unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is a professor of management and senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management. He is also the author, co-author, and editor of a number of books. His works include The Hero's Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire, Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters, and, most recently, Trump's Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox with Steven Tian.

Greg and Jeff discuss why Jeff thinks leadership scholars and journalists misread Donald Trump. He argues the goal should be not to normalize or judge Trump but to understand Trump’s predictable, strategic patterns—often mistaken as impulsive—so they can be countered, and he criticizes the labeling Trump as “stupid” or “crazy” for helping create widespread complacency. 

Jeff recounts a contentious 30-year relationship with Donald Trump that began with his Wall Street Journal critiques of “The Apprentice,” and then continued through Trump’s attempts to win him over (including with a position at Trump University), and Trump’s use of tactics like divide-and-conquer, distraction, the “sleeper effect,” and “wall of sound.” The discussion contrasts personal power versus institutional success,and  stresses collective action as an effective counter.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The danger of underestimating your opponent

04:11: My take on this, in short, is the most dangerous element of American society, after perhaps Donald Trump and some of his acolytes, are many of his critics because his critics give us a false sense of confidence by, for over 10 years now, calling him stupid and calling him crazy. More recently, he's had a break with reality, a sudden cognitive decline with age, and chortling to themselves in their articles to one another like love letters in Atlantic Magazine or giggling on show after show on MS Now. It's about as dangerous, almost, as what Trump and his immediate followers are doing themselves because it's giving the American public, their viewers and readers, a false sense of security that this is a guy who is veering off the edge of the cliff and about to implode, that we don't need to worry.

Don’t mistake emotion for impulse

05:14: What Trump does sometimes comes with a lot of emotion-laden packaging, but these aren't impulsive, accidental decisions he's making. These are strategic, decisive, definitive moves that he's making, and that he has a whole arsenal of them.

How to counter divide and conquer

50:18: How do you prepare for false information? Be ready to counter it very quickly and to make sure you're not divided by one another and all these other kinds of things. How do you counter false information? How do you avoid divide and conquer? You know, those are the lessons from the book rather than to follow these tactics.

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What insights on social psychology can be gleaned from ancient texts? 

William Ian Miller is a professor of law at the University of Michigan and prolific author. His work is that of a polymath and covers everything from Icelandic sagas (Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland; 'Why is your axe bloody?': A Reading of Njals Saga) to philosophical meditations on what makes us human (Outrageous Fortune: Gloomy Reflections on Luck and Life; Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence).

William joins Greg to discuss the varying themes across his body of work including, luck and magical thinking, law and violence in Icelandic sagas, competition and humility, and the purpose of disgust. 

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The de-evolution of psychological smarts in a pacified society

12:57: When you're a medieval historian, you'll see a lot of things that obviously progressed—medical care, stuff like that. A lot of things went backward, like, let's say, just psychological smarts. You had to be much better back then at reading somebody else's intentional states than we are now, because we're a highly pacified society. The idea that some clown can walk towards you texting and make you get out of the way and not get clocked in the face is just beyond... that could not happen in medieval Iceland. You bumped into somebody and didn't look where you were going, that would be an offense to that person's honor,  to the one you bumped into, of not even bothering to see who he was or where he was.

Democracy as a principle of shared contempt

30:54: Democracy might be a principle of shared contempt, that everybody knows that they're held in contempt just as they hold the other in contempt.

Utilitarianism’s math problem and the dark funding of happiness

08:02: How much happiness is schadenfreude? Delight in somebody else's misery. How much of your happiness is funded by other people's misery? I always think that utilitarianism ran into a real math problem. The greatest happiness for the greatest number needed to be funded by misery somewhere.

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Kyle Chayka is a staff writer for the New Yorker and also the author of the books Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture and The Longing for Less: What's Missing from Minimalism.

Greg and Kyle discuss how algorithmic feeds shift culture from the “long tail” promise of niche discovery toward homogenization, rapid fads, and blockbuster dominance. Kyle argues platforms lower barriers to publish but make reaching audiences dependent on gaming recommendation systems, pushing creators, journalists, and even restaurants and tourism toward engagement-driven, Instagrammable, simplified outputs and fast feedback loops. 

