unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

How much does venture capital actually have to do with finance? It turns out, not that much. Rather, venture capital has more to do with psychology, network theory, and organizational dynamics. 

Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He’s written numerous books, including The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future and More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite. 

He and Greg discuss how venture capital can be a form of finance without much finance, why governance plays such an important role in successful venture capital, and why other places have found it difficult to replicate the Silicon Valley model. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Embeddedness is essential for startup success 

45:09: Most of the good GPs I wrote about in my book either had an engineering degree or some other skill which would add value to the portfolio company, maybe be an expert in go-to-market strategies. Secondly, they know something about business and finance; perhaps they have a business degree. Thirdly, they may have started a startup or been an early employee in a startup. So that experience from the inside of being an entrepreneur, and you don't need maybe all three of those things, but you probably might need two. That's the obvious thing. The less obvious thing is that You need to be what I call embedded. You need to be in a network which is going to be generating startup founders, and you need to have standing in that network. You need to have thought leadership such that the founders that emerge from this network are going to want to come to you for money because they're also going to want you as their advisor, and that embeddedness is super important.

What VCs are looking for

04:00: Credibility, storytelling, embeddedness in the network, a sense of vision, a sense of passion, and commitment from the founding team. These are what the Venture Capitalists are looking for.

Is there any chance we could create a more factory-like system for identifying good investments and good founders and investing in them?

41:42: I think fundamentally the things that AI will not cannibalize are things where human-to-human contact is super important, and that is true of venture investing because it is about a venture capitalist, a human being, meeting a startup entrepreneur. They have to agree that they're going to be partners together and that this is going to be something you can't exit very easily, and you're probably going to be meshed together if it goes well.

Behavioral dynamics

23:28: Behavioral dynamics are super interesting when you think about the question of whether solo venture capitalists—whether that's a good model—became fashionable in the last three, four, or five years. I think partly a function of the bull market leading up to 2021 because it was relatively easy to raise capital. If you had some decent claim to be embedded in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, you could go out as an individual and raise some money, and why not do it by yourself? But I think that when you're trying to make slippery judgments on early-stage ventures, which have no quantitative guidelines, as I began by saying, all you have is the ability to test your human judgment on a smart partner who will push back against you and say if they disagree. So I think the dynamics within venture companies like that Monday morning meeting when you decide what to invest in, you've got six or seven partners around the table. That's super important.

• Ronald Coase
• Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnaLee Saxenian
• Sequoia Capital
• Kleiner Perkins

• Professional Profile for Council on Foreign Relations 

• The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
• More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite 
• The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations

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Why are only 8.5% of large projects completed on time and within budget? No matter what type of project you're involved in, whether it's home renovations or space exploration, this conversation promises a wealth of knowledge and insights.

Bent Flyvbjerg is a professor at both Oxford University and the IT University of Copenhagen. He is also the author of several works, and his latest book is How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between.

Bent and Greg delve into the influence of strategic misrepresentation on project outcomes and the often-overlooked power dynamics within organizations that wield considerable influence over a project's fate. They discuss fascinating case studies from the Sydney Opera House, Pixar's blockbusters, and Amazon's product development approach.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The more you allow your brain to work, the more biases you're going to have

10:49: The more you allow your brain to work, the more biases you're going to have. If you're allowing your brain to work in this manner where it's trying to figure out things for this specific project, if you allow your brain to work in collecting data on similar projects, where it's an empirical fact that these data had the performance that they did and now you use this empirical fact as your base rates for what you're doing, then you're doing the right thing. Then you're thinking the right way. But if you're thinking the conventional way, where you're trying to understand things inside out, you understand your product from the inside without taking other projects into account that's when you open the doors for all these cognitive biases that we have—because you have to make everything up.

11:31: The mind is very good at making things up, and that's what you have to be careful about when you are working on big investment decisions.

The need for courses in power and politics 

56:59: If you're working on anything big, you are going to be in an organization, even a small organization. There's power. Wherever people are gathering, there will be power issues. And if you haven't been trained in how to deal with them, I don't know how you can be effective in a power environment.

