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Nicholas Humphrey is a  fellow at Darwin College at Cambridge University, and the author of many books. His latest works are titled, Why Is the World So Beautiful?: Our Minds in Search of Nature's Rhymes and The Mind Made Flesh: Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution. Greg and Nicholas discuss why humans uniquely among all creatures seek and feel aesthetic emotion, especially toward “pointless” natural beauty like sunsets and rainbows, which seems puzzling for Darwinian adaptation. Nicholas gives evolutionary explanations for beauty in bodies, landscapes, and also design, and then unifies them through Gerard Manley Hopkins’s idea that beauty is “rhyme,” defined as likeness tempered with difference across sensory and abstract domains.  Nicholas argues the world is full of “rhyming” categories because enduring kinds of things persist, and humans use rhyme to build world models from infancy, with culture shaping which rhymes we notice. Their discussion covers ugliness as category confusion, connoisseurship and collecting, superstimuli, beauty’s growth through expanded understanding, and the Earth’s unique richness of life. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Guide:00:00 Meet Nick Humphrey01:17 Why Beauty Exists03:19 Humans and Aesthetic Emotion04:26 Darwinian Puzzle of Beauty05:39 Evolutionary Explanations06:45 Rhyme as Beauty Key08:40 Rhyme Built Into Reality09:56 Training Minds With Rhymes11:58 Hopkins Chestnut Example13:39 Culture Shapes What Rhymes15:54 Learning Deepens Appreciation18:02 When Rhyme Turns Obsessive21:20 Ugliness and Category Threats23:23 Adapting to Anomalies25:21 Splitters and Joiners26:58 Earth as Rhyme Hotspot27:17 Life Makes Rhymes27:36 Why Mars Disappoints28:32 Beauty as Social Emotion32:30 Scientists Chase Beauty35:30 Is Beauty Increasing39:50 Training Taste Transfers43:05 Inequality of Beauty45:47 Truth Beauty Rhyme47:49 Pregnant Uncertainty49:20 Blindsight for Beauty51:33 Closing ThoughtsEpisode Quotes:How we learn to recognize beauty 15:17: You don't find rhyme mentioned in textbooks of developmental psychology, and yet all mothers know that the kids love rhyme, whether it's in nursery rhymes or songs or picture books or whatever it maybe. So we all know how to take advantage of it. And then, as we say, it branches out. As we grow up, we become interested, become connoisseurs of different parts of the world, and we say we look for different levels of rhyme. And I think that's one of the great things that makes me so optimistic in a way about the possibilities for the world we live in and finding new kinds of beauty is that we can always look deeper. What makes things beautiful  06:28:  We notice that the very same principle applies to what we like about human bodies as what we like about buildings and what we like about  the flower meadows and so on. We like rhyme. We like this relationship where things belong together in particular categories and contrast with other categories. And I picked that out as the central theme of the human response to beauty. Why life makes Earth special 26:56: I'm not shy of saying that the Earth is a very unique and probably an isolated example of how things could develop. There's more rhyme here because, really because of the evolution of life. Life gave rise to new kinds of rhymes, which gave rise to animals such as ourselves who could make things which rhymed to people like us. So we'd use language to find new kinds of rhymes and so on, and we go on doing it. Now, if and when some of our human explorers go to visit other planets in the universe, the one thing they shouldn't hope for is to find a place as beautiful as the Earth.  Show Links:Recommended Resources: SpandrelGerard Manley HopkinsON THE ORIGIN OF BEAUTYRhymeRupert SheldrakeMary DouglasThomas ReidErnst GombrichDavid HumeRhyme-as-reason effectHowards End Chapter 5Guest Profile: Personal WebsiteWikipedia ProfileCARTA ProfileGuest Work: Amazon Author PageWhy Is the World So Beautiful?: Our Minds in Search of Nature's RhymesThe Mind Made Flesh: Frontiers of Psychology and EvolutionThe Inner EyeIn a Dark TimeLeaps of Faith:Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural ConsolationSentience: The Invention of ConsciousnessSeeing Red: a Study in ConsciousnessSoul Dust: The Magic of ConsciousnessA History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of ConsciousnessGoogle Scholar PageIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: Mark JohnsonCésar HidalgoNicholas HumphreyAlva Noë Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our body contains a complex communication network, with hormones providing the signals. How do these signals regulate our energy, our appetites, our growth, and our moods? And does our environment shape the nature and intensity of these signals? Saira Hameed is a consulting endocrinologist who is also a clinician and lecturer at Imperial College London. She is also the author of the new book, Signals: The Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones - A Scientific Guide to Understanding How the Body Talks to Itself. Greg and Saira discuss how hormones regulate moment-to-moment homeostasis through feedback loops, including issues of hormone resistance such as insulin resistance driving type 2 diabetes and related conditions. Saira argues that hormones are misunderstood in public discourse and that endocrinology remains young and still mysterious, stressing the importance of thorough history-taking because powerful therapies like TRT, HRT, and steroids are nuanced, complicated, and require watertight diagnosis.  They also discuss cortisol regulation, Addison’s disease and Cushing’s syndrome, the hypothalamus as “mission control,” and the historical path to endocrine discoveries. The conversation touches on GLP-1 drugs, leptin resistance in obesity, environmental contributors including ultra-processed food and endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the value of clinician–researcher cross-talk, and limits of continuous monitoring beyond glucose sensors. Episode Guide: 00:00 Meet Saira Hameed02:29 Why Hormones Matter04:15 Homeostasis Feedback Loops05:41 Insulin Resistance Explained08:01 Modern Metabolic Epidemic10:49 Doctor As Listener13:23 Hormones And Aging Myths16:02 Cortisol Stress Signals21:02 Master Gland Mission Control22:47 Endocrinology Origin Stories26:11 Stop Blaming Willpower27:30 GLP Drugs Teaser27:39 How GLP-1 Signals Fullness28:20 From Diabetes Drug to Weight Loss29:33 Leptin Resistance Explained31:56 Breaking the Hunger Cycle33:41 Endocrine Disruptors Everywhere35:58 Practical Ways to Reduce Exposure37:07 Regulating Hormone Mimics38:23 Clinicians and Researchers Connect40:09 Learning Bedside Manner41:48 Doctor vs Customer Pressure43:41 Limits of Medicine and Burnout44:59 Why She Wrote the Cookbook47:13 Food as Metabolic Medicine48:34 Light, Circadian, and Vitamin D49:01 Endocrinology Research Frontiers50:21 No Such Thing as Boring Patients51:51 Wearables Data and Hormone Testing54:15 Medical History and Future Humility56:05 Final Thoughts and Farewell*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:GLP-1 and the body's natural hunger signals 27:39: So GLP-1, world famous now, is actually a naturally occurring hormone. It's produced by the gut, and your gut will release this hormone when you eat something. So you eat something, your gut releases GLP-1, this signal does a number of things, but one of the most interesting things it does is this GLP, this natural GLP, travels from your gut and the bloodstream up to the brain, to the hypothalamus that we talked about, the master gland, and, it says, "You're full. You're done. You don't need to eat anything more." That then elicits a behavior. You're like, "Okay, I'm good." Put your knife and fork down, leave the table, move on with your day. That's occurring every time we eat. So. the pharma industry obviously saw an opportunity, right? Because they understood that this hormone is very potent.  