unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

What are practical strategies to avoid overload and exhaustion in today’s digital world? What norms can organizations create for tool usage, and how can finding offline activities that provide a mental contrast to digital work?

Paul Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara, a consultant and speaker on digital transformation and the future of work, and an author of several works. His latest book is called Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life.

Greg and Paul discuss the complementary nature of his two most recent books: the first focuses on harnessing digital tools, and the second on mitigating the overwhelm they can cause. They also explore teaching technology management, including the importance of understanding technology’s impact on people and organizational processes. Paul explains the 30% rule, emphasizing the need to understand digital tools well enough to use them effectively. They also explore the concept of digital exhaustion, the subject of his most recent book, its symptoms, and how to manage it, both at work and in daily life. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How can we reduce exhaustion?

41:29: One easy way of reducing our exhaustion is to match the sort of complexity of the task that we are trying to do with the affordances or the capabilities of the technology. And I say match, not over exceed, because we also have the problem where, like me, I am sure you have been in many, many meetings that should have just been an email, that there is not the need. And so what we have done in that situation is we have overstimulated people, right, in a setting with, you know, 15 other folks, and we have taken an hour out of their day and maybe the travel time to get there. And that has created other avenues for exhaustion when, if we had just perceived this information via email, we could not have had the meeting. So you do not want to overmatch, you just want to like match to the complexity of the task. And that is the key to reducing our exhaustion.

It’s not just distraction that exhausts us

18:28: I think we have failed to look at how it is not just being distracted that is a problem, but it is the act of switching itself across all of these different inputs really is a significant source of our exhaustion.

Inference is a big driver of exhaustion

32:45: Inference is really a big driver of exhaustion. And I would say the place that it most shows up, although not exclusively, is in our social media lives. Because, of course, people are curating their lives in terms of what they post, whether that is LinkedIn or TikTok or Instagram, that does not really matter. And we are constantly not only making inferences of them, but what I find is that we are also very often making inferences about ourselves because we see a past record of all the things that we wrote and all of the things that we posted. And then we are also making inferences of what we think other people think about us based on all the things that we post.

Recommended Resources:

• Human Multitasking
• Task Switching
• Fatigue
• Unsiloed Podcast Episode 612: Rebecca Hinds

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at UC Santa Barbara
• PaulLeonardi.com
• Wikipedia Profile
• LinkedIn Profile

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life
• The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI
• Expertise, Communication, and Organizing
• Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World
• Car Crashes without Cars: Lessons About Simulation Technology and Organizational Change from Automotive Design
• Google Scholar Page

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What changes happened in the histories of Europe and China to create two economies that developed so differently? How did different forms of local cooperation influence state development, rule of law, and economic progress?

Guido Tabellini is a professor of Political Economics at the University of Bocconi in Milan, Italy. He is also the author of several books, most recently co-authoring Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000.

Greg and Guido discuss the historical divergence in prosperity between Europe and China, exploring when and why it began, and whether it arose from cultural or institutional phenomena. Guido also emphasizes the contrasting roles of corporations and clans in both regions, the impact of state capacity, and the lasting effects of these differences on modern economic and political landscapes. Their conversation touches on the historical process of cooperation across regions and its implications for modern development economics.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What are the political origins of corporations?

31:55: So, we should not think of the corporation just as a firm, as a way to organize production that is important, but actually comes at the later stage. And the very important role of the corporation is also to have a political role, to govern a city, to represent a city in parliament, in China. The role of the corporations, when they emerge. Instead, it is purely economic. You do not have self-governing city, and even at the level of monasteries, you do have Buddhist monasteries, which are important, but each one of them is organized as an entity. You do not have a congregation of monasteries like the Cluny monastery or like, eventually, the church. 

Reframing the conversation on the Great Divergence

02:34: Rather than talking about great divergence, we actually like to talk about great reversal in the book because it has been a reversal. So even before starting to debate when the divergence begins, meaning that Europe gets ahead of China, we should acknowledge that the opposite was true, that China was ahead of Europe at the turn of the first millennium. 

