unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Behind every great invention is an engineer who figured out how to make it work. But how do you take an extremely technical, cutting-edge innovation and make it easy to understand and use for the public? That’s where designers come in.

Barry Katz is a professor emeritus of industrial design at California College of the Arts and a consulting professor at Stanford University. He is the author of the book, Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design, co-author of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, and has spent decades studying the history of design thinking and its purpose at organizations. 

Barry and Greg discuss the historical trajectory of design in tech, how engineers and designers began collaborating in the 1980s, and the role of design in transforming technologies into user-friendly products. The conversation also covers the interdisciplinary nature of design, the impact of design thinking on various industries, and Barry’s latest book detailing the application of design principles in healthcare. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

You don't have to be a designer to think like one

31:47: You don't have to be a designer to think like one. And in fact, you probably don't want to become a designer. But over the course of this rather remarkable few decades, designers have learned a lot of tricks, and they're basically tricks. And many of those tricks can be learned by entrepreneurs, lawyers, physicians, which is what we dealt with in our most recent book. And it's not turning them into designers; it's giving them tools to solve their problems in medicine, law, engineering, or wherever, in something like the way that designers solve their problems.

Why design thrives like an ecosystem

19:17: So what is the connector between the internal combustion engine and the car, between the printed circuit board and the lamp? It's design. So, in the course of that, designers have had to learn a whole lot of new skills, new tricks. That’s where design thinking has played, I think, an important role, which may be drawing to a close. They’ve learned to integrate the behavioral sciences. They’ve learned how to talk to technical people. There's no doubt that it is an ongoing challenge.

Designers shape experiences, not just products

25:40: We don't want products to fail people. Now, a refrigerator is one thing, but then, when you are starting not just to approach a large appliance in your kitchen but to put it in your pocket, your kid's backpack, or a contact lens—which is to deliver insulin to a diabetic, which Google X is working on—then your tolerance for a bad experience vanishes. And it is a bit of a hackneyed thing to say, but the role of designers has been to create an experience.

Design isn’t about knowing everything, it’s about knowing who to ask

27:15: What happens when you have an exposure to the way anthropologists approach a problem, or economists, or linguists, or whoever it might be, is not that you become one or you acquire that level of professionalism, but you know who to ask. And you've heard an entirely new inventory of questions that may not have occurred to you in the past but are now on your agenda.  And you either acquire a sufficient level of professional skill to answer those questions, or you now know who to ask. 

Recommended Resources:

• Moore’s Law 
• The Microma 
• Silicon Valley (TV series) 
• Alphonse Chapanis 
• Larry Page 
• Franz von Holzhausen
• DeepSeek
• Natasha Jen: Design Thinking is Bullsh*t

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at California College of the Arts
• Faculty Profile at Stanford University
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn

His Work:

• Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
• Change by Design, Revised and Updated: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

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What can shake organizations out of the cycle of doing things the way they have always been done because that’s the way they have always been done? Will a shift within an organization be more likely to stick with a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach? How can organizations allow freedom for their employees, but still be in control of the direction of that freedom?

Freek Vermeulen is a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School and the author of Business Exposed: The Naked Truth about What Really Goes on in the World of Business and Breaking Bad Habits: Why Best Practices Are Killing Your Business.

Greg and Freek discuss the essence of strategy in organizations, highlighting the complexities and dysfunctions within organizations, the evolutionary parallels in human behavior and cultural practices, and the critical importance of understanding organizational strategy at all levels. Freek emphasizes the necessity of both top-down strategic direction and bottom-up innovation, the pitfalls of over-reliance on visible metrics, and the value of periodic organizational changes. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

A strategy no one follows is no strategy at all

40:14: Strategy can not only be top-down, it has also to be bottom-up, that people display initiative themselves in line with strategy. And this is how it relates to it being a collective cognitive construct, and people knowing about the firm's strategy. A strategy is only a strategy if people do something different as a result of it in their daily job. If the C-suite changes the strategy, but everybody in the cubicles keeps doing the same thing, I'm sorry, you don't have a strategy. Now you have a McKinsey PowerPoint deck, but you don't have a strategy. It's only a strategy if people do something different as a result of it. And one aspect of this is that can only happen if they know about it and if they understand it. And that places a big onus on how you communicate it, how you put that in people's minds or so. 

