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  • 696. Hormones, Homeostasis, and the Hidden Language of the Endocrine System with Saira Hameed

    696. Hormones, Homeostasis, and the Hidden Language of the Endocrine System with Saira Hameed
    2026/11/02
    Our body contains a complex communication network, with hormones providing the signals. How do these signals regulate our energy, our appetites, our growth, and our moods? And does our environment shape the nature and intensity of these signals?Saira Hameed is a consulting endocrinologist who is also a clinician and lecturer at Imperial College London. She is also the author of the new book, Signals: The Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones - A Scientific Guide to Understanding How the Body Talks to Itself.Greg and Saira discuss how hormones regulate moment-to-moment homeostasis through feedback loops, including issues of hormone resistance such as insulin resistance driving type 2 diabetes and related conditions. Saira argues that hormones are misunderstood in public discourse and that endocrinology remains young and still mysterious, stressing the importance of thorough history-taking because powerful therapies like TRT, HRT, and steroids are nuanced, complicated, and require watertight diagnosis. They also discuss cortisol regulation, Addison’s disease and Cushing’s syndrome, the hypothalamus as “mission control,” and the historical path to endocrine discoveries. The conversation touches on GLP-1 drugs, leptin resistance in obesity, environmental contributors including ultra-processed food and endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the value of clinician–researcher cross-talk, and limits of continuous monitoring beyond glucose sensors.Episode Guide:00:00 Meet Saira Hameed02:29 Why Hormones Matter04:15 Homeostasis Feedback Loops05:41 Insulin Resistance Explained08:01 Modern Metabolic Epidemic10:49 Doctor As Listener13:23 Hormones And Aging Myths16:02 Cortisol Stress Signals21:02 Master Gland Mission Control22:47 Endocrinology Origin Stories26:11 Stop Blaming Willpower27:30 GLP Drugs Teaser27:39 How GLP-1 Signals Fullness28:20 From Diabetes Drug to Weight Loss29:33 Leptin Resistance Explained31:56 Breaking the Hunger Cycle33:41 Endocrine Disruptors Everywhere35:58 Practical Ways to Reduce Exposure37:07 Regulating Hormone Mimics38:23 Clinicians and Researchers Connect40:09 Learning Bedside Manner41:48 Doctor vs Customer Pressure43:41 Limits of Medicine and Burnout44:59 Why She Wrote the Cookbook47:13 Food as Metabolic Medicine48:34 Light, Circadian, and Vitamin D49:01 Endocrinology Research Frontiers50:21 No Such Thing as Boring Patients51:51 Wearables Data and Hormone Testing54:15 Medical History and Future Humility56:05 Final Thoughts and Farewell*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:GLP-1 and the body's natural hunger signals27:39: So GLP-1, world famous now, is actually a naturally occurring hormone. It's produced by the gut, and your gut will release this hormone when you eat something. So you eat something, your gut releases GLP-1, this signal does a number of things, but one of the most interesting things it does is this GLP, this natural GLP, travels from your gut and the bloodstream up to the brain, to the hypothalamus that we talked about, the master gland, and, it says, "You're full. You're done. You don't need to eat anything more." That then elicits a behavior. You're like, "Okay, I'm good." Put your knife and fork down, leave the table, move on with your day. That's occurring every time we eat. So. the pharma industry obviously saw an opportunity, right? Because they understood that this hormone is very potent. Why hormones are constantly working to keep your body in balance04:44: These signals are controlling the body's homeostasis. It keeps everything in equilibrium. If this goes up, then this has to go down. 'Cause I'm quite a sort of visual learner, the way it would be great for your audience to picture this, you know, when you're hanging a picture at home, and you want to know if the picture's straight? And to your eye, it looks straight, but then you put a little spirit level on top, and the bubble is not in the middle, and then you do one millimeter, another half millimeter, and then suddenly the bubble's in the middle, and it's all straight, and you've reached the picture's kind of reached equilibrium. It's in balance. And that's what these hormones are doing all the time, and the precision is so sophisticated. It's absolutely exquisite. And this is happening really on a moment-to-moment basis. Often we think of hormones as controlling life's major milestones, puberty, pregnancy, menopause, and so on. But actually, you know, moment to moment, they're controlling pretty much everything too.What food can do that medicine sometimes can't47:25: When it comes to food and eating, food is a very, very powerful medicine when used in the right way. Real food, food our ancestors would have considered to be food, right? And the changes in somebody's metabolic health that I've seen when they change the way they eat, I can't prescribe anything that powerful.Show Links:Recommended Resources:HormoneDiabetesCortisolAddison's DiseaseThomas AddisonCushing's ...
