unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

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

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

• 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
• Coco Krumme

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Huggy Rao is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and Henrich Greve is the Rudolf and Valeria Maag Chaired Professor in Entrepreneurship at INSEAD. They are also co-authors of the new book Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk.

Greg, Henrich, and Huggy discuss their new book and the language of online conspiracy talk. They describe entering the topic via research on managerial talk, the 1857 Indian mutiny rumor, and pandemic effects on collective action, then the COVID-era “distributed doubt.” 

Huggy and Henrich define conspiracy theories as elaborate, non-falsifiable narratives where lack of evidence is treated as proof, including “gateway” claims like COVID false positives. Rather than pathologizing believers, they analyze online talk as a social coordination mechanism and cultural toolkit involving bricolage, which is recombining semantically proximate words and narratives, within crowded “rabbit holes.” They propose that platforms shape but don’t determine discourse. For managers, they recommend early rumor monitoring, “prebuttals,” and credibility-preserving communication, noting shrinking executive authority and the risks of manufacturing threat for innovation.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why should leaders always get ahead of conspiracy theories?

40:18 [Henrich R. Greve]: I think an important thing about leaders and organizations is that, I mean, they have the advantage that often the conspiracy theories are initiated by things that they did, all right? Because in society, events just happen, and so conspiracy theories just burst out of the blue. In firms, there is some sort of leadership initiative, and conspiracy theories can be traced back to it. And so, knowing this, there are certain conversations that have to happen before the initiative, during the initiative, just to make sure that there is understanding spread about why is this happening. So, that's the inoculation phase. And actually, it's a privilege of management that they should know that conspiracy can happen whenever something big and unexplained is announced.

Conspiracy theories can create communities

11:22 [Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao]: Conspiracy theories are coordination mechanisms for people to engage in the digital commons, so to speak. You don't have pubs and taverns, but you have microblogs and the like, and that's kind of what people do. They use it as a coordination device to create groups and so on and so forth. But the thing that struck us, and we use this imagery, is they're not exactly paranoid.

Great leaders awaken pride, not paranoia

44:54 [Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao]: The real job of leaders, and perhaps I'm oversimplifying grossly, is you actually want to make your employees feel capable. If you want to make them feel capable, peddling conspiracy theories is perhaps not the best kind of first step to start with. Instead, what you want them to do is, how can you have an impact? What is it you can do? Those kinds of things become important. And what all of that leads to is actually awakening pride. But before you awaken pride, you have to show that you care for it.

• Spanish Flu
• Conspiracy Theory
• Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
• Cognitive Dissonance
• Consistency
• Ann Swidler
• Bricolage
• Levi Strauss  
• Pizzagate Conspiracy Theory
• McCarthyism
• The Functions of the Executive
• Matthew Ridgway

Guest Profile:

• Hayagreeva Rao | Faculty Profile at Stanford Business School
• Hayagreeva Rao | LinkedIn Profile
• HuggyRao.com
• Henrich R. Greve | INSEAD Profile
• Henrich R. Greve | LinkedIn Profile
• HenrichGreve.com

Guest Work:

• Hayagreeva Rao | Amazon Author Page
• Henrich R. Greve | Amazon Author Page
• Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk
• Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less
• The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder
• Network Advantage: How to Unlock Value From Your Alliances and Partnerships
• Organizational Learning from Performance Feedback: A Behavioral Perspective on Multiple Goals: A Multiple Goals Perspective
• Organizational Learning from Performance Feedback: A Behavioral Perspective on Innovation and Change

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

• 366: Robert Sutton - Dissecting Workplace Friction: A Deep Dive
• 200: Robert Cialdini - The Golden Age of Persuasion

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Helen Zoe Veit is a professor of history at Michigan State University and also an author and editor. Her latest books are titled Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History and Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century.

Greg and Helen discuss changes in American eating habits during the 20th century. Helen explains that food history became a viable academic field largely in the last 25 years, and describes early-20th-century shifts toward government regulation, nutrition science, calories, home economics, and factory food, which encouraged Americans to distrust appetite and pleasure while fueling diet culture and moralized views of weight.

Their conversation traces how children’s “natural” pickiness was culturally constructed through things like Clara Davis’s studies, rising processed foods and instant alternatives, advice from Dr. Spock, and marketing power via supermarkets and the media. They discuss diluted “foreign” foods, faddists like Fletcher, the decline of Home Ec classes, and how history could inform a more balanced, pleasurable relationship to food.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

When did picky eating become a “thing”?