Strategy is  collective cognitive construct

39:26: Strategy is in the mind, and it is a mindset and understanding of what we're trying to work towards and trying to do as an organization. And it's collective because it has to be shared. It’s a tool to cooperate, that we have a joint understanding of what we're actually trying to do and what we're not trying to do.

What gets you to the top won’t always keep you there

14:50: What we certainly know, and also that's what we see in research in cultural anthropology, by the way, as well, where there is research on what sort of individuals are most likely to become the head of a tribe, where we observe highly similar things, is to say your chances of making it to the next level, what sort of variables determine your probability of making it to the next level, and hence eventually reaching the top, are not necessarily the same traits that make you a good CEO and a good steward in the long term for an organization. There can be mismatches between these things. In a tribe, for instance, if you are a very combative individual and prone to a good fight or something like that, that may make you more likely to go through the tournament and become the head of a tribe. But it may also make you more likely to take your tribe on the warpath, which may not be so good for survival. So the same characteristics that make people more likely to become CEO are not necessarily the same characteristics that make them better as CEOs for organizations.

Are business schools equipping mba students with the right tools for leadership success?

53:23: This understanding about how behavioral mechanisms, including norms and so on, work is something that we need to do better in business schools. The experiment... is indeed to see if people who have more managerial experience and more economics training get it more wrong because we have some other studies that suggest that understanding more about financial incentives and economic rational behavior makes you less aware of these other aspects of human behavior, which of course exist in organizations and in reality.

Recommended Resources:

• Kuru (disease)
• Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease
• Frans van Houten
• Leo Tolstoy
• Change for Change’s Sake | HBR
• SEI Investments Company
• William H. Starbuck
• Constantinos C. Markides
• Asch Conformity Experiments

Guest Profile:

• LinkedIn Profile
• Faculty Profile at London Business School
• Social Profile on X

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Business Exposed: The Naked Truth about What Really Goes on in the World of Business
• Breaking Bad Habits: Why Best Practices Are Killing Your Business
• Google Scholar Page

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It’s official: AI has arrived and, from here on out, will be a part of our world. So how do we begin to learn how to coexist with our new artificial coworkers? 

Ethan Mollick is an associate professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. The book acts as a guide to readers navigating the new world of AI and explores how we might work alongside AI. 

He and Greg discuss the benefits of anthropomorphizing AI, the real impact the technology could have on employment, and how we can learn to co-work and co-learn with AI. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The result of an experiment identifying the impact of GEN AI

07:35 We went to the Boston Consulting Group, one of the elite consulting companies, and we gave them 18 realistic business tasks we created with them and these were judged to be very realistic. They were used to do actual evaluations of people in interviews and so on. And we got about 8 percent of the global workforce of BCG, which is a significant investment. And we had them do these tasks first on their own without AI, and then we had them do a second set of tasks either with or without AI. So, random selection to those two. The people who got access to AI, and by the way, this is just plain vanilla GPT-4 as of last April. No special fine-tuning, no extra details, no special interface, no RAG, nothing else. And they had a 40 percent improvement in the quality of their outputs on every measure that we had. We got work done about 25 percent faster, about 12.5 percent more work done in the same time period. Pretty big results in a pretty small period of time. 

Is AI taking over our jobs?

20:30 The ultimate question is: How good does AI get, and how long does it take to get that good? And I think if we knew the answer to that question, which we don't, that would teach us a lot about what jobs to think about and worry about.

Will there be a new data war where different LLM and Gen AI providers chase proprietary data?

11:17 I don't know whether this becomes like a data fight in that way because the open internet has tons of data on it, and people don't seem to be paying for permission to train on those. I think we'll see more specialized training data potentially in the future, but things like conversations, YouTube videos, podcasts are also useful data sources. So the whole idea of LLMs is that they use unsupervised learning. You throw all this data at them; they figure out the patterns.

Could public data be polluted by junk and bad actors?

16:39 Data quality is obviously going to be an issue for these systems. There are lots of ways of deceiving them, of hacking them, of working like a bad actor. I don't necessarily think it's going to be by poisoning the datasets themselves because the datasets are the Internet, Project Gutenberg, and Wikipedia. They're pretty resistant to that kind of mass poisoning, but I think data quality is an issue we should be concerned about.