Why hormones are constantly working to keep your body in balance 04:44: These signals are controlling the body's homeostasis. It keeps everything in equilibrium. If this goes up, then this has to go down. 'Cause I'm quite a sort of visual learner, the way it would be great for your audience to picture this, you know, when you're hanging a picture at home, and you want to know if the picture's straight? And to your eye, it looks straight, but then you put a little spirit level on top, and the bubble is not in the middle, and then you do one millimeter, another half millimeter, and then suddenly the bubble's in the middle, and it's all straight, and you've reached the picture's kind of reached equilibrium. It's in balance. And that's what these hormones are doing all the time, and the precision is so sophisticated. It's absolutely exquisite. And this is happening really on a moment-to-moment basis. Often we think of hormones as controlling life's major milestones, puberty, pregnancy, menopause, and so on. But actually, you know, moment to moment, they're controlling pretty much everything too. What food can do that medicine sometimes can't 47:25: When it comes to food and eating, food is a very, very powerful medicine when used in the right way. Real food, food our ancestors would have considered to be food, right? And the changes in somebody's metabolic health that I've seen when they change the way they eat, I can't prescribe anything that powerful. Show Links:Recommended Resources: HormoneDiabetesCortisolAddison's DiseaseThomas AddisonCushing's SyndromePituitary GlandHypothalamusGlucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1)Tirzepatide (Mounjaro)National Health ServiceHippocratesGuest Profile: SairaHameed.comFaculty Profile for the Imperial College LondonSocial Profile on InstagramGuest Work: Amazon Author PageSignals: The Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones – A Scientific Guide to Understanding How the Body Talks to ItselfThe Full Diet Cookbook: Over 100 delicious recipes to lose weight, feel energised and live life to the fullIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 550: Maggie Jackson - The Power of Uncertainty: Embracing the Unknown for Growth and Success438: Travis Rieder - Exploring Medicine’s Moral and Ethical Questions Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Clare Carlisle is a professor of philosophy at King’s College London and the author of several books. Her latest works are titled, Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy and The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life Greg and Clare discuss what it means to be religious today through a Spinozist (Baruch Spinoza) lens, contrasting medieval religion as a virtue (behavior and “due honor to God”) with modern religion as ‘belief and belonging’ after the Reformation. Clare explains how Spinoza rethinks virtue as “power and flourishing” and God as “God or nature,” why he was seen as an atheist (rejecting anthropomorphic God, divine goodness, biblical authority, and institutional religion), and how The Ethics links metaphysics to human joy and emotional life.  They also discuss doing philosophy beyond writing, philosophy’s relation to literature and life-writing, why biographies matter, “Devotion’s” shift from religion to art and marriage, “Habit’s” double character and its relation to practice, “to kalon” blending ethics and aesthetics, contrasts with Kierkegaard on faith and institutional critique, differences between philosophy and theology, universities and existential questions, and Spinoza separating science from other concerns. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:Devotion is more than a feeling 26:22: So devotion is, it’s to do with love, commitment, and desire. But it's very much a sort of lived phenomenon. It wouldn't make sense to say that you're devoted to something if you're just not really spending any time pursuing that thing. So whereas when we use the word love, love can mean so many different things. It might just refer to a sort of feeling we have or an emotion that we have. I think in the case of devotion, there's got to be something inherently practical and expressive about it, and it's to do with giving your time to something that you value. Philosophy has more than one path 16:07: Philosophy means the love of wisdom or the pursuit of wisdom, and so there are many different ways of going about that. And writing is just one of them. Why Spinoza resisted labels 11:08: Putting Spinozism into any kind of sort of ready-made box, whether that's the box marked atheism or the box marked Christianity or Judaism, doesn't really do justice, not just to the fact that Spinozism is very sort of distinctive and in a way it doesn't fit into any box, but also, more importantly, I think Spinoza wrote philosophy in a way where he was actively resisting that kind of box-categorizing, labeling way of thinking about human life in general, and particularly about religion. Show Links:Recommended Resources: George EliotSøren KierkegaardBaruch SpinozaThomas AquinasSteven NadlerMiddlemarchHabitAristotleEthosHexisImmanuel KantNeuroplasticityMarcel ProustKalonGuest Profile: Faculty Profile at King’s College LondonProfile on WikipediaGuest Work: Amazon Author PageTranscendence for Beginners: Life Writing and PhilosophyMarriage QuestionSpinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the EthicsKierkegaardian Essays: A Festschrift in Honour of George PattisonPhilosopher of the HeartSpinoza's EthicsOn Habit (Thinking in Action)Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and PositionsKierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling': A Reader's GuideKierkegaard: A Guide for the PerplexedIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 629. Beyond Happiness: The Deep Longing to Matter with Rebecca Goldstein413. A Rational Look at Irrationality with Steven Nadler115. Modern Philosophy and The Role of The Philosopher with Justin E. H. Smith Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The term “Luddite” is often used today in a pejorative way for people standing in the way of progress and averse to technology. But for the Luddites of the 19th century, pushing back against technological advancements was a matter of life and death.  