Podcasts about university fm

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

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

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

Is the emperor wearing clothes?  Hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen are joined by economist and political scientist Timur Kuran who wrote the book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. This 30-year-old book explains the social phenomenon where people express preferences they do not have.   As political and social tensions have risen in the U.S., the freedom to express views that go against the status quo has become more difficult.  Jonathan, Jules, and Timur discuss what preference falsification is and why people engage in it, historical and contemporary examples, the implications of this behavior in various domains, including politics, business, and academia, and insights into how societies can counteract it. The conversation also addresses the importance of fostering environments, particularly in universities, where open and honest discourse is encouraged.  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.

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

As a seasoned entrepreneur, investor and mentor, Ben Mayberry '76 has seen a lot of change in the Houston business sector over the last 50 years.Beginning his career in the technology sector, Ben went on to co-found companies like BSG and Winston Sage, and has been deeply involved in the Rice Business community through mentorship and recruiting. Ben has also served as the president of the Rice Alumni Association and has been a judge in the Rice Business Plan Competition for two decades. Ben joins Owl Have You Know co-host Brian Jackson ‘21 to discuss his incredible career journey, commitment to Rice, involvement in the Houston Angel Network, approach to mentoring entrepreneurs, and the many lessons he's learned over the course of his 50-year career. Episode Guide:00:00 Introduction to Ben Mayberry01:07 Early Career and Entrepreneurial Spirit02:42 Building and Managing Teams05:46 Mentorship and Advice07:36 Winston Sage Partners and Business Ethics09:43 Houston Angel Network14:33 Rice Business School Involvement22:32 Life Lessons and Final ThoughtsOwl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:Why Ben thinks Houston is the easiest place to do business26:29: There's not one pivot point in my career I can point to, other than deciding to work for myself at some point. Then the decision points along the way that I've made. And, fortunately, I never made a decision that was so devastating that it, you know, shut me down. The most fun job I think I had of all was when we decided to open our other offices at BSG, and I was in charge of opening our remote offices. I just learned a lot about how you do business around the country. I learned how to negotiate with New Yorkers, people in Atlanta, Dallas, et cetera. The most important thing I've found is Houston is the easiest place to do business. 28:08: In Houston, people are generally welcoming to people that come from somewhere else because it's been a melting pot for so long.Why meeting in person matters for entrepreneurs28:52: If you want to get together with other entrepreneurs and bounce ideas off of them, or even build teamwork within your group, I think two things. Number one, within a company, it's important to have functions where you get together occasionally. We used to have quarterly meetings where we'd bring everybody into a central location, and it's not inexpensive. And once a quarter, we're also bringing the leadership from various places and having a strategy session all together. And certainly, you can do it by Zoom, but there's nothing like getting together, going out, and having a few drinks that night or dinner or whatever. Now, for someone like you, who—you're in Houston and nobody else is—you need to make a list of people you're going to have lunch with every day. Don't have lunch in your office. Go out three or four times a week and have lunch with somebody that's different and new.Why listening matters for entrepreneurs seeking success07:23: Each entrepreneur is, especially if they're in a startup, unique. They have some traits in common. They're generally stubborn. They don't listen as well as they should, and so you have to figure out if they're willing to listen at all. If not, you move on. If they're willing to listen, then you're able to give them advice, and it's based on—do they like—and a CEO doesn't have it all. They may be technical, they may be good at sales, they may be good at marketing, but they're rarely good at all of those. So you've got to figure out where their weakness is and attack that, and help them understand that's really where they need help.Show Links: TranscriptGuest Profiles:Ben Mayberry | Rice Business

