Podcasts about university fm

How did a teenage video game designer from London become a Nobel Prize-winning scientist behind one of the most consequential technology efforts in history? Sebastian Mallaby is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the new book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence which provides an in-depth look into one of the greatest minds behind artificial general intelligence. In this episode, Sebastian and Greg discuss how Hassabis's early immersion in game design and neuroscience shaped his unique approach to artificial intelligence, why groundbreaking science is increasingly happening outside academia, and the tension between scientific discovery and corporate strategy.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why AI is becoming an ‘infinity machine' 03:01: It struck me that two breakthroughs in AI pointed to more to come. And these were AlphaGo and then AlphaFold. And what these two things had in common was—you had a sort of massive combinatorial space in both cases. So with Go, because it's a nineteen-by-nineteen board, the very first move, there's three hundred and sixty-one choices, then there's three-sixty for the second one. If you multiply that out, you pretty soon get to a search space which is sort of, you know, approaching infinity in terms of the number of possible permutations in the game. And with proteins, the way they can fold is even bigger. And so in both of these challenges, effectively, you have a machine that can make sense of near infinity of data, so an infinity machine. And once you have that, I figured, well, it's niche for the moment, but it may not stay niche forever. The “Third Way” that helped Google overcome the innovator's dilemma 44:06: The third way is you have a skunkworks, like DeepMind in London, which is a separate entity, and you're letting them kind of be the new policy in waiting, like the fightback policy in waiting. And you don't activate it. But when the moment comes when your competitor embraces the new technology, and you're in danger of falling foul of the innovator's dilemma, then you've got the answer because you've been keeping it ready, and you bring it in, and then you fight back fast. How DeepMind helped Google catch up in the AI race 42:54: How did they, in the space of two and a half years, go from the merger announcement to Gemini 3.0, which was better than the ChatGPT rivals? The key to it is that DeepMind had that top-down strike-team methodology, which came from the video game development world, and they imposed that on the Mountain View team, which was much more bottom-up and kind of inchoate in the research process. And that's what generated Gemini 3.0. That's how they got ahead. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Sebastian Mallaby | unSILOed AlphaGo AlphaFold Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter Geoffrey Hinton Mustafa Suleyman Guest Profile: Senior Fellow Profile at Council on Foreign Relations Professional Profile on LinkedIn Guest Work: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence  The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future  More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite  The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jo Marchant is a science journalist and podcast host, and also the author of several books. Her latest works include In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment and Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body. Greg and Jo discuss the shared threads across her work: a long view of the history of thought and the mind–body relationship. Jo explains how physics and neuroscience challenge a single objective “now,” describing perception as an active predictive process shaped by past experience and expectations, with examples from illusions and sensory priming. They discuss predictive coding, placebo effects, psychoneuroimmunology, anxiety as attention-weighted error monitoring, and how mindfulness and awe can rebalance attention and reduce stress. Jo also contrasts flow with mindfulness, explores choking and depersonalization-derealization as over-attention to self, and critiques medicine's structural barriers to integrating context and meaning.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why once you hear it, you can't unhear it 14:49: There are other times when we can consciously override things where, for example, if you hear, I don't know, a record being played backwards or something, and it might not, you know, sound like anything, and you're told that actually there's a satanic message hidden within the sound, and you see written down a transcript of what the voice is meant to be saying. So you're listening for it, and so that's adjusting the filtering that your brain's doing. And so it will sort of tune down some things, tune up other things, and then suddenly the voice pops out and you hear it clear as day, and you think, “How on earth did I not hear it before?” You can't unhear it. Perception is prediction 09:59: Everything that we perceive is being shaped by everything that we have perceived in the past and everything that we expect about the future. There's no differentiation between real physical pain and psychological pain. 22:20: There's no differentiation between real physical pain and psychological pain. It's all exactly the same pain. All of that pain or fatigue or whatever it is , is that integrated output of the brain taking everything into account that it knows, and then it's giving you this warning signal, and it's that sort of overall picture. And it's the exact same pain, whether that is purely coming from you've just broken your leg or something, or whether it's coming from a lifetime of stress and trauma that's telling you that you're in a really dangerous situation and something is wrong. The pain is going to feel just as real. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Heraclitus Placebo Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder (DPDR) Guest Profile: JoMarchant.com Wikipedia Page Social Profile on Instagram YouTube Channel Guest Work: Amazon Author Page In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body Decoding the Heavens The Shadow King: The Bizarre Afterlife of King Tut's Mummy Where The Wild Thoughts Are Podcast Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tom Rath is a researcher and #1 NYT bestselling author of 12 books. His latest works are How Full Is Your Bucket? And What's the Point? Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower. Greg and Tom discuss the broader arc of Tom's work, translating research on wellbeing, engagement, and strengths into practical tools. Tom describes shifting from self-improvement to “other-improvement,” using Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s question “What are you doing for others?” as a daily compass, and reframing purpose as an hour-by-hour “portfolio” rather than a single grand mission.  He contrasts purpose with passion, criticizes status and social-comparison traps, and argues that the responsibility for one's wellbeing largely rests with individuals because many employers and leaders model unhealthy, always-on habits themselves. Tom explains his concept of job/task/relationship/cognitive crafting, the primacy of relationships, and how AI increases the need to prioritize proactive, creative, human work over reactive tasks that are likely to be automated. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: What's the point of any given hour in your day? 13:57: What's the point of any given hour in your day, and is it doing something that serves other people, makes a contribution to the world? Or is it something that kind of winds you up and gets you charged so you can be at your best for other people? Kind of just asking, the point of that is even more important now than it was 12 months ago because, as I've studied this and gotten more into all of the tools that are available at our disposal with AI right now, the things that can be automated and just require responding instead of thinking about something and initiating or creating, those are the things that are going to be eliminated most rapidly. So my mindset on this has changed a little bit in the last six months, even to say I think everybody needs to be a little more critical and ask some of those questions because if you're doing something that just involves pulling together some numbers or responding to some emails, that's not sustainable anymore. Your strengths don't make a difference in isolation 50:31: The point of uncovering your natural talents or pathways is not so that you can go out there and beat your strengths into the world and tell everybody about your strengths. The point of it is so you can be more systematic about engineering how you apply those strengths to serve your clients and your customers and your community and the people around you because your strengths don't make a darn bit of difference in isolation. They kind of come to life in the context of a relationship and of a purpose. Can you make purpose more practical? 11:52: Telling people that they need to go find some big grand purpose at any stage in their life may do more harm than good because it produces a level of anxiety where you're thinking it's something larger than it really is that you need to find, or it's one big thing. Versus, as you get into the work, I've found that if you treat purpose like something you do on an hour-by-hour basis, and it's multiple touch points throughout a day, and it's a way to restructure what you do and reprioritize your daily routine, that you can make purpose into something practical. And when you're able to do that, your day is a little more rewarding. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Eudaimonia Donald O. Clifton Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Guest Profile: TomRath.org LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Profile Facebook Profile Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page How Full Is Your Bucket? What's the Point? Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower Strengths Finder 2.0 Strengths Based Leadership Life's Great Question: Discover How You Contribute To The World It's Not About You: A Brief Guide to a Meaningful Life Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

As we continue our hallmark tenth season of the Eccles Business Buzz podcast, host Frances Johnson sits down with Cameron Smith, Founder & CEO of Kindling Snacks, and Co-Founder of Kodiak Cakes. Cameron is also a graduate of the David Eccles School of Business with a BS in Business Administration.Cameron talks to Frances about his time at Kodiak Cakes, where he served as president (2019–2023) and helped expand the product line into multiple protein-forward and frozen categories. Cameron shares how it was college's structure that later helped him research, learn, and become well-rounded across business functions, and how he joined early-stage Kodiak without a clear long-term plan, but drawn by the people and the chance to work broadly. Cameron explains the balance between intuition and data, highlighting the successful launch of the protein “Power Cakes” at Target, and discusses building brand affinity beyond functional benefits. He also describes founding Kindling Snacks in May 2024, a better-for-you pretzel brand, and how they meet challenges like tariffs, finding space in stores and on shelves, and the importance of hunger, execution, and real effort.Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University.fm.Eccles Business Buzz is proud to be selected by FeedSpot as one of the Top 70 Business School podcasts on the web. Learn more at https://podcast.feedspot.com/us_business_school_podcasts. Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:Taking actions creates your own opportunity[27:05] What was so interesting is the organization that I was a part of at Kodiak with Joel allowed me to do that, allowed me to express those entrepreneurial feelings and mindsets in an already established business that I didn't have to start it, but I was able to disrupt it and innovate. And I think so many times people wait for... They wait for things to happen for them, and they wait for opportunities. And the reality is opportunities do happen for some people, but you have to make it happen.How curiosity fuels disruption[29:40] If you want to be disruptive, you've got to think like someone who is disruptive. The other night, we were driving home, this was so funny, we were driving home as a family, and it was raining, and my 9-year-old daughter, she just starts saying, "You know, Dad," because the windshield wipers were going, "Dad, I know this would cost a lot of money, but they should put, like, a roof over the road so that you don't have to, you know, essentially, like, use your windshield wipers." And is it practical? No. Could you do that across all of America? You couldn't do that, but what's happening is she's seeing the world in possibilities. I read something that our curiosity peaks at age, like, six, like three to five, three to six, which is so unfortunate that as we get older, we stop being curious. We stop having these ideas of, "What if you could put a ceiling above the road?" And, like, she's just thinking these ideas. And then so, like, we need to encourage that, encourage that in people on our teams, encourage that with people that we're around and our families, that curiosity, that observation. And I mean, imagine if you go with your family and you're just, you sit in a Starbucks, and you say, "Okay, what's inefficient about what they're doing? What could they do better? What would you do differently?" And you start to create these mindsets of, "How could we think differently? How could we disrupt?" And it just, like, that's how other things start to happen. Deliberate strategy vs Emergent strategy[21:04] Our deliberate strategy was whole grain pancake mixes, add water only. The emergent strategy was protein pancake mixes, and it started to grow. And so the data told us, "Hey, there was a market for this." So we started to launch new flavors, and it continued to grow to the point that today, as you look at Kodiak as a brand, most places that Kodiak goes into, there's protein in because that's what the brand has become known for. But that was an emergent strategy. That was not our deliberate strategy. And so I think part of that learning is you need to have a deliberate strategy, and you need to pay attention to the emergent strategies. And sometimes your emergent strategy can become your deliberate strategy, but you also don't want to just chase after emergent strategies because that's what some businesses do, and they never see. A strategy that's working because they're looking for the next thing that's going to emerge for a lot of different reasons.Show Links:Kindling Snacks | About UsCameron Smith | LinkedIn ProfileDavid Eccles School of Business (@ubusiness) | InstagramUndergraduate Scholars ProgramsRising Business LeadersEccles Alumni Network (@ecclesalumni) | Instagram Eccles Experience Magazine

Joanna Stalnaker is a professor of French at Columbia University and also the author of the books The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death and The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. Greg and Joanna discuss how Enlightenment figures faced death amid disbelief or tempered religious belief. Joanna says scholars have emphasized 18th-century death rituals more than philosophers' personal end-of-life writings, and she links her interest to growing up with atheist philosopher parents to her earlier work on Enlightenment description, and Rousseau's late writings.  Their conversation covers models like Socrates and Montaigne's, public scrutiny of deaths, last rites, and burial, and tensions between posterity and accepting oblivion. They discuss Hume's death and ambivalence about his reception, Diderot's Seneca-inspired reflections and critique of Rousseau's self-presentation, Voltaire's editing of Meslier and correspondence with Madame du Deffand, Buffon's gradual “ossification” view of dying, salons and letters' role in Enlightenment networks and women's participation, posthumous publication, and the value of literary form for understanding embodied philosophy and equanimity toward death. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: On publishing a book against transhumanism 07:19: I published the book [The Rest Is Silence] that, in a certain sense, it's kind of a book against transhumanism or all these attempts to sort of survive, whether it be through technology or whether it be through spreading one's genetic material by having as many babies as possible. There's this—I see, in our current moment, a kind of denial of death through those various phenomena. Sorates is a model of enlightened death  04:53: Socrates is a model in terms of how to die, what one might call an enlightened death; how to die a philosophical death; and how to face death in a courageous manner, in keeping with one's philosophy. And that was a preoccupation for both David Hume and Voltaire. They were very aware that the public was watching their deaths and that there was great interest in how they would die and whether they would recant their beliefs on their deathbeds. They were thinking back to this model of Socrates, I believe. Can you separate philosophy from the way it is written? 39:04: One of the things that I want to insist on in my work is the fact that we need to take literary form and genre and style into account because it's very difficult. The philosophical ideas cannot be extracted from their form, and I, in this particular book  [The Rest Is Silence], was interested in the question of embodiment because my book is really about them attempting, acknowledging their coming deaths but acknowledging that they lived as bodies, as mortal bodies, and attempting to find a way to express that in writing. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Stoicism Epicureanism Michel de Montaigne Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers by Carl L. Becker Denis Diderot David Hume Madame du Deffand Voltaire Boredom Adam Smith Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Columbia University Profile for the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dan Edelstein is a professor of French, history, and political science at Stanford University. He's also the author of several books on revolution and the Enlightenment, including The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin, Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality, Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, and The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Greg and Dan discuss the changing meaning of “revolution” as an idea rather than a catalog of revolts. Dan explains how Greeks distinguished violent upheaval (stasis) from regime change, how “revolution” entered political vocabulary via Polybius's rediscovered Book VI, and how fears of cyclical instability shaped mixed-constitution thinking from antiquity to the American founders.  They contrast pre-1789 “revolution” as restoration (including England's Glorious Revolution) with the French Revolution's progress-driven, consensus-seeking model that produces counterrevolution, factional purges, and a “Red Leviathan.” The discussion covers Enlightenment cultural uses of “revolution,” the ancients-vs-moderns debate and historical progress, differences between Anglo-American common-law rights and French state-centered reform, the tainted term in 1989, revolutionary “playbooks,” and how literary training and novels illuminate revolutionary psychology. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: From preserving order to accelerating history 12:42: Once this new-fangled idea of historical progress starts to get going in France in the 18th century, suddenly you can have a totally different vision of yourself. You're not just trying to prevent change and maintain the existing situation as long as you can. Suddenly, you might become an accelerator—you might become—and this is when the word "revolutionary" emerges in France, in 1789—you want to be on the right side of history. You want to be, you know, in favor of progress. And so I think that this new idea, both about history and about the role of revolutions in this sort of progressive vision of history, it really has huge effects on how people think about themselves, how they act, and ultimately how these historical revolutions from 1789 onward play out. Why ancient thinkers designed politics to prevent revolution 06:52: For people, even before Polybius, people like Plato and Aristotle, this did become the question of political thought. Like, how do you prevent a state from being ripped apart by division and just leading to this kind of destruction and death that accompanies revolutions? And this is where we get the idea of a well-balanced constitution. Protection vs. power  39:02: The English and the Americans, you know, there's just this deep skepticism towards the government. You want to really protect the individual from governmental encroachment. The French are almost coming to the revolution wanting to empower the government for good, like it's going to solve all our problems. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Age of Enlightenment Revolution Polybius Niccolò Machiavelli Voltaire Montesquieu John Adams Anacyclosis Vladimir Lenin Velvet Revolution Marquis de Condorcet Anne Robert Jacques Turgot Barebone's Parliament Millenarianism J. G. A. Pocock Norman Cohn Stefanos Geroulanos Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Stanford Profile at the Hoover Institution Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin On the Spirit of Rights Networks of Enlightenment: Digital Approaches to the Republic of Letters Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions The Enlightenment: A Genealogy The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much Yale French Studies, Number 111: Myth and Modernity Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Following an upbringing as an expat in Jakarta, Indonesia, today's guest is applying his unique worldview to the management consulting industry and helping clients solve complex business challenges with digital solutions. David Aldrich, a Rice Business alum from the Professional MBA Class of 2015, serves on the Rice Business Alumni Association Board and is a practice lead at EPAM Systems, a management consulting firm where he focuses on energy and AI. David joins co-host Brian Jackson '21 to discuss his journey of growing up abroad and how the Rice MBA helped him pivot into consulting. They also explore how AI is reshaping the consulting industry and how Rice Business became not just his alma mater, but a lifelong community and support system. Episode Guide:00:00 Meet David Aldrich02:00 Growing up in Jakarta05:27 Landing in a Philosophy Major07:38 Venturing Into Startup Sales at FlightAware12:00 Pivoting to Consulting Through a Rice Professional MBA18:09 Life at EPAM Systems21:47 Finding Digital Solutions for Clients Through AI28:55 What Makes a Good Consultant31:36 The Ukraine War's Impact on EPAM37:09 Life Outside of Work39:38 Giving Back to Rice41:12 Alumni Breakfast Series42:59 Future of AI Consulting46:39 ClosingThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:An advice for students who want to get into consulting17:12: My advice to students that want to go into consulting is you need to get really good at the AI piece, right? Study right now and get proficient with tools like Anthropic, tools like, you know, ChatGPT's Codex, tools like, you know, Gemini's Nano Banana, and, like, PaperBanana, the new one that they just announced. You have to be proficient in this space and be certified in this space, too. Like, Claude just announced a certification program. You can go get certified as, like, an Anthropic Claude architect. It's free. You can do it. Like, these are things that I think you need to have on your resume to position yourself for value, regardless of what strategy you take. If you want to go into strategy consulting or Big Four or technology, having those new skills on how to create agent capabilities for clients is going to be the table stakes to separating yourself from, I think, other people who are also looking to go into consulting.Adapting to AI with caution26:15: I don't think you should stop AI adoption because of that potential, but I think it's important to understand that there's things that you can do right now to enhance productivity by using these tool sets. There's other things that require, I think, a little bit more due diligence, and is it the right decision to completely re-architect the way we work with agents? Because what's good for Anthropic and how they might not be the best thing for your company long term.What makes a good consultant29:10: A good consultant is not afraid to ask questions, to push clients, and, kind of, challenge thinking. I think there's an art to being able to do that without offending and pissing clients off, and understanding when you have the opportunity to, kind of, push hard to get clients thinking in a different way. I think the other key part is being able to be hungry for any opportunity and not scared to learn any new topic, right? Because the nature of consulting is that you're being thrown into a bunch of different businesses, and no matter how much you've worked in a specific industry or at, like, businesses, there's always going to be something new that they're doing, whether it's from a technology that they're using, a process that they're following, the nomenclature that they're using.Show Links: Learn more about EPAMTranscriptGuest Profile:David Aldrich | Rice BusinessDavid Aldrich | LinkedIn

