unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Curiosity isn't reserved for the elite thinkers; it's a fundamental part of being human that propels us from the cradle to the cosmos. But what is the evolutionary necessity of curiosity, its manifestation in children and adults, and its intimate relationship with all of our personalities?

Mario Livio is an astrophysicist formerly at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the author of several books. His latest works are titled Galileo: And the Science Deniers and Why?: What Makes Us Curious.

Mario and Greg discuss the educational systems and societal attitudes towards curiosity, with insights into Galileo's legacy and the synergies between science and art. Mario talks about the increasing tide of science denial and affirms the vital role of curiosity in perpetuating awe. Mario takes Greg deep into the concept of curiosity, and they explore the diverse ways in which curiosity is expressed and how it correlates with creativity and knowledge.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What’s the difference between perpetual and epistemic curiosity?

05:30: Perceptual curiosity is the curiosity we feel when something surprises us or when something kind of doesn't agree with what we know or think we know. And it is that curiosity which, when studied on the neuroscience side, they find that the areas in the brain that are associated with conflict, or sometimes with hunger or thirst, are the ones that are activated also when you have that type of curiosity. Epistemic curiosity, on the other hand, is when we really want to learn something new or we want to understand something we didn't understand before. And there, actually, the area in the brain that's activated is the one that's activated for anticipation of a reward. You know, it's like when you sit in a theater for a play you wanted to see for a long time or when somebody offers you a piece of chocolate. So that's the one that we want people to really have more of, to be more curious epistemically. 

Is curiosity necessary for creativity?

11:43: Curiosity seems to be a necessary condition for creativity, even though it is not always a sufficient condition for creativity.

Is there a universal approach to curiosity?

28:19: The best idea that I can think of is that you start with something that you know for a fact that this person is already curious about,  but you find an ingenious way to move from that to the topic that you are interested in to begin with.

Science and arts can be intertwined

41:05: Scientists try to understand the universe and make predictions about it, while artists give a human, emotional response to the universe. So, in some sense, these two things are complementary to each other. That's how I see this. But I would be very sad if we had one and not the other, so I really like this complementarity.

Recommended Resources:

• Kate Chopin
• Mark Twain
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Richard Feynman
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Galileo Galilei
• William Blake

Guest Profile:

• Mario-Livio.com
• Social Profile on X

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Galileo: And the Science Deniers
• Why?: What Makes Us Curious
• Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe
• Is God a Mathematician?
• The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry
• The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World's Most Astonishing Number
• The Accelerating Universe: Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant, and the Beauty of the Cosmos
• Stories in Scientific American

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There’s a great misunderstanding surrounding government debt and its economic implications. Many view it as a financial burden that will be passed down to the next generations. But what if, in fact, government debt is a critical component to how money gets made? 

Paul Sheard is the former vice president of S&P Global and the author of The Power of Money: How Governments and Banks Create Money and Help Us All Prosper. He’s got decades of experience analyzing global financial markets and was the chief economist at Lehman Brothers during the 2008 financial crisis. 

Paul and Greg chat about the common misconceptions around how money is made and injected into the economy, government debt, and the role of quantitative easing.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The hidden costs of cutting government spending

20:04: This is a very widespread idea that the most virtuous thing is a balanced budget. Government deficits are somehow bad. This mountain of government debt is this bad thing and a burden on the future population. Well, that's like saying we have this expanding bathtub, and we need water. The water level in the bathtub to keep expanding as well. But we want to turn off one of the taps. The tap, the government spending tap, the government deficit tap. If you do that, you're going to need to turn on bank credit creation, tap much, much more. So much more water comes out of that.

The important thing about government spending

20:48: Government debt, government spending, has various elements, but one of the very important things that it allows is for money to be created and for purchasing power to be transferred through time.

Monetary and fiscal policy intertwined

05:00: We've sort of, for good, understandable reasons, developed this world where we think of monetary policy as being one thing, that's the preserve of independent technocratic central banks, and we have this fiscal policy, but that's the stuff that's separate, and that's the stuff that politicians have to deal with, where in actual fact they're actually very, very closely intertwined.