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

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

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

The OneHaas Alumni Podcast is pleased to welcome Keith and Kenneth Tsang, who are not only identical twins, but also had identical triple majors at UC Berkeley – political science, psychology, and business.After being born in the Bay Area, Keith and Kenneth moved to Hong Kong where they spent the first formative years of their childhood. Growing up in a family that prioritized education and exploration, the twins developed a strong sense of curiosity for the world around them. It's this curiosity that sparked their desire to pursue not one, but three majors for their undergraduate degrees at UC Berkeley. Keith and Kenneth chat with host Sean Li about how they applied those three majors to careers in entrepreneurship, lessons they learned from growing up in Hong Kong and then reacclimating in the U.S., and how their career journeys have taken shape thanks to a healthy dose of staying curious and making friends. *OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Kenneth on why their decision to add business as a second major“ I think we were just blown away from the beginning, like, wow, all this business stuff is completely different from your history class and your chemistry classes in high school. It felt practical and relevant. And I think we were hooked pretty early on. And I think, to be honest, I think Keith and I are a bit competitive, and then I think with Haas, some people might know, the undergraduate is competitive and we figured we can do this too. So let's get in on this game and succeed here.”Keith on how the brothers identify entrepreneurial opportunities“ I've worked in all kinds of businesses and industries, obviously venture capital, then you have Nest with thermostats. I've also worked at LinkedIn and Meta, big companies, but also small companies doing housekeeping double-sided marketplace and robot delivery pizza. So it's a little bit of everything. But part of that is just being open to what's interesting, like do you see value here? Like are you able to have an impact? So that's like the first checkbox you're looking at: can you actually do something that is influencing change? And the second part of it is just being able to be open with your network… like you're talking to people and you're learning about these things and when something catches your interest, you just learn a little bit more and see whether you have a role to play in that. So I think that's, at a high level, that's what it really is, being open to these opportunities.”Kenneth on being a student always“ …Just to plug the Haas values, just being student always, I think the learning never stops. And I think that curiosity sort of kept us going. And in hindsight, I think a lot of these things are hard to plan. They're kind of serendipitous, but I think if you're open to learning and then having that curiosity is what sort of led us down these paths that we've taken.”Keith on how their parents nurtured their curiosity early on“ They definitely provided us with different opportunities to explore our interests – playing different sports, soccer, baseball, being in the Boy Scouts, which I think was actually one of the best experiences. It was kind of where we were able to just experience all kinds of things like archery, horseback riding, stuff like that, and just try different things. And I think that really is important for setting that foundation to be curious always, is that you are able, you're comfortable being in new situations and after the first time you realize that's enjoyable, you do it a second time, it's still enjoyable and you just keep it up. But I think if you were in a situation or environment where that is limited, you're always being constantly told no, I can very much see how that could be hampered.”Show Links:Kenneth's LinkedIn ProfileKeith's LinkedIn ProfileSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/onehaas/donations

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

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

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

With a Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics from Rice, Summer Husband '02 has been at the forefront of AI and data innovation for years. From transforming how the U.S. Navy uses machine learning to now leading data products and applied intelligence at Worley, her career bridges complex tech and real-world impact.Following her workshop, Unleashing Your Inner Cyborg, at this year's Women in Leadership Conference, Summer joined Owl Have You Know co-host Brian Jackson '21 to discuss the evolution of AI, the power of pairing machine learning with human judgment, and the ethical guardrails she believes are essential in today's data-driven world.Episode Guide:00:12 Meet Summer Husband: AI and Data Expert01:00 Women in Leadership Conference Insights01:52 Ethics and Rapid Advancements in AI04:01 Upskilling and AI Deployment in Business04:53 AI as a Sales Response Generator06:47 Summer's Career Journey and AI Evolution13:05 AI's Impact on Human Roles and Ethics16:20 Future of AI and Human Intuition22:59 Empowering Women in Tech and Leadership26:06 Conclusion and Final ThoughtsOwl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:The power of being surrounded by empowered women22:32: It's really powerful for women to be around other very capable and talented women. I didn't realize what an impact that had. I've loved all the organizations that I've worked for. My first job, there was only one other woman on the technical side. I didn't think that impacted me. But my next organization had a lot of women in executive leadership, and I suddenly started to feel like taking a more senior role was a possibility. 23:04: I never would've connected those dots, but I really appreciate Rice opening up the opportunity for women to hear from other women. 23:26: It's just a little different when it's mostly women in the room, and you feel safe to ask some questions that you just don't feel safe to ask in some other spaces. That's just kind of the way that goes. So, I appreciate the opportunity.On navigating AI ethics without a roadmapThe technology is just changing really quickly, which makes this a very exciting space to be in, but it makes it really challenging around ethics. One of the other, I think, challenges in this space is, because it's fairly new, it's changing rapidly, so the technology is changing rapidly. The legal landscape is changing really rapidly, also. So, some of the partners that we tend to go to for playbooks in these spaces don't have a fully baked playbook in this space. A lot of organizations are needing to define and figure out their approach to ethics and AI together. So, at Worley, we're approaching that with a pretty comprehensive approach that includes our AI experts, of course, our legal experts. We want to ensure that we've got our operations involved in that. They're the ones that are, boots on the ground and are going to be using these tools. We've had to cast a pretty wide net, but we've had to do a lot of discovering and shaping for ourselves.The challenge of deploying AI thoughtfully03:05: There definitely are some roadblocks in keeping pace. And the risk and the ethical concerns is one of those. But I would say, also, having the right skill set in your workforce and upskilling your workforce — that's a challenge. There's a real opportunity for people who know their business very well and do the work to learn how to deploy AI in their field, in their area. It's that combination of skills. I think there are a lot of very smart people doing very smart things to build really amazing technology. What I think a lot of businesses have challenges with and where we face a bit of a roadblock is, how do you deploy those tools well in a breadth of different businesses?Show Links: TranscriptGuest Profiles:Summer Husband | Rice University