 How should academic discourse take place? Is it time to update the antiquated journal system?  In the season finale, hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen tackle the problems present in the current system for disseminating academic research, including how digital distribution has eliminated effective curation while peer review remains slow, incentive-misaligned, and dominated by anonymous referees seeking to impress editors. Together, they explain the inner-workings of the academic journal system and the problems with peer review. Jonathan also shares details about his new website, launched with fellow researchers, that provides a place for rigorous informed discourse.  Find All Else Equal on the web:  https://lauder.wharton.upenn.edu/allelse/ All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions Podcast is a production of the UPenn Wharton Lauder Institute through University FM. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How much is on us, as individuals, to fix the world's great problems? Do initiatives like encouraging homeowners to switch to green energy really move the needle in the battle against climate change? After decades of these types of strategies, it turns out that needle hasn't moved much.  Nick Chater is a professor of behavioral science at Warwick Business School and author. His latest book, co-authored with George Loewenstein, is It's on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We're to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems.  Nick and Greg discuss individual frameworks vs. systemic frameworks employed to solve large social problems, why misunderstanding multiple casualties can hinder solutions, and how behavioral insights should be used to design and build support for systemic policies (e.g., carbon taxes, congestion charges) rather than marginal tweaks. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The two ways of seeing dilemma 05:07: I think our natural instinct, and this is sort of a basic fact of human psychology, is that we see things either as individual-level problems or as societal-level problems. So it's just a general point that we can't really see things in two ways at once. For example, if we take something like the increasing levels of obesity in the U.S. and the U.K., lots of countries around the world, it's very difficult for us to quite manage the psychology of thinking. Oh, at an individual level, say for me or my family, the interventions that might be appropriate are individual-level things. So I might think, oh, I want to just eat slightly different foods and slightly different amounts of them and exercise a bit more, and so on. And if I'm thinking about it like that, it's very hard to simultaneously think, oh, hang on. But that individual-level story can't really explain why obesity has risen so substantially over the last few decades. On weaponizing personal responsibility 29:27: If you want to stop your voters and the general public from worrying about these s-frame systemic rule-change things, a really good idea is to focus them on the i-frame. Say, well, wow, this problem is a problem, and it's a problem for individuals. So we need to individually worry about it. And once you're worrying about it individually, then suddenly you've forgotten about the s-frame. You suddenly think, "Oh, I might. I should reduce my carbon, and so should everybody else." In fact, now I can start to blame myself. I can blame my neighbors. Why marginal tweaks won't fix broken systems 17:51: I've had the experience many times of sitting brainstorming with teams of people where our objective is to think of something to solve, you know, let's improve, let's make accident care, an emergency or ER, I guess, in the US, how to make that, you know, safer and work better. Or how are we going to, are we going to, you know, get people to take more exercise, or whatever the issue is. And we're supposed to be brainstorming these sorts of little nuggets, these little changes, which we are going to hope to roll out. And it just always felt like just a really, you know, the solutions one came up felt incredibly feeble in relation to the scale of the problem. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Nick Chater | unSILOed Nudge Unit  Regulation for Conservatives: Behavioral Economics and the Case for “Asymmetric Paternalism" David Laibson George Stigler Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Warwick Business School Professional Profile on LinkedIn Dectech company website Guest Work: It's on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We're to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

N. Katherine Hayles is a professor of English at UCLA and Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is also the author of a number of books on consciousness and AI. Her latest book is titled Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts. Greg and Katherine discuss technics - recursive feedback loops in which humans and tools co-evolve. Katherine argues that cognitive technologies and AI intensify this process, so we design them while they also design us. She distinguishes cognition from consciousness, emphasizing fast nonconscious neuronal processing and defining cognition as interpreting information in context with meaning, operationalized by SIRAL (sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, learning).  Katherine claims plants and bacteria meet these criteria, while physical processes are agents without choices; cognitive systems are actors that select and adapt. She applies this to computation, treating deterministic mechanisms as noncognitive but viewing modern systems and LLMs as cognitive, discussing aboutness via biosemiotics and LLMs' “conceptual environment.” *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Are humans and AI evolving toward each other? 07:29: So we can chart the evolution of humans and cognitive computational media in just this fashion. So humans start by being immersed in their environment. They could not survive otherwise. And then humans evolve up to abstraction. Computers start with abstraction, and now, with sensors and actuators and networking, they evolve toward immersion. So humans start with purpose. Their purpose is to survive. That's true of all biological organisms. And then they evolve up to design. Computers start with design. But now, with AI, they seem to be evolving toward purpose, which is the same as biological purpose, to survive.  Consciousness is based on selfhood and self-narration 10:27: Consciousness is based on selfhood and self-narration. The stories we all tell ourselves every moment of every day about who we are and what we're doing, and that consciousness frequently lies. We know that eyewitness reports, for example, are often very untrustworthy because people just perceive what consciousness wants them to perceive. And often that is not accurate. One of the primary purposes of consciousness is to make the world make sense. When highly unusual phenomena happen, consciousness just edits it out. AI can now see humans from the outside 37:23: So we're using our projective capabilities to imaginatively construct an umwelt and then seeing what that would mean for our existence, our sense of meaning or whatever. But we're always doing that from the outside. We're never inside anything but the human umwelt. Now we have a technology in large language models that is capable of seeing the human umwelt from the outside and telling us about it. That has never happened before. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Bernard Stiegler Inclusive fitness Chiasmus Consciousness Daniel Dennett John Searle Stochastic parrot Biosemiotics Umwelt Symbiosis Context window LLM Terrence Deacon Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at UCLA Faculty Profile at Duke Wikipedia Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary Writing Machines Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Continuing the excitement of the Eccles Business Buzz podcast's tenth season, host Frances Johnson talks with Clark Ivory, CEO of Ivory Homes, Utah's Number One Homebuilder since 1988. Clark will also be inducted into the David Eccles School of Business Hall of Fame this spring.The Ivory companies have built more than 25,000 homes and 4,000 apartments. Clark has also held civic leadership roles and helped launch efforts including the Utah Impact Partnership, Utah Preservation Fund, and Utah Community Builders. He and his wife Christine have funded 4,000+ scholarships, established the Ivory University House (housing 623 students with proceeds supporting scholarships, internships, and stipends), and cofounded Ivory Innovations with their daughter Abby to address housing challenges via the Ivory Prize and affordable housing projects. Clark links education—especially literacy, citing only 50% of Utah third graders currently reading at grade level—to upward mobility, homelessness, and workforce needs. He also outlines his vision-goals-plan-accountability “success formula;” and emphasizes resilience, principles, and incremental growth through setbacks and market uncertainty.Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University.fm.Eccles Business Buzz is proud to be selected by FeedSpot as one of the Top 70 Business School podcasts on the web. Learn more at https://podcast.feedspot.com/us_business_school_podcasts. Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:How to develop communities through a business lens without losing sight of people's needs[31:24] The thing I love about Utah is that there are so many people that are willing to work together to solve problems and to come up with solutions. It's just so nice to be able to get together, collaborate, bring all the resources to bear, get the Gardner Institute looking at things critically, coming up with a new approach to governance for the state, which we did, and then nominating the right people to help lead out. And I think we're actually going to make some headway with homelessness. There's a lot of people contributing, but it's amazing how we've been able to get a much higher level of expertise in understanding the challenge and what can have a long-term impact that will actually move the needle instead of just throwing money at a problem or, you know, not ever measuring outcomes or understanding that we have to maybe re-look at the entire system and what's broken.What the Ivory success formula means to Clark [15:40] I just had opportunity after opportunity to do little things, and I had this view and this vision that I could become something. And I had this idea that maybe someday I'd go to a really top-notch business school. And that's the vision.And you always need to have a longer-term vision. And then if you do, it's easier to focus on goals that are one year or five year, and then you work harder to achieve your plans that you put together. So, that's been a process that I've shared with every organization I've been in and with all of my Ivory team members. And I ask them to share their success formula every year. And I always tell them, you know, "If you don't like my success formula, don't use it, but have your own." And the important thing is that you do have a great big vision of where you want to go, and then you aren't afraid to set goals. I always told all my kids, "It's always important to have goals, but you can change them anytime you want when they don't make sense, because circumstances change." You have to be able to be resilient and still be positive and say, "Okay, this has been ruled out, but now what is my goal? How am I going to adapt? What am I going to do differently?" And so, this has become part of our ethos at Ivory Homes and with Ivory Innovations and every organization I'm working with.How Clark views affordable housing as key to economic growth [36:57] If we can create great neighborhoods that really have a lot of people prospering, you know, people are so much more likely to graduate from high school, go on to college, have higher incomes, et cetera. And some of the zip codes and neighborhoods in the state are more challenged. And I love the fact that the University of Utah is really investing in the west side of the valley now, with this new hospital project that's going to get started soon. And we've also looked at neighborhoods out there and where we can really make a difference. I think we, like you have said earlier, we have to look a little bit earlier in the process of, you know, an individual's growth. And the earlier we can help them, the better. And then, of course, they're likely to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of life if they do get off to the right start. We're not going to be able to do it everywhere as a state, or we are not going to be able to do it in our own communities, but we all need to be heading in that direction.Show Links:Clark Ivory | LinkedInIvory Homes | WebsiteIvory Foundation | WebsiteClark Ivory encourages Rising Business Leaders to be driven by principles and impact | ArticleDavid Eccles School of Business (@ubusiness) | InstagramUndergraduate Scholars ProgramsRising Business LeadersEccles Alumni Network (@ecclesalumni) | Instagram Eccles Experience Magazine

