unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

If you're going to succeed in negotiation, It's about arguing with a reason. And what game theory and logic does is allow you to frame the negotiation correctly and figure out the arguments for why you should get more.Barry Nalebuff is a Milton Steinbach Professor at Yale SOM, where for thirty years he has taught negotiation, innovation, strategy, and game theory. He is the co-author of seven books and an online course. His most recent book is “Split the Pie,” which is based on his negotiation course at Yale.In this episode, Greg and Barry weigh different approaches to fairness, discuss making presumptions about rationality, and conflicting views of information in negotiations.Episode Quotes:Negotiation tactics:What I argue is that when you figure out what the other side wants, you should give it to them. And most times when somebody asks for something, it's like, well, if they want it, I can't give it to them. But actually if I can give them what they want, guess what? I can get what I want.2 parts to negotiations:There's two parts of negotiation. There's the Spock and there's the Kirk. There's the logic and there's the emotion. And I'm a big fan of emotions. I understand that aspect. But I'd say there's a missing element of logic. Sunk cost fallacy:It's a question of okay, it's sunk. It’s sunk whether or not we do this deal. And so, I'm either going to lose that and get nothing for it. Or I'm going to lose and get nothing for it, but something else because of the pie. You have to train yourself to think about the fact that, why are we having this deal? It's not to recover the sunk costs, they’re sunk. It's to make this new thing happen.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Yale UniversityInstructors Profile on CourseraBarry Nalebuff on LinkedinBarry Nalebuff on TwitterBarry Nalebuff | Talks at GoogleHis Work:Barry Nalebuff on Google ScholarSplit the Pie WebsiteSplit the Pie: A Radical New Way to NegotiateCo-OpetitionLifecycle Investing: A New, Safe, and Audacious Way to Improve the Performance of Your Retirement Portfolio Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Economists are no longer simply describing and understanding markets, but are often playing the role of “economic engineer”, improving existing markets and sometimes, designing market mechanisms from scratch. Al Roth is a professor of economics at Stanford University and the author of “Who Gets What ― and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design.” And although this book came out about seven years ago, it is still so, so fresh. He and Greg talk about the growing field of market design, liquidity in modern day markets, game theory and stable matching.Episode Quotes:How speed & technology have changed trading & markets:So right now a lot of trading engines are co-located with exchange servers in the same buildings, because the speed of light is bound on how fast you can find these trades. Majority of trades these days are algorithmic trades and they make very little money on each trade, but they make many, many trades.And it's not clear that that's helping price discovery or efficiency, because people who are making markets or offering bids and asks, have to take wider spreads in order to defend themselves against having traded on a stale bid or ask when someone who's a little faster than they gets new information from one of the markets.The growth of game theory & economics: I think a little bit that's the way economics developed. For a long time we took markets as things that happened and our job was to study them. But one of the things you can study and particularly with the advent of game theory in the 20th century, one of the things you can study is the details of how markets work. What is their design? And once you start studying their design, you can start talking about maybe helping to alter it and fix it.How Al got his start:It turned out the future of game theory was in economics. And so my claim when I speak to [Operations Research] audiences these days is that I didn't change my field, I stood my ground and the disciplinary boundaries moved around me. So I'm an economist because game theory is about economics. But increasingly it's coming back to operations research because market design is about the operations of certain kinds of companies that run markets.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityFaculty Profile at Harvard Business SchoolProfessional Profile at The Nobel Prize's WebsiteAl Roth at Talks at GoogleHis Work:Al Roth on Google ScholarWho Gets What ― and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market DesignWho Gets What - And Why Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Douglas Kenrick is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. His research interests include integrating models from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to study the effects of fundamental social motivations on basic cognitive processes. Among Kenrick's many publications are the books "Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life" and "Social Psychology," a textbook coauthored with Steven Neuberg and Robert Cialdini. We’re talking about dating and mating in this episode, touching on topics like the divide between natural and social sciences, micro theories, loss aversion and the history of dating ads.Episode QuotesStimulus control:I think by understanding that we're designed in a way that doesn't match the modern world, we can basically engage in what behaviorists used to call stimulus control. If I take the stimulus away, it's a lot easier. Achieving goals: Of course we're not designed to be happy, right? We're designed to do things that will promote the replication of our genes. And so as soon as we reach one goal, BOOM! Our brain says, all right, what's next? Dating apps possibly changing the way we mate:So you're still seeing in those apps, you're still seeing the regular old stuff play out. But it might be that, yes, they're changing our adaptation level. They're changing this, our expectation of what we can get, that we start to want everything and we're unhappy with our options.