Episodes

  • 641. How to Become an Expert in Conflict with Amy Gallo

    641. How to Become an Expert in Conflict with Amy Gallo
    Apr 16 2026

    Even though conflict is something we all instinctively want to avoid, it’s an essential part of a healthy culture. So what can organizations do to ensure they’re not only managing conflict productively but also leveraging it to make the organization stronger?

    Amy Gallo is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review and author of the books HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict and Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People). Her research and consulting work focuses on how to effectively navigate and even utilize conflict to better your organization.

    Amy and Greg discuss the necessary ingredients for fruitful conflict, the consequences of failing to manage it effectively, and run through some of the most difficult personalities people might face in the workplace and the best strategies for working with them.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

    Episode Quotes:

    Why I disagree with you doesn't equate to I hate you

    03:35: Sometimes it feels like saying, “I disagree, Greg,” is the same as saying, “I hate you, Greg.” Right? People find it so offensive; disagreement, conflict is so hurtful, damaging, when actually, if it's done well, it's incredibly productive. We get that sort of friction that you need in an organization to come up with new ideas, to improve the way we work together, to even bond with one another.

    What if ego didn’t get in the way of conflict?

    06:09: Conflicts would be so much easier if no one involved had any ego, which, of course, is not possible. But it's one of the things I try to do when I get involved in a conflict in my work or personal life: think, “Okay, if I wasn't defending my ego right now, how would I think about this problem?” And I think if more people could show up in that way, we'd get through conflicts much, much easier and, really, honestly, with stronger relationships intact.

    Is there an optimal level of conflict?

    02:32: Is there an optimal level of conflict? I've never seen research that says this is the optimal. I think right now, in our current culture, where we are with global politics, with sort of the state of the world, I think the truth is we actually need more conflict in our organizations, on our teams, than we currently have. And so the chances are that the optimal is more than you currently have.

    Show Links:

    Recommended Resources:

    • Reed Hastings
    • Sigal G. Barsade
    • Rebecca Hinds | unSILOed
    • Heidi Grant
    • “An illustrated guide to the six types of difficult coworkers you’ll meet at your first job” | Boston Globe
    • Women at Work podcast

    Guest Profile:

    • Professional Website
    • Professional Profile on LinkedIn

    Guest Work:

    • HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict
    • Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People)

    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    56 mins
  • 640. From Ancient Merchants to Modern Markets: Sven Beckert's History of Capitalism

