unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

There is no doubt that we are in a stress epidemic in our fast paced and modern world. But Daniel Keating says this may seem pretty paltry in comparison to what's coming. He predicts a full stress pandemic on the horizon, where everything needs immediate fixing or else it's perceived as an existential threat.Daniel Keating is a Professor at the University of Michigan in the departments of Psychology, Psychiatry and Pediatrics. And he wrote a couple of books, the most recent being Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact Of Early Life Adversity And How To Break The Cycle.In that book, Daniel looks into early childhood and prenatal experience and how experiences here shape our stress response as adults. We hear more about that groundbreaking research in this episode, as well as the importance of resiliency, the precariousness of the modern workplace, and possible policy interventions to reduce stress in early childhood and pregnancy.Episode Quotes:What accounts for our current stress epidemic: I think what we need to recognize is that people can feel stress not just about material insufficiency or the fear of it. Precarity is the new term, that their circumstances are precarious enough that they might experience material insufficiency at any time. And so there's that, but then there's also the whole status component to it. Where do you stand within your group, amongst other people? And those are psychologically very real threats. So if you feel like you're sliding down the social ladder and that you could wind up on the dreaded “welfare” word, or that you could lose your home and your family would be homeless. Those may not be immediate material insufficiency things, but they're certainly status threat kinds of things to our psychology, our identity.High SES parents are desperate for kids to maintain social status:That also puts a huge amount of pressure on those kids. You have got to succeed, right? You absolutely have to succeed. If you don't succeed, it gets to the point where it feels, although it almost surely in reality is not, it feels like an existential threat. You're going to lose your status. Our status. So we need you to do everything. If you don't get into one of the ivys or the big 20 top rated schools or whatever, all is lost. Despite the fact that there's no evidence to support that.The future of stress:At some point, if you ramp the stressors up enough, nobody's going to have the capacity to withstand it. I don't care how much supposed grit you've got, it's going to overwhelm you. And the more you increase the vulnerability. The less the stressors have to be to overwhelm you. When you're increasing both, which I think we are, I think the vulnerabilities increasing partly because of this kind of whole epigenetic shift that's going on. And, at the same time, we're very rapidly ramping up the stressors out of the societal structure and societal practices. And I think that's just such a really bad mix.  Show Links:Guest Profile:Daniel Keating on TwitterDaniel Keating on LinkedinFaculty Profile at University of MichiganHis work:Daniel Keating on Google ScholarBorn Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity - and How to Break the CycleConstructivist Perspectives on Developmental Psychopathology and Atypical Development (Jean Piaget Symposia Series)Nature and Nurture in Early Child Development Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anna Lembke says we are becoming a nation of addicts. She makes that pretty clear in her books with titles like Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance In The Age Of Indulgence and Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, And Why It's So Hard To Stop.Her argument is in a world where we’re constantly chasing pleasure, it's not just that we're using up our dopamine and then we go back to baseline. It's that there's a price to pay for every pleasure. Anna Lembke is a Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, and joins Greg today to talk about what being an addict in our modern, digital world really means; touching on America is a nation of pain, opioids, identity in illness narratives, and the balance of pain, pleasure and homeostasis.Episode Quotes:A bit on Dopamine Nation:Almost everything has become drugified. It's not just that medications are incredibly potent. it's that everything's become more potent or novel, more accessible. Large to even infinite quantities. So it's not just that we're all vulnerable to addiction because of pharmaceuticals, we're vulnerable to addiction because investing money has become gamified and addictive. Playing games has become addictive. Reading - the combination of the formula of storytelling, plus the technology of e-readers has made reading potentially a drug. So the point really is that we're surrounded by feel good drugs and behaviors. The pursuit of pleasure can destroy our capacity for it:Dopamine is like money in the bank. And if you spend all that money, and then you want to keep going, you have to borrow money. And then you go into debt and that's that dopamine deficit state. And you can only do that for so long before people won't lend you money anymore. And then you're really in trouble. So it's this idea that, it's not just that we're using up the dopamine and then we go back to baseline. It's that there's a price to pay for every pleasure. How can we minimize the likelihood of addiction?:I think we have to go out into the world today with an appreciation that almost everything has been engineered to be addictive. And to have us consume more of it than is actually healthy for us. Desire is healthy. So this is not to