Iain McGilchrist is a former fellow at Oxford University and the author of a few books, including Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, and The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Greg and Iain discuss Iain's work on hemispheric differences in the brain, especially in The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. Iain argues the left and right hemispheres embody distinct modes of attention—narrow, acquisitive focus versus broad, open vigilance—and that how we attend changes what we perceive. He rejects pop-psychology stereotypes and contends the right hemisphere “sees more” and should guide the left, which is useful but prone to delusion when dominant.  Iain traces three Western cycles where early cultural flourishing gives way to left-hemisphere domination and civilizational decline, linking this to bureaucracy, organizational “exploit” drift, and modern metrics-driven thinking. They also discuss metaphor's centrality to science, AI's limits, mental-health decline, internet-driven polarization, and reforms to universities to revive the humanities alongside science. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Imagination needs a maintenance of open attention 17:57: See, imagination is misunderstood. It's not about brainstorming and writing down every silly thing that comes into your head. Imagination is about seeing something below the level that is immediately accessible to the conscious mind and listening to that and responding to it, and pursuing it, and allowing something to grow. Now, that requires patience, time, and a continuing maintenance of open attention. Once it gets closed down, you've lost it. So that's one reason that it won't work. And the other is that if you've got too many people involved in the bureaucratic side, that's not going to work well either. There are specializations, and take the hint from nature. They are so different that they do need to be kept distinct if you're going to survive. Your attention shapes your reality 40:05: It is certainly true that there is a constant dialogue between our minds and the world. The world influences the mind and the brain, and the mind and the brain, having been influenced, in turn influence the world around us. So we can get locked into a vicious cycle in which we see things in a certain limited way, and we think that's all that there is. And so that feeds back to that being the only right way to think. Science is based on nothing but metaphors 30:32: Science is based on nothing but metaphors. It is entirely metaphorical. And that's not a mistake or a problem, because it can't avoid—I mean—the alternative would be to say nothing. But it has to say it's like this. And metaphor is saying this thing can be understood by likening it to something else. And the problem is that scientists don't realize that they're using metaphors and that their metaphors both dictate what it is they can see and how they see what it is that they do see. So, models, which science can't work without, are simply elaborated metaphors. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Postmodernism Exploration–exploitation dilemma Lateralization of brain function Dunning–Kruger effect Antonio Damasio G. K. Chesterton Daniel Kahneman Logos Mythos V. S. Ramachandran Theory of mind Friedrich Nietzsche Heraclitus Renaissance Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at All Souls College | University of Oxford LinkedIn Profile Professional Website Wikipedia Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World TED Talk: The Divided Brain Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Susan Wise Bauer is a prolific author, former instructor at the College of William and Mary, and classical education expert. Her books include, The History of the World series, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education, and most recently, The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy. Susan and Greg discuss the mismatches between institutional schooling and how kids learn, the historical context in which the U.S. education system was created, and practices for cultivating deeper learning, whether it be in a homeschool environment or reading for enjoyment. They also dive into Susan's latest book, The Great Shadow, and explore how historical experiences of sickness have shaped daily life, persistent health beliefs, and current tensions between vaccines and wellness rhetoric. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The education system mismatch 04:49: The thing about this system is it actually worked really, really well. It did what it was supposed to do for over a hundred years, which was assimilate immigrant children, teach them how to speak English, teach them how to read, teach them how to write, teach them civic virtues, teach them the Pledge of Allegiance, all of these American things. The problem is that, you know, a hundred, 150 years on, 200 years on, that regimented system simply doesn't suit a good number of the students who are sort of marshaled into it and run through it anymore than every 18-year-old would do well in Army basic training. Some of them would do great, but some of them, it's just not going to fit. And that's the challenge that we now face with our current K-12 system. Books makes us human 25:26: If we lose books, we are going to lose part of what makes us human and what has made us human since the invention of writing. We're going to lose a huge element of our evolution as people if we lose books. We need to create space where reading is just for fun 32:22: So I do see parents wanting to push kids into harder reading too early, without them realizing that if they want kids to enjoy books, then they have got to make a space in the kid's life to read things that are too easy, because that's when we enjoy ourselves—when we're doing something that is not straining every mental muscle that we have. So we do need to create also this space where reading is just for fun. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Montessori education Mortimer J. Adler  Spontaneous generation Wishbone (TV series)  Miasma theory Guest Profile: Professional Website Profile on Instagram Guest Work: The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy  The History of the World Series  The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had  The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home  Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How can economic science help you decide which college to attend, or how many children to have, or even who to marry?  Pablo A. Peña is an associate instructional professor of economics at the University of Chicago and the author of Human Capital for Humans: An Accessible Introduction to the Economic Science of People. In the book, he applies economist Gary Becker's human capital theory to everyday things like parenting, housework, marriage, and aging.  Pablo and Greg discuss why human capital has long been an overlooked field in economics, how it shows up in household production, parenting tradeoffs between time and money, fertility's quantity vs. quality tradeoff, and how AI could be shifting valuable human capital skills toward critical thinking, creativity, and adaptability. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Firms, households and human capital 25:43: Households are like little firms, but they don't produce stuff that they sell in the market. They produce experiences that they themselves consume. So if you think about it, it's very complicated to have all the members of a family sitting at the same time, right, to have a meal that must be nicely served at that specific point, maybe listening to nice music, maybe it's complicated. The efficient thing to do will be everybody fend for themselves in whatever you can, whenever you can. But no, we want that 'cause it's the experience that we produce. Now you need a CEO and a COO and whatever in a household because you want these things to happen. Somebody has to organize the production processes, production of experiences. Human capital helps in that process. So the more human capital a person or multiple people in a household have, the better that production process can occur, the more productive they can be. Human capital vs. other forms of capital 10:08: Human capital can be developed, its formation responds to incentives, it appreciates, and so on. And because of its asymmetries with other forms of capital, we typically think there may be a problem of underinvestment. That is, for instance, a very consequential difference when we think human capital versus other forms of capital. Why investing in yourself is fundamentally different 10:48: If I go to the bank and I say, "Hey, I want to get more skills. I want to learn how to do this or that, and I'm going to leave you my brain as collateral, or you can possess it." Obviously, that's not something that can happen. So that means there's an asymmetry, and you and I at this stage upon lives, and I assume we're not that different in terms of age, but when we are, say, late teens or maybe twenties, we may have had that idea if I only could get the money to invest itself. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Gary Becker  Simon Kuznets Adam Smith Sam Walton Thomas Robert Malthus Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at University of Chicago Professional Website Professional Profile on LinkedIn Guest Work: Human Capital for Humans: An Accessible Introduction to the Economic Science of People Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Yan "Anthea" Zhang, the Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Chair of Strategic Management at Rice Business, has spent more than two decades researching the decisions that make or break organizations: CEO succession, corporate governance, and the gender dynamics shaping who rises to the top.On this special live episode, Zhang joins host Maya Pomroy '22 to share what her research reveals about the leap from functional roles to the C-suite, and why taking risks is non-negotiable for career advancement (especially for women). She also opens up about her origin story — from being part of the first-ever cohort at Nanjing University's business school to building a life and career in Houston — and why, after 25 years, Rice still feels like home.Plus: her latest research on AI-powered customer service, advice from her "Last Lecture" and how Rice Business Executive Education's Executive Leadership for Women program is giving women the tools and community to rise.Episode Guide:00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro03:19 Professor Zhang's Origin Story05:09 Hong Kong and USC07:46 Why Rice Feels Different12:32 CEO Succession Insights17:45 Executive Leadership for Women Program19:04 Challenges Women Still Face24:54 Teaching Global Strategy30:06 Managing Uncertainty & Frameworks For Risk36:25 How AI is Transforming Online Sales38:47 Advice to Students The Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:On creating a safe space for women to grow in the workplace19:58: For people who want to move up the career ladder, we need mentors. But a lot of times, people in more senior positions are still men, right? So, that's why both male and female mentors are all important. Because there are still so few women in senior leadership positions, right? That's why if you only rely on more senior female leaders to champion for you, to mentor you, that's not sufficient. You really need mentoring from both male and female leaders. So, I think that is why one benefit of our program is that we really target women who already have some leadership experiences. We create a safe space for them to share their concerns, challenges, and also allow them to share best practices with each other in a safe space. So, we really needed that.Why asking is important for women17:15: [Anthea Zhang] Dare to ask, dare to take risks, dare to get into areas, functions you are not comfortable with, you are not familiar with, which are those factors that are really key. And you have to show your track record instead of saying, "I want to," having a plan or having ambition is not sufficient. You have to show the track record.Higher leadership role means greater responsibility14:35: For people who already made it to top management team positions but still focus on more function-based roles, if you want to make it to the overall leadership role like a CEO, you have to take profit and loss responsibility. You have to expand the responsibility of your position. You know, of course, we see some people transition from CFO to CEO, but what is required for a CEO position is way more, it is way broader than, like, the CFO or chief marketing officer. Show Links: Executive Leadership for Women | Rice BusinessEnergy Transition Strategy | Rice BusinessExecutive Education | Rice BusinessTranscriptGuest Profile:Professor Yan "Anthea" Zhang | Rice BusinessLinkedIn Profile

This week, we're revisiting our ever-timely and fascinating conversation around misinformation with London Business School professor Alex Edmans. All Else Equal will be back with a new episode in two weeks.  What is the real problem with misinformation? Are our biases so ingrained in us that we are unable to think critically about the world and the systems around us? What happens when large institutions attempt to push a heterodox narrative? Do we simply need more education to overcome misinformation, or do we need something much deeper—to learn to think critically again? In this episode, hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen welcome Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at London Business School to discuss his latest book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It.   Find All Else Equal on the web:  https://lauder.wharton.upenn.edu/allelse/ All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions Podcast is a production of the UPenn Wharton Lauder Institute through University FM. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Steve H. Hanke is a Professor of Applied Economics and Founder and Co-Director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University in the Whiting School of Engineering. He is also the author and co-author of several books on economics. His latest title is called Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System. Greg and Steve discuss why macroeconomics sidelines banks and money creation. Steve argues macro should rest on the Quantity Theory of Money and Capital Theory, including “waiting” as a factor of production with interest as its price, and criticizes the profession for abandoning these foundations. He contrasts GDP with gross output and links Fisher's MV=PT to intermediate transactions, then explains why commercial banks create money via lending while investment banks intermediate savings, and why regulation (capital and reserves) matters more than the federal funds rate. Steve critiques universal banking for siphoning capacity from deposit-taking lending, faults the Fed for ignoring broad money measures, discusses Divisia aggregates and Volcker-era measurement errors, and applies quantity theory to post-COVID inflation. Hanke also summarizes his meta-analysis finding that lockdowns saved few lives, describes censorship and publication hurdles, reflects on theory-empirics and the disappearance of the history of thought, and recounts policy, currency board, and trading experiences. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: On the failure to distinguish between market intermediation and bank intermediation 19:30: Most people think that banks intermediate savings, and that's not really what banks do. Investment banks do that, and other financial institutions do that. But if you have a pool of savings, that goes through investment banking and not commercial deposit-taking banking...[19:59] Let's make it very simple—the savings end up at investment banks, and they go into bankable projects. The savings are intermediated; that's how it goes. It doesn't go through a commercial bank, basically. So what do commercial banks do? They fund bankable projects, but they do it by creating money out of thin air. The beauty of the fractional reserve banking system is just that. ​​The two key legs macroeconomics stands on 08:09: It's capital theory and the quantity theory of money. Those are the two key legs that macroeconomics stands on. And those two legs, by the way, they basically aren't taught in economics today. For the last 30 years, the economics profession has basically spent full time destroying macroeconomics, in my view. The quantity theory of money, in simple terms 31:29: The quantity theory of money, in simple terms, is you change the quantity theory of money significantly, and with a lag asset prices will change. And then, with a little longer lag, real economic activity will change. And then, with a longer lag of maybe 12 to 24 months, inflation will change. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Macroeconomics Quantity theory of money Capital (economics) Federal Reserve Friedrich Hayek John Maynard Keynes Leland B. Yeager John Hicks Mark Skousen Irving Fisher Federal funds rate Milton Friedman Paul Volcker Jonas Herby Google Scholar Page Spanish flu Kenneth Boulding Currency board Geoeconomics Jay Bhattacharya - Lockdowns and Lessons: The Pandemic Retrospective | UnSILOed Ep 427 Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Profile Profile for the Mises Institute Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System Capital, Interest, and Waiting: Controversies, Puzzles, and New Additions to Capital Theory Russian Currency and Finance: A Currency Board Approach to Reform Currency Boards for Developing Countries: A Handbook Monetary reform for a free Estonia: A currency board solution Fortune Articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if reducing screen time or eating less processed food didn't feel like deprivation, but rather it was the key to unlocking more joy and excitement in our lives?  Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD, is a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk, where she reports on mental health, nutrition, psychology and neuroscience. She's also the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans and her latest, Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child's Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods.  Greg and Michaeleen discuss how many products are engineered to create bottomless, non-closure experiences that leave users feeling drained. They also unpack how the dopamine system in our brains really works, and go over practical tips to reduce reliance on screens and ultraprocessed foods that lead to happier, more fulfilling lives.   *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why more desire doesn't mean more satisfaction 09:09: Here's the thing: pleasure. And this is how the system is supposed to work, right? Dopamine triggers desire, wanting, motivation, willingness to work. A lot of scientists will tell you its willingness to work, right? How hard an animal will work for something. And this makes us go, want, desire, want more, want more, want more. But when you actually trigger the pleasure center, the hedonic hotspots, as they're called, you stop wanting, you feel satisfied, you feel you're done. What if parenting isn't about taking things away? 04:14: Dopamine Kids is really about creating a culture where you're not just taking things from kids or taking things from your family, but you're actually inviting kids to discover better things in their lives. Why kids actually enjoy effort 19:17: What I think parents don't understand is it's pleasurable to work. Kids find it pleasurable to work, and they want to. And I'm not talking about doing things that they don't like and they hate, right? Or they feel really like they have to. But working on something that you are excited about and that you feel some sort of innate drive to do—this is very pleasurable for people, including children. And actually, that's the way the system is. The dopamine system is evolved to work, right? It triggers wanting, desire for something, and then working to get it. And then the pleasure comes after working and the satisfaction. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Hunt, Gather, Parent feat. Michaeleen Doucleff | unSILOed  Natasha Dow Schüll B. J. Fogg What You Have in Common With a Pigeon and Why It's Causing Problems for You by Michaeleen Doucleff | New York Times https://michaeleendoucleff.com/dopamine-kids-resources/   Guest Profile: Professional Website Correspondent Profile for NPR Guest Work: Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child's Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode of our hallmark tenth season of the Eccles Business Buzz podcast, host Frances Johnson sits down with Nicole and Peter Mouskondis, the CEO and Owner, respectively, of Nicholas and Company, a third-generation, family-owned-and-operated broadline foodservice distribution company in the Intermountain West. Nicole and Peter are also being recognized with the Distinguished Entrepreneur Award at this spring's David Eccles School of Business Hall of Fame event. Peter describes giving back through boards and the University of Utah after benefiting from mentors at key times, while Nicole reframes service as stewardship and servant leadership tied to community impact. They recount the immigrant journey of Nicholas and Company founder, Nicholas himself, the company's creative beginnings selling dented canned goods, and their eventual growth into broadline foodservice. Nicole explains the values behind “Nicholas and Company,” the shift from the PRIDE acronym to an MVP model, and the Greek ethos of “philotimo.” Peter and Nicole discuss entrepreneurial courage, sales lessons, major innovations like an ERP implementation, people-first leadership and empathy, COVID-era adaptation and food donations, the pressure of being the third generation of a family business, and a structured succession plan as their children enter the business as well.Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University.fm.Eccles Business Buzz is proud to be selected by FeedSpot as one of the Top 70 Business School podcasts on the web. Learn more at https://podcast.feedspot.com/us_business_school_podcasts. Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:The entrepreneurial grit behind Nicholas and Company's success[20:26] Peter Mouskondis: You know, I am a young man, Nicole and I had just gotten engaged. We had just put money down on our house. And I came home and said, you know, "My dad basically has fired me and said the last stop is on sales, and if you make it, that's great, and if you don't, go do something completely different." And, you know, that was scary. You find ways of becoming very creative, and I know at one time I actually slept in my car in Park City because I was waiting for the chefs to come in the next morning. I wanted to be right there when they came in. And so, you get really creative in the sense of what you're trained to either sell or how you portray yourself. And that was not only fruitful, I mean, in the end, you know, thank goodness I was successful there, but it was scary. And that's something I think any entrepreneurial person would go through starting a brand-new company like my grandfather.How changing the mission felt almost sacrilegious but was necessary for the future generations. [16:11] Nicole Mouskondis: We have this secret ingredient called philotimo. So, at every step of the way in that mission statement, there is an absolute nod to everything that is unique about us. Preserving our family recipe for success, the family recognizes that we're a family business. The recipe for success recognizes that we're in food service. And securing the dreams recognizes that this started with the American dream, this immigrant story of an American dream. And everybody has dreams for themselves, their future, their families, for all future generations. And that's really a nod to this fact that we are a legacy business. We intend to be here to stay for generations to come. That secret ingredient in the recipe for success is this Greek word called philotimo. And at the time, especially, nobody knew what that meant. Nobody knew what that was. There still is no single English translation for the word. So, we had to come up with our own definition and explain to people what it was. And in the Greek culture, it is this sense of honor, this love and honor, and this duty and obligation to one another to make things better, to right the wrongs, to do what's right simply because it's right. It's, kind of, all-encompassing, this aspiration. We're not perfect, but it's something that resonates with all of our stakeholders as something that we are trying to become every single day and trying to make that so that it's not just words on the wall, but that we live that aspiration.Why empathy is an important leadership tenet [31:05] Nicole Mouskondis: I think one of the most important leadership tenets ever is empathy. And so, if you can lead by, you know, really trying to put yourself in the shoes of someone else, I mean, at the end of the day, it all comes down to people. And so, when we have to make changes, we don't take those lightly because you're impacting and affecting somebody's world, somebody... It is personal to them. It's not just business to them if you have to make a change that, you know, they feel, like, is not a good change for them.Show Links:Nicholas and CompanyNicole Mouskondis | LinkedInHall of Fame | David Eccles School of BusinessDavid Eccles School of Business (@ubusiness) | InstagramUndergraduate Scholars ProgramsRising Business LeadersEccles Alumni Network (@ecclesalumni) | Instagram Eccles Experience Magazine

