Podcast
unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc
Hosted by Greg La Blanc · EN
unSILOed is a series of interdisciplinary conversations that inspire new ways of thinking about our world. Our goal is to build a community of lifelong learners addicted to curiosity and the pursuit of insight about themselves and the world around them.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
41episodes
Episodes
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652. Silent Legacies: How Enlightenment Philosophers Faced Mortality with Joanna Stalnaker
3w ago00:52:28Tap to summarizeJoanna Stalnaker is a professor of French at Columbia University and also the author of the books The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death and The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. Greg and Joanna discuss how Enlightenment figures faced death amid disbelief or tempered religious belief. Joanna says scholars have emphasized 18th-century death rituals more than philosophers’ personal end-of-life writings, and she links her interest to growing up with atheist philosopher parents to her earlier work on Enlightenment description, and Rousseau’s late writings. Their conversation covers models like Socrates and Montaigne’s, public scrutiny of deaths, last rites, and burial, and tensions between posterity and accepting oblivion. They discuss Hume’s death and ambivalence about his reception, Diderot’s Seneca-inspired reflections and critique of Rousseau’s self-presentation, Voltaire’s editing of Meslier and correspondence with Madame du Deffand, Buffon’s gradual “ossification” view of dying, salons and letters’ role in Enlightenment networks and women’s participation, posthumous publication, and the value of literary form for understanding embodied philosophy and equanimity toward death. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: On publishing a book against transhumanism 07:19: I published the book [The Rest Is Silence] that, in a certain sense, it's kind of a book against transhumanism or all these attempts to sort of survive, whether it be through technology or whether it be through spreading one's genetic material by having as many babies as possible. There's this—I see, in our current moment, a kind of denial of death through those various phenomena. Sorates is a model of enlightened death 04:53: Socrates is a model in terms of how to die, what one might call an enlightened death; how to die a philosophical death; and how to face death in a courageous manner, in keeping with one's philosophy. And that was a preoccupation for both David Hume and Voltaire. They were very aware that the public was watching their deaths and that there was great interest in how they would die and whether they would recant their beliefs on their deathbeds. They were thinking back to this model of Socrates, I believe. Can you separate philosophy from the way it is written? 39:04: One of the things that I want to insist on in my work is the fact that we need to take literary form and genre and style into account because it's very difficult. The philosophical ideas cannot be extracted from their form, and I, in this particular book [The Rest Is Silence], was interested in the question of embodiment because my book is really about them attempting, acknowledging their coming deaths but acknowledging that they lived as bodies, as mortal bodies, and attempting to find a way to express that in writing. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Stoicism Epicureanism Michel de Montaigne Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers by Carl L. Becker Denis Diderot David Hume Madame du Deffand Voltaire Boredom Adam Smith Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Columbia University Profile for the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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651. Redefining Revolutions: From Ancient Cycles to Modern Movements with Dan Edelstein
3w ago00:53:25Tap to summarizeDan Edelstein is a professor of French, history, and political science at Stanford University. He’s also the author of several books on revolution and the Enlightenment, including The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin, Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality, Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, and The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Greg and Dan discuss the changing meaning of “revolution” as an idea rather than a catalog of revolts. Dan explains how Greeks distinguished violent upheaval (stasis) from regime change, how “revolution” entered political vocabulary via Polybius’s rediscovered Book VI, and how fears of cyclical instability shaped mixed-constitution thinking from antiquity to the American founders. They contrast pre-1789 “revolution” as restoration (including England’s Glorious Revolution) with the French Revolution’s progress-driven, consensus-seeking model that produces counterrevolution, factional purges, and a “Red Leviathan.” The discussion covers Enlightenment cultural uses of “revolution,” the ancients-vs-moderns debate and historical progress, differences between Anglo-American common-law rights and French state-centered reform, the tainted term in 1989, revolutionary “playbooks,” and how literary training and novels illuminate revolutionary psychology. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: From preserving order to accelerating history 12:42: Once this new-fangled idea of historical progress starts to get going in France in the 18th century, suddenly you can have a totally different vision of yourself. You're not just trying to prevent change and maintain the existing situation as long as you can. Suddenly, you might become an accelerator—you might become—and this is when the word "revolutionary" emerges in France, in 1789—you want to be on the right side of history. You want to be, you know, in favor of progress. And so I think that this new idea, both about history and about the role of revolutions in this sort of progressive vision of history, it really has huge effects on how people think about themselves, how they act, and ultimately how these historical revolutions from 1789 onward play out. Why ancient thinkers designed politics to prevent revolution 06:52: For people, even before Polybius, people like Plato and Aristotle, this did become the question of political thought. Like, how do you prevent a state from being ripped apart by division and just leading to this kind of destruction and death that accompanies revolutions? And this is where we get the idea of a well-balanced constitution. Protection vs. power 39:02: The English and the Americans, you know, there's just this deep skepticism towards the government. You want to really protect the individual from governmental encroachment. The French are almost coming to the revolution wanting to empower the government for good, like it's going to solve all our problems. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Age of Enlightenment Revolution Polybius Niccolò Machiavelli Voltaire Montesquieu John Adams Anacyclosis Vladimir Lenin Velvet Revolution Marquis de Condorcet Anne Robert Jacques Turgot Barebone's Parliament Millenarianism J. G. A. Pocock Norman Cohn Stefanos Geroulanos Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Stanford Profile at the Hoover Institution Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin On the Spirit of Rights Networks of Enlightenment: Digital Approaches to the Republic of Letters Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions The Enlightenment: A Genealogy The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much Yale French Studies, Number 111: Myth and Modernity Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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650. How ‘Nudge’ Policies Shifted the Blame From Systems to Individuals with Nick Chater
4w ago00:56:00Tap to summarizeHow much is on us, as individuals, to fix the world’s great problems? Do initiatives like encouraging homeowners to switch to green energy really move the needle in the battle against climate change? After decades of these types of strategies, it turns out that needle hasn’t moved much. Nick Chater is a professor of behavioral science at Warwick Business School and author. His latest book, co-authored with George Loewenstein, is It's on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems. Nick and Greg discuss individual frameworks vs. systemic frameworks employed to solve large social problems, why misunderstanding multiple casualties can hinder solutions, and how behavioral insights should be used to design and build support for systemic policies (e.g., carbon taxes, congestion charges) rather than marginal tweaks. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The two ways of seeing dilemma 05:07: I think our natural instinct, and this is sort of a basic fact of human psychology, is that we see things either as individual-level problems or as societal-level problems. So it's just a general point that we can't really see things in two ways at once. For example, if we take something like the increasing levels of obesity in the U.S. and the U.K., lots of countries around the world, it's very difficult for us to quite manage the psychology of thinking. Oh, at an individual level, say for me or my family, the interventions that might be appropriate are individual-level things. So I might think, oh, I want to just eat slightly different foods and slightly different amounts of them and exercise a bit more, and so on. And if I'm thinking about it like that, it's very hard to simultaneously think, oh, hang on. But that individual-level story can't really explain why obesity has risen so substantially over the last few decades. On weaponizing personal responsibility 29:27: If you want to stop your voters and the general public from worrying about these s-frame systemic rule-change things, a really good idea is to focus them on the i-frame. Say, well, wow, this problem is a problem, and it's a problem for individuals. So we need to individually worry about it. And once you're worrying about it individually, then suddenly you've forgotten about the s-frame. You suddenly think, "Oh, I might. I should reduce my carbon, and so should everybody else." In fact, now I can start to blame myself. I can blame my neighbors. Why marginal tweaks won't fix broken systems 17:51: I've had the experience many times of sitting brainstorming with teams of people where our objective is to think of something to solve, you know, let's improve, let's make accident care, an emergency or ER, I guess, in the US, how to make that, you know, safer and work better. Or how are we going to, are we going to, you know, get people to take more exercise, or whatever the issue is. And we're supposed to be brainstorming these sorts of little nuggets, these little changes, which we are going to hope to roll out. And it just always felt like just a really, you know, the solutions one came up felt incredibly feeble in relation to the scale of the problem. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Nick Chater | unSILOed Nudge Unit Regulation for Conservatives: Behavioral Economics and the Case for “Asymmetric Paternalism" David Laibson George Stigler Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Warwick Business School Professional Profile on LinkedIn Dectech company website Guest Work: It's on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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649. Bacteria to AI: Technics, Nonconscious Cognition, and Meaning in LLMs with N. Katherine Hayles