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    55 分
  • 695. Faith, Reason, and Habit: Living Philosophically with Clare Carlisle

    695. Faith, Reason, and Habit: Living Philosophically with Clare Carlisle
    2026/10/28
    Clare Carlisle is a professor of philosophy at King’s College London and the author of several books. Her latest works are titled, Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy and The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double LifeGreg and Clare discuss what it means to be religious today through a Spinozist (Baruch Spinoza) lens, contrasting medieval religion as a virtue (behavior and “due honor to God”) with modern religion as ‘belief and belonging’ after the Reformation. Clare explains how Spinoza rethinks virtue as “power and flourishing” and God as “God or nature,” why he was seen as an atheist (rejecting anthropomorphic God, divine goodness, biblical authority, and institutional religion), and how The Ethics links metaphysics to human joy and emotional life. They also discuss doing philosophy beyond writing, philosophy’s relation to literature and life-writing, why biographies matter, “Devotion’s” shift from religion to art and marriage, “Habit’s” double character and its relation to practice, “to kalon” blending ethics and aesthetics, contrasts with Kierkegaard on faith and institutional critique, differences between philosophy and theology, universities and existential questions, and Spinoza separating science from other concerns.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Devotion is more than a feeling26:22: So devotion is, it’s to do with love, commitment, and desire. But it's very much a sort of lived phenomenon. It wouldn't make sense to say that you're devoted to something if you're just not really spending any time pursuing that thing. So whereas when we use the word love, love can mean so many different things. It might just refer to a sort of feeling we have or an emotion that we have. I think in the case of devotion, there's got to be something inherently practical and expressive about it, and it's to do with giving your time to something that you value.Philosophy has more than one path16:07: Philosophy means the love of wisdom or the pursuit of wisdom, and so there are many different ways of going about that. And writing is just one of them.Why Spinoza resisted labels11:08: Putting Spinozism into any kind of sort of ready-made box, whether that's the box marked atheism or the box marked Christianity or Judaism, doesn't really do justice, not just to the fact that Spinozism is very sort of distinctive and in a way it doesn't fit into any box, but also, more importantly, I think Spinoza wrote philosophy in a way where he was actively resisting that kind of box-categorizing, labeling way of thinking about human life in general, and particularly about religion.Show Links:Recommended Resources:George EliotSøren KierkegaardBaruch SpinozaThomas AquinasSteven NadlerMiddlemarchHabitAristotleEthosHexisImmanuel KantNeuroplasticityMarcel ProustKalonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at King’s College LondonProfile on WikipediaGuest Work:Amazon Author PageTranscendence for Beginners: Life Writing and PhilosophyMarriage QuestionSpinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the EthicsKierkegaardian Essays: A Festschrift in Honour of George PattisonPhilosopher of the HeartSpinoza's EthicsOn Habit (Thinking in Action)Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and PositionsKierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling': A Reader's GuideKierkegaard: A Guide for the PerplexedIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:629. Beyond Happiness: The Deep Longing to Matter with Rebecca Goldstein413. A Rational Look at Irrationality with Steven Nadler115. Modern Philosophy and The Role of The Philosopher with Justin E. H. Smith 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
  • 694. What We Can Learn From The Luddites with Brian Merchant

    694. What We Can Learn From The Luddites with Brian Merchant
    2026/10/22
    The term “Luddite” is often used today in a pejorative way for people standing in the way of progress and averse to technology. But for the Luddites of the 19th century, pushing back against technological advancements was a matter of life and death. Tech journalist Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, unveils the history behind the first time machines came for human jobs and the lessons we can glean for today’s fight against big tech. He’s also the author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.Brian and Greg discuss the ties between Luddite displacement in the 19th century to today’s gig work, and AI-driven job cuts. Brian also describes sneaking into Shenzhen’s Foxconn City and emphasizes that technologies like the iPhone result from collective organizational effort, while “great man” narratives obscure workers’ contributions and shape how society views “tech titans.”