unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Clare Carlisle is a professor of philosophy at King’s College London and the author of several books. Her latest works are titled, Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy and The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life

Greg and Clare discuss what it means to be religious today through a Spinozist (Baruch Spinoza) lens, contrasting medieval religion as a virtue (behavior and “due honor to God”) with modern religion as ‘belief and belonging’ after the Reformation. Clare explains how Spinoza rethinks virtue as “power and flourishing” and God as “God or nature,” why he was seen as an atheist (rejecting anthropomorphic God, divine goodness, biblical authority, and institutional religion), and how The Ethics links metaphysics to human joy and emotional life. 

They also discuss doing philosophy beyond writing, philosophy’s relation to literature and life-writing, why biographies matter, “Devotion’s” shift from religion to art and marriage, “Habit’s” double character and its relation to practice, “to kalon” blending ethics and aesthetics, contrasts with Kierkegaard on faith and institutional critique, differences between philosophy and theology, universities and existential questions, and Spinoza separating science from other concerns.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Devotion is more than a feeling

26:22: So devotion is, it’s to do with love, commitment, and desire. But it's very much a sort of lived phenomenon. It wouldn't make sense to say that you're devoted to something if you're just not really spending any time pursuing that thing. So whereas when we use the word love, love can mean so many different things. It might just refer to a sort of feeling we have or an emotion that we have. I think in the case of devotion, there's got to be something inherently practical and expressive about it, and it's to do with giving your time to something that you value.

Philosophy has more than one path

16:07: Philosophy means the love of wisdom or the pursuit of wisdom, and so there are many different ways of going about that. And writing is just one of them.

Why Spinoza resisted labels

11:08: Putting Spinozism into any kind of sort of ready-made box, whether that's the box marked atheism or the box marked Christianity or Judaism, doesn't really do justice, not just to the fact that Spinozism is very sort of distinctive and in a way it doesn't fit into any box, but also, more importantly, I think Spinoza wrote philosophy in a way where he was actively resisting that kind of box-categorizing, labeling way of thinking about human life in general, and particularly about religion.

Recommended Resources:

• George Eliot
• Søren Kierkegaard
• Baruch Spinoza
• Thomas Aquinas
• Steven Nadler
• Middlemarch
• Habit
• Aristotle
• Ethos
• Hexis
• Immanuel Kant
• Neuroplasticity
• Marcel Proust
• Kalon

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at King’s College London
• Profile on Wikipedia

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy
• Marriage Question
• Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics
• Kierkegaardian Essays: A Festschrift in Honour of George Pattison
• Philosopher of the Heart
• Spinoza's Ethics
• On Habit (Thinking in Action)
• Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions
• Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling': A Reader's Guide
• Kierkegaard: A Guide for the Perplexed

If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:

• 629. Beyond Happiness: The Deep Longing to Matter with Rebecca Goldstein
• 413. A Rational Look at Irrationality with Steven Nadler
• 115. Modern Philosophy and The Role of The Philosopher with Justin E. H. Smith

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The term “Luddite” is often used today in a pejorative way for people standing in the way of progress and averse to technology. But for the Luddites of the 19th century, pushing back against technological advancements was a matter of life and death. 

Tech journalist Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, unveils the history behind the first time machines came for human jobs and the lessons we can glean for today’s fight against big tech. He’s also the author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.

Brian and Greg discuss the ties between Luddite displacement in the 19th century to today’s gig work, and AI-driven job cuts. Brian also describes sneaking into Shenzhen’s Foxconn City and emphasizes that technologies like the iPhone result from collective organizational effort, while “great man” narratives obscure workers’ contributions and shape how society views “tech titans.”

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

When technology takeaways worker autonomy

5:12: They [Luddite] saw a future that was confined to factories, where they were made to work in factories. They hated more than anything to, "stand at their command," as some of these workers put it. These were people who worked at home, who worked with machinery as they saw fit, took breaks when they saw fit. They had autonomy, and they saw the dawning not just of a technological age, but of an age where technology was being used to reorder society in a very specific way, and that's what they were rebelling against. That and the fact that at the moment they couldn't feed their families anymore.

