73: Special Series Episode 5: Wisdom Frontiers

Welcome to a five-episode special series built around the first Annual Review of Psychology chapter on wisdom since 2011.

Episode 5: Wisdom Frontiers (with Dilip Jeste, Barry Schwartz, and Justin Brienza)

Can wisdom live beyond the individual, in the organizations we build, and the technologies we create? In the final episode of our special series, Dilip Jeste, Barry Schwartz, and Justin Brienza join Igor and Charles to explore the frontiers of wisdom research, from neuroscience to the design of wiser institutions. Dilip takes us inside the brain systems involved in empathy, emotion regulation, and perspective-taking, while explaining why measuring wisdom remains such a challenge. Barry turns to the organizations we spend our lives in, revealing how even well-intentioned people can make poor judgments when the culture around them gets in the way, and why better decisions depend on creating environments where people can learn from their mistakes. Justin asks how we might build wisdom into institutions themselves, from red-teaming and premortems to incentives that encourage dissent, stewardship, and collective responsibility. The series arrives at one final question: if we can build machines that are increasingly intelligent, what would it mean to make them wise?

Special Guests: Barry Schwartz, Dilip Jeste, and Justin Brienza.

Links:

• Barry Schwartz: Our loss of wisdom | TED Talk
• Wisdom in action: A call to bridge fields in psychology (and beyond) to solve complex world problems | American Psychologist. Advance online publication - Glück, J., & Brienza, J. P. (2025)
• Transforming artificial intelligence into artificial wisdom | Nat. Mental Health 4, 886–897 - Jeste, D.V., Paulus, M.P., Alexopoulos, G.S. et al. (2026)
• Imagining and building wise machines: The centrality of AI metacognition | Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Johnson, S. G., Karimi, A. H., Bengio, Y., Chater, N., Gerstenberg, T., Larson, K., ... & Grossmann, I. (2026)