Tech journalist Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, unveils the history behind the first time machines came for human jobs and the lessons we can glean for today’s fight against big tech. He’s also the author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. Brian and Greg discuss the ties between Luddite displacement in the 19th century to today’s gig work, and AI-driven job cuts. Brian also describes sneaking into Shenzhen’s Foxconn City and emphasizes that technologies like the iPhone result from collective organizational effort, while “great man” narratives obscure workers’ contributions and shape how society views “tech titans.” *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:When technology takeaways worker autonomy 5:12: They [Luddite] saw a future that was confined to factories, where they were made to work in factories. They hated more than anything to, "stand at their command," as some of these workers put it. These were people who worked at home, who worked with machinery as they saw fit, took breaks when they saw fit. They had autonomy, and they saw the dawning not just of a technological age, but of an age where technology was being used to reorder society in a very specific way, and that's what they were rebelling against. That and the fact that at the moment they couldn't feed their families anymore. What people get wrong about Luddites 06:29: What people get wrong is that the Luddites were anti-technology, right? They were really just anti-exploitation and anti the factory system. Really, they were anti-poverty. Their struggle was against, in some cases, a technology or a set of technologies that had existed for some time. The myth of the lone innovator 54:09: We have bound up progress or our notions of progress, our ideas of progress in a single person being the motor, being the hander-down of innovations, the sort of disruptor. And until we can change that, and part of my project trying to untangle some of those assumptions, and the whole, as you mentioned, the whole iPhone book is chapter by chapter trying to tell the story and give credit to all the other people who sort of were behind the innovations that wound up in the iPhone and wound up changing the way that we live through this one device. And similarly with the Luddites, I wanted to explain their point of view, why they felt crushed by these titans, why they felt like their lives were being made worse by the technologies that they were using, and give voice to that collective body. Show Links:Recommended Resources: Luddites Adam Smith “E.W. Scripps to Become an ‘AI-Powered Broadcast Journalism Company’ After Sweeping Layoffs” | The Wrap Combination Act 1799 Lord Byron“The Future Encyclopedia of Luddism” by Miriam A. CherryRichard ArkwrightGuest Profile: Professional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInGuest Work: Blood in the Machine | Substack Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Meghan O’Gieblyn is a writer who writes on the interface of technology and humans. Her latest books are titled Will and Attention: A Memoir and the book God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. Greg and Meghan discuss Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis, whether technology and AI re-enchant the world, and how opaque algorithmic systems invite faith-like deference while also prompting anthropomorphism and mechanistic views of the mind.  Meghan explores how metaphors in religion and AI become literalized, complicating concepts like intention and consciousness. Turning to will and willpower, she connects her Calvinist upbringing, debates over free will, and experiences with addiction and recovery, emphasizing surrender and Simone Weil’s idea of curing faults by attention rather than will.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:AI and the new disenchantment 03:42: I think the whole idea of disenchantment is that we can understand the world, right? That we have like, the more we gather more information, more data, we're slowly gaining more control and more understanding. And now we find ourselves at the mercy of these systems that are, in some ways more intelligent than humans, that are better at predicting things than humans, that are outsmarting humans already in many ways. And we don't understand, even the people who are making them don't totally understand how they work. And we're at a point of information glut and overload where we almost have to defer to these opaque systems in order to understand the world. And I was curious about the idea of like, well, how is it different to, just have to accept an algorithmic output on faith as opposed to what I was told as a Christian, which is like, “The world is so complex we can't understand it, we just have to trust God and His will.” Why we see ourselves in AI 06:16: “I think that we are kind of doomed for better or for worse to seeing the world through the lens of the human. And the fact that we do this with... really crude technologies that we tend to personify. And then here come these algorithms that use language, and we have never in our human history encountered something non-human beyond a spiritual being, that uses language and interacts socially with us in that way.  And I just think we're not prepared evolutionarily, to engage with that kind of technology without imbuing it with personhood. When metaphors stop being metaphors 10:50: In the earlier days of AI research, it was really common to see words like thinking or learning in quotation marks, just to signal that these were metaphors, and at some point, we lost those quotation marks, and in fact, now a lot of people will say, "Well, they are thinking. They are learning. Like, what's the difference?" And so yeah, I think we're never going to get away from metaphors. Like, our whole language is built on metaphor, but, do think there's a way in which, it does make a difference whether you're attentive to when you're using a metaphor and when you've, it's become a dead metaphor and you've forgotten it.  Show Links:Recommended Resources: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of CapitalismTranshumanismRay KurzweilSimone WeilAkrasiaReformed ChristianityJulian JaynesIris MurdochArthur SchopenhauerSaint AugustinBill W.Amor FatiGuest Profile: Meghan O’Gieblyn’s WebsiteWikipedia PageGuest Work: Harpers ArticlesAmazon Author PageWill and Attention: A MemoirMiss MacIntosh, My DarlingGod, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for MeaningInterior States: EssaysIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 649: N. Katherine Hayles - Bacteria to AI: Technics, Nonconscious Cognition, and Meaning in LLMsChristine RosenSherry TurkleClancy Martin Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nir Halevy is a professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the author of the new book called Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them. Greg and Nir argue that hierarchy can never be eliminated from organizations because of coordination needs, division of labor, and human drives for social comparison, achievement, predictability, and safety, yet it can become self-reinforcing and abusive.  