, and Exits (Wiley Finance)

Every time we make a choice, our minds go through an elaborate process most of us never even notice. We’re influenced by subtle aspects of the way the choice is presented that often make the difference between a good decision and a bad one. How do we overcome the common faults in our decision-making and enable better choices in any situation? This question and more are answered in our guests latest book, ​​"The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters."Eric Johnson is a faculty member at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University where he is the inaugural holder of the Norman Eig Chair of Business, and Director of the Center for Decision Sciences. His research examines the interface between Behavioral Decision Research, Economics and the decisions made by consumers, managers, and their implications for public policy, markets and marketing. Eric and Greg analyze choice architecture from many angles in this episode, as well as touching on menu science, the problem with alphabetizing, and the impacts of good choice architecture on education. Episode Quotes:How do you know whether someone's made a good decision?53:11: One thing you can do is create the equivalent of a flight simulator. That is, we know a cockpit has a good design because you can land at SFO, you can land at Charles de Gaulle, under different conditions if you do the right thing. Now, one thing I can do is I can say: You have three kids, they go to the doctor this number of times. Can you pick the right health insurance? So I know what you should be doing in that case. And see if you can find it. I called this the decision simulator approach. So in many domains, I may not know what you exactly want, but I can tell you what you need to find and see if you can find it. And that's super helpful.How to overcome bias41:16: Fluency is the way you get around present bias. You make the right behavior very easy and reduce the barriers to entry.Is education the key to regulating choice architecture?44:07: Education helps, but it can't be the entire solution, and it's very expensive. Not just in the kinds of places that you and I teach, but even in grammar school, if you're teaching about Choice Architecture, which I think you should, you're doing less on other subjects. So there's always:Is education the most effective way of doing things? At the same time, I think the notion of defaults is a really simple thing to teach. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Peter Ubel episodeBarry Schwartz episodeGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Business SchoolProfessional Profile at TIIA InstituteEric Johnson on TwitterEric Johnson on LinkedInEric Johnson on DLDConferenceHis Work:Eric Johnson on Google ScholarThe Elements of Choice WebsiteNeuroeconomics: Chapter 3. Computational and Process Models of Decision Making in Psychology and Behavioral Economics

Dr. Robert Cialdini has spent his entire career conducting scientific research on what leads people to say “Yes” to requests and appeals. The results of his research, his ensuing articles, and New York Times bestselling books have earned him an acclaimed reputation as a respected scientist and engaging storyteller.His books, including “Influence” and “Pre-Suasion,” have sold more than 7-million copies in 44 different languages. Robert is also the Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University.In this episode, Robert joins Greg to talk about what's changed in the 30 years between his published books; authority & credibility; the predominance of fear in our culture; and how they each teach ethics in their business courses.Episode Quotes:What is the importance of social scientists observing phenomena in the field? 6:49: I think it's crucially important for a couple of reasons. One is in the laboratory; we control or eliminate all sources that may affect our data except the ones that we are studying. That's what we try to do. Those may be the things that exist in the natural environment that could influence the effects, but we don't register their influence because we've eliminated them in the hothouse of the experimental lab. So, that's one thing. The other is we can see the power of the effects that we find in the field because if they are successful, they have overcome all of this myriad of other influences that are working on people—making decisions, making choices, in everyday situations to transcend all that ground noise that's going on, that could otherwise eliminate the effect if the effect wasn't strong enough to overpower those influences.How can we manage the constant barrage of appeals for our attention?26:50: There's one strategy that is the most powerful in rebalancing the scales against the larger impact that a salient argument has. And that is to consider the opposite.Influence as a leadership tool47:22: For leadership, you want influence in the long term. You want to create an aura that allows people to feel comfortable moving in your direction, even though they don't have to make a purchase or anything, but they're willing to go along with your preferences because you've established yourself as a credible source of authority for them.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Daniel KahnemanGuest Profile:Professional Profile at Arizona State UniversityRobert Cialdini WebsiteRobert Cialdini on TwitterRobert Cialdini on LinkedInHis Work:Influence At WorkInfluence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of PersuasionPre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and PersuadeThe small BIG: small changes that spark big influenceYes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