If universities believe they should be free from government interference and that students and faculty have the right to freely express whatever viewpoints they hold, then the universities should be held to the same standard, right? Hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen are joined by Richard Saller, an American classist and former interim president of Stanford University, to discuss whether or not the government has the right to intervene in university affairs and the hypocrisy that sometimes surrounds these issues. The conversation covers the recent statement signed by 562 university presidents advocating for academic freedom, examples of academic censorship, and the impact of federal funding on universities. They also raise questions about what true academic freedom means as universities have grown increasingly homogenous, and propose solutions to how universities can live up to their mission of being a place where all viewpoints can be expressed.  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.

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

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

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

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

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

On this episode of the OneHaas Alumni Podcast, meet leadership coach Jeremy Guttenplan, a double bear with an MBA and a bachelor's degree in engineering from Haas. After years working in the data science and risk management fields, and holding top leadership positions at Wells Fargo and Capital One, Jeremy realized he wanted to spend more time coaching and developing his team than playing corporate politics. Jeremy chats with host Sean Li about how he made the pivot to coaching, explains the nuances between coaching, counseling, mentoring, and advising, and gives Sean a taste of his coaching style with an emphasis on the impact and return on investment personal development work can provide. *OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On his journey from data science to strategy, and discovering coaching as a career path“ I would get into these jobs that'd be very specific, very narrow focused.  And I had a way about me that I would create a T shape out of every role I'd end up in. So, you know, where they wanted me to do a certain thing and go really deep on something, I'd learn everything around it, connect all the dots together, you know, and make it really broad. Also, I generally master the one thing they wanted me to do pretty quickly, and then I'd get bored and wanna figure everything else out. And I was doing that in every job I was in.”On how the birth of his son propelled him to pursue coaching“I wanted to be a father, but I was also afraid I wasn't gonna be a great one. And there was a day that it hit me that, you know, I'm having a son and I'm gonna be his male role model.  And it was like a bucket of ice water got dumped on my head. It just woke me up. It woke me up out of this, whatever life I had been living up to that point, it wasn't what I'd want my son to look up to. I didn't see myself as a role model. A lot needed to change and a lot of that was about accepting myself.”On the definition of coaching“ Coaching is not about right or wrong, good or bad. There's nothing bad or wrong about that.  Coaching is about noticing it, asking yourself, is this getting me what I want? Like what I really want, what I say that I want right now? I might wanna be right about something, but what do I really want? And so that's what I ask my clients: Is that getting you what you say that you want? You know, thinking that other thing's gonna be better than this thing. And you know, the answer is always no. And it's an interruption tool to see that, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I have everything I need right now in this moment. I am already a whole complete, perfect human. And I can still aspire to be an even greater version of myself.'”On the ROI of coaching“ A coach can accelerate your journey to your freedom, your happiness, your fulfillment, whatever that is.  You know, whether it's in your relationships, whether it's in your job, whether it's with your finances, your relationship with money. The sooner you take care of these things, the more of your life you're gonna live, right? You might even live longer, because you'll be putting less stress on yourself.”Show Links:LinkedIn ProfileInstagram Profile Leading Your Life CoachingSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/onehaas/donations