Why is uniqueness bias dangerous? 

09:40: Uniqueness bias is a pretty mean bias in the sense that it makes us ignore reality. If you think my project is unique, you have no reason to look at other projects and go out and search for knowledge about what happened in other projects because it's irrelevant per definition, as you think your project is unique, right? And that's really dangerous.

On rationality and power

54:25: I think that it's less legitimate to talk about power than it is to talk about rationality. So it's much easier. And, by the way, on a lot of the project types that we are talking about, including IT projects, there's a large dose of engineers, and of course, engineers are trained in rationality, talking about rationality, and making their projects rational. But on the big projects, engineers are actually working in political organizations. And again, whether they are private businesses or public government, there's politics in both kinds of organizations. And that means that there's pressure to do things in certain ways.

• Cass Sunstein
• Planning fallacy
• Optimism bias
• False-uniqueness effect
• Fat-tailed distribution
• Skewness
• Kurtosis
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Daniel Kahneman
• Mandelbrot set
• Sydney Opera House
• Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
• Frank Gehry
• Pixar
• Sarbanes–Oxley Act
• Albert O. Hirschman
• Jørn Utzon
• Andrew Wolstenholme

• Faculty Profile at Oxford
• Bent Flyvbjerg on X
• Bent Flyvbjerg on LinkedIn

• How Big Things Get Done
• Rationality and Power
• The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management
• Megaproject Planning and Management
• Real Social Science: Applied Phronesis
• Public Sociology: Proceedings of the Anniversary Conference
• Decision-Making On Mega-Projects: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Planning and Innovation
• Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition
• Making Social Science Matter
• Google Scholar Page
• Medium Articles

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In this episode, we unravel the misunderstood philosophy of Epicureanism. Don't be fooled by common misconceptions - Epicureanism isn't just about hedonism. It's about a balanced pursuit of tranquility, ataraxia, and the good life.

Emily Austin is a Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and the author of Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life. 

Emily and Greg compare and contrast Stoicism and Epicureanism, two philosophies with differing views on virtue and happiness. Discover why modern Stoicism has drifted from its ancient foundations and how the life of Seneca may have twisted his philosophy. Emily and Greg also break down the significance of shared meals in Epicurean tradition, discussing the peculiar competition around extravagance and the possible elitism attached to it. They also discuss Epicurus' methods to mitigate the fear of death and the complexities of living unnoticed in our modern, hyper-connected world.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Allegiances are central to friendship

32:37: As an adult, it's fascinating, right? When somebody starts to have some success, people basically almost pretend they don't know you. Will be like, “Hey, let's go out for a drink,” right? But given the finite amount of time and energy we have, you go out for a drink with that person, and you're neglecting a friend who's been trustworthy. And so you can start seeing some of this sort of shifting allegiances, even in adulthood. It's fascinating. So, those are the things that I think for Epicurus are central to friendship. But then once you have those things, you enjoy all these extravagances together, and those friends are there for you during times of need, and you have all these wonderful memories with them. Even when you find yourself dying, you don't feel like you're going to be abandoned.

What sets Stoics and Epicureans apart?

18:10: One of the big differences between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that the Epicureans avoid politics. And the Stoics think it's a demonstration of your masculinity, and your excellence to participate in politics.

Friends don’t make friends anxious

30:16: There is this kind of view about extravagances, and this way that we internalize kinds of status pulls us away from having meaningful relationships. It produces anxiety to see your friends, right? And then, I think that it is true for Epicurus too, like just in the general sense that friends don't make friends anxious. As I have it in the book, the two most important things for having a good friend are trust and a shared sense of fundamental values.

Epicurus thoughts on desire

24:13: One feature of a desire like that is that it's never satisfied because there's always more. And Epicurus thinks tranquility is a kind of satisfaction. It's being satisfied with having what you need. So if you have these desires, he thinks you're always going to be dissatisfied. Then they're competitive, so you're going to alienate people, and if you care a lot about them, then you're going to commit injustice, and that's going to cause anxiety. Or you'll become like a lackey or a bully to get them more, and that will again cause anxiety and alienate you. And so he thinks you should cut those out entirely. So necessary ones, get them, focus on them, their priorities, and then pursue the extravagances as they come along, and often those will be the most memorable experiences of your life. So, for various reasons, including the role of memory and his coping with misfortune, he wants you to pursue them the right way.

