unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if the tale of Genesis were reframed as a story of humanity’s ascent into awareness of mortality and entropy? How are both connectedness and a “mattering project” key to flourishing as an individual? Rebecca Goldstein is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books, including The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, and The Mind-Body Problem. Greg and Rebecca discuss how the ideas in her new book, The Mattering Instinct, trace back to her novel, The Mind-Body Problem. Rebecca details a long-developed theory of human motivation: beyond survival and pleasure, humans are “creatures of matter who long to matter,” driven to justify themselves in their own eyes (homo justificans). To Rebecca, this is linked to self-reflection, theory of mind, and existential “absurdity.” This episode will outline some mattering strategies and also discuss personality links, ethics, and concerns about AI. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: We are creatures of matter who long to matter 08:21: What we are are creatures of matter who long to matter. I love that we can do that in English. You know, we can't do it; it can't be replicated in other languages. But thank goodness for English, two amazing words: the noun matter and the verb matter. Why everyone needs to feel like they matter 04:23: Look, everybody needs to feel like they matter. Then there's a great diversity of ways in which we might try to prove to ourselves that we matter. The human search for values 15:11: Entering into this world of entropy, where everything eventually runs out of energy and does die, the universe itself will run out of energy and thermal equilibrium that awaits the universe, with that stepping out of paradise. They took on the burden, but the dignity of being human, of trying to justify becoming Homo Justific, becoming creatures who are in search of values that will justify them in their own eyes. We come up with a whole bunch of values, and we disagree tremendously about these values, but there's something so grand about being creatures who need values in order to be able to live with themselves, even if they're bad values, but that we bring values into the universe because we are creatures longing to matter. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Ludwig WittgensteinAristotleBook of GenesisBaruch SpinozaEudaimoniaHappiness EconomicsSigmund FreudEntropySecond Law of ThermodynamicsTheory of MindBlaise Pascal“The unexamined life is not worth living.”DarwinismWilliam James Guest Profile: RebeccaGoldstein.comWikipedia ProfileProfile on the National Endowment for the Humanities Guest Work: Amazon Author PageThe Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides UsIncompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of FictionPlato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go AwayThe Mind-Body ProblemBetraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us ModernityKurt GödelThe Dark SisterMazelProperties Of LightLate Summer Passion of a Woman of MindThe Mattering Map | Substack Newsletter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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