unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Nowadays, if someone wants to make a lot of money in finance, they don’t go and work for investment banks. The real money to be made is at private equity firms. With most of these firms controlling a huge percentage of the country’s overall GDP and doing so largely unchecked, is it time to take a hard look at the systems that protect and allow these actors to flourish?? Brendan Ballou is special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. His book, Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America, takes a hard look at the way private equity firms operate and the laws they exploit.  He and Greg discuss what sets private equity firms apart from other financial institutions in America, the ways private equity firms avoid liability when things go wrong, and what reforms are needed to the systems that essentially allowed private equity to become the beast that it is today. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Private equity as an institution is unique05:31: Private equity as an institution is unique for three reasons. One is that private equity owners tend to invest for just a few years, so you're talking about a three, five, or seven-year time horizon. Two is that private equity firms tend to load up the companies they buy with a lot of debt and extract a lot of fees. And the magic trick, as you probably know, a lot of these private equity deals is when they load these companies up with debt; for the acquisition, it's the company that holds the debt, not the private equity firm. So if things go badly, it's the company that's on the hook. It's not the private equity owners and investors. And then the third thing, and this is what really interests me as a lawyer, is private equity firms are enormously successful at insulating themselves legally from the consequences of their portfolio company's actions. So, if something goes wrong at a portfolio company, someone is hurt, or an employee is taken advantage of, whatever it happens to be, it's very hard to hold a private equity firm responsible.Is private equity an extreme version of capitalism?03:44:  Private equity is an extreme version of capitalism, for better or for worse...It's not an extreme form of capitalism. It's a deviation or a perversion of capitalism by the specific laws and regulations that we have that incentivize short-term term investing, reliance on debt, and insolation from liability. We've created these legal structures that allow certain people to capture all the upside of our economy if things go well, but walk away if they don't.Short-term gain versus long-term success12:17: The time frame that you've got for an investment changes your perspective on what you're going to do with it, whether you're going to jack up prices for the short term, even if it means that you're going to lose customers for the long term, underinvest in your employees and your innovation, even if it means that you might be scooped by the competition in a few years, and so forth.How are private equity firms compensated?31:00: Private equity firms are compensated on a 2-in-20 model: 2% of the profits above a certain threshold, 20% of the profits above a certain threshold, and 2% of the assets under management every year. The carried interest loophole says that both of those should be treated as capital gains rather than ordinary income, and capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. That's pretty much all the money that a private equity executive typically makes. So, leaders of private equity firms have historically paid a lower tax rate than the firefighters and teachers that they nominally serve.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Other People's Money And How The Bankers Use It by Louis BrandeisThe Modern Corporation and Private PropertyPeter Whoriskey’s story on the Carlyle Group for The Washington PostWorth RisesSIFIsGuest Profile:Brendan Ballou on LinkedInBrendan Ballou on X His Work:Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ever wondered why some people seem to have an aversion to gesturing while speaking? Or did you know that even in the absence of sight, human beings instinctively use gestures to communicate?Susan Goldin-Meadow is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago and also the author of the books Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts, The Resilience of Language, and Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think.Susan and Greg take a deep dive into the integral role of gestures in language acquisition, especially during early childhood. They also discuss the striking similarity of key gestures across various cultures, indicating a shared linguistic heritage, the fascinating evolution of various sign languages, and the unique ways they convey information distinctly from spoken language. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On integrating gesture with speech34:21: What gesture is really good at is integrating with speech. It needs to be integrated with speech. It's one of the reasons co-speech gesture is useless for deaf kids because they can't hear the speech, and then they see all of these things that we do, and they think, and so what they come up with is quite different from co-speech gestures. So, co-speech gesture is co-speech gesture and needs to be thought about along with speech. So, taking away speech isn't going to do it. If in fact, you tell people, "Okay, shut up, don't say a word," but gesture to describe this, your gesture will look different from the way it looks when it accompanies speech.Gestures are not as sophisticated as sign language26:18:  You can do whatever you want in sign language, and it works. It's a language. Gestures are not as sophisticated as sign language or spoken language.Transmission is important for language to take-off12:40: Deaf individuals used to be pretty isolated in hearing homes. But at one point, they created a Deaf education system, and they brought a bunch of homesigners, essentially, together, and they interacted with one another. So, at that point, they started to develop lexical items that they shared, things like that. But the language took off when new little deaf kids came into the community and learned the system from these older ones. So, there's some evidence that real transmission helps the language grow. You may need to share it and communicate. But transmission is essential in order for the language to take off.Sign language is more than just Hand-in-Mouth31:00: Signers gesture, but their sign language is categorical, just like spoken language, and their gesture is more imagistic. So, sign language sign-gesture mismatches work in the same way that speech-gesture mismatches work: to predict. Learning it can't be about two modalities because the signers are using one modality, just hands, to represent this stuff—and that turns out to be true. So it feels like it's not just hand-in-mouth. Hand-in-mouth may help. It may do some work for us, but there's something more. It really is the way gesture represents information and language represents information co-occurring together.Show Links:Recommended Resources:List of GesturesFrench Sign LanguageFrench Sign Language FamilyPaul EkmanDance NotationLabanotationGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at the University of ChicagoThe Goldin-Meadow LaboratoryNational Academy of Sciences ProfileSusan Goldin-Meadow on LinkedInSusan Goldin-Meadow on TEDxUChicagoHer Work:Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our ThoughtsThe Resilience of LanguageHearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us ThinkGoogle Scholar PageResearchGate Publications Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, discusses the risks of a deteriorating democracy in America. Topics include the threats to citizenship, the disappearing middle class, and the impact of the education system on exacerbating the problem.

