unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

While Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is still the most widely accepted, it may be missing a key component: cooperation. And how can mathematical equations help us understand this fundamental piece of evolutionary biology? 

Martin Nowak is a professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. His books like, Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life and SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed use the intersection of mathematics and biology to delve deeper into our understanding of evolution theory. His latest book, Beyond, is an exploration of how mathematics and religion are intertwined.  

Martin and Greg discuss the five mechanisms of cooperation including direct and indirect reciprocity, how game theory evolved from economics as a way to explain strategic decisions of humans, and the role of religion and spirituality in promoting cooperative norms.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

To what extent is punishment necessary to keep cooperation going?

27:38: ​​Punishment, if you really think about it, is a terrible idea. Because, in most cases, punishment is not done for any noble reason. In most cases, punishment is just an act of violence. And every well-ordered society absolutely wants to make sure that people don't take the law into their own hands — that they just don't punish others. This is, for me, the principle of a functioning society: that we do not punish each other. So, for me, cooperation often means to refrain from punishment. And punishment is a very dangerous weapon. And I think many people have actually understood that critique — that punishment between individuals is a bad idea. And then they are still out there to say that it could be more useful if punishment is done by institutions. But also here, I'm very cautious. Because institutions are also not necessarily the best players all the time. They are the powerful players, and they could also use it inappropriately. So, I think that punishment is extremely problematic.

Does mathematics lead us to God?

43:47: It is not true that science explains everything. And now you should pause and ask yourself, so there is something which is independent of science, which is deep truth, which is absolute truth, which is unchanging truth. Where does that live? You know, where is that actually, if it's not in the atoms, if it's not in this, in the material world? So, this leads us to mathematical platonism. So, for me, mathematics is a step toward spirituality. It's a step toward the divine, as you say. And so, does mathematics lead us to God? Yes. The answer is yes, in my opinion, because it leads to a platonic heaven. And that is already the step of God. Does biology lead to God? Yes. Also because, in biology, the best understanding of evolution is mathematical. And so again, you need mathematics in order to understand evolution.

What is the mechanism of direct reciprocity?

15:12: The idea here is that, yes, interactions are repeated, but not necessarily between the same two people. So, I might help somebody who is a complete stranger. Or, in my class, I often talk about the New York subway hero, this brave man who saved another person who fell in front of the train. And, sort of, this isn't really the beginning of a long, repeated game. So, the question is, why do we have this instinct that we want to help? Even if it is with somebody we don't know, presumably a direct interaction is unlikely. And here, the proposal is that this works because of reputation. So, you help somebody, and that gets you the reputation of a valuable member, which is a person who receives help. Or, you refuse help to somebody, and that then will earn you other refusals in the future.

Transcending the ego to unveil the nameless self

50:05: Once you start to love the divine, you treat people differently; it becomes embracing. And so, if you also start to learn the difference between the ego and the self, there's this shell, and we are enslaved by the shell. And this shell has a name. And that name—we want to make that name famous. Then, we are sad if other people are against us. But inside us, there is the self. And the self is nameless, and the self is untouchable. The self can only be touched by us, not by others

Recommended Resources:

• Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern
• John Maynard Smith
• Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics by Josef Hofbauer and Karl Sigmund
• W. D. Hamilton
• Noam Chomsky
• Wesley Autrey
• “Winners Don’t Punish” by Anna Dreber, David Rand, Drew Fudenberg, and Martin Nowak
• Error catastrophe

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Harvard University
• Professional Website

His Work:

• Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life
• SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed
• Beyond
• Virus dynamics: Mathematical principles of immunology and virology
• Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation

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Why might our brains be keeping us in the dark about our own motives? What's the reason humans give to charity? How do cultural norms lead to continual efforts to signal to our potential allies?

Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University . His latest two books are titled, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, and The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.