    640. From Ancient Merchants to Modern Markets: Sven Beckert's History of Capitalism
    Apr 13 2026
    How can you trace capitalism from long-distance merchant networks (including 12th-century Aden) to a modern-day world economy? What are alternative stories to the commonly held Eurocentric view of capitalism’s origins? Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and is also the author of several books. His most recent titles include Capitalism: A Global History, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Greg and Sven discuss how Sven sees the history of capitalism, contrasting it with neoliberal-leaning accounts that underplay violence, the state, and capitalism’s global character. He also offers a helpful minimalist definition—privately owned capital productively invested to produce more capital—and argues markets are universal but become central only in capitalism. He dissects the pillars that propped up capitalism through the years, including diverse labor regimes such as slavery and indenture, noting slavery’s major but time-specific role in the Americas, enabled by European power and used to overcome resistance to capitalist transformation. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Challenging Eurocentric narratives about capitalism 23:49: Look at the world today. We are living in a world in which no one in their right mind would, A, say, “Okay, we need to only look at the European continent to understand the global economy today.” And B. Nobody would ignore, you know, the history of Asia or Latin America, or even Africa, in telling the history of the global economy today. So, we are entering this debate now at a different vantage point. I am not saying that, you know, scholars a hundred years ago or so had some terribly ill-intentioned thought in their way of looking at this. No, they lived in a different world, and the world looked different to them. But today we are living in a world in which clearly Europe is not at the center of the universe and not at the center of global capitalism. And that now forces us, I think, to not just think differently about the present, but to think differently about the entire history of capitalism. Capitalism is a state of constant growth 49:25: Capitalism is not conservative. Capitalism is the most revolutionary economic civilization ever. It is a state of permanent revolution. No expansion seems to be impossible within that capitalist civilization. I think it goes against its very core, what it is. It is a state of constant growth. It is a state of constant expansion. Capitalism without markets is conceptually unimaginable 05:05: I think capitalism without markets is conceptually unimaginable, and markets, of course, play a very important role in contemporary capitalism. But I think it would be mistaken to define capitalism primarily by the fact that it is a society in which markets regulate all or parts of economic life. Because, as far as I know, I have not yet found a human society which did not know of markets. I have not yet found a human society which did not engage in some forms of trade. So I think these are kind of universal attributes of economic life on planet Earth. But what is not universal is societies in which markets are not just on the margins of economic life, as they are in many, many societies, but really are at the very center of economic life. And this is certainly the case for capitalism. Why is capitalism essential in our lives? 39:13: Capitalism is extremely important to our lives today. It structures the biggest processes that we inhabit, but also the most intimate parts of our lives. And people are having passionate opinions about capitalism. They want to understand how we claim to live in the world in which we live right now. Show Links: Recommended Resources: CapitalismKarl PolanyiFernand BraudelWage LabourSlaveryAdenRobert BrennerKarl MarxIndustrial RevolutionEast India Company Guest Profile: SvenBeckert.comFaculty Profile at Harvard UniversityWikipedia Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author PageCapitalism: A Global HistoryEmpire of Cotton: A Global HistoryAmerican Capitalism: New HistoriesGlobal History, Globally: Research and Practice around the WorldSlavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic DevelopmentPlantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global CommoditiesThe Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    52 mins
  • 639. Understanding Stereotypes & How They Impact Us with Claude M. Steele

    639. Understanding Stereotypes & How They Impact Us with Claude M. Steele
    Apr 9 2026

    Claude Steele is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of the landmark book, Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. His new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It, takes the theories from Whistling Vivaldi and examines the psychological stress that comes with navigating diversity.

    Claude joins Greg to discuss his decades' worth of research on the concept of identity, the impacts stereotypes have on our cognitive load, even if we don’t subscribe to those stereotypes, the limits to “colorblindness”s, the concept of “wiseness,” and why trust could be the antidote to the churn.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

    Episode Quotes:

    The tension beneath how we come together

    08:39: I'm trying to characterize, with the term “churn,” this sort of emotion that can be a real factor in our experience of diversity and our coming together. We're a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-class society. And to function well, we have to get along well in these critical situations—school, workplace—and churn is a symptom of the tensions that can arise.

    Trust is the antidote of churn

    10:10: The hopeful part of churn is that it does have a remedy, an antidote, and that is trust. As soon as we've built trust together, then I relax. Well, I know you're not going to do that.

    How do you build trust?

    29:13: You really do have to try to get yourself in the position of the other, to see the world from the other person's shoes. That really helps to build trust. Just the effort that you're interested in doing that is maybe the most fundamental step forward that a person in authority can take to build trust in people that work for them or work with them.

    The limits of being colorblind

    19:48: I think in many aspects of our society, it's absolutely essential. We have to think that way, that we have to have policing, healthcare access, housing, mortgages be colorblind. So, I'm uncompromising on many aspects of it, but I think if we take it too far, we can ignore the experiences that people have because of their identities. Yeah, just because of their identity. So, if we're colorblind, I don't need to know about all those things that affect your life that have to do with your identity.

    Show Links:

    Recommended Resources:

    • Erving Goffman
    • Affirmative action
    • “Differences in STEM doctoral publication by ethnicity, gender and academic field at a large public research university” by Mendoza-Denton and Fisher

    Guest Profile:

    • Faculty Profile at Stanford University
    • Former Provost Bio at UC Berkeley

    Guest Work:

    • Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It
    • Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do

    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    50 mins
  • 638. Why Nothing Works: How Progressivism’s Split Led to Today's Governance Gridlock with Marc J. Dunkelman