say that we should never use intoxicants or that we should never play video games or never use pornography, but we need to go into those endeavors with a full on awareness that they are inherently addictive, that they were made to be that way. And that really anybody is vulnerable. Show Links:Guest Profile:Anna Lembke’s WebsiteAnna Lembke on LinkedinAnna Lembke on TwitterFaculty Profile at Stanford UniversityAnna Lembke on TEDXStanfordHer work:Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of IndulgenceDrug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The robots will steal our jobs. That's how many people see the future of labor in the United States. But what do we stand to lose when humans aren’t doing the work they've done for decades?Frank Pasquale is a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. And also the author of New Laws Of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise In The Age Of A.I. and The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money And Information.We often overestimate what AI can do, even as it gains ground all around us. Listen as Greg and Frank discuss how AI should complement human labor, not replace it, augmented vs artificial intelligence and the delicate balance algorithms and individual discretion.Episode Quotes:Possible problems with algorithms becoming the norm over human insight:My worry is that the cost cutting pressure in many of these areas is so high that we're going to see this pressure to repeatedly get rid of the professional, or make people jump through a hundred hoops that are automated, like a phone tree before they get to the professional. So the game becomes, how do I present my symptoms so I can finally get it to a doctor? I'm very worried about that sort of future.How do we police the algorithms for flaws:Ideally it's in the owners of these systems interest to invite criticism and to invite feedback and to get people involved in improving them. And in a way that could be a good business strategy. If you get more people invested in improving what you're doing, then you have this sort of group that becomes a community that can also enjoy being committed to investing in some way in one's own services.Where automation is happening now:Okay everyone who's really thinking about AI - they're looking for the self-driving car, they're looking for The Jetsons sort of scenario. And it's like, don't look there. Look to high-frequency trading and finance. And look to your newsfeed. Right? Cause that's where you've got total automation.Show Links:Guest Profile:Frank Pasquale on TwitterFrank Pasquale on LinkedinFaculty Profile at Brooklyn Law SchoolProfessional Profile at Vermont Law SchoolHis work:Frank Pasquale on Google ScholarNew Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AIThe Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In a world where the hustle and the grind are glamorized, it can be almost radical to consider the importance of rest. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang wants to reinvent work so that we can shorten working hours, and even whole working weeks, in order to promote productivity.Alex is the founder of Strategy And Rest, a company that advises others on how to instill more productivity and creativity in their workforce by providing an environment that facilitates better rest. He is also a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and author of "Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less―Here's How”, as well as “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less”Does it sound too good to be true? Think you could slow down and rest more? Well, listen as we discuss how the work of the mind can't always fit into a structured schedule, the valorization of overwork and why this balance is NOT too good to be true.Episode Quotes:How we got to a place of forgoing rest:With creative work, unlike, being in the factory or in the field. At the end of the day, we don't have a bucket of widgets or a certain field that's been plowed. And so as a result, the amount of time that we spend working becomes a proxy for how well we are working. And then there are more recent cultural examples that have reinforced this idea, within the tech industry and finance. They have helped undermine the idea that success is a story of steady growth from the mailroom to the corner office. It's now something that happens super quickly in a few years, where you work titanically long hours in between economic slumps and you make your fortune before either you burn out or the next downturn happens.Work as identity:In all of these professions, how you work is an expression, not just of social identity, but of personal identity. And it is really easy to think that the more you work the more committed you seem to your colleagues, the more committed you feel yourself.Who responds well building their own schedule: The people who do well by which I mean, people who both perform well with their jobs and also don't burn out at them after 10 years, tend to be people who are really protective of their free time. They're good about leaving work behind on nights and weekends. They take vacations, they have hobbies, they've got other things in their life than work that keeps them from obsessing about it when they're off the clock. Show Links:Guest Profile:Alex Soojung-Kim Pang on LinkedinAlex Soojung-Kim Pang on TwitterProfessional Profile at Stanford UniversityAlex Soojung-Kim Pang on TEDxYouth@MontereyStrategy + Rest WebsiteHis work:Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less—Here's HowRest: Why You Get More Done When You Work LessThe Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today we’re talking