Robin and Greg discuss the discrepancies between what we say and our true intentions.Robin shares how human interaction within our discussions is less about the content and more about social positioning and signaling. Robin talks about the intricate dance of conversations, where showing status, expressing care, and signaling allyship are at the forefront. They also wrestle with the concept of luxury goods and their role in consumer behavior, challenging the conventional wisdom about why we buy what we buy and the messages we're really sending with our choices.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

On conscious mind and social norm

23:39: Humans have rules about what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do, especially regarding each other. And we really care a lot about our associates not violating those norms, and we're very eager to find rivals violating them and call them out on that. And that's just a really big thing in our lives. And in fact, it's so big that plausibly your conscious mind, the part of your mind I'm talking to, isn't the entire mind, you have noticed. You've got lots of stuff going on in your head that you're not very conscious of, but your conscious mind is the part of you whose job it is mainly to watch what you're doing and at all moments have a story about why you're doing it and why this thing you're doing, for the reason you're doing it,isn't something violating norms. If you didn't have this conscious mind all the time putting together the story, you'd be much more vulnerable to other people claiming that you're violating norms and accusing you of being a bad person for doing bad things.

Our individual doesn’t care much about norms

20:25: Sometimes norms are functional and helpful, and sometimes they're not. Our individual incentive doesn't care much about that. Our incentive is to not violate the norms and not be caught violating the norms, regardless of whether they're good or bad norms, regardless of what function they serve.

Why do people not want to subsidize luxury items, but they do subsidize education?

46:34: So part of the problem is that we often idealize some things and even make them sacred. And then, in their role as something sacred, we are willing to subsidize them and sacrifice for them. And then it's less about maybe their consequences and more about showing our devotion to the sacred. In some sense, sacred things are the things we are most eager to show our devotion to. And that's why people who want to promote things want us to see them as sacred. So, schools have succeeded in getting many people to see schools as a sacred venture and therefore worthy of extra subsidy. And they're less interested in maybe the calculation of the job consequences of education because they just see education itself as sacred.

On notion of cultural drift

47:55: So human superpower is cultural evolution. This is why we can do things so much better than other animals. The key mechanism of culture is that we copy the behaviors of others. In order to make that work, we have to differentially copy the behavior that's better, not the behavior that's worse. And to do that, we need a way to judge who is more successful so that we will copy the successful. So our estimate of what counts as success—who are the people around us who we will count as successful and worthy of emulation—is a key element of culture. And that's going to drive a lot of our choices, including our values and norms. We're going to have compatible and matching with our concept of who around us is the most admirable, the most worthy of celebration and emulation.

Recommended Resources:

• François de La Rochefoucauld
• Microsociology
• Patek Philippe Watches
• Consumption
• Parochialism
• The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
• Evolution

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at George Mason University
• Blog - Overcoming Bias
• Podcast - Minds Almost Meeting
• Profile on LinkedIn
• Social Profile on X

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
• The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth

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What patterns can connect and unify biology, society, and the environment? How do cities outlast empires and survive unimaginable destruction? Why do buildings and trees have natural height limits?

Geoffrey West is a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and also the author of the book Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. 

Geoffrey and Greg discuss the intricate tapestry of complexity science, where the life of cities and the corporate world intertwine with the principles of biology. Geoffrey's expertise is in linking these seemingly disparate realms in a panoramic view of the universal laws that govern growth, innovation, and sustainability. Geoffrey explains how scaling laws inform everything from the rhythm of every heart in every animal to the pace of city life.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why is it that companies die more quickly than cities?

52:57: ​​If you look at the biology and most of the scaling curves, the points lie very close to the scaling line. Cities, there's some variance; you know, there's much more variance, but it's still pretty good. Companies, it's much broader, a much bigger band of variance. Not surprisingly, because animals have evolved over hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years, cities for hundreds of years to maybe a few thousand, possibly, and companies are tens of years, if you're lucky, in some cases, it's not surprising that you get tremendous variance. So, if you believe that the scaling laws are a tendency towards optimizing something to be decided, it's not surprising that companies will have a lot of variants because, if they haven't been around very long, everything's still sort of evolving and adapting.

