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  • 612. Cracking the Code of Effective Meetings with Rebecca Hinds
    2026/01/15
    When are meetings the best way to coordinate and make decisions and when do they make things worse?? How do you use the two-pizza rule to hold effective meetings and what happens when you start including too many people in a process?Rebecca Hinds is the head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done, a book outlining the way to address one of the ways productivity is lost in organizations.Greg and Rebecca discuss the importance of intentionality in information flow within organizations, the common pitfalls of meeting culture, and practical strategies to improve meeting efficiency. Rebecca emphasizes the use of data and AI to measure meeting effectiveness and reduce 'meeting bloat', while sharing insights from her experiences at Asana and her studies on organizational collaboration. They also explore the evolving collaboration between HR and IT departments in the era of AI and the necessity for both tech and HR professionals to exchange and enhance their skills.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How ‘visibIlity bias’ fuels endless meetings[07:28] We know that humans have a bias to associate presence with productivity. And so what I find to be often the case is people start to associate more meetings with more importance and status within the organization, and so when you're stuck and not sure how to make progress or you're worried about productivity, a meeting becomes a knee-jerk solution to solve that. You might not accomplish anything meaningful in the meeting, but at least you've sat together and shown that some progress or perceived progress was made. And so I think at the core of this, is this pervasive productivity theater that goes on in organizations, this visibility bias where we associate meetings with importance within the organization. There are a host of other problems, but at the core, I think that's the fundamental problem that we're dealing with.The pressure ingrained in our calendars and meeting cultures[09:37]  As soon as someone extends a meeting invite. They're establishing this social contract where you feel like you have to reciprocate. Even when we think about terminology around, it's a meeting invite. You either accept or you reject. You start to feel like you're not just rejecting the meeting, but rejecting the person. And it's taken very personally. AI tools can help reveal participation imbalances in meetings[22:59] If you're seeing that leaders are consuming 70%, 80% of the airtime, that's an opportunity to course correct and improve your meeting effectiveness. And often when it comes from an AI tool or an objective analytic tool, it's much more effectively received than a less powerful person trying to voice that takeaway in the meeting and try to veer influence that way.Are we socially conditioned to hate meetings?[28:48] Humans have what I call a meeting suck reflex, right? For a multitude of different reasons.When we hear the word "meeting," we have this negative, visceral reaction. So much so that you know when you're asked to evaluate your meetings in public versus private, you tend to rate your meetings much more negatively when you're around people in public as compared to privately, because we think that we should hate meetings. We've been socially conditioned to feel such, and there's few things that bond coworkers more quickly than bonding over a bad meeting that could have been a five-line email, right? And so to avoid that, assessing whether a meeting was worth your time helps to level set. Everyone has an intuitive sense of whether a meeting was worth their time. Is there something more productive they could have done with that time or not? And so that tends to be a good gauge for you as an organizer.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Asana, Inc.Parkinson's lawSteven RogelbergLaw of TrivialityAmazon’s Two-Pizza TeamsROTIRobert I. SuttonGuest Profile:RebeccaHinds.comThe Work AI Institute at GleanLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on X for GleanGuest Work:Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done 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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    55 分
  • 611. Finding a Strategy for Life, Business, and Everything in Between feat. Geoffrey A. Moore
    2026/01/12
    Whether in markets, organizations, or the universe itself, today’s guest is a master at navigating complex systems where existing models have stopped working, and new ones must emerge.Geoffrey Moore is a consultant in the high-tech sector and a prolific author, with titles including Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets, and, most recently, The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality. Geoffrey and Greg discuss his transition from Renaissance English scholar to high-tech strategist, why narrative is critical in business, the challenges of disrupting industries, and what “The Infinite Staircase” reveals about life’s meaning and human purpose. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The importance of sales and the failure of business schools09:32: It's absolutely a travesty that business schools don't teach sales. It's, it's crazy. And there are a bunch of people that have made that argument before. But the reason why academics didn't like sales is it felt too much like Glengarry Glen Ross: sleazy, you know, closers, "coffee is for closers," and all the kind of stuff the academics hate. But the point about it is that, particularly in contemporary B2B sales, that's not what a salesperson does anymore. You have to help the customer find the use cases and the ROI that validates why they're gonna buy this thing, which means you have to be intellectually curious about their business and not just yammer about your own business. And so it is, it's actually a really interesting profession if you approach it, you know, in a kind of more in-service-to-the-customer approach, as opposed to, "I'm going to make my commissions and go to the club," although that's also a big motive among salespeople.Venture capital is literary criticism06:10: Venture is a form of literary criticism prior to investment. And then, as you invest, you start to figure out, now how can I verify? How can I validate? And eventually, the analytics and the numbers become very important. But not at the beginning. At the beginning, it is really about the story.Venture Capital vs. Corporate metrics38:11: Venture capitalists do not fund performance. They fund power, but everything in a venture model is about becoming more powerful, not becoming more performant. When we exit, then they'll become performant, but not now, and that idea is still very hard to land in a large corporation.The correct sequence for success33:51: The correct sequence has to be customers first, employees second, investors third. Any other sequence doesn't work, not for sustainable success.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Regis McKennaAlfred D. Chandler Jr.Edmund SpenserGreat chain of beingClayton ChristensenSatya NadellaNorthrop FryePhilip SidneyGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInProfile on XGuest Work:The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and MortalityCrossing the ChasmInside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth MarketsDealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their EvolutionLiving on the Fault Line, Revised Edition: Managing for Shareholder Value in Any EconomyThe Gorilla Game: An Investor's Guide to Picking Winners in High TechnologyZone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption 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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    55 分
  • 610. Shaping Spaces: Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning with Witold Rybczynski
    2026/01/08