Recommended Resources:

• “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality” | Harvard Business School
• Geoffrey Hinton
• Project Gutenberg
• Gemini AI
• “Google’s Gemini Controversy Explained: AI Model Criticized By Musk And Others Over Alleged Bias” | Forbes
• Devin AI 
• Karim Lakhani

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Pennsylvania

His Work:

• Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI 

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How much has our understanding of choice evolved throughout history? And what has that invention meant to how we experience and acknowledge freedom? 

Sophia Rosenfeld is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on the history of things taken for granted. Her books, Common Sense: A Political History, Democracy and Truth: A Short History, and most recently The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, examine the origins of ideas that have become so commonplace in our modern world, they can often go overlooked. 

Sophia and Greg discuss the historical role of choice in consumerism, politics, and personal relationships, how choice initially got a reputation for being a feminine phenomenon, what choice has meant for concepts like freedom, and the political evolution of common sense in today’s world. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Has choice become the ultimate measure of freedom?

47:24: Choice once had this kind of very moral apparatus around it. And, as I mentioned, over time, choice became more, I would call, value-neutral. It meant pick what you like. I don't have to like your choices; it's just what you prefer. But the strange third twist in this story is that just having the choices itself started to become a moral good. Just saying choice itself was the good, and I think that's not always right because there are certainly moments in which choice is freeing, but there are also choices that are not freeing—there are choices that are contrary to our well-being, there are places where choice is not a benefit. This choice of any weapon to buy, for instance, is a different kind of decision than saying choice in profession. Your choice in profession has little bearing on me. Your choice in weapon might have a large bearing on me or the other guy down the street. So I do question the assumption that more choice, more opportunities, more options is always preferable.

How choice became the definition of freedom

37:22: In the face of the threat of communism on the one hand and the threat of fascism on the other, one thing that starts to emerge most strongly in the U.S., but also in other parts of the sort of allied world, is a convergence around political choice and commercial choice, saying that what freedom is, is having choice in these two different domains. And from that point forward, I think you might say that democracy and capitalism get wedded together around the notion that choice is freedom.

Is having more choices always a good thing?

42:42: We've now seen policies emerge on the right and on the left framed around choice. School choice is usually more appealing on the right, reproductive choice more appealing on the left. So, I would have said that choice is one of those things that we are so used to that it's a kind of unquestioned value across the political spectrum. We might fight about what should be and by whom, but we don't fight about the value of choice itself. And to this day, things are marketed all the time around choice. You look at billboards or look at advertising anywhere you are, and you'll see choice is still a really common term—whether it's banking, house cleaning, or anything else. That may be ending in some spheres on the right.

Recommended Resources:

• Thomas Paine
• Alexis de Tocqueville
• The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz
• Jane Austen
• Hannah Arendt 

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Pennsylvania
• Professional Website

Her Work:

• The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
• Common Sense: A Political History
• Democracy and Truth: A Short History 

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How important is it for business leaders to not only identify talent within their organization, but to take meaningful action to actually develop that talent? On the flip side, how handicapping can it be for an organization to keep employees who are holding the company back from success? 

Bill Conaty is a top former HR executive at GE and co-author of The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers. His 40 years at GE and his time as an advisory partner for Clayton, Dubilier & Rice has made him an expert in identifying and developing raw talent at an organization. 

Bill joins Greg to share insights from his time at GE, emphasizing the necessity of integrating HR with other business functions and the importance of having a seat at the table. They also discuss GE's unique HR practices, such as talent development programs, the role of corporate audit staff, and the evolution of HR through different business eras, including the impact of COVID-19 and the DEI movement.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Candor comes first trust comes later

41:55: Candor comes first; trust comes later. In other words, we always—through our leadership development in session C, we had to say, "We always had the list of development need, one or two." And it wasn't that I needed to go to the next course at Crotonville or that I'm too tough on myself. It had to do with legitimate development needs, and you had to be able to trust the company before you could cite, you know, "I don't have great listening skills," or—and you had to feel like, "Whatever you stipulate, we're going to work with you on that." And we said: a development need is not a fatal flaw. A development need is only a development need as long as you address it. If you don't, it can become a fatal flaw.