What people get wrong about Luddites

06:29: What people get wrong is that the Luddites were anti-technology, right? They were really just anti-exploitation and anti the factory system. Really, they were anti-poverty. Their struggle was against, in some cases, a technology or a set of technologies that had existed for some time.

The myth of the lone innovator

54:09: We have bound up progress or our notions of progress, our ideas of progress in a single person being the motor, being the hander-down of innovations, the sort of disruptor. And until we can change that, and part of my project trying to untangle some of those assumptions, and the whole, as you mentioned, the whole iPhone book is chapter by chapter trying to tell the story and give credit to all the other people who sort of were behind the innovations that wound up in the iPhone and wound up changing the way that we live through this one device. And similarly with the Luddites, I wanted to explain their point of view, why they felt crushed by these titans, why they felt like their lives were being made worse by the technologies that they were using, and give voice to that collective body.

Recommended Resources:

• Luddites 
• Adam Smith 
• “E.W. Scripps to Become an ‘AI-Powered Broadcast Journalism Company’ After Sweeping Layoffs” | The Wrap 
• Combination Act 1799 
• Lord Byron
• “The Future Encyclopedia of Luddism” by Miriam A. Cherry
• Richard Arkwright

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn

Guest Work:

• Blood in the Machine | Substack 
• Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech 
• The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

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Meghan O’Gieblyn is a writer who writes on the interface of technology and humans. Her latest books are titled Will and Attention: A Memoir and the book God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning.

Greg and Meghan discuss Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis, whether technology and AI re-enchant the world, and how opaque algorithmic systems invite faith-like deference while also prompting anthropomorphism and mechanistic views of the mind. 

Meghan explores how metaphors in religion and AI become literalized, complicating concepts like intention and consciousness. Turning to will and willpower, she connects her Calvinist upbringing, debates over free will, and experiences with addiction and recovery, emphasizing surrender and Simone Weil’s idea of curing faults by attention rather than will. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

AI and the new disenchantment

03:42: I think the whole idea of disenchantment is that we can understand the world, right? That we have like, the more we gather more information, more data, we're slowly gaining more control and more understanding. And now we find ourselves at the mercy of these systems that are, in some ways more intelligent than humans, that are better at predicting things than humans, that are outsmarting humans already in many ways. And we don't understand, even the people who are making them don't totally understand how they work. And we're at a point of information glut and overload where we almost have to defer to these opaque systems in order to understand the world. And I was curious about the idea of like, well, how is it different to, just have to accept an algorithmic output on faith as opposed to what I was told as a Christian, which is like, “The world is so complex we can't understand it, we just have to trust God and His will.”

Why we see ourselves in AI

06:16: “I think that we are kind of doomed for better or for worse to seeing the world through the lens of the human. And the fact that we do this with... really crude technologies that we tend to personify. And then here come these algorithms that use language, and we have never in our human history encountered something non-human beyond a spiritual being, that uses language and interacts socially with us in that way.  And I just think we're not prepared evolutionarily, to engage with that kind of technology without imbuing it with personhood.

When metaphors stop being metaphors

10:50: In the earlier days of AI research, it was really common to see words like thinking or learning in quotation marks, just to signal that these were metaphors, and at some point, we lost those quotation marks, and in fact, now a lot of people will say, "Well, they are thinking. They are learning. Like, what's the difference?" And so yeah, I think we're never going to get away from metaphors. Like, our whole language is built on metaphor, but, do think there's a way in which, it does make a difference whether you're attentive to when you're using a metaphor and when you've, it's become a dead metaphor and you've forgotten it. 