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

What's worse than failing in your career? For Michelle Lewis '05, it's not trying at all.That fearless mindset propelled her from a fine arts degree to a global career as a C-suite leader, board director, and private equity principal. Over the years, Michelle has helped drive $10 billion in acquisitions across 30 countries and guided companies through complex strategic transitions in the energy and industrial sectors.At the Women in Leadership Conference, she sat down with Owl Have You Know co-host Brian Jackson '21 to talk about her journey — from the arts to executive leadership, why soft skills matter more than you think, and how failing fast and smart can shape a resilient career.Michelle also shares one of her favorite tips as a self-proclaimed uber-organizer, and what it's like balancing board service, entrepreneurship and motherhood.Episode Guide:00:10 Meet Michelle Lewis00:55 Insights from the Women in Leadership Conference01:42 The Role of Luck and Hard Work in Career Success05:15 Mentorship and Leadership06:42 Pathway to Board Membership11:23 From Fine Arts to Private Equity22:06 The Importance of Soft Skills26:07 Tips for Balancing Career and Family28:25 Final Thoughts and TakeawaysOwl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:Failing is learning not losing17:25: I've never been afraid to just try something new. I mean, because what can happen, right? You can fail. And what happens when you fail? You learn. You learn more than when you're successful. You know, I sell all the veggies, and great, I got, you know, some points in my pocket, but if I don't sell them, I have to try a new way the next day. Right? Yeah. So, I mean, there are a lot of my mentors who I attribute that to, like there's another woman. Same thing in executive recruiting. All you do is just, like, pick up the phone and ask someone—it's an opportunity. Maybe they're interested, maybe they're not. Like, worst case, they say, "No thanks," right? But a lot of people are afraid to pick up the phone. I mean, you can meet some fascinating people. So, I've just always thought, like, there's no downside to trying. The downside is if I don't try. Not if I fail.What led Michelle to where she is today02:05: I think I've been in a fortunate position to, wherever I am, to be working really hard and trying to do a good job and be a good person, and, and then, through that, have found that other people have come to me and said, "I see something in you that maybe you don't even see in yourself, and we think you can do X," which might be completely different to what I was doing at the time. And, and that's typically been the case throughout my entire career. So, the majority of my career, I was just going along to get along, and then someone else came along and said, "We're going to move you over here"—either a different industry, a different city, a different function. All really through someone else's vision.How mentorship shaped Michelle's approach to leadership06:00: One of the things I think that I learned, and that I do as well, is just conversations where I'm asking a lot of questions, not necessarily telling them what the answers are, and it's the same thing in a board and advisory role, right? I'm not there to tell the CEO what to do. I mean, if I'm telling the CEO what to do, we don't need that CEO. I'm there to ask questions. So, it's the same thing that my mentors did for me: asking questions that may highlight there are different ways, different paths, different answers for me to consider. That's the same thing that I'm doing when I'm in an advisory role or a board role.Show Links: TranscriptGuest Profiles:Michelle Lewis on LinkedIn

What exactly is a trade deficit? And why are so many policymakers fixated on it? Lately, the trade deficit in the U.S. is taking the bulk of the blame for the economic situation we're in and it's one of the reasons the Trump administration is pushing for sweeping tariffs. But tariffs are likely not the answer, and a trade deficit might be better referred to as a capital surplus.  As a continuation of the tariffs discussion in the last episode, hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen are joined by John Cochrane, an economist at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution.   The conversation covers how trade deficits actually work, their implications on global and domestic economies, and how current trade policies may impact economic growth, inflation, and international relations.  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.

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

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

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

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

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

For women's history month, the OneHaas Alumni Podcast is pleased to welcome Olivia Chen, a Haas undergrad alumna and the co-founder of Twrl Milk Tea.Like so many of the best entrepreneurial ventures, Twrl was born out of a necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic. With boba milk tea shops closed, Olivia and her co-founder Pauline Ang were finding ways to still enjoy the treat at home while also making a version of milk tea that prioritizes quality and pays tribute to their Taiwanese and Chinese heritage. Olivia joins host Sean Li to chat about being raised by immigrant parents from Taiwan, her career journey from Haas to Twrl, and Olivia dishes on all the ways her on-the-go milk teas are taking the boba industry by storm.*OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On her family's deep Berkeley roots“I actually am,  I would say, like a Berkeley baby, because we were in the Berkeley family housing units, there are baby photos of me playing on the playground. And so Berkeley has always been a really big part of my identity because my family, my dad are Berkeley alums. And so, my parents were really, really proud when I actually was accepted into Berkeley. And so being kind of from the Bay Area, you know, when relatives came, the first place we'd take them would be Berkeley to go see the campus. And so when I got in, it was kind of a no-brainer that I would be attending.”Lessons on entrepreneurship from her parents' career paths “ How the evolution of entrepreneurship goes is, you know, you climb one mountain, but you're at the bottom of another hill. And so you just keep climbing these mountains and then you just hope you can peak at an amazing peak. And so that is literally entrepreneurship. That is also the journey of an immigrant, right? Like, you go through these ebbs and flows of mastering language or mastering cultural norms.  And so those types of skills that I've seen my parents persevere with, they have been very, very motivating.”On what makes Twrl stand out“ What makes our canned drinks unique is we're the first to bring nitro infusion to the tea category. We're the first to bring pea protein. And so there's very little innovation in the last 30, 40, 50 years of the tea category. So we are literally the first tea brand out of all these big players out there to bring nitrogen infusion, to use pea protein. So it has actually changed a lot of things that are happening in the tea category itself.”On how Twrl got its name “ Twrl is a really special name for us because we, you know, think about our heritage and our origin. And an emperor was walking through a garden holding a hot cup of water and a leaf twirled into his cup and that's where the first brewed tea was born. That's the origin story. And we'd love to kind of say that, you know, our brand is steeped in history, but we're twirling for the future. And so we're really excited to share a little bit more about ourselves. And we're really, really proud of our heritage as Taiwanese and Chinese Americans.”Show Links:LinkedIn ProfileTwrl Milk TeaPodcast Rec: How I Built This with Guy Raz Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/onehaas/donations

