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Elizabeth Dunn is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, and director of their Happiness Lab. She's also the co-author of two books, Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species and Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending. Greg and Elizabeth discuss how her work links common errors in forecasting happiness with misunderstandings about carbon impact. Elizabeth argues that experiences generally bring more lasting joy than material goods do because of comparison and hedonic adaptation. However, savoring and creating scarcity can renew enjoyment. She shares experiments showing people become happier when spending money on others, with studies where participants were given cash and a TED-backed $10,000 project where other-focused spending and charitable donations produced the greatest happiness. On climate, Elizabeth says guilt and fear exhaust people, and a better plan would be “more math, less moralizing,” focusing on high-impact actions like commuting choices, housing size and location relative to work, and travel decisions (nonstop flights, carry-on). She also debunks myths about straws and individual AI use, highlights contagious positive behaviors like solar adoption, defends having children, and emphasizes voting and civic action as key ways to make a difference alongside individual change. And for curious car fans, Greg's college and current car is a 1983 Mercedes 240d, which is described as a legendary, over-engineered diesel sedan built on the indestructible W123 platform. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why time is more valuable than money 37:27: People who prioritize time over money end up happier than people who prioritize money over time. So, for example, we followed students who were graduating from the University of British Columbia. We measured whether they tended to prioritize time or tended to prioritize money, and what we discovered was that students who reported prioritizing time at the end of their university career ended up happier one to two years after graduating, and that was because they chose to engage in more intrinsically enjoyable activities, like choosing a graduate school or a job that they found intrinsically enjoyable and motivating. And I would just say on sort of the climate side of things, for many people who care about climate change, being able to take a job that enables them to contribute on this topic is something that could be really valuable. How climate action can make us happier 29:09: Climate change is scary, and it is something that can make people very concerned, but recognizing this threat is actually a wonderful opportunity to change our lives in ways that can actually make us happier. On focusing on what actually matters 30:05: Since actually doing all of this research and learning a lot more about climate change, what I've learned is that I could actually leave all the lights on in my two-bedroom condo for the rest of my life, and the carbon emissions would be equivalent to eating 13 hamburgers... And so some of the things that people are kind of wagging their fingers about don't really matter, and there are all these other actions that really do matter that are quite impactful and can actually make us feel good. And, in fact, we don't need to shame other people into doing them. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Scarcity Mindset Chris Anderson - TED The Deadweight Loss of Christmas Greta Thunberg Carbon Footprint Calculate Your Carbon Footprint Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at the University of British Columbia Profile on Wikipedia Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 442: Michael Norton - Enhancing Community and Connection with Rituals Sonja Lyubomirsky Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Salim Ismail is a co-founder & partner at Exponential Venture Capital, founder of OpenExO, founding Executive Director at Singularity University, and an author. His latest work is, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it). Greg and Salim discuss Salim's shift from focusing on exponential technologies to organizational design as the main bottleneck to organizations adopting disruption. He traces the idea to his experience leading innovation at Yahoo, where disruptive ideas were rejected by a corporate “immune system,” and to building Singularity University with a tiny team, which led him to study fast-scaling unicorns and develop the Exponential Organizations (ExO) model.  They also talk about how legacy firms optimize for predictability and efficiency, making them hostile to disruption, and why change must often happen at the edge via spin-outs (e.g., Nespresso, Google X, Apple teams). Salim argues that AI agents will replace much middle management coordination (60–80% in 5–7 years), making judgment and accountability scarce, reshaping universities and expertise, and accelerating permissionless, low-cost innovation and startups. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Is the end of middle management coming? 30:59: Middle management does two things: it takes decisions from above and cascades them down, and it takes information from down and feeds it up. Okay? It's all coordination, and AI can do all that coordination at a hundred X faster, cheaper, more accurately than a human being can do it. Erik Brynjolfsson, I think, has the best frame for it. He calls it white-collar drudgery, right? Nobody needs to be assembling sales report from five regions and then passing it up just to the chief sales officer. Nobody really wants to be doing that, but somebody's got to do it. And there's that whole human hierarchy and coordination function in Cosian thinking. AI replaces most of that, so we think middle management evaporates by about a sixty to eighty percent level over the next five to seven years. The world is driven by disruption, not efficiency 13:39: Today the world is not driven by efficiency and predictability, it is driven by disruption... Human hierarchical structure does not work in a world that's changing quickly. And as AI comes along, it breaks it completely. Innovation has to happen at the edge 19:40: You've got to spin off. That's the only thing to do it. So the only solution to this, and I've looked at the innovation process of probably, I've been in the boardroom of probably two hundred of the Fortune five hundred over the last decade. There's only one path, which is you do disruptive things at the edge away from the mothership and let that become the new gravity center. That's it. That's the only way you can make it work. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Coase Theorem Manu Chandaria John Seely Brown Valve Corporation Geoffrey Hinton Moore's Law Vitalik Buterin Byzantine Fault Guest Profile: SalimIsmail.com LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Profile Social Profile on X Singularity University Exponential Venture Capital Open ExO Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact Exponential Transformation: Evolve Your Organization (and Change the World) Massive Transformative Purpose — The Heartbeat of Every ExO - Medium Post If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: Sangeet Paul Choudary John Hagel III Pascal Finette Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Carlos Escapa is a venture partner at Across Legal and Masia VC, an AI expert, investor, and former technology leader at Meta and Amazon AWS. He is also the co-author of The AI Driven Business: Leading, Competing and Thriving in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Greg and Carlos discuss why AI adoption is primarily an organizational and talent challenge rather than a pure technology play. Carlos argues companies need a “talent flywheel” to complement their  “data flywheel,” CEO-led change, and strong data culture; many pilots fail when organizations can't adapt roles, workflows, and governance. They discuss continuity vs discontinuity in AI (transformers and reasoning as shifts), agentification vs automation, and the risks of vibe coding: including security, maintenance, and tacit-knowledge dependence.  Carlos emphasizes that value accrues mainly to applications powered by proprietary data and better data infrastructure (catalogs, access, ontologies), not necessarily frontier model vendors, and has an optimistic view on the relevance of enterprise SaaS due to efficiency and cost. Their conversation also highlights burnout, mental health, and the need for more humanistic workplaces as AI scales. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Is AI really a technology problem? 02:29: AI is not so much a technology play. When we talk about digital transformation, we say that in our classes, right? It is much more of a mindset, and getting an organization and people prepared for the adoption of the technology is something where most companies lag behind. And, you know, truth be told, when you have such new technology as AI, and big data have been, it takes a while for the organization to catch up. Automation makes humans more vulnerable 22:20: The more you automate these low-level tasks, the more important it's going to be to drive what makes us really human, all this creativity, the ability to dream, and to do more together. What can't AI do? 23:02: Let's not exaggerate what artificial intelligence can do. It's a very limited technology. It is a wonderful technology, but it has a lot of limitations. And one of these limitations is that it does not understand cause and effect. When we have a world that is changing so rapidly, the sort of changes that we are experiencing at the moment are unprecedented in history. Data culture drives AI success 27:30: The companies who have proprietary data are the ones that are making the biggest value capture in the market at the moment. But I think yes. So the answer would be yes, as long as they have the data culture inside of the company. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Satya Nadella Vibe Coding Marc Benioff Amazon Web Services Warren Buffett SAAS - Software as a service What is a Data Lake Kimi K3 Jensen Huang Guest Profile: LinkedIn Profile AAE Speakers Profile Across Legal Profile Masia VC Guest Work: The AI Driven Business: Leading, Competing and Thriving in the Age of Artificial Intelligence If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 672: Vivienne Ming - Robot-Proof Yourself: Navigating AI's Impact on Work and Life 487: Gary Marcus - Challenging AI's Capabilities 497: Arvind Narayanan - Spotting The Difference Between AI Innovation and AI Snake Oil 476: Juan M. Lavista Ferres - AI's Potential for Positive Social Change Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If how much you learn is directly correlated to how much you fail, how do organizations crack the science behind using failure to their advantage? Pascal Finette is the co-founder of Radical, an advisory firm that helps organizations turn disruption into competitive advantage. He's also the author of several books including, Disrupt Disruption: How to Decode the Future, Disrupt Your Industry, and Transform Your Business and OUTLEARN: The Art of Learning Faster Than the World Can Change.  In this episode, Pascal shares with Greg the lessons he picked up working for Mozilla, reframing failure as the “first attempt in learning,” the importance of psychological safety in the workplace, and what organizations can do to make learning cheap and fast.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why assumptions fall apart 06:11: The challenge I have is that we build so much of our lives and our products and services we design on assumptions. And because we feel like it is too hard to test these assumptions, we just bake them in as factual knowledge. And then, once they hit reality, they do not survive the contact with reality, and they fall apart. So, it behooves us to figure out what our assumptions are and figure out a way to test those assumptions the quickest, cheapest, easiest way. The formula for faster learning 07:55: The core formula in this book, ‘Outlearn,' is very simple. It's the speed of learning is inversely proportional to the cost of failure. So make learning cheap, and you learn faster. To do that, and I think that is the big part, is you need to figure out what you are actually testing and break it down into smaller components. On focusing on learning, not failure 11:17: Language is really important, and I think there is this piece where you want to slow down a tiny bit and just think about, "What did we learn?" instead of the failing part. Because learning anchors stuff in your prefrontal cortex, the creative part of your brain. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Firefox Amy Edmondson Obi Felten Pandora (service) Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary by Geoffrey Cain Dashun Wang, Google Scholar Guest Profile: Staff Profile at radical Professional Website Professional Profile on LinkedIn Guest Work: Disrupt Disruption: How to Decode the Future, Disrupt Your Industry, and Transform Your Business  OUTLEARN: The Art of Learning Faster Than the World Can Change  960: A short book about the time you have left If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: How To Fail The Right Way with Amy Edmondson Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

All Else Equal is taking a short break over the summer and will be revisiting some of our favorite conversations from last season. The show will be back with new episodes soon.  Whether it be in politics, public health, or corporate finance, why are people more likely to interpret facts or data in a way that fits their preconceived notions about the world as opposed to searching for the fundamental truth?   A new paper from the Harvard Business School called, Sharing Models to Interpret Data (by Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam) studies the propensity for people to adopt interpretations to data based on their community's beliefs, and why this can lead to less accurate conclusions. Hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen are joined by the paper's co-author  Adi Sunderam, who is a professor of corporate finance at Harvard Business School, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a co-editor of the Journal of Finance.  The conversation covers the complexity of Bayesian updating and how the process is improperly deployed in today's thinking, not only in corporate decision-making but also on a sociological level. They also discuss Sunderam's model for explaining how people interpret data, why people are more likely to fall into group-belief dynamics, and if there are any interventions that would lead to better decision-making.   Read Adi Sunderam and Joshua Schwartzstein's paper:  Sharing Models to Interpret Data   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.