*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:When technology takeaways worker autonomy5:12: They [Luddite] saw a future that was confined to factories, where they were made to work in factories. They hated more than anything to, "stand at their command," as some of these workers put it. These were people who worked at home, who worked with machinery as they saw fit, took breaks when they saw fit. They had autonomy, and they saw the dawning not just of a technological age, but of an age where technology was being used to reorder society in a very specific way, and that's what they were rebelling against. That and the fact that at the moment they couldn't feed their families anymore.What people get wrong about Luddites06:29: What people get wrong is that the Luddites were anti-technology, right? They were really just anti-exploitation and anti the factory system. Really, they were anti-poverty. Their struggle was against, in some cases, a technology or a set of technologies that had existed for some time.The myth of the lone innovator54:09: We have bound up progress or our notions of progress, our ideas of progress in a single person being the motor, being the hander-down of innovations, the sort of disruptor. And until we can change that, and part of my project trying to untangle some of those assumptions, and the whole, as you mentioned, the whole iPhone book is chapter by chapter trying to tell the story and give credit to all the other people who sort of were behind the innovations that wound up in the iPhone and wound up changing the way that we live through this one device. And similarly with the Luddites, I wanted to explain their point of view, why they felt crushed by these titans, why they felt like their lives were being made worse by the technologies that they were using, and give voice to that collective body.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Luddites Adam Smith “E.W. Scripps to Become an ‘AI-Powered Broadcast Journalism Company’ After Sweeping Layoffs” | The Wrap Combination Act 1799 Lord Byron“The Future Encyclopedia of Luddism” by Miriam A. CherryRichard ArkwrightGuest Profile:Professional WebsiteProfessional Profile on LinkedInGuest Work:Blood in the Machine | Substack Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    56 分
  • 693. Spiritual Journeys in the Age of AI with Meghan O’Gieblyn

    693. Spiritual Journeys in the Age of AI with Meghan O’Gieblyn
    2026/10/20
    Meghan O’Gieblyn is a writer who writes on the interface of technology and humans. Her latest books are titled Will and Attention: A Memoir and the book God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning.Greg and Meghan discuss Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis, whether technology and AI re-enchant the world, and how opaque algorithmic systems invite faith-like deference while also prompting anthropomorphism and mechanistic views of the mind. Meghan explores how metaphors in religion and AI become literalized, complicating concepts like intention and consciousness. Turning to will and willpower, she connects her Calvinist upbringing, debates over free will, and experiences with addiction and recovery, emphasizing surrender and Simone Weil’s idea of curing faults by attention rather than will. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:AI and the new disenchantment03:42: I think the whole idea of disenchantment is that we can understand the world, right? That we have like, the more we gather more information, more data, we're slowly gaining more control and more understanding. And now we find ourselves at the mercy of these systems that are, in some ways more intelligent than humans, that are better at predicting things than humans, that are outsmarting humans already in many ways. And we don't understand, even the people who are making them don't totally understand how they work. And we're at a point of information glut and overload where we almost have to defer to these opaque systems in order to understand the world. And I was curious about the idea of like, well, how is it different to, just have to accept an algorithmic output on faith as opposed to what I was told as a Christian, which is like, “The world is so complex we can't understand it, we just have to trust God and His will.”Why we see ourselves in AI06:16: “I think that we are kind of doomed for better or for worse to seeing the world through the lens of the human. And the fact that we do this with... really crude technologies that we tend to personify. And then here come these algorithms that use language, and we have never in our human history encountered something non-human beyond a spiritual being, that uses language and interacts socially with us in that way. And I just think we're not prepared evolutionarily, to engage with that kind of technology without imbuing it with personhood.When metaphors stop being metaphors10:50: In the earlier days of AI research, it was really common to see words like thinking or learning in quotation marks, just to signal that these were metaphors, and at some point, we lost those quotation marks, and in fact, now a lot of people will say, "Well, they are thinking. They are learning. Like, what's the difference?" And so yeah, I think we're never going to get away from metaphors. Like, our whole language is built on metaphor, but, do think there's a way in which, it does make a difference whether you're attentive to when you're using a metaphor and when you've, it's become a dead metaphor and you've forgotten it. Show Links:Recommended Resources:The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of CapitalismTranshumanismRay KurzweilSimone WeilAkrasiaReformed ChristianityJulian JaynesIris MurdochArthur SchopenhauerSaint AugustinBill W.Amor FatiGuest Profile:Meghan O’Gieblyn’s WebsiteWikipedia PageGuest Work:Harpers ArticlesAmazon Author PageWill and Attention: A MemoirMiss MacIntosh, My DarlingGod, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for MeaningInterior States: EssaysIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:649: N. Katherine Hayles - Bacteria to AI: Technics, Nonconscious Cognition, and Meaning in LLMsChristine RosenSherry TurkleClancy Martin 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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    51 分