• Epicureanism
• Lucretius
• Hedonism
• Ataraxia
• Hedonic treadmill
• Hyperbolic discounting
• Stoicism
• Seneca the Younger
• Nero
• Lonesome Dove
• Wake
• Athenaeus

• Faculty Profile at Wake Forest
• Professional Portrait by Wake Forest

• Amazon Author Page
• Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

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Strategic Insights are everywhere, but they often go unnoticed by leaders. How can leaders of organizations harness the ideas around them by opening up their strategic planning process?

Christian Stadler is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Warwick Business School and the author of the books Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-Suite (Management on the Cutting Edge), Enduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding Corporations, and the German book Krieg. 

Christian and Greg discuss the challenges of idea generation in established companies and champion mid-sized businesses for their ability to introduce fresh perspectives. Christian explains Open Strategy: promoting a culture of openness, reshuffling within an organization, and creating unexpected connections, all geared towards fostering an environment that thrives on change. They also take a look at how academia and organizations can build open environments that encourage lifelong learning and innovation.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How much of our business idea should we share with other people?

30:38: You can control what you share and what you do not share when you open up, and try to get input from people. If it comes to that lot of details of formulating a strategy, then you probably have to reveal more. But for this, you can have a much more controlled setting where you bring people in who sign non-disclosure agreements, and then it's much more similar to what the consultant typically would do in this space. So here, you can contain that. If you talk about idea generation, you don't need to tell people much in order to get their ideas, and you don't need to share that much afterwards what you do with that information either.

New ideas thrive even in stable environments

47:25: Even if you have a stable environment, it doesn't prevent you from bringing in ideas on some dimensions, be it new product ideas, new markets, or opportunities where you can still engage larger groups of people in this. There are more opportunities when there's more radical change on the horizon.

Who do you communicate ideas and problems in companies?

23:33: Some companies develop this online culture where people constantly comment on things. To keep it alive, the top leadership needs to be visible in this space as well. And you need to have strong moderation. So, the illusion that this is somehow making less work and you can almost outsource this to somebody else is an illusion. You need somebody who sits on top of this, who moderates, who filters out things. There's crowdsourcing tools as well that can help you with this.

Is it harder to generate new ideas in large companies?

16:32: The other big problem you have in large companies, in particular, is silo thinking, where you have departments duplicating work and not talking to each other, where just being able to connect different departments sometimes would lead to this recombination of knowledge, which is a main kind of mechanism to create new ideas. But it's hard to do in large organizations.

• VUCA
• Michael Porter
• How CEOs Manage Time
• Innovative Medical Products, Inc.
• Centre for European Reform
• Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates
• Adam M. Kleinbaum Articles
• The Rise of AI-Powered Companies

• Faculty Profile at Warwick Business School
• Professional Profile on Winthrop Group
• Christian Stadler's Website
• Christian Stadler on LinkedIn
• Christian Stadler on X
• Christian Stadler on Youtube

• Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-Suite
• Enduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding Corporations
• Google Scholar Articles
• Forbes Articles

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Is History driven by heroic individuals or by variation and selection? What determines the speed of innovation? 

Matt Ridley is a science writer, journalist, and businessman. His books include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and How Innovation Works.

Matt and Greg discuss the integral role freedom, idea exchange, and trade play in driving innovation. They delve deep into the concept of creative destruction and how it's essential for large corporations to reinvent themselves to stay competitive or be allowed to cease to exist suddenly. Matt talks about the debate surrounding the origin of COVID-19, its implications for virology, and the spread of false information in our interconnected world. The discussion examines the controversial lab leak hypothesis and the impact of China's rise on global innovation.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why is it that evolutionary thinking is like the gift that keeps on giving?