The high stakes of clan adjudication

49:05: In China, the demand for external enforcement was probably less, evident because the clan needed less of an external enforcement. They were smaller communities, they had stronger reciprocal ties. The reputational mechanism within the clan was much more important because if I cheat on my clan member, I am kicked out of the clan. And if I am kicked out of the clan in a society which is organized around clans, I am on my own and I die. In Europe, of course, reputation is very important, but the penalty of cheating is not as harsh. So the altruistic value ties are weaker, and the penalty of cheating is also weaker. And so you have a stronger demand for external enforcement. 

Recommended Resources:

• Great Divergence
• Charles Tilly
• Clan
• Cluny Abbey
• Confucius

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Brocconi University
• Wikipedia Profile
• CEPR.org Profile

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000
• L'Italia in gabbia: Il volto politico della crisi economica
• The Economic Effects of Constitutions
• Political Economics: Explaining Economic Policy
• Flexible Integration: Towards a More Effective and Democratic Europe
• Monetary and Fiscal Policy: Politics
• Google Scholar Page

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Where did the concept of management as a profession come from, and how did it develop? Why do bureaucratic practices persist? How can companies break free from those constraints to unlock greater potential and adapt more effectively to the relentless change and competition in today’s business world?

Gary Hamel is the founder of the Management Lab, a professor at the London Business School, a visiting professor at the University of Oxford, and the author of several books. His recent titles include Humanocracy, Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them, What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation, and Competing for the Future.

Greg and Gary discuss the evolution of Gary’s thinking on management over the years and the detrimental effects of entrenched bureaucratic systems in organizations. He argues that bureaucracy stifles innovation, efficiency, and human engagement, leading him to suggest that organizations need to adopt more human-centric, dynamic, and decentralized models. He also points out the eventual trajectory of all companies that don’t follow this path.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why organizations stop being technical and start being bureaucratic

08:29: I don’t think administrative skills are any more a competitive advantage. You need them, but they are not much of a differentiator. So far as I can see, they are not really a source of competitive advantage. And yet, given that history of them being so rare, we basically turned our organizations into administrative aristocracies . And so what that meant practically was, once you reached a certain level in an organization, a fairly low level, the only way to advance your career was to become a manager. And that is still true in most organizations. People tend to compete for those jobs because, and I have young friends, and kids and so on who, very capable people worked in organizations, and however capable you are technically, you reach a point where they are coaxing you into an administrative or managerial role as the only way to grow. And the desire to keep great employees and to pay them well means that those positions proliferate. We create more managerial roles because that is the way of rewarding people and escalating their salaries.

The radical shift from static hierarchy to dynamic power

39:04: I am all for having a hierarchy, but I think it needs to be highly dynamic depending on the issue, and the hierarchy needs to be able to shift also. When people in power are no longer adding value or whatever they need to, you need to be able to fire those people from below.

Why traditional leadership programs create administrators, not leaders

47:18: In survey after survey, by Fortune, by McKinsey or others, the vast majority of executives do not think leadership development is producing positive returns or noticeably positive returns. And again, I think the reason for that is what we call leadership development is, first of all, almost done completely in the bureaucratic frame. We are not trying to find people with genuine leadership, natural leadership capacity. We are not trying to find people who understand how to mobilize and catalyze others to do things that people thought were impossible. Our leadership training is basically training people to take on bigger administrative jobs and stratified just like the pyramid: managing yourself, managing a team, managing a unit, managing a function, managing the organization. So number one, we have that problem. It is simply replicating, and it is creating better administrators. I do not think the data says that it is creating leaders.