Social interaction and the urban pace

48:26: Giving rise to more social interactions, more ideas; and so on also leads to the increasing pace of life in a systematic or predictable way, as distinct from biology, where that economy of life is the slowing of the pace of life. Everything slows down the bigger you are; you live longer, and everything takes longer.

The classic agglomeration effects of what city does

40:36: The fundamental structure of a social network is that A talks to B, B talks to C, C talks back to A, and we build on each other. We keep building on these ideas; I mean, effectively, they may be stupid ideas, and they may be wrong, and no one gives a damn about any of it, but we forget them afterward, so in almost all cases, it's irrelevant. On the other hand, the thing that's extraordinary about that is that dynamic is what produces a theory of relativity or a Google or a Microsoft or UC Berkeley or whatever, you know, produces; that's what it does. That's what we're here for. So these are the classic agglomeration effects of what a city does, and this is just putting it into a network language; it's the interaction within these networks and the structure of those networks. 

The scale of life’s capillary networks

20:11: The thing that distinguishes you from a whale is that, in this context, we have the same capillaries, but the network is so much bigger. So that's the idea. And there's this shrew; you can barely see it's less than a millimeter, but the whale is like, you could drive a car through it, and so, but down at the capillary end, but the other end. of the network when they're the same. So that's the idea because you build up and use those as building blocks.

Recommended Resources:

• Economies of Scale
• Diseconomies of Scale
• Charles Darwin
• Isaac Newton
• Max Kleiber
• Brian J. Enquist
• Maxwell's equations
• Invariant
• Optima for Animals: Revised Edition
• D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
• Galileo Galilei
• Sigmoid Function
• Lewis Mumford
• Jane Jacobs
• Jack Welch
• Malthusianism

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at the Santa Fe Institute
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
• Geoffrey’s TED Talk

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Business leaders face uncertainty everyday, it’s unavoidable. But one of the most important things leaders can do to help their companies thrive is to confront uncertainty and reframe it as an opportunity for growth. 

Rebecca Homkes is a lecturer at London Business School’s Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, a faculty member at Duke Corporate Executive Education, and the author of the book, Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times.

Rebecca and Greg discuss her three steps for growth strategy and how the pandemic shaped these ideas, the significance of utilizing uncertainty as an advantage, and why agility must be aligned with strategy if you want to avoid chaos.  

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Agility without strategy is chaos

44:45: What I hear often, and I'm sure you've heard something similar is, strategy is great. But we're not going to do strategy this year because we want to be more agile. And you have to pause, smile, and say, the definition of agility is making good decisions quickly aligned with strategy. Lacking a strategy, you cannot have agility. You have speed, but it's not aligned speed. And that's the key words you're looking for: aligned speed. Alignment without speed is too slow to matter. Speed without alignment is chaotic. You're building aligned speed, which comes from the true definition of agility: making good decisions quickly aligned with strategy. But you can't do that lacking a value-creating strategy, because then I don't know what's most important and why. And I might be making great decisions, and you're making decisions, but if they're not aligned with each other, we're not rowing in the same direction as an organization.

Directions give teams alignment

25:04: Directions are okay. And the direction gives the team the alignment they need from leadership while preventing you from falling into that delusion trap that you've got. Because as soon as you've communicated a firm message, you will also be less likely to be heads up looking for any information that might go against it.

What's the advantage of really surfacing uncertainty as one of the key things that leaders need to focus on?

02:30: If you want to grow consistently and successfully through every market cycle, you've got to start by reframing. The definition of uncertainty is a series of future events which may or may not occur. Whether or not those events are good or bad depends on what we're trying to do and how we're set up. So if you see your role as doing that, figure out what we're trying to do, and then get set up rather than reducing uncertainty, you've just opened the opportunity set to an order of magnitude more than others you're competing against.