    638. Why Nothing Works: How Progressivism’s Split Led to Today's Governance Gridlock with Marc J. Dunkelman
    Apr 7 2026
    How is governance dysfunction linked to declining ‘middle-ring’ community ties? Marc J. Dunkelman is a fellow at Brown University and a fellow at the Searchlight Institute in Washington, D.C. Marc is also the author of two books, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back and The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community. Greg and Marc discuss how U.S. progressivism has long been split between a Jeffersonian impulse to decentralize power and curb “bigness” and a Hamiltonian impulse to centralize authority in expert institutions. Marc explains how figures like Robert Moses could push projects through, while today expanded rights, litigation, and procedural checks—driven by 1960s–70s distrust of authority (Vietnam, civil rights failures, environmental and consumer scandals, Watergate-era culture)—have reduced discretion so much that even widely supported projects stall. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why is it so hard to build things? 44:34: You're awarding rights to classes of individuals who have long been stepped on by powerful people. And, like, award these new standing. Exactly. To your point, in order to reduce the discretion of the would-be Robert Moses, who would make that choice on their own without ever really thinking through, alright, now that all these people have, like, a voice, how are we going to resolve that? And to this day, I don't think the progressives have actually answered that question. I don't think that we have in our minds even a system by which you would make trade-offs between those groups. And it's one of the reasons, to your point, it's so hard to build things, like, if everyone wants that new road to be built, but each individual constituency has enough power to say, not through this particular route, you're fundamentally stuck. What motivated Marc to write “Why Nothing Works.” 05:07: The motivation here was to understand what had changed between the fifties and the 2010s, to make it so that it used to be that bad projects couldn't be stopped, and now good projects couldn't go. That prompted a whole series of questions that eventually would lead to this book, Why Nothing Works. On tension within progressivism 36:28: There is sort of a notion that centralized power itself is up to no good, and that, in order for America to restore its promise and luster, we need to restore the power, the individual agency that people once had. And, I want to make this clear: that shift is remarkably profound within progressivism, but it is not that the old effort to centralize power wasn't progressive. And it's not that this new impulse to restore power to the woman who wants to control her own body, to the black family that wants to be able to rent a room in any hotel of their choosing, to the ordinary person who doesn't want to be the victim of discrimination, to the neighborhood that doesn't wanna be clobbered by, like—these are both ultimately progressive impulses. Show Links: Recommended Resources: The Power BrokerRobert MosesProgressivismLouis BrandeisSacco and VanzettiFelix FrankfurterCadillac DesertBowling AloneAbundance Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at the Watson School of International and Public AffairsSearchlight InstituteLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author PageWhy Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It BackThe Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • 637. AI and the Human Mind: Exploring Surprising Parallels with Christopher Summerfield

    637. AI and the Human Mind: Exploring Surprising Parallels with Christopher Summerfield
    Apr 3 2026

    When AI tells us what we want to hear, is it acting in a rogue way, or is it emulating behavior that society clearly values? How does our ability to sleep enable us to update faster than neural networks currently can, and what will be different when they can update themselves more frequently?

    Christopher Summerfield is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Oxford University, the Research Director at the UK’s AI Safety Institute, and the author of the book These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means.

    Christopher and Greg discuss the historical split between symbolic, rule-based “rationalist” AI and data-driven “empiricist” learning, arguing that the recent success of large models vindicates the latter despite earlier skepticism. They discuss how structured behavior can emerge from messy networks, how modern models are trained with reinforcement learning to produce step-by-step reasoning, and why systems often “make” solutions by writing code rather than routing to specialized tools.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

    Episode Quotes:

    From messy brains to intelligent machines

    04:40: If you look inside the brain, your brain and mine and the brains of other biological species, they're really messy. They're like really, really messy and unstructured. So nature managed to solve the problem. And so maybe that gave impetus for this movement to kind of, you know, continue to sort of plug away. And when we finally got computers big enough to process lots and lots of data, it started to take off. And the rest is history.

    Hallucinations aren’t just an AI problem

    34:36: How does the model know what is the kind of socially or culturally appropriate response?  We're often very worried about the models,  like, the models don't tell the truth and  they make stuff up.  But people forget that most of language is literally making stuff up. That is what you do when you open your mouth.