  • 692. Level Up: Fixing Broken Hierarchies and Organizations with Nir Halevy

    692. Level Up: Fixing Broken Hierarchies and Organizations with Nir Halevy
    2026/10/16
    Nir Halevy is a professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the author of the new book called Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them.Greg and Nir argue that hierarchy can never be eliminated from organizations because of coordination needs, division of labor, and human drives for social comparison, achievement, predictability, and safety, yet it can become self-reinforcing and abusive. Nir diagnoses “broken hierarchies” via his three interlinked symptoms—ultra-competitiveness, injustice, and instability—which damage wellbeing, retention, and performance, and can be worsened by misdesigned incentives and oblivious leaders. He proposes a treatment framework—CPR: common value, pluralism (multiple pathways and dimensions for status), and relatedness—along with structural options like co-leadership to dilute domineering “dark triad” leaders. They also discuss examples from sports, ballet, secrecy at work, and measurement signals like turnover, absenteeism, and disengagement.unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.Chapter Timestamps:00:00 Meet Nir Halevi00:44 What Is Hierarchy02:31 Tournament Theory Gladiators04:37 Why Hierarchy Persists06:51 Leadership Avoidance09:03 Pluralism In Status11:36 Is Status Zero Sum14:51 Three U Breakdown16:09 Ultra Competitive Cultures17:30 Injustice And Instability18:27 Intentional Or Accidental19:48 Changing Culture From Within21:58 Burnout And Wellbeing22:39 Work Meaning Metrics22:55 Secrecy Stress Tradeoff23:58 Leader Blind Spots24:34 Distance And Construal25:08 Power Versus Status25:57 Designing Stability28:44 Turnover And Mobility30:19 Narrative Through Promotions30:47 Status Momentum Stress31:35 Dark Triad Leaders34:00 CPR Fix Framework34:59 Common Value Examples37:05 Recognition Without Dilution38:54 Relatedness And Community40:35 Creative Retirement Belonging42:12 Organizational Checkups KPIs43:15 Measuring Early Warning Signs43:53 Final Takeaways And BookEpisode Quotes:How everyday action shapes hierarchies19:48: I would say that it's not just the responsibility of top management or the CEO or the HR leader to kind of take care of the structure of the hierarchy because there are a lot of everyday behaviors that we engage in, right? So, Greg, when you spread malicious gossip about a coworker, right, that pulls them down in the eyes of others, and maybe that creates fewer opportunities for them to collaborate. When you're writing a gratitude letter for a colleague, that actually creates a different type of culture for all of us, right? When someone makes a contribution that is not really valued by others, but you double down and emphasize their contribution, you really highlight it, you broadcast it more, then you're contributing to kind of a pluralistic hierarchy. So I think, yes, there are some org design features that are coming from the top down. On rethinking the path to leadership08:45: We can be more pluralistic about the pathways for gaining power. We don't have to assume that leadership involves politics or undermining other people or fierce competition and stabbing people in the back. There are different ways to contribute and ascend and become a leader and lead once you're in that position.Status doesn't have to be a zero-sum game11:47: A lot of people tend to think about status as a zero-sum game. We don't have to think about it as a zero-sum game, just like we don't have to think about negotiation as a zero-sum game, right? So, if you're creating a pluralistic environment where there are a lot of different dimensions, bases, pathways to status, then it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.Show Links:Recommended Resources:John Roberts podcastPaul MilgromOrganizational ArchitectureEdward LazearHierarchyBill BellamyValue PluralismThe Paths to Power podcastCharles A. O'Reilly III podcastCalSTRSCalPERSDark TriadMary BarraTeleverdeRobert D. PutnamGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford GSBLinkedIn ProfileSocial Profile on XGuest Work:Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix ThemGoogle Scholar PageResearchGate PagePromotion GameIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:404: Christina Maslach - The Evolution of Burnout365: John Roberts - The In’s and Out’s of Organizational Economics593: Nicolai Foss - The Myth of the Bossless Company114: Jeff Pfeffer - Why Good People Need to Understand the Rules of Power 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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    44 分
  • 691. The Accidental Origins of Capitalism with Trevor Jackson

    691. The Accidental Origins of Capitalism with Trevor Jackson
    2026/10/13
    Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? Believe it or not, the economic system was not inevitable in human history, and it’s not inevitably in our future either. Trevor Jackson is a professor of history and political economy at UC Berkeley. He's the author of The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, a book that traces the origins and evolution of capitalism, as well as Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830.Trevor and Greg discuss how capitalism emerged not by design but through accidental solutions to immediate problems, why historians and economists see the past so differently, and how financial crises went from being treated as crimes to being treated as natural disasters. They also explore the purpose of history in the modern world and why academic historians have lost faith in their own relevance even as public demand for historical knowledge has never been higher.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What makes capitalism distinctive?27:51: To me, what is distinctive about capitalism is not that we have commodity markets, because indeed we can find those in ancient Rome, we can find those in the Soviet Union, if we try hard enough, but rather markets in the factors of production: land, labor, and capital. So if I go to ancient Rome, can I found an AI startup? No. There is no land market for me to buy land. It is distributed by the state. There might be some labor markets in skilled labor, but most people are in unfree labor conditions. Are there banks? No. If I go to the Soviet Union, can I found an AI startup? No. There are no banks. There are no labor markets. There is no land market. Well, twentieth-century US, twenty-first-century US, we have all those things. And so the creation of each of those markets is a definable historical moment where we can see them being created. Often they are created given a whole set of legal changes that make those markets possible.How things become unintelligible09:12: I think a lot of people are interested in how new things are created, but I am interested in how old things are forgotten or lost or rendered unintelligible.The accidental origins of markets05:32: What most people use their agency for is to reproduce and reinforce whatever existing structures they encounter. By definition, those structures would not continue to exist if people did otherwise. So instead, we tend to tell the stories of people who use their agency to not do that and do something weird, but that makes them definitionally atypical. Markets are a thing that only works insofar as people agentially contribute to their continual functioning without ever, you know, the intention is not, “I am going to go buy a cup of coffee to keep the coffee market going.” The intention is, “I am going to satisfy my need for a cup of coffee.” And so there is a weird unintentionality to the use of agents in economic life. And so I tried to focus a lot on accidents, unintended consequences, unforeseen mistakes, surprises, [and] collective disaster that results from individually rational behavior.Show Links:Recommended Resources:John Harold ClaphamBarry EichengreenChristina RomerBen BernankeThe Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward BaptistJames Bradford DeLongEugene GenovesePaul A. DavidJack Ryan (character)Heather Cox Richardson | substackKevin KruseFredric JamesonGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at UC BerkeleyGuest Work:The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the WorldImpunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:Sven Beckert Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    52 分
  • 690. How Your Brain Makes You Sick: The Sark Side of the Placebo Effect with Helen Pilcher

    690. How Your Brain Makes You Sick: The Sark Side of the Placebo Effect with Helen Pilcher
    2026/10/09
    What happens when your brain predicts a symptom that doesn't belong — and your body obeys? Can a diagnosis itself make you sicker? And could the way your doctor delivers bad news change the course of your disease?Helen Pilcher is a science writer whose work has appeared in Nature, The Guardian, and the BBC. Her new book, This Book May Cause Side Effects: The Curious and Dangerous Power of the Nocebo Effect, Placebo's Evil Twin, explores how negative expectations can produce real, measurable harm in the body.Helen and Greg discuss how the nocebo effect turns clinical warnings into self-fulfilling prophecies, why modern medicine's culture of full disclosure may be doing patients more harm than good, and how social media has become a new vector for mass psychogenic illness, spreading symptoms as easily as information.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The brain predicts symptoms01:00:29: What we realize now, is that most of our conscious experience is actually a prediction. It's a controlled hallucination, and most of the time, we get it right. But when we don't get it right, when our brains make a prediction error, that's when all sorts of things can happen. So, that's what creates the nocebo effect. The brain is predicting a symptom where the symptom doesn't belong.How much medical information is too much?24:31: One of the things that the medical profession in the West needs to think about is how much information is too much information. And the information that I choose to give, how can I give it better? So I can boost any placebo effect that might be relevant and reduce any nocebo effect that might be relevant.When illness spreads through social media43:38: We live in this interconnected world where you can go on social media, you can go on TikTok, your kids can go on TikTok. You can watch people who have illnesses of any kind, from mental health illnesses to physical illnesses. They call themselves chronic illness influencers or illfluencers is the term that I came across. People who we presume, I'm not disputing this, have very genuine health concerns and they're making content about it. And that can play a really, really important role in society because people with certain health conditions can feel quite alienated. It can be quite lonely. This can help them get information. It can help them belong. Sometimes it can put them on a path to treatment. That's the positive side. The downside is that sometimes also seeing people being ill can trigger mirror symptoms.