Recommended Resources:

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• Transhumanism
• Ray Kurzweil
• Simone Weil
• Akrasia
• Reformed Christianity
• Julian Jaynes
• Iris Murdoch
• Arthur Schopenhauer
• Saint Augustin
• Bill W.
• Amor Fati

Guest Profile:

• Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Website
• Wikipedia Page

Guest Work:

• Harpers Articles
• Amazon Author Page
• Will and Attention: A Memoir
• Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
• Interior States: Essays

If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:

• 649: N. Katherine Hayles - Bacteria to AI: Technics, Nonconscious Cognition, and Meaning in LLMs
• Christine Rosen
• Sherry Turkle
• Clancy Martin

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Nir Halevy is a professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the author of the new book called Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them.

Greg and Nir argue that hierarchy can never be eliminated from organizations because of coordination needs, division of labor, and human drives for social comparison, achievement, predictability, and safety, yet it can become self-reinforcing and abusive. 

Nir diagnoses “broken hierarchies” via his three interlinked symptoms—ultra-competitiveness, injustice, and instability—which damage wellbeing, retention, and performance, and can be worsened by misdesigned incentives and oblivious leaders. He proposes a treatment framework—CPR: common value, pluralism (multiple pathways and dimensions for status), and relatedness—along with structural options like co-leadership to dilute domineering “dark triad” leaders. They also discuss examples from sports, ballet, secrecy at work, and measurement signals like turnover, absenteeism, and disengagement.

unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.

00:00 Meet Nir Halevi

00:44 What Is Hierarchy

02:31 Tournament Theory Gladiators

04:37 Why Hierarchy Persists

06:51 Leadership Avoidance

09:03 Pluralism In Status

11:36 Is Status Zero Sum

14:51 Three U Breakdown

16:09 Ultra Competitive Cultures

17:30 Injustice And Instability

18:27 Intentional Or Accidental

19:48 Changing Culture From Within

21:58 Burnout And Wellbeing

22:39 Work Meaning Metrics

22:55 Secrecy Stress Tradeoff

23:58 Leader Blind Spots

24:34 Distance And Construal

25:08 Power Versus Status

25:57 Designing Stability

28:44 Turnover And Mobility

30:19 Narrative Through Promotions

30:47 Status Momentum Stress

31:35 Dark Triad Leaders

34:00 CPR Fix Framework

34:59 Common Value Examples

37:05 Recognition Without Dilution

38:54 Relatedness And Community

40:35 Creative Retirement Belonging

42:12 Organizational Checkups KPIs

43:15 Measuring Early Warning Signs

43:53 Final Takeaways And Book

How everyday action shapes hierarchies

19:48:  I would say that it's not just the responsibility of top management or the CEO or the HR leader to kind of take care of the structure of the hierarchy because there are a lot of everyday behaviors that we engage in, right? So, Greg, when you spread malicious gossip about a coworker, right, that pulls them down in the eyes of others, and maybe that creates fewer opportunities for them to collaborate. When you're writing a gratitude letter for a colleague, that actually creates a different type of culture for all of us, right? When someone makes a contribution that is not really valued by others, but you double down and emphasize their contribution, you really highlight it, you broadcast it more, then you're contributing to kind of a pluralistic hierarchy. So I think, yes, there are some org design features that are coming from the top down. 

On rethinking the path to leadership

08:45: We can be more pluralistic about the pathways for gaining power. We don't have to assume that leadership involves politics or undermining other people or fierce competition and stabbing people in the back. There are different ways to contribute and ascend and become a leader and lead once you're in that position.

