unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

What strange thing happens when a neuron is left alone? Are there ways to moderate stress and anxiety, and even channel them into productive and helpful signals there to assist you in making good decisions? How can you develop initiative, and what has to change in today’s education landscape to accomplish this? 

Angus Fletcher is a Professor of Story Science at Project Narrative of Ohio State University. He also teaches screenwriting and is a screenwriter, as well as the author of several books including Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know, Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence, and Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature.

Greg and Angus discuss the intersection of story science and philosophy, emphasizing the importance of mythos and narrative thinking as opposed to logos, the purely logical, data-driven approaches in areas like decision-making and leadership. Angus outlines how neurophysiology and the brain's natural restlessness contribute to human intelligence and explores the practical applications of narrative cognition in fields ranging from military operations to education and business. He highlights the role of literature in developing imagination, perspective, and emotional intelligence, arguing for its integration into educational systems and other training programs to cultivate better leaders, thinkers, and problem-solvers.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why fear and anger are the two most powerful emotions

41:50: I worked a long time with operators on this, and we particularly worked on fear and anger because those are our two most powerful emotions. Those are our fight-or-flight responses. Fear is flight, and anger is fight. And you know what is going on there? Well, what is going on there is your brain has a bias to action. Your brain always wants to be doing something. The moment that your brain is sitting still, it feels extremely vulnerable, so it always wants to have a plan. And when your brain experiences a severe threat and it realizes this threat is so new, so different, that it does not have a plan that it has confidence in, it does not know what to do here—that is when your brain starts to feel scared. That is when you feel fear. So the question is, why is fear the emotion that your brain evolved? Why did it not evolve some other emotion, like curiosity or whatever? And the answer is just because fear makes you incredibly susceptible to outside influence. The more scared you are, the smarter other people's suggestions sound.

Emotion is the smartest thing in your brain

41:06: Emotion is the smartest thing in your brain. If you're not using your emotions, you're severely limiting your intelligence. And the reason that we know emotion is the smartest thing in the brain is it's the oldest form of intelligence in the brain, so it's been keeping you alive for hundreds of millions of years.

Stories help us imagine alternatives

13:11: When you tell someone a story effectively, it allows them to imagine themselves in that position. And then what they do in that position is they imagine, what could I do? And when that's done effectively, what it allows them to do is imagine alternatives—not just alternatives from what they themselves are doing in their own lives, but alternatives to what the individuals did in that situation.

Why modern life produces so much anxiety

46:21: Why is it that so many people are experiencing over-anxiety in our modern world? Well, the first thing is that too many people spend their time inside these artificially stable environments where they're just not used to anything being unstable. If you spend all your time in the suburbs, and bananas are always there, even in the middle of the winter when you go to the supermarket and the whatnot, you know, then you're not ever coping or having to engage with even a mild amount of instability or volatility. So the moment you encounter any of it, you immediately freak out and think that something must be wrong.

Recommended Resources:

• Mythos
• Logos
• Daniel Kahneman
• Dual Process Theory
• I. A. Richards
• William Shakespeare
• Case Study
• Steve Jobs
• Mike Tyson
• Ronald Crane
• New Criticism
• Postmodernism
• Post-Structuralism
• Schadenfreude
• The Chicago School
• Aeschylus
• Sophocles
• Fight-or-Flight Response

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Ohio State University
• Project Narrative Profile | Ohio State University
• AngusFletcher.co | Website
• Angus Fletcher | Wikipedia Page
• Profile on LinkedIn
• Social Profile on Instagram

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know
• Narrative Creativity: An Introduction to How and Why (Elements in Creativity and Imagination)
• Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence (No Limits)
• Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature
• Creative Thinking: A Field Guide to Building Your Strategic Core
• Comic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American Republic
• Screenwriting 101: Mastering the Art of Story
• Evolving Hamlet: Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and the Ethics of Natural Selection
• Angus Fletcher | IMDB Page

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How has rational choice theory come to dominate both our understanding of the world and our view of good judgment, and why is that a problem? What are the benefits of remembering to zoom in and out to get a better picture of problems and solutions? Why do we prefer reducing things to numbers even if that abstracts useful levels of data?