Ever wondered about the growing presence of asset managers in all aspects of our lives?Brett Christophers is a Professor in the Department of Human Geography at Uppsala University in Sweden and the author of several books. His latest work is titled Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, and next year, he has a new book coming out called The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet. Brett and Greg discuss the migration from public equity to private, the rise of large landlords and infrastructure providers, and the outsourcing of public services to the private sector. The conversation takes a deep dive into the realm of asset management in the housing sector. Brett offers an enlightening perspective on what it means for tenants when asset managers are landlords. They unpack the mixed bag of potential benefits and disadvantages that could arise in this scenario. Brett and Greg also discuss the rising trend of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing, and how asset managers are leveraging this wave.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are asset managers public service or a powerful rhetoric?40:43: One of the main lines of defense that these investment managers, asset managers, rely upon when they come under attack from the likes of me, but not only the likes of me, politicians from the likes of Elizabeth Warren and so on in the U.S., is they'll say, "Look, you don't want to be attacking us because we're providing a public service in the way you just outlined. If our funds perform well, then that's all to the well and good because the money we're investing through those funds is the money of the firefighters, the teachers, and the nurses." And that's a very powerful piece of rhetoric. It's that rhetoric which sustains the business model in large part because people buy that rhetoric, and therefore, the business continues on its merry way.The power of asset managers in infrastructure investments33:50: If governments have increasingly persuaded themselves that the private sector is the answer in terms of infrastructure investment, then almost by definition they've persuaded themselves that asset managers are the answer. Because asset managers have the command of the greatest surplus capital today, if you're looking into the private sector to invest, then, essentially, you're looking to asset managers because they're the ones that have all the dry powder.Are asset management companies publicly traded but still opaque?23:40: Public ownership entails a certain degree of scrutiny that is still lacking in the cases of these asset management companies, even if those asset management firms are themselves publicly traded. Many of them now are the likes of Blackstone, which would be a good example of that. So yes, the firms themselves are publicly traded, but much of what occurs through the funds that they established is obviously still very, very opaque in a way that is not necessarily true of publicly traded companies.Private equity and real estate investments use the same fee mechanisms and fund structures03:41: Whether you're talking about private equity or real estate investment, what you find is that they're often using exactly the same kind of fee mechanisms, fund structures, and so on. So that's why I use that terminology, because I think that the most important thing to really draw attention to is this fact that, at the end of the day, most of the money that they're investing is not their own. And that's a key feature of this. But even though, of course, they're using different investment strategies, different fund structures, and so on.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Pension fundKKR & Co. Inc.Blackstone Inc.The Carlyle GroupPensions in CanadaOMERSBrookfield CorporationMacquarie GroupSovereign wealth fundGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Uppsala UniversityHis Work:The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the PlanetOur Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the WorldRentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal BritainThe Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of LawBanking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in CapitalismEnvisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of TelevisionDavid Harvey: A Critical Introduction to His ThoughtEconomic Geography: A Critical Introduction (Critical Introductions to Geography)Google Scholar PageAcademia.edu ArticlesThe Guardian ArticlesTime Articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is it possible to simplify life without losing the comfort and complexity that enriches it? John Maeda, vice president of artificial intelligence and design at Microsoft, has been writing about the intersection of design, technology, business, and life for years. His book, The Laws of Simplicity, explores the question of needing less while still getting something more. He and Greg discuss some of the pivotal moments in John’s career, how his view of design changed over the course of writing The Laws of Simplicity, and the aspects of business education that could use some tweaking. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Traditional design is not the same as customer-centricity26:42: Business is about design thinking. It's different. It's customer-centricity. It's all the C words, whatever. But the way design is taught, like your microphone, is so beautiful. It's super cool-looking, right? That was created not just to be easy to use. It was also created to be "beautiful, stand out, et cetera," whatever—all these other factors that are not user-centered. They're ego-centered, which you could argue is like user-centered design, but it's different…[27:32] Traditional design is good at messing with your mind, your ego, and your wallet or purse. And it's fascinating. But it's not the same as customer-centricity. And that's what's so interesting about it and useful about it at certain times in a product's evolution.Understanding powerful concepts of computer science23:27:  There are certain concepts in computer science that are hard to understand because they're so powerful. So, I focus on what's powerful. And what's powerful is that it never gets tired. That's weird. It can loot forever. It is able to encompass large data sets at any scale and at any level of precision. So, it can handle infinitely large issues with infinitesimal accuracy. That is strange. And so, going through these properties helped me understand how weird it is. Two kinds of supply chain risks10:32:  There are two kinds of supply chain risk. There's physical supply chain risk and digital supply chain risk. And a physical supply chain – we know what that looks like in our heads, or optimized with Amazon robots, etc. But a digital supply chain is like building on top of Azure, and Azure goes down. Whoa, what do you do? Or you've built your organization's communication system on Slack, and it goes down. Like, what do you do? So that's an invisible supply chain that we're just starting to understand in business, and they're very similar. Unless you're cyber-equipped, it's just that you can't see the kind of analogy you could make between the two worlds.On being equipped to explain computation30:13: I realized how powerful computation is, and I realized that anyone can explain design better than me. What is something that I'm equipped to do? Oh, I can explain computation. So, I wanted to make a way to explain to any business leader what computation is. Because if they don't understand it, they can't digitally transform.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer JohnsonMoore’s LawDonald KnuthTraitorous EightGuest Profile:Automattic Advisory Council Profile at MIT Media LabProfessional WebsiteJohn Maeda on LinkedInJohn Maeda on TwitterJohn Maeda on YouTubeJohn Maeda on TEDTalk John Madea on Talks at GoogleHis Work:The Laws of SimplicityHow to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of UsRedesigning Leadership (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) Creative Code: Aesthetics + Computation Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses the dichotomy between research and teaching in higher education, the implications of student evaluations, the necessity for peer review of teaching, and the lasting impact of teaching and learning.

Richard N. Langlois, an economics professor, discusses the rise and fall of the managerial era in American corporations, misconceptions about antitrust laws, and companies' influence on the political system. The podcast also explores the significance of studying organization in economics, coordination costs in the car industry, the birth of antitrust, Shumpeterian competition, and the transition to platforms in business.

Matt Abrahams, a lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University, discusses the delicate dance of communication. Topics include the difference between rehearsed and spontaneous communication, the role of mindset in effective communication, communication styles across eras and age groups, the power of stories and structures in enhancing communication, and the importance of teaching communication skills.

