What is ‘good stress’ and what are the benefits of it? How does an upbringing in uncertainty prepare you in some ways better for the world than others? How are intolerance and uncertainty linked? What is the important purpose of daydreaming for creativity and business?

Maggie Jackson is a journalist and the author of the books Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention, and What's Happening to Home: Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age.

Greg and Maggie discuss the nuances of uncertainty, attention, and distraction, emphasizing the importance of daydreaming and mind wandering. Maggie explores her findings about the impact of these states on creativity, learning, and memory. Their discussion also covers how societal and cultural attitudes towards uncertainty affect decision-making and problem-solving, especially in professional settings like medicine and finance. Maggie also reveals the role of dissent in fostering creativity and collaboration, and the need to manage mental well-being in an increasingly fast-paced world.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How uncertainty primes us to learn and perform

05:44: What's really important to understand, and comes from the new neuroscience of uncertainty, is that this discomfort we feel is actually good stress. So, when you're meeting up with something new or unexpected or ambiguous—in the forest, or in the workplace, or wherever—you actually have a stress response. Neurotransmitters, hormones, et cetera, you know, are cascading through your body. Your body and brain are kind of springing into action. And what's really amazing, and very new scientifically, is that your brain on uncertainty is undergoing remarkably positive changes. So, when you're unsure—this has been documented in emergency room physicians and others—your working memory improves, your attention heightens, your brain becomes more receptive to new data. So, this is a state—yes, that's uncomfortable—but that's good stress. You're actually being primed to learn and perform.

Uncertainty is a signal to learn not to retreat

06:42: Uncertainty is the brain telling itself, "There's something to be learned here." So, that puts a different spin on this idea that we should retreat from it.

Tolerance of uncertainty is a skill you can build

28:15: So, we all sit somewhere on the spectrum of this new personality trait. It was actually discovered about 50 years ago, but it's getting a lot of attention, called tolerance of uncertainty or intolerance of uncertainty. So, if you're tolerant of uncertainty—highly—you're more a flexible thinker. You like surprises, you see uncertainty as a challenge. Intolerant people, during the acute phase of the pandemic, for instance, they were far more likely to turn to denial, avoidance, and substance abuse to cope. So, it's really interesting because our intolerance of uncertainty is mutable. Not only can we boost our tolerance—we can practice, we can do daily exercises—there are clinical studies that are actually treating anxiety just by helping people bolster their tolerance and uncertainty. But it's also important to know that it's situational.

Recommended Resources:

• Yerkes–Dodson Law
• Jeremy P. Jamieson | Google Scholar
• Carol Collier Kuhlthau | Rutgers University
• Harry S. Truman
• “The Einstellung Effect, Explained”
• Amy Edmondson
• Daniel Kahneman
• Robert Stickgold
• James J. Collins

Guest Profile:

• Maggie-Jackson.com
• LinkedIn Profile

Her Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure
• Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention
• What's Happening to Home: Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age

How can the leadership power be wielded for both good and ill? How can leaders use their influence more ethically and effectively, and why is that important for the growth of the whole superorganism?

Adam Galinsky is a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School, and also the author of the books Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others and Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both.

Greg and Adam discuss Adam’s research and teaching experiences, emphasizing the complexities of human leadership compared to leadership in the rest of the animal kingdom. Adam highlights the importance of understanding power dynamics and how small actions from leaders can have amplified impacts on their teams. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

On the power perspective taking

40:13: One of my biggest research findings was, you know, that power lowers perspective taking, right? Even though the powerful have greater impact and, in some ways, need for perspective, they have less of it. But I also have shown that there's a particularly powerful force of power with perspective taking. And so I actually call it—it's like driving a race car, right? Would be a good analogy. So power is the gas that lets you go fast. But if you don't have a steering wheel, you're gonna crash into things. So perspective taking is your steering wheel. And so, if you just have the steering wheel without the gas, you just sit there going nowhere, right? So it's the combination, I think, of the two that are really, really powerful.