Barry Schwartz is a professor Emeritus at Swarthmore College and the prolific author of many books. His latest titles include Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making and Wisdom: How to Discover Your Path in Work and Life.

Greg and Barry discuss the limitations of rational choice theory, the importance of practical wisdom, and the role of judgment in making decisions. They also touch on the broader implications of rational choice theory across various fields, the history of economic and social science paradigms, and the necessity of incorporating ethical considerations into people’s decision-making. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The way we think about the world changes the world

10:47: The argument in the book [Choose Wisely] was, the way we think about the world changes the world. And it is true that the way we think about the world changes the world, but it changes the world materially. It does not just change the world because of the ideas we have running around in our heads; it changes the material world. Yeah. The factory did not exist, and then it did. And as a result, what it meant to work changed. That was not in our heads. That was, you know, a structure that was out in the world that made demands on the people who walked in the door every day. So it was not idealism. The argument was that ideas change not just how people think, but what kinds of things people are able to do. And I think the same thing is true with rational choice theory, though it is a bit more abstract. You know, you cannot do a rational choice analysis without being able to quantify.

Why we can’t game the way to design incentives

14:16: People somehow think that there is a bulletproof way to design incentives, so that they will not distort why they gave us the incentives they are designed to encourage. And, the bad news is there is no such thing, and there is no system that cannot be gamed.

How economics changes the way we think

07:22: There is a general, more general problem in social science, which is that, unlike planets, people are affected by claims that are made about what they are like. And so, the more we read social science, and the more economics, the king of the social sciences, dominates the news, the more inclined we are to think like and act like economists. So, does this tell us that the economists have discovered something? No. I mean, maybe. But it is just as likely that what economists have done is create something. They have created a way of approaching decisions and value assessment and so on that is consistent with their framework and changed people as a result.

What we miss when we measure everything

42:15: Rational choice theory is not neutral about what stays in the frame and what goes outside it. Things that go outside the frame are the ones that are most difficult to quantify using the same scale that you are using for everything else. And so, in the case of the price of a pound of beef, you could add the amount of money that our taxes contribute to subsidies. You could factor in the costs of the fertilizers that enable the corn to grow enough so that the cows can get fattened up. How do you quantify exactly the cost to human health? You can do it. How many more dollars do we pay per year because of antibiotic-resistant bacteria? But does that capture the cost in health? No. It only captures the dollar cost in health.

Recommended Resources:

• Rational Choice Model
• Daniel Kahneman
• Reinforcement Learning
• B. F. Skinner
• Reflexivity (Social Theory)
• Karl Popper
• George Soros
• Goodhart's law
• The Omnivore's Dilemma
• Annie Duke
• Phronesis
• Telos
• Swarthmore College
• Adnan Khashoggi

Guest Profile:

• Wikipedia Page
• Faculty Profile at Swarthmore College
• Profile at The Decision Lab
• Social Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making
• Why We Work (TED Books)
• Wisdom: How to Discover Your Path in Work and Life
• Brilliant: The Art and Science of Making Better Decisions
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Revised Edition
• Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing
• Are We Happy Yet? Happiness in an Age of Abundance (Cato Unbound)
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
• The Costs of Living
• The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life

Related unSILOed episodes:

• Barry Schwartz - Why We Work: Breaking Down the Psychological and Economic Factors of a Great Workplace
• Donald MacKenzie - Trading at Light Speed: The Impact of Ultra-Fast Algorithms on Financial Markets

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For organizations that are tempted to throw out the classic organizational management handbook in favor of a structure with no managers – think again. 

Nicolai J. Foss is a professor of strategy at Copenhagen Business School and the co-author of Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company. The book pushes back on the notion that the key to breakthrough success for organizations is through flat, leaderless structures akin to today’s trendy startups, and makes the case for why companies need hierarchies to function. 