14:56: You know, another thing I thought about a lot was that there are all sorts of things our kids are initially reluctant or fearful about today. My kids didn't want to put on pants for a while. They didn't want to wear snow boots in the snow. They didn't want to go to school or brush their teeth or put on sunblock or wear seat belts or car seats. But I just had this enormous cultural confidence. Of course they can get used to it because I see everybody else doing it, and I didn't hesitate to just, you know, insist that they do it in a way that the structure of daily life used to just insist children eat this kind of food, and they were getting used to it in such large numbers and so quickly that people didn't see it as a thing. So that really became the book. Like, how did we start to see this as a thing and to think it had this really unique psychological significance? And, you know, the answers are really complicated. And a lot of it happened in the 20th century.

Why is our relationship with food so complicated?

34:20: Americans have a very uneasy relationship to pleasure of food, as like we're really hedonistic in a lot of ways. We consume a lot of junk food, this high-calorie, high-sugar delicious food, and we're like, ‘You can't tell me not to eat this.’ It's a big part of American culture, but it's not deeply pleasurable in some ways, right? The pleasure of eating with other people, the pleasure of feeling good about what we've eaten, and how it affects our bodies. We often have pleasure in a very narrow way today.

How supermarkets changed what kids eat

25:12: Grocers as, you know, and general stores which preceded them, these were adult interactions. This was more or less designed to be one adult talking to another, with a list in hand. Kids were particularly invited into this conversation. But by the time modern grocery stores, which start really in the '20s, maybe 30s, start popping up in American towns and cities, and by the '50s we get supermarkets, really much larger stores with the big carts. That's a totally different model. Self-service leads immediately to just an explosion of impulse buying. In fact, the term was coined in the 1940s to describe what was going on in supermarkets, and it also led to an explosion of children's power over family food purchases in a way they hadn't before. Marketers keenly are aware of this.

Recommended Resources:

• Fernand Braudel
• Jacques Pépin
• Sidney Mintz
• Annales School
• Clara M. Davis and the wisdom of letting children choose their own diets
• Neophobia
• Benjamin Spock
• Sigmund Freud
• Horace Fletcher
• John Harvey Kellogg
• Euthenics
• Darwinism
• Home Economics

Guest Profile:

• Personal Website
• Faculty Profile at Michigan State University

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History
• Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century
• Food in the Civil War Era: The South
• Food in the Civil War Era: The North
• Food in the American Gilded Age

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

• 236: James Hamblin - Cleanliness, Purity, Health and Culture
• 454: Paula S. Fass - American Childhood From the Frontier to Helicopter Parenting

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Is it true that divorced moms actually do less housework than married moms? Is there an optimal time for women to pause their careers to start a family? How can you tell by the third date whether or not your relationship is a good deal? 

Dr. Corinne Low is a professor of public policy and economics at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, provides a roadmap for optimizing your resources and maximizing your satisfaction in life, whether it be with your career or your family. 

Corinne and Greg discuss the problems modern women face in the workplace and at home, the economic tools women can apply to make the most out of what they’ve got, and the importance of strategically picking a romantic partner. They also unpack the million dollar question with profound social implications: Why are women still expected to do the majority of the housework? 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Women can earn more and still do more housework

28:00: In my data, I will see couples, and we focused on couples who are hourly workers 'cause otherwise people would say, "Well, men just have jobs that are more inflexible, and women have these more flexible jobs, so that's why women end up doing more of the housework." But if we zoom in on couples where they're both hourly workers, and I could go to a couple where she is earning four times what he earns per hour, okay? And she does more than twice as much housework, and he works more hours than she does, and she works fewer hours. So that couple, if he would take on some of the domestic load and she could, in the modal couple here, she's like a healthcare worker, so if she could pick up a shift as a nurse, the couple would be richer. It would loosen their economic constraints. What is stopping them? And yes, I have to think it's these deeply ingrained gender norms about what roles do we learn in our natal households? How do we feel like we're contributing?

Optimize for the life you actually want

03:57: We're all facing scarcity. But if you figure out what your utility function is and you figure out what constraints you're facing, you can solve for a life that meets your needs, fulfills you, enriches you, and provides you all sorts of amazing opportunities. But that does sometimes mean being selective and not trying to go for the maximum of everything everywhere all at once.

Is there a perfect time to have a child?

41:30: Having a child is such an important life decision and is going to be, ultimately, such a larger source of utility than your career for people who do choose to become parents, that you should do that when works for your family, right? I think you should be strategic about all the infrastructure you build around when you do that, but I don't think that you should try to be perfectly strategic about when you do it.