Even without the attention-consuming technology we're immersed in today, humans have always been easily distractible. So what distracted the mindful monks of the past? And are there lessons from the monks' practice that we can apply to today's level of distraction?   Jamie Kreiner is a history professor at UCLA and the author of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. In the book, she details the strategies monks used to improve concentration and connects the past to the present – examining why the human mind has persistently been prone to wandering.  Jamie and Greg discuss monks' theories of distractibility and why concentration mattered for salvation, ethical obligation, and getting beyond self-fixation. The conversation also contrasts monastic aims with Stoicism and Buddhist mindfulness, and considers what modern people can learn from the monastic approach. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: How monks managed distractions internally 23:02: This is a really basic but really profoundly smart way that monks tackled having thoughts they did not want to have. So rather than kind of ignoring them or hoping they are not real or just not paying attention at all and letting something fester and get bigger, you sort of act as a bouncer or a screener of anything that comes through, and you have to evaluate with each one, "Do I want this here? Is this a good thing?" And sometimes that can be really hard. Sometimes they thought that work of deciding whether something was good or bad was so difficult you actually needed to consult another person about it, like a mentor. We would think of it maybe as a therapist now, but they had a very different idea of what that kind of mentoring involved. Books like technology can be distracting too 29:40: Books are really essential to that initial process of learning, meditating, and internalizing, and part of the memory training involves interacting with books in these ways. But it was also, like any piece of tech, distracting on its own. How monks strengthened attention over time 26:59: Probably the most basic difference is that they just treated the memory like we would treat a muscle or something. It needed exercise, it needed training. You had to keep it in good shape if you wanted it to behave properly. So the memory for them was both a storage unit, but also a kind of construction site or toolkit that could work with the memories. It had to be a kind of exploratory place to build new ideas out of. So you would train the memory in two different ways. One was training it to store things that you actually wanted to retrieve. They knew it was really hard to get rid of memories, but if you kept stocking new ones that mattered or kept revisiting the ones that you thought were most important, that would more effectively, over time, edge out the things that you thought were intrusive.  Show Links: Recommended Resources: Stoicism Akrasia  Monasticism Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at UCLA Google Scholar Profile Guest Work: The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction  Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It might sound counterintuitive, but when it comes to the art of persuasion, using a logic-first approach is the last thing you want to do. This is because, in reality, every human being is wired to feel first, and reason later.  Josh Bandoch is Senior Vice President for Policy Research at the Foundation for Research Into Equal Opportunity and has spent years becoming a master of persuasion. His latest book, How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion, is the ultimate guide to understanding the techniques that will actually move people, and the science behind why.  In this episode, Greg and Josh discuss the critical role of emotional intelligence in effective persuasion, how to listen and engage with your audience, “the granny test,” and how Montesquieu's teachings on particularism can apply to persuasion.   *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Research rigor isn't enough on its own [05:44] We want to marry the IQ that the research rigor, the intellectualism gives us, you have to marry that with emotional intelligence. Because you could have the most rigorously researched paper in the history of mankind and if you deliver that in a way that is not emotionally intelligent, might or might be emotionally unintelligent, then it's going to be counterproductive. So, you need to marry those two together and think about how you deliver this information in a way that your audience receives it warmly and they're willing to actually do something that you want them to do with it. That's where the sweet spot is. Every human being is wired to feel first, and reason later.  [05:12] All a billion of us are wired to feel first then reason. Sometimes it's feel then reason. Sometimes it's a feeling we never get to reasoning. And moreover, people who tragically suffer brain damage and lose the ability to emote, they actually see their reasoning impaired, which means that the logic-first approach to persuasion is actually illogical. Why we can't stop talking about ourselves [12:02] There are five aspects of our cognitive wiring that are foundational to persuasion that are central to the book. One is that it's about them, not you, but we're wired to think and talk all about ourselves, which isn't persuasive. So, we're wired to think and talk about ourselves. Talking about ourselves generates the same sensations in our brain as sex and money. It feels really good. And it's just, it's a survival mechanism. So, like if we don't think a talk about ourselves, who's going to? Quite possibly nobody.  On what he thinks about AI being more persuasive than humans.  [51:52] I'm open to the prospect that the average AI can be more persuasive than the average human because maybe the average human doesn't bring the calm, or maybe there are some basic, sort of, persuasion tools that AI can use. I still don't think, and I don't think we'll ever be at the point where the most persuasive AI is going to be as good as the most persuasive humans. And even if we are, it's still the humans who are making the decisions.  Show Links: Recommended Resources: Thinking, Fast and Slow How to be more persuasive | Joshua Bandoch | TEDxIllinois Tech Milton Friedman Modes of persuasion The Spirit of Law  Immanuel Kant John Locke Guest Profile: Vice President Profile at The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity Professional Website Professional Profile on LinkedIn Guest Work: How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion  The Politics of Place: Montesquieu, Particularism, and the Pursuit of Liberty Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What does the history of human innovation tell us about the current moment we're in? It tells us that, despite the computational and AI gains of the last few decades, the world's progress is a bit flat. Why?  Carl Benedikt Frey is an associate professor of AI & Work at the University of Oxford and directs the Future of Work Programme at Oxford. His latest book, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, examines the world's start and stall relationship with progress over the last thousand years.  In this episode, Carl and Greg dive into the history of how centralized and decentralized systems have impacted the world's technological innovation. They contrast China's earlier technological lead and bureaucratic state-building with Europe's decentralized politics that enabled the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, Prussia's critical role in advancing progress, and why despite the breakthroughs with AI, the world could be facing an era of less progress and more stagnation. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The real driver of progress [49:28] Most progress comes from doing new and previously inconceivable things. And if we begin seeing more entry in the AI applied to entirely new products and industries, then I think it can be a much more sustained productivity growth. And so how progress ends refers to the pattern that what we've seen globally for the past two decades is productivity stagnation. And the point is not that that trend cannot be reversed, but doesn't look too encouraging at the moment, I would say.  Is US innovation actually paying off? [47:16] I think even if you look at space innovation, the, sort of, real upsurge comes in the 1990s with privatization. And so since then if you look at patenting we haven't seen anything similar. And I don't want to diminish the compliments of SpaceX, but I think it's a continuation of what happened in the '90s, not the new pattern. And clearly there's innovation happening in the United States, but it's not yet showing up in the productivity statistics. And so, you can have exponential technologies without exponential growth.  How historical incentives created the meritocratic state capacity behind East Asia's successful industrial policy. [14:00] To study for the civil service examination, you had to memorize the Confucian classics. There was no emphasis on science, technology, and engineering. And it was the way that you could move up in the social hierarchy. It was the best escalator for social mobility there was. And so if Galileo had been born in China, he would probably have been a bureaucrat rather than a scientist, and such were the incentives. And I think it's interesting, and I think it's a point worthwhile making, that really long-lasting legacy of a meritocratic civil service is still there in China today, and it's still there in East Asia more broadly, and it's still there in the countries that we think of as being the most successful in industrial policy, right? Show Links: Recommended Resources: Alexander Gerschenkron Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel Voltaire René Descartes Huguenots Prussian Reform Movement Crédit Mobilier scandal Losing the War with Japan | PBS Frontline Manhattan Project MIT Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab) Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at University of Oxford Professional Website Professional Profile on LinkedIn Guest Work: How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: Economic Growth in the Age of Automation with Carl Benedikt Frey Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Henry Richardson, a former national champion diver, has built a career centered around health, wellbeing, and community. After earning his MBA at Rice Business, Henry founded the fitness studio chain, DEFINE body & mind, a nod to a professor's words about defining your role in this world.  Henry's work with DEFINE has since evolved into Define Living, apartment communities with health and wellbeing at their core. In this episode of Owl Have You Know, hosted by Brian Jackson ‘21, Henry shares his journey from all-star athlete to entrepreneur, how he's creating environments that shape behavior and improve wellbeing, and why he believes business, at its best, is a spiritual practice.Episode Guide:00:00 Meet Henry Richardson00:55 Life in Tepoztlán02:40 From Diving to Teaching05:33 Yoga Turning Point09:19 Choosing Rice MBA10:39 The Moment That Sparked DEFINE14:29 Environment Shapes Behavior16:34 Define Living Community Model22:10 Leadership in Real Estate25:14 Positive Psychology Proof27:26 Feronia Retreat Vision31:56 Business As A Spiritual Practice35:46 Advice for Disconnection38:10 Defining His Role TodayThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:The lightbulb moment Henry knew he had to build something of his own[11:34]  I was in business school 2007 through 2009, and that was literally the time of the Great Recession. And so my first semester of my second year was when everything just essentially was bleak. I remember one of my professors, he said, "Look, last year 75% of students at this point had job offers, and this year only 25%. So it's a complete flip, right? And so things aren't as hopeful as they perhaps were over a year ago.”  And he said the phrase you just mentioned. He said, "Listen, don't take a job just because it's available. Take something that's going to define your role in this world." And I just, like, stopped in my foot track, like, this may not be exactly what I do, but if I do, if I open up a studio, a fitness studio, I'm calling it Define.That's exactly the thing I needed. And I actually have to admit, I cut my next class, which I am not one prone to do. I feel like I'm a good student, right? But I cut my next class, and I filed my DBA for Define in Harris County. On why Henry sees business as a spiritual practice, not just a hustle [32:12] Business is actually a very spiritual process. It is discipline. It's devotion. It is connecting to something that's bigger than yourself so that you can be better than just the individual self that you are. And I think business is very much like that. I feel like if you are working in an industry that you're passionate about, that you want to contribute to, it can be something that can be utilized for the good of humanity. You know, doing well by doing good, that whole mindset. His calculated approach to big leaps like taking the plunge at Rice Business School [13:17] I'm creative, and I'm adventurous for sure. I mean, I used to dive from a 10-meter platform. But I'm not just, like, blindly foolish in anything I do. I'm pretty calculated in terms of the approach that I take to most things. Like in diving, you start on the one meter, and then you go to the three, and then you go to the five, and then you go to the seven, and then you go to the ten. And so there's these steps that take you along this path, and the exact same thing happened with me at business school. And it was so powerful because Rice was the quote-unquote "platform" for me to dive and jump into my business, and it gave me the path and the training to feel confident.Show Links: Define LivingFeronia | Retreat and Event VenueBreathing Life Back in Business, Henry Richardson | TEDxTranscriptGuest Profile:Henry Richardson | LinkedInHenry Richardson | Rice Business