The canonical misunderstanding of how money come in our economy

09:05: Most people, if you ask them that, "Where does money come from?" they would think they understand. They'd give you some answers. And they'd say, "Central banks create money." Or they would say that banks collect savings, and that's the money that is in the economy, or they talk about governments borrowing money. All of those things are actually wrong or not really accurate descriptions.

Recommended Resources:

• S&P Global 
• Japanese asset price bubble
• Quantitative easing 
• Modigliani-Miller theorem 
• John C. Williams 
• Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers 
• Ben Bernanke
• Federal Reserve Act
• Troubled Asset Relief Program 

Guest Profile:

• Paul Sheard bio

His Work:

• The Power of Money: How Governments and Banks Create Money and Help Us All Prosper

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The acceleration of research in science, comes with an increasing number of flawed resultsparticularly in the medical sciences, where misapplied statistical measures and the relentless pursuit of publishing create a breeding ground for Type I errors. What is the role of the humanities in medicine, and what other revelations did the COVID-19 pandemic ultimately reveal?

John Ioannidis is a professor, writer, physician, and researcher who studies scientific research. John and Greg discuss the current state of scientific research and the challenges researchers face, including uncertainty in statistics, the prevalence of flawed findings, and the need for effective hypothesis testing. John also highlights the need for collaboration, transparency, and accuracy in research. John and Greg also explore the intersection of science, politics, and empathy, advocating for a more humane healthcare system that honors the arts and literature.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How incentives drive scientist 

22:19: Incentives are a core feature in driving what we want to get out of science. Scientists are very bright people, very smart, and they will do their best to try to fit whatever orders are given to them. So if they're told, "You need to get extreme, extravagant, extraordinary results," they will come up with them because that's what will allow them to continue doing what they enjoy and what they love. I'm not saying that they're criminals in doing it. They just want to do science and continue to do science. So, we need to find ways that our reward and incentive system is aligned with the expectation not being spectacular but flawed results, but accurate results.

What can medicine learn from A/B testing?

35:34: Medicine could learn a lot from the massive scale that A/B testing is conducted in some other fields, mostly commercial, but pretty effectively. What we have learned from A/B testing is that, first of all, our prior beliefs are not very solid or not very accurate. So if people try to make guesses of what will be effective and what will not, probably they're better than chance, but not much better than chance.

Science vs. politics

01:01:49: Scientists are not trained to be politicians. They're not trained to be taming beasts, and it's a very different job. And it's very unfortunate when people who are those who tame beasts and are in the political sphere, instead of trying to find ways to bridge divides and close differences, find a way to have a societal response that is more understanding and more empathy, sympathy, and love for each other. It leads to just a split and division and even situations of disruption in a sense of the social fabric.

Is science self-contained?

01:07:17: Sometimes we tend to think that science is self-contained, but science is about humans, especially medicine; it is about humans who suffer, have emotions, have beliefs, and face big dilemmas in their life and in their deaths. And I don't think that you can answer all of that just with either equations, biological samples, or with very fancy analytical methods. We need something more than that to struggle with our inadequacy. I feel very inadequate all the time, just trying to cover that inadequacy as much as I can.

Recommended Resources:

• Ronald Fisher
• P-value
• P-hacking
• Replication crisis
• Daryl Bem
• Bayesian statistics
• Infection fatality ratio and case fatality ratio
• Operation Warp Speed
• Manhattan Project
• William Carlos Williams
• John Keats

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Stanford Medicine
• Faculty Profile at Stanford University
• Wikipedia Page

His Work:

• Google Scholar Page

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Unlock the secrets to commanding any room with the power of influence and persuasion. Imagine ascending the corporate ladder with ease, your words leading the way—this episode will get you started.

Zoe Chance is formerly a creative force behind the Barbie brand at Mattel, currently teaching at the Yale School of Management, and author of the book Influence Is Your Superpower: How to Get What You What Without Compromising Who You Are.

Zoe and Greg discuss why finesse in influence is not just for marketers but a universal key to professional success across a wide range of jobs including teaching and education. Zoe explores the power behind the art of saying no, a skill that builds resilience and carves out space for personal growth, and the counterintuitive truth that a well-placed no can magnetically lead to more affirmative responses. 

