Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan

The Great Askers is an occasional Origins Podcast extra, where we nourish a sensibility of asking and cultivate great askers by exploring it with people who have singularly practiced it. Find the inaugural episode here .  So we occasionally on this show add to a series called ‘ the great askers ’ to center the philosophy and practice of asking questions. We do this by talking with the people askin...

CORRECTION: Season Nine will commence on July 7, not June 30 Origins Podcast Website Hello friends, a new season of Origins arrives on July 7! I can't genuinely describe my experience in the world right now without the term confusion.  Confused in a deep sense: feeling a growing distance between the world as I experience it and the world we seem to be creating together. The appropriate respon...

The fundamental challenges confronting humanity are not the failure of particular nations or institutions or businesses or civil organizations, but rather the disconnect between our economic, political, and social systems. Dennis Snower and David Sloan Wilson, converging economics and evolution, have a plan to ameliorate the decoupling of economic prosperity and political success from social and e...

Guru Madhavan reverences the world and all that is in it. Guru is an engineer, but his conception of engineering is more vast than we typically assign to the role. To it he brings a systems consciousness that widens the field in recognition of its entanglement with the social and cultural. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes : David Sloan Wilson on Origins (02:05) sys...

Francesca Samsel is crafting a new language for our world. That is, she crosses art, science, and visualization to open new ways of understanding and engaging with the natural world, not just visually but across the sensorial spectrum. She recognizes the inextricably social element to this, too, and her work raises our capacity to collaborate, and in the process, alters our sense of what scientifi...

Malka Older makes a life at the crossroads of our existing and future worlds. Between research into the sociology of organizations, on-the-ground work in humanitarian aid and disaster risk reduction, and acclaimed writing of speculative and science fiction, Older brilliantly, beautifully, uncommonly lives the great paradox in front of us all: to hold at once the two truths of lived experience and...

Biologist, philosopher, educator, facilitator, and historian of science Mette Miriam Böll is embodiment of the kind of life that emerges when we accept, recognize, and revere our profound interconnectedness. Her scholarship as her life are nourishment for returning to the task we are all called to: to human well, at once simple and complex, individual and civilizational.  Origins Podcast Website F...

Dr. Dan Jay has a mission to inspire where art and science meet. His life has been spent in the liminal and generative space between and among these domains of inquiry that are too often considered separate, distinct, even opposing. Yet, it is transformative creativity only possible from the co-mingling and conversation of art and science that we seem to be called to in the 21st century.  Origins...

Zachary Ugolnik has for years been charting a new path that refuses the tired and inanimate narrative about the separateness of science and spirituality, reason and religion. In his life we find rich possibility when those old illusory dichotomies are discarded, and from that possibility perhaps new wisdom for creating a society full of care and flourishing, one that embraces our inherent needfuln...

Dr. Jennifer Wiseman gives expression to our cosmos, as a pioneering astrophysicist, an outspoken advocate for science within policy and the public, as well as a person of faith. Her's are sensibilities of a scientist, a theologian, and a human being in awe of the universe, recognizing that these parts of ourselves need not be in opposition but rather in beautiful and enriching conversation. ...

Susan Magsamen makes her life at the frontier: the frontier of neuroscience, of institutional change, of the intersection of art and science. Her's is a life full of wisdom for how to live amongst mystery and befriend complexity. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes : spontaneous "you are my sunshine" (02:00) T. S. Eliot (08:00) implementation science (0...

Origins Podcast Website Hello friends, a new season of Origins arrives next week, on Tuesday, May 20.  This next chapter of Origins is about exploring conversation, that great practice of placing two things next to one another and allowing them to be astonished by the other. It is also about exploring the collective narrative of our time.  This trailer is both introduction and meditation on how Or...

Few concepts are more important to our society than resilience. Agnostic of domain, of nation, culture, and scale (as vital, indeed, to the individual life as to the planetary civilization), it would be impossible to overstate the pressure on us to understand it. If resilience is a core competency of our time, it would not be hyperbole to say that Dr. David Woods one of our most important thinkers...

Paul Smaldino is an explorer. That might seem like an odd way to describe a professor of cognitive science, but anyone who has glanced at his biography will recognize that he lives his life in exploration. His scholarship as his life are inspiration for keeping the lines of inquiry wide open and the things we can discover in doing so. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Not...

I've been following John Paul Lederach's work for years, finding the words he uses inordinately relevant to all of the details and spaces of my life. John Paul is Professor of International Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame. He has been a teacher to me across time and space and I believe the ideas he brings into the world are teache...

Flourishing is not a fixed state; it is an unfolding. In this time of rupture we need encounters with flourishing, to know it in our lived experiences individually and collectively. In this transformative event on December 12, 2024, Ryan McGranaghan, host of the Origins Podcast and founder of the Flourishing Salons , engaged in a moving conversation with four profound provocateurs and a wider comm...

Natalie (Talia, as she goes by) Stroud has for years been studying the ways that our lives online show up in and shape our lives together. Her scholarship as her life are unexampled guides to the tumult, the challenges, and the opportunity presented by the advent and evolution of digital media. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes : Federal Communications Committee &qu...

Simon DeDeo's inquiry takes on the most immense topics: astrophysics, history, epistemology, culture. He brings the precision of a physicist, the capability of a data scientist, and the sensibility of a philosopher to thinking about how we live our lives; and his polymathic life might be the example we need to make sense of the world we are walking into, one requiring an evolution to our way...

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is one of the world's foremost scientists. Couple that with an unprecedented understanding of how teams work and a sense of care that is exceedingly rare in our world and you recognize her for what she is: altogether unexampled. Her's is a story of exploration, of universe, of planet, of society, and of self.  Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Sho...

It would feel wrong to place labels on Jane Hirshfield. Language would fail to reach there, ironic for someone who has devoted their life to the practice of poetry and the practice of Zen Buddhism. Jane is a modern master, change-maker, and wise and winsome voice. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes : The Ritual Process by Victor Turner (09:30) nonattachment (14:00) P...

Agustín Fuentes reads a multi-million year history of our world, a student of its myriad lessons that often subvert unquestioned modern narratives and the problematic ways we've arrived at them. His is an anthropological, ecological, refreshingly unalloyed sensibility, an uncommon concoction whose life of scholarship and insight illuminate what we all might need to cultivate for the world we...

Albert-László Barabási thinks in networks and his scholarship, as his life, is embodiment of the explorative, imaginative, and generative nature of networks. It would be difficult to imagine a person better suited to steward us through the innate and seemingly universal tendency of things to connect to each other and all of its implications. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter S...

Hello friends, a new season of Origins is coming NEXT WEEK. Last season of this show was a season of flourishing. The episodes ahead we not be a season of something in particular but a movement toward process, toward open-endedness, toward unsettledness; of discipline, of intellect, of being. Great scientific breakthroughs are discoveries of process, and the great discoveries of society and our ow...

Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter and the post introducing Great Asking Show Notes : Sara Hendren's Origins Conversation start of a living conversation (05:20) Ignorance by Stuart Firestein (06:00) questions are the oxygen of imagination (08:00) curiosity is a moral muscle (10:10) The Division of Cognitive Labor by Philip Kitcher (09:20) Sara's substack (10:40) Howar...

James Evans' life is one resplendent with ideas. His trajectory into research and learning in areas as wide as network science, collective intelligence, computational social science, and even how knowledge is created, is as irreducible as it is exhilarating, and is a beacon in disorienting times marked by seemingly accelerating paces of change.  Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons New...