Leadership tools can build or break

51:48: Every single part of the leadership toolbox can be used for good. Or it can be used for a really bad goal. It can be used to hurt people. And so part of what inspiring leadership is, using the toolbox towards inspiring goals, and to making other people's lives better.

The five-second leadership habit

26:47:  One of the things that I hope from my books and from my teaching is it just helps people take a little step back and think thoughtfully about, like, little things that they can do, to, when they walk into a meeting, just be a little conscious of, like, where's the best place for me to sit? Five seconds. That's all you got to think about it, right? But like, what am I trying to accomplish in this meeting? Who needs to speak? Okay, I'm going to sit here, right? And I know people sometimes feel like, oh, it's overwhelming enough time. Like most people I know, once they get into the practice of doing that, it's actually very invigorating. It gives them a sense of agency, it gives them a sense of control over the world because they understand it. It's like the pill in the Matrix, right? Like the things, all of a sudden make sense in a way they didn't before.

Recommended Resources:

• Dave Brailsford
• Deborah H. Gruenfeld
• Superorganism
• Claude Steele
• Cameron Anderson
• Don A. Moore
• Bruce Kogut
• Linda Rottenberg
• Groundhog Day (film)

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Columbia Business School
• AdamGalinsky.com
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on X

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others
• Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both
• Google Scholar Page
• Ted Talks

There have been periods throughout history when cultural aficionados of the time proclaimed that painting was dead! Yet, the artform has risen over and over again. What is it about painting that makes it so timeless and gives it the ability to continuously evolve? Why, after centuries, can we still be awestruck by the right combination of brushstokes? 

Art critic Martin Gayford has interviewed many artists over his lifetime about their craft. His books explore painting through a multitude of eras and even gives a personal account of what it’s like to sit for a painting in Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud. His latest book, How Painting Happens (and why it matters), compiles wisdom from numerous artists past and present. 

Martin and Greg discuss the challenges of writing about a non-linguistic medium like painting, the unique, often physical process of painting, and insights Martin has gleaned from his conversations with contemporary artists, including what makes a painting a great one.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The silent intensity of painting

16:13: You don't have to talk or put things in words to think. There is such a thing as physical thinking, and painting is probably a very good example of that. That was one of the points that struck me when I was posing for Lucian Freud, which I—was a very long, drawn-out process. As you can imagine, it took about 18 months to produce two paintings. And Lucian was very slow, but it wasn't that he was painting all the time very slowly. Most of the time in a sitting, he'd spend thinking, looking. And then, after quite a while, and mixing up the paints and contemplating the situation—looking at me, looking at the painting—then he'd dart forward and put a stroke on, quite fast actually. But probably 95% of the time, he wasn't doing that. He was considering the situation.

Why we still need painting in a world of screens

42:43: It's arguable that, therefore, paintings, sculptures, unique works of art are what we need now. 'Cause they're the opposite of phones and screens and endless deluge of imagery and distraction, which the modern world offers us. A painting is—if it's good enough—it's something you can just look at for the rest of your life, and if it's really good enough, it'll carry on being rewarding.

Painting as a language without words

02:02: Painting or visual art isn't exactly a language. It's certainly not a verbal language, but it's a means of communication. And as such, it doesn't necessarily neatly translate into words.

How artists reshape art history to suit themselves

39:37: Although artists—practicing artists, rather—may have tremendous insights, and the insights of a kind which nobody else has access to, they're going to see art history and the art, the work of all other artists, from the point of view of their own art. And they'll be utterly out of sympathy, therefore, with quite large sections of the art of the past and of the present. To an extent, that's true with critics. They'll have certain idioms, certain styles, certain media they like more than others. But a critic can be a little bit less prejudiced. Oh, I'd like to think critics can be a bit more open-minded about what they're looking at. An artist will pretty well instinctively refashion the whole of art history so that it leads up to what they're doing today in their studio. But we don't all have to do that.