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Clifton Meador, M.D.Primo LeviThe Farewell (2019 film)Alia Crum Keith Petrie“YouTuber Jan Zimmermann Dies ‘Unexpectedly’ from Epileptic Seizure at 27”Lucy FoulkesRené DescartesGuest Profile:Professional Website Professional Profile on LinkedInGuest Work:This Book May Cause Side Effects: The Curious and Dangerous Power of the Nocebo Effect, Placebo’s Evil TwinSmall Inventions That Made a Big DifferenceThe Time Nature Keeps: A Visual Guide to the Cycles and Time Spans of the Natural WorldLife Changing: How Humans are Altering Life on EarthBring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinctionIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:Jo MarchantEllen J. Langer Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    1 時間 7 分
  • 689. Artificial Intelligence and the Threat to Independent Thought with Bruno Giussani

    689. Artificial Intelligence and the Threat to Independent Thought with Bruno Giussani
    2026/10/05
    Bruno Giussani is a speaker and consultant, formerly the head of TED in Europe and an author of many works in Italian and the new English work Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.Greg and Bruno discuss how AI, social media, and other algorithmic technologies capture and steer attention, eroding “cognitive integrity,” or the ability to understand reality lucidly and decide autonomously. Bruno argues that today’s personalization of chatbots enables society-scale influence person by person, amplified by cheap AI-generated content and political “flood the zone” tactics that blur fact and fiction and deepen polarization. They discuss deskilling and “cognitive debt” from outsourcing thinking to chatbots, the non-neutrality and value-laden programming of AI (with examples from Chinese chatbots and Grok), and risks of subtle manipulation. Bruno covers Europe’s dependence on U.S. tech and the need for renewed industrial policy, outlines cognitive warfare tactics including poisoning chatbot outputs, and describes education-system experiments to integrate AI without replacing learning.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:How does technology put us at risk?04:06: When companies say, "We have the ability to personalize information," be it news or advertising, whatever, what they are saying is, "We have the ability to target one single person's mind with our technologies." But we do it at the scale of a whole society, right? And that's what makes this a real new challenge to a new level of challenge. And the reason why I consider it the most urgent, which is not the most important, but the most urgent, is it's going to be very difficult to solve any other challenge, be it, inequality and poverty and climate, you call it, if we cannot maintain some level of capacity to understand the world in a lucid way and to decide independently and autonomously about how to react to the circumstances in which we are in. And that's exactly where these technologies put us at risk. They target exactly that element.Why we anthropomorphize AI29:15: The anthropomorphization element is really interesting because we are so naturally drawn to consider things that speak like us and write like us and express themselves like us, so language is really central to this. Somehow they must be like us. If there is a text and the text is fluid and orthographically correct and even beautiful, there must be a mind behind it that has created this text. And so instinctively we believe that, and that's the kind of relationship that we are creating with these machines.When we outsource our thinking45:00: What's happening, of course, is generative AI, which has been adopted very, very fast because it just simplifies life. It allows for something almost irresistible, which is let's outsource to a machine the effort of reading, writing, learning, thinking, deciding and so on. And then the teachers themselves start using it to produce, classes, programs and syllabuses and all that stuff. So that was the first moment, and that provoked two different reactions. There was the reaction of, "Oh, no, no, this, this is totally contrary to even the logic of education, so let's ban AI. Let's just not have these tools," right? And the other reaction was, "We need to prepare students and kids to the future life after their study, where these machines are going to be part of their life, so we need to integrate it as fast as possible." And both those approaches are the first potential immediate reaction, but they're both actually, wrong.Show Links:Recommended Resources:TEDSteve JobsiPhone (1st generation)ChatbotElon MuskGrokOpenAIAnthropicSam AltmanCognitive WarfareBixonimaniaMustafa SuleymanOpenAI–HuggingFace IncidentPeter ThielHypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the Architecture of RealityGuest Profile:Giussani.comLinkedIn ProfileTED ProfileWikipedia ProfileSocial Profile on InstagramGuest Work:Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of Artificial IntelligenceIf you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:Nir EyalGloria MarkSherry Turkle Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    52 分