Nicolai and Greg discuss the feasibility and realities of operating without traditional hierarchies, why these models often rely heavily on exceptional founders and are not suited for all business types, and the essential roles managers play in coordination, cooperation, and maintaining effective workflows, especially during times of crisis. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

We still need managers

41:33 [Managers] They're doing a lot of good stuff. They are coordinating, and they are cooperating at the most abstract level. I mean, activities need to be coordinated in the sense of, we have to figure out what those activities should be, how they should change in response to outside disturbances. Activities have to be linked. Activities have to be rethought. And once we have figured all that out, which is, of course, an ongoing struggle, then people have to be motivated to cooperate inside those, and actually carry out those activities in the best possible way and in a dynamic reality. This is a never-ending quest.

No human system run itself

11:44: No human system works itself or runs itself. It has to be supported, maintained. There has to be support, scaffolding, or whatever you want to call it. Same goes for firms—and perhaps all different ones.

Organization is about coordinated cooperation

02:40: At the end of the day, organization is about coordinated cooperation, and the right question to ask is, what exactly is the role of managers in bringing about coordinated cooperation?

Boselessness is not for every company

20:43: [Bosslessness] It works for some companies, typically those that have a more modular kind of underlying technology, where there is no high need for mutual adaptation between units or activities or processes. But it works much less well for a traditional industrial company.

Recommended Resources:

• Organizational theory
• Principal–agent problem
• First, Let’s Fire All the Managers by Gary Hamel
• Jensen Huang
• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
• Can you run a company as a perfect free market? Inside Disco Corp 
• Morningstar, Inc.
• Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini
• Valve Corporation
• The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (film)

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Copenhagen Business School
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn

Guest Work:

• Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company

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How have politics changed from the  Bill Clinton era to that of  Donald Trump? How have identity politics diverted attention from economic issues, and how have the educated elites derailed activism?

Fredrik deBoer is the author of both fiction and nonfiction works, including The Mind Reels, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.

Greg and Fredrik discuss the American political left and why the left-right dichotomy fails to tell the complete story.  Fredrik provides a critical examination of the internal divisions within the political left, identity politics, and the impact of social media on political engagement. He argues that the left's preoccupation with symbolic issues often undermines its ability to build broad-based coalitions, and suggests a return to class-first politics as a more effective strategy. They also touch on the role of nonprofits, the evolution of meritocracy in education, and the challenges of achieving genuine economic and social justice.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How social media turned politics into identity performance

45:28: What makes all of this particularly more pernicious in the 21st century is, it's not just now your immediate peer group of people you see face-to-face. You've got to answer to a couple thousand people on social media who know your name and who know where you work, and who will yell at you if you have the, quote-unquote, wrong position. Right? And this is a thing that has happened all over the world of the left, which is, cultural issues began to be foregrounded above economic issues to an extreme extent. There was a development of a very narrow sort of list of approved opinions that you could hold on cultural and social issues. They came to be seen as sort of outside of the realm of politics, and without anyone actually intending for it to happen, what the sort of default young Democrat in politics was shifted over time in an extreme identitarian direction.

When politics becomes a team sport, everyone loses nuance

29:18: I think we are just training generations of young people who do not understand politics as anything other than a sort of blood sport, organized around a very simplistic binary.

The heart of politics is empathy, not ideology

07:23: I have a very long list of disagreements with Bill Clinton, but he was a political genius, and everyone knows, his signature phrase is, I feel your pain. And to me, that's the heart of politics. It's saying, I understand that you need something, and I'm here for you. In that sense, the identity politics on the left in the last 15 years has been about telling large groups of people that they do not have real problems, right? So, if you go show up to a university campus and you start to talk about some of the problems that afflict, for example, the white working class, you'll be told quite directly, oh, to center the white working class, right, is to privilege racism and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It's saying directly to these people, your problems are not real problems. And so, like, that's the perfect example of where you are sacrificing potential allies for a benefit that I just do not even understand.

