unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

There have been periods throughout history when cultural aficionados of the time proclaimed that painting was dead! Yet, the artform has risen over and over again. What is it about painting that makes it so timeless and gives it the ability to continuously evolve? Why, after centuries, can we still be awestruck by the right combination of brushstokes? Art critic Martin Gayford has interviewed many artists over his lifetime about their craft. His books explore painting through a multitude of eras and even gives a personal account of what it's like to sit for a painting in Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud. His latest book, How Painting Happens (and why it matters), compiles wisdom from numerous artists past and present. Martin and Greg discuss the challenges of writing about a non-linguistic medium like painting, the unique, often physical process of painting, and insights Martin has gleaned from his conversations with contemporary artists, including what makes a painting a great one.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The silent intensity of painting16:13: You don't have to talk or put things in words to think. There is such a thing as physical thinking, and painting is probably a very good example of that. That was one of the points that struck me when I was posing for Lucian Freud, which I—was a very long, drawn-out process. As you can imagine, it took about 18 months to produce two paintings. And Lucian was very slow, but it wasn't that he was painting all the time very slowly. Most of the time in a sitting, he'd spend thinking, looking. And then, after quite a while, and mixing up the paints and contemplating the situation—looking at me, looking at the painting—then he'd dart forward and put a stroke on, quite fast actually. But probably 95% of the time, he wasn't doing that. He was considering the situation.Why we still need painting in a world of screens42:43: It's arguable that, therefore, paintings, sculptures, unique works of art are what we need now. 'Cause they're the opposite of phones and screens and endless deluge of imagery and distraction, which the modern world offers us. A painting is—if it's good enough—it's something you can just look at for the rest of your life, and if it's really good enough, it'll carry on being rewarding.Painting as a language without words02:02: Painting or visual art isn't exactly a language. It's certainly not a verbal language, but it's a means of communication. And as such, it doesn't necessarily neatly translate into words.How artists reshape art history to suit themselves39:37: Although artists—practicing artists, rather—may have tremendous insights, and the insights of a kind which nobody else has access to, they're going to see art history and the art, the work of all other artists, from the point of view of their own art. And they'll be utterly out of sympathy, therefore, with quite large sections of the art of the past and of the present. To an extent, that's true with critics. They'll have certain idioms, certain styles, certain media they like more than others. But a critic can be a little bit less prejudiced. Oh, I'd like to think critics can be a bit more open-minded about what they're looking at. An artist will pretty well instinctively refashion the whole of art history so that it leads up to what they're doing today in their studio. But we don't all have to do that.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Lucian FreudPatrick HeronWillem de KooningClement GreenbergTracey EminJames TurrellDamien HirstPierre BonnardBridget RileyPeter Paul RubensRobert RauschenbergGary HumeGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteHis Work:How Painting Happens (and why it matters) Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian FreudModernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London PaintersShaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to NowVenice: City of Pictures A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer ScreenThe Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

What is the intrinsic link between philosophical inquiry and personal development? How can academic thought and theory be applied well to practical living in the real world?Kieran Setiya is a professor of philosophy at MIT and also the author of a number of books, including Knowing Right From Wrong, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, and Midlife: A Philosophical Guide.Greg and Kieran discuss how philosophy and self-help have diverged over time and the potential for their reintegration. Kieran explores the practical use of philosophical reflection in everyday life, the evolving view of philosophy from his early academic years to now, the impact of Aristotle's concept of the ideal life on contemporary thought, and the nature of midlife crises including his own. They also touch on topics like the value of choice, future bias, the role of suffering, and the integration of philosophy in early education. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why Aristotle's ideal life isn't always the answer06:58: What am I going to do here and now, in the conditions I'm in—which are always, to some degree, imperfect—right now, maybe particularly challenging for many of us? And it's just not obvious at all. In fact, I think it's not true that the best way to answer the question, "What should I do in my problematic circumstances?" is, well, look at what an ideal life would be and just sort of aim towards that. And that just—it's both impractical and often very bad advice. It's like if someone said, "Well, you don't have any yeast; try to make some bread." You could think, "Well, what's the thing that's going to be most like a regular loaf of bread?" Or you might think, "Yeah, that's not the right thing to aim for here." There's some more dramatic pivot in how I'm going to try to make a kind of bread-like thing. And I think that's a good—a better—analogy for the situation we're in when we try to think about what to do here and now, when ideals like Aristotle's are not really viable.On regret, choice, and the value of missed opportunities21:21: Regret is a function of something that's not at all regrettable. Mainly the diversity of value.Detached wanting and the good enough life38:10: Stoics have this idea that virtue is the key thing for eudaimonia, and nothing else really matters for eudaimonia. But there are all these—what they call—preferred indifferents. So all the other stuff you might want, it's reasonable to want it, but you should want it in a kind of detached, "that would be a bonus" kind of way. And I think, while I'm not a Stoic and I don't think they draw that line in the right way, I think they're right that there is some kind of line here that has to do with sort of moderation and greed. In effect, thinking at a certain point: "If your life is good enough, you look at all the other things you could have," and the right attitude to have to them is something like, "Well, it'd be great if I had that. Sure." But the idea of being angry that I don't, or feeling like "this is unacceptable that I don't" is just not a virtuous — for want of a better word—it's not a reasonable, justifiable response.Show Links:Recommended Resources:AristotleEudaimoniaTelicityArthur SchopenhauerUtilitarianismPlatoJohn Stuart MillReasons and PersonsIris MurdochGuest Profile:KSetiya.netFaculty Profile at MITProfile on WikipediaProfile on PhilPeople.orgHis Work:Amazon Author PageLife Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our WayMidlife: A Philosophical GuidePractical Knowledge: Selected EssaysKnowing Right From WrongInternal Reasons: Contemporary ReadingsReasons without RationalismSubstack Newsletter

How does strategy factor into the mindsets of presidents like Lincoln and Reagan on both a micro and macro level? What parts of grand strategy are at play when new countries enter NATO due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict?John Lewis Gaddis is a professor of history at Yale University and also the author of several books on history and strategy. His latest books include The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, On Grand Strategy, and The Cold War: A New History.Greg and John discuss the concept of historical consciousness and its relation to strategic thinking. John goes over the teaching of strategy from a historical perspective, comparing it to evolutionary sciences and emphasizing the importance of common sense in strategic decisions. They also explore the use of metaphors in understanding history and strategy, the role of theory, and the necessity of adaptability in leadership. The conversation touches on various historical and contemporary examples to illustrate these ideas, including the strategic mindsets of figures like Lincoln and the implications of NATO expansion and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are we failing to preserve common sense in business schools?36:38: This whole thing about preserving common sense at all altitudes, it seems to me, is something that's often missing in business schools and also in businesses, as we've seen in various cases. So, if reading some history can create that kind of attitude, then I think it's worthwhile. And the reason I think it can work gets back to the sports metaphor because, okay, maybe your business guy is not interested in reading history, but they're probably watching the March Madness or the Super Bowl, and they're probably talking about coaches and why are certain coaches better than other coaches and so on. And when they're doing that, they're talking about what I'm talking about, which is just drawing these lessons from the past, looking at the objective, operating within the rules but understanding that the application of the rules is going to be different in every situation, every moment of the game.The optimal grand strategists know when to adapt and when to steer27:518: I think the optimal grand strategist would be someone who is agile and situationally aware, but also retains a sense of direction.Big ambitions fail without this one principle01:57: It seems to me that there's a kind of logic of strategy, which transcends time and place and culture. And when you set it out, when you give examples of what you mean by that, it sounds like a platitude. So if, for example, I were to tell you that aspirations can be infinite but capabilities must be finite, you would say, I knew that all along. You would say that's a platitude. You can get strategy on that? Well, yes, I think you can build a strategy on that because history is full of people who lost track of that insight, who let their aspirations exceed their capabilities to the point of complete overstretch and self-defeat. [02:50] History is littered with people who forgot that aphorism. And the aphorism is just plain common sense.Why naive questions matter more than you think30:56: You have to realize naive questions are always good to ask. Because one of the problems with theorists is that they don't like naive questions because they're inconvenient. And they're much more interested in the purity of the theory, the rigorousness of the theory, if it's a laboratory sense of replicability, of the theory. But for somebody to come along and just ask a naive question, sometimes they're not prepared for that.Show Links:Recommended Resources:George F. KennanNapoleonMark AntonyMurder BoardJohn NegroponteLeo TolstoyPainting As a PastimePresentismIsaiah BerlinAugustine of HippoJohn C. CalhounVladimir PutinGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Yale UniversityWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageOn Grand StrategyThe Cold War: A New HistoryGeorge F. Kennan: An American LifeThe Landscape of History: How Historians Map the PastStrategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold WarThe United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, ProvocationsThe Age Of Terror: America And The World After September 11

Contrary to popular belief – making more money doesn't necessarily mean you'll be happier in life. The same can be said for societies as a whole, especially when it comes to countries with lopsided wealth distribution leading to high levels of inequality. So what are the connections between that inequality,people's general wellbeing, and politics? Keith Payne is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill. His books, Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide and The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die explore the science behind inequality and the far-reaching impact it has on modern society. Keith and Greg discuss how inequality affects subjective wellbeing and societal outcomes, the connection between inequality and political polarization, strategies to mitigate psychological harm of inequality, and how understanding these psychological mechanisms can improve cross-party dialogues and reduce divisiveness.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why facts don't win arguments51:42: Starting with the goal of understanding is  important, and then when we're actually engaging with the other person, we have this tendency , as soon as they say something is true, we say, well, that's not true, and here are my facts and figures. And so we need to stop trying to bludgeon the other person into agreeing with us by citing facts and better evidence. That may sound counterintuitive, especially in the academic world where I live, because, but that's the currency, right, for argumentation. That's not where most people are coming from. I mean, they care about the facts, but only as tools to defend their social identities. And so, I think a better question to ask is, well, not why do you believe that in terms of why are you wrong about the facts, but what is believing that doing for your psychological bottom line? How is that serving your sense of identity and your group loyalties?Status is more than your paycheck12:50: We need to find ways to judge our status not purely in terms of wealth or income, and to make those richer kind of social connections, as a source of status. Because those are things we have more control over than how rich the 1% is.What shapes our political beliefs06:39:  It is perceived inequality that makes a big difference. And you have to see the wealth around you. And usually, that's not comparing ourselves to the top one-tenth of 1%, because we don't see the billionaires. Even if you live in Manhattan and are surrounded by billionaires, you still don't see it much, right? People like that live in gated communities, surrounded by privacy-insuring mechanisms and stuff. What we see is maybe the top 20% who are driving expensive cars and showing off their vacation pictures on Facebook. So, for the psychological comparisons, you do have to have some visible inequality there. But there's other ways that extreme levels of inequality affect society through non-visible means. [07:34] When it comes to the day-to-day psychological experience of living in an unequal society, the blatant visibility or invisibility of wealth has a lot to do with it.How inequality reshapes our behavior37:07: We found that in high inequality countries, and in high inequality states within the United States, people are engaged in more risky financial behavior — whether that's buying lottery tickets, or not investing for retirement, going to check cashing places rather than traditional banking, et cetera. So that all happens more in high inequality places, and you can see the same sort of patterns with regard to non-financial risk taking around health, like drug use, cigarette smoking — things that are high risk but immediate reward in terms of hedonic or affective reactions — are better predicted by inequality than by poverty as well.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Easterlin paradoxPhilip ConverseDonald KinderNathan P. KalmoeEdmund BurkeJohn Stuart MillGravity Payments“The marketplace of rationalizations” by Daniel WilliamsGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteProfessional Profile on XHis Work:Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous DivideThe Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

When did the idea of parenthood become less of a certainty and more of a choice? How have anxieties about the modern world impacted our desire to procreate and thus impacted the world's population? Is that impact even a big deal?Anastasia Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Irvine and co-author of the new book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice in which she takes a philosophical approach to the question of whether or not to have children. Anastasia and Greg delve into the shifting motivations and anxieties influencing the choice to have children, how this question has popped up throughout history dating back to Aristotle's time, feminism's relationship with motherhood, and the potential reasons behind declining birth rates.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:When choosing parenthood feels like losing yourself18:53: The transformation is one that really threatens annihilation of self. It's more radical than this difficulty of doing a hedonic calculation. What you are saying about the reluctance of calculating, though, I think is really important to thematize, because we see it especially as people increasingly report a conflict between pursuing what a lot of people are able to actually articulate as, like, a family goal or desire to have children and what they can see romantic relationships to be for.Why fewer people won't save the planet42:39: The fantasy that depopulation is going to be a solution for climate change—it's just that: it's a fantasy. What we need is immediate global climate action, and nothing short of it will make a difference.What are parents really responsible for?37:07 What I think people are responsible for in being parents is not that overall wellbeing. What they're responsible for is preparing, to the best of their abilities, their children for meeting life challenges, pains, and suffering. So it's not to say that you can't fail as a parent. It's not to say that we can't say that. Some people, like, should you be a parent? I'm not sure. But it is to say that judgment is not going to be based on the likelihood of your child to just encounter suffering of any kind.Rethinking parenthood as an avenue for self-fulfillment30:17:  The question of whether or not motherhood is an avenue for self-fulfillment should give way to the question of whether or not parenthood is something of value in human life and how to reconcile it with other demands, moral, material, et cetera. And as we said, that's true at both the individual level. So, within a relationship, to try to overcome the thought that the liberal left thing to do is to put the burden of not just choice, but the burden of asking this question of deliberation, of assuming responsibility for the choice, squarely on the shoulders of women, and also socially, to try and find a way of both recognizing the unique burdens that parenthood places on women, especially in the early stages of parenthood, but also reminding us that this is a profound human question.Show Links:Recommended Resources:The “wisdom” of Silenus | The New Criterion After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso (publishing July 2025)Melanie Klein Elena FerranteDetransition, Baby by Torrey PetersGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of California IrvineProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on XHer Work:What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice

How is our fear of uncertainty holding us back? Could an acceptance and willingness to embrace the unknown unlock new potential and innovation?  Margaret Heffernan is a professor of Practice at the University of Bath, an entrepreneur, and a mentor to CEOs. Her books include Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future, and most recently Embracing Uncertainty: How writers, musicians and artists thrive in an unpredictable world.Margaret and Greg discuss the importance of embracing uncertainty in business and life, the value of creative thinking, and the pitfalls of over-reliance on predictability and data models.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why dissent is the secret engine of creativity and better ideas34:46: Our obsession with efficiency means that we may prioritize management over productivity, and critical to productivity is diversity, debate, dissent, because this is how bad ideas get turned into good ideas. I mean, as a CEO I could waltz into work one day with an idea, which I thought was fantastic. And the great gift I was given were  a lot of employees who would think, "Oh God, here she comes back with another terrible idea," and say, "Well, I don't know. What if we did it like this? So what if we did it like that?...[35:31] But at the end of a very long process, you end up with something which started with my bad idea and gradually got a lot better because of everybody else's input, and turns out to be marvelous at the end. But that dissent is absolutely fundamental to the creative process.What's the relationship between being a noticer and being creative?39:11:  It's impossible to be creative without being a noticer, for a start. And I think that the great value of being observant and thinking about what you see is it keeps you much more in touch with what's going on in the world.The danger of mental models and the power of an open mind45:55: The danger of mental models is that they will attract confirming evidence and marginalize, or disguise disconfirming data. And so, the antidotes to that are certainly about having enough time to be in different places with different people who think differently. Having a sufficiently open mind to be prepared to notice this confirmation. Having an open mind prepared to change one's mind. And having, I guess, a way of thinking that tends more towards skepticism.Why embracing uncertainty means loosening up, not tightening down57:32:  Engineers talk a lot about tight and loose. I think much that has gone wrong in organizational life is a function of being too tight. And it sounds very counterintuitive because it is counterintuitive, but uncertainty requires that we loosen up in order to be able to respond more flexibly. And I think you are exactly right that pertains as much to us as individuals, as it does to the largest corporations in the world.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Gerd GigerenzerRichard S. Fuld Jr.The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness “The role of art in difficult times” by Margaret Heffernan | Financial TimesCareless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-WilliamsMax H. BazermanPatrick KavanaghSeamus HeaneyGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of BathProfessional WebsiteHer Work:Embracing Uncertainty: How writers, musicians and artists thrive in an unpredictable worldWillful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our PerilUncharted: How to Navigate the Future A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the CompetitionBeyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small ChangesThe Naked Truth: A Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters

Why is there a need for a cultural and educational shift towards appreciating, building, and maintaining industrial systems? What would a rebirth of manufacturing look like in 2025? How would we go about setting up a new Industrial Enlightenment?David A. Mindell is a professor of aerospace engineering and the history of engineering and manufacturing at MIT. He is also the author of several books. The title of his latest book and the primary subject of this discussion is The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution.Greg and David discuss the 18th-century industrial enlightenment and its implications for modern industrial society. They also explore the evolving relationship between technology and labor, the persistent myths around automation, and the importance of valuing industrial contributions in today's digital economy. Mendell emphasizes the need for a cultural and educational shift towards appreciating building and maintaining industrial systems, advocating for what he describes as a new industrial enlightenment.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The overlooked power of process knowledge12:41: If you are working on a very advanced, cutting-edge product, like a phone, you want to know exactly where there's capacity that's left on the table to enable you to build the next form. Did you design it too conservatively here? Is there something there you could do more with? And that familiarity with process, whether it's manufacturing or maintenance or other aspects of it, is a really important source of knowledge in an industrial system that we've generally devalued in favor of the kind of product innovation. And inventing the shiny new thing. And I'm sitting on the middle of the campus here at MIT, where we spend a lot of time teaching students about what is essentially product innovation. And we have very few folks on this campus who know anything about the processes that make and maintain these systems, even though very often that knowledge is a source of really great innovation.Is disruption really the enemy in industrial systems11:16: Disruption is the enemy in an industrial system. Reliability, repeatability, efficiency, robustness—those are things that people care a lot about in these systems.The untapped potential of maintenance cycles31:59: Improving maintenance cycles is a huge source of process innovation that we have not paid enough attention to, and if you can make something that lasts longer, that's a real contribution. I'm a pilot, and people make airplanes last for 50, 60, 70 years because they're designed to be maintained and upgraded, and you replace the parts that wear out and keep them going. Why can't we do that with laptops and phones and even routers or other disposable parts of the electronic economy? And so, work is changing. Work should change. Work should always be responding to the technological changes and needs of the time.On the myth of replacement in technology and work45:55: The myth of replacement, as I talk about in the book, is really. It's not that technologies don't enable us to do things with fewer people. Again, that's really the definition of productivity and not a bad definition for technology in these settings. It's more that, for one, it's very rare that you see a technology replace a human job and do that job the same way. Much more common that they change the nature of the work. Either they move it to a different place, they change the kind of skills that are required. They maybe make the job higher level. Maybe they make the job lower level. And you want to ask those questions about who's doing the work, where are they? What's their background, what's their training? Why does it matter? Those things change a lot, but it's relatively rare.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Josiah WedgwoodIndustrial RevolutionLewis MumfordJames WattMatthew BoultonEric SchmidtLunar Society of BirminghamAdam SmithWilliam ThompsonLord KelvinDissenting AcademiesJoseph PriestleyWilliam SmallAir France Flight 447WaymoGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at MITProfessional Profile at AeroAstroLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia Profile.Unless ProfileSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial RevolutionOur Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of AutonomyThe Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent MachinesDigital Apollo: Human and Machine in SpaceflightIron Coffin: War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USSBetween Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before CyberneticsWar, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS MonitorResearch Gate Page

What does it mean to learn something? While many living things have the capacity for learning, humans have taken this ability to unmatched levels. Our ability to learn and apply knowledge sets us apart from most other species, and now we're passing that ability on to AI. Leslie Valiant is a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Harvard University. His latest book, The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness, explores our ability to take in new information and raises questions about the broader implications of educability and artificial intelligence. Leslie and Greg discuss the uniqueness of human educability, how that ability differs from artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the future challenges of integrating machine intelligence in human society.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What do people miss when they think about intelligence?02:05: Well, I think the difficulty is that we don't really know what the word "intelligence" is, and we've been using it for more than a century, and we're using it without having any note of what it means. I don't think it's been very useful, for example, in the study of artificial intelligence. So I think the context of IQ tests, I think, arose in the early 1900s in connection with potential definitions of intelligence in terms of people finding correlations between abilities of children to do various subjects at school. And they hypothesized that the children who are good at many subjects had something, and they hypothesized that what they had, this "something," was this intelligence. But that's not a definition of what intelligence is. So they didn't provide specification of how you recognize someone who's intelligent. It's a purely statistical notion.What is the best way to understand humans?03:00: To understand what one is doing, one has to have a definition of what one's trying to achieve. And in some sense, the successes of AI have been along those lines. So, machine learning was something which was defined in terms of what you wanted to achieve. So you had examples of things and you wanted to achieve a prediction of newer examples with high confidence, and people managed to implement this, and this became the kind of backburner of AI. So I think, in understanding humans, I think this is the way forward. We should understand what kind of things we're good at, what we do, what our functions are. And saying someone is intelligent is almost like name-calling.How can we promote educability without also promoting vulnerability?39:06: We already have these incredible capabilities for absorbing information, processing it, applying it, running with it. And this capability somehow exceeds our ability to evaluate information. So someone gives us some story about what happened on the other side of the world yesterday. We can't rush over to check it out. We either believe it or we don't believe it. So we find it very hard to evaluate, to evaluate everything we hear.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Alan Turing Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard UniversityProfessional WebsiteHis Work:The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human UniquenessCircuits of the MindProbably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World

What does it take to go from a criminal prosecutor to a pioneer of the “originalism” movement and one of the top constitutional law scholars in America?Randy Barnett is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the director of Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He has written numerous books including, Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit, and most recently a memoir called A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. Randy and Greg discuss his journey from private to public law, how he discovered and furthered the originalism movement, and his influential roles in landmark cases such as the 2004 medical marijuana challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court and the 2012 Affordable Care Act challenge. They also delve into the nuances of constitutional law and the structural challenges within legal academia.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What motivates justices beyond doctrine19:35: What really motivates these justices, apart from the doctrine, which I think doesn't really motivate them, that means the law is not motivating. And what really motivates them is what I call constitutional principle. They carry within their minds some fundamental constitutional principles. And those principles kind of dictate what they think the right answer is. And at that point, they will start marshaling doctrine on behalf of that. But it isn't merely the policy outcome of the case. That's the difference. For the legal realists, the pure legal realists. It's just, "What outcome do I like?" But for most justices, it's, "What constitutional principles do I hold dear that I want to see vindicated, or do I believe will be undermined if the other side should prevail?" That's a big difference.What is originalism?12:37: Originalism is the view that the meaning of the constitution should remain the same until it is properly changed by amendment.Can contract law theory help you understand constitutional theory better?09:46: Being able to do contract law theory and to be able to do it at all enabled me to do constitutional theory way better than people who have known nothing but constitutional law. And if I can put this more in a vernacular, constitutional law is largely bullshit.The empty concept of activism in legal discourse29:03: The term activism is a completely empty concept. It is more, like what you said earlier, a label to be peeled off and stuck on a decision that you don't like. And it's a sort of process objection, which allows you to avoid having to talk about the merits of the constitutional argument. You say, "Oh, this judge is overstepping their authority. They're engaged in activism," without, and without having to say, "Well, what's wrong with what they said about the constitution?" Or whatever. And so, because it's empty, anybody can hurl it.Show Links:Recommended Resources:“A Consent Theory of Contract” by Randy Barnett Originalism “The Misconceived Quest for Original Understanding” by Ben ZimmerGovernment by Judiciary by Raoul BergerBarry Goldwater Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.Federalist Society Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Georgetown LawProfessional WebsiteHis Work:A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American OriginalistThe Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of LawThe Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and SpiritRestoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of LibertyOur Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People 

Why is historical awareness so important in order to form a strong personal identity? What are the risks of a culture overly centered on safety and fragility?Frank Furedi is an emeritus professor at the University of Kent and director of the think tank MCC Brussels. Frank is also the author of several books. His latest work is titled The War Against the Past: Why The West Must Fight For Its History, and he has also written How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century, First World War: Still No End in Sight, Power of Reading: From Socrates to Twitter.Greg and Frank discuss the disparagement of the past in contemporary culture, the influence of identity politics on historical interpretation, and the educational system's decreasing demands on students. They also discuss the decline of practical wisdom and the impacts of education on cultural values. Frank critiques the modern tendency to detach from historical legacies, highlighting the dangers of presentism and the moral devaluation of the past. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Understanding history beyond simplistic narratives07:26: People say Martin Luther, who isn't the hero of mine, but nevertheless played an important role in the Reformation, was the antecedent of Adolf Hitler, that already in his authoritarian behavior, there were the seeds of what would happen in the 1930s and 1940s. And that kind of simplistic history means that you do not even actually understand what is unique and special about the Holocaust. What is the tragedy that we fell upon us? If you see that merely as more of the same, because then you forget about the Enlightenment, you forget about the incredible achievements of German culture. Someone like Heine, Beethoven, and some of the artistic sort of endeavors that existed there. And impoverish our own sensibility through doing something like that. And I think a mature individual learns to be critical of the horrible things that have occurred in the past whilst at the same time learned to valorize and affirm what were very positive contributions to human civilization.The Renaissance as a positive way of viewing the past05:01: The Renaissance is really about rebirth, and there's a very strong sense in which what they wanna do is they wanna reappropriate the best that existed beforehand. And, in the course of reappropriating it, what they want to do is to make it come alive within their own lifetime. And I think that's a really positive way of dealing with the past.The transformative power of books35:41: Books are important because it kind of demands an element of interaction between you and the author. And what happens is that, sort of as you're going through the pages and reading them, it has the potential to stimulate your sensibilities in a way that provides you with both an aesthetic element but also an intellectual element. I think what is really great about a book is that it is both something that stirs the emotion and, at the same time, makes you aware of the fact that there are problems with these ideas, these existentially difficult kinds of questions. Which basically means that you can, on a good day, come out a slightly different person than when you began that journey when you kind of started on the first page.How inclusion and market forces are reshaping education44:54: What the woke, idea of inclusion does is it fundamentally changes the culture of academic learning, because now what becomes important is the student rather than the subject. So you have what's called student-led learning, which I think is a travesty of any kind of intellectual engagement because in a real academic setting, you have a partnership between the academic and the students that have come in there. So I think it's both a cultural dilution of academic standards alongside the market-driven impulse. And it's the convergence of the two, which is why you have a situation where you have administrators, professional administrators, experts kind of becoming the best allies of the inclusion diversity merchants. It's almost like they got this unholy alliance of controlling the university through their coalition.Show Links:Recommended Resources:PhronesisRenaissanceDark AgesFrench RevolutionPol PotMartin LutherCiceroAncient EgyptCleopatraDavid LowenthalThomas HobbesVirginia WoolfGuest Profile:FrankFuredi.orgProfessional Profile at MCC BrusselsFaculty Profile at the University of KentWikipedia ProfileLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XNewsletter on SubStackHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe War Against the Past: Why The West Must Fight For Its HistoryHow Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First CenturyFirst World War: Still No End in SightPower of Reading: From Socrates to TwitterWhat's Happened To The University?Therapy CultureFreedom Is No Illusion: Letters on LibertyOn Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over SocialisationPolitics of FearGoogle Scholar PageThe Guardian Articles

What are the broader implications of specialized bankruptcy courts on the U.S. legal system? How are bankruptcies being used and misused by debtors and creditors today?Melissa B. Jacoby is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's also the author of the book Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal.Greg and Melissa discuss the complexities of the U.S. bankruptcy code, highlighting its impact on both individuals and corporations. Their conversation digs into the unintended and often unfair consequences of bankruptcy laws, especially concerning personal bankruptcy versus corporate restructuring. Melissa and Greg also touch on the racial disparities in bankruptcy cases, the influence of the consumer credit industry, and the role of non-bankrupt players like the Sacklers in liability discharge.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The cost of going bankrupt in America09:35: You have to pay not to pay in America to go bankrupt. It is the kind of social insurance that requires an outlay of funds, and the bankruptcy system can't print money. It doesn't do job retraining. So the one thing it does is cancel debt, but you have to pay for that.How bankruptcy reflects broader inequality16:14: It's important to see how bankruptcy is in conversation with a lot of other laws and policies that create inequities outside of bankruptcy. And then, when they're brought into bankruptcy, bankruptcy piles on. The role of civil litigation in bankruptcy24:27: There are areas of law that depend not as much on upfront regulation but on ex-post exploration of alleged wrongs, that the civil litigation process is not merely to reward a remedy like some people think, although again, sometimes that is what people want. It is to switch the power dynamics in the control that an injured person gets to ask someone else questions, gets to shape the process. And that doesn't mean they're going to prevail. It is possible that instead of getting 3 cents on the dollar, there will be zero. But that's not really the point here. The point here, you're losing a lot of other objectives that the law outside of bankruptcy is supposed to fill. And it becomes very easy once one spends a lot of time in the bankruptcy system. Everything is about money.Bankruptcy can cancel debts but we've made it too hard to use08:34: The thing that bankruptcy can do the best, or is the most equipped to do relative to other laws, is to cancel debts. So, what is going on with the consumer credit industry in its many, many years of lobbying to make the bankruptcy system more complicated and more expensive for average families to use? It doesn't seem to have been that the bankruptcy system operates more smoothly and efficiently, because, if anything, the 2005 amendments had the opposite effect.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Elizabeth WarrenChapter 9Chapter 11Chapter 13Corporate PersonhoodSackler FamilyRegulatory Takings in the United StatesDouglas Baird PodcastUnited States Bankruptcy CourtGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UNC School of LawMBJacoby.orgLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XHer Work:Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More UnequalGoogle Scholar Page

What are the consequences of feminist ideals on modern women? How have they affected the work-life balance, the denigration of motherhood, and the quest for female autonomy?Carrie Gress is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and at Catholic University. She is also the author of several books. Her latest is titled, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us.Greg and Carrie discuss her latest book, where she argues that feminism has been detrimental to women's happiness and societal roles. Carrie explores the historical roots of feminism dating back to the French Revolution, and cites key figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and the people around her. Carrie critiques the feminist movement's focus on autonomy, notes its influence from communism and socialism, and laments its impact on modern societal issues, including motherhood, family dynamics, and mental health. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What feminism forgot about motherhood16:41: I think the problems really get bigger. The more you start seeing how it's not just about women going to work, but it's really an ideology that we've been fed over and over again, and told that this is really the route to happiness. Meanwhile, something like motherhood is denigrated, even though, you know, there's so much personal growth that happens from motherhood. There's so much growth in terms of just maturing. And I think that's one of the great things about motherhood — it just pulls you out of yourself. And that's what people are resistant to — you don't wanna see how impatient you are. You don't wanna see your limits. And that's what motherhood pushes you to, so that you have to surpass them and become better than what you were before. And there's nobody to take over for you at five o'clock. It just keeps going. And I think that the ways in which our virtues are really extended and can grow — but, you know, few people understand and think through that prism when it comes to motherhood.Home solidifies who you are20:26: Home isn't meant to just be a hotel where you check in at night, but it's meant to be a place where you really solidify who you are. You learn your gifts; you learn your connection to family. And in that rootedness, then you can go out into the world and be something.What really is feminism?03:51: Feminism is a way to protect ourselves against things, instead of really opening ourselves up to something more beautiful, which comes about within the family, within having children, within the home — which is not to say that women shouldn't work. I'm obviously a working mom, but I think it has to be balanced with understanding who we are. And instead of rejecting something, it's really going back to embracing ourselves — the life of womanhood as a mother and wife, and caring for others.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Betty FriedanCongress of American WomenSimone de BeauvoirMary WollstonecraftElizabeth Cady StantonPercy Bysshe ShelleyWilliam GodwinJean-Jacques RousseauMargaret SangerGloria SteinemGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the Ethics & Public Policy CenterCarrieGress.comProfile on LinkedInSocial Profile on InstagramHer Work:Substack NewsletterAmazon Author PageThe End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed UsTheology of Home III: At the SeaTheology of Home II: The Spiritual Art of HomemakingTheology of Home: Finding the Eternal in the EverydayThe Marian Option: God's Solution to a Civilization in CrisisThe Homemaker's LitanyUltimate Makeover: The Transforming Power of MotherhoodThe Catholic Thing ArticlesNational Catholic Register Articles

