unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

The short answer is no. According to Edward Slingerland our taste for alcohol is a practice found in nearly every culture, meaning that its consumption must offer benefits which outweigh its obvious costs.Edward Slingerland is a professor of philosophy at The University of British Columbia up in Vancouver, and is also the author of multiple books. His most recent being “Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.”So today we are looking at alcohol from a historical perspective: the origins of alcohol production, why humans allocate so many resources to it,and how it helps with the downregulation of certain aspects of human cognition. Many of the themes build on another of Edward’s books, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity.Episode Quotes:What we spend on alcohol:People report spending 1/3 of what they spend on food on alcohol. That's a pretty big chunk of your income. And it's almost certainly an under-report because in large parts of the world intoxicants are black market. So you don't really get accurate reports of that. Using alcohol to relax:But it occurred to me at one point that alcohol might be a technology that cultures have stumbled upon to get you around the paradox of trying not to try, because what you can do with alcohol is just take a substance that will reach in directly to your brain and turn the PFC down a few notches.The role of alcohol consumption in commerce:Edward: And so if it's a relatively simple thing, like I'm contracting you to deliver me some paper clips   Greg: I'm gonna download an app on my phone. I don't need to have a drink with the company that makes it. Edward: Yeah, it probably is okay. But if I'm engaged in a really long-term complex undertaking with you where there's lots of lee- there's always leeway, right? That's what I'm going to get on a plane and fly to Shanghai and get drunk with you before I sign the contract.Alcohol for camaraderie:Some companies have replaced the annual office party with heavy drinking with laser tag outings or rock climbing. And it's probable that that's doing some of the same stuff. So with extreme exercise or getting absorbed in some kind of game, you can get some of that same downregulation of the PFC effect. So there are other ways to do it. It's just, alcohol is really efficient and a pleasurable way to do it. What if we ban alcohol:Maybe if we ban alcohol we'll eliminate drunk driving, we'll lower liver damage. We’ll lower our cancer rates, domestic violence will probably go down. There'll be a lot of great benefits. But we'll be losing stuff. We'll be losing creativity. We'll be losing innovation. Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of British ColumbiaEdward Slingerland’s WebsiteEdward Slingerland on TwitterEdward Slingerland on YoutubeEdward Slingerland on TEDXMaastrichtHis work:Edward Slingerland on Google ScholarDrunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to CivilizationTrying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why do some great business and policy ideas make it big while others fail to take off? That's the big question behind John List’s most recent book The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale.John List is an economist at the University of Chicago, as well as chief economist at Lyft. He is also the author of The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life. Having worked for a number of governments & tech companies, he has dipped his toes in a lot of different waters. Hear how growing up going to baseball card auctions prepared John for his career as an economist studying, critical thinking and biases, thinking on the margin, and proper experimental design. Episode Quotes:If your studies don't scale or if they are not representative, then you're going to go down wrong path:The first step is actually generating or obtaining data that can inform your decision-making process. Now that's a great step, but it's also a step that can be very seductive in the sense that you think you're making the right decision. And it can actually be counterproductive to what you're trying to do.We need more replication in social science studies:If somebody is actually reading your work and trying to replicate it, you should take that is a compliment and you should be rewarded when people replicate your work. That doesn't happen in the social sciences. We need to think about the reward system on both the demand side and the supply side to replications and make sure that changes.Thinking on the margin:While people learn to think on the margin, it's really hard for the human mind to apply that concept to their state of play. Whether it's the white house or the boardroom or wherever, it's not an easy concept to say I'm going to use marginal thinking. And then how does marginal thinking suggest I should think through this problem, that's a part that we tend not to teach.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of ChicagoProfessional Profile at IZA Institute of Labor EconomicsJohn List’s WebsiteJohn List on LinkedinJohn List on TwitterHis work:John List on Google ScholarEnhancing Critical Thinking Skill Formation: Getting Fast Thinkers to Slow DownThe Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas ScaleThe Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When we first started to study the social brain as a species, friendship was considered a luxury, it didn't aid us in survival. But now studies show that friendship is vital to not only your mental health and happiness, but your immune system, your cognitive health and your overall longevity. So today we dig into the science behind friendship, with Lydia DenworthLydia Denworth is a contributing editor at Scientific American, and also the author of I Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey Through the Science of Sound and Language and most recently Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.We’ll hear all about loneliness, making friendship a priority, honing the skill of friendship, and quality vs quantity in our relationships. Episode Quotes:What is Friendship: I think that this science of friendship that I explored, it does two things. It clarifies the definition of what a friend really is, but it also blurs the lines between the categories you're talking about. Between family relatives and romantic partners and friends. And what I mean by that is that, um, you know, beyond the, the distinction I just gave of the, you know, these legal and biological differences with friendship, it turns out that the friendship, when we think about friendship as a biological and evolutionary relationship, what it really signifies is a high-quality bond between two individuals.The difference between loneliness and isolation:It's important to understand the difference between loneliness and social isolation, which was the thing that we pretty much all experienced during the pandemic. One is subjective. So loneliness is the mismatch between the amount of social connection you want and the amount that you have. And isolation, social isolation is more objective. It's an actual count of your social interactions and the number of people in your social circle. And it can be unhealthy for you too. To have a very limited amount of connection. But the way you feel about it, that subjective feeling, is where the real harm seems to come in with your health and wellbeing.Spouses as friends:So if we describe our spouse as our best friend or our sibling as a best friend, we're doing it to add something to the description. So it's a category. If I tell you, my husband is a friend. You know he's my husband, that means that we got married and we're connected that way. But when I tell you that he's my best friend, I'm telling you something about the quality of our relationship.Loneliness is a health issue:What we've now found is that that same response in the body that we get from loneliness, is a response in different kinds of adversity. So it's not unique to loneliness. What it's telling us is loneliness is right up there with huge trauma and poverty and other things. And that is the thing that nobody really appreciated until recently.Friendship takes time:So if you're an adult and you move to a new city and you're trying to make some new friends, you can get frustrated quickly. But you have to recognize that if you count up, say, I need 50 hours before this person is gonna feel like a friend. Then I think you might look at it differently. You might realize you have to just keep going back a bit more.Show Links:Guest Profile:Lydia Denworth’s WebsiteLydia Denworth on TwitterLydia Denworth on LinkedinLydia Denworth on InstagramLydia Denworth on TEDTalkHer work:Stories By Lydia Denworth on Scientific AmericanFriendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental BondI Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey Through the Science of Sound and LanguageToxic Truth: A Scientist, a Doctor, and the Battle over Lead 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 we have everything we need to make decisions based on the numbers we are presented in a data set. But any large data set is bound to have problems. And it's often the data that we are missing that can lead us off course unexpectedly. David Hand has written many books, including The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day and the more recent, Dark Data: Why What You Don’t Know Matters. He is also emeritus professor of math at Imperial College.David and Greg talk today about bias in statistics, interpreting data sets, and whether or not we are just more aware of global events happening than we were in the past, and how that affects stats?Episode Quotes:Interpreting data sets:You need an element of caution, skepticism about the data because let's face it. Any large data set is likely to have some problems, measurement, error problems, duplications and missing values. In time, missing records, it's likely to have some problems. So, a skeptical attitude I think is a healthy attitude.Observational data:I think observational data is particularly risky and it has to be said that the data science revolution we are currently living through is in large part driven by big observational administrative data sets. Data sets which arise in the normal practice of everyday life. Running a credit card or a retail operation, for example or a transport company, a hospital or whatever. You're just observing what happens. You're not manipulating or intervening. And in that case, I think the opportunities for distortions are very severe. Now, whether those distortions will impact your conclusions depends on what question you're asking, but there is a great risk.Misconceptions of big data sets:People have this belief that big data, massive data sets, billions of data points - no need to worry, the size of the data or wash all the problems away. What I say is that big data has all the problems of small data and extra problems of their own because I think they have more opportunities for glitches to occur and problems to arise.