Many inclusivity efforts fall short for underrepresented consumers. This Journal of Marketing study explores consumer skepticism and offers strategies to build genuine brand trust.Join host Samantha Cross (Babson College) for a discussion with Jennifer K. D'Angelo (Texas Christian University), Lea Dunn (Brooks Running), and Francesca Valsesia (University of Washington), about their Journal of Marketing study, "Is This for Me? Differential Responses to Skin Tone Inclusivity Initiatives by Underrepresented Consumers and Represented Consumers."Read an in-depth recap of this research here: https://www.ama.org/2024/11/19/when-inclusive-marketing-doesnt-resonate-how-brands-can-build-trust-in-inclusivity-focused-product-lines/Read the full Journal of Marketing article here: https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429241268634Reference: Jennifer D'Angelo, Lea Dunn, and Francesca Valsesia, “Is This for Me? Differential Responses to Skin Tone Inclusivity Initiatives by Underrepresented Consumers and Represented Consumers,” Journal of Marketing.Host: Samantha N. N. CrossTopics: inclusivity, representation, customer respect, product fit, marketing strategy, brandingThe JM Buzz Podcast is a production of the American Marketing Association's Journal of Marketing and is produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠University FM⁠⁠.

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

In this special live episode of Owl Have You Know, James Weston, the senior associate dean for degree programs and Harmon Whittington Professor of Finance, reflects on his 25 years at Rice University.Join James and host Maya Pomroy '22 as they explore his journey from the Federal Reserve to Rice Business, the evolution of the school over the past two and a half decades, and his vision for the future of the university. They also dive deep into his groundbreaking research on racial disparities in auto loan pricing — a study that uncovered significant biases against minority borrowers. Plus, get the inside scoop on his experience running a bar in Rice Village.Episode Guide:01:20 James Weston's Career Journey04:25 Early Career and Mentorship08:56 Teaching Philosophy and Student Relationships13:52 Research on Auto Loans and Discrimination18:58 Linking Mortgage and Experian Data20:14 Evidence of Discrimination in Auto Lending22:48 Challenges in Passing Auto Lending Regulations24:00 The Realities of Owning and Operating a Bar30:24 Transition to Administration at Rice Business33:47 Reflections on a Diverse CareerOwl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:How Dean James pursues scientific rigor34:50: [James Weston] I sort of view the thing that ties together all my papers as a foundational social scientist trying to measure things that are hard to measure. And so when I see things that I think have a lot of social import or a research question that I think has either a practical application or some large social question that I think needs answering, the fun for me is trying to figure out how to measure it and trying to come up with a clever way of identifying the research question in a way that's unambiguous and in a way that we can solidify and say, like, that's the answer. And I know it with as near scientific certainty as I can — you know, the existence of the Higgs boson particle.35:19: [Maya Pomroy] We can't get into that right now. Yeah. 35:33: [James Weston] But, but you know, but I'm saying, like, to treat it like a scientist.35:36: [Maya Pomroy] Yes.35:37: [James Weston] And study it like it's a real causal question. Yeah. And you attack it with the scientific method, and you attack it with the scrutiny and the scientific rigor that they use across campus.On pushing for transparency in auto lending23:20: My hope is that the Senate Banking Committee continues to take action on it, and we see more—just something similar to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, where auto dealers just have to report. They have a spreadsheet, and you just have to send it to the Fed the way every bank does with every mortgage application. And hopefully that transparency attenuates the discrimination the way it largely did in home mortgages. It took time. It was a 10-year process. It'll probably take that long on auto lending. And we're not the only voice in this choir. There's lots of other people now that are sort of jumping on the bandwagon.How Dean James views his new job role30:48: Moving into administration means, in my mind at least, it means I'm not working anymore. In the sense that I'm not executing the primary missions of the school, which are teaching and scholarship. And so I'm not teaching as much anymore, and I'm not doing as much scholarship anymore, which means I'd better be doing something to collect the paycheck. And the way I genuinely view it is that now I'm trying to enable the rest of my faculty to do better teaching and better scholarship. My role is as a service leader, which is how I view this job—as a tour of service, not a career pivot. I didn't take this job to then become dean someplace, to then become provost someplace, to then become Supreme Commander of University somewhere. But, like, it was someone else's turn to do this very important role, which is to coordinate all the programs, get the teaching schedules done, make sure I'm protecting junior faculty and their teaching loads, make sure I'm putting the right people into the right classes, making sure we're keeping track of it.Show Links: TranscriptThe Hidden Inequality in Auto-Lending | Rice Business WisdomGuest Profiles:James Weston | Rice University