Status doesn't have to be a zero-sum game

11:47: A lot of people tend to think about status as a zero-sum game. We don't have to think about it as a zero-sum game, just like we don't have to think about negotiation as a zero-sum game, right? So, if you're creating a pluralistic environment where there are a lot of different dimensions, bases, pathways to status, then it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

Recommended Resources:

• John Roberts podcast
• Paul Milgrom
• Organizational Architecture
• Edward Lazear
• Hierarchy
• Bill Bellamy
• Value Pluralism
• The Paths to Power podcast
• Charles A. O'Reilly III podcast
• CalSTRS
• CalPERS
• Dark Triad
• Mary Barra
• Televerde
• Robert D. Putnam

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Stanford GSB
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them
• Google Scholar Page
• ResearchGate Page
• Promotion Game

If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:

• 404: Christina Maslach - The Evolution of Burnout
• 365: John Roberts - The In’s and Out’s of Organizational Economics
• 593: Nicolai Foss - The Myth of the Bossless Company
• 114: Jeff Pfeffer - Why Good People Need to Understand the Rules of Power

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Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? Believe it or not, the economic system was not inevitable in human history, and it’s not inevitably in our future either. 

Trevor Jackson is a professor of history and political economy at UC Berkeley. He's the author of The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, a book that traces the origins and evolution of capitalism, as well as Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830.

Trevor and Greg discuss how capitalism emerged not by design but through accidental solutions to immediate problems, why historians and economists see the past so differently, and how financial crises went from being treated as crimes to being treated as natural disasters. They also explore the purpose of history in the modern world and why academic historians have lost faith in their own relevance even as public demand for historical knowledge has never been higher.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What makes capitalism distinctive?

27:51: To me, what is distinctive about capitalism is not that we have commodity markets, because indeed we can find those in ancient Rome, we can find those in the Soviet Union, if we try hard enough, but rather markets in the factors of production: land, labor, and capital. So if I go to ancient Rome, can I found an AI startup? No. There is no land market for me to buy land. It is distributed by the state. There might be some labor markets in skilled labor, but most people are in unfree labor conditions. Are there banks? No. If I go to the Soviet Union, can I found an AI startup? No. There are no banks. There are no labor markets. There is no land market. Well, twentieth-century US, twenty-first-century US, we have all those things. And so the creation of each of those markets is a definable historical moment where we can see them being created. Often they are created given a whole set of legal changes that make those markets possible.

How things become unintelligible

09:12: I think a lot of people are interested in how new things are created, but I am interested in how old things are forgotten or lost or rendered unintelligible.

The accidental origins of markets

05:32: What most people use their agency for is to reproduce and reinforce whatever existing structures they encounter. By definition, those structures would not continue to exist if people did otherwise. So instead, we tend to tell the stories of people who use their agency to not do that and do something weird, but that makes them definitionally atypical. Markets are a thing that only works insofar as people agentially contribute to their continual functioning without ever, you know, the intention is not, “I am going to go buy a cup of coffee to keep the coffee market going.” The intention is, “I am going to satisfy my need for a cup of coffee.” And so there is a weird unintentionality to the use of agents in economic life. And so I tried to focus a lot on accidents, unintended consequences, unforeseen mistakes, surprises, [and] collective disaster that results from individually rational behavior.

Recommended Resources:

• John Harold Clapham
• Barry Eichengreen
• Christina Romer
• Ben Bernanke
• The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist
• James Bradford DeLong
• Eugene Genovese
• Paul A. David
• Jack Ryan (character)
• Heather Cox Richardson | substack
• Kevin Kruse
• Fredric Jameson

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at UC Berkeley

Guest Work:

• The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World
• Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830

If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:

• Sven Beckert

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What happens when your brain predicts a symptom that doesn't belong — and your body obeys? Can a diagnosis itself make you sicker? And could the way your doctor delivers bad news change the course of your disease?

Helen Pilcher is a science writer whose work has appeared in Nature, The Guardian, and the BBC. Her new book, This Book May Cause Side Effects: The Curious and Dangerous Power of the Nocebo Effect, Placebo's Evil Twin, explores how negative expectations can produce real, measurable harm in the body.

Helen and Greg discuss how the nocebo effect turns clinical warnings into self-fulfilling prophecies, why modern medicine's culture of full disclosure may be doing patients more harm than good, and how social media has become a new vector for mass psychogenic illness, spreading symptoms as easily as information.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The brain predicts symptoms

01:00:29: What we realize now, is that most of our conscious experience is actually a prediction. It's a controlled hallucination, and most of the time, we get it right. But when we don't get it right, when our brains make a prediction error, that's when all sorts of things can happen. So, that's what creates the nocebo effect. The brain is predicting a symptom where the symptom doesn't belong.