They talk about the cultural conditioning that shackles us to a relentless cycle of yeses, and Zoe gives some techniques that allow the softer voices to echo through boardrooms and beyond. Find out also how to use the ‘Kindly Brontosaurus’ to get what you really want.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why paternalism and materialism work well with behavioral economics

53:39: Behavioral economics allows freedom of choice, and still, it nudges or encourages people towards certain outcomes. And the reason that paternalism or maternalism works well with behavioral economics is that if people feel that you are nudging them in a direction that's consistent with their best interests, they tend to not mind the nudging and the influence that you were doing. If they feel that you are trying to manipulate them to do something in your best interest but not theirs, then there can be tremendous backlash. So, this maternalism, paternalism piece is important. And when somebody feels that you're trying to influence them to do something that they don't feel bad about the possibility of doing, and it's not you just being this selfish, manipulative person, it feels pretty good on both sides. So, I like influence that feels good on both sides.

The magic of “no”

13:36: The magic of "no" is that when we're more comfortable saying no to other people, we're more comfortable with them saying no to us. And that means that our requests lose this edge of neediness that can be repulsive. So, practicing saying no leads indirectly to other people wanting to say yes to you.

The concept of “behavioral introversion”

26:56: There is the "what we do" and the "who we are" piece of introversion, extroversion. So the behavior and the traits, and we're probably not going to do anything about our traits, at least not in the short run. And we have a bit of control over our behavior. And then, as teachers or leaders in environments where we have a wide range of introverts and extroverts, we may not be thinking about how there are people who are extroverted in some contexts that show up as introverts in the domain in which we see them.

Influence is part of the job

04:19: Influencing other people, for most people in most jobs, is a huge part of our job. And it's definitely a bigger part of our job as we rise in an organization and levels of increasing responsibility. And I used to think that if you're the boss, you just get to tell people what to do, and they're going to do it. We know it's totally not like that, becoming less, but I think it has probably always been not that effective.

Recommended Resources:

• John G. Lynch
• Susan Cain
• The Kindly Brontosaurus
• Bernard Roth
• Libertarian paternalism
• Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks
• 350.org

Guest Profile:

• ZoeChance.com
• Faculty Profile at Yale School of Management
• LinkedIn Profile
• Profile on X
• Profile on Psychology Today

Her Work:

• Influence Is Your Superpower: How to Get What You What Without Compromising Who You Are

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How can tempting kids with an extra allowance for extra chores cause them to lose interest in helping out at all? How do incentives work and fail on each level from knave to king? What can be learned from examining the intersection of economics, preferences, and morality?

Samuel Bowles is an economist, professor, and the author of several books on economics and related topics. His latest work is called The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens.

Samuel and Greg discuss how our modern service and information economies pose unique challenges to traditional market principles. Sam shares studies that illuminate the intricate relationship between intrinsic motivation and external rewards. They also debunk misplaced beliefs in equilibrium and Sam emphasizes the need to align economic education with the challenges of climate change. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

A mistake economists make when it comes to the functions of law

28:59: Here's a mistake that economists sometimes make: When we think of people acting, we think that we're acting to get stuff. When we make a decision about saving, investment, getting a job, working hard, whatever, shopping, we're getting stuff. Now, we know, you and I, that when we act, we're acting to get stuff, and we're also acting to be something. So, it's not just getting we're talking about; it's becoming. Now, we know, you and I, that when we act, we're acting to get stuff, and we're also acting to be something. So, it's not just getting we're talking about; it's becoming. Now, yes, we want to be someone. We want to be a particular kind of person. Now, if you add becoming to getting, then you have a better view of what humans are like. Now, what is this becoming? Are we just being generous so as to impress other people? Yes, probably; that's part of it. But, speaking for myself, but also on the basis of a lot of psychological research, we're also signaling to ourselves,  we're reaffirming to ourselves that we're that kind of person.

Do we treat people as selfish when it comes to policy-making?