Vivienne Ming is the executive chair at Human Trust, Founder and Executive Chair at Socos Labs, Professor, and author of the book Robot-Proof: When Machines Have all the Answers, Build Better People. Greg and Vivienne talk about  how AI will reshape work and why the common narratives are really “lazy myths.” Vivienne argues that AI is superhuman at well‑posed problems but humans still retain a relative advantage in ‘ill‑posed problems,' contributing to a U‑shaped labor demand with erosion of jobs in the middle of it. She criticizes benchmark-driven, autonomous AI development and calls for optimizing hybrid intelligence, better education focused on foundation/meta‑learning skills (curiosity, working memory, perspective-taking, intellectual humility). Vivienne and Greg debate the merits of UBI as a solution, when discussing how destabilizing mass unemployment would be, and describes experiments where human‑AI “cyborgs” matched expert prediction markets when participants actively challenged AI rather than copying it. She ultimately delivers her message of hope for the future and belief in the humanity of humans. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Where humans beat AI 13:47: The most interesting problems that feel rare to us, but in almost the entire game are the ill-posed problems. These are the things where, forget right answers, we don't even know what the questions are. And, it may seem sort of trivially, almost axiomatic, to say that while the space of well-posed problems is vast, everything humanity has figured out. Play around with Gemini or GPT or any model you want and be proud. What it can produce is a testament to what humanity has discovered about the world. And sometimes it produces ugly things, and that's a reflection of us too. But the set of things we do not yet know is infinite. Our relative advantage is in ill-posed problems. The importance of foundational skills 45:25: Developing foundation skills isn't just about a better job. It's about a better life. What an amazing opportunity to take this moment in history and not just concern ourselves with whether I'm gonna boo Eric Schmidt because he's doubling down on AI and I feel like I'm losing a job, but to actually see that moment as an opportunity to invest in humanity in the way, almost paradoxically, we always should have been, but we didn't have to, and so we didn't. On transforming people relationship with work 22:56: Viewing your college education simply as a license to earn money, I think, also deserves a lot of self-skepticism. So we need to really transform work, but we also need to transform people's relationships with work, because we simply don't run a factory line economy anymore. I don't need you to be a very sophisticated cog where you're given orders and you execute them, and only a few people are smart enough, like you, to execute those orders. Pretty much everyone's job now, if I may be so self-elevating, is my job. People bring you unknown problems, you gotta figure them out, and I think that's terrifying, and no one's educating the next generation workforce on how to do it. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Jevons Paradox Generative AI AlphaGo Daron Acemoglu Jacquard Machine Industrial Revolution James Heckman Raj Chetty Guest Profile: Profile at Socos Labs LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Page Social Profile on X Guest Work: Robot-Proof: When Machines Have all the Answers, Build Better People 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 Sri Josyula, an EWMBA 25 and Product Management Leader for Seller Experience at Max Retail.Growing up in Hyderabad, India, Sri was surrounded by books and academia. Both her parents hold PhDs and spent their careers as Professors which gave her early exposure to a lifelong learning mindset. After moving to the U.S. and earning a master's degree from the University of Southern California, Sri built a career in tech, but never wanted to stop challenging herself.Sri joins host Sean Li to dig into what it really takes to pursue an MBA as a working parent. They also explore the support systems that made it all possible, how she built that community of support, and is now giving back to it through her substack, “Raising The Bar (And Kids)”, a place for parents who are navigating ambitious career moves alongside family life.*OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On carving her own pathways in her career“ I always want to find myself in an uncomfortable place, meaning, "Hey, if this is too comfortable for me, that's really not something I want to continue doing," because learning always comes when you are stretching yourself, you are finding yourself in a place that you don't find comfort in.”On growing up in a home with professors“Regardless of the time of day, my house was always full of books — both my parents poring through them, their lecture notes, all of it. So I think this was my very early start of "student always," without even realizing I was absorbing all of this, just constantly seeing my parents read, reread, and revise their lecture notes to make them better year after year.”On the importance of creating community and support systems“ I grew up believing that you help people just because you have to help them.You don't help people expecting something in return. And when you genuinely do something, it does come back to you…When you are there for somebody, they really want to be there for you when you need it the most. And I think this is how a genuine relationship is cultivated.”On why the MBA was worth it“My biggest takeaway as a parent going through the program was this essential shift in mindset that the time you invest in yourself is not time taken away from your family. You're expanding the pie for everybody in your family because they're all growing with you.”Show Links:LinkedIn ProfileRaising The Bar (And Kids) | Substack

All Else Equal is taking a short break over the summer and will be revisiting some of our favorite conversations from last season. The show will be back with new episodes soon. In the final part of this two-part interview, Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist and Harvard professor, again joins hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen to discuss his new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. In this episode, Jonathan and Jules break down more revelatory examples from Steven's book that demonstrate how common knowledge is a first order explanatory variable for how humans behave. They also explore the role common knowledge plays in financial markets, particularly when it comes to speculative trading, and examine common knowledge in an academic freedom sense, highlighting the del 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.

Dr. Sebastian Wernicke is a data scientist, a partner at Oxera Consulting, and author of the new book Data Inspired: Building an Organizational Culture of Inquiry for Lasting Transformation. Sebastian talks with Greg about why he thinks culture, not tools, is the biggest obstacle to effective data/AI adoption. Sebastian critiques the “data deficit” assumption that more data yields obvious answers, arguing data often increases complexity and should drive inquiry, psychological safety, and willingness to be proven wrong. They contrast data-driven optimization with a data-inspired mindset that also asks “what if” questions to enable transformation, noting A/B testing examples like Google's “50 shades of Blue” experiment don't generalize out to most business decisions.  Sebastian also explains why initiatives fail when they treat technology as the hard part, while they ignore tacit decision-making, incentives, and workflows, and rely on pilots/lighthouse projects that don't scale. He outlines strategy using Rumelt's framework, discusses silos vs “swamps,” leadership behavior, and why CDO/AI roles need explicit transformation mandates, resources, and CEO-level support. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Culture not technology, drives transformation 11:36: I think when it comes to data and AI specifically, it's really focusing on the wrong problem as the hard problem. I think whenever you're tackling one of these bigger initiatives, you're sort of trying to figure out in the beginning to say, "Well, what's hard about this?" Right? Because that's what we should focus on initially. And usually, I think what many of these projects focus on is clearly technology. So they say, "Well, what's hard about this? It will be hard to get the data together. It will be hard because there's all these fancy algorithms, and we need the cloud infrastructure, and we need the experts," and so on. And the other elements, you know, we need to act differently. We have to bring 20 different stakeholders together because many of these data and AI projects are interdisciplinary, and they all need to agree, and they need to agree in spirit, not just say that they agree and we're actually going to change the way we work, so we're going to redistribute power, maybe even in our organization, or who makes a decision, that's the hard part. More data isn't enough to make better decisions 02:29:  I think we have this inherent assumption that when we want to make better decisions, all we need to do is add a bit of more data to our organizations, right? So, as soon as we see the right data, as soon as we see what the data is telling us, we will know what to do, everybody in the room will agree, and we know how to move forward. And of course, it's not at all like that.  Optimization is not transformation 02:31: We have this inherent assumption that when we want to make better decisions, all we need to do is add a bit of more data to our organizations, right? So as soon as we see the right data, as soon as we see what the data is telling us, we will know what to do. Everybody in the room will agree, and we know how to move forward. And, of course, it's not at all like that. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Google's '50 shades of Blue'​ experiment Marissa Mayer Goodhart's Law Richard Rumelt Guest Profile: LinkedIn Profile Professional Profile on Oxera Guest Work: Data Inspired: Building an Organizational Culture of Inquiry for Lasting Transformation Sebastian's TED Talks Data Inspired | Substack Newsletter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nicholas Lemann is the Pulitzer-Moore Professor of Journalism at Columbia University and a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of several books, including Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream, and most recently, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries. Greg speaks with Nicholas about Returning, his memoir tracing five generations of his German Jewish family in New Orleans. Nicholas reflects on how the pursuit of acceptance led many German Jews to downplay their Jewish identity, distance themselves from Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and oppose Zionism, before describing his own gradual return to Jewish tradition and community later in life. From there, the conversation broadens into a discussion about the changing role of identity and institutions in American life. Greg and Nicholas explore the decline of religious and ethnic identity, the growing secularization of academia and journalism, and how changing ideas of merit, belonging, and fairness have shaped debates over standardized testing, affirmative action, and elite college admissions. Finally, they discuss Transaction Man, examining the rise and fall of the “company man,” the shift from stakeholder-oriented corporations to shareholder primacy, and Nicholas's argument that today's more individualistic, network-driven society has transformed how people find purpose, stability, and community. unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM. Episode Quotes: The hidden cost assimilation 13:35: Jewish assimilation, like my family's story, tends to involve offloading many parts of traditional Jewish observance. Ethnic and religious culture can be a very beautiful and enriching community to live in. And it is for me today. But if you start watering it down, after a certain point, it kind of loses...It doesn't have that much left, and it doesn't fulfill the needs that it used to. It doesn't have the sense of community that it used to. It doesn't have the hold between generations that it used to. A culture doesn't need an enemy to disappear 14:21: We all know why there's almost no German Jews in Germany. That's one story. But there's really almost no coherent German Jewish culture in America, and that's for a whole different set of reasons, which is just lightening what it meant to be Jewish and live as a Jew to the point that it just didn't hold people anymore. The tradeoff between acceptance and identity 11:08: Eastern European Jews made us very uncomfortable. And so we felt that if they came to America in very large numbers, it would kind of make things worse for us 'cause it would unleash prejudice. And with Zionism, Zionism can be defined in a lot of different ways. But if you define it as a sense of peoplehood, you know, we are a people, we are a tribe, even if we don't have a nation state, we are a de facto nation, and we're all in it together in common cause and have a primary loyalty to each other. What I just said, that's exactly what the German Jews didn't think. That's... I was raised not to think. So, we were supposed to be Americans with a light ethno-religious identity, but we were Americans. We didn't have dual loyalty. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Moses Mendelssohn Pittsburgh Platform Lillian Hellman Zionism Antisemitism Felix Frankfurter James Tobin SAT Jack Welch Adolf A. Berle Louis Brandeis Peter Drucker Michael C. Jensen Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure Werner Erhard Reid Hoffman Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Columbia Journalism School Profile at Tulane University LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Page Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing Transaction Man: Traders, Disrupters, and the Dismantling of Middle-Class America American Democracy: 21 Historic Answers to 5 Urgent Questions The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America By Nicholas Lemann - Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War The New Yorker Articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For Alecia Harris '23, art is as essential as breathing, and it's something everyone deserves to have access to. So she's turned that belief into a career that sits at the intersection of art and business, with a mission focused on making art accessible.After years working in arts programming and visitor engagement at Rice University's Moody Center for the Arts, she earned her Professional MBA from Rice Business, then pivoted into private wealth management at J.P. Morgan, where she built a client book of art collectors and museum donors. Now, as chief development officer at the Rothko Chapel, she's channeling all of that experience into leading fundraising and development for one of Houston's most iconic cultural institutions, during a pivotal moment in its history.Alecia joins co-host Brian Jackson '21 to discuss her winding path from art history to finance and back, what “radical hospitality” means in practice, how her MBA gave her the 50,000-foot view she needed, and why Houston's next generation of patrons must step up to steward the city's world-class cultural institutions into the future.Episode Guide:00:00 Meet Alecia Harris01:09 Finding Art History02:29 Art Without Intimidation05:02 Radical Hospitality06:26 The Rothko Chapel07:39 Renovation and Light09:13 Why Get an MBA12:21 From Arts to JPMorgan14:26 MBA Learning Curve15:46 Art Advantage in Banking21:37 Development Role Day to Day23:43 Leadership Across Sectors28:17 Travel for Art31:08 Houston Hidden GemsThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:Why arts shouldn't be a luxury 5:41: If you stand in front of a piece of work, often Rothko paintings, like people talk about having your Rothko moment, like people are moved to tears. They have these transformative experiences in front of it. Why shouldn't that be available to everybody? And for me, even when I was working in, at JPMorgan, and I was working in finance, I had to have access to art every day because for me, it's like breathing. And I think good art holds a mirror up to society. It helps you process universal truths. It helps you connect to people. It's so important to me. It's not a luxury. It's something that I think everybody has to have access to it. And so anything that I can do to make people feel as if they also have an ownership over this, they have a right to access it, that's something that I'm very motivated by.The 50,000-foot view of leadership23:15: I never would have had that 50,000 square foot view or really been able to understand how all the different pieces came together if I hadn't gone to business school. So I'm so, so fortunate that I have that perspective. One, just the scope of programs that we learned at Rice, but then also getting that experience working at the bank and now being able to bring all of that to this very worthwhile organization is incredibly meaningful.Why curiosity makes better leaders23:55: For me, there's not really the qualities that I look for in a leader that I don't look for and think are worthwhile in just general human beings. Like this curiosity and openness, a willingness to listen. I think we can learn so much from unexpected places, take inspiration from unexpected places. I'm somebody that's a big info gatherer, and I'll take something and it's like I don't really know what I'm going to do with that or why I needed to know that right now, but I'll put it, you know, in my back pocket. And then those moments when you're able to make the connection later and it kind of unlocks new meaning or new opportunity, those are always really rewarding.Show Links: Rothko ChapelMoody Center for the Arts | Rice UniversityTranscriptGuest Profile:Alecia Harris | Rothko Chapel