How has the new understanding of broken-windows theory helped to reinforce the importance of community ownership? How do built environments also transmit cultural messages? What does good workplace design actually look like? Leidy Klotz is a professor of engineering, architecture, and a behavioral scientist. He's also the author of three books: Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, Sustainability through Soccer: An Unexpected Approach to Saving Our World, and the latest, In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive. Greg and Leidy discuss Leidy's new book on how the spaces where people live, work, and play affect wellbeing, behavior, and thriving, and why research on the mind–environment intersection remains fragmented across psychology, engineering, architecture, and HR. They discuss habituation and inattention (people missing what should be easily noticeable features like a fire extinguisher or UVA's Memorial Gym), subconscious environmental impacts (noise stress, off-gassing), and the human need for agency through personalizing spaces, with examples from offices, nursing homes, refugee housing, and Mandela's prison garden.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why are humans designed to shape their surroundings 11:53: We talked before about, you know, kind of like these robust ideas from psychology, and one of the most robust is this need for agency, right? The need to have a say in our surroundings. And, you know, if you say, “Where does it come from?” The farthest back. It's like our ancestors roaming around without shelter were more likely to survive if they felt compelled to interact with their surroundings, to make their surroundings more habitable to themselves. Right? And so, if you thought about it, you were pulled psychologically to rear range things or to, you know, move things around to keep the weather away or to keep predators away, you were more likely to survive. And so, that need to interact with our surroundings, right? And now you can get that in a bunch of ways. You can get agency by going to a meeting, but it is still there in that kind of original interaction with our surroundings. Novelty vs. nostalgia 24:26: Novelty is never going to be more than at the beginning. And so, the things that you like about novelty are going to decrease. And then the things that you like about nostalgia are going to increase over time. And so, I think it's just something to really pay close attention to in our surroundings, because it's pretty easy to just go for the novelty. What is the IKEA effect? 13:34: So the IKEA effect is just exactly like it sounds, right, that people build something and that the value that they attribute to the thing is like the material value plus their labor value. So, it's certainly related, and I think the refugee housing is something that they just saw over and over through trial and error. Was that, when people had some say in the things that they built, they felt more ownership over it? So I'd say the IKEA effect is like you're assigning more value to it. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Environmental Psychology Method of Loci Ellen Langer IKEA Effect Habitat for Humanity Broken Windows Theory Eudaimonia Dacher Keltner UnSILOed #140: Leidy Klotz - The Art of Subtraction Guest Profile: LeidyKlotz.com Faculty Profile at the University of Virginia LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Page Guest Work: Amazon Author Page In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less Sustainability through Soccer: An Unexpected Approach to Saving Our World Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How did working with first-principles thinking allow SpaceX to maneuver nimbly past established aerospace giants? What are the limits of prediction and scenario models under “deep uncertainty,” and how can we apply them to AI's potential effects on society? Roger Spitz is a futurist, the president of Techistential, and the author of several books. His latest titles are Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World and the four-volume series of The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption. Greg and Roger discuss ‘Techistential,' named from “tech existentialism,” an agency-focused philosophy for being human in a technological world where algorithms increasingly share decision-making. They argue modern education, governance, and incentives are built for a linear, predictable world, causing people and organizations to seek certainty, delegate judgment to machines, and de-skill. Roger considers resilience in contrast with Taleb's “anti-fragility,” emphasizing systems that benefit from shocks by avoiding single points of failure, embracing mistakes as data, and maintaining slack.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Foresight isn't about making better predictions. [54:25] Personally, I think if you take foresight or future studies as making better predictions, I think that is the wrong approach, because I think there are probably ways, and there's some great colleagues, you know, Philip Tetlock and others who write about this topic. I think that for uncertainty, not deep uncertainty, where there are a range of right answers and et cetera, I think that they always are probably making better predictions so that's what Polymarket and these prediction markets help with, right? But in deep uncertainty, which is completely unpredictable, I think that's where foresight is best. Is technology giving us less agency? [03:51] It's an interesting word and it's an interesting question, you know, the meaning of agency. And then the question about whether technology is giving us less agency. My starting point is to, sort of, think about one or two things. So the first one is I'm coming from a filter of systemic change or systemic disruption and unpredictability. I believe the world is not only non-linear, complex, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, but that the cost of relying on the assumption of predictability, linearity, et cetera, is increasing.-( cost in the broader sense.) So in that sense, disruption and change is actually not necessarily a negative, because I think that if things were predictable, things will be predetermined, you'd have no agency. So from a philosophical perspective, you could argue that it is thanks to uncertainty that you can exercise agency as the opposite best spectrum of predetermination.  Fragile vs anti-fragile [23:50] Roger Spitz: One of the biggest distinctions between fragile and anti-fragile is that in fragile, which is actually most organizations, you hate mistakes. You hate errors. Not only that, but you have incentives to make sure you don't make mistakes.  [24:05] Greg LaBlanc: And if you do have, you disguise them. [24:06] Roger Spitz: If you do have them, you disguise them. Why is that? It's because basically you're fragile. So if there were mistakes, they could have a significant cost. Anti-fragility loves a mistake. Because what is mistake? It's data. It's emergent; it's a discovery process. It's trial and error. You might discover something new. You're going to respond to that in a way. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Shoshin - Beginner's Mind Nassim Nicholas Taleb Antifragile Viasat Zoom SpaceX First Principle “Move fast and break things” Guest Profile: Disruptive Futures Profile Profile on LinkedIn Profile on Techistential.ai Profile on World Economic Forum Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption (4 Volume Series) Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this episode of the OneHaas Alumni Podcast, meet Brittany Jacob, a former news anchor turned senior consultant at Deloitte thanks to her career-transforming experience at Berkeley Haas. Growing up in Texas, Brittany fell in love with theater and the arts, a passion that propelled her to a career in journalism. For Brittany, community is at the heart of everything she does – a passion that shone through while she was at Haas when she decided to create the podcast, Belonging@Haas. Brittany joins host Sean Li to chat about her upbringing in Texas, what she learned during her time as a news anchor and reporter, what brought her to Haas, how she's now using her MBA to shape stories, and how she built community through Belonging@Haas. *OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On her time in the news biz “Imagine, I was lugging around a tripod, a camera, setting up my own interviews, doing my interviews, going back, editing them, writing them, and then setting up my live unit so that I can go live. And I did all of that by myself at the beginning of my career. So when you think about reporting… It was nothing fancy or pretty. It was work and you got into the industry because you loved what you did.”One of her fond memories from her time at Haas“ It felt like we were like 17 years old again – we were in the car on our commute to Berkeley for our accounting quiz, and we're like going through our flashcards and I took a moment to realize, I was like, how crazy is this? We're all in our thirties and we're running through flashcards on our way to class for accounting.”On her pivot from journalism to consulting“ I didn't wanna just tell stories. I wanted to shape them. And so that curiosity led me to Berkeley Haas and just really expanding my storytelling into strategy while still rooted in community and impact.”On the creation of the podcast, Belonging@Haas“A big part of it was like, how do we leave a legacy that lives beyond this year … and we ran a survey of all of our peers, like, what do you want? Do you feel like you belong? What do you wanna see from the classroom? What are your needs? And we really went through that survey to understand our classmates, like we had two years on this campus to make an impact. And so, we heard them loud and clear. They wanted to hear from their peers. And what better way than a podcast being able to listen on the go while you're cooking, while you're working out, when you're on the flight. Everyone messaged me like, we're downloading this before the winter break to listen. But really it was about giving a voice to students.”Show Links:LinkedIn ProfileInstagram ProfileBelonging@Haas Podcast

Even though conflict is something we all instinctively want to avoid, it's an essential part of a healthy culture. So what can organizations do to ensure they're not only managing conflict productively but also leveraging it to make the organization stronger?  Amy Gallo is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review and author of the books HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict and Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People). Her research and consulting work focuses on how to effectively navigate and even utilize conflict to better your organization.  Amy and Greg discuss the necessary ingredients for fruitful conflict, the consequences of failing to manage it effectively, and run through some of the most difficult personalities people might face in the workplace and the best strategies for working with them.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why I disagree with you doesn't equate to I hate you 03:35: Sometimes it feels like saying, “I disagree, Greg,” is the same as saying, “I hate you, Greg.” Right? People find it so offensive; disagreement, conflict is so hurtful, damaging, when actually, if it's done well, it's incredibly productive. We get that sort of friction that you need in an organization to come up with new ideas, to improve the way we work together, to even bond with one another. What if ego didn't get in the way of conflict? 06:09: Conflicts would be so much easier if no one involved had any ego, which, of course, is not possible. But it's one of the things I try to do when I get involved in a conflict in my work or personal life: think, “Okay, if I wasn't defending my ego right now, how would I think about this problem?” And I think if more people could show up in that way, we'd get through conflicts much, much easier and, really, honestly, with stronger relationships intact. Is there an optimal level of conflict? 02:32: Is there an optimal level of conflict? I've never seen research that says this is the optimal. I think right now, in our current culture, where we are with global politics, with sort of the state of the world, I think the truth is we actually need more conflict in our organizations, on our teams, than we currently have. And so the chances are that the optimal is more than you currently have. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Reed Hastings  Sigal G. Barsade  Rebecca Hinds | unSILOed  Heidi Grant  “An illustrated guide to the six types of difficult coworkers you'll meet at your first job” | Boston Globe  Women at Work podcast  Guest Profile: Professional Website Professional Profile on LinkedIn Guest Work: HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict  Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People)  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When Professor Yael Hochberg made the decision to come to Rice, she had a vision for building an entrepreneurship program like no other — it would be one for the modern era that would set the pace for entrepreneurship education going forward. Now, more than a decade later, Rice consistently ranks number one in the country for entrepreneurship and is leading the way in world-changing innovation through hubs like the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie), which offers experiential learning opportunities and co-curricular activities.In this episode, Professor Hochberg, head of the Rice Entrepreneurship Initiative and Lilie, joins co-host Brian Jackson '21 to discuss how she brought her vision for a modern entrepreneurship program to life at Rice, the incredible innovation that has come from Lilie over the last 10 years and what the future holds for entrepreneurship education in the age of AI. Episode Guide:00:00 Introduction to Professor Yael Hochberg00:37 Her “Accidental” Entrepreneurship Origins05:50 Why She Chose Rice & Her Vision for Better Entrepreneurship Education09:18 Inside the Liu Idea Lab16:22 Student Startup Wins19:53 Alumni Network Power22:59 Research-Driven Teaching 30:32 AI and Entrepreneurship35:02 What's Next for Lilie41:47 The Most Rewarding MomentsThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:On the entrepreneurial spirit at Rice39:31: [Brian Jackson] When I think about the entrepreneurial spirit that's present at Rice, I think a big driver pulling that in is the recognition we consistently get, be it Princeton Review ranking us as a, you know, the nation's top graduate school for entrepreneurship seven years in a row. When you think about that success, what do you think is the biggest driver behind it? What's making that possible?39:54: [Yael Hochberg] I think it's a combination of many things. It's our students, our amazing students who come in with the drive to create things. It's our alumni who are willing to stand behind us and support us. It's people like Frank Liu who were willing to see the resources that were necessary here on campus to, to truly support entrepreneurial ventures. It's the amazing staff and faculty at Lilie who, you know, give 90 to a hundred-hour weeks, 365 days a year to make sure that our students have the support that they need, that our faculty have the support that they need.Entrepreneurship can be taught if there's a drive04:43: People always ask me, what do you mean you can teach entrepreneurship? Why do you guys even bother with entrepreneurship programs? People are either born as entrepreneurs or they're not. They either have that entrepreneurial drive or they don't. I think there's something to that, and that it is true that I can't take someone without the drive and turn them into an entrepreneur. But I can take someone who has that latent drive and who is interested, and I can give them tools and frameworks that will help them be successful if they pursue entrepreneurship. I happen to be one of these people who has that drive. I like to build, I don't like sitting still. When I see problems, I don't like to simply say, “Hmm, that's really annoying.” I try to solve them.AI is changing how fast you can build and test ideas31:02: The tools that are available today really do change how you think about things, because the tools offer you an opportunity to build things faster than you could ever imagined before, to test things faster than you could ever imagined before. We have classes where nearly all of our classes are experiential. The students are actually building something. They're doing something, they're walking through the process, and they're getting it in the wraps, right? And it may be on something stupid like Uber for cats, I don't care. I want them to learn the process and actually go out and experience it. And when the right idea comes along, they'll already know how to actually do it.Show Links: The Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and EntrepreneurshipTranscriptGuest Profile:Yael Hochberg | Rice BusinessYael Hochberg's WebsiteYael Hochberg on LinkedIn