What have we lost when the expert aesthetic judgement of professors and literary critics is replaced by the marketplace and bestseller lists? How can someone be both a critic and a creator, and do those identities improve or detract from each other?Michael W. Clune is a professor at Case Western Reserve University and the author of several books, including the subject of this discussion, A Defense of Judgment, and the upcoming novel Pan.Greg and Michael discuss Michael's perspective on the necessity of judgment in the study of literature and the arts, contrasting it with the modern academic trend that moves away from making definitive evaluations. Michael draws parallels between literary criticism and economics, highlighting a shift towards egalitarianism and market-driven valuations at the expense of aesthetic judgment. Their conversation delves into the historical evolution of these ideas, the importance of close reading, and the role of literary education in transforming personal taste and understanding. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Michael finds it counterintuitive and strange that there is no public standard for distinguishing great art from mediocre art.05:18 To say that there's no public standard for judging some work's better than the other and to say that everyone should make their own judgements and professors and critics and museum curators shouldn't try to tell people what's good and what's not, that presents as like, oh, everyone gets to choose.There's no public standard. But in fact, what you actually see happening is that it's the replacement of one standard, the judgment of those educated in the arts by another standard, which is the marketplace. And so, bestseller lists basically replace the canon that's constantly changing and there's all of complex judgments, but that's basically the displacement. So in fact, it's not really an egalitarian move in the way that many of its proponents take it to be. It's actually a disavowal of the expertise of aesthetic educators and throwing everything to the kinds of orderings produced by the marketplace.Everyone can make artistic judgments.03:01 There's no coherent way to do literary study or to teach art history without making judgments all the time. That's just the nature of it.The practice of teaching literature requires tacit skills. 20:01 When it comes down to the brass tacks of pedagogy of teaching, and this is a famous thing about literary study, let's say Moby Dick, you could imagine a version of the class where I just talk about Moby Dick and no one reads it, and I describe how great it is and how wonderful it is, and how it's surprising and strange and so forth. You could do that in chemistry. You could do something like that in economics or in physics, but in literature, the student has to encounter it for him or herself, right? It's like nothing is happening unless they're encountering for themselves, unless they have the experience in which something magical is disclosed to them. And so, the actual practice of teaching literature involves what the chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, described as tacit skills, which is really simply a kind of knowing how, without being able to say exactly what you're doing.Aesthetic education is a vital human need and universities are failing to provide it44:01 The desire for aesthetic education, the desire to have one's taste, be guided to know what books one should look at, how one should read those books, how one should spend one's precious time. That desire is totally out there and is very strong and is not being met by literature departments in the way that I think they should. I think it's a tragedy and a big mistake that literature in our departments are no longer fulfilling that vital human need. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Democracy in AmericaLéon WalrasCarl MengerWilliam Stanley JevonsMichael PolanyiIn Praise of Commercial CultureCultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon FormationDavid HumeImmanuel KantJohn KeatsGwendolyn BrooksMoby-DickH. G. WellsJane AustenMarcel ProustHelen VendlerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Case Western Reserve UniversityProfile on WikipediaMichaelWClune.comHis Work:Amazon Author PagePan: A NovelWhite Out: The Secret Life of HeroinA Defense of JudgmentGamelife: A MemoirAmerican Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000Writing Against TimeHarpers Magazine Articles

According to today's guest, “ You can't study anything involving any creature, let alone human beings, let alone human beings in a business setting, whilst pretending that the biological forces that shape our behavior are somehow non-existent.” Dr. Gad Saad is a professor of marketing at Concordia University and the author of the books, The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature and Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. His work applies evolutionary psychology to the fields of marketing and consumerism. Gad and Greg discuss resistance toward evolutionary psychology in academia, practical applications of the field in marketing and business, and finally, the implications of parasitic ideas on society and the balance between empathy and scientific truth.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The animus against evolutionary psychology[06:10] Maybe I could mention just a few reasons why people have such animus towards evolutionary psychology. So, number one, there's something called the human reticence effect, which exactly purports that evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology should be applicable to every species, but human beings transcend those forces, right? Or it might explain why we have opposable thumbs, but surely don't use evolution to explain everything that's above the neck. Okay? In some cases, people could be a bit more flexible in saying, well, it explains very primal urges why I want to eat a juicy burger, but it surely can't explain higher-order reasoning. What do you mean? Where do you think our cognition comes from? And so, even though I'm completely used to, at this point, facing all the animus, it still surprises me because, to me, it should be banal and trivially obvious that, of course, evolutionary psychology explains our human behavior.According to Dr. Saad, a good marketer is wedded to a solid understanding of human nature. [15:16] A marketer who decides based on their understanding of the human mind, they will create product lines. If it's not weathered to evolutionary psychology, it'll fail. On why people hate evolutionary theory[20:52] There's a deeper reason why people hate evolutionary theory. I think it's because in many cases it attacks people's most foundational ideological commitment. Parasitic ideas that emanate from academiaI will be focusing on specific set of parasitic ideas that emanate from academia. And as it so happens, since academia is astonishingly leftist, those parasitic ideas happen to be originating, their genesis from the left. That doesn't mean that people on the right can't be parasitized. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Richard LewontinStephen Jay GouldHomicide: Foundations of Human Behavior by Martin Daly and Margo WilsonMultitrait-multimethod matrixThat's Interesting! by Murray S. DavisRobert TriversPopperian falsificationAsch conformity experimentsThe Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan SperberHugo Mercier on unSILOedGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteProfile on LinkedInProfile on XThe Saad Truth podcastHis Work:The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common SenseThe Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life

Why would religion be necessary for a liberal democracy to function fully as intended? What benefits does Christianity provide to society in tandem with democracy that would collapse if either of those pillars failed? Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and also the author of several books and articles across various publications. His latest book is titled Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy.Greg and Jonathan discuss the declining influence of Christianity in America, the historical symbiosis between religion and liberal democracy, and how that relationship has shifted over time. They explore the rise of alternative spiritual movements and the consequences of shifting toward a more secular society. Jonathan explains his concepts of thin Christianity, sharp Christianity, and thick Christianity, and the benefits of thick Christianity as exemplified by the Latter Day Saints. They also examine the political polarization within Christianity and the effects it is having on the makeup of the church.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The core message of Jonathan's book[15:10] You've probably seen this in academia. They look at religion as the sum total of sociology plus demography and political leanings. Those things matter, but theology matters more. The Bible matters, and that remains within Christianity, a fundamental groundwork that it's hard to shop your way out of. I mean, you can. Of course, there's some pretty wackadoodle Christianity out there, but most mainstream Christianity is rooted in certain teachings, and those do provide some important ethical principles. The core message of my book is that the three most important central principles to Christianity, according to Christians, are also three core principles of liberal democracy. And you don't have to believe in Jesus to see that they're true and to see that they're important.Is America ungovernable without Christianity?[04:47] Religion is fading as part of American life. And that's great because religion is divisive, and it's dogmatic, and we'll just all get along better without it. I have never been so wrong. It turns out the founders told us this, but I forgot it, that Christianity, religion generally, but in the US that means Christianity- that especially means white Christianity, is a load-bearing wall in our democracy. And America is becoming ungovernable in significant part because Christianity is failing.The crisis of authority[36:22] Barna, which is a Christian research group, did a big survey of pastors a couple years ago. They asked if pastors had seriously considered quitting in the last year. 42% said yes. And the number three reason after, I can't remember number one and two though, were obvious, like low pay and high stress.Number three was politics.Why Christianity and liberalism need to support each other.[39:29] Liberalism needs that sense of rootedness and groundedness, that attention to higher transcendent things and core values and scriptures that are 3000 years old or 2000 years old, depending. It needs those things precisely because it is always changing and always churning.Show Links:Recommended Resources:ChristianityFriedrich NietzscheStrange Rites: New Religions for a Godless WorldJohn Stuart MillAlexandre LefebvreImmanuel KantChristian NationalismAmerican Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal OrderLouis P. SheldonFamily Research CouncilBarna GroupEvangelicalismDavid FrenchEquality UtahRussell D. MooreTim KellerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Brookings InstitutionJonathanRauch.comProfile on WikipediaLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageCross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with DemocracyThe Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of TruthThe Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free ThoughtDenial: My 25 Years Without a SoulGay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for AmericaThe Outnation: A Search for the Soul of JapanIndex of Articles

The AI transformation of our world has already begun, and Silicon Valley has positioned itself to be home base. But how did the AI takeover happen so rapidly there? Who were the founders and investors who opened the floodgates? Investigative journalist Gary Rivlin has more than two decades of experience writing about the tech industry. In his new book, AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence, he gives readers an up-close look at the players behind AI's dramatic rise to dominance in the tech world. Gary and Greg discuss some of the key moments in AI's recent history, the role of venture capital in tech, how Silicon Valley's unique ecosystem lends itself to AI innovation, and what the future could hold for artificial intelligence. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why startups find themselves working for big companies like Google and Microsoft[04:19] I started this book thinking I'm just going to follow the startups, right? What company's going to be the next Google, the next Facebook? And by this time I was finished, I realized that the next Google was probably going to be Google. The next Facebook was going to be…Meta, this stuff is so expensive. So, the start of 2023, you needed tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars to train, fine tune, and run these models. By the end of 2024, you needed billions, if not tens of billions. And how does a startup raise that kind of money? There are a couple that have, I mean, openAI just raised another $40 billion. Anthropic, I think, has raised about $20 billion, but they still have to raise more money because they're not profitable yet. And they're looking at several years without profit. I worry that these really innovative startups doing incredible things are going to have to be gobbled up just to survive.Can an army of AI help you build a billion-dollar company?[13:18] Something to understand I think that people don't get about AI is, it's not like it's going to do it for you. It's your copilot. It's your assistant. It's a really powerful tool that you could use just like a computer or a calculator or a camera is a tool. It doesn't give you much unless you give it a lot. So the way I find it to be effective is I'm almost stream of consciousness. Here's what I wanna do, here's what I'm thinking about. Here's my idea, here's how I want to frame it. And that's when I get a good answer,you know. Write a book about AI would be awful. But if I start giving it, quotations and describe characters and all that, it'll be something much richer. So getting back to the example, you still need a marketing person or two, you still need salespeople. I don't think people are gonna be persuaded by some bot saying, Hey, will you buy our product? Here sign up, a million dollar contract for three years. There still needs to be humans in the loop.AI has been part of people's lives for a long time. [18:04] AI has been part of our world. It was different in 2022, the end of 2022 when Open AI released chatGPT. It was a product that you can talk with and like you could feel the AI. And so suddenly it was much more real. It wasn't behind the glass. It was something that you could converse with.Dual edge of AI[26:35] A powerful tool for good is also a powerful tool for bad. And, you know, many people have lots of concerns. I'm not a doomer, but the use of AI weaponry using AI for surveillance, these things reflect the biases we have. So using AI to predict, [or] determine someone's sentence, whether or not we interview them for a job, that scares me.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade MetzReid HoffmanMustafa SulyemanMichael MoritzThe Social Network (2010) Christopher ManningMarc AndreessenGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInHis Work:AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial IntelligenceBroke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Working Poor Became Big BusinessSaving Main Street: Small Business in the Time of COVID-19Becoming a Venture Capitalist

What is the benefit of adventure, the role of adversity, and the importance of narrative in shaping one's experience of happiness? What are the larger areas of fulfillment that round out one's well-being and shape one's life experience? Shigehiro (Shige) Oishi is a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and the author of the books Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life and The Psychological Wealth of Nations: Do Happy People Make a Happy Society?Greg and Shige discuss the evolving field of subjective well-being, distinguishing between happiness, meaning, and Shige's newly proposed third dimension – psychological richness. He discusses how these dimensions can sometimes conflict but also complement each other. They also delve into how culture, personality, and life choices like exploration versus stability affect psychological richness, and offer practical insights on how both individuals and organizations can cultivate a richer life.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On why there's a need for a third dimension to a good life[12:01] Some people really don't like structure. Some people really don't like routines. Some people really like to explore the world and find something interesting, something new. So when you, for instance, look at the big five personality traits and which traits are correlated with the happy life and meaningful life, and actually one big part of the big five traits, openness, the experience, it's not really correlated with happiness or meaning either. So, given that right, a lot of personality psychologists think that there are five global traits because they are useful. They're functional. Maybe there's an evolutionary reason.Sensation seekers struggle with reflection and growth[24:38] If you are [a] boredom-prone person, then obviously I think you have to do something new. But when you do something new, I think one thing you can change here is the reflection. I think what sensation seekers do not tend to do is that just after having this adventure, [is] sit down, reflect upon, and savor their experiences. If you do that, I think the boredom, at least the frequency of the boredom will be reduced.What is the optimal amount of psychological richness?[27:51]  I think you could definitely pursue psychological richness too much, right? I mean, some people may think, "Oh, I have to do something new every moment, every day."But as I said, unless you can just reflect upon [it] and add it up in your psychological memorabilia or portfolio, it is not really adding up. So essentially, unless you can just reflect upon and remember these experiences, it doesn't work that well. I think too much richness is the situation where, given a short period of time, you experience too much that you cannot really process and remember.On the human tendency toward familiarity—and its hidden costs[16:21] Looking at all kinds of cognitive bias literature, I think there's a huge familiarity bias. I mean, Bob Zagonc found this mere exposure effect in the 1960s, and essentially we like familiar things, right? And also, loss aversion is a huge example.The endowment effect is the same thing. Once you own it, you think it's more valuable than the new thing, right? So I think all these things are biased towards the familiar and sure gain. And if you're trying to maximize happiness, that's great. That's the strategy you should take actually. BuEt that has a downside, such as we said, you don't learn anything new. Maybe your curiosity is not fully met and you're not adventurous enough to discover something.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jeremy BenthamSubjective Well-beingHappiness is everything, or is it?EudaimoniaJiro Dreams of SushiJohn Stuart MillBlaise PascalMarcel ProustBob ZajoncNick EpleyEd DienerCarol RyffGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of ChicagoProfile on LinkedInSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageLife in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better LifeThe Psychological Wealth of Nations: Do Happy People Make a Happy Society?Google Scholar Page

What does it mean to belong to a tribe? How does cultural psychology offer insight into politics, organizational behavior, and leadership? How does tribalism distinguish humans from other animals?Michael Morris is the Chavkin-Chang Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School and also serves as Professor in the Psychology Department of Columbia University. Michael is also the author of the new book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.Greg and Michael discuss the concept of tribalism, its historical and modern connotations, and how our evolved group psychology can both contribute to and resolve contemporary social conflicts. Michael emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural instincts like the peer instinct, hero instinct, and ancestor instinct, and how leaders can harness these to steer cultural evolution in organizations and societies. The conversation also explores real-world examples of cultural change, the pitfalls of top-down and bottom-up change strategies, and the critical role of managing cultural identities in fostering cooperation and successful adaptation.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What makes us human is our tribal nature14:22: We are the tribal animal. If we want to understand what distinguishes us, our brains are not that much bigger than chimpanzees'. Our brains are not bigger than Neanderthals'; they're smaller than Neanderthal brains. But what distinguishes us is that we have these adaptations for sharing culture that enable tribal living, and this wonderful force of tribal inheritance, of wisdom accumulating like a snowball across the generations. And it can be the generations of a nation, but it can also be the generations of a corporation or the generations of a motorcycle club. Generations don't have to be referring to the human lifespan. And so, that's our killer app. That's what makes us who we are. That's what made us the top of the food chain and the dominant species of the planet and solar system. So, we should not renounce our tribal nature. We shouldn't pretend that what makes us human is rationality, or ethics, or poetry, or something like that.Why tradition is actually a change maker's secret weapon19:02: Tradition can seem like an obstacle to change. And the traditionalism in our mind can seem like an obstacle to cultural change, but it's a change-maker's secret weapon.How we learn from our community through peer, hero, and ancestor instincts16:39 There are social learning heuristics, and I kind of label them in a way to try to make them more concrete and more accessible. I label them the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct. But I'm aggregating decades of research from evolutionary anthropologists and from a cultural psychologist about the fact that we tend to learn the culture that nurtures us, in part by paying attention to what's widespread. And that's peer instinct learning, by paying attention to what carries prestige. That's hero instinct learning. And by paying attention to what seems like it's always been the distinctive mark of our community, traditions, and that's ancestor instinct learning. And so we're sort of wired to form maps of our community in those three ways.Show Links:Recommended Resources:TribalismE. O. WilsonCesar ChavezPhilip E. TetlockMulticulturalismPolyculturalismSyncretismGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Business SchoolMichaelMorris.comWikipedia ProfileSocial Profile on XHis Work:Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us TogetherGoogle Scholar Page