Lydia Pyne’s work may loosely be called history, but it's really a combination of the sciences and the humanities. It's a reflection on how we make sense of ourselves and our past.Lydia is a writer and historian, interested in the history of science and material culture. She has degrees in history and anthropology and a PhD in biology (history and philosophy of science) from Arizona State University. Her field and archival work has ranged from South Africa, Ethiopia, and Uzbekistan, as well as the American Southwest.She is currently a visiting researcher at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and her books include “Endlings: Fables for the Anthropocene” and “Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff.”She shares with Greg this episode how stories motivate us to actions, how nature documentaries need to include a few lies, categorizing museums, fake artifacts & art, and how the element of time can make us rethink authenticity and change. Episode Quotes:How material and medium play a significant role in how we respond to authenticity26:46: It makes me wonder how much the material and the medium drive how we respond to challenges to authenticity. We have different ways and different expectations of that, where if you were to go to, say, a science museum and see a T.Rex skeleton and to sort of say, Okay, this is conveying knowledge about the past, and this is telling me things that are true, and I’m going to take this away. I think it makes a lot of sense to have. Ookay, this is a replica. This is what we fill in and our best guess. And oh, this is a cast of the actual fossil. But we wanted to be really clear, so to me, I see that there isn’t a blanket statement that we can sort of apply to all material culture, but that it varies. Our tolerance and expectations change over time and vary depending on the medium.20:39: I love this idea that something that starts out as fake in the early parts of its life could be made authentic and could be made real given enough time.On defining endlings04:49: So an endling is the last known individual of a species before the species is declared extinct. And it seems like such a straightforward definition, like, nope, it's the last one. Once this one individual dies, then the species is declared extinct. But the more I try to hone in on and to think about the last of this species, the more I realize that it's very difficult to count the last of something when the category that it is the last of is so slippery, tricky, and historically contingent, to begin with.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Johan Beringer's lying StonesBeth Shapiro episodeGuest Profile:Lydia Pyne’s WebsiteLydia Pyne on TwitterLydia Pyne on Talks at GoogleHer Work:Articles on JSTOR DailyArticles on GlasstireEndlings: Fables for the Anthropocene (Forerunners: Ideas First)Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social NetworkGenuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff (Bloomsbury Sigma)Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human FossilsBookshelf (Object Lessons)The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene

Innovation seems to occur at uneven rates across different countries. At a time when we’re so intimately connected in all fields and industries, its interesting that there are still such vastly different kinds of technology and innovation happening at the same time all over the world. Dr. Mark Zachary Taylor, formerly a solid-state physicist, now specializes in S&T politics and policy, political economy, the American presidency, and comparative politics. In his research, he tries to understand the sources of national economic competitiveness. In his book, “The Politics of Innovation,” he seeks to explain why some countries are better than others at science and technology. He currently studies the role of the US presidency in short-run economic performance, as well as an Associate Professor at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology.Following the ideas of Cardwell’s Law, Greg and Zach discuss the uneven distribution of innovation globally, how and why we got to this place, and the role of government investments.Episode Quotes:There’s a lot of politics in physics(02:49) As a physicist, you're trained that science is all about efficiency and coming up with the right research and methods. But the deeper you got into it, you realize there was a lot of politics that went into deciding which were the right questions to answer, which were the right methodologies that you would use, and which labs got the funding or not in order to pursue these, and then which got published or not. There was a political aspect to it. And this wasn't being picked up on the sort of economic side, on the politics side.What makes a great politician?(49:15) I think we, as voters, should always be on the lookout for politicians who have that vision and who are skilled at politics, and are thoughtful about the policy. If you can combine those three, you've got some winners.The importance of competition on innovation(13:04) Whether it's for the individual scientists and engineers who are training or for the companies that they're going to wind up working for or even creating the product spaces, you've got to have that element of competition, or you're going to wind up with this protective turf building. That's going to stagnate over time.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Georgia Institute of Technology Mark Zachary Taylor’s WebsiteMark Zachary Taylor on TwitterMark Zachary Taylor on LinkedInHis Work:Mark Zachary Taylor on Google ScholarThe Politics of Innovation: Why Some Countries Are Better Than Others at Science and Technology