Kyle discusses “algorithmic anxiety,” authenticity and taste being shaped by feeds, and incentives like Spotify’s 30-second stream metric affecting music length, quality, and what artists do to respond to that system. They contrast shallow metrics with criticism and curation, discuss minimalism and performative authenticity, and note countervailing long-tail models like newsletters, Patreon, and podcasts, emphasizing the need to exit feeds for deeper engagement.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why everything online starts to look the same

06:02: Algorithmic feeds and recommendations kind of encourage people to homogenize themselves. Like, they don't just stamp the content. The digital platform doesn't dictate exactly what the content looks like, but it encourages all of us, all of the writers and creators and musicians, to behave in similar ways in order to game the system and get an audience for ourselves.

Do algorithmic feeds reward simplicity?

09:46: I think algorithmic feeds reward simplicity. Like, they reward the idea translated into the fewest words or the image that is the most, like, basically attractive or compelling, that lights up your brain right away. So I think people tend to present themselves and mold themselves in that direction as well.

Have we lost control of what we like?

28:45: Taste is never totally organic, right? Like, a record label executive is going to pick the hot young band of the moment in the 1990s. A museum curator will choose who to put in a gallery show, and that will influence what you're actually seeing. But to me, that sense of anxiety was new. Like, that fear that you had lost control of what you liked and that you couldn't identify with it because it was somehow alien to you, that was really striking to me.

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Christian B. Miller is the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and the author of several books. His latest title is The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. 

Greg and Christian discuss what Christian calls ‘The Honesty Crisis.’ He defines honesty as a virtue involving both stable honest behavior (not lying, cheating, stealing, misleading, promise breaking, fraud, hypocrisy, self-deception, or “BS-ing”) and proper motivation (rooted in altruistic concern or duty, not self-interest). He argues honesty tracks subjective belief, so false statements can be honest and true statements can be dishonest, and discusses bullshitting, authenticity, excessive frankness, white lies and their costs, and the puzzle of self-deception. 

Christian cites research suggesting most people default to truth-telling, but claims that multiple “honesty crises” are happening now where technology makes dishonesty easier to commit and harder to detect: AI cheating, deepfakes, internet infidelity, political misinformation, celebrity/influencer dishonesty, and plagiarism. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The two features of an honesty crisis

35:08: An honesty crisis, any of those, is going to have two features. It's more tempting to be dishonest than it was before, and it's easier to get away with dishonesty than it was before. So it's important to highlight that it's not that there was never dishonesty in these areas. That would be silly. That would be a bad claim, dumb claim. You know, education is one of my areas. There's always been student cheating. It's that something has changed such that it's more tempting now to be dishonest than it was before, and it's harder for others to detach that dishonesty.

Is honesty one of the broadest virtues there is?

04:30: Honesty protects against lying, but it also protects against stealing, against cheating, against misleading, against promise breaking, fraud, hypocrisy, self-deception, BS-ing. There's a lot of moral territory it covers on the behavioral side. Maybe one of the broadest virtues there is.

Subjective truth vs. reality

05:57: Honesty tracks the subjective truth. It tracks how you see the reality, not necessarily how reality really is. I mean, ideally, of course, you want your subjective representation to line up with how reality really is. That's what we all want. But it doesn't always. And honesty tracks how you see the world, how you see reality, not necessarily how reality really is.

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Nicolas Darveau-Garneau is the founder of Garneau Digital Advisors, is the former chief evangelist of Google, and is the author of the book Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai: The Seven Growth Secrets of the World’s Most Successful Companies.

Greg and Nicolas discuss how AI systems are akin to powerful “genies,” but the real power and risk come from the “wishes” humans give them. With everyone having similar access to similar “genies,” the true differentiation will come from the strategy behind their use.

Nicolas emphasizes the need to think carefully about how we measure success in marketing and other areas of business. Often we focus on metrics that are easier to capture as opposed to the ones that really matter for achieving our goals. He also claims that companies that fail to articulate their goals in marketing are most likely to fail in other areas.

