unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

How do you reach the goal of a balanced brain? What will the future of mental health treatments look like, and how do we find the line between psychology and physiology? 

Camilla Nord leads the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge and is the author of the new book, The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health, which explores several scientific developments that are revolutionizing the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events—and treatments—can affect people in such different ways.

Camilla and Greg discuss how phobias, immune responses, and learning intertwine, painting a picture of a brain that wields a direct influence on our physical states. They also examine the role of dopamine, unveiling its true colors in motivation and the intricate dynamics of mental health treatments from Cognitive Behavior Therapy to the uncharted territories of psychedelics and chore therapy. And finally Camilla lays out her view of the shifting landscape of mental health research. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Brain disruptions happen in the brain, whether neurological or physiological 

05:21: If you look at the history of psychiatry, lots of conditions that are now considered neurological conditions, because we understand to some degree their physiological basis, something like epilepsy, were not long ago called psychiatric conditions because we didn't. And it's sort of like every time we understand the basis of a brain disorder, it gets sucked up into a different category, into this neurology category. When in reality, these are all brain disorders that we have a better or worse understanding of the origin for. And often, we know less about neurological disorders than people might think. And we might know more about psychiatric disorders than people might think, but they are all disruptions happening in the brain. 

Awareness isn’t enough to fix mental health

36:58: Mental health is something that we all experience. Mental illness is not; it is something that some of us experience sometimes. In those times, it's critical to get those people the resources and treatments that they need. And sometimes, mental health awareness campaigns get in the way because it makes something like anxiety seem like a universal phenomenon, rather than anxiety disorders as a specific phenomenon that some people really suffer from and need help for.

Brain disruptions happen in the brain, whether neurological or physiological

32:05: I think often, one assumption is that dopamine just feels good. And whenever you experience something that kind of feels good, that must be dopamine. That's actually a mischaracterization of dopamine…[32:30] Dopamine, what it really is closer to is when you want something, when you're motivated to get something. And then it also is, of course, involved in how you learn about that thing. So it has a couple of different functions, different roles in the brain. But the motivational role of dopamine is a really fascinating one because it means you could be motivated to get something that isn't even necessarily pleasurable.

Unmasking dopamine

30:21: I think if you asked people who experience pain, they would say the optimal amount of pain is zero. But that's because we forget just how much we've learned about the world through pain. So if you look at a toddler in pain at some point every single day, and that's how they learn what things not to do so that they don't injure themselves, so they don't walk into a table, so they, you know, catch themselves when they fall over and don't just smash their face, so adapt to the world, they fit themselves in the world, partially via those painful experiences.

Recommended Resources:

• Hedonia and Eudaimonia
• Amy Edmondson
• Bayesian statistics
• Placebo
• Dr. Caitlin Hitchcock
• Bipolar disorder

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at the University of Cambridge
• Mental Health Neuroscience Lab
• LinkedIn
• Social Profile on X
• Psychology Today Profile

Her Work:

• The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health
• Google Scholar Page
• ResearchGate

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The family household is a fundamental unit of economics, and by extension – a fundamental unit of society. But the amount of research and study on the family within the profession of economics is still developing. 

Melissa Kearney is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, and the director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Her book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, examines how the makeup of families can determine a child’s economic success. 

She and Greg discuss the success gap between children from two-parent homes vs. one-parent homes, the role families play in the overall economic state of our country, and what needs to be done to bridge that inequality and address poverty.  

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why does family structure matter in economic success and social mobility?

03:43: When you look at all of the research that economists have done on poverty, inequality, and social mobility, family structure is important and determinant of all of that. And so what I'm doing is not uncovering something that isn't there in all of the academic evidence. I just think it doesn't get the attention it deserves when we then say, so what should we do about inequality, threats to social mobility, or poverty? We take family structure as a given in all of our research, and so it matters because it is so determinant. Even if we wish it were otherwise, it is so determinant. We just see that over and over and over again that kids from one-parent homes are less likely to graduate high school, graduate college, go on to achieve high earnings. It's really determinant of all of these markers of what we might think of as economic success.

The real constraints of higher educated parents vs. economically constrained parents

36:58: Higher-educated folks, married parents; they have more resources that allow them to be the kind of parents that they want to be. And more economically constrained parents have less; they have fewer resources, allowing them to be that.