You may not believe it, but there is a link between our current political instability and your childhood attachment to teddy bears. There's also a reason why children in Asia are more likely to share than their western counterparts and why the poor spend more of their income on luxury goods than the rich. Or why your mother is more likely to leave her money to you than your father. What connects these things?The answer is our need for ownership. How does our urge to acquire control our behaviour, even the way we vote? And what can we do about it?Bruce Hood explores these questions in his latest book, “Possessed: Why We Want More Than We Need.” Bruce is currently Professor of Developmental Psychology in Society in the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol, with a diverse range of research interests including the origins of supernatural beliefs, intuitive theory formation, object representation, spatial cognition, inhibitory control and general cognitive development.He chats with Greg this episode about the concept of ownership, the psychological relationship we have with our possessions, Essentialism, and possessions vs experiences.Episode Quotes:The distinction between ownership and possession07:08: So there's a distinction between possession and ownership, which it's important to draw because ownership is a social convention. And I would argue you don't see any evidence of ownership in the animal kingdom, but plenty of evidence of territorialism and possessions.The principle of establishing ownership17:23: So when people take a piece of writing, or they take a tune and modify it and say, oh, it's different, then they gotta argue, well, to what extent does that constitute an original piece of effort?So it is actually quite nuanced even in the adult world, but the basic origin of it is yes. If you put effort into transforming, constructing, and creating something, that should default with you.On defining the essence21:27: Whenever we form an emotional attachment or have an emotional perspective on something, we imbue it with a metaphysical property of some unique feature which characterizes it. And that's called the essence.The importance of control for humans46:38: The perception of control is really important for humans to the extent that when they're uncertain or stressed, they'll look for patterns in the world to try regaining control. And that's where superstitions arise because we don't know what's controlling.Show Links:Recommended Resources:unSILOed: Ownership: What It Is, and What It Isn't feat. Michael Heller unSILOed:The Power of Social Pressure feat. Robert FrankGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of BristolContributor’s Profile at Closer To TruthBruce Hood’s WebsiteBruce Hood on TwitterBruce Hood on LinkedInBruce Hood on InstagramBruce Hood on Talks at GoogleBruce Hood on TedXSouthHamptonHis Work:Possessed: Why We Want More Than We NeedThe Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates IdentityThe Science of Superstition: How the Developing Brain Creates Supernatural BeliefsSuperSense: How the Developing Brain Creates Supernatural Beliefs

Having a background in planetary science gives our guest an interesting perspective on the world. In his work, Lewis can tie together things like the existence of humanity, and how the human experience has been impacted or even made possible by things like the movement of the tectonic plates and the great oxidation event.Lewis Dartnell is a research scientist, and author based in London, UK. His books include “The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch,” and “Origins: How the Earth Made Us.”He is currently a Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster, after having spent some time at the UK Space Agency.Lewis sits down with Greg to talk about building seed banks and prepping for the future, the scientific method, what a manual for civilization might look like, and how to change people's perspectives on the overwhelming weight of history of our species.Episode Quotes:On terraforming Mars43:07: So when people talk about terraforming Mars or making the Martian environment much more like the earth is today. We're not really talking about creating something new, but we're basically talking about turning back the hands of time, turning back Martian history to its primordial state when it did have a much more habitable environment.Our planet’s problem is the one we created48:25: The problem we're finding with our planet's environments and global climate is a problem that we created as an unintended consequence of the solution we found to a previous global problem, which was energy scarcity.Africa as a place of greatest genetic diversity34:08: The vast majority of human evolution, human history has been in Africa. And that is where we find the greatest genetic diversity across the entire species is still in our home stomping grounds in the African continent. And there's actually very, very little genetic diversity across people living everywhere else in the world.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The-knowledge.orgConnecticut Yankee goes to king Arthur's court book by Mark TwainThe Leftovers by Tom PerottaJoseph TainterunSILOed: In Defense of Genetic Engineering feat. Beth Shapiro Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of WestminsterLewis Dartnell’s WebsiteLewis Dartnell on LinkedInLewis Dartnell on TwitterLewis Dartnell on FacebookLewis Dartnell on TEDTalkLewis Dartnell on Talks at Google | Origins Lewis Dartnell on Talks at Google | The KnowledgeHis Work:Article on AeonOrigins: How the Earth Made UsThe Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from ScratchMy Tourist Guide to the Solar SystemLife in the Universe: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides series- Astrobiology