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Arizona State UniversityProfessional Profile at Psychology TodayDouglas Kenrick on LinkedinDouglas Kenrick on TwitterHis work:Douglas Kenrick on Google ScholarSex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human NatureSocial Psychology: Goals in InteractionThe Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Binyamin Appelbaum on the editorial board of the New York Times as well as a reporter there. He is also the author of “The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society.”In this book & his work, Binyamin traces the rise of the economists, first in the United States and then around the globe, as their ideas reshaped the modern world, curbing government, unleashing corporations and hastening globalization.This episode focuses on economic consensus around positive vs normative approaches, whether political beliefs shape the intellectual inquiry or vice versa, the origins of the anti draft movement and the evolution of antitrust enforcement.Episode QuotesThe end of the economists hour:That degree of veneration, of deference, of trust in economists, I think, is not going to be recovered at least while living memory of those events is with us. And I think that is what I mean by the end of the economist's hour. Is this period of growing and ultimately unquestioned influence over the direction of economic policy really reaches its endpoint with the global financial crisis.Antitrust enforcement: It's not just the influence of economists. It's an economic idea being seized upon by corporate interests and their political allies carried into practice in a very particular way with a very particular set of outcomes. That's the world we live in today, is a world in which, for all intents and purposes, antitrust enforcement is a dead letter in the United States.Political beliefs in economics:Friedman used to say that the work of a good economist, you shouldn't be able to tell their political beliefs by looking at their work. And his wife used to say that he was being ridiculous. And I'm on his wife's side. She was absolutely right. If you show me the work of an economist, I can tell you a great deal about their political beliefs with a high degree of accuracy. And there's a reason for that.Placing value on things:The things that couldn't be valued would be ignored in policymaking, if you couldn't put a price tag on it, it wasn't going to have a seat at the table. And I think to this day, that remains true. And the dominant response in economics has been to try to assign values to more and more things. The value of lost time, the value of a view that is no longer available, the value of a sunny day. and not to grapple with the question of, well aren't there some things that we're never going to value properly. And how do we include those in a rational decision-making process?Show Links:Guest Profile:Professional Profile at The New York TimesBinyamin Appelbaum’s WebsiteBinyamin Appelbaum on LinkedinBinyamin Appelbaum on TwitterHis work:Columns at The New York TimesThe Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today's episode is diving into anthropology, paleontology, archeology, and all of these related disciplines with Ian Tattersall.He is the curator emeritus with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and also the author of a wide range of books, both by himself and with his co-author Rob DeSalle. The most recent book is “The Accidental Homo Sapiens: Genetics, Behavior, and Free Will,”, which builds on a lot of their previous work, including “Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins.”Nicaraguan deaf school children, the origins of vocal language, molecular anthropology, and “bean bag genetics.”Episode QuotesWhy is “bean bag genetics” so popular?:Our minds are reductionist, we want to understand the world and we want to understand it in terms that we can readily relate to. And the idea that a gene is responsible for something in a one-to-one correspondence gives us an easy way to explain it to ourselves. It doesn't have anything to do with reality. On human nature:Unintentionally, I don't think we are going out to make any species extinct, but we are just having that effect. And the only iron clad rule of human nature really is, it’s a rule of unintended consequences. And that's just the effect that we have. On the emergence & evolution of language:And that's what makes language peculiar. And language maps so closely on to thought for us, that I'm sure that it was the invention of language, vocal language in this case because there were no vocal languages, that is what stimulated the sort of feedback system in the brain that gave rise to symbolic thought.And that's something I just can't see happening over a long, long, long period of time, which is the way that most people look at it.Functional evolution:Basically, the thing that we really have to understand is that you can't do something new unless you already have the capacity to do it. So the structure has to be there before you can start behaving in a different way. Show Links:Guest Profile:Ian Tattersall’s WebsiteProfessional Profile at American Museum of Natural HistoryHis work:The Accidental Homo Sapiens: Genetics, Behavior, and Free WillA Natural History of WineMasters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human OriginsHoax: A History of Deception: 5,000 Years of Fakes, Forgeries, and Fallacies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The traditional notion is that schools are failing and they need “reforming.” But our guest believes that our education system is obsolete and needs re-imaging. Why? Because our education systems were created at the Dawn of the Industrial Era, and we no longer live in the Industrial Era. Tony Wagner is at the Learning Policy Institute, and he’s also been at Harvard University and a number of other institutions. He also published a memoir last year called “Learning by Heart: An Unconventional Education.”In this episode we look at the modern education system from all angles;, how can we teach teachers, the future of microcredentials and how can parents embrace education at home.Episode QuotesIs learning content the