Breaking The Fever Alison Taylor & Jérôme Tagger

This episode of Breaking the Fever features a podcast takeover by interdisciplinary researcher Nithya Iyer, who has been investigating existential risks and systemic change. The theme of the takeover is AFTERMATH, which starts from a fictional aftermath of systemic and ideological collapse, and seeks to interview thinkers acting at the apex of present and future technologies, mainstream and alternative philosophies, factual and fictional realities, asking: where do we go from here?

In this takeover finale, we feature Timothy Morton - a prolific writer, philosopher and interdisciplinary thinker. Tim has carved out a celebrity status through their pioneering ecological thought and the conception of the 'hyperobject' - a tool for thinking about the vastness of existential threats. We discuss what it means to live in a world where the individual is helplessly entangled in existential threats and the narrative of the 'End of the World', how to make sense out of the chaotic dismantling of meaning in 2021, 'panicking cheerfully' and the George Harrison method of trying to change stubborn minds.


You can read more about Tim's ideas at

- Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/timothy-morton-hyperobjects-all-the-way-down/

- Liberation: https://www.liberation.fr/idees-et-debats/cest-le-bon-moment-pour-paniquer-rencontre-avec-le-philosophe-timothy-morton-20211201_PZOWKJCHCVCUDPUSW36BZU2KBY/

In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Ian McCarthy about the many faces of bullshit — how it’s different from lies, the harmless and harmful forms it can take, and what organizations can do to measure and mitigate its effects.

We discuss:

- How McCarthy's background as an engineer, particularly engineering’s focus on authenticity and risk management, have shaped his approach to bullshit
- Why reading the seminal essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt prompted his curiosity about the role of BS in the corporate world
- The many shapes of BS, from pub banter to persuasion tool
- What distinguishes BS from lying
- BS as a power strategy with career risks
- The effect of BS on organizational cultures, and how culture rewards BS
- The use of BS in the more visionary and creative stages or parts of an organization
- How organizational leaders can counter BS when it is destructive
- The place of BS in ESG
- How remote work shapes BS in organizations

Ian McCarthy is the W.J. VanDusen Professor of Innovation and Operations Management. He came to Simon Fraser University from the University of Warwick, England, where he was a Reader and Head of the Organizational Systems Strategy Unit. He worked for several years as a manufacturing engineer before earning his PhD in operations strategy from the University of Sheffield. His research and teaching focus on operations management, change and innovation management, and social media.

In this episode of the podcast, we speak with David Sloan Wilson about cooperation—how it evolved in social beings, how culture and norms can support and disrupt it, and how to sustain it across different levels (community, industry, nation, etc).

We discuss:

- How David got interested in the evolution of positive or prosocial cultural change
- The intellectual tradition of individualism
- The idea of society as an organism
- Why natural selection at the smallest scale is socially disruptive
- The game of Monopoly as an illustration of multilevel selection theory
- Polycentric governance in a nutshell
- Archipelagos of knowledge
- The spread of new norms, like those constituting the Me Too movement, online and off
- Elinor Ostrum’s Nobel Prize-winning core design principals of effective groups
- How nations approximate Ostrum’s core design principles
- The problem with the invisible hand, neoliberal model of globalization
- Changing norms in tight versus loose cultures

David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He applies evolutionary theory to all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life, both in his own research and as director of EvoS, a unique campus-wide evolutionary studies program that recently received NSF funding to expand into a nationwide consortium. His books include Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, and The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time and Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others.

In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Alison Goldsworthy, Laura Osborne, and Alexandra Chesterfield about the manifestations of political polarization in our personal and professional lives and how we might best go about coping with it and mitigating it where possible.

We discuss:

- Signs of increasing polarization
- How polarization affects decision-making—who to marry, live with, and hire
- Whether business helps to bring people together who disagree politically
- Whether political or ideological neutrality might be tenable in business
- Facilitating constructive political conversations on polarizing topics
- How emphasizing similarity, identifying superordinate goals and identity can reduce animosity
- How puncturing the illusion of explanatory depth can help people to realize they know less than they actually do, inducing a more open mind
- Valuing intellectual honesty in leaders, and rewarding honesty about ignorance and the willingness to find out new information
- The importance of asking people how they arrived at the views you disagree with
- How personal ethics might affect what political positions people are willing to try to understand or empathize with

Alison Goldsworthy has been a political adviser and campaigner for more than 20 years. A former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats, she led the team that built the fastest-growing campaigning organization in the United Kingdom. In 2017 she was a Sloan Fellow at Stanford, co-creating its first depolarization course. A board member of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, Alison has won numerous awards for her work. She has written for the Telegraph, Independent, New Statesman, The Times, and Financial Times.

Laura Osborne is a professional communicator, spokesperson, and podcaster, with a background in public affairs and government communications. Currently Corporate Affairs Director at London First, the voice of the city's largest employers, she was previously Communications Director at Which?, the U.K.’s consumer association. Laura has led large teams, working with some of the U.K.’s biggest corporations to apply lessons from communications, consumer insight, and behavioral science to making business a force for good.

Alexandra Chesterfield is a behavioral scientist with a master's degree in Cognitive and Decision Science. Forever curious about why we do what we do, she currently works in financial services, leading a team of behavioral scientists to help get better outcomes for employees and customers. For four years, she was an elected Councillor in Guildford for the Conservative Party. She has personally experienced the effects of affective polarization, both in and out of the workplace.

This episode of Breaking the Fever features a podcast takeover by Nithya Iyer — a Preventable Surprises Research Fellow investigating existential risks and systemic change.

This takeover episode features biophysicist and meta geneticist Dr Christopher Mason. He is a professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine, the director of the World Quantitative Initiative, was the lead researcher on the NASA Twin Study, and founder of MasonLab which is working towards a 500-year plan for humanity to inhabit other planets through genetic engineering.

We discuss the 500-year plan, how scientific visions move in the world and become reality, and the meaning of life.

The podcast refers to Chris's new book 'The Next 500 Years, Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds', by MIT Press which you can find here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/next-500-years

Also referenced are Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/6113/oryx-and-crake-by-margaret-atwood/

Immanuel Kant, John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

and John Stuart Mills' Utilitarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism_(book)

You can read more about Chris's work here: https://www.masonlab.net/

This episode of Breaking the Fever features a podcast takeover by Nithya Iyer - a Preventable Surprises Research Fellow investigating existential risks and systemic change.

Over the course of three episodes, the takeover focuses on the AFTERMATH, starting from a fictional aftermath of systemic and ideological collapse to interview thinkers acting at the apex of present and future technologies, mainstream and alternative philosophies, factual and fictional realities, asking: where do we go from here?

This episode features global disaster relief expert and blockchain entrepreneur Vinay Gupta. We discuss the context of our current environmental predicaments, the grave risks humankind faces, and the types of futures that are possible if we dismantle false notions of green economies.

The podcast refers to Lester Brown's Plan B, which you can find here: http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4 and Jamais Cascio's (https://www.iftf.org/jamaiscascio/) work on geoengineering.

You can read more about Vinay Gupta's work here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulsingireddy/2017/10/18/vinay-gupta-on-why-ethereum-is-the-future/

and here: https://mattereum.com/team/