What do measures of uncertainty tell us about the state of the economy and how should firms and households use those measurements to inform decision-making? Hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen are joined by returning guest Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University, whose research on the causes and consequences of uncertainty helped build the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index. In the discussion, they cover the various ways to measure uncertainty including the VIX and text-based methods, Bloom explains how the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index works, why discrepancies can sometimes exist between uncertainty measurements, and how these uncertainty indices can help inform better business decision-making.   Find All Else Equal on the web:  https://lauder.wharton.upenn.edu/allelse/ All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions Podcast is a production of the UPenn Wharton Lauder Institute through University FM. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How can you trace capitalism from long-distance merchant networks (including 12th-century Aden) to a modern-day world economy? What are alternative stories to the commonly held Eurocentric view of capitalism's origins? Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and is also the author of several books. His most recent titles include Capitalism: A Global History, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Greg and Sven discuss how Sven sees the history of capitalism, contrasting it with neoliberal-leaning accounts that underplay violence, the state, and capitalism's global character. He also offers a helpful minimalist definition—privately owned capital productively invested to produce more capital—and argues markets are universal but become central only in capitalism.  He dissects the pillars that propped up capitalism through the years, including diverse labor regimes such as slavery and indenture, noting slavery's major but time-specific role in the Americas, enabled by European power and used to overcome resistance to capitalist transformation. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Challenging Eurocentric narratives about capitalism 23:49: Look at the world today. We are living in a world in which no one in their right mind would, A, say, “Okay, we need to only look at the European continent to understand the global economy today.” And B. Nobody would ignore, you know, the history of Asia or Latin America, or even Africa, in telling the history of the global economy today. So, we are entering this debate now at a different vantage point. I am not saying that, you know, scholars a hundred years ago or so had some terribly ill-intentioned thought in their way of looking at this. No, they lived in a different world, and the world looked different to them. But today we are living in a world in which clearly Europe is not at the center of the universe and not at the center of global capitalism. And that now forces us, I think, to not just think differently about the present, but to think differently about the entire history of capitalism. Capitalism is a state of constant growth 49:25: Capitalism is not conservative. Capitalism is the most revolutionary economic civilization ever. It is a state of permanent revolution. No expansion seems to be impossible within that capitalist civilization. I think it goes against its very core, what it is. It is a state of constant growth. It is a state of constant expansion. Capitalism without markets is conceptually unimaginable 05:05: I think capitalism without markets is conceptually unimaginable, and markets, of course, play a very important role in contemporary capitalism. But I think it would be mistaken to define capitalism primarily by the fact that it is a society in which markets regulate all or parts of economic life. Because, as far as I know, I have not yet found a human society which did not know of markets. I have not yet found a human society which did not engage in some forms of trade. So I think these are kind of universal attributes of economic life on planet Earth. But what is not universal is societies in which markets are not just on the margins of economic life, as they are in many, many societies, but really are at the very center of economic life. And this is certainly the case for capitalism. Why is capitalism essential in our lives? 39:13: Capitalism is extremely important to our lives today. It structures the biggest processes that we inhabit, but also the most intimate parts of our lives. And people are having passionate opinions about capitalism. They want to understand how we claim to live in the world in which we live right now. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Capitalism Karl Polanyi Fernand Braudel Wage Labour Slavery Aden Robert Brenner Karl Marx Industrial Revolution East India Company Guest Profile: SvenBeckert.com Faculty Profile at Harvard University Wikipedia Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Capitalism: A Global History Empire of Cotton: A Global History American Capitalism: New Histories Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Claude Steele is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of the landmark book, Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. His new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It, takes the theories from Whistling Vivaldi and examines the psychological stress that comes with navigating diversity.  Claude joins Greg to discuss his decades' worth of research on the concept of identity, the impacts stereotypes have on our cognitive load, even if we don't subscribe to those stereotypes, the limits to “colorblindness”s, the concept of “wiseness,” and why trust could be the antidote to the churn.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The tension beneath how we come together 08:39: I'm trying to characterize, with the term “churn,” this sort of emotion that can be a real factor in our experience of diversity and our coming together. We're a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-class society. And to function well, we have to get along well in these critical situations—school, workplace—and churn is a symptom of the tensions that can arise. Trust is the antidote of churn 10:10: The hopeful part of churn is that it does have a remedy, an antidote, and that is trust. As soon as we've built trust together, then I relax. Well, I know you're not going to do that. How do you build trust? 29:13: You really do have to try to get yourself in the position of the other, to see the world from the other person's shoes. That really helps to build trust. Just the effort that you're interested in doing that is maybe the most fundamental step forward that a person in authority can take to build trust in people that work for them or work with them. The limits of being colorblind 19:48: I think in many aspects of our society, it's absolutely essential. We have to think that way, that we have to have policing, healthcare access, housing, mortgages be colorblind. So, I'm uncompromising on many aspects of it, but I think if we take it too far, we can ignore the experiences that people have because of their identities. Yeah, just because of their identity. So, if we're colorblind, I don't need to know about all those things that affect your life that have to do with your identity. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Erving Goffman Affirmative action “Differences in STEM doctoral publication by ethnicity, gender and academic field at a large public research university” by Mendoza-Denton and Fisher  Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Stanford University Former Provost Bio at UC Berkeley Guest Work: Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It  Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

As we continue our hallmark tenth season of the Eccles Business Buzz podcast, we will bring you conversations with notable alumni from the David Eccles School of Business and their stories about the impact the school has had on their lives and careers. In this episode, host Frances Johnson talks with Jhareil Hutchinson, a marketing professional and junior project manager for the NBA's Utah Jazz.Jhareil, a 2024 David Eccles School of Business marketing graduate and First Ascent Scholars alumnus, describes some of the barriers he faced coming to college as a first-generation student, and how the First Ascent cohort helped him build a sense of community and belonging. Jhareil credits the program and Eccles with teaching him networking, getting him involved through internships and campus roles, and allowing him to be vulnerable enough to ask questions. Jhareil and Frances discuss his career path, from Jazz team attendant to Cotopaxi intern, to his first job with the Olympic Legacy Foundation, and then back to the Jazz. He discusses aiming to work for the NBA, mentoring current students with his wife Julie, and advises students to not be afraid to pursue opportunities.Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University.fm.Eccles Business Buzz is proud to be selected by FeedSpot as one of the Top 70 Business School podcasts on the web. Learn more at https://podcast.feedspot.com/us_business_school_podcasts. Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:How the people you surround yourself with and the choices you make shape your future[20:56] One of my favorite athletes of all time is the late Kobe Bryant, and he said good coaches tell you where the fish are. But great coaches teach you how to find them. And I think that when I think about that, I kind of just think about the people that are around you, the people that you kind of surround yourself with. People will tell you, “Hey, I have this car; I got this really great promotion. You know, just showing off all these extravagant things, or yeah, like look, kind of just like, look at me, look at me, look at me." And I think that in order to kind of succeed and find those fish and tell you, you know, to have that coach tell you exactly where those fish are, you need to surround yourself with people who are going to be honest with you with tough love but also be like, "Hey, if you want to go down this path, let's do it together." I'm here in your corner to support you. Let's talk about it, let's research it, and let's come up with a plan to actually take action and do the thing that you want to do. I feel like I've always wanted to know exactly where I want to go or where I need to achieve the things, and it's always just about having those people in your corner, but then it's also up to yourself to go out there and do the research.On guiding students toward proactivity, while staying accountable himself[37:50] There's so many different paths to go down in sports, whether that's with sales, marketing, game presentation, whatever it is. So I think it's like a really cool opportunity just because we had some amazing mentors. We had some really cool people to kind of reach out to and ask questions. So I'm wanting to do the same for these students that are in this program. And so far it's been really cool to talk with these students and hear about all the different career paths that they're watching to go down, because it's not all the same. And we don't have the same advice for every student. But, I think the thing that we always tell students is to, again, like we've talked about, like don't be afraid to get involved. Don't be afraid to ask questions. And I think the thing that I get out of it the most is kind of—it's just like a reset point for us, or at least for me. Just kind of like, okay, this student is doing this, and, you know, I'm telling them to make sure that they're reaching out to folks and making sure that they're getting involved and making sure that they have their checks and balances. But am I holding myself accountable for those checks and balances? So it's kind of like a reflection. Like make sure you're telling them to, you know, do all these things for their sake, because we want them to have good grades, we want them to excel. We want them to have a great career, but then we also want that for ourselves.The struggles of being a first-generation student[03:33] I think another barrier that I faced coming into college was just the sense of belonging. Being a first-generation college student, none of my family members had ever even gone to college. So I was the very first one, and I had no clue what to think. I had no clue what to say. I had no clue what to ask. I had no clue who to reach out to, didn't know anything about classes, [and] didn't know anything about internships or, you know, just everything that had to do with college. I had no kind of support system in that sense. And so that kind of put me like, I kind of took a step back, and I was like, "Man, is this really for me?" Like, I don't know anybody; no one else knows about this. Like I'm really here on my own. So it's really up to me to figure out exactly what I need to do. I know there's individuals out there who have had the privilege of, you know, their parents went to college or their brother went to college, and so they kind of had that support system for someone to reach out to, and they had someone to say, “Hey, this is where financial aid is," or “Hey, this is all the clubs that you could be a part of,” and, you know, so on and so forth. It was really tough at first because again, like, I had no one to reach out to, and I had to figure it all out on my own, which was kind of a positive and a negative with my experience coming into college.Jhareil reflects: Wishing his younger self had more courage[31:06] I think the thing that I probably would tell myself is to not be afraid, to not dig my hole before it even, like, starts. I think a lot of the times, like, in high school, like, I was super, super shy. So, coming into First Ascent, having to share, you know, a room with another person, and let alone the whole house with 10 other students, I was like, "Okay, I guess I have to. Just don't be afraid to get out of your comfort zone. Don't be afraid to ask those questions." And I think a lot of the times a lot of students are like, "Oh, like, this is probably not going to happen for me, so I'm just not even going to pursue it." Or, "Oh, like, they're just going to tell me no, so I'm just not even going to do it." And I wish I would've told myself to just don't be afraid. Like, the worst thing people can tell you is no. Show Links:Jhareil Hutchinson | LinkedIn ProfileJhareil Hutchinson | InstagramUtah Jazz | NBA TeamFirst Ascent Scholars | Eccles SchoolDavid Eccles School of Business (@ubusiness) | InstagramUndergraduate Scholars ProgramsRising Business LeadersEccles Alumni Network (@ecclesalumni) | Instagram Eccles Experience Magazine

On today's episode, host David Mansouri speaks with Emily Oppold, 2025-26 president of the Graduate Student Association, and Trevor Tobey, 2025-26 president of the Student Association, about their time at Rice and experiences at the school and in their student government positions. Emily and Trevor discuss their paths to Rice, leadership motivations, and what the SA and GSA really do. Emily, a third-year PhD statistics student, was drawn to Rice by its Houston and Texas Medical Center collaborations. She emphasizes GSA advocacy and community-building for a graduate population that is 41% international, with focuses including dining, professional development, alumni connections, and support for graduate caregivers.  Trevor, a senior studying economics and sports management, describes the SA as a bridge to the administration to advocate and illuminate student issues and can help improve the undergraduate quality of life. Their conversation covers managing growth,  changes in social culture, fostering dialogue across differences via institutional neutrality and free-speech efforts, and adapting to AI's impact on teaching, integrity, and trust in higher education. Let us know you're listening by filling out this form. We will be sending listeners Beyond the Hedges Swag every month. Episode Guide: 00:00 Welcome and Introduction 00:44 Emily's Path to Rice 02:18 Trevor's Path to Rice 03:33 Why Student Leadership 06:59 What the Student Association Does 08:35 What the Graduate Student Association Does 10:13 Top Student Issues Today 14:22 What Alumni Should Know 17:36 Protecting Traditions 18:57 Leading Diverse Voices 23:44 AI in the Classroom 27:03 Hopes for Rice Future 30:36 Rapid Fire Questions Beyond The Hedges is a production of Rice University and is produced by University FM. Episode Quotes: Ensuring student life improves as Rice grows 11:57: [Trevor Tobey]  So with the growth, we should also be expanding services. Students should be benefiting from the growth, not lowering the experience. And so that is why we have pursued things like late night dining and printing credits. And we had the largest initiative fund in student association history this year for clubs to apply to. And so, initiatives like this to make sure that students aren't getting left behind in the growth, I think is the biggest priority and the biggest concern among the student body right now. What's the central role of GSA in Rice? 20:54: [Emily Oppold]: I think not only getting my PhD, but getting it at Rice has committed me to becoming a lifelong learner. And that's something that I'm proud of and I'm excited about, and a lot of that is just surrounded by people that I'm meeting outside the classroom and just listening. Like I am learning as a leader so much just to listen. My ears are more powerful than my voice a lot of times, and that's something that I wish I could have told myself a year ago. Learning to lead by listening 08:07: [Trevor Tobey] To me, our central mission is improving student quality of life at Rice. How do we expand services? How do we make sure that students are taken care of? How do we make it the best experience for students on our campus?...I would say that our central role is student quality of life, and bridging the gap between students and administration. Show Links: Student Association (SA) | Rice University Graduate Student Association (GSA) | Rice University Rice Alumni Association of Rice Alumni | Facebook Rice Alumni (@ricealumni) | X (Twitter) Association of Rice Alumni (@ricealumni) | Instagram  Host Profiles: David Mansouri | LinkedIn David Mansouri '07 | Alumni | Rice University David Mansouri (@davemansouri) | X David Mansouri | TNScore Guest Profiles: Emily Oppold | LinkedIn Emily Oppold | People of Rice Profile Trevor Tobey | LinkedIn Trevor Tobey | Rice SA President Profile