Recommended Resources:

• Lucian Freud
• Patrick Heron
• Willem de Kooning
• Clement Greenberg
• Tracey Emin
• James Turrell
• Damien Hirst
• Pierre Bonnard
• Bridget Riley
• Peter Paul Rubens
• Robert Rauschenberg
• Gary Hume

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website

His Work:

• How Painting Happens (and why it matters) 
• Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud
• Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters
• Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now
• Venice: City of Pictures 
• A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen
• The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

What is the intrinsic link between philosophical inquiry and personal development? How can academic thought and theory be applied well to practical living in the real world?

Kieran Setiya is a professor of philosophy at MIT and also the author of a number of books, including Knowing Right From Wrong, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, and Midlife: A Philosophical Guide.

Greg and Kieran discuss how philosophy and self-help have diverged over time and the potential for their reintegration. Kieran explores the practical use of philosophical reflection in everyday life, the evolving view of philosophy from his early academic years to now, the impact of Aristotle's concept of the ideal life on contemporary thought, and the nature of midlife crises including his own. They also touch on topics like the value of choice, future bias, the role of suffering, and the integration of philosophy in early education. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why Aristotle’s ideal life isn’t always the answer

06:58: What am I going to do here and now, in the conditions I'm in—which are always, to some degree, imperfect—right now, maybe particularly challenging for many of us? And it's just not obvious at all. In fact, I think it's not true that the best way to answer the question, "What should I do in my problematic circumstances?" is, well, look at what an ideal life would be and just sort of aim towards that. And that just—it's both impractical and often very bad advice. It's like if someone said, "Well, you don't have any yeast; try to make some bread." You could think, "Well, what's the thing that's going to be most like a regular loaf of bread?" Or you might think, "Yeah, that's not the right thing to aim for here." There's some more dramatic pivot in how I'm going to try to make a kind of bread-like thing. And I think that's a good—a better—analogy for the situation we're in when we try to think about what to do here and now, when ideals like Aristotle's are not really viable.

On regret, choice, and the value of missed opportunities

21:21: Regret is a function of something that's not at all regrettable. Mainly the diversity of value.

Detached wanting and the good enough life

38:10: Stoics have this idea that virtue is the key thing for eudaimonia, and nothing else really matters for eudaimonia. But there are all these—what they call—preferred indifferents. So all the other stuff you might want, it's reasonable to want it, but you should want it in a kind of detached, "that would be a bonus" kind of way. And I think, while I'm not a Stoic and I don't think they draw that line in the right way, I think they're right that there is some kind of line here that has to do with sort of moderation and greed. In effect, thinking at a certain point: "If your life is good enough, you look at all the other things you could have," and the right attitude to have to them is something like, "Well, it’d be great if I had that. Sure." But the idea of being angry that I don't, or feeling like "this is unacceptable that I don't" is just not a virtuous — for want of a better word—it's not a reasonable, justifiable response.

Recommended Resources:

• Aristotle
• Eudaimonia
• Telicity
• Arthur Schopenhauer
• Utilitarianism
• Plato
• John Stuart Mill
• Reasons and Persons
• Iris Murdoch

Guest Profile:

• KSetiya.net
• Faculty Profile at MIT
• Profile on Wikipedia
• Profile on PhilPeople.org

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way
• Midlife: A Philosophical Guide
• Practical Knowledge: Selected Essays
• Knowing Right From Wrong
• Internal Reasons: Contemporary Readings
• Reasons without Rationalism
• Substack Newsletter

How does strategy factor into the mindsets of presidents like Lincoln and Reagan on both a micro and macro level? What parts of grand strategy are at play when new countries enter NATO due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict?

John Lewis Gaddis is a professor of history at Yale University and also the author of several books on history and strategy. His latest books include The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, On Grand Strategy, and The Cold War: A New History.

Greg and John discuss the concept of historical consciousness and its relation to strategic thinking. John goes over the teaching of strategy from a historical perspective, comparing it to evolutionary sciences and emphasizing the importance of common sense in strategic decisions. They also explore the use of metaphors in understanding history and strategy, the role of theory, and the necessity of adaptability in leadership. The conversation touches on various historical and contemporary examples to illustrate these ideas, including the strategic mindsets of figures like Lincoln and the implications of NATO expansion and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Are we failing to preserve common sense in business schools?