most important thing anymore?:In the 21st century, content knowledge still matters. In a world where Google knows everything, it's a different kind of content that matters. Skills matter more, I argue in the innovation era, and motivation matters most.How creativity gets squashed out of kids:What happens in school, fewer and fewer think of themselves as creative in any way. It's something that happens off there in the corner, in a niche for just a few kids. And kids become obsessed with getting the right answer rather than asking their own questions. You don't have to take a creativity test to see this, you see it every day in classrooms, Greg. Kids aren't asking questions. They don't have time, they're not encouraged. If it's a question, it’s -“ will this be on the test?” or “how much does this count towards my grade?”, which is what we're teaching in school.How will we change the current education system?:The challenge is, if we're going to get shaken out of our usual way of doing things at any of these levels, there has to be a sense of urgency. And that has to be created by leaders. Show Links:Guest Profile:Professional Profile at Learning Policy InstituteTony Wagner’s Website Tony Wagner on LinkedinTony Wagner on TwitterTony Wagner at TEDxNYEDHis work:Tony Wagner’s BlogLearning by Heart: An Unconventional EducationMost Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation EraCreating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the WorldThe Global Achievement Gap: Why Our Kids Don't Have the Skills They Need for College, Careers, and Citizenship -- and What We Can Do About ItChange Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Would you believe Cleveland used to be a hub for innovation? Now the Bay Area is the height of start ups and global technology. It seems like everybody, no matter where they are around the world, is trying to create a Silicon valley back in their country or “Silicon hyphens.” Dan Breznitz is the Munk Chair of Innovation Studies at the Munk School of Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He's also the co-director of their Innovation Policy Lab, as well as an author. His books include “Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization,” and “Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World.”Listen as Dan & Greg talk about the global fragmentation of production, innovation vs. invention, luxury shoes, and what's wrong with the intellectual property system that we have today.Episode QuotesProblems with patents in the US:To get the patents, apart from this being really original, another problem of our current patent system, you have to describe it in such a way that anyone with common technical skills in that area would immediately know how to produce it. Because the other thing that you want to do with innovation, if you care about economic growth, is that it's extremely rapid. And that's a dilemma that has not been solved very well. Effects from COVID:If we don't change the system, what I think COVID has shown us [North America], Is that in a time of crisis, we cannot produce and innovate on the things we want.Even if we were the first to innovate them, like the N95 masks, like ventilators. And that our obsession, what I called “techno fetishism”, our idealization of the new - has cost us greatly and made us unbelievably vulnerable. Thoughts on politicians in the tech spaces:There's my cynical rule of, if it arrived to a politician and they're really keen about a new industry, it's about seven years too late. Because seven years ago were the people who were really smart started to develop it. Around five years later, it was successful, it got to the media. And two years after it got the media, politicians say it's a safe thing to talk about. Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of TorontoSpeaker’s Profile at Chartwell SpeakersDan Bresnitz on LinkedinDan Bresnitz on TwitterHis work:Dan Bresnitz on Google ScholarRun of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in ChinaInnovation and the State: Political Choice and Strategies for Growth in Israel, Taiwan, and IrelandInnovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ethan Kross says the human ability to be introspective is a super power. We can time travel in our heads. We can be excited about planning the future, and look back on our lives in nostalgia. But what happens when that time machine gets stuck? And you're only focused the negative. Here is where the ability to harness that inner voice becomes key. Ethan is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and the author of “Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.”In this episode he shares some tips on wrangling negative thoughts, some benefits of not being in the moment, paralysis by analysis, and zooming in vs zooming out.Episode QuotesThe cost of depression in the workplace:The World Health Organization recently put a price tag on this, for the US global economy. They looked at what the cost to the economy is of anxiety and depression in the workplace. And we know that chatter fuels those conditions. The number was $1 trillion for, I think it was 2020. And that's a number that was predicted to rise exponentially over the next 10 years. Benefits of the inner voice:It allows you to do many different things. It's a really flexible tool. It lets you keep information active in your head. You go to the grocery store, you forgot what to buy, you remind yourself, what's on your list in your head: ketchup, tomato sauce, pasta. You can use your inner voice to simulate and plan, like before presentations I'll go over the talking points, what I'm going to say. I do that in my head. You can use your voice to control yourselves. Like when you're working out: “come on four more sets and then I get to take a break.” And this is one of my favorite features just because I think it's so cool. We use our inner voice to create stories that give shape to our sense of who we are.Being in the moment:The human mind was not designed to be in the moment at all times. And that's okay, actually. The ability to travel in time in our mind is another one of these amazing capacities that we possess. Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of MichiganProfessional Profile at Emotion & Self-Control LabEthan Kross WebsiteEthan Kross on TwitterEthan Kross on LinkedinEthan Kross on InstagramEthan Kross on TEDxGatewayHis work:Ethan Kross on Google ScholarChatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What does it mean to be a philosopher? What does it mean to DO Philosophy? What are the boundaries of philosophy as a discipline? These are just some of the themes that have pervaded the work of Justin Smith. Justin Smith is a professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris, and he has written several books, including the upcoming “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning” out March 22nd 2022.Justin and Greg dive deep into Justin's 2016 book “The Philosopher: A History in Six Types,” what it means to be a modern philosopher, the “bookshelf classification” problem, and how philosophy can address the modern economy of attention. Episode Quotes:On social media:And rather than social media being truly subjected to democratic oversight, things are going to continue to get worse. In terms of the topsy turvy social upheaval of social mobbing that is, in a sense, ruining everything. You can't do anything in the way you could have expected to do it 10 years ago.And in terms of the universal surveillance that these new technologies are affording, these things are just going to keep getting worse and worse until there's real democratic oversight. And that's going to be extremely hard. And I think that it's only going to come after a period of worsening of the conditions of our social life together up to a point where people just won't take it anymore.Philosophy as an academic discipline:Now, I think philosophy as an academic discipline has failed tremendously to discover interesting things about how we think. Because what it in fact ends up doing is reflecting on the way “we,” not Qua* human beings, but “we, Qua* WEIRD, 21st century wealthy, educated Americans take things to be.The importance of philosophy:One thing is that we live in a world where we're side by side, neighbor by neighbor, with people we don't understand. People who are strangers to us and of whom we’re extremely suspicious and this leads to constant conflict. And one thing about this approach that I am promoting is that it enables a kind of humility.Once you start to realize all of the delirious range of ways people have made sense of the world around them and still somehow managed to thrive, even though these ways are totally foreign from the way we make sense of the world. Modern philosophy:So there's this new demand to find philosophy where we weren't detecting it before. That's coming down almost as a kind of administrative pressure - like philosophers, at least in the United States are under pressure to do this. And ironically for me, it's making them open, but also somewhat inconsistent because even though they're becoming more open about what can count as philosophy, they're still pretending, there is somewhere, a well-defined demarcation such that such that John Locke is a philosopher and Lawrence Stern is not, right?Show Links:Guest Profile:Professional Profile at Paris Diderot UniversityJustin E. H. Smith’s WebsiteJustin E. H. Smith on TwitterHis work:Justin E.H Smith on SubstackThe Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a WarningIrrationality: A History of the Dark Side of ReasonNature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern PhilosophyThe Philosopher: A History in Six TypesDivine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We like to think that technology makes the world a better place and that progress moves forward in a fairly linear fashion. And yet, there are plenty of signs that show well-being does not necessarily increase along with the sophistication of technology. This idea is explored in Edward Tenner’s books, the most recent being The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't Do. A sequel to his previous book, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences.He also just wrapped up a stint at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and is currently a scholar at the Smithsonian.In this episode, Edward and Greg run through a number of scenarios based on revenge effects, risk associated with metrics, while factoring for human responses and serendipity.Episode Quotes:On his latest book, The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't Do:One of the arguments of my newest book, The Efficiency Paradox, is that too much efficiency in the short run makes us less efficient in the long run. And there is case after case of that, but the point of it is that very often it is the top managers who don't really take a holistic view of their enterprise and who don't understand that sometimes you really need to have more failures in order to have long-term success.The single minded pursuit of efficiency:If you focus too much on short-term metrics and short-term results, you're overlooking the needs for experimentation and failures and losses that will lead to greater long-term benefits. It’s really as simple as that. Why we might want to hesitate on using metrics, in this case in publishing:For example, Moby Dick was really considered a failure. It got bad reviews at first. If there was like, an AI that was supposed to evaluate the prospects for books, it probably would have been turned down. Harry Potter was turned down by 20 publishers.And the reason for that is that a lot of extremely successful things, a lot of best-selling works are initially a little bit strange. They’re different. And so people who are using experience, people who are consulting their databases will really be unable to pick up on that. Sometimes you have to put something out there and see if it works or not.Show Links:Guest Profile:Edward Tenner’s WebsiteEdward Tenner on Twitter​​Edward Tenner on LinkedinSpeaker’s Profile at TED TalkHis work:Edward Tenner’s Published Essays and ArticlesThe Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't DoOur Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body TechnologyWhy Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.