HR Success Starts with the CEO

05:41: No matter how good of an HR leader you are, if the CEO doesn't have high expectations for what he wants out of that function, you're in for a long day.

What do we look for in leaders?

34:50: What do we look for in leaders? We started out with three E's—energy, energize, and edge—and so that's a green light, red light, yellow light. We'd go out to all the businesses, and we came away from one, and the leader had dynamite energy, could energize others, more than enough edge, and his numbers sucked. So, I said to Jack, "We assume this, but we need a fourth E, and that's called execution."

 Do you need a different kind of talent master to evaluate the talent versus the values?

53:26: I think the values piece is—I think it's fairly easy to identify, but it's fairly easy to identify. If you have a real intimacy in the organization. If you don't, if you're just standing off in the distance and applauding the numbers that are coming in, you can have a real kick-ass leader that people really don't enjoy working for and probably won't work for that long.

Recommended Resources:

• Clayton, Dubilier & Rice
• Jack Welch 
• Jeff Immelt 
• Crotonville
• Omar Ishrak
• Dave Ulrich 
• Steve Kerr (bschool professor not coach)

Guest Profile:

• Author bio
• Expert Profile at Strayer University

His Work:

• The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers

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Contrary to popular belief, global migration levels have remained relatively stable. So why has it become such a hot button issue on the political world stage? 

Hein de Haas is a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam and an expert in migration. His book, How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics delves into migration as a historical and ongoing phenomenon, comparing past and present migration patterns.

Hein and Greg discuss common misconceptions about migration, why people migrate in the first place, and what the actual impact of migration is on the economy, culture, and climate. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Political showmanship won’t solve migration

26:24: There are no easy solutions for complex migration problems. So that migration can cause problems in places where migrants concentrate, and not everybody is happy about it, particularly because employers reap the biggest benefits of their cheap labor—I can fully understand that. But the kind of solutions that politicians sell to us have more to do with bold acts of political showmanship than any really serious effort to control and manage migration.

Migration is part of development

15:07: We need a new paradigm, a new theory on migration—that migration is part of development. This is not about liking migration or not or denying that migration can also lead to tensions and problems. But if you deny that fundamental reality, you also see it in middle-income countries, where many governments have tried to stop or curb rural-to-urban migration. It has all failed.

Are politicians in denial about the realities of migration?

02:53: Both in the U.S., but also across the Atlantic in Europe, politicians have been basically in denial for over the last four to five decades about the realities of migration. That's the reason why these policies always fail. It’s a lack of fundamental understanding of migration as a social and economic process that needs to be the foundation of any policy. The migration issue has been completely hijacked by politicians, with pro- and anti-migration debates that don't really engage with the realities of migration. That huge gap is really the problem.

Recommended Resources:

• Economist Michael Piore books 

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Amsterdam
• Professional Website

His Work:

• How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics

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As conversation swirls around how the U.S. is going to pay back its $30 trillion debt, old concerns about public debt have been raised once again.

Barry Eichengreen is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley and one of the leading experts on international currency markets and their history. His books include Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era, and most recently, In Defense of Public Debt. 

Barry and Greg delve into the pros and cons of public debt, the mechanisms ensuring sovereign debt repayment, and the potential risks of inflation, and put modern debt levels into perspective by looking back at other major financial events in history. They also discuss the impact of political polarization on long-term financial decisions.

**This episode was recorded in 2021.** 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Napoleonic Wars
• Corporation of Foreign Bondholders
• Foreign Bondholders Protective Council
• Mario Draghi
• Ricardian Equivalence 
• Anne Osborn Krueger
• Argentine Debt Crisis

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at UC Berkeley
• Professional Profile on X

His Work:

• In Defense of Public Debt
• The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era
• Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System
• Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History 
• Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System
• Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939

The political capacity to issue public debt goes hand in hand with financial development

31:25: If you go back and look at the history, you see the value to financial markets of sovereign debt—that as sovereigns’ and states’ debts begin to be recognized as safe and liquid with political checks and balances, they become safe. With the development of markets in them, they become more liquid. They're then used as collateral for other borrowing and lending, and you accelerate the development of private financial markets. So, I think the political capacity to issue public debt goes hand in hand with financial development, and financial development, historically, is an important component of economic development.