Recommended Resources:

• Socialism
• Marxism
• Progressivism
• Single-Payer Healthcare
• Bill Clinton
• Donald Trump
• Adolph L. Reed Jr.
• Paul Ingrassia
• Occupy Wall Street
• Iron Law of Oligarchy
• Robert Reich
• Barack Obama

Guest Profile:

• FredrikdeBoer.com
• Wikipedia Profile
• Fredrik deBoer Substack

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The Mind Reels
• The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
• How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

Related UnSILOed episodes:

• Michael Spence - A Deep Dive into Signaling and Market Dynamics

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How will AI change the size, shape, and structure of companies? Where will we see new leverage points in the AI economy? How does AI move beyond task automation and into the coordination of tasks? How does a manager keep from becoming just a cog in a system of automations?

Sangeet Paul Choudary is a senior fellow at UC Berkeley, a consultant, and the author and co-author of several books. His latest work is titled, Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy.

Greg and Sangeet discuss Sangeet’s latest book, as well as the work he co-authored, Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You. Sangeet emphasizes how AI's transformative impacts extend beyond automating tasks to fundamentally altering industry structures, competitive advantages, and corporate strategies. The conversation also covers even broader implications of continued AI adoption like modularity in business, the shifting roles in professional services, and the creation of new economic control points. They provide a comprehensive look at how businesses can realign their strategies around AI as an engine driving innovation and competitive advantage for the future.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

AI as a tool vs. AI as an engine

22:28: The idea of using AI as a tool versus AI as an engine is that a tool is typically something that you bolt onto your existing workflows—pick a tool from the toolbox, and it helps you speed up a task, perform it faster, better, cheaper. But if you're really using an engine, you're constantly thinking about how to redesign your entire workflow and your entire organization, your business model, around the capabilities of the engine.

Bridging the gap in AI through storytelling and narrative

54:19: Storytelling and narrative, in general, are such important skills today because we are in an age where we are information-rich but attention-poor. And the way to harness that attention is to have compelling storytelling and narratives that bridge that gap.

How is the basis of competition shifting?

29:09: The impact of AI does not play out only at the level of tasks—tasks that are inside workflows. So workflows get transformed. Workflows are organized through organizational mechanisms, so new organizational systems will have to come into place. And organizations, essentially, compete in an ecosystem. They help firms compete in an ecosystem. And so the starting point would be to ask ourselves—with AI coming in and with other forces at play—how is the basis of competition shifting? What was the basis on which firms previously competed? What was our basis of differentiation and competition? And does that change? Do some of those assumptions no longer hold true? And on that basis, if we can lay out some clear hypotheses and heuristics on what’s changing in terms of the basis of competition, what does that mean in terms of the capabilities we need to have in place?...All of those need to come into question and need to be evaluated.

Recommended Resources:

• Walmart
• Shein
• Platform Economy
• Large Language Model
• TikTok
• Social Graph
• The Open Graph protocol
• Erik Brynjolfsson
• General Electric
• Perplexity AI
• OpenAI
• Best Buy
• Amazon Alexa

Guest Profile:

• Profile on Platform Thinking Labs
• Profile on LinkedIn
• Profile on Wikipedia
• Social Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy
• The Fast Future Blur: Discover Transformative Interconnections Shaping the Future
• Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You
• Platform Scale: How an emerging business model helps startups build large empires with minimum investment
• Medium
• Substack

Related unSILOed Episodes:

• Geoff Parker | Will Every Business Become a Platform Business?
• Marc Levinson | How the Container Changed the World

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How does code, like language, shape the way we see the world? How can we rediscover enchantment in our technology?? How can we determine the half-life of knowledge as we continue to learn and discover new things?

Samuel Arbesman is a scientist in residence at Lux Capital, a fellow at Case Western School of Management, and the author of three books, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future, Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension, and The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date.