With President Trump's tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, and other countries now in full swing, what consequences from an economic standpoint could the U.S. be facing? And what was the path that led us here? Hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen put the tariffs question to economist and author Dani Rodrik. Rodrik is  the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and the author of the book Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy. Beginning with the historical context and purpose of tariffs, the conversation covers how the political and social dissatisfaction with hyperglobalization opened the door for these extreme tariffs, whether or not they're an effective tool in modern trade policy, and what alternative strategies exist to rebuild America's middle class.  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.

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

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

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

OneHaas is pleased to welcome Yael Zheng, class of 1992, who is a seasoned marketing executive with two decades of experience in the tech industry. She's served as the Chief Marketing Officer for companies like Bill.com and VMware, and has sat on seven different boards including MeridianLink and UC Berkeley's  Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.Yael moved to the U.S. from China when she was a teenager and found herself drawn to the world of engineering. After getting an undergraduate degree at MIT, she felt like her true calling was elsewhere and decided that business school was the best way to find it. Yael chats with host Sean Li about finding her passion for marketing at Haas, her family's experience emigrating from China after the Cultural Revolution, and some of the top lessons she's gained from serving as a Chief Marketing Officer and now a board member. *OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On coming to the U.S. from China in 1981“ When I came to this country, I went to New Jersey and was finishing up the last few years of high school. And it was such a completely weird experience. Eyeopening would be an understatement. And I remember going to a local supermarket and finding the shelves just full of stuff like everything was stocked with stuff, and I was telling my sister like, oh my gosh how could there be so much stuff in the store? You know, of course, I came from a country back then, stuff was still kind of scarce.”On the misconceptions of what a Chief Marketing Officer does“ It's not about just taking a product and then, you know, go put out a website and some blogs and whatever, some market advertising. I mean, that's kind of the tactic. [But] far more important and far more interesting is to really figure out, behind all the tactics, [the product market fit i.e. what customer problems need to be solved and how big and how pressing,] what strategy you need to adopt, how you price it, how you package it.”On the importance of doing your homework on a company before working there“ I've known people who kind of feel like, oh, you know, you seem to have got pretty lucky with several companies that have really gone somewhere. I think luck is definitely a big part of it. But I think like anything, as we all know, you improve your luck or increase your luck by really doing your homework ahead of time, right? You try to see, okay, this company is really trying to attack a problem that's really big. A lot of customers, right? A lot of businesses feel the potential pain. And so there's a really potentially big opportunity to try to solve that problem.”On being a board member vs. an operational executive “ I think that we are constantly reminded as board directors that it's not our job to actually run the company. That's the job of the leadership team, the management team. We're supposed to provide oversight and governance. So having been an operator for many years, you know, I have to constantly remind myself   nose in and then fingers off. So it's our job to ask questions and ask good questions to help the management team to make sure that they have the right strategy in place and that they're executing effectively.”Show Links:LinkedIn ProfileYael's recommendation – HubSpot blogSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/onehaas/donations