Nir diagnoses “broken hierarchies” via his three interlinked symptoms—ultra-competitiveness, injustice, and instability—which damage wellbeing, retention, and performance, and can be worsened by misdesigned incentives and oblivious leaders. He proposes a treatment framework—CPR: common value, pluralism (multiple pathways and dimensions for status), and relatedness—along with structural options like co-leadership to dilute domineering “dark triad” leaders. They also discuss examples from sports, ballet, secrecy at work, and measurement signals like turnover, absenteeism, and disengagement. unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM. Chapter Timestamps:00:00 Meet Nir Halevi 00:44 What Is Hierarchy 02:31 Tournament Theory Gladiators 04:37 Why Hierarchy Persists 06:51 Leadership Avoidance 09:03 Pluralism In Status 11:36 Is Status Zero Sum 14:51 Three U Breakdown 16:09 Ultra Competitive Cultures 17:30 Injustice And Instability 18:27 Intentional Or Accidental 19:48 Changing Culture From Within 21:58 Burnout And Wellbeing 22:39 Work Meaning Metrics 22:55 Secrecy Stress Tradeoff 23:58 Leader Blind Spots 24:34 Distance And Construal 25:08 Power Versus Status 25:57 Designing Stability 28:44 Turnover And Mobility 30:19 Narrative Through Promotions 30:47 Status Momentum Stress 31:35 Dark Triad Leaders 34:00 CPR Fix Framework 34:59 Common Value Examples 37:05 Recognition Without Dilution 38:54 Relatedness And Community 40:35 Creative Retirement Belonging 42:12 Organizational Checkups KPIs 43:15 Measuring Early Warning Signs 43:53 Final Takeaways And Book Episode Quotes:How everyday action shapes hierarchies 19:48:  I would say that it's not just the responsibility of top management or the CEO or the HR leader to kind of take care of the structure of the hierarchy because there are a lot of everyday behaviors that we engage in, right? So, Greg, when you spread malicious gossip about a coworker, right, that pulls them down in the eyes of others, and maybe that creates fewer opportunities for them to collaborate. When you're writing a gratitude letter for a colleague, that actually creates a different type of culture for all of us, right? When someone makes a contribution that is not really valued by others, but you double down and emphasize their contribution, you really highlight it, you broadcast it more, then you're contributing to kind of a pluralistic hierarchy. So I think, yes, there are some org design features that are coming from the top down.  On rethinking the path to leadership 08:45: We can be more pluralistic about the pathways for gaining power. We don't have to assume that leadership involves politics or undermining other people or fierce competition and stabbing people in the back. There are different ways to contribute and ascend and become a leader and lead once you're in that position. Status doesn't have to be a zero-sum game 11:47: A lot of people tend to think about status as a zero-sum game. We don't have to think about it as a zero-sum game, just like we don't have to think about negotiation as a zero-sum game, right? So, if you're creating a pluralistic environment where there are a lot of different dimensions, bases, pathways to status, then it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Show Links:Recommended Resources: John Roberts podcastPaul MilgromOrganizational ArchitectureEdward LazearHierarchyBill BellamyValue PluralismThe Paths to Power podcastCharles A. O'Reilly III podcastCalSTRSCalPERSDark TriadMary BarraTeleverdeRobert D. PutnamGuest Profile: Faculty Profile at Stanford GSBLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XGuest Work: Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix ThemGoogle Scholar PageResearchGate PagePromotion GameIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 404: Christina Maslach - The Evolution of Burnout365: John Roberts - The In’s and Out’s of Organizational Economics593: Nicolai Foss - The Myth of the Bossless Company114: Jeff Pfeffer - Why Good People Need to Understand the Rules of Power Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? Believe it or not, the economic system was not inevitable in human history, and it’s not inevitably in our future either.  Trevor Jackson is a professor of history and political economy at UC Berkeley. He's the author of The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, a book that traces the origins and evolution of capitalism, as well as Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830. Trevor and Greg discuss how capitalism emerged not by design but through accidental solutions to immediate problems, why historians and economists see the past so differently, and how financial crises went from being treated as crimes to being treated as natural disasters. They also explore the purpose of history in the modern world and why academic historians have lost faith in their own relevance even as public demand for historical knowledge has never been higher. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:What makes capitalism distinctive? 27:51: To me, what is distinctive about capitalism is not that we have commodity markets, because indeed we can find those in ancient Rome, we can find those in the Soviet Union, if we try hard enough, but rather markets in the factors of production: land, labor, and capital. So if I go to ancient Rome, can I found an AI startup? No. There is no land market for me to buy land. It is distributed by the state. There might be some labor markets in skilled labor, but most people are in unfree labor conditions. Are there banks? No. If I go to the Soviet Union, can I found an AI startup? No. There are no banks. There are no labor markets. There is no land market. Well, twentieth-century US, twenty-first-century US, we have all those things. And so the creation of each of those markets is a definable historical moment where we can see them being created. Often they are created given a whole set of legal changes that make those markets possible. How things become unintelligible 09:12: I think a lot of people are interested in how new things are created, but I am interested in how old things are forgotten or lost or rendered unintelligible. The accidental origins of markets 05:32: What most people use their agency for is to reproduce and reinforce whatever existing structures they encounter. By definition, those structures would not continue to exist if people did otherwise. So instead, we tend to tell the stories of people who use their agency to not do that and do something weird, but that makes them definitionally atypical. Markets are a thing that only works insofar as people agentially contribute to their continual functioning without ever, you know, the intention is not, “I am going to go buy a cup of coffee to keep the coffee market going.” The intention is, “I am going to satisfy my need for a cup of coffee.” And so there is a weird unintentionality to the use of agents in economic life. And so I tried to focus a lot on accidents, unintended consequences, unforeseen mistakes, surprises, [and] collective disaster that results from individually rational behavior. Show Links:Recommended Resources: John Harold ClaphamBarry EichengreenChristina RomerBen BernankeThe Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward BaptistJames Bradford DeLongEugene GenovesePaul A. DavidJack Ryan (character)Heather Cox Richardson | substackKevin KruseFredric JamesonGuest Profile: Faculty Profile at UC BerkeleyGuest Work: The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the WorldImpunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: Sven Beckert Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens when your brain predicts a symptom that doesn't belong — and your body obeys? Can a diagnosis itself make you sicker? And could the way your doctor delivers bad news change the course of your disease? Helen Pilcher is a science writer whose work has appeared in Nature, The Guardian, and the BBC. Her new book, This Book May Cause Side Effects: The Curious and Dangerous Power of the Nocebo Effect, Placebo's Evil Twin, explores how negative expectations can produce real, measurable harm in the body. Helen and Greg discuss how the nocebo effect turns clinical warnings into self-fulfilling prophecies, why modern medicine's culture of full disclosure may be doing patients more harm than good, and how social media has become a new vector for mass psychogenic illness, spreading symptoms as easily as information. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:The brain predicts symptoms 01:00:29: What we realize now, is that most of our conscious experience is actually a prediction. It's a controlled hallucination, and most of the time, we get it right. But when we don't get it right, when our brains make a prediction error, that's when all sorts of things can happen. So, that's what creates the nocebo effect. The brain is predicting a symptom where the symptom doesn't belong. How much medical information is too much? 24:31: One of the things that the medical profession in the West needs to think about is how much information is too much information. And the information that I choose to give, how can I give it better? So I can boost any placebo effect that might be relevant and reduce any nocebo effect that might be relevant. When illness spreads through social media 43:38: We live in this interconnected world where you can go on social media, you can go on TikTok, your kids can go on TikTok. You can watch people who have illnesses of any kind, from mental health illnesses to physical illnesses. They call themselves chronic illness influencers or illfluencers is the term that I came across. People who we presume, I'm not disputing this, have very genuine health concerns and they're making content about it. And that can play a really, really important role in society because people with certain health conditions can feel quite alienated. It can be quite lonely. This can help them get information. It can help them belong. Sometimes it can put them on a path to treatment. That's the positive side. The downside is that sometimes also seeing people being ill can trigger mirror symptoms. Show Links:Recommended Resources: Clifton Meador, M.D.Primo LeviThe Farewell (2019 film)Alia Crum Keith Petrie“YouTuber Jan Zimmermann Dies ‘Unexpectedly’ from Epileptic Seizure at 27”Lucy FoulkesRené DescartesGuest Profile: Professional Website Professional Profile on LinkedInGuest Work: This Book May Cause Side Effects: The Curious and Dangerous Power of the Nocebo Effect, Placebo’s Evil TwinSmall Inventions That Made a Big DifferenceThe Time Nature Keeps: A Visual Guide to the Cycles and Time Spans of the Natural WorldLife Changing: How Humans are Altering Life on EarthBring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinctionIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: Jo MarchantEllen J. Langer Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bruno Giussani is a speaker and consultant, formerly the head of TED in Europe and an author of many works in Italian and the new English work Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Greg and Bruno discuss how AI, social media, and other algorithmic technologies capture and steer attention, eroding “cognitive integrity,” or the ability to understand reality lucidly and decide autonomously. Bruno argues that today’s personalization of chatbots enables society-scale influence person by person, amplified by cheap AI-generated content and political “flood the zone” tactics that blur fact and fiction and deepen polarization.  They discuss deskilling and “cognitive debt” from outsourcing thinking to chatbots, the non-neutrality and value-laden programming of AI (with examples from Chinese chatbots and Grok), and risks of subtle manipulation. Bruno covers Europe’s dependence on U.S. tech and the need for renewed industrial policy, outlines cognitive warfare tactics including poisoning chatbot outputs, and describes education-system experiments to integrate AI without replacing learning. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:How does technology put us at risk? 04:06: When companies say, "We have the ability to personalize information," be it news or advertising, whatever, what they are saying is, "We have the ability to target one single person's mind with our technologies." But we do it at the scale of a whole society, right? And that's what makes this a real new challenge to a new level of challenge. And the reason why I consider it the most urgent, which is not the most important, but the most urgent, is it's going to be very difficult to solve any other challenge, be it, inequality and poverty and climate, you call it, if we cannot maintain some level of capacity to understand the world in a lucid way and to decide independently and autonomously about how to react to the circumstances in which we are in. And that's exactly where these technologies put us at risk. They target exactly that element. Why we anthropomorphize AI 29:15: The anthropomorphization element is really interesting because we are so naturally drawn to consider things that speak like us and write like us and express themselves like us, so language is really central to this. Somehow they must be like us. If there is a text and the text is fluid and orthographically correct and even beautiful, there must be a mind behind it that has created this text. And so instinctively we believe that, and that's the kind of relationship that we are creating with these machines. When we outsource our thinking 45:00: What's happening, of course, is generative AI, which has been adopted very, very fast because it just simplifies life. It allows for something almost irresistible, which is let's outsource to a machine the effort of reading, writing, learning, thinking, deciding and so on. And then the teachers themselves start using it to produce, classes, programs and syllabuses and all that stuff. So that was the first moment, and that provoked two different reactions. There was the reaction of, "Oh, no, no, this, this is totally contrary to even the logic of education, so let's ban AI. Let's just not have these tools," right? And the other reaction was, "We need to prepare students and kids to the future life after their study, where these machines are going to be part of their life, so we need to integrate it as fast as possible." And both those approaches are the first potential immediate reaction, but they're both actually, wrong. Show Links:Recommended Resources: TEDSteve JobsiPhone (1st generation)ChatbotElon MuskGrokOpenAIAnthropicSam AltmanCognitive WarfareBixonimaniaMustafa SuleymanOpenAI–HuggingFace IncidentPeter ThielHypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the Architecture of RealityGuest Profile: Giussani.comLinkedIn ProfileTED ProfileWikipedia ProfileSocial Profile on InstagramGuest Work: Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of Artificial IntelligenceIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: Nir EyalGloria MarkSherry Turkle Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Even without the contributions of modern medicine and technology, humans have been evolving to live longer lives for centuries. So what led to this evolution and why is aging important?  