The best pivots are changes

38:15: The best pivots are changes, not these big, massive "we're doing A, and now we're going to do B." It's about these small micro-changes and micro-adjustments as we're learning, and not necessarily tactical, right? But these micro-changes and adjustments—you know, this was one of my muscle memories and battles—you know, I'm going to kind of shift, like, you know, of these two sub-things I'm resourcing, I'm going to go from one to the other. And I'm doing that because I've got my belief tracker up.

Recommended Resources:

• The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
• OODA loop
• Porter’s Five Forces

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website

Her Work:

• Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times

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In recent decades, economic theory has made inroads into the study and practice of law, mainly in the domain of commercial transactions and corporate organization. But economics may also have a lot to say about how our governments are organized and how political actors engage in bargains and exchange.

Professors Robert Cooter and Michael Gilbert are leading experts in the field of economics and law. Robert is the Herman F. Slevin Professor of Law at UC Berkeley and the co-author of the textbook, Law and Economics. Michael is the vice dean of University of Virginia’s law school. He and Robert’s new book, Public Law and Economics, explores the impact economic scholarship has on the study and practice of public law like the separation of government powers and elections.

Robert, Michael, and Greg discuss why the disciplines of economics and law go hand in hand, how economics can inform the behavioral impact of legal rules, and how economic theories play out in a judicial context.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why law and economics has become so important in law schools

02:40 First of all, much of economics is about incentives, that is to say, the reasons why people are motivated to do things. For example, if the price goes up, there's an incentive for people to buy less of the good. It turns out that the law can be regarded as an incentive system. For example, if the speed limit is increased from 55 to 65 miles an hour, that provides incentives for people to go ahead and drive faster. Furthermore, if the fine is increased from 100 to 150 dollars for exceeding the speed limit, that's an incentive for people not to exceed the speed limit. So, it turns out that many of the laws can be regarded as incentives to change people's behavior.  

How economics can often be applied to humanistic practice of interpretation that lawyers are involved in

52:58 My impression is that a lot of interpretation, especially in the hard cases where there's room to maneuver, it ends up being a function of people's intuitions. And sometimes, their intuitions are good, but sometimes they lead us astray. And economics isn't about a single person's intuitions; it's programmatic, it's general, it's built on a set of tools and assumptions that you can pinpoint. It isn't just myths in one person's mind. And I think that can be very helpful for interpretation.

Understanding what efficiency means

15:23 People equate efficiency with money and profit. And that's not what efficiency is, as any economist will tell you. Efficiency is about the satisfaction of people's preferences, and economists place nearly no limits or constraints on what the content of those preferences are.

Is having more judiciary independence always better?

43:51 You need independence in order to free the judges from outside influence and allow them to apply the law correctly and objectively, rather than taking bribes or deciding based on threats or whatever else. On the other hand, there's something a little perplexing about this. So, if you give them too much independence, you're empowering them to decide the law objectively, free from influence, and that's good. But you're also empowering them to do anything they want. Maybe they'll ignore the law. Maybe they'll read their own preferences under the law. Where's the constraint now? (44:36) The other thing I'll say about this is that almost every state elects judges in one capacity or another. And when I've talked to people, especially non-US citizens, they just across the board think this system is absolutely crazy because it just cuts too much into the independence of the courts. And maybe it does. And yet, I think most states are perceived to have the rule of law and have for decades and decades. So we’re constantly navigating this trade-off.

Recommended Resources:

• Richard Posner 
• Coase theorem

Guest Profile:

• Robert Cooter’s faculty profile at UC Berkeley
• Michael Gilbert’s faculty profile at University of Virginia

Their Work:

• Public Law and Economics

Robert's Work:

• Law and Economics
• Solomon's Knot: How Law Can End the Poverty of Nations
• The strategic constitution

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How are our fates in society like hikers on a mountain, climbing together? In our ever increasingly interconnected world how can one balance the rewards of a connected planet against the perils that come with it?