02:25: The message of my book, "The Evolution of Everything," is that we don't want to let this insight remain confined to biology. It's just as useful as a way of understanding human society in lots of different aspects. Not just economics, but social change as well. Because really, the simple idea that if there's variation, if there's trial and error, if there's experimentation going on, then some ideas are going to survive at the expense of others. And that's going to lead to progressive adaptation. That's going to lead to progressive improvement in some technology, in some social habits, whatever it might be.

Innovation is more about rearranging the world

14:20: Recombination of existing genes is the main way that innovation happens in evolutionary biology, much more common than de novo mutation, and that's true of us too. Most of the new products we produce in the world by innovation are actually just the same old materials combined in new and interesting ways. Innovation is more about rearranging the world than it is about coming up with completely new things.

Crony capitalism extends corporate lifespans, stifling innovation

27:41: Crony capitalism, corporate favoritism, is a tried-and-true and tested way to stay in the game. But it tends to come at the expense of innovation, and it tends to leave you more and more vulnerable to collapse when you do. Get to face real competition. It tends to leave the company vulnerable to disappearing. 

Everybody thinks they know innovation, but only few people can pin it down

30:46: The main reason we're living lives of far greater comfort than we did 500 years ago is still somewhat mysterious. We can tell you things like it needs freedom, it needs trial and error, and things like that, but we can't switch it on and off, let alone tell you when and where it's going to happen. In that sense, it's a surprisingly slippery thing, innovation. Everybody talks about it. Everybody thinks they know about it, but surprisingly, few people can really pin it down. And as I say, you can't put it in a mathematical model, at least not in a very convincing way.

• Intentional stance
• Great man theory
• Francis Crick
• Infinite Improbability Drive
• Meme
• Geoffrey West
• Linear model
• Francisco Mojica
• COVID-19 lab leak theory
• Zoonosis
• Michael Shellenberger

• Speaker’s Profile on Chartwell Speakers
• Matt Ridley's Website
• Matt Ridley on LinedIn
• Matt Ridley on X
• Matt Ridley on YouTube
• Matt Ridley on TEDTalk
•  Matt Ridley on Talks at Google

• Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19
• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
• How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
• The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
• The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
• Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
• The Origins of Virtue
• Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human
• Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code
• Climate Change: The Facts 2017

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How does one tell the story of knowledge through the centuries? And what kind of knowledge is being discussed when looking at its history? 

Peter Burke, a professor of history at Cambridge University, has written more than 30 books over the course of his lifetime and has taken a special interest in studying the history of knowledge and polymaths. 

He and Greg discuss a couple of his major works like The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag and What is the History of Knowledge? (What is History?). They also discuss how the history of knowledge can not come without a history of ignorance, whether or not polymaths are a thing of the past, and if the aggregate amount of knowledge is increasing today.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Decision-Making, where history of knowledge meets general history

39:59: I got into decision-making, and the nice thing about it is it connects history of knowledge with general history more clearly than other studies in the history of knowledge. So it breaks down one more barrier because one great thing about history in the last couple of generations is the interest of different historians in different other disciplines: economic historians studying economics, social historians studying sociology. The great price has been that in having a fruitful dialogue with their colleagues in the neighboring discipline, they no longer speak to other historical colleagues, but this history of knowledge and ignorance has the potential for connecting things. All these different practical areas where decisions are taken that is influencing the history of the world, and knowledge is playing this crucial part, or the absence of knowledge is playing this crucial part.

What unique insights do historians offer to understand knowledge creation and innovation?

48:30: Historians are people who specialize in telling you that the problem that you think is unique is one that has occurred a number of times in the past. And that's the most specifically historical. Otherwise, I think historians are like sociologists and even more like anthropologists because they try to understand the mindset of people in other cultures, and this is an absolutely indispensable kind of knowledge, which we need more and more in a globalizing world where we're constantly living. Meeting people from other cultures, constantly misunderstanding them, and constantly being misunderstood by them.

How does the brain of polymaths work?