philosophy. And we know you may be thinking, somebody creating an app that entertains people or automates some routine office work can’t be compared to the great philosophers or great artists. But there’s more of an overlap than you may think. Brad Feld is a co-founder of the Foundry Group, Mobius VC, and Techstars, the famous accelerator. He is also known as the author of a bunch of books, including Venture Deals, Startup Communities, and the most recent, The Entrepreneur's Weekly Nietzsche: A Book For Disruptors.In this episode we’ll hear all about Brad’s early startup life, “authenticity and vulnerability,” his thoughts on certain entrepreneurship cliches, and mental health in the space.Episode Quotes:How Brad and his co-author got the idea for their latest book:There's so much depth in Nietzsche. And when you start to unwind pieces of it and think about them in whatever the context is, an awful lot of the things, the quotes, stimulate thinking about different aspects of entrepreneurship.And that was really what captured both of us. It's not that, you say, okay, well, Nietzsche's philosophy applies to entrepreneurship and therefore you should do these things. That's not it at all. It's almost the inverse of it. It's - here's a very provocative quote of his. Think about it, ponder it, play around with it. Apply it to your own experience. And there were so many of those that resonated against the backdrop of all the different things that happen in entrepreneurship.Mental health and entrepreneurship:The stigma associated with mental health is incredibly toxic. It is a huge burden on many leaders and significantly inhibits many people's ability to accomplish things and have really successful lives. It's not the mental health challenge, it's the stigma associated with it. Because the mental health challenge is a challenge. Diabetes is a health challenge. You break your arm, you break your arm. If you have bipolar disorder or you have borderline personality disorder, or you have obsessive compulsive disorder, you have chronic anxiety, these are things that you can work on. But if you're in a place where you're afraid to even acknowledge it. Because leaders don't acknowledge those things, leaders don't do that kind of work. It's not my problem, it's your problem. I think most people that think about it for more than a couple of minutes, know many very powerful people that have extraordinary mental health issues.Importance of sleep and self care:There's nothing wrong with working one hundred hours a week. If you work many hours, whatever that many hours is if you are not, then taking care of yourself in the hours you are not working (which by the way includes sleep) but also include what you put into your body, how you spend your time with other people, how you spend your time by yourself. It's not healthily sustainable over a long period of time. Show Links:Guest Profile:Brad Feld on LinkedinBrad Feld on TwitterFoundry Group WebsiteBrad Feld on TEDxBoulderHis work:The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for DisruptorsThe Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial EcosystemStartup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day JobStartup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of DirectorsStartup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your CityVenture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture CapitalistDo More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When asked about what superpower they could have if possible, people often respond with mind reading. As humans, many of us are constantly thinking about what other people are thinking about us. Does their brain work the same way as mine? What's going on in their inner world? Well, what if I told you there is actually no inner world of thought?That is the basis of Nick Chater’s work. We all like to think we have a hidden inner life. Psychologists and psychiatrists have struggled to discover what lies below our mental surface. And Nick wants to flip that idea on its head.Nick Chater is author of The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind, as well as a Professor of Behavioral Science at Warwick Business School.Greg and Nick tackle a number of theories of the inner brain, including maintaining consistencies between the external and internal worlds, parallel vs serial processing, taking a break to refresh in creative pursuits, and sleeping on a big decision.Episode Quotes:Maintaining consistencies:The external world is consistent. And the illusion we have is, well, the inner world, it's a world after all, it must be consistent too. It's not. So then the intuition we have is that any inconsistencies I come up with must be some kind of reading error. I'm looking in my mind, I'm making a few mistakes. And that, of course, that's the way psychologists have normally seen it.Life as improv:I have some guidelines. I have some expectations about how I'm gonna behave and how I'm gonna feel, but I don't really know. And going back to the point that we're improvisers, it's kind of impossible to know cause I'm inventing it now. So I hadn't made it up before. And so to know what I was going to do would be to sort of do all the thinking of one's entire life and do it upfront.On the myth of productive multitasking:If you're trying to pay close attention to a particular process or a particular way things are done. And that may be, in some cases, really important, but if you're doing that, you're going to miss stuff.And if you're trying not to miss other stuff, that might be unexpected, you're going to miss some of the meticulous stuff. There's just an inevitable trade off. You can't do both perfectly. And that's