Many scholars and philosophers have taken the stance that empathy hinders the true pursuit of knowledge and justice. But our guest today takes the opposite approach.Heidi L. Maibom is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati and the University of the Basque Country. Her book, The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, argues that not only is empathy indispensable, but it's impossible to acquire knowledge about this world and ourselves without it. She and Greg discuss the place empathy occupies in philosophy, the different types of perspectives that go along with empathizing, and whether or not it's possible to have too much empathy. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Empathy is many things44:18: Empathy is many things, and that's partly why I find it distressing to read so many dismissals of empathy which focus on it as one thing. Either you have to understand the other person entirely—their entire history, their experiences, and so forth and so on. Of course we can't empathize in that way. Or you are empathizing with them as an act of "I know better than you," and so forth. We're empathizing with people for all kinds of reasons. It's important to appreciate that and also to then focus your empathy in the right way, depending on what kind of project you're engaging.Does empathy require identification?21:08: Empathy requires some amount of identification. But the identification is interesting because, in essence, what you're trying to do is map the other person's subjectivity onto your own. That's why you have to find a situation of your own that you have experience with to map that situation on. But at the same time, of course, you have to be aware of the ways in which you differ from the other person.Can you have too much empathy?49:05: People who are empathetic are more vulnerable to exploitation from others, to gaslighting perhaps, right? So, being empathetic comes with dangers and advantages. But I think that if we try to go back to this notion of the shape of subjectivity, being how I experience things as the one who acts and who thinks and so forth, then I think that when you then try to understand yourself, taking the perspective, as it were, from the inside, taking a perspective from the outside, as little engaged with yourself as you can be, as it were, and then if you are in a particular interaction with somebody else, the victim or the perpetrator perspective, in addition.How does philosophy of emotions tie with philosophy of empathy?36:02: There's a tremendous amount of information that we can derive from a successful act of emotionally empathizing with someone. And more information than from simply empathizing with a thought or thinking, okay, here is exactly what they're thinking. I think emotions are richer. It just gives us more information, and there's important aspects to an emotion, namely from the perspective of closeness with another person, from feeling understood, just seeing that another person is emoting. It's incredibly important, but there's also all this information that we shouldn't ignore that is really crucial and very helpful for understanding this. Show Links:Recommended Resources:VoltaireJean-Paul SartreRené DescartesGuest Profile:Heidi L. Maibom's WebsiteHeidi L. Maibom on TwitterHer Work:The Space Between: How Empathy Really WorksEmpathy (New Problems of Philosophy)The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Does the financial world need a shake-up? By venturing into the minds of Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot, two outliers who challenge the status quo of modern portfolio theory and efficient market hypothesis, we can find groundbreaking theories with implications for the financial sphere, especially in the face of unpredictable "Black Swan" events.Scott Patterson is a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and also the author of Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis, Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market, and The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It, all of which factor into this episode.Scott and Greg discuss the financial ups and downs of the stock market and traders who tried to ride the wave or predict when bubbles were going to burst. Scott talks about covering climate change for the Journal and the way it complicates predicting what start-ups will end up on top. Dive into the subtle and sometimes blurry distinctions between investing and gambling and find out what can make a company shut off its computers on this episode of UnSILOed.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is climate change the big dog in the world of crises?42:12: Climate change is what I write about in the journal—that's my beat—so I wanted the book (Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis) to be not just about buying out-of- the-money options to protect your portfolio. I wanted it to be broader in terms of thinking about the risks that we face. And that's in the subtitle of the book, The New Age of Crisis, which I try to make an argument that we're entering a world of crises that are manifesting and overlapping more and magnifying the nature of the crisis. Some people call it the polycrisis, and climate, I think, is the big dog in that crisis world.On the risk of high-speed contagion across markets36:00: The risk of a high-speed contagion across markets is something we should be concerned about...[36:33] With high-speed trading, I was on the front lines there reporting it. It wasn't a well-known phenomenon. And I found it very alarming that the financial markets evolved into this race to trade microseconds faster than the next guy.The inconvenient truth of ignoring fat tails06:55: Nassim [Taleb] one time showed me an email that he'd gotten from a very well-known, respected academic in finance, who conceded to Nassim that, yes, we know that these fat tails exist, but our models don't work if we incorporate them into the models. And that's the problem: if you recognize that there is potential for three, four, five sigma events, then you have to put a fat tail into the model. And that's fine. But as long as the people running trading desks and executives understand that if you have a value-at-risk model, it's not capturing the real risk that you're going to be facing because it carves out 5 percent of the volatility, of the extreme volatility over a year.Is high-speed computer trading a threat to financial markets?38:32: In 2020, there were some extremely insane things going on in the markets, and I think probably negative oil prices and bonds. You couldn't buy a Treasury bond or sell a Treasury bond for a while at one point. Not normal. But I think a lot of that was not just an exogenous event: COVID was causing the global economy to seize up, and that moved into financial markets. Central bankers came in and threw a bunch of money at it, and cleaned out the pipes. But this idea of a high-speed computer-driven contagion is something I've always been concerned about, but I don't think we've seen that yet.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Nassim Nicholas TalebBenoit MandelbrotMark SpitznagelCalPERSUniversaRecency BiasEmpirica CapitalBlack Swan TheoryRobert LittermanFischer BlackGuest Profile:Professional Profile on Wall Street JournalScott Patterson on LinkedInScott Patterson on XHis Work:Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of CrisisDark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock MarketThe Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed ItWall Street Journal ArticlesMuck Rack Articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.