Recommended Resources:

• Thomas Paine
• Max Weber
• McKinsey & Company
• James G. March
• Herbert A. Simon
• Disruptive Innovation
• KKR & Co.
• Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-Suite
• Dominic Barton
• Jeffrey Pfeffer
• Barbara Kellerman
• Leadership Development
• Management Development
• Peter Drucker

Guest Profile:

• GaryHamel.com
• LinkedIn Profile
• Wikipedia Profile
• Humanocracy.com
• The Management Lab
• Social Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Humanocracy, Updated and Expanded: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them
• What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation
• Competing for the Future
• The Future of Management
• The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance In the Changing World of Work
• Leading the Revolution
• Bringing Silicon Valley Inside
• Google Scholar Page

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When are meetings the best way to coordinate and make decisions and when do they make things worse?? How do you use the two-pizza rule to hold effective meetings and what happens when you start including too many people in a process?

Rebecca Hinds is the head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done, a book outlining the way to address one of the ways productivity is lost in organizations.

Greg and Rebecca discuss the importance of intentionality in information flow within organizations, the common pitfalls of meeting culture, and practical strategies to improve meeting efficiency. Rebecca emphasizes the use of data and AI to measure meeting effectiveness and reduce 'meeting bloat', while sharing insights from her experiences at Asana and her studies on organizational collaboration. They also explore the evolving collaboration between HR and IT departments in the era of AI and the necessity for both tech and HR professionals to exchange and enhance their skills.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How ‘visibIlity bias’ fuels endless meetings

[07:28] We know that humans have a bias to associate presence with productivity. And so what I find to be often the case is people start to associate more meetings with more importance and status within the organization, and so when you're stuck and not sure how to make progress or you're worried about productivity, a meeting becomes a knee-jerk solution to solve that. You might not accomplish anything meaningful in the meeting, but at least you've sat together and shown that some progress or perceived progress was made. And so I think at the core of this, is this pervasive productivity theater that goes on in organizations, this visibility bias where we associate meetings with importance within the organization. There are a host of other problems, but at the core, I think that's the fundamental problem that we're dealing with.

The pressure ingrained in our calendars and meeting cultures

[09:37]  As soon as someone extends a meeting invite. They're establishing this social contract where you feel like you have to reciprocate. Even when we think about terminology around, it's a meeting invite. You either accept or you reject. You start to feel like you're not just rejecting the meeting, but rejecting the person. And it's taken very personally. 

AI tools can help reveal participation imbalances in meetings

[22:59] If you're seeing that leaders are consuming 70%, 80% of the airtime, that's an opportunity to course correct and improve your meeting effectiveness. And often when it comes from an AI tool or an objective analytic tool, it's much more effectively received than a less powerful person trying to voice that takeaway in the meeting and try to veer influence that way.

Are we socially conditioned to hate meetings?

[28:48] Humans have what I call a meeting suck reflex, right? For a multitude of different reasons.When we hear the word "meeting," we have this negative, visceral reaction. So much so that you know when you're asked to evaluate your meetings in public versus private, you tend to rate your meetings much more negatively when you're around people in public as compared to privately, because we think that we should hate meetings. We've been socially conditioned to feel such, and there's few things that bond coworkers more quickly than bonding over a bad meeting that could have been a five-line email, right? And so to avoid that, assessing whether a meeting was worth your time helps to level set. Everyone has an intuitive sense of whether a meeting was worth their time. Is there something more productive they could have done with that time or not? And so that tends to be a good gauge for you as an organizer.

Recommended Resources:

• Asana, Inc.
• Parkinson's law
• Steven Rogelberg
• Law of Triviality
• Amazon’s Two-Pizza Teams
• ROTI
• Robert I. Sutton

Guest Profile:

• RebeccaHinds.com
• The Work AI Institute at Glean
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on X for Glean

Guest Work:

• Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done

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Whether in markets, organizations, or the universe itself, today’s guest is a master at navigating complex systems where existing models have stopped working, and new ones must emerge.

Geoffrey Moore is a consultant in the high-tech sector and a prolific author, with titles including Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets, and, most recently, The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality. 