21:17: Polymaths need a great power of concentration. So, they're described by their families and friends as they pick up a book, and they somehow sort of suck the contents out in half an hour, but they do this because they've got this incredible concentration. But because they're concentrating on the problem, and they're living in the everyday world, what other people notice is their failure: The failure of the polymaths to notice what's happening around them, absent-mindedness. But their mind, if it's absent from ordinary everyday life, is extremely present next to the problem they're trying to solve.

New knowledge is always associated with new ignorance

42:33: New knowledge is always associated with new ignorance, and this is inevitable given that human beings still sleep for eight hours a night except for a few polymaths. And they don't spend all their time acquiring knowledge. So if they acquire some of the new knowledge, for example, about IT, and then they've got less time to acquire some of the old knowledge.

• Karl Mannheim
• Edward Shils
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Thomas Aquinas
• Lewis Mumford
• Cs lewis discarded image 

• Faculty Profile at Cambridge University

• Ignorance: A Global History
• The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag
• The Art of Conversation
• What is the History of Knowledge? (What is History?)
• French Historical Revolution
• The Italinan REnaissance
• What is Cultural History?
• Social History of Knowledge
• Fortunes of the Courtier
• Eyewitnessing
• Cultural Hybridity

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Nowadays, if someone wants to make a lot of money in finance, they don’t go and work for investment banks. The real money to be made is at private equity firms. With most of these firms controlling a huge percentage of the country’s overall GDP and doing so largely unchecked, is it time to take a hard look at the systems that protect and allow these actors to flourish?? 

Brendan Ballou is special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. His book, Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America, takes a hard look at the way private equity firms operate and the laws they exploit.  

He and Greg discuss what sets private equity firms apart from other financial institutions in America, the ways private equity firms avoid liability when things go wrong, and what reforms are needed to the systems that essentially allowed private equity to become the beast that it is today. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Private equity as an institution is unique

05:31: Private equity as an institution is unique for three reasons. One is that private equity owners tend to invest for just a few years, so you're talking about a three, five, or seven-year time horizon. Two is that private equity firms tend to load up the companies they buy with a lot of debt and extract a lot of fees. And the magic trick, as you probably know, a lot of these private equity deals is when they load these companies up with debt; for the acquisition, it's the company that holds the debt, not the private equity firm. So if things go badly, it's the company that's on the hook. It's not the private equity owners and investors. And then the third thing, and this is what really interests me as a lawyer, is private equity firms are enormously successful at insulating themselves legally from the consequences of their portfolio company's actions. So, if something goes wrong at a portfolio company, someone is hurt, or an employee is taken advantage of, whatever it happens to be, it's very hard to hold a private equity firm responsible.

Is private equity an extreme version of capitalism?

03:44:  Private equity is an extreme version of capitalism, for better or for worse...It's not an extreme form of capitalism. It's a deviation or a perversion of capitalism by the specific laws and regulations that we have that incentivize short-term term investing, reliance on debt, and insolation from liability. We've created these legal structures that allow certain people to capture all the upside of our economy if things go well, but walk away if they don't.

Short-term gain versus long-term success

12:17: The time frame that you've got for an investment changes your perspective on what you're going to do with it, whether you're going to jack up prices for the short term, even if it means that you're going to lose customers for the long term, underinvest in your employees and your innovation, even if it means that you might be scooped by the competition in a few years, and so forth.

How are private equity firms compensated?

31:00: Private equity firms are compensated on a 2-in-20 model: 2% of the profits above a certain threshold, 20% of the profits above a certain threshold, and 2% of the assets under management every year. The carried interest loophole says that both of those should be treated as capital gains rather than ordinary income, and capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. That's pretty much all the money that a private equity executive typically makes. So, leaders of private equity firms have historically paid a lower tax rate than the firefighters and teachers that they nominally serve.

• Other People's Money And How The Bankers Use It by Louis Brandeis
• The Modern Corporation and Private Property
• Peter Whoriskey’s story on the Carlyle Group for The Washington Post
• Worth Rises
• SIFIs

• Brendan Ballou on LinkedIn
• Brendan Ballou on X 

• Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America

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Ever wondered why some people seem to have an aversion to gesturing while speaking? Or did you know that even in the absence of sight, human beings instinctively use gestures to communicate?