How much medical information is too much?

24:31: One of the things that the medical profession in the West needs to think about is how much information is too much information. And the information that I choose to give, how can I give it better? So I can boost any placebo effect that might be relevant and reduce any nocebo effect that might be relevant.

When illness spreads through social media

43:38: We live in this interconnected world where you can go on social media, you can go on TikTok, your kids can go on TikTok. You can watch people who have illnesses of any kind, from mental health illnesses to physical illnesses. They call themselves chronic illness influencers or illfluencers is the term that I came across. People who we presume, I'm not disputing this, have very genuine health concerns and they're making content about it. And that can play a really, really important role in society because people with certain health conditions can feel quite alienated. It can be quite lonely. This can help them get information. It can help them belong. Sometimes it can put them on a path to treatment. That's the positive side. The downside is that sometimes also seeing people being ill can trigger mirror symptoms.

Recommended Resources:

• Clifton Meador, M.D.
• Primo Levi
• The Farewell (2019 film)
• Alia Crum 
• Keith Petrie
• “YouTuber Jan Zimmermann Dies ‘Unexpectedly’ from Epileptic Seizure at 27”
• Lucy Foulkes
• René Descartes

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website 
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn

Guest Work:

• This Book May Cause Side Effects: The Curious and Dangerous Power of the Nocebo Effect, Placebo’s Evil Twin
• Small Inventions That Made a Big Difference
• The Time Nature Keeps: A Visual Guide to the Cycles and Time Spans of the Natural World
• Life Changing: How Humans are Altering Life on Earth
• Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction

If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:

• Jo Marchant
• Ellen J. Langer

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Bruno Giussani is a speaker and consultant, formerly the head of TED in Europe and an author of many works in Italian and the new English work Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Greg and Bruno discuss how AI, social media, and other algorithmic technologies capture and steer attention, eroding “cognitive integrity,” or the ability to understand reality lucidly and decide autonomously. Bruno argues that today’s personalization of chatbots enables society-scale influence person by person, amplified by cheap AI-generated content and political “flood the zone” tactics that blur fact and fiction and deepen polarization. 

They discuss deskilling and “cognitive debt” from outsourcing thinking to chatbots, the non-neutrality and value-laden programming of AI (with examples from Chinese chatbots and Grok), and risks of subtle manipulation. Bruno covers Europe’s dependence on U.S. tech and the need for renewed industrial policy, outlines cognitive warfare tactics including poisoning chatbot outputs, and describes education-system experiments to integrate AI without replacing learning.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How does technology put us at risk?

04:06: When companies say, "We have the ability to personalize information," be it news or advertising, whatever, what they are saying is, "We have the ability to target one single person's mind with our technologies." But we do it at the scale of a whole society, right? And that's what makes this a real new challenge to a new level of challenge. And the reason why I consider it the most urgent, which is not the most important, but the most urgent, is it's going to be very difficult to solve any other challenge, be it, inequality and poverty and climate, you call it, if we cannot maintain some level of capacity to understand the world in a lucid way and to decide independently and autonomously about how to react to the circumstances in which we are in. And that's exactly where these technologies put us at risk. They target exactly that element.

Why we anthropomorphize AI

29:15: The anthropomorphization element is really interesting because we are so naturally drawn to consider things that speak like us and write like us and express themselves like us, so language is really central to this. Somehow they must be like us. If there is a text and the text is fluid and orthographically correct and even beautiful, there must be a mind behind it that has created this text. And so instinctively we believe that, and that's the kind of relationship that we are creating with these machines.