Geoffrey and Greg discuss his transition from Renaissance English scholar to high-tech strategist, why narrative is critical in business, the challenges of disrupting industries, and what “The Infinite Staircase” reveals about life’s meaning and human purpose. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The importance of sales and the failure of business schools

09:32: It's absolutely a travesty that business schools don't teach sales. It's, it's crazy. And there are a bunch of people that have made that argument before. But the reason why academics didn't like sales is it felt too much like Glengarry Glen Ross: sleazy, you know, closers, "coffee is for closers," and all the kind of stuff the academics hate. But the point about it is that, particularly in contemporary B2B sales, that's not what a salesperson does anymore. You have to help the customer find the use cases and the ROI that validates why they're gonna buy this thing, which means you have to be intellectually curious about their business and not just yammer about your own business. And so it is, it's actually a really interesting profession if you approach it, you know, in a kind of more in-service-to-the-customer approach, as opposed to, "I'm going to make my commissions and go to the club," although that's also a big motive among salespeople.

Venture capital is literary criticism

06:10: Venture is a form of literary criticism prior to investment. And then, as you invest, you start to figure out, now how can I verify? How can I validate? And eventually, the analytics and the numbers become very important. But not at the beginning. At the beginning, it is really about the story.

Venture Capital vs. Corporate metrics

38:11: Venture capitalists do not fund performance. They fund power, but everything in a venture model is about becoming more powerful, not becoming more performant. When we exit, then they'll become performant, but not now, and that idea is still very hard to land in a large corporation.

The correct sequence for success

33:51: The correct sequence has to be customers first, employees second, investors third. Any other sequence doesn't work, not for sustainable success.

Recommended Resources:

• Regis McKenna
• Alfred D. Chandler Jr.
• Edmund Spenser
• Great chain of being
• Clayton Christensen
• Satya Nadella
• Northrop Frye
• Philip Sidney

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn
• Profile on X

Guest Work:

• The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality
• Crossing the Chasm
• Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets
• Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution
• Living on the Fault Line, Revised Edition: Managing for Shareholder Value in Any Economy
• The Gorilla Game: An Investor's Guide to Picking Winners in High Technology
• Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption

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What is the real importance of understanding architectural history, and how is its teaching different from the histories of other disciplines? How can good design influence business decisions?

Witold Rybczynski is an emeritus professor in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of several books on architecture and its history. His most recent titles have been The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car, Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History, Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays, and The Story of Architecture.

Greg and Witold discuss Witold’s extensive work on various topics, including the present state and histories of architecture, urban planning, and design. Their conversation covers the cultural valuation of architecture versus fine arts, the historical impact of city planning and urban design in the United States, and the unique characteristics of American cities compared to how cities and urban planning happens in European countries. They also get into the interplay of style and function in car design based in the research from Witold’s new book.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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What was the role of experimentation in early science? How did past scientific paradigms continue to influence current scientific discourse? What is the utility of understanding the history of science for modern scientists?

Peter Dear is a professor emeritus of history at Cornell University, and the author of several books, including The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science and Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution.

Greg and Peter discuss the evolution of science from natural philosophy, addressing how scientific progress is not simply a linear journey towards greater knowledge. Peter talks about the transformative periods like the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, and the debate over the definition and significance of terms like 'scientific revolution.' They also explore how today's scientific practices are deeply rooted in 19th-century developments. Their conversation also covers the historical context behind Newton's and Darwin's work among other famous scientists throughout history.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The two “registers” of science

09:50: Science nowadays, and through the course of the last, well, developing over the last two centuries, really in the 19th and 20th centuries, science is still talked of as if it were a naturaln actual philosophy, even if that term is not used very much anymore. Science is sometimes regarded as something that is about understanding the universe, understanding the natural world as if it is an intellectual enterprise and just an intellectual enterprise. And at the same time, it is also regarded as something that is practically useful, practically valuable, and these two different registers for talking about science, I think, sort of ride alongside one another and switch back and forth depending on how it is that people want to represent any particular kind of knowledge.