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The real power of AI is not the AI

55:47: The whole point of AI is that we’re building these amazing genies, but the power isn’t in the genie. The power is in the wish. We have to think very carefully about what we ask these genies to do for us. By the way, I actually think that is going to make us even more human, right? And we have to really do some deep ethical thinking, some deep value thinking, and really give these AIs the right wishes. And then I think we will thrive and be fully human. But if we give these AIs the wrong wishes, then AI can send us into a tailspin, not only as companies but as a society, pretty fast.

Most companies start with the wrong wish

02:42: So, as Google's [former] chief evangelist, I met over 1,000 companies in five years, and what I noticed was that, even in marketing, 90% of the time the teams were asking for the wrong wishes.

Stop designing for the average customer

16:33: So the trick is not to test or design your customer experiences for the average customer. It is to actually build customer experiences for your best customers. Very, very few companies do it this way, right? And so, once you can predict the customer lifetime value of a brand-new customer or an existing customer, the entire corporate strategy should revolve around it.

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Peter Fleming is a professor of management at the University of Technology Sydney, and also the author of several books. His recent works are Dark Academia: How Universities Die, Sugar Daddy Capitalism: The Dark Side of the New Economy, and The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation.

Greg and Peter discuss doing critical theory inside business schools and how neoliberalism and managerialism have reshaped universities. 

They also discuss the professionalization of higher education toward “employability,” driven by scarce public funding and human capital theory, which monetized expectations and intensified pressure, insecurity, and unhappiness. Peter suggests even executives face external constituent pressures. He explains his critique of Homo economicus as an extreme Cold War governance template that failed and contributed to “deaths of despair,” and he emphasizes rebuilding institutions by focusing on the labor problem and workplace conditions.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How human capital theory killed academic wonder

14:01: When we go into the classrooms, we've still got that old idea of imparting critical reflexivity, imparting wonder in the world, whether it's in the sciences, humanities, business schools, and so forth. And we are confronting this very monetized, "No, I want a degree simply because it's going to make me more money." Now, I'm not saying that for all students, but that's the culture that's been encouraged, I think. And that derives from human capital theory because if you're paying for it as a student, then you need to, especially in the US with student loans and all of that, you know, which is just out of control at the moment, then you're going to want to see a return on your investment, to use the phraseology. So I think human capital theory has really reshaped the way in which we think about our lives, in many ways and many facets of society, including higher education. And it's quite sad really, isn't it? It's quite sad.

What does it really mean to become a manager?

45:00: When it comes to teaching students about what it will mean to be a manager, there's a couple of things I try to convey. The first thing is: don't think about becoming a manager. Think about when you're 70 years old and you're looking back on your life, are you going to say, "I made the right decision about what I chose to do for a living"? The worst thing would be to look back and go, "What a waste," and I'm only realizing it now towards the twilight of my years. So choose something that you love.  

The painful implications of capitalism in crisis on the workers

50:04: The subject of the most painful implications of capitalism in crisis is the worker. And I think it's telling what you said earlier, that even tenured professors are feeling awful, right? Many of us can't understand why, but fearful. You know, we're in a well-paid job, security, but it feels like economic destitution is around the corner, which just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. And so I think that finding a way to unify that workforce that's been fragmented, differentiated, different interests, different pay rates, et cetera, et cetera. But dealing with the labor problem, I think, is the big one.

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Matt Kaplan is the science correspondent at The Economist and also the author of a number of books. His latest work is I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right.

Greg and Matt discuss how Matt chose science journalism over academia, the value of being a generalist, and how journalists can cross-pollinate ideas from others. They also discuss academic silos, pecking orders, and how fear, funding pressures, and ego create sticky consensuses that punish deviants, and linking historic cases to modern parallels. 