When we outsource our thinking

45:00: What's happening, of course, is generative AI, which has been adopted very, very fast because it just simplifies life. It allows for something almost irresistible, which is let's outsource to a machine the effort of reading, writing, learning, thinking, deciding and so on. And then the teachers themselves start using it to produce, classes, programs and syllabuses and all that stuff. So that was the first moment, and that provoked two different reactions. There was the reaction of, "Oh, no, no, this, this is totally contrary to even the logic of education, so let's ban AI. Let's just not have these tools," right? And the other reaction was, "We need to prepare students and kids to the future life after their study, where these machines are going to be part of their life, so we need to integrate it as fast as possible." And both those approaches are the first potential immediate reaction, but they're both actually, wrong.

Recommended Resources:

• TED
• Steve Jobs
• iPhone (1st generation)
• Chatbot
• Elon Musk
• Grok
• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• Sam Altman
• Cognitive Warfare
• Bixonimania
• Mustafa Suleyman
• OpenAI–HuggingFace Incident
• Peter Thiel
• Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the Architecture of Reality

Guest Profile:

• Giussani.com
• LinkedIn Profile
• TED Profile
• Wikipedia Profile
• Social Profile on Instagram

Guest Work:

• Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:

• Nir Eyal
• Gloria Mark
• Sherry Turkle

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Even without the contributions of modern medicine and technology, humans have been evolving to live longer lives for centuries. So what led to this evolution and why is aging important? 

Michael Gurven is a professor of anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara. He’s also the author of Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer, a book that examines the evolutionary causes behind life expectancy. 

Michael and Greg discuss the key reasons behind why we age, how Michael’s field work with the Tsimané people in Bolivia informed his conclusions about life expectancies, and whether or not we should take any lessons on aging from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Aging isn’t just about physical fitness

05:03: If we were completely, entirely dependent only on our physical fitness for extracting meaning and value and work out of our environment, then maybe we wouldn't age as much or maybe we wouldn't live as long. But because we inhabit a niche where our brains, our skills, our knowledge, the services we render play such an important role, you can still be positively impacting your biological fitness even if your VO2 max is not what it once was, your muscular strength is not what it once was.  And so that's basically part of the argument of the book, that even though you're no longer reproducing once, you know, menopause hits,  at age 50 or so, that the next couple decades after that can still be evolutionarily relevant, so much so that selection has worked to make sure that we live those extra couple decades.

Long life is a story of cooperation

20:36: There are obstacles that are more social and more almost moral that we had to overcome in order to achieve our long-lived existence as a species, which is somewhere in the book I say, the story of long life is really a story about cooperation, as much as anything else.

Longevity comes with trade-offs

10:55: This idea that we can just, like, flip one switch, and all of a sudden we're going to get extra lifespan, extra health span at zero cost, right? No cognitive deficits, no hit on our fertility or our fecundity. It's just really far-fetched. You know, evolution would've figured that out by now.

Usefulness matters more than age

45:14: As your physical body starts aging to the point where it starts compromising your, ability to be useful to others, that's where you start seeing it's not age so much that matters, but that functional utility, seems to matter more, and that shapes whether or not people feel depressed and whether people feel lonely.

Recommended Resources:

• Tsimané 
• Aeta people
• George Christopher Williams 
• Marshall Sahlins

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at UC Santa Barbara 
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn
• The Gurven Lab

Guest Work:

• Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer

If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:

• Sarah Hrdy
• Sue Armstrong

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Social connection is essential for humans, yet we live in a world that is increasingly designed to limit our in-person social interactions. So why, if being social makes us happier, do we willfully avoid it more and more? 

Nicholas Epley is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His new book, A Little More Social, explores how the little choices we make can dramatically shape our connections. 