For a podcast called unSILOed, you really can’t think of a more perfect guest than John Hennessy. From being a founder of a company, to a scholar, to a book author and an administrator, John has straddled many a silo in his career. John Hennessy is an American computer scientist, academician and businessman who serves as Chairman of Alphabet Inc. Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems Inc. as well as Atheros and served as the tenth President of Stanford University. A pioneer in computer architecture, Hennessy joined Stanford’s faculty in 1977 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.John joins Greg this episode to discuss his multifaceted resume, including the tension between undergraduate & graduate education being in the same buildings, the secret ingredient of university research, and the challenges facing deans & administrative staff in our current cultural climate. Episode Quotes:John’s definition of humility6:09: Humility was about both realizing that I was able to be successful because I stood on the shoulders of many other people who had contributed along the way, both to my education and to my opportunity to do this, but also to recognize that you're not the expert on everything and bringing in experts, people who know the field is crucial to building a team that can be successfulWhat academic leadership needs to learn from corporations12:50: One of the challenges you face in academic leadership is that we do not do a particularly good job of preparing people for succession and management, and moving up the chain, unlike corporations, do a much better job in terms of preparing their leaders to take on bigger roles.How can universities give more access to education?49:46: Right now, we have far too many students who don't graduate college. Who start and don't graduate, not at great institutions like Berkeley or Stanford. You know, the national graduation rate for full-time students is about 55 to 60%. Well, that means you've got a lot of students who took on debt and didn't get a degree to finish it. That's a shared responsibility. It's clear that there are issues that are on the students, but it's also the institution's responsibility. And right now, we put all the burden on the student. Right? And why don't institutions have some responsibility when students default on debt?Because most of the students who default either didn't graduate or got a degree that did not prepare them for a career. So, the institution should be taking a larger responsibility for that.

The minute you walk into an elevator, everybody is immediately sizing up each other to figure out who is high and low status. When you're driving down the road, you can't help but think that someone's trying to “out status” you by accelerating past you or cutting you off. Status is everywhere, even if we're not conscious of it. Will Storr is an author, and former photographer and journalist. His books include, “The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It: On Social Position and How We Use it,” “Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us,” and the novel “The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone: The Secret Ingredient of Unforgettable Food Is Suffering.”He and Greg chat in this episode about all of the things we humans use to rate each other's status, including humiliation, the exploitation of status on social media, the cult of Crossfit, and the problem with relentlessly encouraging high self esteem in our children.Episode Quotes:Status is a psychological nutrient for our bodies 9:36: One of the ways I think about status is it's a social nutrient. It’s like an essential nutrient that we need, but it's a psychological nutrient rather than one for our bodies. And, when we don't get that nutrient, we begin to suffer very badly.Humiliation drives people to be cruel10:46: Humiliation is a sudden and painful public loss of status that drives people to cruel and evil acts. And it even affects us physically.Social media as a status generating machine19:20: Social media has become universally so huge all over the world because it's a status-generating machine. Billions of people who live otherwise kind of relatively ordinary lives can go on social media, and they can earn status. They can show off their possessions or their political beliefs, attack other people, and play these status games. Social media has created all this status where there wasn't any kind of status beforehand.Morality is an aspect of our shared imagination50:05: You can't see morality under a microscope. It's not a scientific thing that exists in the world in a material way. We all decide it's the rules of our game. So what happens is that we have our own moral laws and our moral symbolic beliefs. But when another group has a different set of moral beliefs, we take that as an attack on our sense of status, like our beliefs are often our criteria for claiming status.Guest Profile:Professional Profile at The GuardianSpeaker’s Profile at London Speaker BureauWill Storr WebsiteWill Storr on LinkedInWill Storr on TwitterWill Storr on YoutubeWill Storr on InstagramHis Work:The Science of Storytelling LIVE!The Status Game: How Social Position Governs EverythingThe Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them BetterSelfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to UsThe Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of ScienceThe Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of ScienceThe Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone Will Storr Vs. The Supernatural: One man's search for the truth about ghosts 

Well, Rick Sander has been working on questions of social and economic inequality for nearly all of his career. From being an activist in Chicago back in the day, to his published works, Rick truly understands the longstanding roots of residential segregation in the United States, and how it continues to evolve.  But there is still some confusion about the origins of segregation and how it affects us, from our neighborhoods to our universities and everywhere in between. Rick is a professor of law at UCLA, an economist, and an author of  “Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing,” and “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It.”Greg and Rick dive deep into segregation in this episode, discussing what really draws people to certain neighborhoods, the disappearance of ethnic enclaves, trends toward greater integration efforts, and getting rid of racial and legacy preferences.Episode Quotes:Why do academic institutions ignore mismatch?4:38: [Academic] mismatch is clearly a big problem. And the real frustration here is that our academic institutions have just ignored it. They're afraid to take on something that's politically sensitive.On economic segregation13:40: Economic segregation is a problem. But, it's wrong to think that we're gonna solve racial segregation by doing that stuff. And we tend to put a lot of political capital, as we’ll get to when we talk about affirmative action. We tend to put large amounts of political capital into strategies without thinking through in advance: Is this actually going to solve the problem we're trying to solve?Social mismatch37:47: There's a phenomenon we call: "social mismatch." So you might say, well, even given this academic mismatch, this is a price that we're willing to pay because we want to create these integrated campuses. And I think that's wrong for a couple of other reasons, but the key problem is that it endures social mismatch.Show Links:Recommended Resources:“Why Poor Families Move (And Where They Go)” - study by Ross Chetti and Stephanie DeLuca“Outliers” by Malcolm GladwellGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UCLA LawRick Sander on LinkedInHis Work:Moving toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair HousingMismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It

Epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee and her husband, psychologist Tom Patterson, were vacationing in Egypt when Tom came down with a stomach bug. What at first seemed like a case of food poisoning quickly turned critical, and by the time Tom had been transferred via emergency medevac to the world-class medical center at UC San Diego, where both he and Steffanie worked, blood work revealed why modern medicine was failing: Tom was fighting one of the most dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world.Steffanie joins Greg this episode to discuss solving her husband's medical crisis, and what she learned from this horrific experience. They also discuss how Covid has ramped these trends up, how critical phages are for our bodies, and the open mindedness of PhDs vs MDs.Steffanie is Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences and Harold Simon Distinguished Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins and Simon Fraser Universities. She co-directs UCSD’s new center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH), Global Health Institute and the International Core of UCSD’s Center for AIDS Research. Stefanie has co-authored her memoir all about her husbands illness titled, “The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug.”Episode Quotes:The need for a phage library[30:40] What we need to do is build a phage library that maps onto a superbug library. And, of course, these are going to be constantly needing to be updated because these are organisms that are co-evolving to attack one another.What's the future looking for the advancement of phage[37:55] I can imagine a situation in the future, though, where, because we have, sequencers that are portable and cheaper than ever before, that you'd be able to sequence a phage and sequence a bacteria and be able to have a database to say, okay, you know, this phage will match that bacterium or to even genetically modify or synthesize a phage. So in a 3D printing model, some of my colleagues in Belgium have, you know, been working on that. So, I think that there's going to be advances that are going to help us make this work. But right now, we need phage libraries. We need more investment in clinical trials.Pushing beyond boundaries leads to discovery[39:49] When your back is up against the wall, whether it's you as an individual, us as a society, or a planet, we can sometimes have creative ideas to come up with solutions that we wouldn't otherwise do. And that's what I'm hoping that we'll do now because both climate change and antimicrobial resistance are colliding.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC San DiegoFaculty Profile at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public HealthProfessional Profile at Canadian Association for Global HealthSteffanie Strathdee on LinkedInSteffanie Strathdee on TwitterSteffanie Strathdee on InstagramSteffanie Strathdee on TEDxNashvilleHer Work:Steffanie Strathdee on Google ScholarThe Perfect Predator Website

When trying to figure out how to understand humans, we tend to look to our nearest neighbors: bonobos, chimps, and monkeys. But our guest Mark Moffett believes that in many ways, we're unlike chimps and more aligned with social insects like wasps and ants. Mark Moffett is known for documenting new species and behaviors during his exploration of remote places in more than a hundred countries.  He is a high school dropout who began doing research in biology in college and went on to complete a PhD at Harvard, studying under the poet-laureate of conservation, Edward O. Wilson. He is now a research associate at the Smithsonian Institute and an author of books like “The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall Hardcover” and “Adventures Among Ants.”Mark & Greg discuss the complexity of ant societies, kin selection, the speciation of accents and the pros and cons of war for a society. Episode Quotes:What’s the commonality between humans and ants?14:16 - I came upon this idea when I realized that ants and humans, despite being virtually alien species to each other, have this commonality. Ants use, what is equivalent to their national flag, which is a scent on their body surface and all the ants and the colony have that scent. And as long as you have that scent, you're golden. If you don't, you are attacked, or if you're a colony, that's smaller, you run away. Humans use a lot more signaling, and that's a big part of social psychology, how this signaling works. Defining social networks12:49 - Social networks exclude a lot of people within societies and include those outside societies, and that's true in some other animals.You can save a lot of mental effort in societies by allowing strangers34:50 -  Chimpanzees and most species don't allow for strangers, and allowing for strangers was a big step in our evolution, even though it happened back in a point of time where our societies were quite small by modern standards, that was essential. When the opportunity came along for societies to grow, it had to be there already because you can add individuals to society at no cost, as long as they did the right things, behaved the right way, and so forth. We could be comfortable with societies that could grow to any size. And that's very unique to humans and a few ants. Show Links:Recommended Resources:E.O WilsonGuest Profile:Professional Profile at National Museum of Natural HistoryMark Moffett WebsiteMark Moffett on TwitterMark Moffett on Talks at GoogleMark Moffett's Interview on National GeographicHis Work:The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and FallAdventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of TrillionsFace to Face with Frogs (Face to Face with Animals)