The term “woke” might be modern, but woke movements have been going on throughout history. And while an “awokening” is meant to further equality among systemically marginalized groups, they often can exacerbate existing social inequalities. Musa al-Gharbi is a sociology and assistant professor of communication and journalism at Stony Brook University. His book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, examines how professionals in the so-called symbolic capitalism space like media, nonprofits, and education have gained elite status through woke culture, and in turn, benefit from some of the inequalities they are morally aligned against. Musa and Greg discuss the origins of woke movements throughout history including what factors in society can lead to “awokenings,” how symbolic capitalists have become the new elite, the role of cultural capital in today's world, and why the elimination of DEI programs and pushback against woke culture can sometimes accelerate a new “awokening.”  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Can we be committed to seeking social justice and elite status at the same time?12:52: It's our desire to be an elite that often ends up winning out and kind of transforming how we pursue these social justice goals, so that we mostly try to pursue them in ways that don't cost anything for us, risk anything for us, require us to change anything about our lifestyles and our aspirations, and the aspirations of our children, and all of that stuff. And so that mostly pushes us into pursuing these social justice goals in largely symbolic ways, on the one hand. And on the other hand, it often leads us to expropriate blame to other people, who often benefit far less from the system than we do, and exert a lot less influence over institutions and so on than we do.Has diversity become a status symbol instead of a value?46:01: Diversity is great as long as its fellow affluent, highly educated people. But God forbid, if they want to build affordable housing in your neighborhood, that's a hard no.On competition over status18:41: One of the things that's interesting about competitions over status and cultural capital and things like this is that status—one—it's actually more of a zero-sum competition.So, for wealth, it's possible for everyone in a society to have a decent amount of wealth or a high amount of wealth. But for status, that's not the case. A situation where everyone had a high amount of status—the same status—would be a situation where nobody had any status. Status is more zero-sum. You actually can't give more attention, more time, more deference, and whatever to one person without actually taking some from someone else, because our attention is finite, et cetera, et cetera. And so status is actually more of a zero-sum competition.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Pierre BourdieuWhy Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern by Bruno Latour Andrew AbbottSocial Gospel movement..Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American PoliticsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stony Brook UniversityProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInHis Work:We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite

What does a workplace look like where everyone can thrive and flourish? Once we know the makeup of that space, how can companies work to achieve it? When is it smart to rely on numbers and when will strict adherence to data lead you astray in the quest for equality?Iris Bohnet is a professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard and the author of the books Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results and What Works: Gender Equality by Design.Greg and Iris discuss the concepts of workplace fairness, representation, and the indicators of a fair work environment. They delve into implicit and explicit biases, systematic interventions like structured hiring and promotions, and the effectiveness of diversity training. Iris emphasizes the importance of focusing on systemic changes rather than trying to 'fix' individuals. They also touch upon the necessity of role models, the impact of organizational culture, and the balance between fairness and business objectives. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:We should stop trying to fix people and fix our systems09:17: We should stop trying to fix people and fix our systems. And this goes way beyond bias in terms of gender, race, or anything other in terms of demographic characteristics or social identities, but just general in behavioral science. We have by now identified more than 200 different types of biases. It's incredibly hard to unlearn them, and so that's why many behavioral scientists, again, beyond the question of fairness, now focus on changing the environment. So basically making it easier for all of us to get things right.Meritocracy and the need for fairness15:01: There is no meritocracy. Without fairness, we have to have that equal playing field to allow the best people to end at the top. And so, I think meritocracy is a valuable goal to have. I don't think we have ever lived in a meritocratic world.Representation as an indicator of fairness02:14:  Representation is not a dependent variable per se, independent of anything else. But, as you said, it is a bit of an indicator of whether what we're doing truly creates a level playing field where everyone can thrive.On the value of larger diverse talent pool16:07:  We now benefit from a larger talent pool. And that's the argument behind it—the larger talent pool has two implications. One is we literally have a larger talent pool, so we can draw from more people, and it goes back to the quote that you offered earlier: we're more likely to find the right person for the right job at the right time. And secondly, and that often is overlooked, we can also allocate that work better, that, in fact, Sandra Day O'Connor finds exactly the job for which she excels. And that fraction of GDP protector growth is about 14%. So I think that's the macro business case that I always have to remember—that, in fact, more talent is just good. And giving the talent the chance that they deserve and that our organizations deserve is both the right thing and the smart thing to do.Show Links:Recommended Resources:IntersectionalityClaudia GoldinProportional RepresentationHarvard Kennedy SchoolGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the Harvard Kennedy SchoolProfile on WikipediaProfile on LinkedInHer Work:Personal WebpageAmazon Author PageMake Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real ResultsWhat Works: Gender Equality by Design

Are the algorithms that exist in our daily lives getting so smart that they know us better than our parents or our spouses? How do we balance the convenience and efficiency of this technology with privacy and consumer protections? Sandra Matz is a professor at Columbia Business School and the director of the Center for Advanced Technology and Human Performance. Her book, Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior examines the link between algorithms and psychology. Sandra and Greg chat about the bright and dark sides of psychological targeting, its applications in marketing, politics, and mental health, as well as the ethical considerations and future implications of using algorithms for personalized interactions.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Even the smartest algorithms slip up24:01: When we talk about these algorithms, and I'm guilty of that myself, it always seems like, well, yeah, if they can predict your personality with high accuracy, that makes sense, but it still makes mistakes, right? So, accuracy is always captured at the average level. So, on average, we kind of get it right most of the time. But that still means that, at the individual level, we make a lot of mistakes. And those mistakes can be costly for the individual, right? 'Cause now you are seeing stuff that is completely irrelevant. Also costly for companies, 'cause now you are optimizing for something that's not actually true. So, I think if you can really think about application—I think the more you can turn this into a two-way street and conversation, the same way that this works in an offline world, right? If you kind of suddenly start talking to me about topics that I care nothing about, you're going to get that feedback, 'cause either I'm not going to see you again, or I just tell you we just talk about something else. And companies oftentimes don't get that because they don't allow users to interact with some of the predictions that they make. And I think it's a mistake, not just from an ethical point of view, but even from a kind of service, convenience, product point of view.Are algorithms making us boring?11:09: There's something nice about having these algorithms understand what we want, but I also do think that there's the risk of us just becoming really boring.The trouble with signing away our data49:29: The way that we typically sign away data is, we consent, but not because we understand it. And I think some of it is just that technology moves so fast that just keeping up with technology is almost impossible. So I think about this 24/7, and I have a hard time, and you also have to have this understanding of — not just in the here and now — like, a fully rational person would say, "Here's all the benefits, and here's all the downsides." And now I kind of make this rational decision that kind of maximizes utility. But we don't understand the downsides.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Big Five personality traitsCambridge AnalyticaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Business SchoolProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInCenter for Advanced Technology and Human PerformanceHer Work:Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior

If critical thinking is the equivalent to daily exercise and eating a good diet, then today's guest has the vaccine for misinformation viruses. Sander van der Linden is a professor of Social Psychology in Society at Cambridge University. His books, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity and The Psychology of Misinformation delve into his research on how people process misinformation and strategies we should be arming ourselves with to combat it. Sander and Greg discuss the historical context and modern-day challenges of misinformation, the concept of “pre-bunking” as a method to immunize people against false beliefs by exposing them to a weakened dose of misinformation beforehand, and the importance of building resilience against manipulative tactics from an early age through education and awareness. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How misinformation spreads like a virus24:25: A virus wants to replicate, right? It wants to replicate itself. So, misinformation isn't a problem—you know, if it can't spread. But it has to find a susceptible host. So, for me, the viral analogy is that misinformation wouldn't spread unless it can find a susceptible host. There's something about human psychology that makes it susceptible to being infected with misinformation, and then our desire to want to share it with others. And so, that's kind of where it aligns for me.Misinformation is about more than just obvious falsehoods02:26: Misinformation is about more than just obvious falsehoods—it's also about misleading information. So, in a way, it's designed either unintentionally or intentionally to dupe people because it uses some kind of manipulation technique, whether that's presenting opinion as facts or presenting things out of context.What is the antidote for misinformation?12:20: Ideology correlates with cognitive rigidity, right? The more ideological people are, the more rigid and the more closed off they are. So, in some ways, the antidote to misinformation and conspiracy theories is being open-minded about things—not attaching yourself to a motivated sort of hypothesis—and that does strongly predict lower susceptibility to misinformation.Why misinformation goes viral while facts don't27:15: So, research shows that misinformation explodes moral outrage. Specifically, for example, misinformation tends to be shocking, novel, emotionally manipulative, highly moralized, and polarized; it uses conspiracy, cognition, and paranoia, right? Whereas factual, neutral news uses none of those things. It tends to be boring, neutral, with no loaded words, right? And so, that tends to not go viral. Most people don't engage with fact checks—that's why fact checks don't go viral. So, in the cascades, when you model these things, there are clear differences in the virality of misinformation and the virality of neutral, objective information. And so, the infectiousness of these two things is very different.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Neil deGrasse TysonPizzagate conspiracy theory Asch conformity experiments Robert CialdiniWilliam J. McGuire“Wayfair: The false conspiracy about a furniture firm and child trafficking” | BBC NewsSouth ParkCognitive reflection testActively open-minded thinkingGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Cambridge UniversityProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInHis Work:Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build ImmunityThe Psychology of Misinformation

What are ‘untimely questions' and why do they become common blind spots in philosophy? Why is philosophy a team sport?? How does Moore's paradox highlight the differences between truth and belief?Agnes Callard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of the books Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, The Case Against Travel, and On Anger.Greg and Agnes discuss the essence of living a philosophical life through the Socratic method. Agnes emphasizes inquiry, human interaction, and rigorous thinking as processes that require effort and dialogue. Their discussion touches on the distinctions between problem-solving and questioning, the complexities of human preferences, and the societal tendency to convert deep philosophical questions into more manageable problems. Callard also reflects on philosophical engagement within various contexts, including education, relationships, and ethical frameworks. The episode highlights the value of philosophical inquiry not just as an academic pursuit but as a fundamental part of living a meaningful life.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Philosophy concerns itself with problems not questions05:41: I think philosophy concerns itself not with problems, but with questions. Where the thing that you actually want is the answer to the question, and you're not trying to answer the question so that you can get on with something else that you were doing anyway. That's what you were doing—you were on a quest. And both problem-solving and question-answering are, kinesis, in Aristotle's sense? They're emotions; they're processes. So they're similar in that way, but t hey're different in that, with a question, there's a sense in which the process leads to a sort of self-culmination, where the answer to the question kind of is the culmination of the process of questioning. And it's—we can almost say—you really fully understand the question when you have the answer, so that there's a kind of internal relationship between the question and the answer. Whereas, with problem-solving, anything that gets the problem out of the way is fine. You don't need a deep understanding of the problem. Like, if you were trying to move the boulder and someone else is like, "Look, you could just go around it," then that'll be fine.Philosophical training means simulating an opponent29:27: What philosophical training is, is training in simulating an interlocutor who objects to you—right? That's what you do in philosophy.What gets you to the top won't always keep you there33:38: I think answering requires less training than asking; it requires less kind of experience in philosophical activity. And so Socrates had to relegate himself to the Socrates role because he was dealing with a bunch of people who didn't know how to do philosophy yet.Why the Socratic approach matters in philosophy39:54: Your philosophical, ethical system is going to constrain how you live your life. That's kind of the whole point of an ethical system. But I do think that the Socratic approach is one that can be inflected as a way of doing—a lot of what you were doing in your life. The Socratic approach says, do all that same stuff inquisitively. Now, there may be some things you can't do inquisitively—don't do those things. Or it may be that there are some things that you can't do inquisitively, but you simply have to do them to survive or something—like, as long as they're not unjust, that's fine. But the thought is like, well, let's take romance or something. Let's take politics. Let's take death, right? So those are the three areas I talk about. Can you be a philosopher and be doing those things? And Socrates, I think, goes out of his way to try to say, yes, that is, it's not just that those things can be done philosophically, but they're done best philosophically.Show Links:Recommended Resources:SocratesSocratic MethodAristotleTuring TestLarge Language ModelMoore's ParadoxParmenidesUtilitarianismKantianismJohn Stuart MillJeremy BenthamGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at The University of ChicagoProfile on WikipediaSocial Profile on XHer Work:Amazon Author PageOpen Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical LifeAspiration: The Agency of BecomingThe Case Against TravelOn Anger

Behind every great invention is an engineer who figured out how to make it work. But how do you take an extremely technical, cutting-edge innovation and make it easy to understand and use for the public? That's where designers come in.Barry Katz is a professor emeritus of industrial design at California College of the Arts and a consulting professor at Stanford University. He is the author of the book, Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design, co-author of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, and has spent decades studying the history of design thinking and its purpose at organizations. Barry and Greg discuss the historical trajectory of design in tech, how engineers and designers began collaborating in the 1980s, and the role of design in transforming technologies into user-friendly products. The conversation also covers the interdisciplinary nature of design, the impact of design thinking on various industries, and Barry's latest book detailing the application of design principles in healthcare. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:You don't have to be a designer to think like one31:47: You don't have to be a designer to think like one. And in fact, you probably don't want to become a designer. But over the course of this rather remarkable few decades, designers have learned a lot of tricks, and they're basically tricks. And many of those tricks can be learned by entrepreneurs, lawyers, physicians, which is what we dealt with in our most recent book. And it's not turning them into designers; it's giving them tools to solve their problems in medicine, law, engineering, or wherever, in something like the way that designers solve their problems.Why design thrives like an ecosystem19:17: So what is the connector between the internal combustion engine and the car, between the printed circuit board and the lamp? It's design. So, in the course of that, designers have had to learn a whole lot of new skills, new tricks. That's where design thinking has played, I think, an important role, which may be drawing to a close. They've learned to integrate the behavioral sciences. They've learned how to talk to technical people. There's no doubt that it is an ongoing challenge.Designers shape experiences, not just products25:40: We don't want products to fail people. Now, a refrigerator is one thing, but then, when you are starting not just to approach a large appliance in your kitchen but to put it in your pocket, your kid's backpack, or a contact lens—which is to deliver insulin to a diabetic, which Google X is working on—then your tolerance for a bad experience vanishes. And it is a bit of a hackneyed thing to say, but the role of designers has been to create an experience.Design isn't about knowing everything, it's about knowing who to ask27:15: What happens when you have an exposure to the way anthropologists approach a problem, or economists, or linguists, or whoever it might be, is not that you become one or you acquire that level of professionalism, but you know who to ask. And you've heard an entirely new inventory of questions that may not have occurred to you in the past but are now on your agenda.  And you either acquire a sufficient level of professional skill to answer those questions, or you now know who to ask. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Moore's Law The Microma Silicon Valley (TV series) Alphonse Chapanis Larry Page Franz von HolzhausenDeepSeekNatasha Jen: Design Thinking is Bullsh*tGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at California College of the ArtsFaculty Profile at Stanford UniversityProfessional Profile on LinkedInHis Work:Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley DesignChange by Design, Revised and Updated: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