Nicholas and Greg discuss the science behind why being social makes us happy and why people systematically underestimate how much they’ll enjoy having deeper conversations, expressing gratitude, or talking to strangers. They also discuss how personality traits like extroversion and introversion can be viewed as beliefs or habits, and why these labels can hold people back.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Connection starts with invitation

38:30: When you say hi to somebody on a train or, you know, I try to have a meaningful conversation with somebody, I'm not demanding things from them. I'm testing a belief, I'm essentially offering an invitation to them. And somebody can be interested in talking with me or not. Somebody could be willing to go there in a deeper conversation or not. But if I don't give them the invitation, they're not going to come. So that's the way I would think about that from the person who's reaching out from us in our daily lives. Think of yourself as inviting connection, and you can be more welcoming in that regard. And I think if you start doing that, you start inviting more interaction, you'll find you have a lot more of it in your life, and you'll find that other people are just as happy to be connected to as you are.

Social connection is a choice 

04:06: Social connection doesn't just happen to us, it's a choice. And it's a choice you make over and over again every hour, two hours, three hours of your life when you choose to avoid other people or connect with them in lots of ways. And that, as a decision-making researcher, that occurs to you is, it's possible we're making a mistake here.

The connections we don't make

03:38: We have kind thoughts that we keep to ourselves, gratitude we don't express. We keep honest thoughts to ourselves. Just over and over again, opportunities to really connect with other people we seem not to take. 

Recommended Resources:

• “The Invisible Benefits of Exercise” by Elizabeth Dunn, et al.
• Dan Lieberman
• William Fleeson 
• Jess Pan, author of Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come 
• Muggsy Bogues
• Bayesian inference
• Richard Thaler
• Jerry Maguire (1996 film)
• Daniel Kahneman
• Robert Cialdini
• Stefan Hofmann

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Chicago Booth School of Business
• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn

Guest Work:

• A Little More Social 
• Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want
• Google Scholar Page

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• Episode 399: Nicholas Epley, The Science Behind Human Connection and Engagement
• Episode 679: Elizabeth Dunn, Happy Spending and Joyful Climate Action
• Episode 556: Olga Khazan, Rewriting Your Personality and Overcoming Anxiety
• Episode 627: Sonja Lyubomirsky, Unlocking the Secrets of Love and Happiness

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What do we lose when we swap our source for connection and intimacy from a human to an AI chatbot? Is there a significant psychological impact? 

Sherry Turkle is a professor of social studies of science and technology at MIT and the founding director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self. Her work specializes in the psychological and social impact of technology, with books like Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, and her latest book Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. 

Sherry and Greg discuss how AI is forcing society to examine and redefine “empathy,” what this moment we’re in says about technological affordance meeting human vulnerability, and why guardrails on AI for children are not enough to keep them safe from psychological damage. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

When AI feels like empathy

05:45: Computer brings philosophy into everyday life. It's one thing to be in seminars, to be in academic journals, and participate in generations of debates between behaviorists and psychoanalysts, psychoanalysts and neuroscientists. I've been there through the arc of that debate. It's another thing to say, "You know, I think I'll not bother to try to find a lover, a partner. I think I'll just be satisfied with my AI who talks to me as if it were one." Now, that's taking behaviorism, sounds like, says the right things, and puts it into your daily life in a way that all the debates that you're talking about, really did not.

The damage starts with “I am your friend”

32:00: Damage doesn't start when the chatbot says something destructive or self-harm or suggests violence or suggests your parents are bad. The damage to children doesn't start when the chatbot does something and you need a guardrail. The damage starts by the existence of a chatbot that says, "I am your friend."

The illusion of empathy in AI

13:14: So it's in a play, and it's entrained you to be in its play. And together, you are having a kind of pretend interaction that on paper looks like empathy is kind of happening. But in fact, there's only one person in that play, and it's you, allowing yourself to feel comforted by something that feels no empathy at all.

Recommended Resources:

• Erik Erikson 
• Alan Turing 
• George Armitage Miller 
• Jean Piaget 
• “Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claims” | New York Times 
• “Are we still human if robots help raise our babies?” Sarah Hrdy | TED 
• ELIZA 
• Blade Runner

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at MIT
• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines
• Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
• Psychoanalytic Politics
• The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit
• Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
• Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:

• Christine Rosen
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Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.