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

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

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

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*


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    51 分
  • 609. The Evolution of Science: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Understanding feat. Peter Dear
    2026/01/05
    What was the role of experimentation in early science? How did past scientific paradigms continue to influence current scientific discourse? What is the utility of understanding the history of science for modern scientists?Peter Dear is a professor emeritus of history at Cornell University, and the author of several books, including The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science and Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution.Greg and Peter discuss the evolution of science from natural philosophy, addressing how scientific progress is not simply a linear journey towards greater knowledge. Peter talks about the transformative periods like the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, and the debate over the definition and significance of terms like 'scientific revolution.' They also explore how today's scientific practices are deeply rooted in 19th-century developments. Their conversation also covers the historical context behind Newton's and Darwin's work among other famous scientists throughout history.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The two “registers” of science09:50: Science nowadays, and through the course of the last, well, developing over the last two centuries, really in the 19th and 20th centuries, science is still talked of as if it were a naturaln actual philosophy, even if that term is not used very much anymore. Science is sometimes regarded as something that is about understanding the universe, understanding the natural world as if it is an intellectual enterprise and just an intellectual enterprise. And at the same time, it is also regarded as something that is practically useful, practically valuable, and these two different registers for talking about science, I think, sort of ride alongside one another and switch back and forth depending on how it is that people want to represent any particular kind of knowledge.The birth of experimentation22:23: One of the things about experimentation, is that it was a matter of developing practices, procedures for generating knowledge claims about nature that were different from the ways in which experience had been used, particularly in Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian context, to talk about the behavior of nature. Experiments are a particular way of understanding what experience is useful for in making sense of the world.The twin dimensions of science40:30: I think all scientists have always relied on the twin dimensions of science, the fact that science can be regarded as an actual philosophy when it's talking about the way things are, and the fact that science can be regarded as, or talked about in terms of, instrumentality. When you are focusing on the capabilities, the practical capabilities, the particular ideas and procedures enable you to do, and at different times and places, scientists will sometimes play up the natural philosophy side of things and at other times play up the instrumentality side of things, depending on what it is interested in talking about at the time. But I think everyone, all scientists, regard those as both essential elements, so to speak, of what scientific inquiry is all about.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Scientific RevolutionFrancis BaconParacelsusAristotleNicolaus CopernicusGalileo GalileiIsaac NewtonRené DescartesRobert BoyleTaxonomyCharles LyellAlbert EinsteinThomas KuhnGuest Profile:Academia PapersProfessors Emeriti List at Cornell UniversityGuest Work:Amazon Author PageThe World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern ScienceRevolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge in Transition, 1500-1700Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific RevolutionThe Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the WorldMersenne and the Learning of the SchoolsResearchGate 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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    45 分
  • 608. Why Imperfection Is Core to Being Human feat. Laurence D. Hurst
    2025/12/22