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Imperial College LondonProfessional Profile at The British AcademyHis work:David Hand on Google ScholarDark Data: Why What You Don’t Know MattersThe Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every DayMeasurement: A Very Short Introduction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dean Buonomano is a professor of psychology and neurobiology at UCLA, and the author of Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives, as well as the newer, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. He says it's impossible to overstate how important associations are for cognition, behavior learning and decisions.We’ll learn in this episode about memory capacity, creating and breaking those important associations, reward learning, and why we think about the brain as a computer.Episode Quotes:Breaking associations:It's not forgetting. I think maybe, maybe a hundred years ago, it was thought that extinction was a type of forgetting, but it's best seen as a different type of learning and suppressing a previously existing learned response.Comparing human memory with harddrive data:When we retrieve information from our computer hard drive, it doesn't alter that. Nor does it store that information that it was retrieved. But in the case of the human brain, every time we retrieve information, we're also sort of rewriting it or reconsolidating it. And again, this makes sense in the sense that every time you see your nephew every six months or every year, you're not only recalling your niece or nephew - his or her face. But you're rewriting it as well. So you're continuously updating it. So the process of writing information down and recalling it is not independent, but interacting in the case of the brain, which is very different in the case of the computer.Memory and Capacity:I do take the position that one of the reasons we forget, and one of the reasons that our memories are not perfect is because there is a capacity issue. Now it's extremely hard to quantify. you said some people have a better memory, some people don't and it seems, like, well, how can you reconcile that?Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of California, Los AngelesDean Buonomano on TwitterDean Buonomano on Talks at GoogleDean Buonomano on TEDXViennaHis work:Buonomano LabsDean Buonomano on Google ScholarYour Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of TimeBrain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You can have genetically identical siblings. They have the same genome. They lay right next to each other in the womb. They're born, and at the moment they're born, they're already different. Before any experience has accrued at all. Why shouldn't they be just the same?This question and more are discussed in today’s episode on individuality, variability, heritability and epigenetics. Our guest is David Linden. He is a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. He is also at the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. His most recent book is Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality.Episode Quotes:On Variability:“The other thing that's important to realize is sometimes it's a lot easier to kind of break a process than it is to make a process function to a greater degree.”On memory:A lot of our memory has to do with things that we can't recall. Like when you practice a sport and you get better at it. You can recall maybe your tennis lessons, but you don't really recall how to hit the ball better. It is a subconscious experience. Likewise, you may have been traumatized as a child by an aggressive dog. And now as an adult, every time you see a dog, your heart races. And it's not like you necessarily remember the experience as a child, but that reaction, that association, that fear learning is there at a subconscious level. All these things form us as individuals.On OkCupid traits and preferences:If you really like to eat lutefisk, that probably came because you grew up liking it because there's just about no other way to like it. It doesn't seem to be genetic related and it doesn't seem to have to do with what taste or smell receptor variants you have. It’s something that's socially encoded in your experience. Likewise, if you were to say, well, I've always been an early bird all my life. Well, that is heavily genetically infected. That's a highly heritable trait and we know a lot about the genes that contribute to people who like to rise earlier or rise late.On food preference:Generally speaking, food preference has some heritable things that we can trace mostly to your odorant receptors and a few of them to your taste receptors. But most of it is socially determined. You go to Thailand, it's pretty hard to find someone who doesn't like chili peppers. Whereas, if you're walking around Baltimore, you'll find plenty of people that don't like chili peppers.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at John Hopkins School of MedicineProfessional Profile at Kavli Neuroscience Discovery InstituteDavid Linden’s WebsiteDavid Linden on TwitterDavid Linden on TEDXUNCHis work:David Linden on Google ScholarUnique: The New Science of Human Individuality Kindle EditionThe Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and GodThe Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So GoodTouch: The Science of the Hand, Heart, and Mind Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Intensifying competition, accelerating change, extreme disruptive events. A combination of these elements are leading to a global shift to living in constant fear and uncertainty. But John Hagel says you can cultivate emotions that motivate you to move beyond this fear. John is a leading strategy thinker who has worked at McKinsey, and was most recently at Deloitte where he founded and is now emeritus chair of The Center for the Edge.In addition to his very generous blog posts, John is also the author of many, many books, including The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends On Productive Friction And Dynamic Specialization and his most recent and most personal book The Journey Beyond Fear: Leverage the Three Pillars of Positivity to Build Your Success.John joins Greg to discuss the evolution of his insights, fear and uncertainty, personal narratives, and cultivating