    Is language more powerful than we thought?

    32:05: The surprising thing is that language, it turns out, is sufficiently rich and expressive that if you have it in huge volumes and you process it effectively, then you can actually make a whole bunch of inferences about the world, which are surprisingly accurate. So you would think that you would need to actually experience them firsthand rather than just through hearsay, because we work like that, right? Like we rely on our senses. Of course, we rely on hearsay a little bit, and we think about what other people say, and it allows us to infer new things. But like the models just have language, well, I mean now they have multimodal data, but let's take a conversational agents lms, and what I think has been so surprising is that language contains enough structure that you can really uncover patterns of information that you would think that you would need to see.

    Show Links:

    Recommended Resources:

    • Rationalism
    • Empiric School
    • George Bull
    • Frank Rosenblatt
    • Neural Network (machine learning)
    • Marvin Minsky
    • Perceptron
    • GPTs

    Guest Profile:

    • Human Information Processing Lab
    • Social Profile on X

    Guest Work:

    • These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means
    • Google Scholar Page

    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    59 mins
  • 636. Rediscovering Virtue the Renaissance Way with James Hankins

    636. Rediscovering Virtue the Renaissance Way with James Hankins
    Apr 1 2026
    It’s one of the oldest debates in political philosophy: Do good laws make good men, or do good men make good laws? Minds have been wrestling with this question since the days of Petrarch and Machiavelli, but both sides may have insights that can inform modern political philosophy. James Hankins is a professor of history at Harvard University, a visiting professor of humanities at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School, and author of numerous books including Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena. He’s also the co-author of the textbook, The Golden Thread, which focuses on the history of Western civilization. Greg and James discuss Renaissance humanism, sparked by Petrarch’s response to 14th‑century crises, and explore the humanist education focused on virtue, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. They also delve into Machiavelli’s critiques and pushback against humanism, how Chinese Confucianism compares with the West’s legal system, and why James believes virtue should be brought back into modern education. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why we need both systems and good character 11:47: I think I agree with the people who think there should be a balance between good character and the formation of good character and expertise and wisdom and competence and the people who say that systems can solve all your problems and you just get the right systems and thinkful function. I think that is a very, kind of left, left hemispheric way of understanding human nature. Good law is nothing without good people 07:59: If you have great laws, but corrupt judges, you are going to have bad laws. If you have laws being written by corrupt people, that is even worse. So the humanist is saying the whole problem is, the human heart, right? This is where the problem is. And what we have to do is to bring back antiquity. Is democracy only the legitimate form of government? 47:14: Today, we might say that a democracy is the only legitimate form of government where a republic reflects the will of the people. But they would not say that in the Renaissance. They talk about better and worse, that monarchs are better when you have got a good monarch. But when you have a bad monarch, the monarch of the republic is better. It is that kind of calculation. It is not the way we think about political regimes today as being, legitimate or illegitimate. Show Links: Recommended Resources: PetrarchFrancesco PatriziNiccolò MachiavelliIsocratesLorenzo VallaThomas AquinasCola di Rienzo Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Harvard UniversityFaculty Profile at Hamilton School at the University of FloridaProfessional Website Guest Work: Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance ItalyThe Cambridge Companion to Renaissance PhilosophyPolitical Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of SienaThe Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, Volume I: The Ancient World and Christendom Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • 635. The Psychology of Computers with Tom Griffiths