What can shake organizations out of the cycle of doing things the way they have always been done because that's the way they have always been done? Will a shift within an organization be more likely to stick with a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach? How can organizations allow freedom for their employees, but still be in control of the direction of that freedom?Freek Vermeulen is a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School and the author of Business Exposed: The Naked Truth about What Really Goes on in the World of Business and Breaking Bad Habits: Why Best Practices Are Killing Your Business.Greg and Freek discuss the essence of strategy in organizations, highlighting the complexities and dysfunctions within organizations, the evolutionary parallels in human behavior and cultural practices, and the critical importance of understanding organizational strategy at all levels. Freek emphasizes the necessity of both top-down strategic direction and bottom-up innovation, the pitfalls of over-reliance on visible metrics, and the value of periodic organizational changes. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:A strategy no one follows is no strategy at all40:14: Strategy can not only be top-down, it has also to be bottom-up, that people display initiative themselves in line with strategy. And this is how it relates to it being a collective cognitive construct, and people knowing about the firm's strategy. A strategy is only a strategy if people do something different as a result of it in their daily job. If the C-suite changes the strategy, but everybody in the cubicles keeps doing the same thing, I'm sorry, you don't have a strategy. Now you have a McKinsey PowerPoint deck, but you don't have a strategy. It's only a strategy if people do something different as a result of it. And one aspect of this is that can only happen if they know about it and if they understand it. And that places a big onus on how you communicate it, how you put that in people's minds or so. Strategy is  collective cognitive construct39:26: Strategy is in the mind, and it is a mindset and understanding of what we're trying to work towards and trying to do as an organization. And it's collective because it has to be shared. It's a tool to cooperate, that we have a joint understanding of what we're actually trying to do and what we're not trying to do.What gets you to the top won't always keep you there14:50: What we certainly know, and also that's what we see in research in cultural anthropology, by the way, as well, where there is research on what sort of individuals are most likely to become the head of a tribe, where we observe highly similar things, is to say your chances of making it to the next level, what sort of variables determine your probability of making it to the next level, and hence eventually reaching the top, are not necessarily the same traits that make you a good CEO and a good steward in the long term for an organization. There can be mismatches between these things. In a tribe, for instance, if you are a very combative individual and prone to a good fight or something like that, that may make you more likely to go through the tournament and become the head of a tribe. But it may also make you more likely to take your tribe on the warpath, which may not be so good for survival. So the same characteristics that make people more likely to become CEO are not necessarily the same characteristics that make them better as CEOs for organizations.Are business schools equipping mba students with the right tools for leadership success?53:23: This understanding about how behavioral mechanisms, including norms and so on, work is something that we need to do better in business schools. The experiment... is indeed to see if people who have more managerial experience and more economics training get it more wrong because we have some other studies that suggest that understanding more about financial incentives and economic rational behavior makes you less aware of these other aspects of human behavior, which of course exist in organizations and in reality.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Kuru (disease)Creutzfeldt–Jakob diseaseFrans van HoutenLeo TolstoyChange for Change's Sake | HBRSEI Investments CompanyWilliam H. StarbuckConstantinos C. MarkidesAsch Conformity ExperimentsGuest Profile:LinkedIn ProfileFaculty Profile at London Business SchoolSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageBusiness Exposed: The Naked Truth about What Really Goes on in the World of BusinessBreaking Bad Habits: Why Best Practices Are Killing Your BusinessGoogle Scholar Page

It's official: AI has arrived and, from here on out, will be a part of our world. So how do we begin to learn how to coexist with our new artificial coworkers? Ethan Mollick is an associate professor at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. The book acts as a guide to readers navigating the new world of AI and explores how we might work alongside AI. He and Greg discuss the benefits of anthropomorphizing AI, the real impact the technology could have on employment, and how we can learn to co-work and co-learn with AI. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The result of an experiment identifying the impact of GEN AI07:35 We went to the Boston Consulting Group, one of the elite consulting companies, and we gave them 18 realistic business tasks we created with them and these were judged to be very realistic. They were used to do actual evaluations of people in interviews and so on. And we got about 8 percent of the global workforce of BCG, which is a significant investment. And we had them do these tasks first on their own without AI, and then we had them do a second set of tasks either with or without AI. So, random selection to those two. The people who got access to AI, and by the way, this is just plain vanilla GPT-4 as of last April. No special fine-tuning, no extra details, no special interface, no RAG, nothing else. And they had a 40 percent improvement in the quality of their outputs on every measure that we had. We got work done about 25 percent faster, about 12.5 percent more work done in the same time period. Pretty big results in a pretty small period of time. Is AI taking over our jobs?20:30 The ultimate question is: How good does AI get, and how long does it take to get that good? And I think if we knew the answer to that question, which we don't, that would teach us a lot about what jobs to think about and worry about.Will there be a new data war where different LLM and Gen AI providers chase proprietary data?11:17 I don't know whether this becomes like a data fight in that way because the open internet has tons of data on it, and people don't seem to be paying for permission to train on those. I think we'll see more specialized training data potentially in the future, but things like conversations, YouTube videos, podcasts are also useful data sources. So the whole idea of LLMs is that they use unsupervised learning. You throw all this data at them; they figure out the patterns.Could public data be polluted by junk and bad actors?16:39 Data quality is obviously going to be an issue for these systems. There are lots of ways of deceiving them, of hacking them, of working like a bad actor. I don't necessarily think it's going to be by poisoning the datasets themselves because the datasets are the Internet, Project Gutenberg, and Wikipedia. They're pretty resistant to that kind of mass poisoning, but I think data quality is an issue we should be concerned about.Show Links:Recommended Resources:“Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality” | Harvard Business SchoolGeoffrey HintonProject GutenbergGemini AI“Google's Gemini Controversy Explained: AI Model Criticized By Musk And Others Over Alleged Bias” | ForbesDevin AI Karim LakhaniGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of PennsylvaniaHis Work:Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI 

How much has our understanding of choice evolved throughout history? And what has that invention meant to how we experience and acknowledge freedom? Sophia Rosenfeld is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on the history of things taken for granted. Her books, Common Sense: A Political History, Democracy and Truth: A Short History, and most recently The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, examine the origins of ideas that have become so commonplace in our modern world, they can often go overlooked. Sophia and Greg discuss the historical role of choice in consumerism, politics, and personal relationships, how choice initially got a reputation for being a feminine phenomenon, what choice has meant for concepts like freedom, and the political evolution of common sense in today's world. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Has choice become the ultimate measure of freedom?47:24: Choice once had this kind of very moral apparatus around it. And, as I mentioned, over time, choice became more, I would call, value-neutral. It meant pick what you like. I don't have to like your choices; it's just what you prefer. But the strange third twist in this story is that just having the choices itself started to become a moral good. Just saying choice itself was the good, and I think that's not always right because there are certainly moments in which choice is freeing, but there are also choices that are not freeing—there are choices that are contrary to our well-being, there are places where choice is not a benefit. This choice of any weapon to buy, for instance, is a different kind of decision than saying choice in profession. Your choice in profession has little bearing on me. Your choice in weapon might have a large bearing on me or the other guy down the street. So I do question the assumption that more choice, more opportunities, more options is always preferable.How choice became the definition of freedom37:22: In the face of the threat of communism on the one hand and the threat of fascism on the other, one thing that starts to emerge most strongly in the U.S., but also in other parts of the sort of allied world, is a convergence around political choice and commercial choice, saying that what freedom is, is having choice in these two different domains. And from that point forward, I think you might say that democracy and capitalism get wedded together around the notion that choice is freedom.Is having more choices always a good thing?42:42: We've now seen policies emerge on the right and on the left framed around choice. School choice is usually more appealing on the right, reproductive choice more appealing on the left. So, I would have said that choice is one of those things that we are so used to that it's a kind of unquestioned value across the political spectrum. We might fight about what should be and by whom, but we don't fight about the value of choice itself. And to this day, things are marketed all the time around choice. You look at billboards or look at advertising anywhere you are, and you'll see choice is still a really common term—whether it's banking, house cleaning, or anything else. That may be ending in some spheres on the right.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas PaineAlexis de TocquevilleThe Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier ZunzJane AustenHannah Arendt Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of PennsylvaniaProfessional WebsiteHer Work:The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern LifeCommon Sense: A Political HistoryDemocracy and Truth: A Short History 

How important is it for business leaders to not only identify talent within their organization, but to take meaningful action to actually develop that talent? On the flip side, how handicapping can it be for an organization to keep employees who are holding the company back from success? Bill Conaty is a top former HR executive at GE and co-author of The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers. His 40 years at GE and his time as an advisory partner for Clayton, Dubilier & Rice has made him an expert in identifying and developing raw talent at an organization. Bill joins Greg to share insights from his time at GE, emphasizing the necessity of integrating HR with other business functions and the importance of having a seat at the table. They also discuss GE's unique HR practices, such as talent development programs, the role of corporate audit staff, and the evolution of HR through different business eras, including the impact of COVID-19 and the DEI movement.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Candor comes first trust comes later41:55: Candor comes first; trust comes later. In other words, we always—through our leadership development in session C, we had to say, "We always had the list of development need, one or two." And it wasn't that I needed to go to the next course at Crotonville or that I'm too tough on myself. It had to do with legitimate development needs, and you had to be able to trust the company before you could cite, you know, "I don't have great listening skills," or—and you had to feel like, "Whatever you stipulate, we're going to work with you on that." And we said: a development need is not a fatal flaw. A development need is only a development need as long as you address it. If you don't, it can become a fatal flaw.HR Success Starts with the CEO05:41: No matter how good of an HR leader you are, if the CEO doesn't have high expectations for what he wants out of that function, you're in for a long day.What do we look for in leaders?34:50: What do we look for in leaders? We started out with three E's—energy, energize, and edge—and so that's a green light, red light, yellow light. We'd go out to all the businesses, and we came away from one, and the leader had dynamite energy, could energize others, more than enough edge, and his numbers sucked. So, I said to Jack, "We assume this, but we need a fourth E, and that's called execution." Do you need a different kind of talent master to evaluate the talent versus the values?53:26: I think the values piece is—I think it's fairly easy to identify, but it's fairly easy to identify. If you have a real intimacy in the organization. If you don't, if you're just standing off in the distance and applauding the numbers that are coming in, you can have a real kick-ass leader that people really don't enjoy working for and probably won't work for that long.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Clayton, Dubilier & RiceJack Welch Jeff Immelt CrotonvilleOmar IshrakDave Ulrich Steve Kerr (bschool professor not coach)Guest Profile:Author bioExpert Profile at Strayer UniversityHis Work:The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers

Contrary to popular belief, global migration levels have remained relatively stable. So why has it become such a hot button issue on the political world stage? Hein de Haas is a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam and an expert in migration. His book, How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics delves into migration as a historical and ongoing phenomenon, comparing past and present migration patterns.Hein and Greg discuss common misconceptions about migration, why people migrate in the first place, and what the actual impact of migration is on the economy, culture, and climate. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Political showmanship won't solve migration26:24: There are no easy solutions for complex migration problems. So that migration can cause problems in places where migrants concentrate, and not everybody is happy about it, particularly because employers reap the biggest benefits of their cheap labor—I can fully understand that. But the kind of solutions that politicians sell to us have more to do with bold acts of political showmanship than any really serious effort to control and manage migration.Migration is part of development15:07: We need a new paradigm, a new theory on migration—that migration is part of development. This is not about liking migration or not or denying that migration can also lead to tensions and problems. But if you deny that fundamental reality, you also see it in middle-income countries, where many governments have tried to stop or curb rural-to-urban migration. It has all failed.Are politicians in denial about the realities of migration?02:53: Both in the U.S., but also across the Atlantic in Europe, politicians have been basically in denial for over the last four to five decades about the realities of migration. That's the reason why these policies always fail. It's a lack of fundamental understanding of migration as a social and economic process that needs to be the foundation of any policy. The migration issue has been completely hijacked by politicians, with pro- and anti-migration debates that don't really engage with the realities of migration. That huge gap is really the problem.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Economist Michael Piore books Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of AmsterdamProfessional WebsiteHis Work:How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics

As conversation swirls around how the U.S. is going to pay back its $30 trillion debt, old concerns about public debt have been raised once again.Barry Eichengreen is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley and one of the leading experts on international currency markets and their history. His books include Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era, and most recently, In Defense of Public Debt. Barry and Greg delve into the pros and cons of public debt, the mechanisms ensuring sovereign debt repayment, and the potential risks of inflation, and put modern debt levels into perspective by looking back at other major financial events in history. They also discuss the impact of political polarization on long-term financial decisions.**This episode was recorded in 2021.** *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Napoleonic WarsCorporation of Foreign BondholdersForeign Bondholders Protective CouncilMario DraghiRicardian Equivalence Anne Osborn KruegerArgentine Debt CrisisGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC BerkeleyProfessional Profile on XHis Work:In Defense of Public DebtThe Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern EraGlobalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary SystemHall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary SystemGolden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939Episode Quotes:The political capacity to issue public debt goes hand in hand with financial development31:25: If you go back and look at the history, you see the value to financial markets of sovereign debt—that as sovereigns' and states' debts begin to be recognized as safe and liquid with political checks and balances, they become safe. With the development of markets in them, they become more liquid. They're then used as collateral for other borrowing and lending, and you accelerate the development of private financial markets. So, I think the political capacity to issue public debt goes hand in hand with financial development, and financial development, historically, is an important component of economic development.Public debt as a lifeline in times of crisis02:58: Public debt has been critically important in history. To enable states to meet emergencies—so, if you look at the history, it has been issued typically in wartime to defend the realm. Admittedly, states and rulers have issued it to fight offensive as well as defensive wars, but also to meet threats, pandemics, natural disasters, and other national emergencies.Why public debt levels depend on politics and time34:50: I don't think economic science is advanced to the point where we can identify an optimal or uniquely sustainable level of public debt. I think politics impinges on this as well. So, if you ask a German politician and an American politician what an appropriate or optimal level of public debt is, they'll give you very different answers. Economic circumstances change over time as well. So, public U.S. public debt in the hands of the public has basically tripled since the turn of the century. Debt service—interest paid on that debt as a share of GDP—hasn't budged. Interest rates have come down, and they've been trending downward for the better part of 30 or 40 years. That has made it easier to sustain a heavier level of public debt.

What are the ramifications of holding a fixed mindset over a growth mindset? How does it alter the mechanics of the people within a company and what can be done to shift an entrenched culture mindset?Mary C. Murphy is a Professor of Psychology and Brain Science at the University of Indiana, and the author of the book Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations.Greg and Mary discuss the differences between growth and fixed mindsets, the significant impact of environmental factors on a given mindset, and the concept of mindset culture. Mary shares insights from her research and personal experiences, including her collaboration with Carol Dweck on the external factors influencing mindset. Their conversation covers the practical applications of growth mindset principles in education and corporate settings, how to implement effective learning systems, the role of leadership in fostering a culture of growth, and the importance of reframing effort in relation to ability. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Carol DweckJoseph AddisonVitality CurveKathleen HoganSatya NadellaGrowth Mindset vs. Fixed MindsetJean TwengeSara BlakelyYerkes–Dodson LawGuest Profile:MaryCMurphy.comFaculty Profile at the University of Indiana BloomingtonSocial Profile on InstagramSocial Profile on XHer Work:Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and OrganizationsGoogle Scholar PageEpisode Quotes:Reframing effort and ability through growth mindset41:55: So, what the growth mindset culture does—and what we do when we are creating growth mindset learning environments or working environments in companies—is that we're really trying to reframe that relationship between effort and ability. Pointing out, telling stories, showing people, having them do self-reflection on where they made the most progress, right? Where do you actually see the best outcomes coming? Is it always effortless, or have there been challenges that have been overcome, strategies that had to be pivoted, and teams that had to come together, right? So, illuminating the process of success helps people understand whether or not effort is what's required for ability, required for high success, right? And strong success and excellence. Why growth cultures are more diverse and inclusive49:36: In a culture of growth, it's much more diverse naturally. Why? Because it's not about matching to some narrow prototype of success that looks or feels a certain way. Instead, it's about who can grow the most, who can develop the most, who can pivot, who's overcome challenges. And when we look at our society and look at who has overcome challenges, who has actually had to pivot, try new things, and overcome these structural barriers, we see that that's a much more diverse group of people. And it's not just focused on any one identity. And so, we see that in these cultures of growth, they attract, retain, promote, and positively evaluate a much wider variety of people.How do we mirror growth to inspire workplace success?34:50: As adults in the workplace setting, if we can create relationships where we actually show employees and our direct reports—individual contributors—where we have seen their growth and development, appreciate that, and mirror it for them, it puts them in that growth mindset. This makes them willing to try something new, to continue to push, and to continue to develop either in that area or in a new area that's required in the moment. And so, I think that's one thing that we can do pretty easily—to just be that mirror for process, growth, and development for people and help them reflect on that for themselves. 