passionate explorers.Episode Quotes:What are some reasons for the “big shift”:One of the key elements of this big shift is what I described as mounting performance pressure on all of us. As individuals and as institutions. The pressure takes many different forms. Some of it is intensifying competition on a global scale. Competitions intensifying, not just for companies, but for individuals. I mean, more and more people I talk to are worried that their jobs are going to be taken by robots. They're competing with technology, or they're competing with people from lower income countries who could do their job. So there's a lot of intensifying competition. What are the damaging effects of this fear?:One impact of fear is it shrinks our time horizon. If we're really afraid, all we can do is focus on the moment. We can't spend time looking ahead, that's a distraction. If we just shrink our time horizons, we end up in a win/lose view of the world. If it's just about today, the resources are a given.The only question is who's going to get them, me or you, win/lose. There's no win-win here. And it leads to erosion of trust. Because you may seem like a nice person, but at the end of the day I know only one of us is going to get these resources so I can't afford to trust you. And you become more risk averse.How can we use personal narratives to grow?:When you talk to psychologists about personal narratives, what they mean is what's the story of your life? Look back, and how did you get to where you are today? And it stops with today.My view of personal narratives is that it's about the future, not about the past. When you look ahead, what is really the biggest motivator for you? Is it a threat or an opportunity? And if it's one or the other, what kind of threat or what kind of opportunity? And then step back and reflect is this really what's gonna motivate me to accomplish as much as I could. And so it's looking ahead and articulating, expressing that narrative.Show Links:Guest Profile:John Hagel’s WebsiteJohn Hagel on TwitterJohn Hangel on LinkedinJohn Hagel on TEDxWestlakeJohn Hagel Speaker’s ProfileHis work:The Journey Beyond Fear: Leverage the Three Pillars of Positivity to Build Your Success The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in MotionThe Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends On Productive Friction And Dynamic SpecializationOut of The Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today and Growth Tomorrow Through Web Services Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Humans are born to create theories about the world -- unfortunately, we're often wrong and our intuitive theories keep us from understanding science and the world as it really is.Andrew Shtulman is a cognitive developmental psychologist who studies conceptual development and conceptual change, particularly as they relate to science education, and does this work at Occidental College, where he is currently a professor of psychology.He has also written a book, Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often WrongAndrew joins Greg in this episode to talk about conceptual development, intuitive theories, anti science folks, and the subconscious act of suppression.Episode Quotes:Perceptual inputs as a learning tool:The only way that you can really wrap your mind around a parabolic path is to let go of impetus. It's a fiction, it doesn't exist, that the way an object falls is a function of its velocity in combination with gravity. And that's it. There's no force acting on the object other than gravity. There has to be some additional intellectual work that goes on, in addition to these kinds of firsthand experiences, to make the firsthand experiences meaningful.Should educators be trying to sidestep these intuitive beliefs, or create a bridge from these intuitive beliefs to the scientific understanding?:The problem is just that you can't have an orthodoxy about the matter where you say science is all intuitive. We just have to show how it's intuitive. Or vice versa, science is all counter-intuitive. We have to break students of their pre instructional ideas and teach them a whole new set of ideas. The mapping is piecemeal and you have to figure it out as a scientist doing experiments, which mappings work and which mappings don't work.Why city kids are at a disadvantage compared to rural kids:The human species is moving towards the cities and away from rural areas. And that means contact with nature is going to be rarer. And that kind of contact has educational benefits. It enriches our folk theories of biology or provides a database upon which our theories can be built. That's going to be absent if your only experience with nature is through a television screen or at the zoo.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Occidental CollegeAndrew Shtulman on LinkedinAndrew Shtulman on TwitterHis work:Andrew Shtulman on Google ScholarScienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When it comes to ownership, the same few simple stories are used from the playground to the courtroom. And the problem lies here, that we still have this very old, physical notion of ownership that no longer works in a digital world.Michael Heller is a professor of law at Columbia University and co-author of the classic The Gridlock Economy, and the more recent Mine! How The Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives. In this episode we’ll dig into the merits of copyright and property law, why law is extremely overrated as a mechanism for resolving ownership disputes, what that “buy now” purchase button really means, and what we lose when we don't own physical things. Episode Quotes:How social norms play a role in our thoughts on ownership:So for example, say you're in a grocery store and you have a shopping cart full of groceries. If