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science. In addition he is the author of several books. His most recent titles are Liberalism and Its Discontents, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, and the upcoming In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir. Greg and Francis talk about Frank's “End of History” thesis and later work on liberalism, identity, trust, and political order. Fukuyama argues long-run historical progress is visible in the gap between developed and developing societies, but he still sees no coherent “higher” alternative to liberal democracy and market society. He also explains that modern discontent through generational forgetting of 20th-century horrors and a deeper human desire for recognition and struggle (thymos), including megalothymia - the drive for superiority, which can turn tyrannical.  They discuss how modern prosperity arose from Europe's unique mix of innovation culture, political fragmentation, religious schism, and family changes that fostered individualism. Frank contrasts state strength with constraint, and traces democracy's path through England to parliament and common law, critiques American anti-statism in state-building, and examines China vs India. They also discuss war's effects on state capacity, the internet's role in polarization and factual disagreement, and the need for shared liberal norms. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The collapse of a shared factual basis  [47:23] Liberal societies need to tolerate viewpoint diversity, but what we're seeing goes way beyond this. This is kind of empirical, factual diversity where people don't accept the same factual basis of the nature of the world. So, you know, are vaccines safe? Well, we used to think there was consensus about that because you have this whole accepted scientific system for empirical testing of propositions like that, and for some reason now people don't trust that anymore, or, you know, who won the last election, sort of, issue. Very hard to have a democracy if you disagree about whether you had a free and fair election, right? And these, again, I think would not have existed in the pre-internet age, that kind of disagreement over just simple factual information. The absence of a higher alternative to liberal democracy  [05:18] A lot of people have lost faith in liberal democracy, but I still don't see anyone posing a real alternative of a higher society. Does the rule of law hold without shared norms? [54:46] One thing that the last few years have taught me is that, in a way, you know, we used to think there's law and there are norms, and the norms are basically more flighty and less weighty, but the law is really a big barrier to bad action. And I think we're realizing that's not true. Everything is normative. Why the drive for superiority can't simply be eliminated [12:42] It was Bob Iger or some big CEO who wanted to climb the seven highest mountains in the world, you know? So there's a lot of ways that you can demonstrate your superiority that are basically, if not socially constructive, they're at least peaceful; you know, they're not going to harm other people. But it turns out that for Donald Trump, at least that wasn't enough. And I think that's a basic problem. You want outlets for this, what I call "megalothumia." This is the desire to be recognized as superior, and basically you can't have a society without that. I mean, you're not going to have any great baseball players, musicians, you know, philosophers if you don't have people that want to be excellent at something. But that also unleashes a kind of tyrannical desire to simply dominate, and I think that's the problem we're dealing with right now. Show Links: Recommended Resources: United States Agency for International Development Karl Marx Liberalism Thumos Bob Iger Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status Joel Mokyr Roman Empire Reformation Caesaropapism Henry II of England Estates of the Realm Oliver Cromwell Glorious Revolution Assize of Novel Disseisin Code of Justinian Neal Stephenson Robert D. Putnam Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Stanford University Wikipedia Profile Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir Liberalism and Its Discontents Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity End of History and the Last Man Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How do leaders create a unified culture at their organizations that's not only sustainable but propels growth and success?  Psychologist Jennifer A. Chatman and sociologist Glenn R. Carroll put their expertise on management and organizational behavior together in the new book, Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs. Chatman is Dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and Carroll is a professor of management at Stanford University.  On this episode, they join Greg to discuss how organizational culture research has evolved, valid methods for measuring culture within a firm, the defining characteristics of strong cultures, how culture and strategy are complements to each other, and practices for changing an organization's culture. They also delve into case studies from existing organizations like Netflix, Genetech, and Berkeley Haas.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why great strategies fall 08:13: [Jenniffer Chatman] The problem has never been finding the right answer. The problem has been scaling it up through the entire organization so that you're actually delivering, right? I mean, you teach strategy. Strategy formulation is, there's theory and there are best practices, and you can develop a beautiful, elegant, distinctive strategy that takes into account all the dynamics that are going on currently. But if you can't implement that throughout the organization, it's not valuable. So culture is the other piece of that, which is how to cascade things through an organization that allows it to execute completely on a well-advised strategy. Cultures form whether you design or not 54:29:  [Jenniffer Chatman]  No matter what you do or don't do, a culture will form. And if you're not intentional about it, the risk is that a culture forms that actually deviates significantly from what your true objectives are, and then, you're in trouble. What makes a strong culture? 11:56: [Glenn Glenn Carrol] Strong culture is the combination of high intensity by individuals, which means they really care about what goes on, and they will go out of their way to correct people if they think you're doing it wrong. So that kind of intensity, coupled with homogeneity or agreement among people in the organization about what should be done. And so when you have both high intensity and high agreement, you have what we call a strong culture. Now, the content of the culture is the actual substance of the rituals, beliefs, practices, and you can find, by our definition, strong culture organizations that run the gamut from business organizations to religious organizations to cults to terrorist cells, you name it. So around any content, you can pretty much produce a strong culture. Show Links: Recommended Resources: “Corporate culture: Evidence from the field”, 2022, Journal of Financial Economics   Benjamin E. Hermalin “People and Organizational Culture: A Profile Comparison Approach to Assessing Person-Organization Fit”, 1991, Academy of Management Journal  No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings Clifford Geertz Bronisław Malinowski Genentech Guest Profiles: Jennifer Chatman Dean Profile at UC Berkeley Jennifer Chatman Professional Website Jennifer Chatman LinkedIn Profile Glenn Carroll Faculty Profile at Stanford University Glenn Carroll LinkedIn Profile Guest Work: Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs  Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer | Podcast  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

All Else Equal is taking a short break over the summer and will be revisiting some of our favorite conversations from last season. The show will be back with new episodes soon.  Everyday, we participate in seemingly arbitrary but essential choices for society to function. We all agree on what side of the road to drive on, to use paper currency, or to speak the same language. These kinds of choices make up a group's common knowledge – things that are made blatantly and publicly known. But what about the things that are known, but unspoken? What is the purpose of innuendos, euphemisms, and veiling the true meaning of our words in society?  Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist and Harvard professor, joins hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen to discuss his new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. In this two-part conversation, they explore the psychological and social significance of common knowledge in human interactions, highlighting its complex role in both fostering cooperation and permitting social taboos. They also discuss the intersection of common knowledge with economic behaviors like speculative trading, and the balance between maintaining social norms and fostering open debate in academic settings.   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.

In a world of constant, rapid digital transformation, one industry has struggled to evolve: construction. With all the gains made in efficiency and productivity, what's holding the construction industry back?  Brian Potter is a senior fellow at the Institute for Progress and author of the book, The Origins of Efficiency which charts the history of production efficiency, examining the great leaps forward with inventions like penicillin, the light bulb, and automobiles.  Brian joins Greg to share his experience in the construction industry that prompted his research into productivity and why construction productivity appears flat compared with manufacturing and agriculture. They also discuss distinctions between labor productivity and overall efficiency, the central role of scale and fixed costs, why tacit knowledge makes process transfer hard across plants and countries, and political obstacles such as guilds and unions resisting automation, including AI. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: A factory is like a big sociotechnical machine 16:55: A factory is like a big sociotechnical machine where some of the capability lives in the machine, and a lot of it lives in, like, the processes that have been implemented and the heads of the people that are working on the line and know exactly what they have to do to make this work effectively. And it all kind of works together as one uniform thing. A lot of that is, like, not necessarily written down any place. It's either in this knowledge of these guys' heads, it's not written down, or it's, like, an emergent property of how all these things kind of work together, and it's very hard to decompose that and transfer it to a new place. It's often quite difficult to do that.  Has scale been the primary driver of efficiency since the Industrial Revolution? 08:42: Scale is a really big part of it for a lot of reasons. One is that just scaling effects are very powerful on their own. And then two is that scaling actually ends up being like a gating mechanism for a lot of other efficiency improvements in the sense that a lot of other efficiency improvements that you might implement need some sort of level, need some sort of scale, to be able to deploy them because they operate like large fixed costs. What is the genesis of “The Origins of Efficiency” 05:59: To understand why construction is so hard to make more efficient, I need to understand what other industries are doing to get more efficient. What strategies are they employing? And then I could understand why those strategies don't work in construction or whatever. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Adam Smith and The Pin Factory Katerra Henry Ford Do Management Interventions Last? Evidence from India by Bloom, Roberts, McKenzie, and Mahajan Nicholas Bloom - The Science of Management John Roberts - The In's and Out's of Organizational Economics Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business Frederick Winslow Taylor Joel Mokyr Guest Profile: Fellow Profile at Institute for Progress Professional Profile on LinkedIn Guest Work: The Origins of Efficiency  Construction Physics Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

After building a career in enterprise risk management and rising to senior leadership in banking, Kenzel Fallen '12 and her husband Tio turned a shared passion for specialty coffee into Three Keys Coffee — a roastery and cafe focused on sustainability, creativity and music. What started as a side project during COVID has since landed on the shelves of Trader Joe's and been named Food & Wine's “Best Coffee Roaster in Texas.”As CEO of Three Keys Coffee, Kenzel is combining her Rice MBA training with her risk management mindset to navigate the daily challenges of owning a rapidly growing business. On this episode, she joins co-host Brian Jackson '21 to chat about the inception of Three Keys Coffee, why entrepreneurship was a surprising path for her, and how Rice Business provided the right launchpad.Episode Guide:00:00 Meet Kenzel Fallen01:02 How Love Brought Her to Rice Business05:27 From Risk to Coffee Entrepreneurship09:13 Shopping Your Values12:00 Working as a Couple14:59 COVID Launch and Growth18:08 Sourcing and Supply Chain21:35 Jazz Brand Inspiration25:03 Awards and Recognition30:41 Coffee Impact and Purpose35:04 What's Next for Three Keys37:31 Distinguished Alumni Honor39:10 Advice for Aspiring FoundersThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:Your network is your education04:36: Sometimes when people hear that, you know, your network is your net worth, it's almost more of a sense of, someone can just get you an introduction, or they can get you in a room. And it's not so much about having adjacency to people. I think that's more, that's like social climbing, right? But when you network, I see that as sharing. I see that as exchanging information and insights. And so, for me, when I think of that phrase, like "network is your net worth," I look at that as enhancing your education, enhancing your perspective, enhancing how deeply you understand the world and society that we live and work in. And sometimes you do have to rely on a lot of different experiences and perspectives. And for me, that's how that network expands.Bringing the cafe experience at home22:50: Jazz was actually one of the genres that helped with the advent of, you know, vinyl albums. You know, people wanted to be able to take that live music experience but be able to enjoy it and celebrate it at home. Prior to some of the early jazz recordings, there really was just, like, classical music that had actually been put on vinyl. And so jazz allowed people to bring home that concert and that live band experience, and that's the same thing that we kind of wanted to do with coffee. It's like, "Hey, you don't have to go to a shop. You get the right beans. You understand how to make them. You can have that cafe experience at home." And so kind of drawing that parallel as well in the way that we wanted to create coffee and share coffee with people.The email that changed everything25:25: I remember getting an email that was like, "Hey, we're thinking about doing, you know, highlighting different coffee shops. Can you send us some pictures of your shop?" And it was from Food & Wine, but I'm just thinking, "Oh, they're just going to highlight a bunch of folks." I had no clue. I truly had no clue until the announcement was made that we were named. They had us on the list as the best in Texas. We were just, I mean, mind-blown.Show Links: Three Keys CoffeeTranscriptGuest Profile:Kenzel Fallen | Rice BusinessKenzel Fallen | LinkedIn