Greg and Samuel discuss Samuel’s newest book, The Magic of Code, and how programming languages have evolved and continue to evolve over time. Samuel explores society’s enchantment and disenchantment with technology, the evolution of programming languages, the intersection of computer science and humanities, and the ongoing shift towards more democratized software creation. They also go over Samuel’s  earlier works, highlighting the temporary nature of facts and the continual necessity for adaptive learning in a rapidly evolving world.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Reenchanting technology through humanities 

03:24: I think the larger perspective of the book [The Magic of Code] is to also recognize that, in addition to this wonder and delight, also recognizing that when we think about computing competition, it doesn’t need to just be this branch of engineering or this thing of computer science. It really is this almost humanistic liberal art that, when you think about it properly, should connect to language and philosophy and biology and art and how we think and the nature of reality and all these different kinds of things. And for me, those are the windows and the lenses that allow us to actually kind of re-enchant, not even just computing, but in turn many aspects of our own lives, and hopefully can repair at least a little bit of that kind of broken relationship.

On the magic of code

06:31:  We actually have this weird information stuff that can actually work in the real world. That’s amazing. And we should pause at least and say, wow, that really is incredible.

Why democratizing software is powerful

26:56: This idea of being able to democratize software creation is incredibly powerful. And actually, in going back to the analogy with magic, I mean, yes, in many of the tales of magic, it did require a great deal of effort. You had to apprentice, or you had to, I don’t know, go to Hogwarts for seven years or whatever it is. But there also were stories of magic for everyone; there were spells that could be used by people if they, like in the Middle Ages, had lost their cattle and needed to recover it. And I think we need that same kind of thing in the software realm as well, which is, we need spells and code that can be used by everyone. And now, with this ability, it’s unbelievable to see.

Ideas are always in draft form

53:41: A professor of mine, when I was in graduate school, told me this story. This was already after I had left grad school. He was telling me this story that he was teaching some course, came in on Tuesday, and gave a lecture on some topic. Then, the next day, he read a paper that invalidated the lecture he had given the day before. So he went in on Thursday and said, “Remember what I taught you on Tuesday? It’s wrong. And if that bothers you, you need to get out of science.” And I think that kind of idea—that science, or what we know, is constantly in draft form—is a very powerful idea.

Recommended Resources:

• Max Weber
• Dune
• iPhone (1st generation)
• ChatGPT
• H. P. Lovecraft
• Fantasia
• Guido van Rossum
• Larry Wall
• Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis
• List of Programming Languages
• Brainfuck
• Fortran
• Perl
• Vibe Coding
• Robin Sloan
• VIC-20
• Pierre-Simon Laplace
• Vannevar Bush
• Don R. Swanson
• Luis Walter Alvarez
• Marc Benioff
• The Unaccountability Machine
• Isaac Asimov

Guest Profile:

• Arbesman.net
• Professional Profile for  LuxCapita
• LinkedIn Account
• Social Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future
• Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
• The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
• Wired Articles
• Substack - Cabinet of Wonders

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Is it time to overhaul the way we study and teach ancient history? Are we limiting our ability to understand fully how the past informs the present in ways like inequality if we keep these disciplines siloed?

Walter Scheidel is a professor of humanities, classics, and history at Stanford University. He’s the author of more than a dozen books, including What Is Ancient History? and The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.

Walter and Greg discuss methodological divides between departments studying ancient history, the relevance of the Classics today, and the case for a new discipline on “foundational history.” They also explore the origins of inequality and how war, plagues, and technological advancements are the primary drivers for equality shifts. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How ancient innovations still shape the modern world

13:37: People face similar challenges, and they should be studied accordingly. And we should try to understand how people, at the time of many thousands of years ago, put all kinds of innovations in place and bundled them together in very specific ways that really create our world—in terms of material culture, in terms of social arrangements, institutions, cognitive frameworks, if you will. Writing and literature and world religions and other belief systems, and so on, are still very much with us. They really shape everything that we do today. So the world we inhabit today is like a supercharged version of what people set up in this formative period. But they did it all over the place.

Why ancient studies need a paradigm shift

10:08: Unless there is some major paradigm shift or some major other shock to the system, there's really no sufficient force to reconfigure the way we approach the study of the ancient world.