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

Rice Executive MBA student Shai Littlejohn is no stranger to reinvention. From law to music — and now, corporate counsel for one of the world's most recognizable brands — she has built a career on embracing challenges and following her passions.As director and corporate counsel for global supply chain & innovation at Starbucks, Shai recently spoke at Rice Business' annual Women in Leadership Conference about the evolving legal landscape in Texas.After the panel, she sat down with Owl Have You Know co-host Brian Jackson '21 to talk about her dynamic career path, the lessons she's learned across industries, why she chose to pursue an Executive MBA at Rice and how she's already applying insights from the program in her career. Episode Guide:00:51 Shai Littlejohn's Career Journey03:14 Navigating Law and Music04:38 Pursuing Music and Personal Fulfillment09:36 Transition to Starbucks11:30 Balancing an Executive MBA15:09 Empowering Women in Business16:35 Conclusion and Favorite Starbucks OrderOwl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:On deciding what you want and going for it[16:05] Brian Jackson: If you had a hope for one thing that the attendees today would take with them, what would that be? [16:12] Shai Littlejohn: That they have to decide what they want and just go for it. You know, it's like—if the law doesn't... You can't look for laws necessarily to help you all the time or wait for the environment or timing to be right. We have talent that we can bring to the table. We have ideas, and nothing can stop that. We just have to keep putting them out there. You're not always going to get the reception you want, but that can't stop you from trying and going for it.What Rice's Women in Leadership Conference means to a woman in business15:43: Being a woman in business is exciting, and attending this conference is truly invigorating because opportunities are all around us. No matter what's happening in the world, we as women have immense potential and endless opportunities to pursue. This group is ready to seize them, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it.What's the biggest difference in working between oil and gas and coffee? 11:17: Corporate culture. Starbucks has a unique corporate culture, which I hope remains distinct because balancing culture with productivity is crucial. Many companies struggle to get that right, and striking that balance—work-life harmony alongside productivity—is very challenging.Show Links: TranscriptGuest Profiles:Shai Littlejohn's website

The recent crackdown on federal spending has universities sweating despite the fact that many of them boast huge billion-dollar endowments. So what gives? Why would less money from the federal government be a cause for concern? Where does all that money go? And could there be more to this budget picture than meets the eye? In this episode, hosts and finance professors Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen delve into the inner workings of university endowments and how these institutions are balancing their budgets in a way that's leaving themselves vulnerable to dire financial situations. Read John Cambell, Jeremy Stein, and Alex Wu's paper, “Economic Budgeting for Endowment-Dependent Universities” here. 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.

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

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

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

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

A Journal of Marketing study shows how targeted marketing can dismantle colonial health narratives, amplifying First Nations voices for fair health services.Join host Samantha Cross (Babson College) for a discussion with Dr. Steven D'Alessandro, Professor of Marketing at the Edith Cowan University School of Business and Law in Australia, about his Journal of Marketing study, "On the Path to Decolonizing Health Care Services: The Role of Marketing."Read an in-depth recap of this research here: ⁠https://www.ama.org/2024/01/23/marketing-for-equity-pioneering-culturally-competent-health-care-for-first-nations/⁠Read the full Journal of Marketing article here: ⁠https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429231209925⁠Reference: Reece George, Steven D'Alessandro, Mehmet Ibrahim Mehmet, Mona Nikidehaghani, Michelle Evans, Gaurangi Laud, and Deirdre Tedmanson, “⁠On the Path to Decolonizing Health Care Services: The Role of Marketing⁠,” ⁠Journal of Marketing⁠.Host: Samantha N. N. CrossTopics: healthcare, first nations, health marketing, decolonization, indigenousThe JM Buzz Podcast is a production of the American Marketing Association's Journal of Marketing and is produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠University FM⁠.