Michael Gurven is a professor of anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara. He’s also the author of Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer, a book that examines the evolutionary causes behind life expectancy.  Michael and Greg discuss the key reasons behind why we age, how Michael’s field work with the Tsimané people in Bolivia informed his conclusions about life expectancies, and whether or not we should take any lessons on aging from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:Aging isn’t just about physical fitness 05:03: If we were completely, entirely dependent only on our physical fitness for extracting meaning and value and work out of our environment, then maybe we wouldn't age as much or maybe we wouldn't live as long. But because we inhabit a niche where our brains, our skills, our knowledge, the services we render play such an important role, you can still be positively impacting your biological fitness even if your VO2 max is not what it once was, your muscular strength is not what it once was.  And so that's basically part of the argument of the book, that even though you're no longer reproducing once, you know, menopause hits,  at age 50 or so, that the next couple decades after that can still be evolutionarily relevant, so much so that selection has worked to make sure that we live those extra couple decades. Long life is a story of cooperation 20:36: There are obstacles that are more social and more almost moral that we had to overcome in order to achieve our long-lived existence as a species, which is somewhere in the book I say, the story of long life is really a story about cooperation, as much as anything else. Longevity comes with trade-offs 10:55: This idea that we can just, like, flip one switch, and all of a sudden we're going to get extra lifespan, extra health span at zero cost, right? No cognitive deficits, no hit on our fertility or our fecundity. It's just really far-fetched. You know, evolution would've figured that out by now. Usefulness matters more than age 45:14: As your physical body starts aging to the point where it starts compromising your, ability to be useful to others, that's where you start seeing it's not age so much that matters, but that functional utility, seems to matter more, and that shapes whether or not people feel depressed and whether people feel lonely. Show Links:Recommended Resources: Tsimané Aeta peopleGeorge Christopher Williams Marshall SahlinsGuest Profile: Faculty Profile at UC Santa Barbara Professional Profile on LinkedInThe Gurven LabGuest Work: Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live LongerIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: Sarah HrdySue Armstrong Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Social connection is essential for humans, yet we live in a world that is increasingly designed to limit our in-person social interactions. So why, if being social makes us happier, do we willfully avoid it more and more?  Nicholas Epley is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His new book, A Little More Social, explores how the little choices we make can dramatically shape our connections.  Nicholas and Greg discuss the science behind why being social makes us happy and why people systematically underestimate how much they’ll enjoy having deeper conversations, expressing gratitude, or talking to strangers. They also discuss how personality traits like extroversion and introversion can be viewed as beliefs or habits, and why these labels can hold people back. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:Connection starts with invitation 38:30: When you say hi to somebody on a train or, you know, I try to have a meaningful conversation with somebody, I'm not demanding things from them. I'm testing a belief, I'm essentially offering an invitation to them. And somebody can be interested in talking with me or not. Somebody could be willing to go there in a deeper conversation or not. But if I don't give them the invitation, they're not going to come. So that's the way I would think about that from the person who's reaching out from us in our daily lives. Think of yourself as inviting connection, and you can be more welcoming in that regard. And I think if you start doing that, you start inviting more interaction, you'll find you have a lot more of it in your life, and you'll find that other people are just as happy to be connected to as you are. Social connection is a choice  04:06: Social connection doesn't just happen to us, it's a choice. And it's a choice you make over and over again every hour, two hours, three hours of your life when you choose to avoid other people or connect with them in lots of ways. And that, as a decision-making researcher, that occurs to you is, it's possible we're making a mistake here. The connections we don't make 03:38: We have kind thoughts that we keep to ourselves, gratitude we don't express. We keep honest thoughts to ourselves. Just over and over again, opportunities to really connect with other people we seem not to take.  Show Links:Recommended Resources: “The Invisible Benefits of Exercise” by Elizabeth Dunn, et al.Dan LiebermanWilliam Fleeson Jess Pan, author of Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come Muggsy BoguesBayesian inferenceRichard ThalerJerry Maguire (1996 film)Daniel KahnemanRobert CialdiniStefan HofmannGuest Profile: Faculty Profile at University of Chicago Booth School of BusinessProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInGuest Work: A Little More Social Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and WantGoogle Scholar PageIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: Episode 399: Nicholas Epley, The Science Behind Human Connection and EngagementEpisode 679: Elizabeth Dunn, Happy Spending and Joyful Climate ActionEpisode 556: Olga Khazan, Rewriting Your Personality and Overcoming AnxietyEpisode 627: Sonja Lyubomirsky, Unlocking the Secrets of Love and Happiness Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What do we lose when we swap our source for connection and intimacy from a human to an AI chatbot? Is there a significant psychological impact?  Sherry Turkle is a professor of social studies of science and technology at MIT and the founding director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self. Her work specializes in the psychological and social impact of technology, with books like Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, and her latest book Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.  Sherry and Greg discuss how AI is forcing society to examine and redefine “empathy,” what this moment we’re in says about technological affordance meeting human vulnerability, and why guardrails on AI for children are not enough to keep them safe from psychological damage.