Matt argues that incremental NIH/NSF funding discourages bold leaps compared with HHMI-style risk-taking, calls for better incentives for peer review and career transitions for senior scientists, and recounts a case in which a dissenting scientist was attacked to the point that they left the field.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

When scientific silos break, innovation happens

09:31: There was a medical conference at the same hotel where this marine biologist was presenting, and one of the surgeons at the medical conference walked by and listened and talked to the marine biologist afterwards and said, “Hey, are you telling me that that spit will hold together stuff in a salty environment?” And the biologist said, “Well, yeah, it's in the ocean.” And the surgeon went, “‘Cause we have really serious problems getting glue that works in the saline environment of a bloody surgery table because your blood is salty, and glues don't work, and we can't put bones together with bolts when the bones are fragments.” So together, they ultimately collaborated and created a glue from the sandcastle worm that's now used in surgery tables around the world. And it was just my favorite word in the world: serendipity. Total serendipity.

Why institutions resist new ideas

14:18: I think uncertainty and fear make us cling to the things that we know. And the more uncomfortable we are with change, the more we cling like a security blanket to the consensus.

Big problems require bigger risks

31:13: I don't think we do enough of the Howard Hughes-type stuff because we got some pretty big problems. I mean, feeding eight billion people, dealing with climate change, generating enough power to have all of the nations of the world have electricity and refrigeration. We can all come together and say refrigeration is probably pretty important. Defeating pandemics. We really have a lot of stuff that needs to be done, and that's not going to get done if we keep taking baby steps. We've got really big problems, and to do that, we need to get comfortable with failure real fast, and we currently are just not accepting it.

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Dale Bredesen is the senior director of the Precision Brain Health Program at Pacific Neuroscience Institute and also the founding CEO of the Buck Institute. He also has authored a number of books, including, most recently, The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime and

The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline.

Greg and Dale discuss Dale’s “network insufficiency” view of Alzheimer’s that shifts focus from plaques alone to a balance of synaptic “supply and demand.” He argues the brain switches from connection to protection under chronic insults, which are microbes, inflammation, toxins, metabolic syndrome, sleep apnea, and poor energetics. Dale highlights tau phosphorylation as part of an antimicrobial response and APOE4 as a pro-inflammatory risk gene with evolutionary benefits. 

They also discuss diet, insulin resistance, exercise, sleep metrics, stress, and the case for prevention and combined approaches.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The brain’s shift from connection to protection

07:33: We see it at every level in the brain. We see it at the molecular level, that you have a connections program and a protection program. We see it at the cellular level, we see it at the tissue level, and even at the organismal level. You can see when people—and you can actually measure this now with blood tests—is someone on the connection side or on the protection side? So therefore, when you have insults, and over our lives it's typically various microbes, it's leaky gut, it's sleep apnea, it's various toxins we're exposed to, air pollution, mercury, microplastics, unfortunately, anesthetic agents, horrible food, all these things that are demanding you be in that protection mode, then ultimately you cannot support five hundred trillion synapses.

The supply-and-demand theory of cognitive decline

30:08: Anything that lowers your supply or increases your demand is going to increase your risk for cognitive decline. On the other hand, anything that lowers the demand and increases the supply is going to be a risk reducer, whether it's Omega-3s, whether it's resolvins, whether it's exercise, whether it's better sleep, more deep sleep, less sleep apnea. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of things. So, for the first time, our armamentarium to reduce risk and reverse decline is huge. Now we can look at these different pieces and manipulate them so that we get better and better outcomes.

Are doctors the antithesis to Silicon Valley?

49:23: Well, here's the thing. Doctors are the antithesis to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is always looking for what's disruptive, what's next, how can we go further, do more. And to be fair, it's because typically those things are not going to kill you. Whether you, like, get your package from Amazon a little faster, it's not going to kill you. Whereas the doctors are told, “Listen,” just like being in the army, “If you do not do what we tell you, someone's going to die.” And that's fair, okay. But they're very poor, therefore, at innovation. If you go back to history, it’s scary, scurvy—it was understood what to do about scurvy in the sixteen hundreds. It wasn't generally accepted until the nineteen hundreds. So thousands and thousands and thousands of people died needlessly because doctors said, “No, we do not believe this.” And the same thing, frankly, is happening now with Alzheimer's disease.

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Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford, and the author of multiple books, including, most recently, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI.