Aaron Brown is an author and risk management professional, formerly the Chief Risk Officer at the hedge fund AQR. Aaron's recent works are titled Wrong Number: How to Extract Truth From a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation and The Poker Face of Wall Street. Greg and Aaron discuss why quantitatively flawed studies still persist today. Aaron argues that the central problem is not just incompetence or conspiracy but a macro phenomenon he calls tribalism, combined with the diffusion of responsibility across authors, reviewers, journals, and journalists. He discusses examples, including an NTSB “Chinatown bus” study, a USAID mortality claim, a Chunnel fire-risk study, an observational marijuana/heart-attack paper, and a study claiming 40% of COVID deaths were caused by evictions and later cited in courts and legislation. They contrast academia's weak incentives with finance and gambling, where betting forces accountability, and Aaron describes the empirical Bayesian approach he prefers using base rates and evidence. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: There are consequences to publicizing bad research. [34:45] I think most researchers are careful not to let the university press office get ahold of their bad study. They're careful not to go out and give interviews on it. The ones who forget that, they're the ones who cause the problems and get caught. I mean, not many people do get caught, and the consequences of getting caught are pretty low, but it can happen. You lose professional credibility, and that's extremely important, you know? That's really the be all and end all for most researchers I know, is what their peer researchers think of them. And that's where you get hurt. In fact, you get hurt even for getting publicity for your good work, you know? There still is a real feeling in a lot of sciences that the guy in the headline is not a real scientist. Why are people so easily misled by quantitative information? [05:32]  It's been documented over and over in lots of different ways, that most published research findings are false, and yet nobody seems to care.  Aaron discusses the promise and pitfalls of Bayesian reasoning.  [57:28] You don't have to go all the way to Bayesian to know that what they're doing in the journals is wrong. The journal, the frequentist, the Fisher classical hypothesis testing, the gold standard, double-blind control trials—those things are just wrong. And you don't have to go all the way to Bayesianism. You can just say, "Okay, we can just show mathematically that those don't work." Show Links: Recommended Resources: National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Tribalism United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID - Lancet Study Channel Tunnel Fires Ronald Fisher Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Francesca Gino Robin M. Hogarth Harrison White Bayesian Statistics UnSILOed 584: David Zweig - Examining School Closure Policies During the Pandemic Guest Profile: LinkedIn Profile Reason Profile Wikipedia Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Wrong Number: How to Extract Truth From a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street The Poker Face of Wall Street Financial Risk Management For Dummies Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance A World of Chance: Betting on Religion, Games, Wall Street Wrong Number with Aaron Brown YouTube 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.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is a professor of management and senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management. He is also the author, co-author, and editor of a number of books. His works include The Hero's Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire, Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters, and, most recently, Trump's Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox with Steven Tian. Greg and Jeff discuss why Jeff thinks leadership scholars and journalists misread Donald Trump. He argues the goal should be not to normalize or judge Trump but to understand Trump's predictable, strategic patterns—often mistaken as impulsive—so they can be countered, and he criticizes the labeling Trump as “stupid” or “crazy” for helping create widespread complacency.  Jeff recounts a contentious 30-year relationship with Donald Trump that began with his Wall Street Journal critiques of “The Apprentice,” and then continued through Trump's attempts to win him over (including with a position at Trump University), and Trump's use of tactics like divide-and-conquer, distraction, the “sleeper effect,” and “wall of sound.” The discussion contrasts personal power versus institutional success,and  stresses collective action as an effective counter. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The danger of underestimating your opponent 04:11: My take on this, in short, is the most dangerous element of American society, after perhaps Donald Trump and some of his acolytes, are many of his critics because his critics give us a false sense of confidence by, for over 10 years now, calling him stupid and calling him crazy. More recently, he's had a break with reality, a sudden cognitive decline with age, and chortling to themselves in their articles to one another like love letters in Atlantic Magazine or giggling on show after show on MS Now. It's about as dangerous, almost, as what Trump and his immediate followers are doing themselves because it's giving the American public, their viewers and readers, a false sense of security that this is a guy who is veering off the edge of the cliff and about to implode, that we don't need to worry. Don't mistake emotion for impulse 05:14: What Trump does sometimes comes with a lot of emotion-laden packaging, but these aren't impulsive, accidental decisions he's making. These are strategic, decisive, definitive moves that he's making, and that he has a whole arsenal of them. How to counter divide and conquer 50:18: How do you prepare for false information? Be ready to counter it very quickly and to make sure you're not divided by one another and all these other kinds of things. How do you counter false information? How do you avoid divide and conquer? You know, those are the lessons from the book rather than to follow these tactics. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Donald Trump Academy of Management Beverly Gage Jared Kushner Andrew Young World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab Steve Forbes Jeff Zucker The Apprentice Jack Welch John Lewis Gaddis unsiloed Thorstein Veblen Business Roundtable Ozymandias Vladimir Putin Sleeper Effect Gavin Newsom Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Arvind Krishna Unsiloed Ep 123: Barry Nalebuff - Game Theory, Negotiation Strategy and Fairness Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Yale School of Management JeffreySonnenfeld.com LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Page Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Trump's Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox The Hero's Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire Resilience Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters Concepts of Leadership Managing Career Systems: Channeling the Flow of Executive Careers Corporate Views of the Public Interest: Perceptions of the Forest Products Industry Google Scholar Page New York Times Articles Fortune Articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why has there never been a better time to start a company?  How do you know if your company is one that needs investment or one that should be home-grown? What does every entrepreneur need to bring in 2026 just to sit at the table in 2026 that used to be a rarity and an indicator of going above and beyond? Shay Har-Noy is the managing director of Techstars Boulder, and has spent his career  at the forefront of space technology, geospatial data, and AI-driven enterprises, helping to scale complex deep tech solutions from early-stage concepts to global market leaders. Shay dives into what he's learned about deep tech, AI, and company building. He traces his path from a Rice professor's push to pursue a PhD to leading National Geographic–backed expeditions using satellites, drones, LiDAR, and radar to search for Genghis Khan's tomb, which resulted in a documentary series and inspired his startup Tomnod; after partnering with DigitalGlobe/GeoEye, Tomnod was acquired by DigitalGlobe, where Shay oversaw AI efforts, web distribution, and a move from on-prem storage to the cloud.  Shay defines deep tech as businesses with defensible technical IP moats - something beyond software, and argues AI makes prototyping cheaper but shifts investor signals, advises founders to focus on real business risks and whether venture funding fits, and highlights moats like data, integrations, and compliance. Shay and David also note the  growing interest in AI governance and cost control. Let us know you're listening by filling out this form. We will be sending listeners Beyond the Hedges Swag every month. Episode Guide: 01:00 Deep Tech Origins 01:26 PhD Mindset and Curiosity 03:33 From Mongolia to Startup Life 05:23 Tomnod Acquisition and AI Scale 07:34 Rebuilding Techstars Boulder 09:17 What Deep Tech Means 11:48 GenAI Changes Startup Building 15:24 Fundraising Reality and Moats 20:10 Skills for the Next Generation 23:47 Jagged Edge and De-Risking 26:29 Hot Spaces AI Governance 29:04 Genghis Khan's Tomb Update and Rapid Fire Questions 30:37 Rice Box Question Story Beyond The Hedges is a production of Rice University and is produced by University FM. Episode Quotes: Why now is the best time to start a company 16:25: There has never been a better time to build a company than today. You can do so much more with so much less and really de-risk your business. Not just de-risk the product, but de-risk your entire business. For investors and for companies seeking investment, one of my most common conversations I have is, why? Why? Don't raise money because TechCrunch tells you to, right? Because you watched "Social Network" and you want to be like, like somebody on TV, right? Be so, so passionate about, about your value proposition, about your customer. And if you keep them in focus, raising a venture may not be the right thing to do. So I say it's, it's never been a better time or rate to start a company, but not necessarily a venture-backed company. What led Shay to pursue tech innovation?  02:42: So you ask, what led me to pursue these deep tech innovations? It's just understanding and having confidence that I can. There's this cliché, it says, "When you finish your undergrad, you think you know everything. You finish your master's, you realize you know nothing, and when you finish your PhD, you realize nobody knows anything." And I try to take that to heart. Building more isn't always better 27:29: Just because you can build a feature doesn't mean you should. And so being really deliberate around what you're building, how you're using it, because it's not free. And it's useful if it can be really powerful and increase your velocity. You still need to be rigorous around it.  Show Links: RiceOwls.com Rice Athletics The Gateway Project 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: Shay Har-Noy | Techstars Profile Shay Har-Noy | LinkedIn Profile Forbidden Tomb of Genghis Khan | National Geographic

All Else Equal is taking a short break over the summer and will be revisiting some of our favorite conversations from last season. The show will be back with new episodes soon.  Historically, the U.S. has had a habit of overestimating the capabilities of its enemies. Why? Is this an intentional security strategy? Or does the U.S. need to change the way it gathers enemy intelligence?  Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster gives hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen a crash course on military intelligence and national security advising.  The conversation covers why the overestimation of enemies happens, including historical examples of misjudgments, the role of proxies in modern conflicts, strategic considerations involving major powers like China, and the threat of information warfare.     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.