The birth of experimentation

22:23: One of the things about experimentation, is that it was a matter of developing practices, procedures for generating knowledge claims about nature that were different from the ways in which experience had been used, particularly in Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian context, to talk about the behavior of nature. Experiments are a particular way of understanding what experience is useful for in making sense of the world.

The twin dimensions of science

40:30: I think all scientists have always relied on the twin dimensions of science, the fact that science can be regarded as an actual philosophy when it's talking about the way things are, and the fact that science can be regarded as, or talked about in terms of, instrumentality. When you are focusing on the capabilities, the practical capabilities, the particular ideas and procedures enable you to do, and at different times and places, scientists will sometimes play up the natural philosophy side of things and at other times play up the instrumentality side of things, depending on what it is interested in talking about at the time. But I think everyone, all scientists, regard those as both essential elements, so to speak, of what scientific inquiry is all about.

Recommended Resources:

• Scientific Revolution
• Francis Bacon
• Paracelsus
• Aristotle
• Nicolaus Copernicus
• Galileo Galilei
• Isaac Newton
• René Descartes
• Robert Boyle
• Taxonomy
• Charles Lyell
• Albert Einstein
• Thomas Kuhn

Guest Profile:

• Academia Papers
• Professors Emeriti List at Cornell University

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science
• Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge in Transition, 1500-1700
• Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700
• Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution
• The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World
• Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools
• ResearchGate Page

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While evolution is often thought to be conducive to perfect adaptation, there are plenty of reasons why we never get there. 

Laurence D. Hurst is a professor of evolutionary genetics in the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath. His book, The Evolution of Imperfection: The Science of Why We Aren’t and Can’t Be Perfect is an expansive look into the imperfections of the human genome and why humans seem to be predisposed to so much bad genetic luck. 

Laurence and Greg explore the evolutionary constraints that lead to imperfections, how population size affects mutation rates, the advancements in gene therapy, and why imperfection could be key to a deeper understanding of evolution. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why humans have such bad genetic luck

07:13: We have good reason to think that humans are far from being as fit as they might be. We have a very high mutation rate. We've got one of the highest mutation rates going, for example, and most mutations are deleterious. Most of the time, five to 10% of us will have a rare genetic disorder, for example. And we could be better. We could be a lot, lot, lot better.

Medicine is anti-evolution

47:17: Medicine is anti-evolution. Evolution is why we keep on having these genetic diseases, and medicine goes, well, you might have them, but we are going to stop them having their effects.

Childbirth is more dangerous than the most dangerous job in America

12:13: Childbirth is, for humans, a spectacularly dangerous pursuit. There was a lovely survey done by Forbes Magazine of America's most dangerous jobs, and it turns out nothing comes close to childbirth. Childbirth is an order of magnitude more dangerous than America's most dangerous job.

Recommended Resources:

• 10 Most Dangerous U.S. Careers Heading Into 2025, Study Reveals | Forbes
• Nearly neutral theory of molecular evolution
• He Jiankui

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Bath
• Professional Website
• Milner Centre Profile on X

Guest Work:

• The Evolution of Imperfection: The Science of Why We Aren’t and Can’t Be Perfect

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How can organizations make more equitable changes to their internal norms and structures, to promote fairness over merely seeking profit? What are alternate ways to tackle the difference in agreeableness that underpins many professional gaps between men and women?

Cordelia Fine is a professor in the history and philosophy of science department at University of Melbourne, as well as the author of several books, including Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, and Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society.

Greg and Cordelia discuss the complexities surrounding gender equality, including the contested reasons for wage differences and occupational gaps between men and women. Cordelia critiques the traditional and evolving gender norms, explains her stance on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) strategies, and advocates for more nuanced, context-aware approaches to addressing gender disparities. She challenges oversimplified evolutionary psychology narratives and underscores the importance of understanding the cultural evolution of gender roles. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why valuing women isn’t enough

52:52: You can say pretty words about valuing the feminine. Oh, you know, women are great. They’re so wonderful. They’re so empathic and collaborative and participative, and they’re really good at building people. But you can’t just say that—you have to actually change your organizations so that you literally put your money where your mouth is, so that is what is actually being rewarded.