The impact of diverging structures on social disparities

08:02: We don't just want to think about single moms and their kids being more likely to live in poverty, but I think the right way to think about it now is that the divergence in family structure between the college-educated class and everybody else is perpetuating inequality. It's exacerbating inequality precisely because these gaps are really large.

Shared income and time are key for positive child development

14:46: As an economist, my earnest wish is that this shouldn't be such a third-rail topic to talk about because nobody is blaming single parents for not doing an awesome job and putting in the hard work. But when there's a second parent in the house, there's more income coming in; there's more time coming in; there's more supervision; and there's more bandwidth. And we see that all of that collective input yields better outcomes for kids.

Recommended Resources:

• Gary Becker
• Raj Chetty
• Claudia Goldin
• Nicholas Eberstadt
• Louisiana Fathers Form 'Dads on Duty' Group to Help Stop Violence at Their Children's High School (People Magazine)

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Maryland
• Director, Aspen Economic Strategy Group
• Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institute

Her Work:

• The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind
• Parental Education and Parental Time with Children

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What do biology, religion, philosophy, and economics all have in common? Well, to some degree, they can all be grounded in the theory of evolution. 

David Sloan Wilson is a professor emeritus of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University at the State University of New York. He’s written a slew of books on a wide range of topics, all dealing with evolution like, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior and Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives. 

David and Greg discuss how everything can be explained by evolution, why the last 50 years of science have been groundbreaking, and Darwinism’s shifts over time. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What are the dominant narratives in the management field?

42:34: So you have two things that are dominant narratives in the management field: laissez-faire and centralized planning, command and control planning, and neither one works. What does work is a process of managed cultural evolution. It's where we have a whole field of management that could not be more important for human affairs, which are suffering under these faulty ideas and just waiting for this in a series of essays or print conversations, this third wave, a managed process of cultural evolution... These two things don't work, and only one thing that can work emerges and is what practitioners typically converge on. So if you look at people that are not driven theoretically but have a lot of experience, they've typically become pragmatic cultural evolutionists. They try a bunch of stuff out. They have some systemic goal. They stick with what works, and then they repeat.

On Darwin's impact on human understanding

04:11: It is still the case that Darwin's theory of evolution is the unrivaled explanatory framework for all living processes. It is indeed true that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Now, when we go to humans, the very concept that humans are not part of biology is weird, but there's a historical reason why this framework, for all of its explanatory scope within biology, was constricted and was not applied to humans, especially human cultural evolution, until the closing decades of the 20th century. But now, that is taking place.

Does selfishness beat altruism in groups?

20:57: All natural selection is based on relative fitness. It doesn't matter how well you survive and reproduce in absolute terms; only compared to other organisms in your vicinity. And because of relative fitness, any behavior or trait that is oriented towards the welfare of others or one's group as a whole has a disadvantage—an inherent disadvantage compared to a more self-serving trait. So, that's why selfishness beats altruism within groups.

The Intersection of genes and symbols in shaping our worldview

45:05: The concept of a symbotype is the cultural equivalent of your genes, both for your symbotype and your genotype. There's quite a bit of flexibility in the way you see the world and your genes; they actually provide you with a repertoire of behaviors. So, you respond to your environment, but it's a limited repertoire, and if you want to go beyond that repertoire, you need to change something. You need to change your genes; you need to change your symbols. So, to an extent, in order to change the way we see the world and act upon the world—in other words, what takes place on the outside, we must change what takes place on the inside.

Recommended Resources:

• On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution by Theodosius Dobzhansky
• Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science by Thorstein Veblen
• William James
• Charles Sanders Peirce
• Herbert Spencer
• Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E.O. Wilson
• Adaptation and Natural Selection by George C. Williams
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
• The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley by Victor Hwang
• Elinor Ostrom

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Binghamton University
• Professional Website
• ProSocial World

His Work:

• Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior 
• Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
• Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives
• This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution
• The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time
• Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others (Foundational Questions in Science)
• A Life Informed By Evolution: A Memoir 
• Atlas hugged : the autobiography of John Galt III

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What happened when El Salvador made Bitcoin an official currency? Who uses cryptocurrency the most? How does the blockchain both help and hinder would-be scam artists and criminals?

Zeke Faux is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News, a National Fellow at New America, and the author of Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.