What are the problems facing academic journals today? What changes to the system could be made to address them? How could being more open about studies that aren't successful actually be a success strategy overall?Faye Flam is a science and medical journalist, a columnist for Bloomberg, host of the podcast Follow the Science, and the author of The Score: The Science of the Male Sex Drive.Greg and Faye discuss the importance and challenges of science journalism. Their conversation touches on the role of science journalists in translating and evaluating scientific data, the replication crisis, the influence of fraudulent research, the dynamics of public trust in science, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public health communication. They also examine the issue with the growing proliferation of deepfakes, ‘fake news,' and the importance of maintaining journalistic integrity in an increasingly digital age.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Replication CrisisScience JournalAmerican Institute of PhysicsAmerican Chemical SocietyGary TaubesRobert F. Kennedy Jr.Peter M. Sandman Risk Communication WebsiteGuest Profile:Faye Flam Personal WebsiteWikipedia ProfileLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XSocial Profile on BlueSkyFacebook PageHer Work:The Score: The Science of the Male Sex DriveBloomberg ArticlesForbes ArticlesFollow the Science PodcastEpisode Quotes:Science journalism and the challenge of neutrality38:23: I think that it's harder these days to sell the kind of story that I used to think was, that I still think is, kind of the heart and soul of science journalism, which is to try to separate the science from the values, try to understand why people are disagreeing, try to understand where the science has evolved, where the science might have been wrong in the past. So even something as fraught as whether sex is binary, I think at least in the past, that's something you could tackle as a journalist without taking sides, but just adding clarity and adding context and saying, you know, these people disagree because they have different values and they want to use different language. They're interpreting things differently. But there are certain aspects of biology that everybody agrees on.Rethinking failure in science10:08:  People have to rethink the meaning of failure. If you have a hypothesis that's kind of a long shot, and you test it, and you do a really good experiment, and you find out the hypothesis didn't hold up, well, you've tested that. Maybe that's something you can rule out. That should be an acceptable, perfectly normal part of science. It's not a failure per se. It's just that sometimes you have to rule something out that's a long shot.On the confidence trap of AI49:01:  One of the hazards of AI is that people—it's so confident—it answers questions with so much confidence, and it sounds so smart that people just assume it's right. And it's often not right. People call them hallucinations, but it can just be, with some subtle thing in your prompt, right? I think there is going to be a period where people are seduced into believing AI because it can be so incredibly smart, and it makes these statements with so much confidence. But a lot of it—there is this kind of chaos to it. Little changes in the prompt will completely change the answer.

When did humans learn to communicate through language? Did it coincide with the invention of fire? Or was it more a gradual process that involved much more than just making sounds with our mouths? Steven Mithen is a professor of prehistory at the University of Reading and the author of numerous books on human evolution including, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World, and most recently, The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved. His work weaves together disciplines like psychology, linguistics, and genetics to chart the history and evolution of the ways our minds make sense of the world.Greg and Steven discuss the integrative nature of language evolution, the role of social and physical environments in shaping language, and the interconnectedness of music and language in bonding and communication. Steven also shares how studying ancient civilizations' water management strategies unveils lessons for today's global water crisis. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jerry Fodor Howard Gardner Charles Darwin Jean-Jacques RousseauJohann Gottfried HerderRichard WranghamNoam ChomskyFerdinand de SaussureLinguistic relativity - Sapir-WhorfGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of ReadingHis Work:The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and ScienceAfter the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and BodyThirst: Water and Power in the Ancient WorldEpisode Quotes:Gesture evolved with language but never drove it forward17:43: Gesture has always accompanied language but never driven it forward. Music's maybe a little bit different, really. It seems to me musical sounds we make are almost more like gestures. And I think that time of moving to full bipedalism at about two million years ago, did really make bodies hugely more expressive. And it was a time when not only body language became important, but I think dance and singing, stamping feet, slapping thighs—all of that acting  as a really important way of building social bonds, of doing some sort of communication, pushed forward that social interaction communication.Language shapes perception51:14:  Different languages have different concepts of how the world is and should be seen, and that does influence how you perceive and think about it.Language shapes culture and complex thought25:01: I think we're mistaken if we think social bonding is the only role of language or necessarily the most important. There are at least two other things that it really does. Just a transmission of information from generation to generation. What we don't see in our human ancestors, like Homo erectus, and then our relatives like the Neanderthals, is only accumulation of culture; it doesn't seem to build from one generation to the next. And I suspect that's because there is a limitation on the way they're using language and the ability to gradually construct more complex ideas. But the other way we use language, and the other important one, is for thinking about complex ideas that I think we just can't do without it. And that's where a metaphor comes in—I think it's hugely important.

How can Legacy companies transform themselves to compete with Startups? What lessons can be learned from the different ways legacy companies Microsoft and IBM navigated the new business landscape. What can we expect from the new tech hubs popping up around the world that aim to be a recreation of what makes Silicon Valley work?Vivek Wadhwa is an academic, entrepreneur, and author of five best-selling books: From Incremental to Exponential, Your Happiness Was Hacked, The Driver in the Driverless Car, Innovating Women, and The Immigrant Exodus.Greg and Vivek discuss Vivek's journey from tech entrepreneur to academic and prolific author. They discuss Vivek's different books focusing on innovation, legacy companies, and the impact of technology on society. Vivek highlights the failures of traditional innovation methods, the cultural transformations necessary for company revitalization, and the broader societal impacts of technology addiction. Additionally, Vivek shares his personal strategies for managing tech distractions in his own life and emphasizes the necessity of face-to-face interactions for true innovation in business.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.***This episode was recorded in 2021.**Show Links:Recommended Resources:MicrosoftSatya NadellaClayton ChristensenFord Greenfield LabsDoug McMillonFrederick TermanSilicon ValleyMichael PorterMark ZuckerbergMitch KaporSteve CaseGuest Profile:Wadhwa.comLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia ProfileFragomen ProfileSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageFrom Incremental to Exponential: How Large Companies Can See the Future and Rethink InnovationThe Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the FutureYour Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight BackThe Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial TalentInnovating Women: The Changing Face of TechnologyEpisode Quotes:The reason silicon valley can't be replicated14:19: Silicon Valley can't be replicated because you need much more than a few people. It's all about culture, the fact that we interact with each other. I mean, you go to parties over here. I mean, I remember coming to Silicon Valley 12 years ago and bumping into Mark Zuckerberg. I said, "Oh my God, Mark Zuckerberg is here." And then you bump into Mitch Kapor, you know, all of these people, and you just go up to them, and they talk to you like normal people. So it's informal; you go to any coffee shop over here, and you ask someone, "You know, what are you doing?" First of all, they'll start telling you about all the things that they failed in. They'll show off about their failure, and then they'll openly tell you what they're doing. Try doing that anywhere else in the world.On how are the people being addicted to technologies 47:41:The fact is that all of us are addicted. We're checking email. We wake up in the morning, and we check email. We go to bed late at night; we're checking email. We're traveling home from work; we're checking email. Right? We're now exchanging texts, you know, 24/7. When we have any free time, we'll start watching some TikTok videos. I mean, the kids, from the time they're like six months old now, seem to be on their iPads and so on. And the result is that teen suicide rates are high. We're not aware. All the studies about happiness show that we are less happy than we ever were. So everything good that should have happened hasn't happened. Instead, we've become addicted, and it's become a big problem for us. Disruption can come from anywhere08:38: You have to be aware that disruption would come from everywhere, and you need to have all hands on deck. It's no longer R&D departments that specialize in developing some specific technology—it's everyone in your company, right? Marketing, customer support, sales, your engineers, of course, finance—everyone now has a role in disruption, helping you reinvent yourself.

Is it time to drastically change the way we think about failure? What if failure is the key to success? John Danner is a faculty member at UC Berkeley and Princeton University and the author of Built for Growth and The Other “F” Word. His research focuses on leadership, strategy, and innovation. He regularly consults with Fortune 500 companies, offering actionable strategies to help them adapt to ever-changing landscapes and grow. John and Greg discuss the paradox of Silicon Valley's celebration of failure and the reality behind it, turning regrets into strategic resources, the importance of self-knowledge, both for individuals and organizations, and how understanding your personality can influence successful entrepreneurship.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.***This episode was recorded in 2021.**Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas Edison Daniel KahnemanMark Coopersmith Jeff Bezos Barry Schwartz | unSILOed Sara Blakely Ben & Jerry's Jack MaGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC BerkeleyProfessional WebsiteProfile on LinkedInHis Work:Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win The Other "F" Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to WorkEpisode Quotes:Embracing failure leads to growth03:33: There's something quintessentially human about failure that connects all of us because we are all experts at it. We do it all the time in very unexpected ways, yet we tend too often to walk away from it, to ignore it, to not talk about it. And it's become, I think, a taboo unto itself, but also, from a leadership point of view, in my experience, both in teaching, consulting, and running organizations, starting organizations, it is a huge barrier in most organizations that I'm familiar with. If you can't talk about failure, if you can't genuinely, honestly, openly discuss it and understand what's behind it, you're never going to be in a position to actually leverage and benefit from it.Failure is like gravity12:11: Failure is like gravity. It is a force and fact of nature. It is inexorable and unavoidable, and it's not a strong force of nature. It's a weak force of nature, but it is the kind of phenomenon that I think we're dealing with.The value of failure02:41: What failure almost always is: reality's way of telling you that you weren't as smart as you thought you were, you were conducting an experiment all along, and it's reality that's telling you what you didn't know but thought you did. So, it's got some value for sure.How can we embrace failure without being overwhelmed by it and use it to improve the odds of success25:21: How can you both accommodate the likelihood of failure but not be overwhelmed by it, not ignore it, but manage through it and, more importantly, perhaps manage with it because failure is a little bit like the coal that holds the diamond; there's insight in every failure. There is something of value that is there to be mined if you have the humility to acknowledge it and the tenacity to go after it. And to that extent, I like this notion of thinking of initiative and action as chances to improve your odds that the experiments you're conducting are more likely than otherwise to prove successful.

What are the ways founders are using AI to experiment and optimize their start-ups faster than ever before? How does this shift affect the various makeups of different companies and industries, and who will be the winners and losers in the new age of AI?Jeff Bussgang is the GP and Founder of Flybridge Capital, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, and also the author of the new book The Experimentation Machine: Finding Product-Market Fit in the Age of AI. Greg and Jeff discuss timeless methods and timely tools for startups. Jeff elaborates on the scientific approach to entrepreneurship and the importance of combining timeless principles with modern AI tools. He shares insights on how generative AI can enhance every aspect of a startup, from ideation to customer engagement, and discusses the evolving roles of founders, venture capitalists, and even employees in this new landscape. Their conversation includes practical advice for founders on prioritizing experiments, scaling, building customer value propositions, and leveraging AI to become more efficient and effective.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Chris DixonThe Idea MazeScott BradyReid HoffmanEric RiesSam AltmanOpenAIAileen LeeSteve BallmerGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Business SchoolLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia ProfileJeffBussgang.comFlybridge.com ProfileSocial Profile on InstagramSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageAdditional Amazon Author PageThe Experimentation Machine: Finding Product-Market Fit in the Age of AIMastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your TermsEntering StartUpLand: An Essential Guide to Finding the Right JobHBS online | Launching Tech Ventures classEpisode Quotes:The startup path is unpredictable but patterns exist03:08: Startups are highly nondeterministic, and so there's really no single playbook or single formula. And yet, there are timeless methods that you can apply to improve your odds of success. Now, you're never going to guarantee success. It's not an engineering formula where certain inputs result in certain outputs. There's just too much randomness. And as I said, nondeterminism is out there, and every age, era, context, startup, and individual are so radically different. So it's highly unpredictable. Yet, as I said, timeless methods. And then, as you noted—and I write in the book—timely tools. I mean, the tools, they're not just getting better every year, every month, every week, every day. Strategy in startups is all about test selection10:36: This question of test selection being strategy is the essence of what founders need to think through because, anytime you have an organization with limited bandwidth and a limited envelope of resources and capital, you need to make prioritization decisions. You need to focus, and so what I advise founders, both that I teach and also through my Flybridge investment activities, is that they should select the tests that are going to uncover the most controversial part of their business model and have the highest likelihood of leading to a valuation inflection point if the test is successful.Why judgment, strategy, and creativity are timeless values for founders51:26: The notion that founders need to leverage their strategic thinking, creativity, and human judgment—and apply that again and again to prioritize these scarce resources—even if the resources can be stretched more fully—is still a competitive market, and everybody is stretching the resources and being more productive. I still think that that judgment is going to be very valuable.AI won't replace founders—but founders who don't use AI will be replaced47:41: AI is not going to replace founders anytime soon; but founders who don't use AI are going to replace founders who don't. I also believe that joiners who use AI are going to replace joiners who don't, that our portfolio companies are looking for AI-native employees, and that we may see a world where employees and candidates come to companies instead of with a team of engineers, marketers, or salespeople, as we have seen in the past—as the HubSpot mafia travels from company to company. [48:32] So I think there's going to be just a really rich set of opportunities for native joiners, and there's going to be a high bar that will be tested by employers about whether their individuals are native and facile with the AI tools.

Given the advancements in technology and AI, how have humans learned to navigate the ever-shifting boundaries of morality in an increasingly complex world? Webb Keane is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. Through his books like, Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories and most recently Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination, Webb offers insights into the nuances of moral life and human interaction. Webb joins Greg to discuss how different cultures navigate ethical boundaries, the complexities of human-animal relationships, the growing phenomenon of anthropomorphizing AI, and the challenges of understanding what it means to be human. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Max WeberClifford GeertzErving GoffmanJoseph HenrichGregory Berns | unSILOedAntigone William PietzKant's Categorical ImperativeGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of MichiganGoogle Scholar PageHis Work:Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral ImaginationEthical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission EncounterEpisode Quotes:How anthropologists immerse themselves in other ways of life53:09: Anthropologists just do what everyone does—they just do it more intensely and with more intentionality. As I said, our most valuable tool is just knowing how to be a person and how to get along with other people. And that, I mean, in principle, anyone can learn a new language. You're never going to learn it as well as you learn your first language, but it's something that's available to you. And so, in some sense, that goes for learning to eat differently, to walk differently, to wear different kinds of [clothes], to interact with people differently, even to imagine yourself into a different kind of metaphysical system. Like, hang out with shamans long enough, and you're going to start to think that, yes, they do turn into jaguars and roam the forest at night.Key difference between anthropologists and other social scientists05:52: One of the key differences between what we do and what other social scientists do is we actually live with them and take part in their lives. And so, that way, you catch not just what people say, but what they do—and not just what they put into words, but what they hint at and imply.Moral propositions must be livable to matter15:28: If you're looking for inhabitable, feasible, ethical worlds—moral ways of living—you can't just sit back and think, "Well, how should this be?"... Moral propositions are great, but to be livable, they have to exist in a world that makes them possible and sustains them.The boundaries between human and non-human are not universal32:26: In many situations that look like we have dramatically different moral or ethical intuitions, the difference is less in what our moral intuitions are, but rather where we draw the line between us and them—between something to which it applies and something to which it doesn't. We may, in fact, share moral intuitions with people who seem utterly strange to us, but we just don't think we agree on where they apply properly.

Why are external accountability and thoughtful integration of algorithms necessary now to ensure fairer labor dynamics across work environments? What's the puzzling problem that comes with increasing the level of transparency of these algorithms?Hatim Rahman is an Associate Professor of Management & Organizations at Northwestern University in the Kellogg School of Management, and the author of the new book, Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers.Greg and Hatim discuss Ratim's book, and his extensive case study of a company matching employers with gig workers, exploring the ways algorithms impact labor dynamics. Hatim draws connections between Max Weber's concept of the 'iron cage' and modern, opaque algorithmic systems, discussing how these systems control worker opportunities and behavior. Their conversation further delves into the evolution and consequences of rating systems, algorithmic transparency, organizational control, and the balance between digital and traditional workforce structures. Rahman emphasizes the need for external accountability and thoughtful integration of algorithms to ensure fairer labor dynamics.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Control TheoryMax WeberGig EconomyGoodhart's LawRatings InflationFrederick Winslow TaylorFair.workGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Kellogg School of Management | Northwestern UniversityLinkedIn ProfileHis Work:Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control WorkersGoogle Scholar PageFast Company ArticlesEpisode Quotes:Experimenting to find the right balance between regulation and self-regulation33:36: Finding the right balance between self-regulation—where organizations can figure things out for themselves—and real legislation, regulation that creates societal and broader outcomes that are beneficial is where we are right now. Of course, the tricky thing is that you don't want to get that balance wrong either. But, I do think we're at the stage where we need to experiment, right? We need to figure out those optimal levels of transparency, opacity, regulation, and self-regulation.Why employers struggle to recognize and value skills badges from lesser-known institutions39:55: The problem with the skill sets that people develop is that, employers, they didn't understand what it meant. Right? Let's say you have a badge from some smaller university or community college. Employees generally struggle to understand what that means, right? Or they'll pass over it. They'll look for more recognizable, established credentials and proxies for skills. And so, at least when I was studying, many of the workers, employers—like we tried, but it didn't help us because the employer didn't know what it meant or how the passing of that skills test would concretely help them do the job that they required.Why do digital platforms struggle to balance transparency and risk?14:17: Organizations and digital platforms want to find the right balance, but they just struggle a lot to do so because many employers are risk-averse and want to limit their liability. I imagine that this is one of the reasons why they have favored opacity, right? If we don't have to reveal or tell, then it limits our ability to get exposure to lawsuits or exposure to gaming, zone, and so forth.