Greg and Carissa discuss Carissa’s newest work, where she links prediction to surveillance and argues that forecasts are speech acts that intervene in the world, often becoming self-fulfilling or self-defeating. She says humans seek prophecy to relieve anxiety, but this grants power to predictors and can undermine autonomy, democracy, and fairness, especially via opaque algorithms, social-credit-style control, and pattern-matching decisions like lending. 

Carissa urges transparent, contestable criteria, skepticism about incentives behind predictions, and treating unwanted forecasts as invitations to defy rather than “obey in advance.” Their conversation critiques utilitarianism and effective altruism for relying on long-term prediction, discusses fatalism and moral luck, and advocates resilience, scenario planning, Epicurean agency, and literature as an antidote to doomscrolling, shrinking attention, and AI-driven cultural convergence.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

When forecasts become commands

25:28: Instead of obeying predictions by believing them uncritically, I suggest that we interpret them as invitations for defiance. And maybe some predictions you do not want to defy. Maybe some predictions you're like, “Okay, yeah, I like that future, and I'm on board.” But with the ones that you don’t like, I think the correct attitude is, “No, we're not. No, we're not. That's not where we're going.”

Can predictions bend reality?

25:34: When we believe that prediction uncritically, when we listen to it as if it were a fact, because grammatically it sounds like a fact, what we are doing is obeying implicitly in the sense of Timothy Snyder, of obeying in advance before we are issued an explicit command. When we interpret predictions as facts, we implicitly obey in advance.

Obeying in advance

23:54: When we believe that prediction uncritically, when we listen to it as if it were a fact, because grammatically it sounds like a fact, what we are doing is obeying implicitly in the sense of Timothy Snyder, of obeying in advance before we are issued an explicit command. When we interpret predictions as facts, we implicitly obey in advance.

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Eric Ries is an author, podcaster, and founder of The Lean Startup. He hosts The Eric Ries Show and his notable books Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great, The Lean Startup, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama, The Leader's Guide, and The Startup Way.

Greg and Eric discuss why startups and corporations lose their mission through shifts from founder-to investor-control, changing from long-term focus to short-term focus, and purpose-driven to profit-driven behavior. Eric argues governance is “organizational soul craft” and critiques shareholder primacy as a recent, judge-and-academic-driven ideology that creates unaccountable short-term pressure, metric surrogation, and value destruction, even for shareholders. 

Eric also explains how markets reward short-term cost-cutting (e.g. reduced R&D), and why mission-driven companies can outperform. He outlines practical protections such as writing mission primacy into charters, converting to Public Benefit Corporations, and stronger structures like foundation ownership (e.g. Novo Nordisk and Patagonia).

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Mission-driven or mission-hopeful?

12:39: So I think for companies, we're seeing this world now where we have a divergence between the mission statement and the actual mission or purpose of the organization. So the mission statement is lofty. I tell the story in the book of Silicon Valley Bank before it collapsed. Its mission statement was something like, “To advance the innovation economy,” or whatever. But its actual legal purpose was just maximize shareholder value. So this divergence caused the collapse of the bank. And so, first of all, if you have a mission statement, but your purpose says “any lawful act or activity,” you're lying. Just so you know, you are lying to your customers. You are lying to your employees. You're lying to everyone you say that mission to because, according to current legal theory, you could be replaced at a moment's notice by your investors, who will then can change the mission to whatever they want. I call that not being mission-driven. You are mission-hopeful. You're hoping nobody will do this to you in the future.

Governance is organizational soul craft

Governance sounds really boring, but it's really the art of organizational soul craft. It's actually really interesting. And if we can get leaders and founders to pay more attention to it, they can have a much higher probability of their organization enduring.

The age of temporary organizations

27:46: I say we've entered an era of temporary managers running temporary organizations for the benefit of temporary owners because executive tenure, company lifespan, and average holding period of stocks have all collapsed in the last, especially the last twenty-five years, let alone the last forty years. So, I don't think it's possible to really have—it's very difficult to build a value-creating organization in that span, and the markets will punish you for doing so.

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