Zeke and Greg discuss crypto bubbles, the crypto space, and the memorable characters Zeke encountered, such as Sam Bankman Fried. Zeke explains his investigations into Tether, the mass scamming compounds in Southeast Asia, and his personal experiences within this fluctuating industry when he bought his own Mutant Ape NFT.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why crypto investors overcome risks

18:25: If you are making a crypto investment and your money is on some DeFi exchange or some centralized exchange, that seems pretty good. What kind of yield would you want just to let them hold your money? It'd have to be a pretty high-yield investment just to get over the risk that something unforeseen will happen, right? There's some chance that even if it seems great, that's something you didn't think is wrong with this because it keeps happening again and again in crypto. And I think what makes these people overcome is that they're not dumb. They know that these risks are there, the crypto investors. But they think, okay, maybe there's a 10% chance that something goes wrong here…[19:22] That's what makes people overcome everything: this desire to get rich quick, in this sense that it's possible because they've seen a lot of other people do it and get rich.

The difference between internet and crypto bubble

07:29: In crypto, the crypto guys do use crypto, but only to buy it. It's not serving any purpose other than just buying it, trading it, and doing things within this crypto world. Whereas with the internet, it was clearly a lot of fun, and it was affecting a lot of parts of real life. The internet bubble got way ahead of what could be justified by how much money these companies were making. But to me, there was never any doubt that the internet was a powerful innovation that was going to change our lives.

Exploring 'Number Go Up' psychology in blockchain

03:29: The key to it is psychology, and the title "Number Go Up" comes from this saying that I heard at my first crypto conference in 2021. I flew down to Miami. I thought I would hear more about technology. I thought I'd see bankers or fintech entrepreneurs who had ideas about how they're going to disrupt the financial system with this new technology, replace intermediaries, and make global transfers faster and cheaper. And instead, I heard this guy on stage saying, "Our technology is called number go up, and number go up technology means the price goes up, and that makes people excited, and they buy more, and the price goes up more, and then more people get excited, and pretty soon, Bitcoin is going to be at a million." And I just couldn't believe it. I was like, "Is that what it's really all about?"

The treatment of crypto wallet transactions vs. traditional banking in stablecoins

37:25: I can open a PayPal account, and I send money to PayPal. And now I have PayPal dollars that I can zap to your account. And that's not so different from a stablecoin. However, PayPal wants to know who I am. They follow all the banking rules and regulations about knowing your customer. They want to know who you are. You can't hold PayPal dollars without disclosing your identity. However, if I have a crypto wallet on my phone, like Metamask or any of the tons of other options, I can hold tethers on my phone and send them to your phone without disclosing any identifying information. And it seems like it's a very similar transaction that's treated very differently by regulators right now. And I just wonder if that will continue, especially if stablecoins keep growing.

Recommended Resources:

• Blockchain
• Bitcoin
• Dogecoin
• Decentralized finance
• Sam Bankman-Fried
• Tether
• Bitfinex
• Cantor Fitzgerald

Guest Profile:

• ZekeFaux.com
• Profile at NewAmerica.org
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on X
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
• Bloomberg Articles

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Why are humans the only species on the planet that’s been able to cooperate on such a massive scale and continuously reinvent our culture? 

Andrew McAfee is the co-director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy and a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His books, such as the Machine trilogy and The Geek Way, examine how technology and cultural evolution have shaped the modern workplace.

He and Greg discuss what has allowed humans to evolve to be these super collaborators, how that evolution translates to organizational culture, and why the education system might be in need of an overhaul. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What does science do with overconfidence?

27:00: What science does that is brilliant is it says to us, overconfident human beings, "You're going to win. You're so smart. Your evidence is going to be right. Go collect the evidence; you're going to be right," and we over overconfidently march off and go do all that. So the amazing thing that happens, the jiujitsu that happens, is that science takes our overconfidence and channels it exactly where it should be. Which is doing the hard work to gather evidence and then confidently getting up in front of your peers and presenting it and have them kick you in the teeth over and over again. It ain't fun, but that's what we signed up for. And what I think is going on at geek companies is they're importing that ground rule to make their decisions. That's why their batting average is higher.

What is it that allows humans to do this thing unique on the planet?

05:12: We human beings, this weird species, have two superpowers. One of them is that we come together and cooperate intensely with large numbers of individuals who we are not related to and who are not our kin…[05:34]The other one is that we evolve our cultures much more rapidly than any other species on the planet.

Navigating disagreement and safetyism in higher education

33:53: If we're not training people about how to debate, disagree, argue, and do it without being jerks or without being completely thin-skinned about it, we're not doing people a service. We're doing them a real disservice. So I think there has been increased safetyism, especially on college campuses. And I think that is not serving young people well for a whole bunch of reasons.