Redefining patriarchy

10:37: There’s a sort of assumption that when we talk about patriarchy, we’re just talking about the harm to girls and women. Its long been recognized, I think, in feminism that often men and certain groups of men do also face harms in that kind of system that’s keeping some men on top.

Why our ideas about sex differences often get it wrong

20:58: I do think we have to be careful about looking at our—first of all, making assumptions about what sex differences actually are—because they’re often, you know, a huge amount of overlap, contingent depending on the context and the cues. But also, to then project that back into our ancestral past without taking a kind of wider look at societies beyond the weird populations—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.

Recommended Resources:

• Cecilia L. Ridgeway
• Cailin O'Connor
• The Making of the Modern Family
• David Benatar
• Leonora Risse
• HILDA Survey
• Nancy Fraser

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at the University of Melbourne
• Cordelia-Fine.com
• Wikipedia Profile
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on Instagram

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work
• Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
• Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society
• A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
• Google Scholar Page

Related Unsiloed Episode:

• Claudia Goldin - Understanding the Gender Wage Gap

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Despite its long-held place in history as the lynchpin of America’s recovery from the Great Depression, what if the New Deal did more to hinder the country’s recovery than help it? 

George Selgin is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia and former director of the Center on Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute. His books like, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery and Floored!: How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession, examine macroeconomic theories through the lens of key moments in monetary history. 

In this conversation, Greg and George dive deep into the inner workings of The Great Depression, covering the biggest misconceptions surrounding the New Deal's role in ending the crisis, why many of President Roosevelt’s policies were counterproductive, and how pre-existing, international factors impacted the U.S.’s recovery.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The myth of New Deal wisdom

47:17: The thing that people have to remember when they are inclined to think, oh, you know, we need to look back at the New Deal and all the wonderful things they did to end the Depression. They knew so much, you know, they had all these experiments. No. We know a lot more about how to fight recessions and depressions than they did because we know that fiscal and monetary stimulus are our best hopes. And those were two things that the Roosevelt administration did not put much, if any, emphasis upon. And that, of course, just hearing that should give a lot of people second thoughts about how helpful the New Deal was. They did a lot of stuff, but they did not do the main thing we rely on now. The main things, they did not promote monetary stimulus, and they did not promote fiscal stimulus except somewhat, reluctantly.

Keynes vs. the New Dealers

59:39: I certainly believe that if Keynes’s advice had been followed instead of what the New Dealers did, that the Depression would have ended much sooner than it did in the United States. 

The downside of "bold experimentation"

35:56: Roosevelt made two statements that were probably the least, the two main unambiguous things he said, one of which turned out to be a very accurate description of what his administration would end up doing. And the other one of which would be a very inaccurate statement. This is all in the course of the campaign. The accurate statement was when he said that his administration planned to go about addressing the Depression through bold experimentation. And that is absolutely true. There was a lot of trial and error. And the problem is, as I say in my book, you know, the problem with bold experiments is they often fail.

On war clouds and gold flows

45:41: What keeps gold flowing in for the rest of the decade, and more and more of it as time goes on, is Hitler's rise to power and the, the gatherings war clouds that eventually have many, many Europeans thinking, I do not think this is place, this place is safe for our gold. And as long as they could, taking it and shipping it to the United States, where now after the suspension of the gold standard and the devaluation, the treasury alone is buying all the gold.

Recommended Resources:

• John Maynard Keynes
• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Herbert Hoover 
• Henry Ford 
• Alexander J. Field 
• James Bradford DeLong 

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Georgia 
• Professional Profile at the Cato Institute
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn
• Profile on X

Guest Work:

• False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 
• Floored!: How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession
• Money: Free and Unfree 
• Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy
• The Menace of Fiscal QE 

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