What insights on social psychology can be gleaned from ancient texts?  William Ian Miller is a professor of law at the University of Michigan and prolific author. His work is that of a polymath and covers everything from Icelandic sagas (Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland; 'Why is your axe bloody?': A Reading of Njals Saga) to philosophical meditations on what makes us human (Outrageous Fortune: Gloomy Reflections on Luck and Life; Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence). William joins Greg to discuss the varying themes across his body of work including, luck and magical thinking, law and violence in Icelandic sagas, competition and humility, and the purpose of disgust.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The de-evolution of psychological smarts in a pacified society 12:57: When you're a medieval historian, you'll see a lot of things that obviously progressed—medical care, stuff like that. A lot of things went backward, like, let's say, just psychological smarts. You had to be much better back then at reading somebody else's intentional states than we are now, because we're a highly pacified society. The idea that some clown can walk towards you texting and make you get out of the way and not get clocked in the face is just beyond... that could not happen in medieval Iceland. You bumped into somebody and didn't look where you were going, that would be an offense to that person's honor,  to the one you bumped into, of not even bothering to see who he was or where he was. Democracy as a principle of shared contempt 30:54: Democracy might be a principle of shared contempt, that everybody knows that they're held in contempt just as they hold the other in contempt. Utilitarianism's math problem and the dark funding of happiness 08:02: How much happiness is schadenfreude? Delight in somebody else's misery. How much of your happiness is funded by other people's misery? I always think that utilitarianism ran into a real math problem. The greatest happiness for the greatest number needed to be funded by misery somewhere. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Legal Code of King Alfred the Great  The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin  James Boyd White  Nomos Physis Paul Rozin Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at University of Michigan Professional Website Guest Work: Hrafnkel or the Ambiguities: Hard Cases, Hard Choices  Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland  'Why is your axe bloody?': A Reading of Njals Saga Outrageous Fortune: Gloomy Reflections on Luck and Life Losing It Faking It  The Mystery of Courage  The Anatomy of Disgust Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kyle Chayka is a staff writer for the New Yorker and also the author of the books Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture and The Longing for Less: What's Missing from Minimalism. Greg and Kyle discuss how algorithmic feeds shift culture from the “long tail” promise of niche discovery toward homogenization, rapid fads, and blockbuster dominance. Kyle argues platforms lower barriers to publish but make reaching audiences dependent on gaming recommendation systems, pushing creators, journalists, and even restaurants and tourism toward engagement-driven, Instagrammable, simplified outputs and fast feedback loops.  Kyle discusses “algorithmic anxiety,” authenticity and taste being shaped by feeds, and incentives like Spotify's 30-second stream metric affecting music length, quality, and what artists do to respond to that system. They contrast shallow metrics with criticism and curation, discuss minimalism and performative authenticity, and note countervailing long-tail models like newsletters, Patreon, and podcasts, emphasizing the need to exit feeds for deeper engagement. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why everything online starts to look the same 06:02: Algorithmic feeds and recommendations kind of encourage people to homogenize themselves. Like, they don't just stamp the content. The digital platform doesn't dictate exactly what the content looks like, but it encourages all of us, all of the writers and creators and musicians, to behave in similar ways in order to game the system and get an audience for ourselves. Do algorithmic feeds reward simplicity? 09:46: I think algorithmic feeds reward simplicity. Like, they reward the idea translated into the fewest words or the image that is the most, like, basically attractive or compelling, that lights up your brain right away. So I think people tend to present themselves and mold themselves in that direction as well. Have we lost control of what we like? 28:45: Taste is never totally organic, right? Like, a record label executive is going to pick the hot young band of the moment in the 1990s. A museum curator will choose who to put in a gallery show, and that will influence what you're actually seeing. But to me, that sense of anxiety was new. Like, that fear that you had lost control of what you liked and that you couldn't identify with it because it was somehow alien to you, that was really striking to me. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Andy Warhol Walter Benjamin Pierre Bourdieu Mark Fisher Marie Kondo Donald Judd Guest Profile: The New Yorker Profile and Work KyleChayka.com LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Page Social Profile on X Social Profile on Instagram Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture The Longing for Less: What's Missing from Minimalism Kyle Chayka Industries | Substack Newsletter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Two Rice alums are shaking up the renewable energy world with Tierra Climate, an AI-powered energy storage platform that's quietly reshaping how the power grid works.Co-founded by Jacob Mansfield (BA '16) and Emma Konet (PMBA '24), Tierra Climate is driven by a shared belief that the transition to clean power needs to happen faster. Both have been passionate about the energy space since early in their careers, and when they saw an opportunity to use AI and software to accelerate the deployment of storage on the grid, they committed fully, leaving stable careers behind to build something that could make a real impact on climate change.They join host Brian Jackson '21 to trace their unlikely path from Citibank trading desks to startup life. They open up about the underlying anxiety of early-stage founding but why entrepreneurship is still worth it, how large-scale batteries are being underutilized on the grid, and the ways the Rice network keeps showing up.Episode Guide:00:00 Introductions & Origin Stories06:29 Founding Tierra Climate11:39 Customers & the Energy Storage Market16:36 The Startup Journey23:11 Taking the Leap & Building with AI29:29 The Rice Network & Industry Trends35:33  What's Next & the Texas PilotThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:Magic happens when you commit20:13: [Jacob Mansfield] I had a professor in business school that said that magic happens when you commit. There's some sort of like lucky space of serendipity that you invite, and you talk to people, and you clearly come from the space and you understand their pain points, and yet you've kind of left all of that world to try to solve the problem. I think that's pretty compelling for folks. I think it's committing at inception, but it's like a continual process of commitment throughout the entire journey.On finding the courage to go all in18:48: [Emma Konet] I think going into that program, I'm not sure I ever would've quit my job and foregone health insurance and taken the big risk, because I was scared. I mean, I was genuinely like, "Oh, like, that feels really risky. I'm not sure my risk tolerance is there." But through the process of my MBA, I think because Rice is so focused on entrepreneurship, that's kind of in the veins of the MBA program throughout. I basically got convinced that it wasn't as big of a risk as I thought, and I think throughout that program, it just made me realize, you know what? Just do it. Like, it was kind of the "just do it, just take the leap" mentality that pushed me over the edge, and I'm very glad that I went full-time on this. On building something that matters16:11: [Jacob Mansfield] Emma and I used to joke early on this concept of existential dread, which I'm sure founders can relate to. You know, when you work in a big organization, it may get some little nervousness around, like bonus day or when you hear, there's going to be some reorg. But generally speaking, I wasn't concerned, going in day in and day out, that Citibank would be in existence. It was one of the largest companies in the world. And so I think the difference is when you start a company, you do have, like, those butterflies in your stomach or that kind of like, okay, like, I want to make sure that what I'm building is going to amount to something and be meaningful.Show Links: Tierra Climate“Clean Energy's Missing Link” | Rice MagazineTranscriptGuest Profile:Jacob Mansfield | LinkedInEmma Konet | LinkedIn

Christian B. Miller is the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and the author of several books. His latest title is The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World.  Greg and Christian discuss what Christian calls ‘The Honesty Crisis.' He defines honesty as a virtue involving both stable honest behavior (not lying, cheating, stealing, misleading, promise breaking, fraud, hypocrisy, self-deception, or “BS-ing”) and proper motivation (rooted in altruistic concern or duty, not self-interest). He argues honesty tracks subjective belief, so false statements can be honest and true statements can be dishonest, and discusses bullshitting, authenticity, excessive frankness, white lies and their costs, and the puzzle of self-deception.  Christian cites research suggesting most people default to truth-telling, but claims that multiple “honesty crises” are happening now where technology makes dishonesty easier to commit and harder to detect: AI cheating, deepfakes, internet infidelity, political misinformation, celebrity/influencer dishonesty, and plagiarism.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The two features of an honesty crisis 35:08: An honesty crisis, any of those, is going to have two features. It's more tempting to be dishonest than it was before, and it's easier to get away with dishonesty than it was before. So it's important to highlight that it's not that there was never dishonesty in these areas. That would be silly. That would be a bad claim, dumb claim. You know, education is one of my areas. There's always been student cheating. It's that something has changed such that it's more tempting now to be dishonest than it was before, and it's harder for others to detach that dishonesty. Is honesty one of the broadest virtues there is? 04:30: Honesty protects against lying, but it also protects against stealing, against cheating, against misleading, against promise breaking, fraud, hypocrisy, self-deception, BS-ing. There's a lot of moral territory it covers on the behavioral side. Maybe one of the broadest virtues there is. Subjective truth vs. reality 05:57: Honesty tracks the subjective truth. It tracks how you see the reality, not necessarily how reality really is. I mean, ideally, of course, you want your subjective representation to line up with how reality really is. That's what we all want. But it doesn't always. And honesty tracks how you see the world, how you see reality, not necessarily how reality really is. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Virtue Honesty Harry Frankfurt Aristotle Truth-Default Theory Pizzagate Conspiracy Theory Guest Profile: The Study Center at Wake Forest Profile ChristianBMiller.com LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Page Social Profile on X UnSILOED Ep 187: Christian B. Miller - What Does It Mean To Be Virtuous Now? Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World Moral Psychology Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue The Character Gap: How Good Are We? Character and Moral Psychology 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.

Nicolas Darveau-Garneau is the founder of Garneau Digital Advisors, is the former chief evangelist of Google, and is the author of the book Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai: The Seven Growth Secrets of the World's Most Successful Companies. Greg and Nicolas discuss how AI systems are akin to powerful “genies,” but the real power and risk come from the “wishes” humans give them. With everyone having similar access to similar “genies,” the true differentiation will come from the strategy behind their use. Nicolas emphasizes the need to think carefully about how we measure success in marketing and other areas of business. Often we focus on metrics that are easier to capture as opposed to the ones that really matter for achieving our goals. He also claims that companies that fail to articulate their goals in marketing are most likely to fail in other areas. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The real power of AI is not the AI 55:47: The whole point of AI is that we're building these amazing genies, but the power isn't in the genie. The power is in the wish. We have to think very carefully about what we ask these genies to do for us. By the way, I actually think that is going to make us even more human, right? And we have to really do some deep ethical thinking, some deep value thinking, and really give these AIs the right wishes. And then I think we will thrive and be fully human. But if we give these AIs the wrong wishes, then AI can send us into a tailspin, not only as companies but as a society, pretty fast. Most companies start with the wrong wish 02:42: So, as Google's [former] chief evangelist, I met over 1,000 companies in five years, and what I noticed was that, even in marketing, 90% of the time the teams were asking for the wrong wishes. Stop designing for the average customer 16:33: So the trick is not to test or design your customer experiences for the average customer. It is to actually build customer experiences for your best customers. Very, very few companies do it this way, right? And so, once you can predict the customer lifetime value of a brand-new customer or an existing customer, the entire corporate strategy should revolve around it. Show Links: Recommended Resources: UnSILOed 598: Guy Kawasaki - Becoming an Evangelist UnSILOed 102: John List - It's Almost Impossible To Undo A Bad Idea Customer Acquisition Cost Customer Lifetime Value Peter Fader Guest Profile: LinkedIn Profile Guest Work: Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai: The Seven Growth Secrets of the World's Most Successful Companies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The tenth season of the Eccles Business Buzz podcast continues as host Frances Johnson sits with Ginger Avitt, a VP Regional Coaching Consultant at Fidelity Investments. She also earned her MBA from the David Eccles School of Business in 2020.Ginger and Frances talk about the framing of what makes for fortunate or unfortunate circumstances, and how to go about overcoming challenges and not succumbing to them under the pressure. Ginger shares her own personal journey that included struggles and hardships, and how she achieved her goals despite the obstacles.In a chance encounter Ginger came across the David Eccles School's In a Pinch Basic Needs Initative, and really understands a lot of the misconceptions that those struggling with basic needs are up against. Through her conversation here and her work with the initiative Ginger works to reverse that narrative. Stressing empathy and understanding, as well as empowering those in tough situations, this is a great conversation to lift and energize the spirit. 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 Ginger's life experiences shaped her people-first leadership [28:31] You never truly know what someone else is carrying outside of work, just like what they're carrying outside of school, what they're carrying outside of work. And so I lean into being people-first, like each with their own challenges, their stories, backgrounds, that awareness guides my approach to coaching and leading. So I focus on connecting to that human to human before anything else. I lead with empathy and listen without assumptions. I meet people where they're at, and that perspective has become one of my greatest strengths in my work if I reflect on my own, the way I show up. So it's what I try to truly bring to work every day.The misconception about struggling students and the reality they face [24:25] Frances Johnson: What do you think are some misconceptions that people might carry about students who rely on things like In A Pinch, students who are facing some of the difficulties that you faced? Do you think there's something that people don't understand about that experience that you wish they understood better?[24:47] Ginger Avitt: I don't think it's unique to this conversation, this topic. I do think it's a common misconception for people who are struggling with these basic needs across, like, not just in college, is what I'm trying to say, is that they're lazy or just simply not making the right choices. And I know for a fact that couldn't be further from the truth for most people. You never know what someone else is carrying behind the scenes, and many students are working, often multiple jobs, still barely getting by, trying to keep those heads above water. But even my second round, some are supporting children, some siblings, or even parents, and others are managing really complex circumstances that you just can't see from the outside that would overwhelm even most of us.[25:36] Frances Johnson: Yeah, anyone.[25:37] Ginger Avitt: And a prepared adult, right?[25:39] Frances Johnson: Absolutely. Yeah. [25:40] Ginger Avitt: And you touched on some of that in the beginning, and many just don't know what resources exist as well, let alone feel comfortable seeking help, because that pride, you know, that dang pride gets in the way.From getting by to creating options, why Ginger wanted to earn her college degree [15:21] Returning to school became essential when I realized I was now the primary provider. I wasn't going to be that teacher, that was the second extra money, you know, something for spending my time that I could find some fulfillment in. I, myself, and my two little boys depended upon where I went next. And I wanted more than just a way to get by. I wanted options. I wanted that ability to shape our future instead of being just limited by circumstances. And so, earning that college degree really represented that possibility for me. So, it was the key to unlocking opportunities that I wouldn't have had otherwise.Show Links:Ginger Avitt | LinkedInIn A Pinch | Eccles Basic Needs InitiativeDavid Eccles School of Business (@ubusiness) | InstagramUndergraduate Scholars ProgramsRising Business LeadersEccles Alumni Network (@ecclesalumni) | Instagram Eccles Experience Magazine

A proposed constitutional amendment on the ballots in California this November will impose a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires. Proponents of the amendment say it will bring upwards of $100 billion to California's revenue, but how did they get to that number and what other side effects of this wealth tax could be looming in the wings? Will this tax actually raise more revenue?  Hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen sit down with Stanford finance professor Joshua Rauh to discuss why wealth taxes don't often achieve their desired result.   The conversation covers the Laffer curve, behavioral responses to tax increases, and the economic side effects of cultivating a society that does not celebrate innovative talent.  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.