fine. What's miraculous about the human mind is it's so unbelievably good at coping with the complex world, even with these limitations.Show Links:Guest Profile:Nick Chater on LinkedinNick Chater on TwitterFaculty Profile at Warwick Business SchoolProfessional Profile at The British AcademyNick Chater on Talk at GoogleHis work:Nick Chater on Google ScholarThe Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Open any newspaper or website, and there are tons of people decrying the end of this or the decline of that. And even with the pandemic just now falling into our recent rearview mirror, it's actually hard to think of a better time for humanity. So why does Gregg Easterbrook think this is such a great time to be alive?Gregg is a prolific journalist and author who has written a number of books. Including It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons For Optimism In An Age Of Fear, Sonic Boom: Globalization At Mach Speed, and the most recent, The Blue Age. You might also remember his ESPN column, the Tuesday Morning Quarterback.We dive into the chaos of the 2016 election, the “golden age of journalism,” claiming membership in the victimhood club and football's place in American culture. Episode Quotes:Isn't some negativity just human nature? Or a part of aging?:Plato was 2,600 years ago. And Plato wrote that the world was "sweetly ordered in his youth, but now it was going to hell in a handbasket. " I can't remember the Greek word for handbasket, but that was his view a long time ago. And, of course by every objective measure, everyone throughout the world lives better than Plato did. Yet he thought things were headed downhill. So some of it is aging.Why is the news so negative:I've written for the Atlantic monthly for 40 years now. I think it's the best general interest publication ever from anybody. It has become so alarmist, the issue almost shakes in your hand. Everything's about how horrible everything is. And the reason is, that's what the customer wants. You give the reader what he wants. The Atlantic, the New York Times, the New Yorker have stabilized their financial situations very nicely by going all negative all the time. That's what people are willing to buy. And I guess if it's a free market, if that's what people want to buy, I'm not going to stop them.Why are we nostalgic for coal mines and farm labor:Oh boy, those were the good old days. Everybody would nod their heads as if there was some kind of wise command. And the Chinese had taken away this wonderful ability to work in a hot, dangerous steel mill, and to die young when something fell on you. Oh, when the Chinese took that away from us. Its abundance denial. People have torn emotions about all the privileges they enjoy. And rather than saying, yeah I'm living a great life and I want to do things that will help this great life be extended to other people all around the world. No, and they go in for abundance denial and they romanticize coal mines. Farm labor is backbreaking. If you've ever done farm labor, even for one harvest season, you know how hard it is. That stuff should be done by machines, not people. Show Links:Guest Profile:Gregg Easterbrook’s WebsiteGregg Easterbrook on TwitterGregg Easterbrook on LinkedinSpeaker Profile on Leading Authorities InternationalHis work:Tuesday Morning QuarterbackThe Blue Age: How the US Navy Created Global Prosperity--And Why We're in Danger of Losing ItIt's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of FearThe King of Sports: Football's Impact on AmericaThe Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sending economic assistance from western, developed countries to poorer, developing countries has always been a virtuous and noble pursuit. But the ethics behind foreign aid can get messy. Bill Easterly has built an entire career analyzing the pros and cons within the field of development economics. He is a professor of economics at NYU, and also the co-director of their Development Research Institute.Bill has written a number of books on the topic as well, including The Tyranny Of Experts, The Forgotten Rights Of The Poor, and The White Man's Burden.Greg and Bill dive into the nuances of development in this episode, including using GDP to measure development objectively, development economics as its own discipline, and facing the colonial roots of the development field and growing from that history.Episode Quotes:Generalized trust vs. trust within a group:Trust within the ethnic group is better than no trust at all. But not as good as generalized trust. At least having trust within the ethnic group makes possible a lot of transactions within the ethnic group.And that at least allows you to build trading networks and investment networks within the ethnic group, which is certainly better than nothing. But it still does prevent you from expanding your network to the whole population and choosing perfect strangers as partners, which is what becomes more possible when you have more generalized trust.Is this work for the developers or “rules” or those who receive the aid:The rulers are often gonna be attached to some kind of prestige measure that shows how wonderful they are as rulers.They will like the high GDP per capita numbers. They will like the prestige projects of big dams and giant interstate roads that are financed by donors that they can open with elaborate ribbon cutting ceremonies, but are often not really consulting the citizens on whether that's really what they wanted or not.Idealism vs. Cynicism with your development economists:I think it's more a function of the fact that we start off with a set of things that we think are sort of easy answers to development, easy answers to poverty. And