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

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

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

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

    Episode Quotes:

    Why humans have such bad genetic luck

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

    Medicine is anti-evolution

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

    Childbirth is more dangerous than the most dangerous job in America

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

    Show Links:

    Recommended Resources:

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

    Guest Profile:

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

    Guest Work:

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

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    56 分
  • 607. Navigating Gender Equality and Patriarchy in the Modern Workplace feat. Cordelia Fine
    2025/12/18
    How can organizations make more equitable changes to their internal norms and structures, to promote fairness over merely seeking profit? What are alternate ways to tackle the difference in agreeableness that underpins many professional gaps between men and women?Cordelia Fine is a professor in the history and philosophy of science department at University of Melbourne, as well as the author of several books, including Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, and Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society.Greg and Cordelia discuss the complexities surrounding gender equality, including the contested reasons for wage differences and occupational gaps between men and women. Cordelia critiques the traditional and evolving gender norms, explains her stance on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) strategies, and advocates for more nuanced, context-aware approaches to addressing gender disparities. She challenges oversimplified evolutionary psychology narratives and underscores the importance of understanding the cultural evolution of gender roles. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Why valuing women isn’t enough52:52: You can say pretty words about valuing the feminine. Oh, you know, women are great. They’re so wonderful. They’re so empathic and collaborative and participative, and they’re really good at building people. But you can’t just say that—you have to actually change your organizations so that you literally put your money where your mouth is, so that is what is actually being rewarded.Redefining patriarchy10:37: There’s a sort of assumption that when we talk about patriarchy, we’re just talking about the harm to girls and women. Its long been recognized, I think, in feminism that often men and certain groups of men do also face harms in that kind of system that’s keeping some men on top.Why our ideas about sex differences often get it wrong20:58: I do think we have to be careful about looking at our—first of all, making assumptions about what sex differences actually are—because they’re often, you know, a huge amount of overlap, contingent depending on the context and the cues. But also, to then project that back into our ancestral past without taking a kind of wider look at societies beyond the weird populations—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Cecilia L. RidgewayCailin O'ConnorThe Making of the Modern FamilyDavid BenatarLeonora RisseHILDA SurveyNancy FraserGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of MelbourneCordelia-Fine.comWikipedia ProfileLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on InstagramGuest Work:Amazon Author PagePatriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at WorkDelusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create DifferenceTestosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and SocietyA Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and DeceivesGoogle Scholar PageRelated Unsiloed Episode:Claudia Goldin - Understanding the Gender Wage Gap 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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    55 分
  • 606. The Great Myth of The New Deal & Its Lingering Economic Impact feat. George Selgin
    2025/12/15
    Despite its long-held place in history as the lynchpin of America’s recovery from the Great Depression, what if the New Deal did more to hinder the country’s recovery than help it? George Selgin is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia and former director of the Center on Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute. His books like, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery and Floored!: How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession, examine macroeconomic theories through the lens of key moments in monetary history. In this conversation, Greg and George dive deep into the inner workings of The Great Depression, covering the biggest misconceptions surrounding the New Deal's role in ending the crisis, why many of President Roosevelt’s policies were counterproductive, and how pre-existing, international factors impacted the U.S.’s recovery.