The OneHaas alumni podcast is pleased to welcome to the show Heather Rascher, the Senior Manager of Global Strategic Partnerships and Business Development at Abbott.Growing up in Sacramento, Heather's connection to UC Berkeley and Haas runs deep. After getting her undergraduate degree in economics and English from Cal, Heather went on to work in the investment banking sector, before deciding to return to Haas in pursuit of a more meaningful career path. Heather joins host Sean Li to chat about her California roots, her passion for supporting public institutions like UC Berkeley, how she gives back through board service and mentorship, and what led her to her fulfilling career in the medical devices industry at Abbott.*OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On her passion for public education“ I just am a huge believer in the ability of education to be transformative to people. And it was really a big thing that was transformative for my family – on my dad's side in particular. So when my dad's family came over from Mexico, his grandparents didn't have any education at all. They had about third to fifth grade education. When they came over here, one of the things that was really important to them was that their kids were able to get an education. Even though they never learned English, they were really clear that their kids had to not only go to school, but they had to go to college. And so all of their kids graduated from college.”On what drew her to healthcare and Abbott“ I just love working on things where there's a tangible benefit to many and an identified problem that it's a tough nut to crack. Even if I can solve one tiny piece of it, so the piece that I'm addressing is through the lives of diabetics and it's still meaningful and I can see that difference, not just in shareholder value, but in meeting diabetics who are using our products, that's what is so exciting to me.”Lessons she's learned throughout her career“I personally think it's better to work for a good manager and a good organization than work on something that's sexy. You can have both, but I think if you have to make a trade off, I've definitely had bad managers and I knew it and I just thought, Oh, but I'm getting red flags, but this opportunity seems too good and, or I'll be able to work with them. And it's true that you can work with them, but you may not thrive.”On the Somos Haas initiative “What we're trying to do is help people understand that you can come and get a business degree at Haas. It's attainable. And here's the way that you can do that. And then helping other organizations see the value of having diverse candidates apply that are all equally qualified. And so I think it's even more important now that there are organizations where people can feel a sense of community that are connected around a cultural identity, but also a singular purpose to be able to have a community that's focused on just supporting one another and driving a community that is oriented towards helping ultimately elevate, at least our objective is to elevate people of Hispanic origin in the business world.”Show Links:LinkedIn ProfileBook Rec: From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. BrooksBerkeley's BIG GIVESupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/onehaas/donations

A great idea is just the beginning. How do you turn it into something bigger?Dr. Paul Cherukuri, Rice University's first vice president for innovation and chief innovation officer, works with academics and industry titans to remove roadblocks for budding entrepreneurs and help cement Houston and Rice as top hubs for innovation. Paul joins Owl Have You Know host Maya Pomroy '22 to chat about how the Office of Innovation is paving the way for cutting-edge, world-changing ideas.They also discuss The Ion, Rice's Midtown hub for entrepreneurship, why Paul chose to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry at Rice, and his path to leading innovation at the university.Episode Guide:01:10 Dr. Cherukuri's Journey to Rice04:47 The Impact of Rice University06:03 Building the Office of Innovation08:33 Challenges and Opportunities in Innovation12:52 Fostering Entrepreneurship at Rice16:05 Exciting Student Projects17:59 Small Business Innovation and Nexus Launch18:50 The Ion: Houston's Innovation Hub19:43 Building an Innovation Ecosystem23:45 Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs28:42 The Exciting and Future Prospects on Rice's HorizonOwl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.Episode Quotes:On empowering the entrepreneurial spirit and taking calculated risks14:20: [Maya Pomroy] You've taken a lot of calculated risks in your life for things that you've done, and to translate that to others, how do you do that?14:55:[Dr. Paul Cherukuri] There are some people who just naturally resonate with the idea of doing it, right? The entrepreneurial spirit is within them and it's active, right?  Then there are some people who are sort of suppressed, repressed, who have always wanted to do it and weren't sure if that was allowed, right? Or if that was fostered for their career. And what we provide is the capability and also the inspiration that this is not only possible, it's welcomed. It's something that we actually want to promote, right?The Ion represents Rice's ability to create a community for innovators23:11: When you find your tribe, it's very, very different, and I think that The Ion represents that ability for us to concentrate people so they can meet each other. But then also provide resources, both with the corporates and the venture capitalists that are in the building.And then we're bringing in government and others to really kind of subsidize things and help us grow these companies, and then not only the companies, but grow the community. And that's what The Ion represents, right? So it is, I think, a magical place in many ways. If you go in there, there is an energy. There's a buzz that has happened now.How Houston's lack of zoning laws fuels growth and connection21:41: One of the beautiful things I think about Houston is we get dinged for not having zoning laws, but I actually think it's a great thing. And it has allowed us to economically grow, thrive, and expand the city. The problem with the expansion of the city is people density, right? So how do you get people to be right next to each other? Because that's when things start to magically happen, right? You got to get close to others.Show Links: TranscriptGuest Profiles:Paul Cherukuri | Rice Business

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

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