05:12: If you design policies that treat people as if they're self-interested, you're more likely to get people to act in self-interested ways. So, it's not only that these policies are going to be misguided; they may even be counterproductive and backfire. And they may produce a citizenry which requires increasing regulation and increasing coercion. Because if you generate an increasingly self-interested population by treating people as if they're selfish, well, then you're going to end up with a very, very authoritarian society or chaos.

Exploring the relationship between markets, generosity, and rule of law in European history

51:52: One of the ways you transact goods when you don't have markets is gift, but another way is theft. Now, I think that the really key idea and my explanation of why Europeans tend to be more generous than people who have less contact with markets, historically talking about Western and Northwestern Europeans most. I think the reason for that is that we've had markets under the rule of law for a long period of time. In a rule-of-law society, you can actually take a chance on trusting somebody. And the reason is the worst possible outcome isn't so bad. They're not going to take your kids. They're not going to burn down your house. Maybe you're going to get cheated once or twice.

Embracing incentives, constraints, and community to create change

10:46: We'll never solve the problems facing us, whether it's economic injustice, how to handle new innovations, or how to handle climate change. We have to have a combination of incentives and constraints of the traditional kind and appeal to people's desire to be members of the community and to actually do something that they'll be proud of because they're good human beings.

Recommended Resources:

• Adam Smith
• Ceteris paribus
• David Hume
• John Stuart Mill
• Alexander Hamilton
• Friedrich Hayek
• Arrow–Debreu model
• Thomas Schelling
• Wendy Carlin
• Voltaire
• Jeremy Bentham
• Albert O. Hirschman
• CORE Econ

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Santa Fe Institute
• Faculty Profile at UMass Amherst
• Profile at The Institute for New Economic Thinking
• Profile on CEPR
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens
• After the Waste Land: Democratic Economics for the Year 2000
• Notes and Problems in Microeconomic Theory
• A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution
• The New Economics of Inequality and Redistribution
• Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution
• Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change
• Google Scholar Page
• Moral economics
• Machiavelli’s Mistake: Why Good Laws Are No Substitute For Good Citizens

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How did a breakthrough in understanding how humans make split-second decisions and how did studying firefighters unlock the key piece of understanding expertise?

Gary Klein is the President of ShadowBox LLC who researches decision-making and is the author of several books. His latest book is Snapshots of the Mind, a compilation of essays that span his career. Also recently published was the 20th Anniversary edition of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions which explores the ways in which expertise factors into decision-making in ways you may not have realized initially.

Gary and Greg discuss the complexities of decision-making, covering the importance of experience, expertise, and the role of mental models. They also explore concepts such as positive cognitive psychology and the idea of implementing positive aspects of decision-making as opposed to focusing on flaws. 

Gary discusses his innovative ShadowBox method used for training decision-makers by providing simulations of expert decisions. He also talks about the role of insights in successful decision-making and the challenges organizations face in fostering a culture of insights.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Can you have an optimal error path?

46:24: So, you want people to learn from feedback. But it's not that trivial because a lot of times, I see people say, "Yeah, we're going to provide feedback about whether you succeeded or not," but that's just the beginning. You also want to help people diagnose why they got it wrong, what they were misinterpreting, what they were missing that they should have been watching more carefully. And so there's that diagnostic part, which gets into the tacit knowledge, which sometimes people can do by themselves. Sometimes, you want to bring in another pair of eyes, somebody with more expertise, to help you unpack: "Why did I get that wrong? Or was there something I could have done that would have prevented this?" So you want to have that kind of opportunity for diagnosis to help get richer feedback rather than just, "I got it right or I got it wrong."

Should you trust your intuition?

19:25: People ask me, "When should you trust your intuition?" And the answer is never because intuition can mislead you. But that doesn't mean you should trust analytical methods either because they can mislead you as well. So, you need to be able to use both for intuition. You don't want to totally trust your intuition, but you want to at least listen to your intuition because your intuition may be telling you some things that aren't captured in the analyses.

Distinguishing experts from journeymen

28:26:  One of the hallmarks of humans, and particularly experts, is to engage in speculative reasoning when you've gone beyond what they've encountered before. And that's one of the ways that we distinguish experts from journeymen: you throw something at an expert that the expert hasn't seen before, and their eyes light up, and they say, "What can we do about this?" Whereas a journeyman says, "I don't know. I'm going to have to call somebody else in." And they get uncomfortable rather than enthusiastic. So yes, as people become more skilled, they love the challenge of having to engage in speculative reasoning. That's human capability and a human source of power.