Public debt as a lifeline in times of crisis

02:58: Public debt has been critically important in history. To enable states to meet emergencies—so, if you look at the history, it has been issued typically in wartime to defend the realm. Admittedly, states and rulers have issued it to fight offensive as well as defensive wars, but also to meet threats, pandemics, natural disasters, and other national emergencies.

Why public debt levels depend on politics and time

34:50: I don't think economic science is advanced to the point where we can identify an optimal or uniquely sustainable level of public debt. I think politics impinges on this as well. So, if you ask a German politician and an American politician what an appropriate or optimal level of public debt is, they'll give you very different answers. Economic circumstances change over time as well. So, public U.S. public debt in the hands of the public has basically tripled since the turn of the century. Debt service—interest paid on that debt as a share of GDP—hasn't budged. Interest rates have come down, and they've been trending downward for the better part of 30 or 40 years. That has made it easier to sustain a heavier level of public debt.

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What are the ramifications of holding a fixed mindset over a growth mindset? How does it alter the mechanics of the people within a company and what can be done to shift an entrenched culture mindset?

Mary C. Murphy is a Professor of Psychology and Brain Science at the University of Indiana, and the author of the book Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations.

Greg and Mary discuss the differences between growth and fixed mindsets, the significant impact of environmental factors on a given mindset, and the concept of mindset culture. Mary shares insights from her research and personal experiences, including her collaboration with Carol Dweck on the external factors influencing mindset. Their conversation covers the practical applications of growth mindset principles in education and corporate settings, how to implement effective learning systems, the role of leadership in fostering a culture of growth, and the importance of reframing effort in relation to ability. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Carol Dweck
• Joseph Addison
• Vitality Curve
• Kathleen Hogan
• Satya Nadella
• Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset
• Jean Twenge
• Sara Blakely
• Yerkes–Dodson Law

Guest Profile:

• MaryCMurphy.com
• Faculty Profile at the University of Indiana Bloomington
• Social Profile on Instagram
• Social Profile on X

Her Work:

• Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations
• Google Scholar Page

Reframing effort and ability through growth mindset

41:55: So, what the growth mindset culture does—and what we do when we are creating growth mindset learning environments or working environments in companies—is that we're really trying to reframe that relationship between effort and ability. Pointing out, telling stories, showing people, having them do self-reflection on where they made the most progress, right? Where do you actually see the best outcomes coming? Is it always effortless, or have there been challenges that have been overcome, strategies that had to be pivoted, and teams that had to come together, right? So, illuminating the process of success helps people understand whether or not effort is what's required for ability, required for high success, right? And strong success and excellence. 

Why growth cultures are more diverse and inclusive

49:36: In a culture of growth, it's much more diverse naturally. Why? Because it's not about matching to some narrow prototype of success that looks or feels a certain way. Instead, it's about who can grow the most, who can develop the most, who can pivot, who's overcome challenges. And when we look at our society and look at who has overcome challenges, who has actually had to pivot, try new things, and overcome these structural barriers, we see that that's a much more diverse group of people. And it's not just focused on any one identity. And so, we see that in these cultures of growth, they attract, retain, promote, and positively evaluate a much wider variety of people.

How do we mirror growth to inspire workplace success?

34:50: As adults in the workplace setting, if we can create relationships where we actually show employees and our direct reports—individual contributors—where we have seen their growth and development, appreciate that, and mirror it for them, it puts them in that growth mindset. This makes them willing to try something new, to continue to push, and to continue to develop either in that area or in a new area that's required in the moment. And so, I think that's one thing that we can do pretty easily—to just be that mirror for process, growth, and development for people and help them reflect on that for themselves. 

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What are the problems facing academic journals today? What changes to the system could be made to address them? How could being more open about studies that aren’t successful actually be a success strategy overall?

Faye Flam is a science and medical journalist, a columnist for Bloomberg, host of the podcast Follow the Science, and the author of The Score: The Science of the Male Sex Drive.