someone were to lean over and say oh, look, you got some eggs. Those are great. Take the eggs, lean in again, there's some milk, take the milk out. You would be furious with them.There'd be a fight. You would say, how is that possible? Those are mine. But if you stop for a second and think it's like, actually they're not yours. You don't own the groceries in your shopping cart. But people don't lean in and take them out of each other's carts because of the power of this norm or custom of possession.That possession it's very deeply rooted. It goes back to our animal and territorial instincts. It's something that kids become masters at from a very young age. It's a language that we all speak as grownups. And it's a language that basically gets us through the day.Why moving towards fewer property rights is better:The goal, from my point of view, is always: What is the absolute minimum we can give to get some level of innovation that we're looking for. And it turns out that the answer is much less legal protection than lawyers in particular and innovators lobby for. So innovators, the fashion industry for example, or, the Apples, the Amazons, the music industry, they're always lobbying for more properties. But I think that's mostly social welfare reducing, not increasing. And I think we have too much copyright in this country and too many patents in this country.Ownership & body parts:This is a really fraught area for ownership because it traces back in this country so directly to slavery, to the ownership of African American bodies and then the sort of end of that horror. And the question now is, now that we have new medical technologies that make the ownership of pieces of our bodies possible, do we say no you shouldn't be able for example, to sell your kidney or your eggs or rent out your womb if you're a woman to gestate somebody else's child. Do we say no to that? Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia Law SchoolMichael Heller on LinkedinMichael Heller on TwitterHis work:Michael Heller on Google ScholarMine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our LivesThe Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

As we head into year 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic, most knowledge workers are still working from home. You may be listening to this from your home office or kitchen table desk. But before working from home became semi mandatory for health and safety reasons, many companies were very resistant to the idea of distributed and remote work. David Burkus is an associate professor of leadership and innovation at Oral Roberts University and an author. His many books include Friend of a Friend: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career, Pick A Fight: How Great Teams Find A Purpose Worth Rallying Around, and the very timely Leading From Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams.In this opportune episode, Greg & David discuss how productivity changes while working from home, the science behind meetings, building boundaries in your new work schedule and creating a shared sense of purpose within teams, even when they are not in person.Episode Quotes:Measuring productivity in knowledge work:It is really hard to measure performance in knowledge work, especially day to day. It's really hard to know all of those people sitting at their desks, on the computer, are they being productive or not? And in the absence of that, a lot of managers, the lazier ones if we're being honest, will just flip and say, okay, well, when did they come in? When did they leave this? This person's gotta be productive because they're always staying late to get extra work done.On remote leadership:Hopefully now we've realized that presence doesn't equal productivity. There's better work to be done to measure and track that. But I really feel like there's a lot of people that even 14 months into this really just feel like it's still the truth and can't wait to get back. And I feel sorry for those people, because a lot of their most talented people do not agree with them. The question I'm asked most often over the last year is when are we going back to the office? And the answer I give them is, we're not. At least not all of us and not all of the time. And so you better get ready to lead in that context. Creating a rule book for communication:Start with a working agreement, social contract. When I'm feeling particularly feisty, I sometimes refer to it as the declaration of interdependence for your team. We have to work together, so we're going to have to find a way to work together, right? And breaking down what is asynchronous versus synchronous communication is a part of that, but it's broader. It's all of those little unanswered questions. Where a lot of friction and where a lot of conflict on a team happens is when somebody assumes a norm that isn't actually what other people assume. It's when somebody sends an email and no one responds in the first 12 hours, and then they get angry when everybody else is going “well, I have a day. Like you sent me it via email, therefore I have 24 to 48 hours to respond”. Right? Those are things we actually need to flesh out. So what I encourage a lot of team leaders to do is make that list of questions about stuff we haven't resolved.Show Links:Guest Profile:David Burkus’ WebsiteDavid Burkus on LinkedinDavid Burkus on InstagramDavid Burkus on YoutubeDavid Burkus on TEDXUniversityOfNevedaHis work:Leading From Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote TeamsPick a Fight: How Great Teams Find a Purpose Worth Rallying AroundFriend Of A Friend: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your CareerUnder New Management: How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as UsualThe Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.