Is our politics and bureaucracy complements or substitutes?

45:53: We want status, and that's where bureaucracy comes from. I'm going to figure out a need to be involved in this work. That gives me status. I honestly believe that's the deepest reason for this stultifying bureaucracy that we come across. The CEO of most companies, if they look at what the processes are like inside their company, they go, "How did things get this bad? What is going on here?" This is not anything close to what I want, but that's because the people in the organization create that encroachment or that encumbrance all the time.

Recommended Resources:

• Amy Edmondson
  • Amy Edmondson on unSILOed
• Chris Argyris
• The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams
• The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich
• The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens
• Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed and the Fall of Arthur Andersen by Barbara Toffler
• Maria Montessori

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at MIT
• Professional Website
• Andrew McAfee on TEDxBoston 2012

His Work:

• The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results
• The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies 
• Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
• Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
• Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges
• More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next

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For centuries, the health of the body was the province of doctors while the health of the soul was the domain of the clergy. What happened with the discovery of a concept of mind as thinking matter? In this episode, we trace the emergence of mind and mental health as a new aspect of what it means to be human.

George Makari is a psychiatrist, historian, and the author of three books: Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, and Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind.

George and Greg discuss the transformation in the way we perceive the mentally ill, thanks in part to the contributions of Philippe Pinel and others who dared to challenge the status quo. They explore the early intersection of sensibility, vitalism, and literary movements that have shaped modern mental health practices. They also dive into xenophobia, where it came from, and how it persists.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Do people in the world of intellectual history need to spend time thinking about medicine and the history of medicine?

02:38: When you went in search of the history of mind, what you found was maybe a history of the mind through the lens of philosophy. Charles Taylor wrote a good one like that. But the more and more I looked into it, it became so clear that the notion of the mind was highly implicated in science, medicine, politics, and broader social change. And that a lot of our 21st-century categories apply back to a time where they didn't really exist…[03:38] The argument in the book is that claims about these major human essences—the soul, the mind, the brain—have very important socio-political ramifications and, not just downstream, but can be affected by socio-political cultural beliefs. So, I tried to tell that bigger story—medicine being part of science, being part of politics—and trying to piece out how these different kinds of things interacted in the creation of the kind of state that we're in now, thinking about soul, mind, and body.

Are we all a little mentally ill?

26:32: Sensibilities getting disrupted, causing depression or something like that. We are all, potentially, the victims of that. So, there is this notion that the mind is a fragile thing. It's not simply that God gave us one, and it's fine. It's part of the body; it's part of the physiology; it's part of this sensible creature who the environment can deeply impact and who can deeply impact the environment.

On the origins of xenophobia

33:12: I did a little bit of etymology and whatnot and found that the Greeks actually, in antiquity, had never used the word xenophobia. And that was critical because phobos in antiquity is just fear. It doesn't mean anything medical. But by the time the term gets invented in the late 19th century, phobia was a medical term, and there were a multiplicity of phobias that had emerged in the late 19th century, up to 75 different ones. And xenophobia was one of them, so that it was now an irrational fear, and that makes all the difference, that adjective. It's an irrational fear; it's a mental illness; it's not just a fear. And so, when you talk about the irrational fear of the stranger, that becomes one of the origins of the concept of xenophobia. As it kind of makes its way.

The "Other Anxiety" of encountering difference

48:03: Bringing people from foreign worlds together works to some extent, and I call that other anxiety. I was like, we shouldn't call that xenophobia because we all have that. If I meet someone who looks different than me, who speaks a different language than I do, and who worships differently than I do, I am going to have some anxiety about what goes on with that person and how they're different and how they're thinking about me. So that's almost universal, and we should think about that as the easiest part of the problem: bringing people together.

Recommended Resources:

• René Descartes
• John Locke
• Pierre Gassendi
• Baruch Spinoza
• Francis Willis
• Philippe Pinel
• Bethlem Royal Hospital
• Charenton-le-Pont
• Sensibility
• Vitalism
• Franz Mesmer
• Franz Joseph Gall
• G. Stanley Hall

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Weill Cornell Medical Center
• Faculty Profile at Yale Universty
• GeorgeMakari.com
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia
• Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind
• Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis
• Academic Publications

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Math is all around us. When you’re debating when to cross the street to avoid oncoming traffic, you’re doing math. When you sing in the shower and you notice how your voice bounces and sounds, that’s math. 