Greg and Faye discuss the importance and challenges of science journalism. Their conversation touches on the role of science journalists in translating and evaluating scientific data, the replication crisis, the influence of fraudulent research, the dynamics of public trust in science, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public health communication. They also examine the issue with the growing proliferation of deepfakes, ‘fake news,’ and the importance of maintaining journalistic integrity in an increasingly digital age.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Replication Crisis
• Science Journal
• American Institute of Physics
• American Chemical Society
• Gary Taubes
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
• Peter M. Sandman Risk Communication Website

Guest Profile:

• Faye Flam Personal Website
• Wikipedia Profile
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on X
• Social Profile on BlueSky
• Facebook Page

Her Work:

• The Score: The Science of the Male Sex Drive
• Bloomberg Articles
• Forbes Articles
• Follow the Science Podcast

Science journalism and the challenge of neutrality

38:23: I think that it's harder these days to sell the kind of story that I used to think was, that I still think is, kind of the heart and soul of science journalism, which is to try to separate the science from the values, try to understand why people are disagreeing, try to understand where the science has evolved, where the science might have been wrong in the past. So even something as fraught as whether sex is binary, I think at least in the past, that's something you could tackle as a journalist without taking sides, but just adding clarity and adding context and saying, you know, these people disagree because they have different values and they want to use different language. They're interpreting things differently. But there are certain aspects of biology that everybody agrees on.

Rethinking failure in science

10:08:  People have to rethink the meaning of failure. If you have a hypothesis that's kind of a long shot, and you test it, and you do a really good experiment, and you find out the hypothesis didn't hold up, well, you've tested that. Maybe that's something you can rule out. That should be an acceptable, perfectly normal part of science. It's not a failure per se. It's just that sometimes you have to rule something out that's a long shot.

On the confidence trap of AI

49:01:  One of the hazards of AI is that people—it's so confident—it answers questions with so much confidence, and it sounds so smart that people just assume it's right. And it's often not right. People call them hallucinations, but it can just be, with some subtle thing in your prompt, right? I think there is going to be a period where people are seduced into believing AI because it can be so incredibly smart, and it makes these statements with so much confidence. But a lot of it—there is this kind of chaos to it. Little changes in the prompt will completely change the answer.

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When did humans learn to communicate through language? Did it coincide with the invention of fire? Or was it more a gradual process that involved much more than just making sounds with our mouths? 

Steven Mithen is a professor of prehistory at the University of Reading and the author of numerous books on human evolution including, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World, and most recently, The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved. His work weaves together disciplines like psychology, linguistics, and genetics to chart the history and evolution of the ways our minds make sense of the world.

Greg and Steven discuss the integrative nature of language evolution, the role of social and physical environments in shaping language, and the interconnectedness of music and language in bonding and communication. Steven also shares how studying ancient civilizations’ water management strategies unveils lessons for today’s global water crisis. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Jerry Fodor 
• Howard Gardner 
• Charles Darwin 
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Johann Gottfried Herder
• Richard Wrangham
• Noam Chomsky
• Ferdinand de Saussure
• Linguistic relativity - Sapir-Whorf

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Reading

His Work:

• The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved 
• The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science
• After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC 
• The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body
• Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World

Gesture evolved with language but never drove it forward

17:43: Gesture has always accompanied language but never driven it forward. Music's maybe a little bit different, really. It seems to me musical sounds we make are almost more like gestures. And I think that time of moving to full bipedalism at about two million years ago, did really make bodies hugely more expressive. And it was a time when not only body language became important, but I think dance and singing, stamping feet, slapping thighs—all of that acting  as a really important way of building social bonds, of doing some sort of communication, pushed forward that social interaction communication.

Language shapes perception

51:14:  Different languages have different concepts of how the world is and should be seen, and that does influence how you perceive and think about it.

Language shapes culture and complex thought

25:01: I think we're mistaken if we think social bonding is the only role of language or necessarily the most important. There are at least two other things that it really does. Just a transmission of information from generation to generation. What we don't see in our human ancestors, like Homo erectus, and then our relatives like the Neanderthals, is only accumulation of culture; it doesn't seem to build from one generation to the next. And I suspect that's because there is a limitation on the way they're using language and the ability to gradually construct more complex ideas. But the other way we use language, and the other important one, is for thinking about complex ideas that I think we just can't do without it. And that's where a metaphor comes in—I think it's hugely important.

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