Ian Goldin is an Oxford University Professor of Globalisation and Development, Senior Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, and the author of several books. His upcoming book is titled, Age of the City: Why our Future will be Won or Lost Together.

Greg and Ian discuss intertwined nature of global connectivity and the systematic risks it poses. Ian explains how pandemics, like COVID-19, highlight these vulnerabilities, emphasizing the need for global cooperation and resilience. Greg and Ian explore modern urbanization, emphasizing how the future is increasingly urban and the challenges and opportunities this presents for sustainability and community within cities. At the end Ian leaves us inspired to adopt global stewardship in our daily lives, in a lesson he learned working with Nelson Mandela.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Is the future more urban?

39:55:  Cities are going through a transformation, but one thing I would bet on is that the rate of urbanization will not decrease, and that's true in the U.S. and it's true elsewhere around the world. Where the most growth of cities is in developing countries with big challenges, the pandemic posed a big challenge, climate is a massive challenge. Cities are hotter than other places, so how they cope with heat stress, with water stress, with flooding becomes important. Ocean rise is a massive challenge for seaboard cities…So, big challenges, but the future will be more and more urban.

Cities are the future

40:55: Cities are the future, but making them livable and sustainable is a massive challenge; getting to zero carbon will make them resilient to climate pressures.

Why do people flock to urban Centers for choice and community?

45:37: People want to be near other people who are like them, creative, and where they'll have high efficiency. What we find in cities is that we have many more options. We can choose the lifestyle we want, whether you are young or old, have sexual preferences, religious preferences, fashion preferences, music preferences, or food preferences. All of these things can be satisfied in a city, which they never could in a small town, let alone in the countryside. And so, the more that we move into a world where our own preferences become important and we can be anywhere, we're going to be in a big city because that's where we're going to satisfy our preferences.

Is there always going to be a trade off that when we increase connectedness, we are necessarily  increasing risks?

03:12: Entanglement is the underbelly, the other side of connectivity, and I think it happens at all dimensions. If you think about it, one's own life, the more you get to know other people and get involved in them, it brings great joy and many benefits, but it can also bring great sadness. And I think it's like that at a macro scale as well, that we now increasingly recognize that we are entangled around the world in multiple ways. And that means that we can benefit enormously. A vaccine can be developed in one place and be around the world, or the worldwide web can join us all. We can hear new music or fashion, go to other places, meet incredible people, and benefit from incredible ideas, but we are also more vulnerable as a result. And so the great challenge of globalization, I think, is how does one harvest the upside and manage the downside.

Recommended Resources:

• Globalization
• Suez Canal
• Henry Paulson
• Deregulation
• World Bank
• OECD
• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
• Renaissance
• Niccolò Machiavelli
• House of Medici
• Girolamo Savonarola
• Martin Luther
• John Calvin
• Socrates
• Aristotle
• Humanism
• Nelson Mandela

Guest Profile:

• IanGoldin.org
• Faculty Profile at the University of Oxford
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Age of the City: Why our Future will be Won or Lost Together
• The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do about It
• Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World
• Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
• Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future
• Development: A Very Short Introduction
• Is the Planet Full?
• Divided Nations: Why global governance is failing, and what we can do about it
• The Pursuit of Development: Economic Growth, Social Change and Ideas
• Globalization for Development: Meeting New Challenges

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What is the mindset that's reshaping how companies and investors forge paths to success from beyond the balance sheets? How are the staunch principles of Net Present Value giving way to strategies that are as nimble and adventurous as the startups they finance?

Ilya Strebulaev is a Professor of Private Equity at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Director of their Venture Capital Initiative, and the co-author of the new book The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth with Alex Deng.