Recommended Resources:

• Daniel Kahneman 
• Richard Thaler 
• Cass Sunstein 
• Claudia Goldin
• Leave It to Beaver 
• “Degrees are Forever: Marriage, Educational Investment, and Lifecycle Labor Decisions of Men and Women” by Mary Ann Bronson 
• “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions” by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz
• Lena Edlund 

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Pennsylvania 
• Professional Website
• Profile on LinkedIn
• Profile on Instagram

Guest Work:

• Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours 

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

• Understanding the Gender Wage Gap feat. Claudia Goldin
• Balancing Personal Life and Career Decision Making with Myra Strober and Abby Davisson

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J. Doyne Farmer is a Professor of Complex Systems Science at Oxford University, Hedge-Fund Founder, and author of the new book, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World. 

Greg and Doyne discuss why complexity science has not displaced mainstream economics. Doyne argues that economics is intellectually conservative and overly committed to closed-form math, with behavioral challenges and the 2008 crisis highlighting endogenous dynamics. He also recounts working to beat roulette using physics, his work on chaos (sensitive dependence, strange attractors), and using simulation as a core complex-systems method. 

When they shift to the topic of finance, he describes “market ecology,” specialists with noisy skill, and why even uninformed trades have market impact. Doyne notes bounded rationality’s rise with modern computing and data, critiques systemic regulation, and describes industry-leading simulation work, including COVID UK economic-policy modeling and energy-transition/climate models that emphasize data-driven forecasts and policy nudges.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Randomness is a subjective concept

08:50: As graduate students, Norman Packard and I and about 15 or 20 others, decided to predict the game of roulette, and we thought we were going to get rich by beating the game of roulette. And roulette is interesting 'cause it's, from the point of view of a casino, it's a random number generator, or at least it's supposed to be. From a physicist, it's a rolling ball on a circular track with a counter-rotating inner wheel, and that's just physics. And when we realized that 15 seconds elapsed between the time the ball's released and them closing the bets, typically, we realized we had time to gather initial data, make predictions. We bought a roulette wheel. We derived the forces acting on the ball and the wheel, built this all into a computer that we operated with our toes, and we did beat the game of roulette. We didn't really get rich, but it did make me realize that randomness is a subjective concept. To us, it wasn't random. To somebody else, it would be. And looking at things a different way could change that. 

What really is complexity

13:34: Complex systems just means any kind of system where you have components that have emergent behavior... [14:08]. The system as a whole exhibits qualitatively different properties from its individual components.

Better models can make systems perform worse

29:02: When you have a system with agents who are modeling their world and acting upon the model, as the models get more sophisticated, the trying to model the whole becomes harder and harder. And, and in some circumstances, the whole system performs worse when everybody has better models because they're too busy trying to outfox the other guys. Now, the economists would say, "Oh, no, but if they're all rational, it all settles into the best solution." Yeah, but we know they aren't. So then you have to really understand the way in which the collective behavior of boundedly rational models causes overshoots and undershoots at the level of the whole economy, and the ways in which, um, what's good for an individual if everybody else is behaving simply can be not good for anybody if everybody does it.

Recommended Resources:

• Complex System
• Santa Fe Institute
• Adam Smith
• Friedrich Hayek
• 2008 Financial Crisis
• Norman Packard
• Efficient-Market Hypothesis
• Eugene Fama
• Herbert A. Simon
• Wassily Leontief
• Gosplan
• Systems thinking
• International Energy Agency
• Cybernetics

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at the University of Oxford
• Faculty Profile at the Santa Fe Institute
• DoyneFarmer.com
• LinkedIn Profile
• Wikipedia Profile

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World
• Google Scholar Page

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

• 423: Geoffrey West - The Scale of Everything: Unifying the Sciences of Growth, Complexity, and Innovation
• 571: Scott E. Page - The Power of Diverse Models in Decision Making

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Scott Samuelson is a professor of philosophy at Iowa State University and the author of several books. His latest work is called To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life.

Greg asks Scott about his views on why philosophy and aesthetics have sidelined food and actual taste in favor of nutrition, consumer preference, or narrow ethics. Scott argues food, cooking, and communal meals are central to human meaning, ethics, and hospitality, and that taste is a form of wisdom joining truth, goodness, and beauty while bridging the labels of subjective, objective, and intersubjective judgment. 