then over time we realized the answers are not so easy, that's the way in which we become wise.Show Links:Guest Profile:William Easterly WebsiteWilliam Easterly on TwitterWilliam Easterly on LinkedinFaculty Profile at New York UniversityHis work:William Easterly on Google ScholarThe Economics of International Development: Foreign Aid versus Freedom for the World's PoorThe Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little GoodThe Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The intersection of public health and data science can be controversial. How much do we value human life? Can we ever put a dollar sign on it, and what factors into that sum? These questions and more are tackled in today's episode with Howard Friedman.Howard Friedman teaches at Columbia University at the School of Public Health and The Data Science Institute. He is also the author of Ultimate Price: The Value We Place On Life.Listen as he and Greg discuss the morality of cases like the 9/11 compensation fund, OJ Simpson,5 and the tradeoffs that lead to these difficult decisions.Episode Quotes:What a monetary value on human life says:Some human beings, as it turns out, are valued at nothing. Whereas others, many, many millions. And you'll see this in the corporate world as well. The incredible range of compensation, depending on who was the victim. How do we get these numbers, value of a life:They're trying to simulate a world in which that person is no longer there and trying to estimate what is the economic impact on the family. And that's why they look at things like income. They do look at this question of dependents and you know, how many people were relying on that person's income.And then you start seeing the dotted-line calculation between that and how people start to think about life insurance. And the reason why is when you look into your life insurance, you start thinking about what is my value, what is my replacement value? If I’m not around, how much money will my family need in order to have the lifestyle they expect or simply to replace the income I'm earning.How the media adds value to certain lives:This is very much the case. And this is the America that we have to understand we live in. And the implications of it really are that some lives are more valued and more protected than others. They go hand in hand. That level of interest that comes from the media and the public, as a result, drives the allocation of resources. So these are true examples and measures.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public HealthHoward Friedman’s WebsiteHoward Friedman on LinkedinHoward Friedman on TwitterHoward Friedman on Talks at GoogleHis Work:Howard Friedman on Google ScholarUltimate Price: The Value We Place on LifeThe Measure of a Nation: How to Regain America's Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

One of the key insights of behavioral economics is that people don't do what they know they should do;. That information by itself is just not enough to move the needle. But Kristen Berman is trying to change that, by doing what Greg calls “Pracademics” - putting academics into practice.Kristen Berman is the co-founder of Irrational Labs with Dan Ariely, the co-founder of the Common Sense Labs for Financial Wellness at Duke University, and was also involved in founding Google's Behavioral Science Lab.Today, she and Greg talk about whether the move to relying on data is a technological or cultural shift, the importance of mental models managing friction, and visible norm-setting.Episode Quotes:Information by itself is just not enough to move the needle / intention action gap:So I tell you about compound interest, that does not mean you'll actually invest money. Now, this does not mean we're stupid. We can learn. So if I tell you about compound interest, you will learn about compound interest. The gap here is the doing, right? The gap here is not learning. And so that's really where behavioral science comes in. It says there's an intention action gap. We may know something about diet and exercise or investing money, but actually doing it is a problem. Delayed reinforcement isn't effective:The worst offenders of this are employee wellness plans. Employee wellness plans basically ask you to do something, and then at the end of the quarter, they may give you a $50 gift card to Starbucks. And lo and behold employee wellness plans have failed, with lots of money put towards them, to actually change any health outcomes. Some of that is self-selection where people who are already healthy are self-selecting into the employee wellness plan. And some of this is just bad design where I do something today, and in a year, in a quarter, my employer will tell me thank you.Using social proof to change behaviors:If I could do a crazy experiment, I would probably pay people to exercise outside in a community that has a higher likelihood of obesity. Visible norm setting is very important. If you're in a community that you don't see something happening, either because it's invisible like savings or because people just aren't doing it like working out, we really have an opportunity to figure out how we can get that social norm to be more visible. So paying people to run outside, you can imagine you see somebody running outside, you're like okay maybe I'll try it. Show Links:Guest Profile:Kristen Berman’s WebsiteKristen Berman on TwitterKristen Berman on LinkedinProfessional Profile at Irrational LabsKristen Berman on TEDxBerlinCompany Podcast: The Science of ChangeHer Work:Articles on Medium.comHacking Human Nature for Good: A Practical Guide to Changing Human BehaviorNo Small Talk Cards Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.