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:When AI feels like empathy 05:45: Computer brings philosophy into everyday life. It's one thing to be in seminars, to be in academic journals, and participate in generations of debates between behaviorists and psychoanalysts, psychoanalysts and neuroscientists. I've been there through the arc of that debate. It's another thing to say, "You know, I think I'll not bother to try to find a lover, a partner. I think I'll just be satisfied with my AI who talks to me as if it were one." Now, that's taking behaviorism, sounds like, says the right things, and puts it into your daily life in a way that all the debates that you're talking about, really did not. The damage starts with “I am your friend” 32:00: Damage doesn't start when the chatbot says something destructive or self-harm or suggests violence or suggests your parents are bad. The damage to children doesn't start when the chatbot does something and you need a guardrail. The damage starts by the existence of a chatbot that says, "I am your friend." The illusion of empathy in AI 13:14: So it's in a play, and it's entrained you to be in its play. And together, you are having a kind of pretend interaction that on paper looks like empathy is kind of happening. But in fact, there's only one person in that play, and it's you, allowing yourself to feel comforted by something that feels no empathy at all. Show Links:Recommended Resources: Erik Erikson Alan Turing George Armitage Miller Jean Piaget “Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claims” | New York Times “Are we still human if robots help raise our babies?” Sarah Hrdy | TED ELIZA Blade RunnerGuest Profile: Faculty Profile at MITProfessional WebsiteProfessional Profile on XGuest Work: Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to MachinesAlone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each OtherPsychoanalytic PoliticsThe Second Self: Computers and the Human SpiritLife on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the InternetReclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital AgeIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: Christine RosenCoco Krumme Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Huggy Rao is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and Henrich Greve is the Rudolf and Valeria Maag Chaired Professor in Entrepreneurship at INSEAD. They are also co-authors of the new book Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk. Greg, Henrich, and Huggy discuss their new book and the language of online conspiracy talk. They describe entering the topic via research on managerial talk, the 1857 Indian mutiny rumor, and pandemic effects on collective action, then the COVID-era “distributed doubt.”  Huggy and Henrich define conspiracy theories as elaborate, non-falsifiable narratives where lack of evidence is treated as proof, including “gateway” claims like COVID false positives. Rather than pathologizing believers, they analyze online talk as a social coordination mechanism and cultural toolkit involving bricolage, which is recombining semantically proximate words and narratives, within crowded “rabbit holes.” They propose that platforms shape but don’t determine discourse. For managers, they recommend early rumor monitoring, “prebuttals,” and credibility-preserving communication, noting shrinking executive authority and the risks of manufacturing threat for innovation. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:Why should leaders always get ahead of conspiracy theories? 40:18 [Henrich R. Greve]: I think an important thing about leaders and organizations is that, I mean, they have the advantage that often the conspiracy theories are initiated by things that they did, all right? Because in society, events just happen, and so conspiracy theories just burst out of the blue. In firms, there is some sort of leadership initiative, and conspiracy theories can be traced back to it. And so, knowing this, there are certain conversations that have to happen before the initiative, during the initiative, just to make sure that there is understanding spread about why is this happening. So, that's the inoculation phase. And actually, it's a privilege of management that they should know that conspiracy can happen whenever something big and unexplained is announced. Conspiracy theories can create communities 11:22 [Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao]: Conspiracy theories are coordination mechanisms for people to engage in the digital commons, so to speak. You don't have pubs and taverns, but you have microblogs and the like, and that's kind of what people do. They use it as a coordination device to create groups and so on and so forth. But the thing that struck us, and we use this imagery, is they're not exactly paranoid. Great leaders awaken pride, not paranoia 44:54 [Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao]: The real job of leaders, and perhaps I'm oversimplifying grossly, is you actually want to make your employees feel capable. If you want to make them feel capable, peddling conspiracy theories is perhaps not the best kind of first step to start with. Instead, what you want them to do is, how can you have an impact? What is it you can do? Those kinds of things become important. And what all of that leads to is actually awakening pride. But before you awaken pride, you have to show that you care for it. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Spanish FluConspiracy TheoryArrow's Impossibility TheoremCognitive DissonanceConsistencyAnn SwidlerBricolageLevi Strauss  Pizzagate Conspiracy TheoryMcCarthyismThe Functions of the ExecutiveMatthew RidgwayGuest Profile: Hayagreeva Rao | Faculty Profile at Stanford Business SchoolHayagreeva Rao | LinkedIn ProfileHuggyRao.comHenrich R. Greve | INSEAD ProfileHenrich R. Greve | LinkedIn ProfileHenrichGreve.comGuest Work: Hayagreeva Rao | Amazon Author PageHenrich R. Greve | Amazon Author PageCtrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy TalkScaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for LessThe Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things HarderNetwork Advantage: How to Unlock Value From Your Alliances and PartnershipsOrganizational Learning from Performance Feedback: A Behavioral Perspective on Multiple Goals: A Multiple Goals PerspectiveOrganizational Learning from Performance Feedback: A Behavioral Perspective on Innovation and ChangeIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 366: Robert Sutton - Dissecting Workplace Friction: A Deep Dive200: Robert Cialdini - The Golden Age of Persuasion Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Helen Zoe Veit is a professor of history at Michigan State University and also an author and editor. Her latest books are titled Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History and Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century. Greg and Helen discuss changes in American eating habits during the 20th century. Helen explains that food history became a viable academic field largely in the last 25 years, and describes early-20th-century shifts toward government regulation, nutrition science, calories, home economics, and factory food, which encouraged Americans to distrust appetite and pleasure while fueling diet culture and moralized views of weight. Their conversation traces how children’s “natural” pickiness was culturally constructed through things like Clara Davis’s studies, rising processed foods and instant alternatives, advice from Dr. Spock, and marketing power via supermarkets and the media. They discuss diluted “foreign” foods, faddists like Fletcher, the decline of Home Ec classes, and how history could inform a more balanced, pleasurable relationship to food. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:When did picky eating become a “thing”? 14:56: You know, another thing I thought about a lot was that there are all sorts of things our kids are initially reluctant or fearful about today. My kids didn't want to put on pants for a while. They didn't want to wear snow boots in the snow. They didn't want to go to school or brush their teeth or put on sunblock or wear seat belts or car seats. But I just had this enormous cultural confidence. Of course they can get used to it because I see everybody else doing it, and I didn't hesitate to just, you know, insist that they do it in a way that the structure of daily life used to just insist children eat this kind of food, and they were getting used to it in such large numbers and so quickly that people didn't see it as a thing. So that really became the book. Like, how did we start to see this as a thing and to think it had this really unique psychological significance? And, you know, the answers are really complicated. And a lot of it happened in the 20th century. Why is our relationship with food so complicated? 34:20: Americans have a very uneasy relationship to pleasure of food, as like we're really hedonistic in a lot of ways. We consume a lot of junk food, this high-calorie, high-sugar delicious food, and we're like, ‘You can't tell me not to eat this.’ It's a big part of American culture, but it's not deeply pleasurable in some ways, right? The pleasure of eating with other people, the pleasure of feeling good about what we've eaten, and how it affects our bodies. We often have pleasure in a very narrow way today. How supermarkets changed what kids eat 25:12: Grocers as, you know, and general stores which preceded them, these were adult interactions. This was more or less designed to be one adult talking to another, with a list in hand. Kids were particularly invited into this conversation. But by the time modern grocery stores, which start really in the '20s, maybe 30s, start popping up in American towns and cities, and by the '50s we get supermarkets, really much larger stores with the big carts. That's a totally different model. Self-service leads immediately to just an explosion of impulse buying. In fact, the term was coined in the 1940s to describe what was going on in supermarkets, and it also led to an explosion of children's power over family food purchases in a way they hadn't before. Marketers keenly are aware of this. Show Links:Recommended Resources: Fernand BraudelJacques PépinSidney MintzAnnales SchoolClara M. Davis and the wisdom of letting children choose their own dietsNeophobiaBenjamin SpockSigmund FreudHorace FletcherJohn Harvey KelloggEuthenicsDarwinismHome EconomicsGuest Profile: Personal WebsiteFaculty Profile at Michigan State UniversityGuest Work: Amazon Author PagePicky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in HistoryModern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth CenturyFood in the Civil War Era: The SouthFood in the Civil War Era: The NorthFood in the American Gilded AgeIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 236: James Hamblin - Cleanliness, Purity, Health and Culture454: Paula S. Fass - American Childhood From the Frontier to Helicopter Parenting Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is it true that divorced moms actually do less housework than married moms? Is there an optimal time for women to pause their careers to start a family? How can you tell by the third date whether or not your relationship is a good deal?  Dr. Corinne Low is a professor of public policy and economics at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, provides a roadmap for optimizing your resources and maximizing your satisfaction in life, whether it be with your career or your family.  Corinne and Greg discuss the problems modern women face in the workplace and at home, the economic tools women can apply to make the most out of what they’ve got, and the importance of strategically picking a romantic partner. They also unpack the million dollar question with profound social implications: Why are women still expected to do the majority of the housework?  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:Women can earn more and still do more housework 28:00: In my data, I will see couples, and we focused on couples who are hourly workers 'cause otherwise people would say, "Well, men just have jobs that are more inflexible, and women have these more flexible jobs, so that's why women end up doing more of the housework." But if we zoom in on couples where they're both hourly workers, and I could go to a couple where she is earning four times what he earns per hour, okay? And she does more than twice as much housework, and he works more hours than she does, and she works fewer hours. So that couple, if he would take on some of the domestic load and she could, in the modal couple here, she's like a healthcare worker, so if she could pick up a shift as a nurse, the couple would be richer. It would loosen their economic constraints. What is stopping them? And yes, I have to think it's these deeply ingrained gender norms about what roles do we learn in our natal households? How do we feel like we're contributing? Optimize for the life you actually want 03:57: We're all facing scarcity. But if you figure out what your utility function is and you figure out what constraints you're facing, you can solve for a life that meets your needs, fulfills you, enriches you, and provides you all sorts of amazing opportunities. But that does sometimes mean being selective and not trying to go for the maximum of everything everywhere all at once. Is there a perfect time to have a child? 41:30: Having a child is such an important life decision and is going to be, ultimately, such a larger source of utility than your career for people who do choose to become parents, that you should do that when works for your family, right? I think you should be strategic about all the infrastructure you build around when you do that, but I don't think that you should try to be perfectly strategic about when you do it. Show Links:Recommended Resources: Daniel Kahneman Richard Thaler Cass Sunstein Claudia GoldinLeave It to Beaver “Degrees are Forever: Marriage, Educational Investment, and Lifecycle Labor Decisions of Men and Women” by Mary Ann Bronson “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions” by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. KatzLena Edlund Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at University of Pennsylvania Professional WebsiteProfile on LinkedInProfile on InstagramGuest Work: Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: Understanding the Gender Wage Gap feat. Claudia GoldinBalancing Personal Life and Career Decision Making with Myra Strober and Abby Davisson Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.