Ilya and Greg discuss the layers of a dynamic business landscape, revealing how traditional corporate strategies are being outpaced by those who dare to think like venture capitalists. Ilya describes how top venture capitalists operate and why embracing their methodologies is critical in a world where change is the only constant. Ilya shares tales of contrarian investment decisions, the growing presence of corporate venture capital, and the converging paths of institutional and corporate VCs.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The venture mindset

42:02: The venture mindset doesn't mean that you have a perfectly crystal ball recognizing these great founders and great ideas. The venture mindset means that you, in an organization, build structure, build decision-making process, what we also call it, build racetracks, so that again and again and again, you will be able not just to spot but also to realize those unusual contrarian investment opportunities. And I think that most successful VC firms that I studied—well, actually all successful VC firms that I studied that have been successful for quite a bit of time, all follow these principles.

How having a prepared mind helps you to invest right away

16:27: In fact, the smartest decisions are never fast. You just prepare yourself for this decision. 

Institutional VCs vs. Corporate VCs

25:50: Institutional VCs have, first, much larger LinkedIn profiles. Larger meaning, not just that they have more information there, but have more connections. Their network is much, much larger. 26:10: Corporate VCs' LinkedIn are much, much smaller. But there's something else: if you look at corporate VCs' LinkedIn profiles, very likely, in fact, their connections will be within their four walls. Or maybe if you come from another organization, there will be these two four walls. So that there will be fewer organizations where their connections are coming from. And you could see it if you map them. But for institutional VCs, it's not just that you have three times more connections. But they're very different. 26:53: Because I think the diversity in constructive networking, as I call it, also brings a lot of new opportunities. And again, you need this, and this is a part of the venture mindset.

Is dissenting from the consensus important in the venture mindset?

35:20:There is something else, which I think is a huge part of the venture mindset, that if everybody invests and there's a craze about it, obviously, it means there are also going to be crazy valuations. That also means that you're likely too late for the party. It's likely that even if everybody is right, your return is going to be right. And as a result of that, I think the best way those who follow the venture mindset think about this is that we have to be right, but there should be a lot of disagreement. If there is consensus that you know, crypto is going to be the next craze. Well, right now, generative AI is going to be the next craze, okay? If everybody is right, then, in fact, you're going to be right, but your returns are going to be relatively small. You would like to be right when you are what we call in the book Mr. Contrarian—somebody who goes against the crowd.

Recommended Resources:

• Net Present Value
• Open Innovation
• Blue Ocean Strategy
• Jensen Huang
• Louis Pasteur
• Drew Houston

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Stanford GSB
• Profile on LinkedIn
• Wikipedia Page
• IlyaStrebulaev.com

His Work:

• The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth
• Google Scholar Page
• Cornerstone Research Page

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Are there reasons to doubt  the conventional wisdom of greenery as the cure-all for urban ills. What are the roots of the Garden City movement, and how has the reality of it been different than the theory?

Des Fitzgerald is a professor of medical humanities and social sciences at University College Cork Ireland, and also the author of a recent book titled, The Living City: Why Cities Don't Need to Be Green to Be Great. (released in the UK with a different title: The City of Today is a Dying Thing.

Greg and Des discuss how urban landscapes aren't just about aesthetics; they're intricately linked to our national identity and cognitive functions. Des helps us uncover how architecture influences our sense of place and impacts our brains, and explores the role of culture in shaping our environmental perceptions. The conversation spans everything from peat briquettes to Georgian-style facades. Des also guides us through an enlightening discussion on the burgeoning field of medical humanities and the innovative concept of green social prescribing within the NHS.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The transformative shift in environmental neuroscience

39:32: Something that is becoming really interesting in this space is the emergence of environmental neuroscience, as I think a relatively new, increasingly interesting, and powerful discipline. Environmental neuroscience exists for a whole bunch of reasons, but certainly the increasing sense that we're able to take a brain measure while a person moves around the space in three dimensions. That's, I think it's something that can be done imperfectly now. It's still very much in progress, but at least we have a horizon in which that's going to become pretty possible at kind of high-resolution research grade relatively soon. And that is transformative, actually, if the three dimensions of a space become truly available as a variable for brain measurement. Then something does happen, and something does change in that moment.