Redefining ancient history beyond Greece and Rome

03:03: If you're a historian, you may want to ask, well, why isn't ancient history, like Roman history, part of our history patterns more generally? And to go beyond that, what do we mean mostly by Greece and Rome when we say ancient history? I think we mean two things when we evoke ancient history. One is Greeks and Romans, maybe Egyptians and Nas if you're lucky, but not, you know, Maya or early China and that sort of thing. Or, more commonly, you refer to something you think is irrelevant and obsolete. You say that's ancient history whenever you want to dismiss something—it's like, that's ancient history. So my book is about both of these meanings and why neither one of them really does any justice to the subject matter and to what our understanding should be of this particular part of history. I want to redefine it as a truly transformative, foundational phase—not so much a period, but a phase of human development that unfolded on a planetary scale and needs to be studied accordingly.

Recommended Resources:

• Gini coefficient
• Branko Milanović
• Kuznets curve

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Stanford University
• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on X

Guest Work:

• What Is Ancient History?
• The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century 
• Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
• Part of: The Princeton Economic History of the Western World (55 books)
• The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy (Cambridge Companions to the Ancient World)
• Part of: Cambridge Companions to the Ancient Athens (17 books) 
• The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World by Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, et al.
• The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford Studies in Early Empires)

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When it comes to the concept of The West, its scope and principles have been criticized both contemporarily and historically. How did the West emerge as a coherent concept, and what has it meant over time?

Georgios Varouxakis is a Professor in the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London, where he is also the Co-director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought. He is also the author of several books, and his newest book is titled The West: The History of an Idea.

Greg and Georgios discuss Giorgios’s new book, 'The West: The History of an Idea,' and explore the origins, evolution, and various interpretations of the concept of 'the West.' Their conversation covers some popular misconceptions about the West, reasons behind its historical development, and the roles nations like Greece, Russia, and Ukraine have played in shaping the West's identity. Giorgios emphasizes how the West has been a flexible and evolving idea, open to new members and continuously redefined through history. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The two myths of the West’s origins

03:06: The popular conceptions are that the West must have always existed. People take for granted that at least since the ancient Greeks, there is a West that has resisted the invasion of Asia through the Persian Empire and that in the Battle of Marathon, the West defined itself and defeated. A projection of things that people later imagined. In this sense, ancient Greeks saw themselves as Greeks. They did not see themselves as West or Europe or anything else. The other end of the spectrum is that the West must have begun with a Cold War, that surely the West is a creation of the post–First World War situation where the United States leads a group of peoples versus the Soviet Union, and that is the West. These are the two popular extremes. Popular conceptions that I consider, the two ends of the spectrum.

The West as an open-ended idea

17:14: The West had inherent from its inception an open-endedness that was not based on just ethnic descent or just religion.

Richard Wright: The gadfly of the West

37:14: [Richard Wright] says, "I'm Western, but I now realize I'm more Western than the West. I'm more advanced than the West. I believe in the Western principles and values, and constitutional and political and other philosophical ideas. I was taught, I believe in freedom of speech, separation of, and the of. These are not necessarily practiced much of the time by Western governments and elites. So he becomes literally like Socrates was the gadfly of Athenian democracy. Richard Wright becomes the gadfly of the West, saying, 'I'm criticizing you because you're not doing the Western thing. You're not Western enough.' Literally, he says, 'The West is not Western enough.'"

Why the West should be improved, not abolished

47:48: My argument is peoples and their leaderships make decisions, and they may change allegiances. They may adopt institutions, alliances, and cultural references that their ancestors did not have a century or two ago, come from a country that. An experiment in that these experiments may change. You know, things may change, but I do not think anytime soon Greece will join some Eastern or whatever alliance. So to the extent that what anyone can predict, the attractiveness of the West is exactly this combination of, and an entity. As we keep saying, it should be criticized and improved. So it is not abolishing the West that I would recommend, it is improving the West and making the West live up to more of its aspirations and principles.