How is governance dysfunction linked to declining ‘middle-ring' community ties?  Marc J. Dunkelman is a fellow at Brown University and a fellow at the Searchlight Institute in Washington, D.C. Marc is also the author of two books, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back and The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community. Greg and Marc discuss how U.S. progressivism has long been split between a Jeffersonian impulse to decentralize power and curb “bigness” and a Hamiltonian impulse to centralize authority in expert institutions. Marc explains how figures like Robert Moses could push projects through, while today expanded rights, litigation, and procedural checks—driven by 1960s–70s distrust of authority (Vietnam, civil rights failures, environmental and consumer scandals, Watergate-era culture)—have reduced discretion so much that even widely supported projects stall.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why is it so hard to build things? 44:34: You're awarding rights to classes of individuals who have long been stepped on by powerful people. And, like, award these new standing. Exactly. To your point, in order to reduce the discretion of the would-be Robert Moses, who would make that choice on their own without ever really thinking through, alright, now that all these people have, like, a voice, how are we going to resolve that? And to this day, I don't think the progressives have actually answered that question. I don't think that we have in our minds even a system by which you would make trade-offs between those groups. And it's one of the reasons, to your point, it's so hard to build things, like, if everyone wants that new road to be built, but each individual constituency has enough power to say, not through this particular route, you're fundamentally stuck. What motivated Marc to write “Why Nothing Works.” 05:07: The motivation here was to understand what had changed between the fifties and the 2010s, to make it so that it used to be that bad projects couldn't be stopped, and now good projects couldn't go. That prompted a whole series of questions that eventually would lead to this book, Why Nothing Works. On tension within progressivism 36:28: There is sort of a notion that centralized power itself is up to no good, and that, in order for America to restore its promise and luster, we need to restore the power, the individual agency that people once had. And, I want to make this clear: that shift is remarkably profound within progressivism, but it is not that the old effort to centralize power wasn't progressive. And it's not that this new impulse to restore power to the woman who wants to control her own body, to the black family that wants to be able to rent a room in any hotel of their choosing, to the ordinary person who doesn't want to be the victim of discrimination, to the neighborhood that doesn't wanna be clobbered by, like—these are both ultimately progressive impulses. Show Links: Recommended Resources: The Power Broker Robert Moses Progressivism Louis Brandeis Sacco and Vanzetti Felix Frankfurter Cadillac Desert Bowling Alone Abundance Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs Searchlight Institute LinkedIn Profile Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When AI tells us what we want to hear, is it acting in a rogue way, or is it emulating behavior that society clearly values? How does our ability to sleep enable us to update faster than neural networks currently can, and what will be different when they can update themselves more frequently? Christopher Summerfield is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Oxford University, the Research Director at the UK's AI Safety Institute, and the author of the book These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means. Christopher and Greg discuss the historical split between symbolic, rule-based “rationalist” AI and data-driven “empiricist” learning, arguing that the recent success of large models vindicates the latter despite earlier skepticism. They discuss how structured behavior can emerge from messy networks, how modern models are trained with reinforcement learning to produce step-by-step reasoning, and why systems often “make” solutions by writing code rather than routing to specialized tools.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: From messy brains to intelligent machines 04:40: If you look inside the brain, your brain and mine and the brains of other biological species, they're really messy. They're like really, really messy and unstructured. So nature managed to solve the problem. And so maybe that gave impetus for this movement to kind of, you know, continue to sort of plug away. And when we finally got computers big enough to process lots and lots of data, it started to take off. And the rest is history. Hallucinations aren't just an AI problem 34:36: How does the model know what is the kind of socially or culturally appropriate response?  We're often very worried about the models,  like, the models don't tell the truth and  they make stuff up.  But people forget that most of language is literally making stuff up. That is what you do when you open your mouth. Is language more powerful than we thought? 32:05: The surprising thing is that language, it turns out, is sufficiently rich and expressive that if you have it in huge volumes and you process it effectively, then you can actually make a whole bunch of inferences about the world, which are surprisingly accurate. So you would think that you would need to actually experience them firsthand rather than just through hearsay, because we work like that, right? Like we rely on our senses. Of course, we rely on hearsay a little bit, and we think about what other people say, and it allows us to infer new things. But like the models just have language, well, I mean now they have multimodal data, but let's take a conversational agents lms, and what I think has been so surprising is that language contains enough structure that you can really uncover patterns of information that you would think that you would need to see. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Rationalism Empiric School George Bull Frank Rosenblatt Neural Network (machine learning) Marvin Minsky Perceptron GPTs Guest Profile: Human Information Processing Lab Social Profile on X Guest Work: These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Despite it being widely taught in business schools and practiced in the industry, you should think twice before using the internal rate of return as a criteria for making an investment decision. Hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen are back to discuss why using the internal rate of return (IRR) as an investment decision rule is fundamentally flawed compared with the net present value (NPV). They outline IRR's problems including multiple or nonexistent solutions, failure to account for scale and timing, and structural vulnerability once financing/payment plans are allowed, enabling arbitrary or inflated IRRs.    Find All Else Equal on the web:  https://lauder.wharton.upenn.edu/allelse/ All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions Podcast is a production of the UPenn Wharton Lauder Institute through University FM. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's one of the oldest debates in political philosophy: Do good laws make good men, or do good men make good laws? Minds have been wrestling with this question since the days of Petrarch and Machiavelli, but both sides may have insights that can inform modern political philosophy. James Hankins is a professor of history at Harvard University, a visiting professor of humanities at the University of Florida's Hamilton School, and author of numerous books including Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena. He's also the co-author of the textbook, The Golden Thread, which focuses on the history of Western civilization.  Greg and James discuss Renaissance humanism, sparked by Petrarch's response to 14th‑century crises, and explore the humanist education focused on virtue, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. They also delve into Machiavelli's critiques and pushback against humanism, how Chinese Confucianism compares with the West's legal system, and why James believes virtue should be brought back into modern education. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why we need both systems and good character 11:47: I think I agree with the people who think there should be a balance between good character and the formation of good character and expertise and wisdom and competence and the people who say that systems can solve all your problems and you just get the right systems and thinkful function. I think that is a very, kind of left, left hemispheric way of understanding human nature. Good law is nothing without good people 07:59: If you have great laws, but corrupt judges, you are going to have bad laws. If you have laws being written by corrupt people, that is even worse. So the humanist is saying the whole problem is, the human heart, right? This is where the problem is. And what we have to do is to bring back antiquity. Is democracy only the legitimate form of government? 47:14: Today, we might say that a democracy is the only legitimate form of government where a republic reflects the will of the people. But they would not say that in the Renaissance. They talk about better and worse, that monarchs are better when you have got a good monarch. But when you have a bad monarch, the monarch of the republic is better. It is that kind of calculation. It is not the way we think about political regimes today as being, legitimate or illegitimate. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Petrarch Francesco Patrizi Niccolò Machiavelli Isocrates Lorenzo Valla Thomas Aquinas Cola di Rienzo Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Harvard University Faculty Profile at Hamilton School at the University of Florida Professional Website Guest Work: Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, Volume I: The Ancient World and Christendom Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bob Dittmar has big goals for the Virani Undergraduate School of Business. As the school's associate dean and Houston Endowment Professor of Finance, he aims to increase Rice Business' national footprint, making it a household name for top-tier business education from coast to coast. Dittmar came to Rice in 2022 after teaching for nearly 20 years at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. He's taught finance courses across Rice Business' degree programs, including in the undergraduate and MBA programs.On this episode, Dittmar joins co-host Maya Pomroy '22 to share what sets the Virani Undergraduate School of Business apart from other undergraduate business programs — and his advice for prospective students who are trying to decide if Rice Business is the right fit for them. He also delves into his fascinating research on options and how to assess risk more clearly, especially when the signals aren't obvious.Episode Guide:00:00 Introduction to Associate Dean Bob Dittmar01:59 Early Influences and Academic Journey03:11 Discovering a Passion for Finance04:59 College Years and Mentorship08:55 Research on Options and Market Psychology16:05 Role as Associate Dean for the Virani Undergraduate School of Business18:05 Teaching Finance and Real-World Applications23:02 The Psychology of Investment Decisions25:54 Understanding Risk and Uncertainty29:35 AI's Role in Education and Work33:31 The Unique Culture of Rice University37:17 Future Vision for the Virani Undergraduate School of BusinessThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:Taking the Rice beyond Houston38:03: My goal at Virani is really largely to try to expand Rice's national footprint to some extent. So I think, you know, if you grew up in Houston, you know a lot about Rice, and you know, Rice is a great institution. Rice is a great institution and really hard to get into. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, look, you know, our median student is, you know, in the right tail, basically, of most students across the country. But look, when I was growing up in Chicago, Rice really was not on my radar. There were a few liberal arts schools in the Midwest that I kind of thought about, but Rice never kind of came up. But I do think that Rice needs a little bit more visibility on the coasts. And that is especially important in business and finance in particular, where New York is so much the center of activity.How do you know if Rice is for you?41:01: If you want to be at a place that is truly collaborative, that has a rigorous education and provides opportunity and really cares about its students, then I think Rice is the right place for you. Think about Rice as a whole institution and how you feel on campus, and compare that to how you feel on the campuses of these other universities. And again, this is a little weird to say, because I am a finance guy. I am supposed to be cold and rational about all these things, but how you feel about these kinds of things, I think, is usually a pretty good indication of what actually is right for you and what is going to suit you.Why Rice is a special place to get your business degree34:29: At the business school at Rice, you get a lot of what I think makes Rice as an institution special. Which, you know, our students are a little quirkier maybe, but they are also a little nicer and less, you know, maybe not quite so cutthroat, I guess, maybe is what I would some ways, much more collaborative. And so I think that, combined with the fact that Rice has this STEM focus that it always has, so it is grounded in a really rigorous way of, kind of, approaching things, really combines together to make this a very special place to get your business degree.Show Links: TranscriptGuest Profile:Robert Dittmar | Rice BusinessProfessional WebsiteLinkedIn Profile

Today's AI has been designed using insights from how humans learn and think about the world. Are there certain psychological lessons we can glean from these artificial minds to further our understanding of human ones?  Tom Griffiths is a professor of information technology, consciousness, and culture at Princeton University. His books, The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind and Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, explore how algorithms and mathematics can be used to understand the human mind, and how it differs from AI.  Tom and Greg discuss the origins of the surprising convergence of psychology and computer science over the last 50 years and delve into the work done by the interdisciplinary minds who made it happen. They also cover how psychology and linguistics impact the current world of machine learning and AI.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: How do we build good inductive bias into AI systems? 26:07: How do we build good inductive bias into these systems? And at the moment that is being engineered to some extent by doing things like synthetic pre-training, where you might pre-train on data which is not the human language data but data that you think is quite good data for shaping the kinds of things that your neural network is going to be biased towards. And then there are some other more sophisticated methods for doing that. In my lab, we use a method called metalearning, where you're explicitly creating a neural network that has initial weights, that has some sort of initial associations that it's already formed, that are going to make it easy for that model to be able to learn from small amounts of data. Neural networks vs. human learners 23:00: One of the big differences between even the fancy neural networks that we have today and human learners is that human learners learn language from far less data than our neural network models do. What is a neural network? 18:30: The way I think about neural networks is that they're a tool for thinking about computation in spaces, a way of mapping one space to another based on the information that you've received that allows you to then build up to more and more complex computations. Show Links: Recommended Resources: David Maher John B. Watson  B. F. Skinner Jerome Bruner  John von Neumann Herbert A. Simon  Noam Chomsky Allen Newell Frank Rosenblatt Marvin Minsky “Embers of autoregression show how large language models are shaped by the problem they are trained to solve” - Paper Roger Shepard Jeffrey Elman Been Kim Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Princeton University Computational Cognitive Science Lab Professional Profile on LinkedIn Guest Work: The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind  Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When the concept of ‘gamifying life' comes up, scoring is transparent and portable but strips nuance, creating a gap between what's measurable and what matters. When codifying everything through metrics, massive amounts of nuance is lost, so how can we utilize game theory without reducing everything to a high score? C. Thi Nguyen is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He is also the author of the books The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Games, and Games: Agency As Art. Greg and Thi discuss the differences between genuine gameplay and institutional metrics and gamification. Thi explains Huizinga's “magic circle” concept, where games create a temporary space with altered meanings and low real-world stakes, enabling intense striving without value capture. Drawing also on Bernard Suits, Thi frames games as voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles and distinguishes achievement play (valuing winning) from striving play (valuing the struggle), separating these from intrinsic vs extrinsic motivations.  They discuss how clear scoring is transparent and portable but strips nuance, creating a gap between what's measurable and what matters; transparency can reduce bias yet undermine expertise. Examples include social media likes, quotas, education metrics, sports rule changes, cooking “recipe vs dish,” and academia's citation and ranking pressures. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The paradox on inefficiency 08:31: To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles,  to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them, which I find, it's got to be to be inefficient, but interestingly not fully inefficient. So we're not trying to be as inefficient as possible. One of the ways to put the paradox of games is we take on an inefficiency and then we try to be as efficient as possible inside that inefficiency. The trap of simple scoring 04:00: One of the biggest differences between real games and the kinds of gamifications of work and education that we find is that gamifications are attempts to modify things into line with simple scoring systems that occur continuously with the rest of life that have direct connections to valuable resources. Collapsing the magic circle 05:08: Twitter likes and citation rates and gamified work are modifications of something that has preexisting value, preexisting activity. So I think the important thing about Twitter, X, Facebook is those scoring systems don't occur in a magic circle. They don't occur in a space with separated meaning. They modify our activities in the real world and change our attitudes and interactions over real world resources. So I think exactly like this easy glide from games or grudge to like we should gamify everything ignores one of the most crucial elements, which is some version of this magic circle is basically active in a lot of genuine gameplay, but is completely inactive, is completely canceled. We have the superficiality of scoring systems and game-ishness, but deep down we don't have the core guts of transferring into a temporary alternate meaning space whose meanings kind of can be held relatively isolated. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Johan Huizinga Lusory Attitude Dungeons & Dragons John Dewey Goodhart's Law Onora O'Neill John Thorne Theodore Porter Autotelic Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at the University of Utah Thi Nguyen's Website Wikipedia Profile Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Games Games: Agency As Art Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