What’s wrong with planting a lot of trees?

43:13: What concerns me about urban tree planting is what we're not talking about when we're talking about urban trees, right? So the amount of social and public problems that trees are meant to solve is ridiculous. It's everything from mental health to youth crime to skills in some parts of England, where they're planting trees in an English town because it's like the people of the town have low skills for some reason. It just seems to go for not tackling boring social problems, right? So, for instance, it's very real that there are major mental health problems in cities. I think there is something very serious about the way we have constructed the contemporary city—that it has bad effects for lots of people.

We need to stop centering urban discourse on charismatic megafauna of global urbanism

45:37: We need to stop centering urban discourse on the kind of charismatic megafauna of global urbanism, right? And look at the kind of, what I would genuinely call the crap cities, right? The kind of second-tier, slightly stronger places, like places like Cork, Cardiff in Wales, where I used to live. I'm not sure what your go-to North American examples would be, but I'm still in those kinds of, like, lower-tier, maybe Poughkeepsie, Peoria, these kinds of places. That's your kind of modular urban experience, I think. And those are places I think we need to take much more seriously culturally and socially.

Interdisciplinarity in medical humanities

49:09: I think what folks in the field are trying to do is do something a little bit more collaborative and a little bit more imaginative, and not just have the philosopher who will sign off your ethics forms, but try to think seriously about how philosophy can inform experimental design. How philosophical work can itself be informed by stuff that's happening in biology and the life sciences. I'm trying to really get at the kind of complex space between those things where you're doing work that is not quite humanities or science but some kind of magic third thing.

Recommended Resources:

• Le Corbusier
• Garden city movement
• Frederick Law Olmsted
• Ebenezer Howard
• John Muir
• Plan Voisin
• Edwin Lutyens
• Port Sunlight
• William Lever
• Samuel Smiles
• Neom
• Edward C. Tolman
• Georges-Eugène Haussmann
• Napoleon III
• Medical humanities
• Wellcome Trust

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University College Cork

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The City of Today is a Dying Thing
• The Living City: Why Cities Don't Need to Be Green to Be Great
• The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City
• Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences
• Google Scholar Page

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Is modern communication leaving us more divided than ever? What can the writings of ancient philosophers teach us about persuasion? How can ancient wisdom illuminate today's polarized political discourse?

Robin Reames is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is also an author and co-author. Her latest book is titled, The Ancient Art of Thinking For Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times.

Robin and Greg discuss the topic of spontaneous speaking. Robin's expertise leads us through the historical corridors of Grecian sophists, as we ponder whether a meticulously scripted statement can ever match the raw resonance of impromptu oratory. Together, Robin and Greg examine the power dynamics embedded in everyday language, underscoring the transformative potential of rhetoric to foster critical thinking and elevate public debate. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

 How studying rhetoric makes you a toughest customer

41:58: One of the effects of studying rhetoric is that you become a tougher customer, but not because there's something you're clinging to, not because there's some idea that you've decided is absolutely correct, fixed, and immovable, but because you can see how the sausage is made in the language. You can see how the persuasion is attempting to gain your credence and your conviction, and it makes it harder for you to persuade. That was the whole idea of creating an art where those techniques and moves are given names, and we can learn the names, and when we learn the names, we can identify when they happen in the language. Well, all of a sudden, it just demystifies it. I'm noticing that the language is making me feel angry, right? And rather than just assume that that's because the language is telling me something that's true in the world, I'm noticing, oh, this is the language that made me feel angry. Why did that make me feel angry? What in the language provoked that response, right? Those are the sorts of things that happen when you learn to identify the skills of rhetoric

Language can never give you reality

25:09: Language can never give you reality itself. It can only package it in a way that makes it recognizable to you.