Susan Goldin-Meadow is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago and also the author of the books Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts, The Resilience of Language, and Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think.

Susan and Greg take a deep dive into the integral role of gestures in language acquisition, especially during early childhood. They also discuss the striking similarity of key gestures across various cultures, indicating a shared linguistic heritage, the fascinating evolution of various sign languages, and the unique ways they convey information distinctly from spoken language. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

On integrating gesture with speech

34:21: What gesture is really good at is integrating with speech. It needs to be integrated with speech. It's one of the reasons co-speech gesture is useless for deaf kids because they can't hear the speech, and then they see all of these things that we do, and they think, and so what they come up with is quite different from co-speech gestures. So, co-speech gesture is co-speech gesture and needs to be thought about along with speech. So, taking away speech isn't going to do it. If in fact, you tell people, "Okay, shut up, don't say a word," but gesture to describe this, your gesture will look different from the way it looks when it accompanies speech.

Gestures are not as sophisticated as sign language

26:18:  You can do whatever you want in sign language, and it works. It's a language. Gestures are not as sophisticated as sign language or spoken language.

Transmission is important for language to take-off

12:40: Deaf individuals used to be pretty isolated in hearing homes. But at one point, they created a Deaf education system, and they brought a bunch of homesigners, essentially, together, and they interacted with one another. So, at that point, they started to develop lexical items that they shared, things like that. But the language took off when new little deaf kids came into the community and learned the system from these older ones. So, there's some evidence that real transmission helps the language grow. You may need to share it and communicate. But transmission is essential in order for the language to take off.

Sign language is more than just Hand-in-Mouth

31:00: Signers gesture, but their sign language is categorical, just like spoken language, and their gesture is more imagistic. So, sign language sign-gesture mismatches work in the same way that speech-gesture mismatches work: to predict. Learning it can't be about two modalities because the signers are using one modality, just hands, to represent this stuff—and that turns out to be true. So it feels like it's not just hand-in-mouth. Hand-in-mouth may help. It may do some work for us, but there's something more. It really is the way gesture represents information and language represents information co-occurring together.

• List of Gestures
• French Sign Language
• French Sign Language Family
• Paul Ekman
• Dance Notation
• Labanotation

• Faculty Profile at the University of Chicago
• The Goldin-Meadow Laboratory
• National Academy of Sciences Profile
• Susan Goldin-Meadow on LinkedIn
• Susan Goldin-Meadow on TEDxUChicago

• Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts
• The Resilience of Language
• Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think
• Google Scholar Page
• ResearchGate Publications

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Is democracy and the idea of citizenship deteriorating because of the state of our country’s education system? 

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He’s written more than 25 books in the realm of classics, military history, and the American political system. His latest book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, explores what it means to be an American. 

Victor and Greg discuss the modern threats to citizenship, the disappearing middle class, and how America’s education system may be exacerbating the problem.  

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Is the decline of classics and the decline of liberal arts education the same things?

32:16: Classics is an intensification of a history or a literature major, but it's the foundation of it. It had a much greater burden because it required or centered on two difficult languages, which you can become an English major or a history major without that as an undergraduate. But they're the same thing. They were the idea that you had a reverence for the past. You didn't go back and try to use the standards of the present to judge people in the past necessarily. You made moral judgments, but that wasn't the intent of history per se. In addition, through the use of literature and historical examples and writing, discussing, and debating, you develop oral fluency. You learn how to write grammatically correct English and stylistically engaging English. You thought. You were inductive. You didn't go into a class where the professor said if you say this particular gender is evil, the subtext is, and then you deduce examples that prove that.

On globalism

51:21: Globalism is a synonym for American popular culture in many ways. We have the most dynamic culture that has very few prerequisites to participate in, as Europe does. But the more sinister thing is: it's an elite-driven phenomenon.

The power of citizenship

02:33: Citizenship is very rare in history. It's usually either the person ruled or is either a member of a tribal organization, a mere resident, a subject, a serf, or a slave. But the idea that a citizen is empowered to self-govern and to create the conditions under which government exists by the consent of the governed doesn't exist anywhere outside the Mediterranean or before the 7th century.