He links taste to style through cooking as an active practice of tasting and adjusting, critiques consumer capitalism’s push toward radical aesthetic subjectivity and “food porn,” and the subject of tradition as an evolving conversation. They also connect food to education via metaphors of digestion, emphasizing initiation, attention, and the cultivation of judgment and style, and Scott defends ‘festivity’ and ‘shared meals' as two foundations for intimacy and flourishing.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Is it possible to be intimate with someone that you've never eaten with?

57:28 [Greg LaBlanc]: Do you think that it's possible to be intimate with someone that you've never eaten with? Is it possible to be a friend with somebody that you've never sat down and had a meal? I find it hard to imagine in a way.

57:45 [Scott Samuelson] I mean, it's almost impossible to imagine having deep connections, intimate connections with family members, with friends, with a lover that doesn't involve sharing a food and drink on a pretty regular basis, actually. And it's not simply that, "Oh, well, you need to eat," and whatever. It's that, that becomes a scene in which, the intimacy plays out, sometimes at its most fundamental level. The family dinner conversations, or the drinks with the friend or the great meal with your lover or whatever, those are things that are fundamental to what it is.

We’re not just consumers of food

20:01: We've thought about things as we thought about ourselves as consumers, and I want us to think of ourselves not just as consumers, but as cooks, not just as eaters, but as makers of food. And that to me is a better lens for thinking about a good life.

Taste is meeting of the subjective and objective

09:50: The beauty of taste is that it is precisely the meeting of the subjective and the object. It's putting an object into my subjective mouth, and it's the meeting of those two things. So there's an objective component, there's a subjective component, and there's an intersubjective component as well that one can't really develop one's taste independent of a community, I think, of taste at some level. But just again, to speak fairly bluntly and straightforwardly, I just think the development of taste is just one of the best things in life.

Recommended Resources:

• Epistemology
• Xenia
• Alfred North Whitehead
• The Taste of Things
• M. F. K. Fisher
• Cotton Mather
• Blaise Pascal

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Iowa State University
• ScottSamuelsonAuthor.com
• Wikipedia Profile

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life
• Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering: What Philosophy Can Tell Us about the Hardest Mystery of All
• Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour
• The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone

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

• 604: Scott Samuelson - The Intersection of Philosophy and Suffering: From the Stoics to Modernity
• Paula Marantz Cohen
• Julian Baggini
• 48: Rob Dunn - Understanding Food Science: The Role of Evolution and Nature in our Diet

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Ashley Goodall is a longtime consultant, Fortune 50 executive, speaker, researcher, and writer in the areas of leadership and human resources. His two books are Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World and The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance.

Greg and Ashley discuss how rapid transformation, especially with AI, often worsens work because human employees are wired for stability, ritual, predictability, and belonging. Change and improvement are not synonyms. They discuss creating “equilibrium under varying load” by making decision processes transparent, offering voice without confusing it with vote, and giving people information to improve predictions, since bad news is often preferable to no news. 

Ashley notes how leaders underinvest in people due to short-termism, and layoffs and constant uncertainty damage both remaining employees and health. He emphasizes building many great teams, choosing and training team leaders well, recognizing excellence publicly, making contributions legible to boost self-efficacy, and reorienting HR toward long-term human performance and organizational prosperity as administrative work is automated.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Transparency matters during change

17:35: I find the most effective sort of safety signal at work is not, "Trust me, it'll be fine," but, "Here's what we're wrestling with." I think you can substitute transparency into what factors leaders are juggling for a promise that it'll all turn out well. I think the challenge with lots and lots of organizational leadership is leaders feel they can't say what's going on. And in the absence of an understanding of what's going on, employees are like, "Listen, I don't trust the beautifully wordsmithed stuff that your communications people write for you to say to me, and that seems to be intended to avoid lawsuits, not intended to help me understand the world.”

Why people struggle with change

04:04: Whether we like it or not, change makes life difficult for people. We are wired as a species in a way that appreciates stability, appreciates knowing where we are, appreciates knowing where things are going.

The complicated reality of AI at work

02:49: Now we're talking to one another in a world where digital transformation is, you from our current attention span, about eighty-nine percent AI. That's what's transforming stuff. And the experience of AI in the workplace is deeply complicated. I don't see workers, employees rushing around going, "This stuff is fabulous. Give us more of it." The sentiment is, "I'm burned out. I've got to manage all these agents all the time. I didn't sign up to be a manager. I don't know whether this stuff is any good. My company is forcing me to use it irrespective of whether I think I should use it." So, the on-the-ground experience of these tools is decidedly mixed.

Recommended Resources:

Guest Profile:

Guest Work:

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

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