Peter Fleming is a professor of management at the University of Technology Sydney, and also the author of several books. His recent works are Dark Academia: How Universities Die, Sugar Daddy Capitalism: The Dark Side of the New Economy, and The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation. Greg and Peter discuss doing critical theory inside business schools and how neoliberalism and managerialism have reshaped universities.  They also discuss the professionalization of higher education toward “employability,” driven by scarce public funding and human capital theory, which monetized expectations and intensified pressure, insecurity, and unhappiness. Peter suggests even executives face external constituent pressures. He explains his critique of Homo economicus as an extreme Cold War governance template that failed and contributed to “deaths of despair,” and he emphasizes rebuilding institutions by focusing on the labor problem and workplace conditions. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: How human capital theory killed academic wonder 14:01: When we go into the classrooms, we've still got that old idea of imparting critical reflexivity, imparting wonder in the world, whether it's in the sciences, humanities, business schools, and so forth. And we are confronting this very monetized, "No, I want a degree simply because it's going to make me more money." Now, I'm not saying that for all students, but that's the culture that's been encouraged, I think. And that derives from human capital theory because if you're paying for it as a student, then you need to, especially in the US with student loans and all of that, you know, which is just out of control at the moment, then you're going to want to see a return on your investment, to use the phraseology. So I think human capital theory has really reshaped the way in which we think about our lives, in many ways and many facets of society, including higher education. And it's quite sad really, isn't it? It's quite sad. What does it really mean to become a manager? 45:00: When it comes to teaching students about what it will mean to be a manager, there's a couple of things I try to convey. The first thing is: don't think about becoming a manager. Think about when you're 70 years old and you're looking back on your life, are you going to say, "I made the right decision about what I chose to do for a living"? The worst thing would be to look back and go, "What a waste," and I'm only realizing it now towards the twilight of my years. So choose something that you love.   The painful implications of capitalism in crisis on the workers 50:04: The subject of the most painful implications of capitalism in crisis is the worker. And I think it's telling what you said earlier, that even tenured professors are feeling awful, right? Many of us can't understand why, but fearful. You know, we're in a well-paid job, security, but it feels like economic destitution is around the corner, which just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. And so I think that finding a way to unify that workforce that's been fragmented, differentiated, different interests, different pay rates, et cetera, et cetera. But dealing with the labor problem, I think, is the big one. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Human Capital Chicago School of Economics Gary Becker Neoliberalism Ludwig Wittgenstein Scientific Management Peter Higgs Managerialism Homo Economicus Friedrich Hayek Milton Friedman Ludwig von Mises Undercover Boss Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at the University of Technology Sydney Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Dark Academia: How Universities Die Sugar Daddy Capitalism: The Dark Side of the New Economy The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation The Worst Is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide The End of Corporate Social Responsibility: Crisis and Critique Dead Man Working Resisting Work: The Corporatization of Life and Its Discontents Google Scholar Page Guardian Articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matt Kaplan is the science correspondent at The Economist and also the author of a number of books. His latest work is I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right. Greg and Matt discuss how Matt chose science journalism over academia, the value of being a generalist, and how journalists can cross-pollinate ideas from others. They also discuss academic silos, pecking orders, and how fear, funding pressures, and ego create sticky consensuses that punish deviants, and linking historic cases to modern parallels.  Matt argues that incremental NIH/NSF funding discourages bold leaps compared with HHMI-style risk-taking, calls for better incentives for peer review and career transitions for senior scientists, and recounts a case in which a dissenting scientist was attacked to the point that they left the field. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: When scientific silos break, innovation happens 09:31: There was a medical conference at the same hotel where this marine biologist was presenting, and one of the surgeons at the medical conference walked by and listened and talked to the marine biologist afterwards and said, “Hey, are you telling me that that spit will hold together stuff in a salty environment?” And the biologist said, “Well, yeah, it's in the ocean.” And the surgeon went, “‘Cause we have really serious problems getting glue that works in the saline environment of a bloody surgery table because your blood is salty, and glues don't work, and we can't put bones together with bolts when the bones are fragments.” So together, they ultimately collaborated and created a glue from the sandcastle worm that's now used in surgery tables around the world. And it was just my favorite word in the world: serendipity. Total serendipity. Why institutions resist new ideas 14:18: I think uncertainty and fear make us cling to the things that we know. And the more uncomfortable we are with change, the more we cling like a security blanket to the consensus. Big problems require bigger risks 31:13: I don't think we do enough of the Howard Hughes-type stuff because we got some pretty big problems. I mean, feeding eight billion people, dealing with climate change, generating enough power to have all of the nations of the world have electricity and refrigeration. We can all come together and say refrigeration is probably pretty important. Defeating pandemics. We really have a lot of stuff that needs to be done, and that's not going to get done if we keep taking baby steps. We've got really big problems, and to do that, we need to get comfortable with failure real fast, and we currently are just not accepting it. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Bioinspired by Sandcastle Worm Glue | Article Robert Axelrod The Big Bang Theory Johann Klein Louis Pasteur Joseph Lister Ignaz Semmelweis National Institutes of Health National Science Foundation Howard Hughes Medical Institute Katalin Karikó Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Guest Profile: Personal Website | About Page LinkedIn Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author Page I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right The Science of Monsters: The Origins of the Creatures We Love to Fear David Attenborough's First Life: A Journey Back in Time with Matt Kaplan Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When Pablo Coello began his medical training, he noticed a persistent gap in healthcare: clinicians and administrators often weren't speaking the same language, and the result was inefficiency that directly affected patient care. That realization ultimately led him to pursue a dual MD/MBA through Baylor College of Medicine and Rice Business.Now an orthopedic surgery resident at UC Health, Pablo brings a dual perspective to medicine — one grounded in clinical practice and another shaped by business training. That combination allows him to think not only about individual patient outcomes, but also about system-wide decisions that affect hospitals and communities.In this episode of Owl Have You Know, hosted by Maya Pomroy '22, Pablo shares why more physicians need business fluency, how teamwork at Rice reshaped the way he practices medicine and what it means to look beyond the exam room to the health of an entire community.Episode Guide:00:00 Meet Pablo Coello01:14 Why Pursue an MBA Alongside an MD03:26 Early Path to Medicine04:13 Harvard Research Summers06:33 OR Inefficiencies Spark Change11:00 Inside the Rice MD MBA13:28 Biggest MBA Takeaways17:01 Advice for Med Students22:16 Defining Success Long Term25:33 Closing ThoughtsThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:Why a hospital is an entity in a community17:51: Medicine is so much more than just what you do in a clinic, in the OR, in the hospital in general. A hospital is an entity in a community. It's not just a place you go. I've noticed this even…especially now that I'm actively practicing and training. There are people that actively need your help. And if you broaden your skills, eventually your level of impact is not just going to be on a patient-to-patient basis. It's on a community as a whole. And that's why I got my MBA, and that's why I would argue as any med student in the Houston area, any med student in general that has access to a business school, especially one as good as Rice, in their backyard or anywhere close, should ideally, if it's financially possible and the timeline works out, get an MBA so that they can have that impact in their community eventually.Medicine is a team sport14:02: Medicine is a team sport. You hear that all the time because we interact with other teams all day, every day. As an orthopedic surgery resident, our field is very specialized. So as a result, we get called by a lot of people, and we have to also call a lot of other people to help us manage things that we simply do not know how to manage. And I think having learned what I learned in the MBA helped a lot in terms of managing a lot of different things at once, different voices, if you will, in the clinical setting, which I did not really expect, to tell you the truth. But it helped because I learned also to not rely on myself as much.On fixing the structures that fail patients08:53: The supportive structures around the OR and other clinical aspects are simply not where they should be; we are failing the patient, and we are doing that over and over and over and over again. And it's affecting the overall health of the community. It's affecting the overall opinion of the community on the healthcare system, and it's costing the hospital—whatever hospital—thousands of dollars a day, every day for eternity. So I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I got this MBA because I wanted to be like this knight in shining armor, and I was going to solve all the problems, because I'm not. That's unrealistic, and I get it. But I want to be part of the solution, if you will.Show Links: TranscriptGuest Profile:Pablo Coello | LinkedIn

