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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.

J. Doyne Farmer is a Professor of Complex Systems Science at Oxford University, Hedge-Fund Founder, and author of the new book, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World.  Greg and Doyne discuss why complexity science has not displaced mainstream economics. Doyne argues that economics is intellectually conservative and overly committed to closed-form math, with behavioral challenges and the 2008 crisis highlighting endogenous dynamics. He also recounts working to beat roulette using physics, his work on chaos (sensitive dependence, strange attractors), and using simulation as a core complex-systems method.  When they shift to the topic of finance, he describes “market ecology,” specialists with noisy skill, and why even uninformed trades have market impact. Doyne notes bounded rationality’s rise with modern computing and data, critiques systemic regulation, and describes industry-leading simulation work, including COVID UK economic-policy modeling and energy-transition/climate models that emphasize data-driven forecasts and policy nudges. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:Randomness is a subjective concept 08:50: As graduate students, Norman Packard and I and about 15 or 20 others, decided to predict the game of roulette, and we thought we were going to get rich by beating the game of roulette. And roulette is interesting 'cause it's, from the point of view of a casino, it's a random number generator, or at least it's supposed to be. From a physicist, it's a rolling ball on a circular track with a counter-rotating inner wheel, and that's just physics. And when we realized that 15 seconds elapsed between the time the ball's released and them closing the bets, typically, we realized we had time to gather initial data, make predictions. We bought a roulette wheel. We derived the forces acting on the ball and the wheel, built this all into a computer that we operated with our toes, and we did beat the game of roulette. We didn't really get rich, but it did make me realize that randomness is a subjective concept. To us, it wasn't random. To somebody else, it would be. And looking at things a different way could change that.  What really is complexity 13:34: Complex systems just means any kind of system where you have components that have emergent behavior... [14:08]. The system as a whole exhibits qualitatively different properties from its individual components. Better models can make systems perform worse 29:02: When you have a system with agents who are modeling their world and acting upon the model, as the models get more sophisticated, the trying to model the whole becomes harder and harder. And, and in some circumstances, the whole system performs worse when everybody has better models because they're too busy trying to outfox the other guys. Now, the economists would say, "Oh, no, but if they're all rational, it all settles into the best solution." Yeah, but we know they aren't. So then you have to really understand the way in which the collective behavior of boundedly rational models causes overshoots and undershoots at the level of the whole economy, and the ways in which, um, what's good for an individual if everybody else is behaving simply can be not good for anybody if everybody does it. Show Links:Recommended Resources: Complex SystemSanta Fe InstituteAdam SmithFriedrich Hayek2008 Financial CrisisNorman PackardEfficient-Market HypothesisEugene FamaHerbert A. SimonWassily LeontiefGosplanSystems thinkingInternational Energy AgencyCyberneticsGuest Profile: Faculty Profile at the University of OxfordFaculty Profile at the Santa Fe InstituteDoyneFarmer.comLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia ProfileGuest Work: Amazon Author PageMaking Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better WorldGoogle Scholar PageIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 423: Geoffrey West - The Scale of Everything: Unifying the Sciences of Growth, Complexity, and Innovation571: Scott E. Page - The Power of Diverse Models in Decision Making Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Scott Samuelson is a professor of philosophy at Iowa State University and the author of several books. His latest work is called To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life. Greg asks Scott about his views on why philosophy and aesthetics have sidelined food and actual taste in favor of nutrition, consumer preference, or narrow ethics. Scott argues food, cooking, and communal meals are central to human meaning, ethics, and hospitality, and that taste is a form of wisdom joining truth, goodness, and beauty while bridging the labels of subjective, objective, and intersubjective judgment.  He links taste to style through cooking as an active practice of tasting and adjusting, critiques consumer capitalism’s push toward radical aesthetic subjectivity and “food porn,” and the subject of tradition as an evolving conversation. They also connect food to education via metaphors of digestion, emphasizing initiation, attention, and the cultivation of judgment and style, and Scott defends ‘festivity’ and ‘shared meals' as two foundations for intimacy and flourishing. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes:Is it possible to be intimate with someone that you've never eaten with? 57:28 [Greg LaBlanc]: Do you think that it's possible to be intimate with someone that you've never eaten with? Is it possible to be a friend with somebody that you've never sat down and had a meal? I find it hard to imagine in a way. 57:45 [Scott Samuelson] I mean, it's almost impossible to imagine having deep connections, intimate connections with family members, with friends, with a lover that doesn't involve sharing a food and drink on a pretty regular basis, actually. And it's not simply that, "Oh, well, you need to eat," and whatever. It's that, that becomes a scene in which, the intimacy plays out, sometimes at its most fundamental level. The family dinner conversations, or the drinks with the friend or the great meal with your lover or whatever, those are things that are fundamental to what it is. We’re not just consumers of food 20:01: We've thought about things as we thought about ourselves as consumers, and I want us to think of ourselves not just as consumers, but as cooks, not just as eaters, but as makers of food. And that to me is a better lens for thinking about a good life. Taste is meeting of the subjective and objective 09:50: The beauty of taste is that it is precisely the meeting of the subjective and the object. It's putting an object into my subjective mouth, and it's the meeting of those two things. So there's an objective component, there's a subjective component, and there's an intersubjective component as well that one can't really develop one's taste independent of a community, I think, of taste at some level. But just again, to speak fairly bluntly and straightforwardly, I just think the development of taste is just one of the best things in life. Show Links:Recommended Resources: EpistemologyXeniaAlfred North WhiteheadThe Taste of ThingsM. F. K. FisherCotton MatherBlaise PascalGuest Profile: Faculty Profile at Iowa State UniversityScottSamuelsonAuthor.comWikipedia ProfileGuest Work: Amazon Author PageTo Taste: On Cooking and the Good LifeSeven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering: What Philosophy Can Tell Us about the Hardest Mystery of AllRome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand TourThe Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for EveryoneIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 604: Scott Samuelson - The Intersection of Philosophy and Suffering: From the Stoics to ModernityPaula Marantz CohenJulian Baggini48: Rob Dunn - Understanding Food Science: The Role of Evolution and Nature in our Diet Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ashley Goodall is a longtime consultant, Fortune 50 executive, speaker, researcher, and writer in the areas of leadership and human resources. His two books are Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World and The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance. Greg and Ashley discuss how rapid transformation, especially with AI, often worsens work because human employees are wired for stability, ritual, predictability, and belonging. Change and improvement are not synonyms. They discuss creating “equilibrium under varying load” by making decision processes transparent, offering voice without confusing it with vote, and giving people information to improve predictions, since bad news is often preferable to no news.  Ashley notes how leaders underinvest in people due to short-termism, and layoffs and constant uncertainty damage both remaining employees and health. He emphasizes building many great teams, choosing and training team leaders well, recognizing excellence publicly, making contributions legible to boost self-efficacy, and reorienting HR toward long-term human performance and organizational prosperity as administrative work is automated. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Transparency matters during change 17:35: I find the most effective sort of safety signal at work is not, "Trust me, it'll be fine," but, "Here's what we're wrestling with." I think you can substitute transparency into what factors leaders are juggling for a promise that it'll all turn out well. I think the challenge with lots and lots of organizational leadership is leaders feel they can't say what's going on. And in the absence of an understanding of what's going on, employees are like, "Listen, I don't trust the beautifully wordsmithed stuff that your communications people write for you to say to me, and that seems to be intended to avoid lawsuits, not intended to help me understand the world.” Why people struggle with change 04:04: Whether we like it or not, change makes life difficult for people. We are wired as a species in a way that appreciates stability, appreciates knowing where we are, appreciates knowing where things are going. The complicated reality of AI at work 02:49: Now we're talking to one another in a world where digital transformation is, you from our current attention span, about eighty-nine percent AI. That's what's transforming stuff. And the experience of AI in the workplace is deeply complicated. I don't see workers, employees rushing around going, "This stuff is fabulous. Give us more of it." The sentiment is, "I'm burned out. I've got to manage all these agents all the time. I didn't sign up to be a manager. I don't know whether this stuff is any good. My company is forcing me to use it irrespective of whether I think I should use it." So, the on-the-ground experience of these tools is decidedly mixed. Show Links: Recommended Resources: The Death and Life of Great American Cities Change Management Centrifugal Governor Watt Steam Engine Peter Cappelli Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Who Moved My Cheese? Whitehall Study Deloitte Guest Profile: AshleyGoodall.com LinkedIn Profile Social Profile on Instagram Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like: 597: Donald C. Kieffer - Transforming Work Culture: From Firefighting to Strategic Flow 337: Simon Johnson - Navigating the Waves of Technology and Prosperity Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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

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

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