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The myth of New Deal wisdom47:17: The thing that people have to remember when they are inclined to think, oh, you know, we need to look back at the New Deal and all the wonderful things they did to end the Depression. They knew so much, you know, they had all these experiments. No. We know a lot more about how to fight recessions and depressions than they did because we know that fiscal and monetary stimulus are our best hopes. And those were two things that the Roosevelt administration did not put much, if any, emphasis upon. And that, of course, just hearing that should give a lot of people second thoughts about how helpful the New Deal was. They did a lot of stuff, but they did not do the main thing we rely on now. The main things, they did not promote monetary stimulus, and they did not promote fiscal stimulus except somewhat, reluctantly.Keynes vs. the New Dealers59:39: I certainly believe that if Keynes’s advice had been followed instead of what the New Dealers did, that the Depression would have ended much sooner than it did in the United States. The downside of "bold experimentation"35:56: Roosevelt made two statements that were probably the least, the two main unambiguous things he said, one of which turned out to be a very accurate description of what his administration would end up doing. And the other one of which would be a very inaccurate statement. This is all in the course of the campaign. The accurate statement was when he said that his administration planned to go about addressing the Depression through bold experimentation. And that is absolutely true. There was a lot of trial and error. And the problem is, as I say in my book, you know, the problem with bold experiments is they often fail.On war clouds and gold flows45:41: What keeps gold flowing in for the rest of the decade, and more and more of it as time goes on, is Hitler's rise to power and the, the gatherings war clouds that eventually have many, many Europeans thinking, I do not think this is place, this place is safe for our gold. And as long as they could, taking it and shipping it to the United States, where now after the suspension of the gold standard and the devaluation, the treasury alone is buying all the gold.Show Links:Recommended Resources:John Maynard KeynesFranklin D. RooseveltHerbert Hoover Henry Ford Alexander J. Field James Bradford DeLong Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of Georgia Professional Profile at the Cato InstituteProfessional Profile on LinkedInProfile on XGuest Work:False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 Floored!: How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great RecessionMoney: Free and Unfree Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing EconomyThe Menace of Fiscal QE 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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    55 分
  • 605. The Intersection of Children’s Rights and Our Legal System’s Flaws feat. Adam Benforado
    2025/12/11
    How does our legal system treat children today, and how do policies affecting their parents and communities cascade down to shape their lives? What forces create a pipeline to criminalization, and what would it take to break that cycle for the children who come next?Adam Benforado is a professor of law at Drexel University and the author of two books titled A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All and Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice.Greg and Adam discuss the deep-seated flaws in the US legal system, including cognitive biases and heuristics affecting legal professionals, and how historical assumptions about human behavior shape legal decision-making. Their discussion explores why the legal system is resistant to integrating behavioral sciences, and the impact of punitive criminal justice policies on society, especially children. Adam highlights the juxtaposition between overparented, affluent children and under-resourced, marginalized youth, advocating for evidence-based, preventative approaches to social issues rather than reactionary legal interventions. There are broader societal implications of legal practices and Adam stresses the importance of prioritizing children's rights now for a more equitable future.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:A different way to look at crime16:49: I think there's a really different way to look at crime, which is that everything is situational. It's a result of genes and environment. And of course society can play around with those things and make crime go up or go down. And so, you know, I think in this book, one of my hopes with doing it was honestly to provoke people to try to think about things that they think they know so well. And crime is one thing we think we know so well in our lives, but I think here we have to understand different countries, different people over time have taken very different approaches. And it is not that somehow, you know, people living in these cultures are fundamentally different. I've been to these other countries, and I would say humans actually are surprisingly similar. And what's different though in our country is how we approach it.Judges are human too07:30: I think the social science that we've accumulated literally over decades now tells a very different story, which is that judges are human beings, like all the rest of us. And so we need to be just as aware of potential biases that are coming into their judgments and decision making as everyone else.Where you’re born shapes who you become43:12: We promise economic, socioeconomic mobility. But if you look at it, right, if you’re in that bottom quintile of family income versus that top quintile of family income, in many ways your trajectory, no matter how inherently smart you are at third grade, a lot of that’s already tracked out simply based on all of that investment that wealthy parents are gonna make over the course of that young person’s childhood. And that’s both positive enrichment, but it’s also when kids, a lot of kids get into trouble. Something doesn’t work, they’re struggling in math, or they hit a kid in school, or they get sick. What happens, right? If you have wealthy parents, those problems get addressed and you get many second chances. If you’re a poor kid, you don’t.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jon D. HansonConvention on the Rights of the ChildEmily OsterTrial by OrdealGuest Profile:AdamBenforado.comFaculty Profile at Drexel UniversityProfile on LinkedInSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Amazon Author PageA Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us AllUnfair: The New Science of Criminal InjusticeGoogle 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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    53 分