How experts navigate mistakes

47:55: Some people, if they make a mistake, say, "Okay, I'm putting it behind me." But the real experts don't put the mistakes behind them. They're really upset about these mistakes, and they keep mulling about it until they can come up with some idea. "Here's what I could have done. Here's what I should have done." And then they can start to relax. And that's one of the ways we distinguish the real experts from the ones who are just pretending: you ask people what's the last mistake they made, and the real experts know the last mistake they made because they're still processing it.

Recommended Resources:

• Martin Seligman
• Daniel Kahneman
• Amos Tversky
• Arab oil embargo
• Billy Beane
• Ben Shneiderman
• Case method
• Knowledge shielding

Guest Profile:

• Gary-Klein.com
• ShadowboxTraining.com
• Wikipedia Profile
• LinkedIn Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Snapshots of the Mind
• Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
• Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights
• Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making
• Working Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis
• Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do
• Linking Expertise and Naturalistic Decision Making
• ResearchGate Profile
• Resarch.com Profile
• Google Scholar Page

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When people are told a statistical claim, particularly about risk, the most important follow-up they can ask is about magnitude. How big of a number or impact is this? But many lack a basic understanding of statistics and how they fit into our world. It’s not baked into the fundamentals of education. 

David Spiegelhalter is an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge. His books like The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data and Covid By Numbers: Making Sense of the Pandemic with Data help contextualize the importance and impact of statistics in everyday life. 

He and Greg discuss the vital role of data literacy, how concepts like 'micro-mort' and 'micro-life' can measure risk, and the ramifications of faulty statistical interpretation during crises like COVID-19. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

You can't talk about risk without talking about its magnitude

04:31: To talk about risk without talking about magnitude, I think, is an abominable thing to do. It's manipulative. It's always manipulative. If someone's going to talk about risk, they are trying to worry you, and they're trying to manipulate your emotions. Most of the time, we talk about increased risk and the risk (delete the ‘of” )without having any idea what the magnitude is. And even if we do, it's quite difficult to know: is that a big number or not? So, I think that this is absolutely essential: whenever people are told something, a claim, they should ask, "How big is it? And is this really a big number? Is this really important?"

Risk as analysis is very often dominated by risk as feeling

21:22: Risk as analysis is very often dominated by risk as feeling, and you've got to have risk as feeling, I think, in there as well. But it's when one of them takes over. And I think the real problem with this is that if you just operate on risk as a feeling, it's so easy to be manipulated by people. "Oh, this is awful. This is awful." You've got to be really careful of this. And you think, "No, it's not bad," or understating what the risks of some things are. So I think that if you're very vulnerable, if you only operate on risk as a feeling, you're vulnerable to manipulation.

How do you gain micro life?

38:40: You can gain micro-lives by exercising and stuff like that. And so, but that's highly nonlinear. The benefits from the first 20 minutes of exercising are considerable. It's about 40 minutes. So it's about a micro-life and a half, or something like that. After that, it's about the past. So, if you exercise for half an hour, you live an extra half an hour. So you better enjoy exercising because that's the extra bit you're living. And it's like time, and I quite like this image that while you're exercising moderately, your aging stops. You're not aging that half hour.

COVID's positive impact on public interest in data

47:00: During COVID, it was amazing. The popular interest in statistics, data, and graphs—I was on the media all the time trying to explain stuff. And that's carried on. It's even good. Is there any good news about COVID? One of the small things I think might be the greater public tolerance for an interest in data and graphs and more subtle ideas being used.

Recommended Resources:

• Ronald Fisher
• Ron Howard
• Paul Slovic

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Cambridge

His Work:

• The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data
• Covid By Numbers: Making Sense of the Pandemic with Data
• The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger and Death
• Sex by Numbers: What Statistics Can Tell Us About Sexual Behaviour 

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The current debate over corporate Governance depicts a conflict between shareholders and stakeholders. But what if their interests were aligned?