Dale Bredesen is the senior director of the Precision Brain Health Program at Pacific Neuroscience Institute and also the founding CEO of the Buck Institute. He also has authored a number of books, including, most recently, The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime and The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline. Greg and Dale discuss Dale's “network insufficiency” view of Alzheimer's that shifts focus from plaques alone to a balance of synaptic “supply and demand.” He argues the brain switches from connection to protection under chronic insults, which are microbes, inflammation, toxins, metabolic syndrome, sleep apnea, and poor energetics. Dale highlights tau phosphorylation as part of an antimicrobial response and APOE4 as a pro-inflammatory risk gene with evolutionary benefits.  They also discuss diet, insulin resistance, exercise, sleep metrics, stress, and the case for prevention and combined approaches. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The brain's shift from connection to protection 07:33: We see it at every level in the brain. We see it at the molecular level, that you have a connections program and a protection program. We see it at the cellular level, we see it at the tissue level, and even at the organismal level. You can see when people—and you can actually measure this now with blood tests—is someone on the connection side or on the protection side? So therefore, when you have insults, and over our lives it's typically various microbes, it's leaky gut, it's sleep apnea, it's various toxins we're exposed to, air pollution, mercury, microplastics, unfortunately, anesthetic agents, horrible food, all these things that are demanding you be in that protection mode, then ultimately you cannot support five hundred trillion synapses. The supply-and-demand theory of cognitive decline 30:08: Anything that lowers your supply or increases your demand is going to increase your risk for cognitive decline. On the other hand, anything that lowers the demand and increases the supply is going to be a risk reducer, whether it's Omega-3s, whether it's resolvins, whether it's exercise, whether it's better sleep, more deep sleep, less sleep apnea. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of things. So, for the first time, our armamentarium to reduce risk and reverse decline is huge. Now we can look at these different pieces and manipulate them so that we get better and better outcomes. Are doctors the antithesis to Silicon Valley? 49:23: Well, here's the thing. Doctors are the antithesis to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is always looking for what's disruptive, what's next, how can we go further, do more. And to be fair, it's because typically those things are not going to kill you. Whether you, like, get your package from Amazon a little faster, it's not going to kill you. Whereas the doctors are told, “Listen,” just like being in the army, “If you do not do what we tell you, someone's going to die.” And that's fair, okay. But they're very poor, therefore, at innovation. If you go back to history, it's scary, scurvy—it was understood what to do about scurvy in the sixteen hundreds. It wasn't generally accepted until the nineteen hundreds. So thousands and thousands and thousands of people died needlessly because doctors said, “No, we do not believe this.” And the same thing, frankly, is happening now with Alzheimer's disease. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's Prion Richard Feynman Alzheimer's Disease Amyloid Apolipoprotein E KAATSU Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Pacific Neuroscience Institute Profile at Apollo Health Social Profile on Instagram Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline The End of Alzheimer's Program: The First Protocol to Enhance Cognition and Reverse Decline at Any Age The First Survivors of Alzheimer's: How Patients Recovered Life and Hope in Their Own Words TEDx Talk: A precision approach to end Alzheimer's Disease Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In honor of Pride Month, the OneHaas Alumni Podcast is pleased to welcome Lucas Chagas Vital to the show. Lucas is a graduate of the full-time MBA program and a principal in corporate strategy and development for Intuit. For Lucas, growing up gay in Sao Paolo, Brazil wasn't always easy. He knew he was gay from a young age, but between attending conservative catholic schools and starting his career in the conservative banking world of Brazil from over a decade ago, he worried he wouldn't be accepted if he came out at work. So he set out to find a more welcoming and accepting culture for LGBTQ people, and found one at Berkeley Haas. On this episode, Lucas joins host Sean Li to talk about his childhood in Sao Paolo, his fulfilling experience with Q@Haas as co-president, and how he's continued that advocacy work since then through inclusion programs at Intuit and other workplaces. *OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On his decision to leave Brazil for the U.S.  ”So I was not out in the work place. I grew up attending a Catholic school and a Catholic university. And even though I was out earlier than many back then, because I came out in junior high school, I was gay-bashed with my two lesbians friends, so there were a lot of stories of coming out and being back in the closet and getting discriminated against and working through that. And when I learned more about the difference of the reality here, at least 10 years ago, that was one of the things that motivated me a lot, right?”On the work that still needs to be done for LGBTQ rights ”Our rights should never be taken for granted, right? Because the LGBTQ+ rights and any other minority rights, they can be lost at any time… Definitely as a cisgender gay man, I acknowledge the better privilege that we have when we compare with the transgender population, right? They are in the front. They are the ones who have so much more attacks and hate and we're hearing more and more right now. So how can we be an ally for that?”On celebrating Pride“ Thinking about the Pride month ahead of us, I feel that Pride Month, it's not only for fun and parties. I think Pride Month, it's how we got here, right? …I remember when I got here in the US and I was so excited with all the Pride initiatives, and I used to hear a lot of complaints of people saying, "Oh, but there is so much corporate all around."And I said, "Yeah, but the first Prides, most of the early Prides actually that I went to in Brazil, we didn't have any corporate support, and we did not have that much visibility. We didn't have that much support, and we had to hide a lot" So there are positive things that we can think about how far we got here”On his time with Q@Haas“ I spent most of my time at Haas, apart from recruiting, at Q@Haas. So we had a very active group of people…So we organized many events…one event was called Not Your Gay Best Friend, to help break all the stereotypes of just being “the gay best friend”, which for me was very interesting as well because it was also a very American culture thing to learn.And then of course, the Coming Out Week, which was a big event. The Coming Out Monologues was actually my first time telling my coming out story to a big audience, and in English.”Show Links:LinkedIn ProfileQ@Haas

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford, and the author of multiple books, including, most recently, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI. Greg and Carissa discuss Carissa's newest work, where she links prediction to surveillance and argues that forecasts are speech acts that intervene in the world, often becoming self-fulfilling or self-defeating. She says humans seek prophecy to relieve anxiety, but this grants power to predictors and can undermine autonomy, democracy, and fairness, especially via opaque algorithms, social-credit-style control, and pattern-matching decisions like lending.  Carissa urges transparent, contestable criteria, skepticism about incentives behind predictions, and treating unwanted forecasts as invitations to defy rather than “obey in advance.” Their conversation critiques utilitarianism and effective altruism for relying on long-term prediction, discusses fatalism and moral luck, and advocates resilience, scenario planning, Epicurean agency, and literature as an antidote to doomscrolling, shrinking attention, and AI-driven cultural convergence. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: When forecasts become commands 25:28: Instead of obeying predictions by believing them uncritically, I suggest that we interpret them as invitations for defiance. And maybe some predictions you do not want to defy. Maybe some predictions you're like, “Okay, yeah, I like that future, and I'm on board.” But with the ones that you don't like, I think the correct attitude is, “No, we're not. No, we're not. That's not where we're going.” Can predictions bend reality? 25:34: When we believe that prediction uncritically, when we listen to it as if it were a fact, because grammatically it sounds like a fact, what we are doing is obeying implicitly in the sense of Timothy Snyder, of obeying in advance before we are issued an explicit command. When we interpret predictions as facts, we implicitly obey in advance. Obeying in advance 23:54: When we believe that prediction uncritically, when we listen to it as if it were a fact, because grammatically it sounds like a fact, what we are doing is obeying implicitly in the sense of Timothy Snyder, of obeying in advance before we are issued an explicit command. When we interpret predictions as facts, we implicitly obey in advance. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Pythia Bayesian Inference Robert K. Merton Oedipus Epicurus Epicureanism Stoicism Notes from Underground Hilary Putnam J. L. Austin How to Do Things with Words Laplace's Demon Peter Singer Guest Profile: CarissaVeliz.com Faculty Profile at Hertford College Faculty Profile at Oxford University Wikipedia Profile LinkedIn Profile Social Profile on X Guest Work: UnSILOed Ep 501: The Philosophical and Ethical Dimensions of Privacy and Surveillance with Carissa Véliz Amazon Author Page Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode originally aired previously and is being re-shared due to its continued relevance. Enjoy this conversation with Jeff Hawkins on intelligence, neuroscience, and the future of AI. With growing concerns over whether or not AI will take away jobs and eventually become superior to human intelligence, maybe it's time to take a closer look at the human brain and discover how AI will always have its limitations.  Hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen sit down with Jeff Hawkins, a neuroscientist and computer scientist, whose book A Thousand Brains challenges the way we think about intelligence and how the brain works.  Jonathan, Jules, and Jeff discuss the fundamentals of how the human brain operates and how it differs from the way current AI models work. They also dive into the cutting-edge innovations happening in the world of AI and whether future versions of the technology could one day emulate the human brain more closely.    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.

Eric Ries is an author, podcaster, and founder of The Lean Startup. He hosts The Eric Ries Show and his notable books Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great, The Lean Startup, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama, The Leader's Guide, and The Startup Way. Greg and Eric discuss why startups and corporations lose their mission through shifts from founder-to investor-control, changing from long-term focus to short-term focus, and purpose-driven to profit-driven behavior. Eric argues governance is “organizational soul craft” and critiques shareholder primacy as a recent, judge-and-academic-driven ideology that creates unaccountable short-term pressure, metric surrogation, and value destruction, even for shareholders.  Eric also explains how markets reward short-term cost-cutting (e.g. reduced R&D), and why mission-driven companies can outperform. He outlines practical protections such as writing mission primacy into charters, converting to Public Benefit Corporations, and stronger structures like foundation ownership (e.g. Novo Nordisk and Patagonia). *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Mission-driven or mission-hopeful? 12:39: So I think for companies, we're seeing this world now where we have a divergence between the mission statement and the actual mission or purpose of the organization. So the mission statement is lofty. I tell the story in the book of Silicon Valley Bank before it collapsed. Its mission statement was something like, “To advance the innovation economy,” or whatever. But its actual legal purpose was just maximize shareholder value. So this divergence caused the collapse of the bank. And so, first of all, if you have a mission statement, but your purpose says “any lawful act or activity,” you're lying. Just so you know, you are lying to your customers. You are lying to your employees. You're lying to everyone you say that mission to because, according to current legal theory, you could be replaced at a moment's notice by your investors, who will then can change the mission to whatever they want. I call that not being mission-driven. You are mission-hopeful. You're hoping nobody will do this to you in the future. Governance is organizational soul craft Governance sounds really boring, but it's really the art of organizational soul craft. It's actually really interesting. And if we can get leaders and founders to pay more attention to it, they can have a much higher probability of their organization enduring. The age of temporary organizations 27:46: I say we've entered an era of temporary managers running temporary organizations for the benefit of temporary owners because executive tenure, company lifespan, and average holding period of stocks have all collapsed in the last, especially the last twenty-five years, let alone the last forty years. So, I don't think it's possible to really have—it's very difficult to build a value-creating organization in that span, and the markets will punish you for doing so. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Governance Shareholder Primacy Overlapping Consensus Silicon Valley Bank Andy Rachleff Environmental, Social, and Governance Mark Zuckerberg Guest Profile: LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Page The Lean Startup Social Profile on X Guest Work: The Eric Ries Show YouTube Channel Amazon Author Page Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Build Successful Businesses The Leader's Guide The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Professor Jonathan Miles' path to teaching organizational behavior at Rice Business is anything but conventional. Before entering academia, he earned a degree in computer science, worked in IT and even launched a comic book store — experiences that shaped his perspective on leadership, influence and human behavior.Today, Miles is known for challenging students to think differently about power, workplace dynamics and ethical decision-making. A co-adviser at the Virani Undergraduate School of Business and voted “Teacher of the Year” by our undergraduate business students, he has built courses that push both MBAs and undergraduates to confront uncomfortable truths about what it really takes to lead and succeed.In this episode, Miles joins host Maya Pomroy ‘22 to discuss why so many talented people struggle to advocate for themselves, what his comic book store taught him about entrepreneurship, and why influence is often misunderstood. He also shares his perspective on AI's growing impact on the workplace, the future of Rice Business and his hope for bringing undergrads and graduate students together in ways no business school has done before.Episode Guide:0:00  Introduction & Teacher of the Year Award2:29  Growing Up: Family, Influences, and Early Life4:40  The Winding Path: Journalism to Engineering to Computer Science7:40  The Value of Exploring Outside Your Major9:57  From IT to Teaching: Discovering a Calling15:56  Teaching Power & Influence at Rice17:55  The Biggest Misconception About Influence at Work22:15  Professionalism & Ethics: Why People Break Their Own Moral Frameworks25:04  AI in the Workplace: Hype, Risk, and the Road Ahead30:19  What Jon Hopes Students Take Away32:27  The Comic Book Store: Lessons in Entrepreneurship37:46  The Future of Rice Business & the New Building40:50  Closing and ConclusionThe Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:Why hard work alone won't get you promoted20:24: I find it interesting that, in the eight years I've been teaching it here at Rice, I don't think I've ever had a class where the majority of people in the class, when I talk about the things that hold them back from power, won't raise their hands and say, "Yeah, at least one of those affects me." And, you know, things like—we call it the just world hypothesis—the idea of like, oh, well, you know, merit exists, and if I do a really good job, I will rise in the organization because people will notice. And we talk about the fact that our research is pretty clear that that's not true. We have years of research on this that says your boss doesn't have any idea what you do, and your boss's boss certainly doesn't. And so this idea of you have to advocate for yourself, even though it doesn't feel great to you. Leaders vs. bad managers36:09: What I told my students is, "I'm not here to make you into great leaders. Some of you will be great leaders because you have that natural piece, and I'm going to teach you this, and if you follow and do this information, you'll become a great leader. But I guarantee you, if you just follow what I say, you won't be a bad manager. You won't be a bad leader." And I've had enough bad leaders over the years that my crusade is to get rid of them, to try and, try and teach people so that we don't have them. And I'm hoping that the people who come out of here with Rice MBAs, and even our Rice undergrad degrees, have the understanding of how to be a manager that does the right things.What Jonathan hopes for the future of Rice Business45:19: I hope that we can maintain doing that because we could provide our undergrads with a tremendous ability to get a great education, and one that they're not going to get in an undergrad program elsewhere, from people who really know what they're talking about and are good at teaching it.Show Links: TranscriptGuest Profile:Jonathan Miles | Rice BusinessJonathan Miles | LinkedIn

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 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.

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.