4w ago01:00:11Tap to summarizeN. Katherine Hayles is a professor of English at UCLA and Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is also the author of a number of books on consciousness and AI. Her latest book is titled Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts. Greg and Katherine discuss technics - recursive feedback loops in which humans and tools co-evolve. Katherine argues that cognitive technologies and AI intensify this process, so we design them while they also design us. She distinguishes cognition from consciousness, emphasizing fast nonconscious neuronal processing and defining cognition as interpreting information in context with meaning, operationalized by SIRAL (sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, learning). Katherine claims plants and bacteria meet these criteria, while physical processes are agents without choices; cognitive systems are actors that select and adapt. She applies this to computation, treating deterministic mechanisms as noncognitive but viewing modern systems and LLMs as cognitive, discussing aboutness via biosemiotics and LLMs’ “conceptual environment.” *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Are humans and AI evolving toward each other? 07:29: So we can chart the evolution of humans and cognitive computational media in just this fashion. So humans start by being immersed in their environment. They could not survive otherwise. And then humans evolve up to abstraction. Computers start with abstraction, and now, with sensors and actuators and networking, they evolve toward immersion. So humans start with purpose. Their purpose is to survive. That's true of all biological organisms. And then they evolve up to design. Computers start with design. But now, with AI, they seem to be evolving toward purpose, which is the same as biological purpose, to survive. Consciousness is based on selfhood and self-narration 10:27: Consciousness is based on selfhood and self-narration. The stories we all tell ourselves every moment of every day about who we are and what we're doing, and that consciousness frequently lies. We know that eyewitness reports, for example, are often very untrustworthy because people just perceive what consciousness wants them to perceive. And often that is not accurate. One of the primary purposes of consciousness is to make the world make sense. When highly unusual phenomena happen, consciousness just edits it out. AI can now see humans from the outside 37:23: So we're using our projective capabilities to imaginatively construct an umwelt and then seeing what that would mean for our existence, our sense of meaning or whatever. But we're always doing that from the outside. We're never inside anything but the human umwelt. Now we have a technology in large language models that is capable of seeing the human umwelt from the outside and telling us about it. That has never happened before. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Bernard Stiegler Inclusive fitness Chiasmus Consciousness Daniel Dennett John Searle Stochastic parrot Biosemiotics Umwelt Symbiosis Context window LLM Terrence Deacon Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at UCLA Faculty Profile at Duke Wikipedia Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts Electronic Lite...
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648. Civilization’s Imbalance and Restoring the Humanities: The Divided Brain with Iain McGilchrist
May 501:08:51Tap to summarizeIain McGilchrist is a former fellow at Oxford University and the author of a few books, including Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, and The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Greg and Iain discuss Iain’s work on hemispheric differences in the brain, especially in The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. Iain argues the left and right hemispheres embody distinct modes of attention—narrow, acquisitive focus versus broad, open vigilance—and that how we attend changes what we perceive. He rejects pop-psychology stereotypes and contends the right hemisphere “sees more” and should guide the left, which is useful but prone to delusion when dominant. Iain traces three Western cycles where early cultural flourishing gives way to left-hemisphere domination and civilizational decline, linking this to bureaucracy, organizational “exploit” drift, and modern metrics-driven thinking. They also discuss metaphor’s centrality to science, AI’s limits, mental-health decline, internet-driven polarization, and reforms to universities to revive the humanities alongside science. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Imagination needs a maintenance of open attention 17:57: See, imagination is misunderstood. It's not about brainstorming and writing down every silly thing that comes into your head. Imagination is about seeing something below the level that is immediately accessible to the conscious mind and listening to that and responding to it, and pursuing it, and allowing something to grow. Now, that requires patience, time, and a continuing maintenance of open attention. Once it gets closed down, you've lost it. So that's one reason that it won't work. And the other is that if you've got too many people involved in the bureaucratic side, that's not going to work well either. There are specializations, and take the hint from nature. They are so different that they do need to be kept distinct if you're going to survive. Your attention shapes your reality 40:05: It is certainly true that there is a constant dialogue between our minds and the world. The world influences the mind and the brain, and the mind and the brain, having been influenced, in turn influence the world around us. So we can get locked into a vicious cycle in which we see things in a certain limited way, and we think that's all that there is. And so that feeds back to that being the only right way to think. Science is based on nothing but metaphors 30:32: Science is based on nothing but metaphors. It is entirely metaphorical. And that's not a mistake or a problem, because it can't avoid—I mean—the alternative would be to say nothing. But it has to say it's like this. And metaphor is saying this thing can be understood by likening it to something else. And the problem is that scientists don't realize that they're using metaphors and that their metaphors both dictate what it is they can see and how they see what it is that they do see. So, models, which science can't work without, are simply elaborated metaphors. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Postmodernism Exploration–exploitation dilemma Lateralization of brain function Dunning–Kruger effect Antonio Damasio G. K. Chesterton Daniel Kahneman Logos Mythos V. S. Ramachandran Theory of mind Friedrich Nietzsche Heraclitus Renaissance Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at All Souls College | University of Oxford LinkedIn Profile Professional Website Wikipedia Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World TED Talk: The Divided Brain Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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647. What’s Missing From the Modern Education System with Susan Wise Bauer
May 100:50:49Tap to summarizeSusan 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 education Mortimer J. Adler Spontaneous generation Wishbone (TV series) Miasma theory Guest Profile: Professional Website Profile on Instagram 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.
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646. The Economics of Life & Being Human with Pablo A. Peña
Apr 2900:57:45Tap to summarizeHow 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 Kuznets Adam Smith Sam Walton Thomas Robert Malthus Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at University of Chicago Professional Website Professional Profile on LinkedIn 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.
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645. Making Money Work: Banks, Capital Theory, and the Fed’s Blind Spot with Steve H. Hanke
Apr 2701:11:36Tap to summarizeSteve 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: Macroeconomics Quantity theory of money Capital (economics) Federal Reserve Friedrich Hayek John Maynard Keynes Leland B. Yeager John Hicks Mark Skousen Irving Fisher Federal funds rate Milton Friedman Paul Volcker Jonas Herby Google Scholar Page Spanish flu Kenneth Boulding Currency board Geoeconomics Jay Bhattacharya - Lockdowns and Lessons: The Pandemic Retrospective | UnSILOed Ep 427 Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Profile Profile for the Mises Institute Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System Capital, Interest, and Waiting: Controversies, Puzzles, and New Additions to Capital Theory Russian Currency and Finance: A Currency Board Approach to Reform Currency Boards for Developing Countries: A Handbook Monetary reform for a free Estonia: A currency board solution Fortune Articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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644. Reclaiming Joy from Screens and Ultra-Processed Foods with Michaeleen Doucleff
Apr 2400:58:41Tap to summarizeWhat 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 Schüll B. J. Fogg What You Have in Common With a Pigeon and Why It’s Causing Problems for You by Michaeleen Doucleff | New York Times https://michaeleendoucleff.com/dopamine-kids-resources/ Guest Profile: Professional Website Correspondent Profile for NPR 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 Foods Hunt, 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.
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643. In a Good Place: How Built Environments Shape Agency, Wellbeing, and Behavior with Leidy Klotz
Apr 2200:54:16Tap to summarizeHow 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 Psychology Method of Loci Ellen Langer IKEA Effect Habitat for Humanity Broken Windows Theory Eudaimonia Dacher Keltner UnSILOed #140: Leidy Klotz - The Art of Subtraction Guest Profile: LeidyKlotz.com Faculty Profile at the University of Virginia LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Page Guest Work: Amazon Author Page In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less Sustainability through Soccer: An Unexpected Approach to Saving Our World Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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