The shifting dynamics of race, class, and gender

17:33: We used to talk about race, class, gender, race, class, gender, but class has disappeared. When you hear that mantra, it's usually race and gender. And this was very brilliant on the part of the left because class is a mobile, fluid concept, and a very successful capitalist society. One generation does not guarantee, necessarily, that they're all going to be in the class of their parents. I can tell you from my own family that's true, both positively and negatively. Races, if you fixate on it, so if you say race is the entire definition of deprivation, bias, racism, and not class, then it's immutable; it's forever.

• Thucydides
• Tacitus
• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
• Herodotus
• Battles of Lexington and Concord
• Michel Foucault
• War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots by Ian Morris 
• High Noon (1952)
• The Searchers (1956)

• Profile for Hoover Institution at Stanford University
• Professional Website
• Victor Davis Hanson on X

• The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
• The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece
• Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
• The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny 
• Carnage and Culture Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power 

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Ever wondered about the growing presence of asset managers in all aspects of our lives?

Brett Christophers is a Professor in the Department of Human Geography at Uppsala University in Sweden and the author of several books. His latest work is titled Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, and next year, he has a new book coming out called The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet. 

Brett and Greg discuss the migration from public equity to private, the rise of large landlords and infrastructure providers, and the outsourcing of public services to the private sector. The conversation takes a deep dive into the realm of asset management in the housing sector. Brett offers an enlightening perspective on what it means for tenants when asset managers are landlords. They unpack the mixed bag of potential benefits and disadvantages that could arise in this scenario. Brett and Greg also discuss the rising trend of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing, and how asset managers are leveraging this wave.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Are asset managers public service or a powerful rhetoric?

40:43: One of the main lines of defense that these investment managers, asset managers, rely upon when they come under attack from the likes of me, but not only the likes of me, politicians from the likes of Elizabeth Warren and so on in the U.S., is they'll say, "Look, you don't want to be attacking us because we're providing a public service in the way you just outlined. If our funds perform well, then that's all to the well and good because the money we're investing through those funds is the money of the firefighters, the teachers, and the nurses." And that's a very powerful piece of rhetoric. It's that rhetoric which sustains the business model in large part because people buy that rhetoric, and therefore, the business continues on its merry way.

The power of asset managers in infrastructure investments

33:50: If governments have increasingly persuaded themselves that the private sector is the answer in terms of infrastructure investment, then almost by definition they've persuaded themselves that asset managers are the answer. Because asset managers have the command of the greatest surplus capital today, if you're looking into the private sector to invest, then, essentially, you're looking to asset managers because they're the ones that have all the dry powder.

Are asset management companies publicly traded but still opaque?

23:40: Public ownership entails a certain degree of scrutiny that is still lacking in the cases of these asset management companies, even if those asset management firms are themselves publicly traded. Many of them now are the likes of Blackstone, which would be a good example of that. So yes, the firms themselves are publicly traded, but much of what occurs through the funds that they established is obviously still very, very opaque in a way that is not necessarily true of publicly traded companies.

Private equity and real estate investments use the same fee mechanisms and fund structures

03:41: Whether you're talking about private equity or real estate investment, what you find is that they're often using exactly the same kind of fee mechanisms, fund structures, and so on. So that's why I use that terminology, because I think that the most important thing to really draw attention to is this fact that, at the end of the day, most of the money that they're investing is not their own. And that's a key feature of this. But even though, of course, they're using different investment strategies, different fund structures, and so on.

• Pension fund
• KKR & Co. Inc.
• Blackstone Inc.
• The Carlyle Group
• Pensions in Canada
• OMERS
• Brookfield Corporation
• Macquarie Group
• Sovereign wealth fund

• Faculty Profile at Uppsala University

• The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
• Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
• Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
• The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
• The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law
• Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism
• Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television
• David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to His Thought
• Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction (Critical Introductions to Geography)
• Google Scholar Page
• Academia.edu Articles
• The Guardian Articles
• Time Articles

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