When Alex Budak first started his course “Becoming a Changemaker” at UC Berkeley, he had to turn students away because it was too popular. This course was the first of its kind, providing experiential teaching that ignites the inner changemaker in students and future leaders from around the world. People are craving change. Alex Budak calls himself a social entrepreneur. He is also a faculty member at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and the author of the upcoming book, “Becoming a Changemaker.”In this episode, these UC Berkeley faculty chat about how to teach people to become changemakers, getting comfortable with failure, and the elusive work-life balance.Episode Quotes:Why you need to experience failure08:54 - We tend to make failure up to be a bigger thing in our head, but once we practice it, we realize that failure isnt fatal. We didn't get laughed at. And often, students come back with a new perspective. And so that's why I think doing is so important that you can't just read a book about failure. You learn so much more by actually doing it. So I want to create those experiences for students where they get to experience that.Desire for change14:44 - So I'm building off of this latent desire among so many people to have a sense of purpose, to have a sense of meaning, to see the world as it is and believe it can be better in some way—that I could play a role.Different ways to consider “change”26:08 - Now, as I think about change, it's a bit like technology. So I see technology as a value-neutral platform. Technology can be used for good and for bad. Change, as well, can be used for good and for bad.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking: Cain, Susan: 9780307352156Episode 163: Iddo Landau — unSILOed Podcast with Greg LaBlancSystems Thinking Resources - The Donella Meadows ProjectGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC Berkeley Haas School of BusinessProfessional Profile at The Science FactoryAlex Budak on LinkedInAlex Budak on TwitterAlex Budak on TIktokHis Work:Becoming a ChangemakerStartSomeGood

Before the coronavirus pandemic, one of the biggest crises of our time was the global financial crisis. And even though that crisis passed, the underlying issues which gave rise to it have not been resolved. Anat Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, a director of the Corporations and Society Initiative, and a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She has written extensively on information dissemination in financial markets, portfolio management, financial contracting, corporate governance, and banking. Anat also co-authored the book “The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It” with Martin Hellwig.In this episode we’re diving into the world of finance, with a focus on housing subsidies in the United States, corporate finance education, and whether or not the private sector will solve our global problems. Episode Quotes:Money influences every sector So money speaks everywhere, including nonprofits and universities are not immune from that actually. Their donors, especially of business schools, are from the private sector and you don't want to annoy them. That's why the only way you're going to talk about society is to make everybody feel good about themselves and do impact investing in philanthropy and all of that. So that's sort of the winner takes all charade of changing the world sort of part of it. So academics are not immune.Change is difficult in academiaSo change is difficult also in academia and business schools especially. In the eighties there started being this mantra with Ronald Reagan, the government is always a problem, the government is corrupt and incompetent, etc. And therefore you have all these heroic CEOs, that they will take care of us because the government can't. To which my response is if the government can't, why is that? And did you have anything to do with it, with your own actions to corrupt the government basically? To weaken the government to rob it of resources in every clever way you can. And now we're all paying the price.The lack of education of corporate financeWhen I started looking into banking as a corporate finance and corporate governance expert right after the financial crisis, I was shocked. I mean, you really actually have academics writing textbooks and it's as if like the civilization of corporate finance and what we understand about the basics of corporate finance just hasn't made it there. They just have a whole other set of words that they use. And they just seem to refuse to accept it's really in the sort of domain of willful blindness. Funding & debtWe just rely too much on debt. And the debt often becomes predatory in bad terms, payday loans, and other things, and even student loans. In other words, what is it you want to fund? And how is it you want to do it? We do way too much funding by debt in general.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford Graduate of School of BusinessProfessional Profile at VoxEU.orgAnat Admati’s WebsiteAnat Admati on LinkedInAnat Admati on TwitterAnat Admati at TEDxStanfordHer Work:Anat Admati on Google ScholarThe Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It - Updated Edition