While philosophers have long wrestled with questions about technology's impact on humanity, these questions have taken on a whole new level of urgency and significance with the rise of AI, smartphones, and the Internet. It's more pressing than ever now to ask: What does it mean to be human?  Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Her latest book, The Extinction of Experience, delves into how modern technologies are reshaping what it means to be human by mediating experience, promising convenience and control while subtly narrowing choices and changing social norms.  Christine and Greg discuss the trade-offs of this digital age: as friction, risk, boredom, and unstructured time disappear, so do the skills and forms of attention that develop through direct interaction with other people and the world. They argue that many of these technologies offer safe simulations of connection that can weaken real relationships, and explore what a renewed humanism would look like. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why technology removes the friction that makes us human 07:37: This is the really seductive thing about these technologies is that they do both at the same time, and they do that by promising us control. And they give us control. If I am having a FaceTime conversation with someone and it gets awkward, or I don't want to continue anymore, I can just press a button and that person disappears. If I'm standing with them face-to-face, I can't really do that. I have to adapt to the situation. I have to deal with it in a completely different way. I would argue a more human way with a lot of friction. So then I learn certain skills of how to be a better human being in those situations. The mediating technology flattens, makes easier, convenient, and more control is promised, and it gives us that. The hidden value in boredom 28:48: Boredom opens up all kinds of meandering paths in the brain that take you to really interesting places if you let it. Protecting human relationships in the age of AI 20:44: We are at a crucial moment right now, particularly with the huge push to integrate AI into so many aspects of life, education, work, home, your daily life. I just think that we have this opportunity now to really be clear about what it is we value in human relationships and what makes it unique and distinct and important to protect those relationships. Why friction and failure are essential for human development 11:21: We learned by failing. We learned with a lot of friction. We learned by having arguments and fights and all that stuff. If kids today don't get that experience as kids in a safe environment with people who love and care for them, when they become adults it is scary because you have to practice. So I would say these are important human skills, and we can no longer take them for granted because there are alternative things to do, like never talk to another human being. But ultimately, I think rates of loneliness and isolation and anxiety suggest that that isn't really the way most people want to live their lives. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Walter Benjamin Theodor W. Adorno Jean Baudrillard Neil Postman Ready Player One Robert Nozick  Experiece machine Sherry Turkle Christopher Lasch Nicholas Carr's The Mirrorball Self Guest Profile: Fellow Profile at American Enterprise Institute Guest Work: The Extinction of Experience My Fundamentalist Education Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How is modern self-knowledge acquired? In what ways can ‘yoga of the mind' help you find and explore new thoughts and thought processes, giving you ongoing courage to confront discomfort and realign consciousness beyond ego narratives? J. Eric Oliver is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and is also the author of several books. His latest titles are How To Know Your Self: The Art & Science of Discovering Who You Really Are, Democracy in Suburbia, and Enchanted America: How Intuition & Reason Divide Our Politics. Greg and Eric discuss Eric's popular Knowing Yourself course, combining neuroscience, Buddhism, philosophy, psychology, and reflective exercises. Eric explains the evolution of the class from abstract texts to practical self-inquiry aimed at expanding students' vocabulary of lived experience, identifying unhelpful mental loops, and cultivating empathy by seeing the self as layered processes shared with other beings. He connects this work to his earlier research in Enchanted America on intuition, conspiracy beliefs, and the political rise of intuitionism, arguing that weakened institutional authority and information overload amplify anxiety.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The Gold Star illusion is not an end all be all 30:15: Most high achieving, intellectually engaged people, I think, are brought up with this Gold Star illusion, which is this thing that if I could just collect all of my gold stars, you know, go to the right schools, get the right job, find the right person, buy the right house, then this sort of happily ever after scenario awaits me. And then what most of us find is that even after we collect all these gold stars, the neurosis and anxieties and miseries don't go away. If anything, they become more profound. And so part of what I'm trying to do, at least with my undergraduates, is sort of say, okay, it's helpful if you can sort of, even if you're going to be on the Gold Star trajectory, because that's so powerfully inculcated into you to begin to realize that that's not going to be the end all be all. Because when you get to the end of that gold star rainbow and you realized, “oh, is this all there is?” You won't be at such a loss, and there won't be necessarily the same level of crisis that awaits you. There is no self as a noun, we are verbs 36:56: There is no self as a noun. We are verbs, we're processes, so we're continually unfolding. And this is great news because we're not stuck in any way. You're not a bad person, you're not a fixed person. Why the information age makes us anxious 20:06: With the explosion of our information technologies and the ability for someone who has a conspiracy theory to suddenly post things online and have just enormous reach that 20 years ago they wouldn't have, suddenly floods our discourse space with these alternative paradigms and these alternative ways of understanding the world, and the fact that we are so saturated now with information from around the globe. So how can we not be anxious?  Show Links: Recommended Resources: Sigmund Freud Buddhism Know thyself Intuitionism Rationalism Gross National Happiness Alexis de Tocqueville Yoga Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at The University of Chicago JEricOliver.com Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page How To Know Your Self: The Art & Science of Discovering Who You Really Are Democracy in Suburbia Enchanted America: How Intuition & Reason Divide Our Politics Local Elections and the Politics of Small-Scale Democracy The Paradoxes of Integration: Race, Neighborhood, and Civic Life in Multiethnic America Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America's Obesity Epidemic Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What do particle physicists and Wall Street traders have in common? How did finance become more like physics, and how is physics now becoming more like finance? Emanuel Derman is an emeritus professor at Columbia in financial engineering and the author of several books, including My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance and Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life. His work examines the entanglement of physics and finance, using memoir to reveal hidden truths about the theories and models practitioners rely on.  Greg and Emanuel discuss his transition from physics to Wall Street, revealing that he found finance to be more social and creative. They also explore how early quant work required both theory and hands-on programming, what distinguishes models from theories, and why, despite some superficial similarities, the fields of finance and physics couldn't be more different. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Financial models require confidence without hubris 29:29: In my life as a quant, I think I said you had to be cocky when you were using models and push them as far as you possibly could, but stop short of hubris, and I think that's important. You ought to understand that your model isn't going to be correct. In the end, the world is going to violate it. When physics meets social sciences 09:35: I think to some extent they [psychists] confuse accuracy with point of view. Even progressive theories get more and more accurate. Newton's laws aren't as accurate as relativity, but they still, both theories, the one just does better than the other, but they still have this nature of saying, let me describe the way the world works rather than, let me make an analogy. Why model builders must explain where models fail 30:46: There's a clear distinction between concentrators to tell the people that use it that this is where it's going to fail, as best I can see. And they'll use it in this regime. And these are the assumptions I'm making. Don't just let them run wild with the formula. I think traders are smarter now and more numerate and maybe understand this better, but I think that's important. Why financial engineers need perspective beyond mathematics  28:13: I don't think one should be teaching philosophy necessarily, but I think one should learn enough to know about the history of finance and to be able to back off a little and look at what you're doing. Not just, I don't know. I have a feeling more and more of the programs focus on mathematics and behavioral psychology. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Dictionary of Financial Risk Management Salomon Brothers James Clerk Maxwell Baruch Spinoza Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Fischer Black Black Scholes Black Derman Toy model Put call parity Paul Wilmott Binomial options pricing model Mark Rubinstein Freeman Dyson Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Columbia University Professional Website Professional Profile on X Guest Work: Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance The Volatility Smile: An Introduction for Students and Practitioners Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most companies think they're customer-focused. Many are wrong.Vikas Mittal, the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing at Rice Business and faculty director of the Center for Customer-Based Execution and Strategy, has spent his career helping CEOs, MBA students and others learn the difference between truly serving customers and simply appeasing them. In this episode, Vikas joins host Brian Jackson '21 to explain why so many corporate strategies fail: the buzzwords, shiny-object initiatives, and mission-statement retreats that produce 50 priorities and zero focus. He shows what it looks like when organizations commit to the one or two things that genuinely create customer value — and stay the course.He also shares how this approach comes to life through his Executive Education course, Strategic Growth Through Customer Focus, and the Center for Customer-Based Execution and Strategy, which produced a landmark report – interviewing over 3,000 customers to reveal what actually drives value across industries and what doesn't.Plus: his famous sneaker collection and why he thinks everyone should write with fountain pens.Episode Guide:00:00 Guest Introduction: Meet Professor Vikas Mittal01:21 From Family Business to PhD03:26 Why Most CEOs Don't Actually Know What Their Customers Want05:54 Trend Chasing and Misalignment11:28 The Science of Customer Focus17:45 Building The Center for Customer-Based Execution and Strategy21:20 Executives Unlearning Legacy Strategy32:29 How Colorful Sneakers Changed His Life40:52 Final Focus TakeawaysThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:Strategy is an ultimate dark art26:10: Strategy is the way it is done in companies. And I repeat this all the time, it's the ultimate dark art. Nobody knows why we are doing it, but everybody believes we have to do it just because my predecessor told me this is how we should do it. And you ask the predecessor, why are you doing it? Well, my predecessor told me this is how we do it. Right? And it's the ultimate dark art and people just keep doing it.Defining customer focus11:36: Customer focus means using science to figure out what creates value for customers, which is very different than just asking the customer what would you want? And believing that whatever the customer tells you is right and just doing it. When academic research calls the CEO01:40: Surprisingly, a lot of the work I ended up doing with CEOs and companies came from CEOs at different companies reading my research, published in academic journals, you know, which is completely the opposite of what a lot of people think, that if you publish in academic journals, people don't read it. I was blown away, how many times I got contacted by companies say, we've got such and such paper of yours, can you come and help us? Show Links: The Center for Customer-Based Execution & StrategyRice Business Executive EducationStrategic Growth Through Customer Focus ProgramThe Center for Customer-Based Execution & Strategy's Customer Value ReportGuest Profile:Vikas Mittal | Rice BusinessVikas Mittal | LinkedIn

What value does a financial sector add to society? How would society function without a financial sector?  In this episode, hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen make the case that a competitive market financial sector is crucial to economic growth and the betterment of society.  Jonathan and Jules contend with the critiques they hear most often when it comes to free markets, breaking down the core purpose of a financial sector and why its value is not easily observable or necessarily fair. They also compare and contrast other financial systems, like command-and-control, and explain why those systems tend to fail.     Find All Else Equal on the web:  https://lauder.wharton.upenn.edu/allelse/ All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions Podcast is a production of the UPenn Wharton Lauder Institute through University FM. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Romantic relationships are something uniquely human — we form attachments and perceive compatibility in ways no other species does. So what explains the idiosyncratic preferences people have for one potential partner over another? And why have popular conceptions based on evolutionary psychology been wrong about when it comes to how humans choose their mates?  Psychology professor Paul Eastwick is the head of UC Davis' Social-Personality Psychology program and the director of the Attraction and Relationships Research Lab. His book, Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection, challenges society's core assumptions about attraction and compatibility, and presents new findings on the key to long-lasting commitment. He also co-hosts the podcast, Love Factually, with his colleague Eli Finkel, which explores the science of relationships through film.  Paul and Greg discuss how a distorted view of evolutionary psychology has perpetuated inaccurate ideas about dating and relationships, the effect online dating has had on intensifying competition and gender differences, and some key tips for building strong, long-lasting connections.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why dating apps can't replace real romantic connections 39:57: The apps make you think like a romantic connection is right there. Like maybe it will be tonight. I would encourage people instead to think about what is it like just to hang out with other people and give the romantic possibilities some time to fall out of those networks a little bit more organically, a little bit more naturally. It takes a while. Like it can take quite a long time, especially like if we haven't been tending to our networks recently, but nevertheless, like this is at least an approach that people should be supplementing with their online dating if, if they're going to continue to use the apps. ​​Why are some couples happy and some are not? 22:46: Compatibility, how well two people fit together. That is probably explaining the lion's share of why some couples are happy and some couples are not. Rather than this idea that like, oh, you got a good long-term partner, that's probably not the best way to think about it. Compatibility is something couples build together 25:17: Compatibility can be many, many things. It can be like, we seem to get along and coordinate well. It could be about our easy flowing conversation, but it also could be about how we get through the day. And often that's what relationships are. It's an interdependent web of goals and preferences and values that two people negotiate together. And it's very hard for people to know how that negotiation is going to turn out until they really dig in and start to try to do it. The evolutionary mismatch behind modern dating 45:44: What I think is deeply ironic is that some of the earliest evolutionary psychological findings happened to be the ones that reinforced the view that really fits this hierarchy idea, the mismatch component of it. So it's like, I love the idea of the evolutionary mismatch, thinking deeply about the environment in which we evolved. My problem is like a lot of the early ev psych ideas actually weren't doing that all that, all that well, that in reality, right? We evolved in small groups. You got to know a limited number of potential partners. There were going to be other people involved trying to shape, you know, who you spent time with and who you got to meet. It wasn't this dramatic marketplace of inequality. Show Links: Recommended Resources: The Moral Animal by Robert Wright John Bowlby Queen Victoria's Costume Balls Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at UC Davis Professional Website Guest Work: Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection Love Factually podcast Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if the tale of Genesis were reframed as a story of humanity's ascent into awareness of mortality and entropy? How are both connectedness and a “mattering project” key to flourishing as an individual? Rebecca Goldstein is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books, including The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, and The Mind-Body Problem. Greg and Rebecca discuss how the ideas in her new book, The Mattering Instinct, trace back to her novel, The Mind-Body Problem. Rebecca details a long-developed theory of human motivation: beyond survival and pleasure, humans are “creatures of matter who long to matter,” driven to justify themselves in their own eyes (homo justificans). To Rebecca, this is linked to self-reflection, theory of mind, and existential “absurdity.” This episode will outline some mattering strategies and also discuss personality links, ethics, and concerns about AI. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: We are creatures of matter who long to matter 08:21: What we are are creatures of matter who long to matter. I love that we can do that in English. You know, we can't do it; it can't be replicated in other languages. But thank goodness for English, two amazing words: the noun matter and the verb matter. Why everyone needs to feel like they matter 04:23: Look, everybody needs to feel like they matter. Then there's a great diversity of ways in which we might try to prove to ourselves that we matter. The human search for values 15:11: Entering into this world of entropy, where everything eventually runs out of energy and does die, the universe itself will run out of energy and thermal equilibrium that awaits the universe, with that stepping out of paradise. They took on the burden, but the dignity of being human, of trying to justify becoming Homo Justific, becoming creatures who are in search of values that will justify them in their own eyes. We come up with a whole bunch of values, and we disagree tremendously about these values, but there's something so grand about being creatures who need values in order to be able to  live with themselves, even if they're bad values, but that we bring values into the universe because we are creatures longing to matter. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Ludwig Wittgenstein Aristotle Book of Genesis Baruch Spinoza Eudaimonia Happiness Economics Sigmund Freud Entropy Second Law of Thermodynamics Theory of Mind Blaise Pascal “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Darwinism William James Guest Profile: RebeccaGoldstein.com Wikipedia Profile Profile on the National Endowment for the Humanities Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away The Mind-Body Problem Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Kurt Gödel The Dark Sister Mazel Properties Of Light Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind The Mattering Map | Substack Newsletter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A key precondition for democracy is civic trust and commitment to common goods; polarization and party identity undermine this, worsened by modern communication technologies that enable separate realities. Josiah Ober is a professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University and also the author and co-author of several books about Athens, Civics, and Ancient Democracy. His latest title is The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives.  Greg asks Josiah about his work linking ancient Athens to modern democracy and organizational design. Josiah argues that political science necessarily blends positive and normative theory, joining rational self-interest with ethical reasoning to secure both stability and the good. He also compares firms and states as purposeful organizations governed by rules, incentives, and norms, noting that democracies struggle to scale but can outperform hierarchies by aggregating dispersed knowledge if institutions align incentives and citizens share information. Josiah emphasizes civics as teachable skills—listening, bargaining, and positive-sum compromise. He makes an appeal for renewed civics education informed by history and classical thinkers, including a rehabilitated view of the sophists and strategic reasoning. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why democracies know more than hierarchies 14:58: The democratic system, intrinsically, knows more than a highly hierarchical boss centered system, simply because those who see themselves as citizens have reason to share what they know. Those who are subjects have reasons to not share what they know. Therefore, it is possible for a democracy for reasons that, you know, Friedrich Hayek talked about in terms of why markets work, because all of that information comes together in, you know, producing a price, it is possible for well-structured democracies to bring in a great deal of information. From a great deal of people who have very different experiences, know different things, to solve the problems that they need to solve. Does democracy only work when the design is right? 15:45: You have to have the right kind of organization, not only of, sort of voting and so on, but of incentives for people to bring what they know to the right place at the right time, not to the wrong place at the wrong time. And that is hard to do. You get it right and you get this tremendous success. You get it wrong and it does not work very well.  Politics should work like buying a car 32:22: When we go into the political regime space nowadays, it's that, well, compromise is bad now. We gave up, they won. The imagination now of politics is something like a football game in which there's a winner and a loser, and the winners cheer and the losers cry. But that's not what politics is. It is much more like buying a used car. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Aristotle Robinson Crusoe Friedrich Hayek Athenian Democracy Stanford Civics Initiative Logos Techne Sophist Protagoras Thomas Hobbes Alexander Hamilton Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Stanford University Hoover Institution Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 BCE The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going On Together Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece A Company of Citizens: What the World's First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How important are relationships and the feeling of being loved to human happiness? How have the fields of happiness studies and relationship studies converged?  Sonja Lyubomirsky is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. She is also the author or co-author of the books How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most, The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, and The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does. Greg and Sonja discuss her shift from happiness research to her co-authored book with Harry Reis, How to Feel Loved. Sonja explains that many happiness interventions (gratitude letters, kindness practices, and variations like texting gratitude vs. social media posting vs. private writing) work largely because they increase feelings of love and connection They also discuss why listening is difficult, with Sonja sharing her experience in a Tel Aviv listening workshop, and the need for compassion and a growth mindset. Other themes include the Michelangelo effect (helping others become who they aspire to be), balancing sharing and listening (avoiding monologues or interrogations), appropriate vulnerability and gradual self-disclosure, and the “multiplicity” mindset of seeing people as complex quilts of good and bad traits to reduce harsh judgment.  The episode also considers whether people can feel loved without being loved, including AI companions that can mimic excellent listening but lack a genuine open heart, and the risk that some people may substitute simulated relationships for real ones.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: What's the distinction between being loved and feeling loved? 07:42: A lot of us are loved, but we do not feel loved. So we might have, we might know that our partner loves us or child, or a family member or friend or colleague. But we do not really feel loved. And when you think about it, feeling loved is what really matters even more, right? Because if, you know, if you love me, but I do not feel loved by you, it is almost like you do not love me, right? Like, because I am not really sensing that, and so feeling loved is really important. That is what really matters to happiness. The key to feeling loved is really to be known and to know the other 10:16: The key to feeling loved is really to be known and to know the other, and we get known by taking the wall down a little bit. And I get to know you if I help you take your wall down. How do I help you take your wall down? By showing curiosity. Then hopefully you will start to open up a little bit. I show even more curiosity. I ask you questions and I l truly listen, not really just try to fix it or help you or tell my own story. I just listen to learn. The first step to feel more loved 09:11: If I want to feel more loved, the first step, which may sound counterintuitive, is to help the other person feel loved first. You go first. I go first. The first step is to show genuine curiosity in the other person, in their inner life and the details of their day, their dreams, goals, values, fears. We all want that. We want to be seen, we want to be heard, and we do not get genuine curiosity very often. When was the last time you remember telling a story about yourself and the other person was so curious they could not wait for you to finish the sentence? It is rare. When it happens, it is priceless. That is such a gift to someone, to show authentic curiosity in them. It has to be authentic because you cannot fake it. That is the first step. You help the person be seen by showing curiosity in them, and that helps them open up more. Real connection requires both listening and sharing 18:48: If you only share, it is a monologue. You are spouting off. If you only listen, then it is an interview. It is an interrogation sometimes. You really need to do both. They go together. That is where the emotional intelligence comes in. Because when you are sharing, the entire time you are sharing, and we all know people who do not do this, they go off and they seem to not see any cues that the other person is not interested in continuing the story. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Harry Reis Relationship Science Michelangelo Phenomenon Impression Management Multiplicity The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work Esther Perel Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become Techne Unsiloed 208: Psychological Safety and the Benefits of Discomfort with Todd Kashdan Guest Profile: SonjaLyubomirsky.com Faculty Profile at UC Riverside LinkedIn Profile Profile on Wikipedia Social Profile on Instagram Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does Google Scholar Page TED Talk | 1 thing you can do today to be happier Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. 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How could AI shift medical value toward primary care relationships if pattern-recognition specialties are more automatable? What would people prefer if given the choice between discussing their problems with a human or with non-judgmental empathic AI? Allison J. Pugh is a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and the author of several books. Her most recent works are The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World and The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity. Greg and Allison discuss Allison's newest book and her concept of “connective labor,” defined as the relational practice of seeing another person and having them feel seen. They also contrast this idea with more individual-centered ideas like EQ. Allison argues that this type of work is reciprocal, widespread across roles (therapists, teachers, chaplains, primary care, managers, service work), and increasingly important as the economy shifts toward requiring more “feeling.” Allison also talks about how AI is being used in new ways to help automate different aspects of different jobs, and along with that come connected effects like the rise of automated medical scribes amongst the medical community, but also the drastic reduction of interns and the near elimination of that valuable aspect of education and job training for an intern's future professional life. They also discuss how the different efficiency tools can backfire because of the increased need to oversee and validate automated output. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why friction is essential to human connection 17:26: Part of the relationship with another human being involves the friction of not being able to control what they say, of running up against their disagreement or conflict or even tension, or they have their own ideas, their own desires. And that is part of making our way through this world, and it is a really important part of being in community, in relationship with other human beings. And that is what chatbots do not give us. They give us no friction. AI is mirror, not a relationship 17:08: So with chatbots, you are not really experimenting how to be with another human being. You are instead experimenting with a mirror, and that is just not going to have the same powerful impact. Who gets humans, and who gets machines? 12:27: The idea that technology will be better than nothing, I am afraid, will not lead to greater opportunities to be seen, for less advantaged people. Instead, they will just have machines seeing them, and the rich people get humans seeing them, and that is an inequality that I find kind of tragic. Seeing people is a leadership skill 49:52: When people have a chance to kind of express their values at work, figure out who they are and have their values kind of enacted in their work and kind of basically attach a purpose to what they are doing, a more transcendent purpose than just kind of earning the paycheck, it translates into a kind of deep meaningfulness, and that is part of the outcome of connective labor. And so it is really worth it for managers to get good at this because it enables people, the people they are seeing, to figure out what matters to them and to find that in relationships at work. That is a path to meaningfulness that can be very important. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Automated Medical Scribe Chat Checkout Lanes Unsiloed 469: Matt Beane - The Importance of Learning by Doing Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins AllisonPugh.com LinkedIn Profile Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity Beyond the Cubicle: Job Insecurity, Intimacy, and the Flexible Self Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Over the past decade, Rice Business has scaled with intention.MBA enrollment has doubled. Faculty ranks have grown. New MBA formats have launched. The Virani Undergraduate School of Business was established. And a new building will open soon, designed to further fuel collaboration, research and innovation.In this conversation, Dean Peter Rodriguez reflects on the strategy behind that momentum — from championing the Online MBA to building one of the nation's strongest entrepreneurship ecosystems in the heart of Houston. He discusses AI's impact on business education, the evolving energy landscape, and the leadership lessons that come with guiding a school through rapid transformation, all while shaping the next chapter for Rice Business.Episode Guide:00:00 Meet Dean Peter Rodriguez01:20 Online MBA Origins and Vision for Growth07:50 Virtual Campus Advantage09:41 From Space Crunch to Expansion: Designing the New Building16:29 Launching the Virani Undergraduate School of Business21:51 AI and Business Education28:46 Dean Life and Daily Headwinds29:23 Why Rice Ranks High & Houston's Entrepreneurship Advantage36:32 What Deans Learn on the Job43:37 Next 50 Years Vision48:25 ClosingThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:On Rice MBA's Growth over the decade01:37: If there was one overarching theme of the last decade, I think growth is it. The question is always like, well, why growth? Or growth for what? And of course, clearly want growth for the good outcomes, and that good outcomes all start with pursuing the mission.We have a mission to create and disseminate knowledge at the vanguard of business and the business disciplines. And so that is what we really do. And when I was really looking at the job almost exactly 10 years ago and thinking about where Rice was and where it needed to be, one of the first conclusions that was easy to draw was that it needed to be about twice as big as it was, at least, you know, and, and it is not that growth is all good, but why would I say that? And the thinking was, you know, in order to advance that mission, we needed more tenure track faculty. And there the foundation on which more or less everything else proceeds.How does the Rice Business navigate AI? 22:19: On the basic part of our mission, which is delivering an education, we have to do two things. We have to prepare people to think really critically and to be able to assess them as individuals without this incredible, unprecedented tool. That is to say, what can Peter do of his own accord? What does he know? And then I have to train him very aggressively to make sure that with the tool, he is also highly capable, far more capable to do some things, and as capable as anybody in any university in the country is using the tool. So there's sort of almost sounds like martial arts mastery. You know, you have to sort of, wax on, wax off, you know, learn these sort of things that are apart from the tool, and then you are sort of empowered. That's where we are, is trying to do that.Houston loves risk takers30:59: Houston loves risk takers. It is part of the environment, it is part of a Texas thing too, but, you know, it is going to space, drilling out in the Permian Basin or deep in the ocean, putting in an artificial heart, whatever it is. I think there is a real admiration for trying hard things and picking yourself up if you fail and not being discouraged because things did not go right the first time.Show Links: Rice Business New Building PlansTranscriptGuest Profile:Peter Rodriguez | Rice BusinessLinkedIn 