Kit Yates is a professor of mathematical biology at the University of Bath. His books, How to Expect the Unexpected: The Science of Making Predictions―and the Art of Knowing When Not To and The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives look at real-world applications of scientific and mathematical concepts. 

He and Greg discuss why the idea of math needs to be reframed, what it takes to scientifically predict the future, and why it’s more important than ever to have basic math skills in this world. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Math is a creative discipline

40:52: Maths is a creative discipline. Sometimes, it involves stewing and thinking about things, and in my case, it involves applying mathematics to the real world and building models of the real world. It's a really creative process because you've got to decide which bits you want to keep and which bits you can throw away, which are the most essential parts. And that's not a thing that you do in 10 seconds. This is something that you have to think really hard about and try and do trial and error and get things wrong, right? We don't encourage people to get things wrong enough. Getting things wrong is the way that you learn how to get things right. And in modeling, we go around in these cycles. When I'm doing a mathematical model of the biological process, we go through this process: model, predict, test, and alter. And then you go back. So you build your model, make a prediction, and then test it against biology, and it's not right. And that's good because you've learned something, and you go and change your model, make a new prediction, and go around the cycle. And this is how mathematical modeling works in general. But it's a really creative process.

You don’t need to be good at math to understand it

32:09: We don't need to be mathematical geniuses, but we do need to be aware of the places where mathematics can have an impact, and those are increasing in frequency over time. We're increasingly presented with more and more data.

On thinking of math in form of stories and narratives

03:09: We’re seeing the products of mathematics all around us all the time, and I think that I wanted to share that through the medium of stories because people connect with that. I wanted to tell the stories of real people's lives where they've been impacted by mathematics, perhaps without even being aware of it, so that other people who read the book can then be aware of what's going on and spot those situations when they start to come up.

It's better to be uncertain about a prediction than to trust a hundred percent in a poor prediction

05:56: We are so convinced that we're right; we fail to check the possibility that we could be wrong. We fail to ask the question, "What if I'm wrong?" And actually, we can get into trouble with that. It's much better to be uncertain and to admit and acknowledge that uncertainty about a particular prediction than it is to be 100 percent certain with the risk that the prediction is wrong.

Recommended Resources:

• Bayes’ theorem
• Ponzi scheme
• Goodhart’s law
• Streisand effect
• Monty Hall problem
• John Forbes Nash Jr.
• Independent SAGE

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Bath
• Professional Website

His Work:

• How to Expect the Unexpected: The Science of Making Predictions―and the Art of Knowing When Not To
• The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives

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In some neighborhoods in the US, life expectancy is lower than in some developing countries. How do poverty, inequality, and the uneven distribution of healthcare resources contribute to this problem? 

Dr. David A. Ansell is a professor of medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. His books, County: Life, Death, and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital and The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills examine the aspects of inequality that lead to a decline in life expectancy among marginalized groups. 

He and Greg discuss Dr. Ansell’s experiences working in hospitals in some of Chicago's poorest communities and why the current healthcare systems are leaving vulnerable populations behind.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The impact of capital extraction on communities and social cohesion

30:09: So this idea of when you extract capital out of a neighborhood, meaning the Sears leaves, the Western Electric leaves, the Zenith leaves—the big companies leave because white people have left. The bosses now, the ones who run the factories, said, I'm not going to rebuild it here. Why do I want to drive into a black neighborhood? When you take that capital out, it's not disinvestment; it's extraction. And then people are left devoid of work that's meaningful. But look at the South and globalization. Then what happens is what sets in: Grandma gets depressed, but the uncles now are off doing something else, and they don't look in on her. So you begin to erode that social cohesion, and when it erodes to a degree, that is now something that you could measure as concentrated disadvantage.

The destructive role of holding companies in healthcare

44:51: It's not just capitalism; it's the toxic form of capitalism that we have in this country that's allowed our healthcare delivery systems to be overly endowed with profit-making machines—holding companies, not healing companies.

How our ahistorical thinking hinders progress

16:05: One of the challenges that we have in our world is that we're ahistorical. We have this myth of meritocracy. There are ways in which ideology, built into a society, blinds us to the structures and realities of the world that we're in.

Rethinking healthcare in a broken system

33:39: So, I think we need universal healthcare because this idea of cherry-picking that goes on – that's racialized because white people, in general, have better, or people who have been assigned to whiteness have better, insurance – drives the behavior of healthcare delivery. It needs to be eliminated by some form of universal healthcare.