    635. The Psychology of Computers with Tom Griffiths
    Mar 30 2026
    Today's AI has been designed using insights from how humans learn and think about the world. Are there certain psychological lessons we can glean from these artificial minds to further our understanding of human ones? Tom Griffiths is a professor of information technology, consciousness, and culture at Princeton University. His books, The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind and Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, explore how algorithms and mathematics can be used to understand the human mind, and how it differs from AI. Tom and Greg discuss the origins of the surprising convergence of psychology and computer science over the last 50 years and delve into the work done by the interdisciplinary minds who made it happen. They also cover how psychology and linguistics impact the current world of machine learning and AI. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: How do we build good inductive bias into AI systems? 26:07: How do we build good inductive bias into these systems? And at the moment that is being engineered to some extent by doing things like synthetic pre-training, where you might pre-train on data which is not the human language data but data that you think is quite good data for shaping the kinds of things that your neural network is going to be biased towards. And then there are some other more sophisticated methods for doing that. In my lab, we use a method called metalearning, where you're explicitly creating a neural network that has initial weights, that has some sort of initial associations that it's already formed, that are going to make it easy for that model to be able to learn from small amounts of data. Neural networks vs. human learners 23:00: One of the big differences between even the fancy neural networks that we have today and human learners is that human learners learn language from far less data than our neural network models do. What is a neural network? 18:30: The way I think about neural networks is that they're a tool for thinking about computation in spaces, a way of mapping one space to another based on the information that you've received that allows you to then build up to more and more complex computations. Show Links: Recommended Resources: David MaherJohn B. Watson B. F. SkinnerJerome Bruner John von NeumannHerbert A. Simon Noam ChomskyAllen NewellFrank RosenblattMarvin Minsky“Embers of autoregression show how large language models are shaped by the problem they are trained to solve” - PaperRoger ShepardJeffrey ElmanBeen Kim Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Princeton UniversityComputational Cognitive Science LabProfessional Profile on LinkedIn Guest Work: The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    52 mins
  • 634. Gaming Life: The Philosophy of Play and Metrics with C. Thi Nguyen

    634. Gaming Life: The Philosophy of Play and Metrics with C. Thi Nguyen
    Mar 27 2026
    When the concept of ‘gamifying life’ comes up, scoring is transparent and portable but strips nuance, creating a gap between what’s measurable and what matters. When codifying everything through metrics, massive amounts of nuance is lost, so how can we utilize game theory without reducing everything to a high score? C. Thi Nguyen is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He is also the author of the books The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Games, and Games: Agency As Art. Greg and Thi discuss the differences between genuine gameplay and institutional metrics and gamification. Thi explains Huizinga’s “magic circle” concept, where games create a temporary space with altered meanings and low real-world stakes, enabling intense striving without value capture. Drawing also on Bernard Suits, Thi frames games as voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles and distinguishes achievement play (valuing winning) from striving play (valuing the struggle), separating these from intrinsic vs extrinsic motivations. They discuss how clear scoring is transparent and portable but strips nuance, creating a gap between what’s measurable and what matters; transparency can reduce bias yet undermine expertise. Examples include social media likes, quotas, education metrics, sports rule changes, cooking “recipe vs dish,” and academia’s citation and ranking pressures. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The paradox on inefficiency 08:31: To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles, to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them, which I find, it’s got to be to be inefficient, but interestingly not fully inefficient. So we're not trying to be as inefficient as possible. One of the ways to put the paradox of games is we take on an inefficiency and then we try to be as efficient as possible inside that inefficiency. The trap of simple scoring 04:00: One of the biggest differences between real games and the kinds of gamifications of work and education that we find is that gamifications are attempts to modify things into line with simple scoring systems that occur continuously with the rest of life that have direct connections to valuable resources. Collapsing the magic circle 05:08: Twitter likes and citation rates and gamified work are modifications of something that has preexisting value, preexisting activity. So I think the important thing about Twitter, X, Facebook is those scoring systems don't occur in a magic circle. They don't occur in a space with separated meaning. They modify our activities in the real world and change our attitudes and interactions over real world resources. So I think exactly like this easy glide from games or grudge to like we should gamify everything ignores one of the most crucial elements, which is some version of this magic circle is basically active in a lot of genuine gameplay, but is completely inactive, is completely canceled. We have the superficiality of scoring systems and game-ishness, but deep down we don't have the core guts of transferring into a temporary alternate meaning space whose meanings kind of can be held relatively isolated. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Johan HuizingaLusory AttitudeDungeons & DragonsJohn DeweyGoodhart's LawOnora O'NeillJohn ThorneTheodore PorterAutotelicDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at the University of UtahThi Nguyen’s WebsiteWikipedia ProfileSocial Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author PageThe Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's GameThe Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of GamesGames: Agency As Art Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    1 hr