Alex Edmans is a professor at the London School of Business and an expert on the impact of ESG factors on firm performance. His latest book is called Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit. 

Alex and Greg discuss the pervading discourse on ESG factors and fiduciary duty. Alex compares the benefits and challenges of long-term versus short-term activism. Join us as we debunk the stereotypes of activist investing, asserting its potential to spark long-term value through a lens that values genuine insight over raw data. Greg and Alex also navigate beyond the surface of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion metrics, drawing a parallel with the flawed educational policy of No Child Left Behind. Alex also gives his personal reflections on the importance of research in real-world business applications and leveraging purpose statements for strategic decision-making both in business and life.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why is it difficult to craft a statement of purpose for companies?

36:03: So why is it difficult to come up with a mission statement, either for a company or for a person? To mean anything, it has to be selective. You can't be all things to all people, and that's why it's difficult to come up with such a statement because there's certain things that you miss out. So when I say to use rigorous research to influence the practice of business, that rules out just doing research for purely intellectual purposes, only to be published in top academic journals and be applauded by fellow academics. Instead, it's something where I'm doing this because I want to influence the way people think and act.

Is shareholder capitalism bad for companies?

11:42: Shareholder capitalism is actually not a bad thing as long as we correctly recognize that shareholder value is long-term shareholder value.

Reforming companies by improving it for the long-term

16:34:  Some of the most valuable companies today, such as the tech companies in the US, are worth far more than their quarterly earnings. Because investors are valuing the future, indeed, the most successful activist investors are the ones that will try to improve a company's productivity and innovation, and indeed there was some nice academic research which looks at the source of the value creation from activist shareholders, and it's not value extraction, value capture, it's indeed things such as improving productivity and improving innovation.

Pursuing action, not profit

08:46: So, one of the messages of the book [Grow The Pie] is actually the best way to pursue a goal. Let's say it's profits. It's not actually direct. If you go in with the mindset, and you're right to highlight the mindset, can I make money from this? There are many good things that do make money in the long term, but because that monetization is unexpected and difficult to predict, if you have the mindset of, I'm only going to do something if it makes me money, then I might not actually take that action.

Recommended Resources:

• Pareto principle
• M-Pesa
• Michael Porter
• Milton Friedman
• ESG - Environmental, social, and corporate governance
• DEI - Diversity, equity, and inclusion
• SASB - Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
• No Child Left Behind Act
• McKinsey & Company
• BlackRock
• CSR - Corporate social responsibility
• Project Last Mile
• Doctors Without Borders
• Bob Iger

Guest Profile:

• AlexEdmans.com
• GrowThePie.net
• Faculty Profile from the London Business School
• Profile on LinkedIn
• Social Profile on X
• Wikipedia Page

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit
• May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do About It
• Google Scholar Page

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Is it better to suppress our negative emotions? How do we feel things like anger, envy, or spite without letting them take over and impact our relationships? Do these so-called negative emotions serve an important purpose in how we perceive the world and ourselves? 

Krista K. Thomason is a philosophy professor at Swarthmore College. Her books, Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good and Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life, deal with the philosophy of emotion and examine why negative emotions are a key component of life. 

She and Greg discuss the history of philosophical thought when it comes to emotions, why bad feelings don’t always need to be turned into something productive, and why a life free of negative emotions wouldn’t actually be fulfilling at all. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The price you pay to master your emotions

49:52: We pay a price for the kind of control that I think we often want when we're trying to master our emotions. I think that's oftentimes what we're looking for. We're looking for safety and security, and we're looking for inner peace. We're looking for a life that is, as they say, frictionless and stress-free and all that. But I think what kind of life do we end up with if it's a kind of life where we have absolutely everything under our thumbs, and nothing escapes the boundaries of our will? What have we done? What sort of life is that? Is life in the comfortable, easy chair a life worth having, even if it never comes with any pain?

The role of emotions in self-discovery

08:24: Understanding and paying attention to your emotions is part of self-discovery. It's part of figuring out what are these things that matter to me. And sometimes your emotions will show what you're invested in and what matters to you, maybe before you fully realize it yourself. So there's this way that they can kind of point us in certain directions and help us learn things about ourselves that we may not initially realize.