Language on autopilot

46:17: To be a language user is, in many ways, to be on autopilot, but it is possible also, as a rhetorical language user, to be on autopilot and also to recognize the effects of that, to see how the effects of that work their way into our way of seeing and viewing the world and understanding and responding to it.

Analyzing arguments as arguments, not political alignments

32:02: It is possible, through using a mechanism like rhetoric, which was designed to have great utility in political discourse, to think about arguments as arguments and language as language, political arguments and political language as political arguments and political language, as opposed to thinking of them entirely in terms of whether they originate from the right or the left, whether I agree with them because I'm on the right or the left. Rhetorical thinking is about thinking language in other terms, in the terms that are supplied by the rhetorical tradition. The way the rhetorical tradition developed over the course of its long, centuries-long, millennia-long life was by noticing, cataloging, and naming the moves that happen in language.

Recommended Resources:

• Techne
• Aristotle
• Rhetoric
• Plato
• Socrates
• Sophist
• Alcidamas
• Gorgias
• Protagoras
• Homer
• Kenneth Burke
• Stephen Toulmin
• Hannah Arendt
• Aspasia

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at the University of Illinois Chicago

Her Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The Ancient Art of Thinking For Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times
• Seeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory
• The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present

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Where do the lines lie between nature and culture within humanity? How can our human social practices affect and shape our biology? The answer is within the concept of niche construction, showcasing how human activities, much like those of other organisms, actively shape our environment, which in turn influences our evolution.

Joseph Rouse is a professor of philosophy and also science and technology at Wesleyan University, and also the author of several books. His latest work is titled, Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction. It's a deep dive into the cultural and ethical practices that have co-evolved with our species.

Greg and Joseph discuss the idea of a world where cultural evolution and biological evolution are not two disparate processes but intricately connected facets of human life. Joseph  illustrates how these have evolved to support a sophisticated network of social justice, individual freedom, and political democracy. Joseph also makes the case for human life as a complex network of practice-interdependent existence, contrasting the more simplistic view of human behavior as merely a quest for reproductive success. Enjoy this new angle on the ideas of evolutionary biology.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The interconnectedness of human biology and social culture

08:16 The anthropologist would happily tell you, culture includes material culture, right? And we live in built environments that have been massively transformed, niched constructively, and so seeing that part of what we think of as our social world, as on the one hand, always accommodating our biological capacities but then also recognizing that those needs and capacities have been transformed by this built environment that has been repeatedly transformed and complicated and diversified over millennia because, after all, one of the distinctive biological features of human beings compared to other organisms is that we don't live in the same way as other human beings.

Understanding what philosophers mean when they talk about practice

26:16 As we know from watching the role of the courts, once you have a rule or a law, what it actually means in each case is open to further interpretation and new issues that hadn't been initially considered and once you adapt the rule or the norm to those issues, it reverberates back on the earlier cases. And so you've got a constant dynamic of normative change in which what is normal enables one to make judgments about how to continue in the same way.

Defining biological normativity

11:35 In its basic form, biological normativity is the way in which an organism and a lineage are a process that's goal-directed. Organisms do all sorts of things and adjust to conditions in order to sustain the very process of their being alive.

The problem in talking about and measuring the complexity of social life

36:38 We tend to assume complexity is one thing and can be measured along one dimension. But in fact, there are many different kinds of complexity. I mean, someone living in what an earlier generation of anthropologists would have called a more primitive society, which we rightly no longer talk about, in fact, hasn't negotiated an extraordinary range of local knowledge and relationships, and so forth. Now, we have, in part, delegated more things to more practices, and that has allowed increasing specialization. It's also enhanced some limitations.

Recommended Resources:

• Evolutionary biology
• Niche Construction
• Normativity
• Immanuel Kant
• John Rawls
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• E. O. Wilson
• Wilfrid Sellars

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Wesleyan University
• PhilPeople.com Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction
• Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image
• Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science
• Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically
• How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism

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