36:38: This whole thing about preserving common sense at all altitudes, it seems to me, is something that's often missing in business schools and also in businesses, as we've seen in various cases. So, if reading some history can create that kind of attitude, then I think it's worthwhile. And the reason I think it can work gets back to the sports metaphor because, okay, maybe your business guy is not interested in reading history, but they're probably watching the March Madness or the Super Bowl, and they're probably talking about coaches and why are certain coaches better than other coaches and so on. And when they're doing that, they're talking about what I'm talking about, which is just drawing these lessons from the past, looking at the objective, operating within the rules but understanding that the application of the rules is going to be different in every situation, every moment of the game.

The optimal grand strategists know when to adapt and when to steer

27:518: I think the optimal grand strategist would be someone who is agile and situationally aware, but also retains a sense of direction.

Big ambitions fail without this one principle

01:57: It seems to me that there's a kind of logic of strategy, which transcends time and place and culture. And when you set it out, when you give examples of what you mean by that, it sounds like a platitude. So if, for example, I were to tell you that aspirations can be infinite but capabilities must be finite, you would say, I knew that all along. You would say that's a platitude. You can get strategy on that? Well, yes, I think you can build a strategy on that because history is full of people who lost track of that insight, who let their aspirations exceed their capabilities to the point of complete overstretch and self-defeat. [02:50] History is littered with people who forgot that aphorism. And the aphorism is just plain common sense.

Why naive questions matter more than you think

30:56: You have to realize naive questions are always good to ask. Because one of the problems with theorists is that they don't like naive questions because they're inconvenient. And they're much more interested in the purity of the theory, the rigorousness of the theory, if it's a laboratory sense of replicability, of the theory. But for somebody to come along and just ask a naive question, sometimes they're not prepared for that.

Recommended Resources:

• George F. Kennan
• Napoleon
• Mark Antony
• Murder Board
• John Negroponte
• Leo Tolstoy
• Painting As a Pastime
• Presentism
• Isaiah Berlin
• Augustine of Hippo
• John C. Calhoun
• Vladimir Putin

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Yale University
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• On Grand Strategy
• The Cold War: A New History
• George F. Kennan: An American Life
• The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
• Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War
• The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations
• The Age Of Terror: America And The World After September 11

Contrary to popular belief – making more money doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be happier in life. The same can be said for societies as a whole, especially when it comes to countries with lopsided wealth distribution leading to high levels of inequality. So what are the connections between that inequality,people’s general wellbeing, and politics? 

Keith Payne is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill. His books, Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide and The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die explore the science behind inequality and the far-reaching impact it has on modern society. 

Keith and Greg discuss how inequality affects subjective wellbeing and societal outcomes, the connection between inequality and political polarization, strategies to mitigate psychological harm of inequality, and how understanding these psychological mechanisms can improve cross-party dialogues and reduce divisiveness.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why facts don’t win arguments

51:42: Starting with the goal of understanding is  important, and then when we're actually engaging with the other person, we have this tendency , as soon as they say something is true, we say, well, that's not true, and here are my facts and figures. And so we need to stop trying to bludgeon the other person into agreeing with us by citing facts and better evidence. That may sound counterintuitive, especially in the academic world where I live, because, but that's the currency, right, for argumentation. That's not where most people are coming from. I mean, they care about the facts, but only as tools to defend their social identities. And so, I think a better question to ask is, well, not why do you believe that in terms of why are you wrong about the facts, but what is believing that doing for your psychological bottom line? How is that serving your sense of identity and your group loyalties?

Status is more than your paycheck

12:50: We need to find ways to judge our status not purely in terms of wealth or income, and to make those richer kind of social connections, as a source of status. Because those are things we have more control over than how rich the 1% is.