We live in an age where uncertainty lurks around every corner, but what if uncertainty didn't have to be an anxiety-inducing, uncomfortable part of life?  The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown, by INSEAD professor Nathan Furr and entrepreneur Susannah Harmon Furr, presents strategies and tools to embrace uncertainty and turn it into opportunity.  Nathan, Susannah, and Greg discuss why humans are naturally wired to avoid the unknown, and how our capacity to face it can be strengthened through learnable tools. The conversation covers some of the strategies described in the book like creating “islands of certainty” through rituals and support systems, maintaining a portfolio of personal options instead of going all-in too early, and focusing on what's within one's control while pursuing other meaningful goals, internally.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The golden space of uncertainty 26:59: [Nathan Furr] The American can-do attitude is it was this kind of illusion that we control the world. And most people who have been through something hard recognize it is not totally in our control. We sure we influence it, we nudge it, but a lot of things are outside our control. And so the people who are able to approach uncertainty with greater calm also kind of said, you know, what is in my control? I will focus on that, and what is outside of my control, or partially outside of my control, I am not going to obsess about that. And so there is this kind of golden space where you are focused on what are my internal goals, being the best, doing my best, making a contribution in the world. And I recognize that, there is some element of, in this complex, ambiguous world that I do not control, and so I am just going to focus on the things I can control and let the other pieces go. That leads to a much calmer view of the world. The video and audio are not synched On being comfortable with uncertainty 11:42: [Susannah Furr]: All of us could have cooler and more brilliant lives if we just tried a little bit more, if we got a little bit more comfortable with uncertainty. It is good to know, like, Ooh, I do not like risks. And we have a tool for that. Like, know what risks you have affinities and aversions for, but definitely do not just decide, Nope, I do not do uncertainty, because you are, you are missing out. The real danger isn't risk 18:29: [Nathan Furr] The real danger is not that you are going to go all in on the uncertain thing, it is that you are probably going all in on the certain thing, and you are not bringing that thing you care about, that thing you dream about, into the portfolio of options in your life. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Ben Feringa  World Uncertainty Index  Sam Yagan  Martin Seligman  Kathleen M. Eisenhardt Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Guest Profile: Nathan Furr Faculty Profile at INSEAD Nathan Furr on LinkedIn Susannah Harmon Furr Profile at INSEAD Susannah Harmon Furr on LinkedIn The Uncertainty Possibility School Guests' Work: The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown The Innovator's Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization Leading Transformation: How to Take Charge of Your Company's Future Innovation Capital: How to Compete--and Win--Like the World's Most Innovative Leaders Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens when you start thinking of time as a scarce resource? What practical strategies can you use to protect it from being passively spent or hijacked so that you can spend the time you have in more fulfilling and meaningful ways? Cassie Holmes is a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, and also the author of the book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. Greg and Cassie discuss how to use time more intentionally to increase both day-to-day joy and overall life satisfaction. Cassie explains how even though these happiness questions are timeless, they have become newly urgent due to modern distractions, cell phones, productivity culture, and the pandemic's effects on time perception, anxiety, burnout, and workplace engagement. Cassie describes exercises such as tracking one's time and rating activities to identify what is personally most joyful and meaningful, noting common low-happiness activities (commuting, work, housework) and how individuals can find variation within them. Cassie opens the window on some of the examples of this within her own life through her regular coffee dates with her daughter and a prearranged commitment device that allows her to count on date nights with her husband. They also cover bundling chores with enjoyable activities, selectively outsourcing tasks, and the tradeoffs of pricing time in money, emphasizing that better time management enables more meaningful and satisfying life activities, not simply doing less. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why being busy doesn't make you fulfilled 08:46: The unhappiness comes from when you have been busy and have spent your time and are looking back on it, feeling unfulfilled, like it got spent without you having invested in anything that ultimately matters to you. Whether it is things that give you that like true sense of joy and enjoyment, oftentimes through our interpersonal relationships, but also even that sense of satisfaction when you are making actual progress on whatever your project is, whatever that endeavor that you are sort of working towards is in line with your purpose, whether it is your personal purpose, which is really what my focus on is in the book, is the individual, and then ideally it is aligned. Your personal purpose is aligned with the sort of purpose of the work that you are doing. What is time poverty? 40:31: What time poverty is, it is this feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. It is a feeling of being limited by the resources, in this case, time that you have available to achieve what you set out to do. Why isn't more enough, when it comes to happiness? 20:22: Not recognizing the role of hedonic adaptation is sure that first half hour, like, yes, that is the delight, right? You have your glass of wine, and you finally can kick back. But once you press, next episode, and you are three hours into your watching TV that night, you see on the happiness ratings that it, your enjoyment goes down over time. So that is also really helpful information, right? Because if we are trying to optimize using your optimization, sort of discipline and thinking, then we will, well, actually, we should spread out those positives, like my TV watching. This is also where intentionality comes into play. Like instead of zoning out for like many hours every night, just watch that first half hour. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Happiness Hedonic Treadmill Intentionality Marie Kondo George Shultz Time Poverty Katy Milkman Guest Profile: CassieHolmes.com Faculty Profile at UCLA Anderson School of Management LinkedIn Profile Guest Work: Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most TEDx Talk | Finding Happiness in Ordinary Moments Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this episode of OneHaas, learn about the incredible, globe-spanning career journey of alumna Ann Hsu, Founder and Head of School at Bert Hsu Academy. From high tech to yogurt to revolutionizing the approach to public education, this double bear's story is not one to miss!Born and raised in Beijing, China, Ann moved to the U.S. with her family at age 11 but has always maintained a strong cultural connection to China. After getting her Master's degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley, she moved back to China and launched into a successful career in high tech. When the need arose to add more business acumen to her skillset, she knew Berkeley Haas was her best option for an MBA. Ann's latest career pivot has been into education, where she's opened the first American-Chinese bicultural school in the U.S., named in honor of her father, Bert Hsu. Ann joins host Sean Li to discuss the exciting ways they are reimagining education at the Bert Hsu Academy, how her Berkeley degrees have supported her career journey, and her advice for current MBA students and young alumni. She also shares her memories of moving to the U.S. as a young girl in 1978, her family's history in China, and how her own bicultural experience has shaped her career and worldview. *OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On her assimilation to American culture“ I remember a discussion in class and they were talking about china, the bowls and plates. Well, I thought they were talking about the country of China. And I raised my hand, I said, ‘I'm from China.' Yes, I knew the word, but I didn't know that we were talking about plates and bowls china and not the country of China. That's what I mean by cultural assimilation or Americanization. It took me four years.”On where the idea for a Chinese-American bicultural school came from“ I thought back to my own experience of going to school in China and the U.S. and then watching my sons go to school in China …and about what's good about the Chinese education approach, what's good about the American ones, what's bad about each. And I thought, I want to combine the Chinese education philosophy, approach and practices with the American ones because both have pros and cons. And if I'm going to design [a school] from scratch, I'll just pick the good ones. The pros!”On her decision to name the school after her father“...It came to me that the person who embodies the bicultural and bilingual Chinese American experience, whom I have the utmost respect for, is my father. And he was bicultural, in addition to being bilingual. He not only survived, but thrived in both China and in the United States because he understood [the culture] and could really thrive in both cultures. And I thought, that should be the goal. I want all of our students to be able to do that.”Her advice to current MBA students“ MBA students, they fret about,what should I do [after MBA]? Which job should I take? What career should I pursue? what I tell them is that you only have so much information. You're never going to get complete information, and you're never going know whether that decision you made is the right decision. So what you do is you take all the information you have, make a decision, and then make that the right decision.”Show Links:LinkedIn ProfileBert Hsu Academy Website Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/onehaas/donations