Are negative emotions good?

05:45: We have this tendency to think that positive emotions are good, helpful things in our lives and that they're sources of information, but the negative emotions are somehow built on false positive beliefs. They are fundamentally irrational. They are seeing the world in the wrong ways, whereas positive emotions are seeing the world in the right ways.

On self-maturity

18:59: Emotional maturity doesn't have to mean reason controls the emotions. Emotional maturity can mean I am good at identifying what I'm feeling. I'm good at accepting that this is how I feel about something, and I'm also good at recognizing that this is how I am experiencing this situation that may or may not be reflecting how the situation actually is. But also, I'm good at just feeling my emotions without necessarily feeling like I have to do something with it.

Recommended Resources:

• Baruch Spinoza
• Stoicism
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Moral Saints by Susan Wolf
• Reflections on Gandhi by George Orwell
• The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
• On Solitude by Michel de Montaigne 
• Lisa Feldman Barrett

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Swarthmore College
• Professional Website

Her Work:

• Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good
• Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life

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What is the difference between politeness and civility? How do you show respect for others during difficult discourse instead of siloing yourself away in only like-minded company?

Alexandra Hudson is an author and writer of the book, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, and also the creator of the Civic-Renaissance newsletter. 

Alexandra and Greg discuss Alexandra’s views on civility and humanity. Alexandra also recounts the wisdom of historical figures like Augustine and Pascal, shedding light on the balancing act between self-interest and societal harmony and why civility remains crucial, even when it's challenging. This episode not only offers a profound examination of civility's role in healing society but also provides actionable insights for integrating these timeless principles into the fabric of everyday life. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Are we overdoing democracy?

38:36: I argue in the final chapter of my book [The Soul of Civility] that we've made idols out of democracy, out of public life, out of our national public discourse. When we have an unhealthy love, unhealthy addiction to something, we know that we've made idols. We have an unhealthy addiction to this because it's invaded all areas of our lives. Things that were historically apolitical now have a profound political dimension and valence to them, like sports, schools, and education, and what newspaper you read, what area of town you live in, all of these historically apolitical decisions now, like you can assess a person's political dimension based on these decisions. And we do that all the time. That's not good—not good for our souls, not good for democracy. Democracy is a beautiful, important, and wonderful thing, but there's such a thing as too much of a good thing, and we're overdoing democracy by making it part of every aspect of our lives, and we're undermining it as a result.

Civility is inherent good

04:15: We need to realize that even when the stakes are high, we still owe the other some basic baseline of respect. That is civility. Even when it might be costly to us and even when it's inconvenient, that's just the right thing. Inherently, that is the right thing to do. And it's an obligation we have.

The essential distinction between civility and politeness

19:21:  I also realized this essential distinction between civility and politeness. That politeness is manners; it's etiquette; it's technique; it's external. It's the stuff where civility is internal. It's the disposition of the heart. It's a way of seeing others as our moral equals who are worthy of respect. And crucially, sometimes respecting others requires being impolite, telling hard truths, and engaging in robust debate. 

What are the foundational questions you ask yourself to be considered truly educated?

44:51: This is the dialogue about foundational questions that every single human being should have the opportunity to ask and answer for themselves in order to be considered truly educated. Questions of origin, purpose, and destiny: Who are we? Why are we here? What is the best way to live? These are thoughtful questions that thoughtful people across history and culture have reflected on and offered answers to. And we do ourselves a profound disservice if we don't grapple with these questions in the context of how other thoughtful people before us have answered them.

Recommended Resources:

• Augustine of Hippo
• Sigmund Freud
• Blaise Pascal
• Chimera
• Ramayana
• Giovanni della Casa
• Petrus Alphonsi
• Distichs of Cato
• Alexander Pope
• George Bernard Shaw
• Slow Horses
• Robert D. Putnam
• Erasmus
• Hannah Arendt
• Alexis de Tocqueville

Guest Profile:

• AlexandraOHudson.com
• Faculty Profile from Indiana University
• Social Profile on X
• LinkedIn Profile

His Work:

• The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves
• Civic-Renaissance.com

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