What shapes our political beliefs

06:39:  It is perceived inequality that makes a big difference. And you have to see the wealth around you. And usually, that's not comparing ourselves to the top one-tenth of 1%, because we don't see the billionaires. Even if you live in Manhattan and are surrounded by billionaires, you still don't see it much, right? People like that live in gated communities, surrounded by privacy-insuring mechanisms and stuff. What we see is maybe the top 20% who are driving expensive cars and showing off their vacation pictures on Facebook. So, for the psychological comparisons, you do have to have some visible inequality there. But there's other ways that extreme levels of inequality affect society through non-visible means. [07:34] When it comes to the day-to-day psychological experience of living in an unequal society, the blatant visibility or invisibility of wealth has a lot to do with it.

How inequality reshapes our behavior

37:07: We found that in high inequality countries, and in high inequality states within the United States, people are engaged in more risky financial behavior — whether that's buying lottery tickets, or not investing for retirement, going to check cashing places rather than traditional banking, et cetera. So that all happens more in high inequality places, and you can see the same sort of patterns with regard to non-financial risk taking around health, like drug use, cigarette smoking — things that are high risk but immediate reward in terms of hedonic or affective reactions — are better predicted by inequality than by poverty as well.

Recommended Resources:

• Easterlin paradox
• Philip Converse
• Donald Kinder
• Nathan P. Kalmoe
• Edmund Burke
• John Stuart Mill
• Gravity Payments
• “The marketplace of rationalizations” by Daniel Williams

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on X

His Work:

• Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide
• The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

When did the idea of parenthood become less of a certainty and more of a choice? How have anxieties about the modern world impacted our desire to procreate and thus impacted the world’s population? Is that impact even a big deal?

Anastasia Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Irvine and co-author of the new book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice in which she takes a philosophical approach to the question of whether or not to have children. 

Anastasia and Greg delve into the shifting motivations and anxieties influencing the choice to have children, how this question has popped up throughout history dating back to Aristotle’s time, feminism's relationship with motherhood, and the potential reasons behind declining birth rates.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

When choosing parenthood feels like losing yourself

18:53: The transformation is one that really threatens annihilation of self. It's more radical than this difficulty of doing a hedonic calculation. What you are saying about the reluctance of calculating, though, I think is really important to thematize, because we see it especially as people increasingly report a conflict between pursuing what a lot of people are able to actually articulate as, like, a family goal or desire to have children and what they can see romantic relationships to be for.

Why fewer people won't save the planet

42:39: The fantasy that depopulation is going to be a solution for climate change—it's just that: it's a fantasy. What we need is immediate global climate action, and nothing short of it will make a difference.

What are parents really responsible for?

37:07 What I think people are responsible for in being parents is not that overall wellbeing. What they're responsible for is preparing, to the best of their abilities, their children for meeting life challenges, pains, and suffering. So it's not to say that you can't fail as a parent. It's not to say that we can't say that. Some people, like, should you be a parent? I'm not sure. But it is to say that judgment is not going to be based on the likelihood of your child to just encounter suffering of any kind.

Rethinking parenthood as an avenue for self-fulfillment

30:17:  The question of whether or not motherhood is an avenue for self-fulfillment should give way to the question of whether or not parenthood is something of value in human life and how to reconcile it with other demands, moral, material, et cetera. And as we said, that's true at both the individual level. So, within a relationship, to try to overcome the thought that the liberal left thing to do is to put the burden of not just choice, but the burden of asking this question of deliberation, of assuming responsibility for the choice, squarely on the shoulders of women, and also socially, to try and find a way of both recognizing the unique burdens that parenthood places on women, especially in the early stages of parenthood, but also reminding us that this is a profound human question.

Recommended Resources:

• The “wisdom” of Silenus | The New Criterion 
• After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso (publishing July 2025)
• Melanie Klein 
• Elena Ferrante
• Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of California Irvine
• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on X

Her Work:

• What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice

How is our fear of uncertainty holding us back? Could an acceptance and willingness to embrace the unknown unlock new potential and innovation?  