Recommended Resources:

• John Stuart Mill
• Auguste Comte
• Ottoman Empire
• Peter the Great
• Catherine the Great
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Ahmed Rıza
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Germaine de Staël
• Thomas Mann
• Francis Lieber
• Donald Trump
• Steve Bannon
• Oswald Spengler
• Western Civilization
• Walter Lippmann
• W. E. B. Du Bois
• Richard Wright
• Francis Fukuyama

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Queen Mary University of London
• LinkedIn Profile

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The West: The History of an Idea
• Liberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International Relations
• Mill on Nationality
• Victorian Political Thought on France and the French
• PhilPapers.org Profile

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Why is historical context so important when looking at topics from the past? What role does a broader appreciation of the humanities play in understanding contemporary issues?

Darrin M. McMahon is a professor of history at Dartmouth College and the author of several books. Recent titles include Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea and the Divine Fury: A History of Genius book.

Greg and Darrin discuss Darrin’s intellectual journey and his approach to longue durée intellectual history. Darrin provides insights into his books on happiness, genius, and equality, exploring themes like the evolution of concepts over time, the intersection of words and ideas, and the roles of intellectual historians. Their conversation examines the connections between religious traditions and modern concepts, the interplay of born versus made attributes, and the historical perspectives on the concepts of happiness and genius. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Are genius, happiness, and equality born or made?

41:06: Are geniuses born, or are they made? You know, can you play the guitar for 10,000 hours, à la Malcolm Gladwell, and become a Beatle? Or, you know, is there just something in you? And that turns out to be a kind of central conflict all the way back to the ancients. Same, as you say, with happiness, right? Is happiness just in our genes? We know some people are wired to just be cheery in the morning. Right? I'm not one of those people. Or does it happen to you? Right? Or can you make it? Right? Can you control your life in such a way so that you can bring about happiness? And the same with equality, right? Are we born equals? Are we made equals in political circumstance? Are we intended to be equal? This too gets tied up with debates around it, around the concept from very early on. And they never really entirely go away. So again, it's a nice way of kind of pointing out continuities, but then also marking points of departure and change.

Why equality creates inequality

29:37: Equality always serves, or always brings into being, new forms of inequality. That very assertion of equals then creates the space then for thinking or measuring others against that standard, and relegating to place.

Intellectual history teaches us how to love

49:28: Intellectual history teaches you to get inside the minds of others who see the world in radically different ways from how you do. And that is what love is all about: trying to get inside the mind of a person who sees the world differently from you, and to empathize even when you do not agree, to understand even when you do not condone. That is crucial. It is a crucial human endeavor, and I think intellectual history teaches that very well.

The arc of equality isn't as straight as we think

30:29: Equality leads to us, and then it's going to spread, and, you know, spill down to more and more people. It will expand and get wider. I grew up in California. I was born in 1965 with that kind of vague idea, and no one said it was going to be easy. Martin Luther King certainly knew it was not going to be easy, and yet, as you say, the arc of history bends towards justice, bends towards equality. We're gradually extending equality to wider and wider circles of people. And that's just how it will go. And I think we were deceived by our own rhetoric. And it was really a rude awakening in 2016 to wake up and realize, oh gosh, you know, it does not quite work that way. And as rude an awakening as that's been, I think it also provides an opportunity then to go back and examine a concept like equality that we thought we knew in some ways, but that really turns out to be much more complicated and fraught than I think we fully appreciated.

Recommended Resources:

• Longue Durée
• Robert Darnton
• Arthur Oncken Lovejoy
• Anglo-Saxons
• Plato
• Subjective Well-being
• Jeremy Bentham
• The Happiness Hypothesis
• Age of Enlightenment
• Socrates
• Daemon
• Doctor Faustus
• Michelangelo
• Michel Foucault
• Memento Mori
• Fasces
• Teresa Bejan
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Tall Poppy Syndrome
• Christopher Boehm
• Branko Milanović
• Karl Marx
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Arthur Schopenhauer
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Thomas Carlyle
• Augustine of Hippo
• Presentism

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Dartmouth University
• DarrinMcMahon.com
• Wikipedia Profile

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea
• History and Human Flourishing
• Divine Fury: A History of Genius
• Happiness: A History
• Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity

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There is a misconception that liberalism lacks a vision of ‘the good life,’ but liberalism is more ingrained in society than often recognized. It affects media, education, and personal beliefs of those in society both directly and indirectly.