Recommended Resources:

Guest Profile:

His Work:

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What’s the difference between a lie and deception? How does cheating show up in nature? And is it always a negative thing? 

Dr. Lixing Sun is a professor of animal behavior, ecology, and evolution at Central Washington University. His books, The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars: Cheating and Deception in the Living World and The Fairness Instinct: The Robin Hood Mentality and Our Biological Nature explore the idea that not everything is as it seems in this world, and seek to answer the question of why? 

He and Greg discuss the differences between lying and deceiving, examples of where you can find cheating in nature, and why humans have gotten so good at cheating and deception. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The substantial reality of female cheating

39:34: Recently, studies show that female cheating actually is substantial, and there are lots of benefits associated with that. In my book, I talk a little bit about it, but now there is more to know why cheating is a good strategy among female animals, including humans. Data do not lie, especially about us. I have this data that's from studies; for men, 22 to 25% in their lifetime, they do cheat. And women, 11% to 15% cheat in their lifetimes as well. So, it's quite substantial.

Self-deception in cheating

09:20: Self-deception is for better cheating because when your consciousness is shut down, you can cheat fluently without finding any conflict.

Cheating without conscious thought

16:47: So as to how or why you don't need a brain to cheat, that's relatively simple because, as long as you have a niche—the ecological niche or, no matter what economical niche—the organisms can always take advantage of it. Basically, you have a niche and this adaptive evolution to fit the niche, to take advantage of it. So that's the evolutionary process. It did not require conscious thinking, sort of like in the psychology approach; in humans, you need conscious thinking.

Lying vs. deception

33:39: Lying is referring to communication. A boy crying wolf is lying because he is sending the wrong information to take advantage of being killed by others. So, that is lying. He should say there's no wolf when he cries for a wolf. He is lying because there's no wolf. That's the reality; that's communication. Deception is different. Deception is not necessarily communication, but deception is a take advantage of our cognitive bias.

Recommended Resources:

Guest Profile:

His Work:

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Today’s episode is a historical feast, unraveling the entwined roots of food, philosophy, and the essence of self. But it isn't just for the history buff; it's a banquet for anyone curious about the rich tapestry that flavors our modern approach to nutrition and identity. 

Steven Shapin is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard University and also the author of several books. His upcoming book is titled Eating and Being, A History of Ideas About What We Eat and Who We Are.

Steven and Greg discuss dietetics far beyond mere sustenance, uncovering how health and moral virtue were historically seen as two sides of the same coin. They delve into the complex relationship between age-old folk wisdom and medical authority, and discover how our ancestors' understanding of well-being still simmers beneath the surface of today's nutritional discourse. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

On exploring the relationship between food, identity, and modernity

06:06: The book could be considered as a kind of gloss on the expression "you are what you eat" because at the end of the day, what I'm interested in is what's the relationship between what we think of the stuff that we put in our mouths and who we are. And that, so it's a story about some quite recent changes in answering that sort of question. So it's a story about how we became modern, and are we indeed modern?

Balancing nutritional expertise and common sense in food choices

31:43: You could tell a story about the way in which nutritional expertise trumps common-sense sensory experience. But that, as it were, aura of expertise doesn't illuminate all of our lives. And there is pushback to that, and it's from people who said we've had enough of this scientific inspection of what's on our plate.

You cannot got from the scientific to the moral

11:33: You cannot get from an is to an ought. In other words, you cannot get from the scientific to the moral. But it's precisely the occupation in dietetics, in what counts as the scientific medicine of past centuries, that's placed the is and the ought in the same field. So that what was good for you would guarantee health and a long life also constituted virtue. Moderation is a virtue. It's one of the seven cardinal virtues. I found it tremendously interesting, so I found myself telling a story about, in a way, how we think about food and ourselves, which is also a story about the modern moment.

The multi-faceted considerations of healthy eating

33:39: When you're eating, you have a mind of what's good for your body, insofar as you know what's good for your body. You might know it through past experience. You might know it from the Nutrition Facts label. You might know it from medical expertise. But you also have in mind what is good for conviviality: a nice meal with friends, have a drink—you don't have to get drunk, but have a drink every now and then—what's good for the environment, what's good for the agricultural laborers that produce your food, and what's good for the people who produce your package and transport your food. All of these belong in this pushback to the nutritionally modulated desire to consume only what's good for your body and live forever.

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