Margaret Heffernan is a professor of Practice at the University of Bath, an entrepreneur, and a mentor to CEOs. Her books include Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future, and most recently Embracing Uncertainty: How writers, musicians and artists thrive in an unpredictable world.

Margaret and Greg discuss the importance of embracing uncertainty in business and life, the value of creative thinking, and the pitfalls of over-reliance on predictability and data models.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why dissent is the secret engine of creativity and better ideas

34:46: Our obsession with efficiency means that we may prioritize management over productivity, and critical to productivity is diversity, debate, dissent, because this is how bad ideas get turned into good ideas. I mean, as a CEO I could waltz into work one day with an idea, which I thought was fantastic. And the great gift I was given were  a lot of employees who would think, "Oh God, here she comes back with another terrible idea," and say, "Well, I don't know. What if we did it like this? So what if we did it like that?...[35:31] But at the end of a very long process, you end up with something which started with my bad idea and gradually got a lot better because of everybody else's input, and turns out to be marvelous at the end. But that dissent is absolutely fundamental to the creative process.

What's the relationship between being a noticer and being creative?

39:11:  It's impossible to be creative without being a noticer, for a start. And I think that the great value of being observant and thinking about what you see is it keeps you much more in touch with what's going on in the world.

The danger of mental models and the power of an open mind

45:55: The danger of mental models is that they will attract confirming evidence and marginalize, or disguise disconfirming data. And so, the antidotes to that are certainly about having enough time to be in different places with different people who think differently. Having a sufficiently open mind to be prepared to notice this confirmation. Having an open mind prepared to change one's mind. And having, I guess, a way of thinking that tends more towards skepticism.

Why embracing uncertainty means loosening up, not tightening down

57:32:  Engineers talk a lot about tight and loose. I think much that has gone wrong in organizational life is a function of being too tight. And it sounds very counterintuitive because it is counterintuitive, but uncertainty requires that we loosen up in order to be able to respond more flexibly. And I think you are exactly right that pertains as much to us as individuals, as it does to the largest corporations in the world.

Recommended Resources:

• Gerd Gigerenzer
• Richard S. Fuld Jr.
• The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness 
• “The role of art in difficult times” by Margaret Heffernan | Financial Times
• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Max H. Bazerman
• Patrick Kavanagh
• Seamus Heaney

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Bath
• Professional Website

Her Work:

• Embracing Uncertainty: How writers, musicians and artists thrive in an unpredictable world
• Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
• Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future 
• A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition
• Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes
• The Naked Truth: A Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters

Why is there a need for a cultural and educational shift towards appreciating, building, and maintaining industrial systems? What would a rebirth of manufacturing look like in 2025? How would we go about setting up a new Industrial Enlightenment?

David A. Mindell is a professor of aerospace engineering and the history of engineering and manufacturing at MIT. He is also the author of several books. The title of his latest book and the primary subject of this discussion is The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution.

Greg and David discuss the 18th-century industrial enlightenment and its implications for modern industrial society. They also explore the evolving relationship between technology and labor, the persistent myths around automation, and the importance of valuing industrial contributions in today's digital economy. 

Mendell emphasizes the need for a cultural and educational shift towards appreciating building and maintaining industrial systems, advocating for what he describes as a new industrial enlightenment.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The overlooked power of process knowledge

12:41: If you are working on a very advanced, cutting-edge product, like a phone, you want to know exactly where there's capacity that's left on the table to enable you to build the next form. Did you design it too conservatively here? Is there something there you could do more with? And that familiarity with process, whether it's manufacturing or maintenance or other aspects of it, is a really important source of knowledge in an industrial system that we've generally devalued in favor of the kind of product innovation. And inventing the shiny new thing. And I'm sitting on the middle of the campus here at MIT, where we spend a lot of time teaching students about what is essentially product innovation. And we have very few folks on this campus who know anything about the processes that make and maintain these systems, even though very often that knowledge is a source of really great innovation.

Is disruption really the enemy in industrial systems

11:16: Disruption is the enemy in an industrial system. Reliability, repeatability, efficiency, robustness—those are things that people care a lot about in these systems.