With AI becoming more advanced every day, what are the ethical considerations of such emerging technologies? How can the way we treat animals and other species of intelligence inform the way we can and should think of personhood in the realm of increasingly advanced artificial intelligence models?James Boyle is a professor of law at Duke University's law school, former chair of the Creative Commons, the founder of the Center for the Study of Public Domain, and the author of a number of books. His latest book is titled, The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood.Greg and James discuss AI as it relates to the philosophical and legal approaches to defining personhood. They explore the historical context of personhood, its implications for AI, and the potential for new forms of legal entities. Their conversation also touches on the role of empathy, literature, and moral emotions in shaping our understanding of these issues. James advocates for a hybrid approach to personhood, recognizing both human and non-human rights while highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary thought in navigating these complex topics.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Kevin RooseA Conversation With Bing's Chatbot Left Me Deeply UnsettledJohn SearleAristotleTuring testB. F. SkinnerGuernica (Picasso)What Is It Like to Be a Bat?DuneSamuel ButlerDreyfus AffairLeon KassGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Duke UniversityJames Boyle's Intellectual Property PageWikipedia ProfileHis Work:Amazon Author PageThe Line: AI and the Future of PersonhoodTheft: A History of MusicBound By Law: Tales from the Public DomainShamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information SocietyThe Public DomainIntellectual Property: Law & the Information Society - Cases & Materials: An Open CasebookCultural Environmentalism and BeyondEpisode Quotes:Are we more like ChatGPT than we want to admit?14:21: There's that communication where we think, okay, this is a human spirit, and I touch a very tiny part of it and have that conversation—some of them deep, some of them shallow.  And so, I think the question is: is what we're doing mere defensiveness? Which it might be.  I mean, are we actually frightened that we're more like ChatGPT than we think? That it's not that ChatGPT isn't conscious, but that for most of our lives, you and I run around basically operating on a script?  I mean, I think most of us on our commute to work and our conversations with people who we barely know—the conversations are very predictable. Our minds can wander, just blah, blah, blah, blah. It's basically when you're on autopilot like that—are you that different than ChatGPT? Some neuroscientists would say, no, you're not. And actually, a lot of this is conceit.Why language alone doesn't equal consciousness11:35: ChatGPT has no consciousness, but it does have language—just not intentional language. And so, basically, we've gone wrong thinking that sentences imply sentience.How literature sparks empathy and expands perspective24:01: One of the things about literature is our moral philosophy engines don't actually start going—they never get in gear. For those of you who drive manual and stick shift, the clutch is in, the engine's there, but it's not engaged. And it's that moment where the flash of empathy passes between two entities, where you think, wow, I've read this, I've seen this, and this makes real to me—makes tangible to me. That it also allows us to engage in thought experiments, which are not the kind of experiments we want to do in reality. They might be unethical, they might be illegal, they might be just impossible. That, I think, broadens our perspective, and for me, at least, it's about as close as I've ever got to inhabiting the mind of another being.

What is the difference between risk and uncertainty? Why does mainstream economics often overlook uncertainty altogether?Amar Bhidé is a professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, professor emeritus at Tufts University, and the author of several books, his latest of which is entitled, Uncertainty and Enterprise: Venturing Beyond the Known.Greg and Amar discuss Amar's recent book, which ties together threads from his previous works such as A Call for Judgment: Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy and The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World. They delve into the concept of uncertainty in economics, touch on the roles of imagination and evidence in decision-making, and discuss the limitations of current economic models and theories. Greg and Amar also examine the importance of storytelling and narrative in understanding and teaching economics and business.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas KuhnFriedrich HayekBob SchillerJoseph StiglitzInformation AsymmetryKeynesian EconomicsPaul SamuelsonMervyn King, Baron King of LothburyMichael PorterBlack–Scholes ModelDisruptive Innovation TheoryGerd GigerenzerHerbert A. SimonRichard ThalerAlfred D. Chandler Jr.John Stuart MillCase methodGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia UniversityFaculty Profile at Tufts UniversityBhide.net HomepageLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageUncertainty and Enterprise: Venturing Beyond the KnownPractical KnowledgeA Call for Judgment: Sensible Finance for a Dynamic EconomyThe Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected WorldThe Origin and Evolution of New BusinessesGoogle Scholar PageEpisode Quotes:A well-functioning board questions assumptions11:40:A well-functioning board is questioning the assumptions, beliefs, and imaginations of the CEO and whatever the CEO has come up with. And these things, somebody cannot explain plausibly under standard economic models. Yet, they have clearly observable differences in what they produce. So the differences in these routines, I would argue, distinguish between the kinds of projects that an entrepreneur undertakes on his or her own. They distinguish between the kinds of projects that an angel investor is willing to undertake but a VC is not, and the kinds of projects that a VC is willing to undertake but the large corporation is not.Using imagination as a bridge between the past and the future24:12: If you want a bridge between what we know about the past and how we want to act vis-à-vis the future, we have to use imagination. And in the use of that imagination, the past provides the evidence; the imagination provides the bridge to what we do not know.Balancing evidence and imagination in case discussions57:06: A good case discussion is also teaching people how to discuss. But how to swap imaginations is not discourse in algebra; it is not discourse using statistics; it's discourse using similes, metaphors, and analogies. How one balances evidence and imagination is such a vital skill in so many fields.

What truly is the relationship between tech giants and government, especially with the recent change of administrations? How does democracy remain at the forefront when corporations are amassing so much capital and power? How can the US hope to balance out the influence of Big Tech money with the needs of a population that will often have different needs and goals?Marietje Schaake is a fellow at the Cyber Policy Center and a fellow at the Institute for Human Centered AI, both at Stanford University, and the author of the book The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley.Greg and Marietje discuss the evolving and complex role of technology corporations in modern society, particularly in democratic contexts. Their conversation covers a range of topics from historical perspectives on corporate power, modern regulatory challenges, national security concerns, and the influence of tech companies on public policy and democracy. Marietje gives her insights on how the lack of deliberate governance has allowed tech companies to gain unprecedented power, and she makes the case for regulatory reforms and enhanced accountability for these companies.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jeff BezosTim CookSundar PichaiSergey BrinElon MuskTim Berners-LeeVint CerfMarc AndreessenGeneral Data Protection RegulationPalantir TechnologiesPegasus ProjectSection 230Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityProfile for European ParliamentEurasia Group ProfileWikipedia ProfileLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XHer Work:The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon ValleyEpisode Quotes:The relentless race for tech dominance without guardrails13:55: There has been too little ownership on the part of corporate leaders of the great responsibilities that having so much power should mean, and they are also given a lot of space that they've taken. So, essentially, because there are too few guardrails, they're just going to continue to race ahead until something stops them. And the very political leaders that can typically wield quite a bit of power to put up guardrails, rules, oversight, and checks and balances, in the person of Donald Trump, are not going to do so, or at least not from a comprehensive democratic vision that I think is necessary if you put democracy first in assessing what role technology should play in our societies.Tech's unavoidable role in our lives03:13: It's hard to imagine any aspect of our lives—whether it's our kids, the elderly, or everyone in between—where tech company platforms and devices don't play a critical role. And that sort of interwovenness, not so much as a sector or as one company, but as a layer that impacts almost all aspects of our lives, makes this a different animal.Regulation's biggest fans should be its biggest critics31:02: Between the critics and the fans, I always say that the EU's biggest fans should be regulation's biggest critics because actually, we need to be honest about what it is and what it isn't. And I think one of the problems is that a lot of the regulation that has been adopted in the EU has been oversold—GDPR being a key example. At some point, the answer to every question about technology in Europe was, "But we have GDPR now." With a few years of hindsight, we can see that enforcement of GDPR was really imperfect. The fact that there was such a singular focus on the right to privacy, which is very important and understandably so from historic perspectives in Europe as well. We also needed to harmonize rules between all the different countries, so there was a lot of logic in there that doesn't translate to what it means for Silicon Valley because, in fact, that was not the most important driver.

What are the psychological and biological underpinnings of human violence and our collective propensity for war? How important really is leadership in wartime decision-making?Richard Overy is an honorary professor at the University of Exeter, and the author of several books. His latest are the brand new Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan, and also Why War?, and Why the Allies Won. Greg and Richard discuss Richard's book, Why War?, which addresses the social and psychological aspects of war rather than just its historical dimensions. Richard explains the evolving nature of military history, the role of cultural and social factors, and the impact of major and minor conflicts throughout history. They also talk about current issues, including the war in Ukraine and how modern warfare strategies differ from traditional methods. Greg asks if Richard thinks World War II will start decreasing in importance as the generations who experienced it or stories of it pass on. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Thomas HobbesJean-Jacques RousseauMargaret MeadJane GoodallValhallaSpartaLebensraumMarc BlochGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of ExeterProfile on WikipediaHis Work:Amazon Author PageRain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of JapanWhy War?Why the Allies WonThe Oxford History of World War IIThe Origins of the Second World WarBlood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945The Air War, 1939-1945The Inter-War CrisisThe Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945The Third Reich: A Chronicle1939: Countdown to WarThe Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the WarsThe Times History of the WorldEpisode Quotes:How a leader's psychology shapes the path to war28:58:  Leaders through history have played an important part, often in motivating their people to fight war and imposing their own personal ambition on what's going on. I think the problem is that this is, in some ways, the most unpredictable source of war. I mean, there's no way you can't have a standard psychological picture of the potential aggressor. And anyway, we don't know enough about Alexander, Napoleon, or even Hitler to be confident about that. But there's no doubt that, at times, a leader does come to play a very critical part in driving a particular community to war. Otherwise, of course, you know, it can be a collective decision; it can be a decision taken in cabinet, by parliament; it can be a decision taken by the tribal elders when they're sitting around the fire. But this hubristic leader, the person who thrives on war, thinks war is the solution, not the problem, is unpredictable and dangerous.The evolving history of warThe history of war has broadened out. Before, it was just soldiers and guns. But now, when you're doing the history of war, you've got to do the whole thing: politics, culture, the psychological effects on the men, women, and so on. So the history of war has become more like history in general. And I think that's why there is much more interest in war than there was 20 or 30 years ago.The role of belief in driving war51:44:  Belief is a very important driver, and I think that the effort of social scientists, particularly to say, "Oh, well, belief is, in fact, a cover for something else. It's a cover for economic interest, or it's a cover for a social crisis, or whatever it is." It's just not the case. There are plenty of warlike societies, think of the Aztecs, you know—where their cosmology is central to the way they organize their life, organize their society, the way they make war, and why they make war. And, we might look at it and say, "What an irrational view of the world," but to them, it's not an irrational view of the world; it's their view of the world. And I think, throughout recorded history, belief has played a very important part in shaping the way people think about war and why they're waging it.

The world of decision-making is now dominated by algorithms and automation. But how much has the AI really changed? Haven't, on some level, humans always thought in algorithmic terms? Kartik Hosanagar is a professor of technology at The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania. His book, A Human's Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control explores how algorithms and AI are increasingly influencing our daily decisions and society, and proposes ways for individuals and organizations to maintain control in this algorithmic world.Kartik and Greg discuss the integration of AI in decision-making, the differences and similarities of human based algorithmic thinking and AI based algorithmic thinking, the significance of AI literacy, and the future of creativity with AI. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Herbert A. SimonPedro Domingos“At UPS, the Algorithm Is the Driver” | The Wall Street Journal“(Re)Introducing the AI Bill of Rights: An AI Governance Proposal” by Kartik HosanagarGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at The Wharton School of the University of PennsylvaniaKartik Hosanagar's SubstackProfessional Profile on LinkedInHis Work:A Human's Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in ControlEpisode Quotes:What's a good system design for AI?43:02: A good system design for AI systems, would be when there's deviation from the recommended decision to have some feedback loop. It's like in a music recommendation system, and Spotify Discover Weekly or any of these other systems where a recommendation comes in; ideally, you want some feedback on did this person like the song or not. And if there's a way to get that feedback, whether you know one way is it's an explicit feedback thumbs up, thumbs down, sometimes it's implicit; they just skipped it, or they didn't finish the song, they just left it halfway through, or something like that. But you need some way to get that feedback, and that helps the system get better over time.At the end of the day, humans shape the future of AI12:43: This view that it's all automation and we'll have mass human replacement by AI, I think, at the end of the day, we shape that outcome. We need to be actively involved in shaping that future where AI is empowering us and augmenting our work. And we design these human-AI systems in a more deliberate manner.On driving trust in algorithmic systems36:08: What drives trust in an algorithmic system shows that transparency and user control are two extremely important variables. Of course, you care about things like how accurate or good that system is. Those things, of course, matter. But transparency and trust are interesting. So, in transparency, the idea that you have a system making decisions for you or about you, but you have no clue about how the system works, is disturbing for people. And we've seen ample evidence that people reject that system.

How is market signaling tied to economic growth, and what will the introduction of AI do to the wave of economic development in the US and abroad? Will other surging economies surpass the United States as dynamics continue to change?Michael Spence is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, also the author of a number of books, including The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World and most recently, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World.Greg and Michael discuss Michael's ideas on economic growth and signaling, exploring the early days of applied micro theory with key figures like Ken Arrow and Tom Schelling. They also cover the evolution of global economic policy, particularly the challenges and opportunities in an increasingly fragmented world. Michael shares insights from his books and emphasizes the importance of cognitive diversity in understanding and addressing global socio-economic issues.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Kenneth ArrowRichard ZeckhauserThomas SchellingThe Market for LemonsPooling EquilibriumJohn Maynard SmithErving GoffmanEdward LazearWashington ConsensusReport: EU competitiveness: Looking aheadGuest Profile:Professional Profile at the Hoover InstitutionProfile for the Council on Foreign RelationsNobel Prize ProfileWikipedia PageHis Work:Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured WorldThe Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed WorldEpisode Quotes:The scarcity of time as a signal18:56: It turns out time is an incredibly important signal. In just an ordinary interaction, if somebody's willing to spend time with you, we always take this for granted because it's part of life, right? If they won't spend time with you, that sends a different signal. I mean, in the internet era, I think most people understand that the scarcest commodity is attention, not money, not other things. And so, the battle for people's attention, or time, or whatever you want to, these are slightly different, but it's pretty important. So, it's all there, but it did have origins well before the signaling and screening work.Signaling model has to be visible11:11: The core of the signaling model is that it has to be visible. It has to cost something; otherwise, everybody would do it. And the costs have to be negatively correlated with the quality; otherwise, it won't survive in equilibrium.Navigating crises, inequality, and global interdependence49:19: The way I approach that is try to look at the big challenges: maintaining some reasonable level of global sort of interdependence with the benefits that it brings without getting into big trouble, dealing with the various dimensions of the sustainability agenda, and dealing with sort of stunningly high levels of inequality, especially in wealth. Thomas Piketty's right; there's long cycles in these things, and maybe you just have to live through them. But, the last thing I did is look at the St. Louis Fed, which publishes pretty detailed data on American household net worth, assets, liabilities, and net worth. The top 10 percent has two-thirds of the net worth. The bottom 50 percent has 3%. Yeah. Sort of wonder, you know, can you really run a society that looks like that indefinitely, or if not, what's going to break and cause it to change?

How are happiness and success intertwined when it comes to business? What crucial element do you lose as a company when the boss or the culture becomes one of stress or pressure? Emma Seppälä teaches at the Yale School of Management and is a Scientific Director at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research at Stanford University. She is also the author of several books, most recently Sovereign: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos.Greg and Emma discuss the evolving field of happiness studies, its application in business, and Emma's research on the relationship between success, well-being, and stress. Emma shares insights on how high-stress cultures in academia and workplaces undermine long-term performance and creativity and offers practical strategies for individuals and leaders to cultivate emotional intelligence and resilience through practices like meditation and breathwork.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Robert ThurmanSKY Breath MeditationBreathworkGuest Profile:EmmaSeppala.comFaculty Profile at Yale School of ManagementFaculty Profile at the Stanford Medicine Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and EducationSocial Profile on InstagramSocial Profile on FacebookSocial Profile on XLinkedIn ProfileHer Work:Amazon Author PageSovereign: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and ChaosThe Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your SuccessThe Oxford Handbook of Compassion ScienceYouTube ChannelEpisode Quotes:Self-awareness vs. self-criticism in leadership18:17: If you want to be a good leader, compassion is so essential. It's a no-brainer. And I teach a lot of female executives, male too, but I would say both of them are highly self-critical. I differentiate between self-awareness and self-criticism. Self-awareness is, oh, you know what? My statistics are terrible. Like I actually need to hire a statistician to help me on my team. That's self-awareness, right? Self-criticism is, I'm a terrible accountant. I can't do this. Like, I'm just so bad, all that stuff is either going to make you feel less than and all the consequences thereof or make you feel like you have to make up for it by being a jerk or "narcissist." Everyone's a narcissist these days, according to everybody else. You know what I mean? But, like, yeah, both of those are consequences of profound self-hatred. That's why, you know, self-awareness is key. Self-criticism? Not so much.Innovation starts with resilience and a sovereign state of mind11:24: What we need the most is innovation, both in our young people, in our employees, and all around ourselves. We need to figure out the problems in our lives, and the best way to access that is to come back to, I'm going to call it, a sovereign state because when you're sovereign and you're sort of centered within yourself, and you're in a calmer state, and you're less frazzled, and also the whole antifragile thing. Well, it's antifragile psychologically, so you're in a state where you are most resilient to the outside world and most creative.Why leadership begins with your well-being33:25: People can't flourish around you if you're stressed, if you're burnt out, if you're showing up yourself; it's not going to happen. As a leader, people are watching you. They're very attuned to you because they're watching out for their own safety, and they're measuring where they are at, where they stand, and so it's critical. I think that's a place where people get lost. You're like, "Oh, well, if I just offer these perks or see these things, everything will be fine." It's like, well, really, people see through you. They see through you. And if you're not authentic, they know that.