Alexandre Lefebvre is a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney in Australia, and the author and editor of several books.  His latest work is Liberalism as a Way of Life.

Greg and Alex discuss the historical and philosophical critiques of liberalism, discussing whether liberalism needs a theory of ‘the good life’ to remain relevant and compelling. Alexandre argues that liberalism has permeated various aspects of modern life, contradicting the common view that it is merely a procedural framework. They also explore John Rawls's philosophy, particularly his concepts of the original position and reflective equilibrium, and examine how these ideas can serve as spiritual exercises for cultivating a liberal ethos. Alexandre highlights the need for liberals to live up to their principles and examines the future challenges and opportunities for liberalism in a pluralistic society.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What are the goods of the liberal way of life?

36:14: What are the goods of the liberal way of life? I do think that they are real goods and, at the heart of it, I would say. I mean, I think any conception of the good life kind of parks two or three virtues, kind of limit at four, I know, at the heart of what it means to live well. And then they have kind of derivative qualities and virtues flowing out from that. So, I take liberals at their word that the two major commitments they have are, let's say, to liberty and liberality, or to freedom and fairness as a kind of interpretation of what it means to be generous. And out of that comes a whole personality structure. That's what I believe. A whole psychology emanates from that. And it behooves us as liberals to cultivate that, not just because it makes us not jerks and not hypocrites, but because living according to those values and those virtues is intrinsically rewarding and joyful. [37:09] So, that's the first thing I want to say: that the liberal personality isn't just a political thing. I want to say that it disseminates into all aspects of our life, from how we deal with our wife or our husband, our romantic partners, how we raise our kids, to the kind of jokes we laugh at, the kind of stuff that makes us upset, et cetera, et cetera.

Why liberalism needs more than rules

09:14: If liberalism can't compel ethical assent and robust commitment, then what are we talking about? We’re done for, we can't campaign forever on just a set of rules, however noble they are. There has to be a there, there.

Why do people reject liberalism?

34:27: I think that a lot of people saying no to liberalism, it's not because they can't live up to its demands, but because they look at the ideals and say, no, not for me, that this is not the kind of life I want. And that the vision of the good life and the good quality is in a different direction. And I think that those are principled rejections of liberalism that make, for me, a lot of sense. And that if we want to understand the attraction of illiberalism, postliberal, all that stuff, we can't just think that these people are either cowards or afraid, or that their leaders are just motivated by the goods of tyranny—kind of sex, power, money, all that stuff. That is part of the picture, no doubt, but they're motivated by genuine ideals that liberalism crowds out.

Liberalism as a way of life

27:16: Philosophy is a way of life. And what I try to do in my book [Liberalism as a Way of Life] is suggest that liberalism could be seen, sort of, in the same vein.

Recommended Resources: 

• Liberalism
• John Rawls
• Adrian Vermeule
• Karl Marx
• Søren Kierkegaard
• Epicureanism
• Liberal Democracy
• A Theory of Justice
• Alexis de Tocqueville
• Last Man
• Judith N. Shklar
• Misanthropy
• Pierre Hadot
• Iris Murdoch
• Dave Chappelle
• Hannah Gadsby
• Patrick Deneen
• French Revolution
• Cult of Reason

Guest Profile:

• AlexLefebvre.com
• Faculty Profile at the University of Sydney
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Liberalism as a Way of Life
• Human Rights and the Care of the Self
• Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson's Political Philosophy
• The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza
• Freedom: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904–1905
• Interpreting Bergson: Critical Essays
• The Subject of Human Rights
• Henri Bergson
• Bergson, Politics, and Religion

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• Helena Rosenblatt
• Samuel Moyn

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