The untapped potential of maintenance cycles

31:59: Improving maintenance cycles is a huge source of process innovation that we have not paid enough attention to, and if you can make something that lasts longer, that's a real contribution. I'm a pilot, and people make airplanes last for 50, 60, 70 years because they're designed to be maintained and upgraded, and you replace the parts that wear out and keep them going. Why can't we do that with laptops and phones and even routers or other disposable parts of the electronic economy? And so, work is changing. Work should change. Work should always be responding to the technological changes and needs of the time.

On the myth of replacement in technology and work

45:55: The myth of replacement, as I talk about in the book, is really. It's not that technologies don't enable us to do things with fewer people. Again, that's really the definition of productivity and not a bad definition for technology in these settings. It's more that, for one, it's very rare that you see a technology replace a human job and do that job the same way. Much more common that they change the nature of the work. Either they move it to a different place, they change the kind of skills that are required. They maybe make the job higher level. Maybe they make the job lower level. And you want to ask those questions about who's doing the work, where are they? What's their background, what's their training? Why does it matter? Those things change a lot, but it's relatively rare.

Recommended Resources:

• Josiah Wedgwood
• Industrial Revolution
• Lewis Mumford
• James Watt
• Matthew Boulton
• Eric Schmidt
• Lunar Society of Birmingham
• Adam Smith
• William Thompson
• Lord Kelvin
• Dissenting Academies
• Joseph Priestley
• William Small
• Air France Flight 447
• Waymo

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at MIT
• Professional Profile at AeroAstro
• LinkedIn Profile
• Wikipedia Profile
• .Unless Profile
• Social Profile on X

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution
• Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy
• The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines
• Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight
• Iron Coffin: War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS
• Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics
• War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor
• Research Gate Page

What does it mean to learn something? While many living things have the capacity for learning, humans have taken this ability to unmatched levels. Our ability to learn and apply knowledge sets us apart from most other species, and now we’re passing that ability on to AI. 

Leslie Valiant is a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Harvard University. His latest book, The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness, explores our ability to take in new information and raises questions about the broader implications of educability and artificial intelligence. 

Leslie and Greg discuss the uniqueness of human educability, how that ability differs from artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the future challenges of integrating machine intelligence in human society.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What do people miss when they think about intelligence?

02:05: Well, I think the difficulty is that we don't really know what the word "intelligence" is, and we've been using it for more than a century, and we're using it without having any note of what it means. I don't think it's been very useful, for example, in the study of artificial intelligence. So I think the context of IQ tests, I think, arose in the early 1900s in connection with potential definitions of intelligence in terms of people finding correlations between abilities of children to do various subjects at school. And they hypothesized that the children who are good at many subjects had something, and they hypothesized that what they had, this "something," was this intelligence. But that's not a definition of what intelligence is. So they didn't provide specification of how you recognize someone who's intelligent. It's a purely statistical notion.

What is the best way to understand humans?

03:00: To understand what one is doing, one has to have a definition of what one's trying to achieve. And in some sense, the successes of AI have been along those lines. So, machine learning was something which was defined in terms of what you wanted to achieve. So you had examples of things and you wanted to achieve a prediction of newer examples with high confidence, and people managed to implement this, and this became the kind of backburner of AI. So I think, in understanding humans, I think this is the way forward. We should understand what kind of things we're good at, what we do, what our functions are. And saying someone is intelligent is almost like name-calling.

How can we promote educability without also promoting vulnerability?

39:06: We already have these incredible capabilities for absorbing information, processing it, applying it, running with it. And this capability somehow exceeds our ability to evaluate information. So someone gives us some story about what happened on the other side of the world yesterday. We can't rush over to check it out. We either believe it or we don't believe it. So we find it very hard to evaluate, to evaluate everything we hear.

Recommended Resources:

• Alan Turing 

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Harvard University
• Professional Website

His Work:

• The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness
• Circuits of the Mind
• Probably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World