How did Chile's economic experiment reshape global economic thinking, and what can it teach us about the future of neoliberalism and populism in Latin America and beyond?Sebastián Edwards is a professor of international economics at UCLA and writes about Latin American history, economics, and politics. His books include Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism, American Default: The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle over Gold, and most recently The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism.Sebastián and Greg chat about the remarkable economic transformation in Chile over the last seven decades, the roots of neoliberalism and its global implications, the contemporary challenges facing Argentina, and what lessons can be gleaned from historical economic events like the U.S.'s default during the FDR era. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Augusto PinochetMilton FriedmanPaul SamuelsonTed SchultzRobert MundellArnold HarbergerJorge AlessandriJosé PiñeraGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UCLAProfessional WebsiteHis Work:The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of NeoliberalismAmerican Default: The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle over GoldLeft Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of PopulismEpisode Quotes:Why could the U.S. justify a default while Argentina couldn't?48:11: I think that the notion of excusable default  is important. If there is an act of God, and the Great Depression was thought to be, in part at least, an act of God, that was one element. The other one is that I think the Supreme Court rulings were very detailed and pedagogical,  and they explained that aspect of the justifiable default in a clear way.  And the third one is that the devaluation was very large, from $20.67 to $35. So, the problem with Latin America is that most devaluation crises are very timid.On Chile's horizontal inequality56:01: Chile is one of the most unequal countries in terms of income, but also it's very segregated.  [56:37] So, there is this horizontal inequality that I think is also important, and as the country developed and people got out of poverty, being treated in a disrespectful way by whiter citizens—there's also a racial component, but in Chile, it's not acknowledged all the time—but being treated without respect is not acceptable anymore.  People get resentful, right?  So, I think that all of that added to this quite unstable cocktail.How inequality and slow growth created Chile's deadly cocktail04:11: When you combine inequality with slower growth, then you have a really deadly cocktail. And that happened after 2014, and it made the criticism higher. And the third point is that there were some implicit promises that the supporters of the model made that did not happen. And that's mostly related to pensions—the fully privately run (not anymore, but originally) pension system based on individual savings accounts. The idea was that if things worked the way people thought they were going to work, workers would get a rate of replacement of about 70 to 80 percent of their income. It turns out they get about 25 percent instead of 70 or 75 percent, and people feel betrayed.

Why do our most complex systems—from financial markets to corporate behemoths—consistently produce outcomes that nobody intended, and what forgotten science might hold the key to fixing them?Dan Davies is an economist and author of the books, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World and most recently, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind. Dan and Greg discuss the complexities of fraud in financial systems and why no individual seems accountable for major financial crises, how the historical and intellectual foundations of cybernetics and systems thinking can be applied to improving organizational design, and the role of information theory in management.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Payment protection insurance“Canadian university loses $10m in phishing scam” | BBC“A Mathematical Theory of Communication” by Claude ShannonCybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert WienerAlan Turing Kurt GödelStafford Beer Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.Michael C. JensenW. Ross AshbyHis Work:Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our WorldThe Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its MindThe Brompton: Engineering for ChangeEpisode Quotes:Fraud thrives where trust exists13:58: If you want to commit a big fraud, you don't go somewhere where there's low trust. You go somewhere where, as long as you show up, wear a nice suit, smile, and say please and thank you, people will assume that you're honest. But the thing is, that's what you want to do if you want to run a legitimate business too. So, people always say that the cost of fraud is never the amount of money that's stolen; it's the amount of legitimate business that doesn't get done. And that's just really saying that trust is an incredibly efficient way of organizing your economy compared to checking. Checking and trust are basically the only two kinds of technologies we have to ensure the integrity of information. And of the two of them, trust is a lot more efficient.How fraud disrupts an economy03:48: Fraud happens when not only does your assumption of perfect information break down, but there's some actual anti-information there. There's some actively false and misleading information that's been injected intentionally.Why investors and economists lead in a data-driven era58:40: A lot of the reason why economists rule the world in policy is the same reason why more and more companies are run by their investors or their investor relations departments. It's because they collect the data, and the economists collect the numbers that are used to make up the world of facts. 

Why have philosophers historically failed to think seriously about privacy? How do invasions of privacy really impact a person? What do we give up when we let our data be freely commoditized by Big Tech companies without being fully aware of how they're doing it?Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford, and the author of multiple books including most recently, The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance.Greg and Carissa discuss why philosophers have historically neglected privacy as a subject, the modern implications of privacy in the digital age, and the ethical issues surrounding data collection and targeted advertising. Carissa argues for a nuanced, objective approach to privacy that considers its deep evolutionary and societal roots. They touch on the tension between convenience and privacy, the importance of legal frameworks, and the responsibilities of both individuals and companies in safeguarding personal data.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Louis BrandeisJudith Jarvis ThomsonRima BasuCivil InattentionPaul de Man23andMeGuest Profile:CarissaVeliz.comFaculty Profile at Hertford CollegeFaculty Profile at Oxford UniversityWikipedia ProfileLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XHer Work:Amazon Author PageThe Ethics of Privacy and SurveillancePrivacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your DataOxford Handbook of Digital EthicsEpisode Quotes:The hidden risks of sharing genetic data34:40: Most people don't really realize what it means to give away your genetic data. Genetic data is something so abstract that I don't think our psychology is built to understand it. It's not something you can touch or you can see. I can't visually show it to you, I mean, except in a very abstract form. And so I don't think people think it through. I think in a society in which we are very respectful of private property, it's very intuitive to think that if we make privacy a question of private property, then we are being respectful towards privacy. And it just doesn't work that way, because when I sell my genetic data to one of these companies, I'm selling the data of my siblings, my parents, my kids, even my very distant kin who might get deported, who could have their insurance denied. So it's not a personal thing.Privacy is a protection against possible abuses of power06:09: Privacy is a protection against possible abuses of power. And as long as institutions are institutions, and people are people, there will always be that temptation to abuse power. We can see this very clearly because people who are more vulnerable to abuses of power tend to care more about privacy.Can consent in data co-exist?50:52: Consent in the data world just doesn't exist because it's not informed. You have no idea what they're doing with your data or where your data is going to end up. And it's not because you're uninformed; no data scientist would know it either. It's because of the way the data market works, and it's not really voluntary because if you say no, then you can't use the service, and not using the service might mean not getting a job or not getting an education. So, we need to change the kind of framework, and I propose an opt-in framework, in which you can opt in to have certain kinds of data collected, and that's effortful, and you only have to do it once.Navigating privacy in a digitally-driven world38:07: As long as the data exists, there's already a privacy risk. And that was my point with the iron law of digitization—that when you turn the analog into the digital, it might seem like a very neutral thing to do, but it's not because you turn something that wasn't trackable into something that's taggable, and that means it's being surveilled. That's what it means to surveil, to track something. And so, when we turn the analog into the digital, we're doing something very morally significant.

What effects will generative AI have on coding and software engineering? Will it make anyone a coder? Will it just turn software engineering into copy/paste exercises? How will the top coders use AI to hack their own efficiency and productivity, and why is it so hard for the large tech companies to do the same things that the smaller ones do?Clive Thompson is a journalist for the New York Times Magazine and Wired as well as the author of multiple books, including Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better and Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.Greg and Clive delve into the cultural and societal impacts of the rise of coders, exploring how the coding mindset infiltrates various aspects of life and business. They also discuss the nature of work in software engineering, the shift towards iterative and agile methodologies, and the potential future shaped by generative AI and its implications for the field. Clive explains the paradoxes of efficiency, the challenges of maintenance over creation in coding, and how his life experience and interests converge in his upcoming book about cycling across the United States and the future of mobility. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Max WeberNeil PostmanSamuel Taylor ColeridgePaul GrahamRay OzzieJeff AtwoodReid HoffmanGuest Profile:CliveThompson.netWikipedia ProfileSocial Profile on XProfile on LinkedInHis Work:Amazon Author PageSmarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the BetterCoders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the WorldWired ArticlesEpisode Quotes:Why do coders need an intense level of focus? If this thing happens [in coding], it will change this other thing. If that thing changes, this thing over here has to happen, and that's also reliant on this other thing. And it's so hard to get the structure of this in your head that you might spend several hours just looking at what you're trying to do, just thinking about it, sort of, getting it in your head. And when it's finally there, then you can begin to do the work. And of course, a couple interesting things fall out of this psychology. One is that you want to stay there. It took you three to four hours to get there, so you don't want to leave. So, you want to stay there for 10, 15, 20, 48 hours. The huge problem with managing coders.[18:15] This is a huge problem with managing coders is that they love learning, in a weird way. You would argue, isn't this an ideal employee? Someone who is eager to learn. Constantly learning new things. Very few employees are like, “I am just omnivorous in my spare time when I'm not being paid, I'm going to do more of this.” I mean, how many accountants at your company go home, and then from eight o'clock at night to two in the morning, do more accounting for fun, just voluntarily? That's a coder, right? And what they're doing is they're going home, and they're doing crazy new forms of software that they're not really allowed to do at work, but they often try and bring that in, and they'll be like, “I'm now obsessed with this framework. Hey, boss, can we use this? And it's like, “No! That framework is experimental and not reliable, and I want you to do the same old boring thing we've been doing for 30 years, because that is reliable.” And this is just a very hard thing. There's an excitement in the craft that a lot of software developers have that's not what the job requires.An interesting analogy between law and codingThat's a great analogy that I'd never heard or thought of before, which is that law needs to be patched the way that software needs to be patched. Because it's the same challenge, which is that [in] writing code and writing law, you're trying to create a system that other people are going to use. Humans are going to use it. And so you, the author of the law, or you, the author of the code, have to try sitting at your desk to imagine all the things that those dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions, or billions of humans will do with this system. And you can't. There's no way you can. So, you have to just put it out there and watch and see what they do, and then fix it as it goes, basically. And, of course, the more critical the system, or the less critical system, the more or less you can get away with.The mental character of coding is closer to that of an artist than it is to many other forms of engineering.Coders hate being interrupted, and that's part of why they're regarded as being such irascible weirdos. [It] is like, if you tap them on the shoulder, they'll bite you.There's something delightful about that mentality of focus. There's something maybe even [to] be learned from it. It's one of the reasons why I realized the more I talked to coders about their attentional needs, and the sweep and drama, and a sort of, epic mental toil, that it reminded me of novelists, of artists, of poets, of temperament. The mental character of coding is closer to that of an artist than it is to many other forms of engineering.

What more can be learned about a topic like the origins of economic growth that has been covered so extensively? When pulling back and looking at all the connected threads, is there an order in which things must happen to spark the change?Mark Koyama is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Research Associate at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), and Mercatus Center, Senior Scholar. He is also the co-author of two books, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth and Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom.Greg and Mark discuss the recurring interest in the origins of economic growth and the Industrial Revolution. Mark lays out the various theories and factors that have shaped economic development across different regions and historical periods, such as geography, demography, culture, institutions, and political conditions. Greg asks why some regions like Europe succeeded in industrialization while others did not, and the role of colonialism in shaping global economic dynamics. Mark also offers insights into the ongoing relevance of economic history in understanding contemporary growth and innovation.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Walt RostowDaron AcemogluDemographyMalthusianismReformed ChristianityDouglass NorthMughal EmpirePaul A. DavidGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at George Mason UniversityMercatus Center ProfileSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageHow the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic GrowthPersecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious FreedomNewsletter | MarkKoyama.comGoogle Scholar PageEpisode Quotes:The overlooked challenge of sustaining economic growth04:45: Once you think about growth, it's hard to think about anything else. It's a question, I think, both for rich countries, which are stagnating. So, I mean, for the US in my view, but if you think about Germany or the UK, these are pretty stagnant economies right now. And so I think these are, you know, it's not just a "Oh, we've had this revolution. Now we can sit on this, wealth gradient.." No, this is an ongoing problem, and I think policymakers in most countries have totally neglected issues of growth. They've focused on all these other issues, which we think are important, and we might say we care about growth, but we really don't act like it. And, similarly, there's a need in developing countries, obviously, to sustain growth. Both the poorest countries in the world, but also middle-income countries, which can stagnate and fall into what's called a middle-income trap.Geography's impact on economic hubs13:55: Geography still has this massive role, basically, even today, in the where, like the location, which locations are going to be economic hubs. But obviously, you can't explain the why, so it's going to be insufficient on its own, but it could be interacting with other factors.On markets and creative destruction42:06: You need markets, which are flexible and adaptable, so they can be disrupted by new technologies and entrepreneurs. Other people will have a more statist perspective. They'll think that you need, maybe, the state to do more on basic science, right? Maybe more even on actual innovation to support this. But I tend to think that you need these market institutions, basically, and they need to be sufficiently vibrant.

We learn the skill of talking as toddlers and by the time we're adults, most of us don't think twice about the inner workings of a conversation. But the reality is, there's a science and an art to conversing. And understanding that science could unlock so much potential in your professional and personal life. Alison Wood Brooks is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of the book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. She also teaches a cutting-edge course at Harvard called Talk where she helps students hone their conversational skills. Alison and Greg talk about talking, including why this critical skill should be incorporated into more school curriculums, the complexities of effective communication, and the importance of small talk. Alison also offers tips for enhancing your conversation skills, whether in personal relationships or professional settings. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Alex PentlandJeffrey Pfeffer | Pfeffer on Power podcast“Risky business: When humor increases and decreases status” by Alison Wood Brooks, T. Bradford Bitterly, and Maurice SchweitzerNicholas Epley | unSILOed GongGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Business SchoolProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on InstagramHer Work:Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being OurselvesEpisode Quotes:Why aren't people experts at communication?01:59: Language acquisition starts very early in our lives, and we spend almost all day long, every day of our lives, practicing it. And so we get to adulthood, and we feel like we should be experts at it, that we should be really great at it. And yet, as we all know, based on our own ruminations about our own lives, and from our observations of others, we are far from perfect at communication. And the reason that we're not experts at it is because, when you look under the hood, conversation is a lot more complicated and tricky than it first appears, and it takes some rummaging under the hood to understand what's really going on here and why aren't we—why aren't we perfect at it?What makes a successful conversation12:12: A successful conversation is about the combination of prep—what you do ahead of time—and then how well you improvise once you're there. It's the combination of preparation and flexibility.Small talk is the start not the destination in every conversation18:01: Small talk is a very important social ritual. You have to do it. You have to start somewhere, especially with strangers and people you haven't seen in a long time. You gotta start with, like, how are you? Like, what's going on? How are you? It'd be weird not to. The mistake that people make is staying there too long, not finding those off-ramps to move up the pyramid to something more meaningful and interesting.The challenge of explicit goals in conversations10:49: Often, we don't know what we want, and it might emerge as the conversation goes on or as a relationship proceeds. So that's a big problem, right? Like, we just can't possibly anticipate all of the many things that we might want. The second challenge is by making our goals explicit. Like, if we were to say all the things out loud, it would undermine much of the magic that we're actually looking for. We want a conversation to feel almost magical. [11:27]  We want to get there and do the thing without having to say out loud what our goals are. And the things that go unsaid in a conversation really matter. If we were to make everything explicit, a lot of that delight would disappear.