Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan

Ingrid Daubechies is endlessly, irrepressibly, beautifully curious. She is a Belgian physicist and mathematician whose scientific achievements have rippled across society in all directions for the past 35 years. But, more than that, she's a fierce champion of diversity and equality, in math and science, in women's rights, in opportunity. To sit with Ingrid, her math and her life, is to i...

Mark Granovetter has made and remade our understanding of social networks, social theory, collective action, and economic sociology, making and remaking our world in the process. It would not be hyperbole to say that few living scholars have had the influence of Mark Granovetter.  Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes : Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell (9:00)...

Tina Eliassi-Rad is a network science pioneer, and an intrepid explorer of where network science shows up in our world and how we understand that. Her work, as her life, falls across network science, complexity, artificial intelligence, and commitments to democracy and equality, itself a constellation of experiences and literacies befitting our increasingly complex world. Origins Podcast Website F...

Judith Donath is a design thinker for some of the most important theory for how people interact in online spaces, drawing on evolutionary biology, architecture, ethnography, cognitive science. She just might be the voice we need for the multi-media multiscale world we're walking into. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes : Tsundoku (09:00) The cost of honesty (09:...

There is something irresistible about the way C. Thi Nguyen thinks about and structures the world. From the lenses of trust, art, games, and communities he thinks about seemingly everything. In each of these topics, he's written pieces that I consider to be among the most important works on them. Origins Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes : Games: Agency as Art (01:55) Anne Har...

We find ourselves living in a time of great complexity and flux, where the very fabric of our societies is being rewoven by the rise of artificial intelligence and the interplay of complex systems. How do we make sense of a world that is undeniably interconnected, with increasingly porous boundaries between nature and culture, human and machine, science and art? Paul Wong is reshaping that convers...

Twins Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn are curious. Their work, individually and together, gives new conception and language to what curiosity is, the work that it does in the world. These are human beings of intelligence and integrity and deep care, and their reification of curiosity might just be a generative narrative of our time.  Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes :...

Every so often someone comes along whose thinking and work inspire you with the kind of awe that always feels new and fills you with an energy that brings vibrancy to life. Julio Mario Ottino is one of these people. Pulling from science, technology, and art, creating entirely new spaces in their convergence, he has transformed how to think about discovery and creativity. Origins Podcast Website Fl...

After a generative break from new episodes, Origins Podcast is back with Season Six! 2023 has been a year of rapid change even as we carry the rupture of the last three years. It is precisely into this evolving landscape, that we are excited to announce that Origins Podcast returns with its Sixth Season! While it will continue to be a forum to explore the pivotal moments for a diverse array of voi...

Frank White is a philosopher of space. In 1987 he coined the term "the overview effect," referring to the life-altering experience astronauts received upon witnessing our planet from outer space. His work, as his life, bring this transformation of perspective into sharper focus, presenting an alternative perception of ourselves, our world, and our future. Origins Podcast Website Flourish...

Nicole Stott has a towering range of knowledge and experience, from the heights of outer space as a NASA astronaut to the depths of the ocean as an aquanaut, from the rigor and structure of science to the openness and imagination of art. She continually defies category, and her life embodies the creativity and interconnection that we are called to in the face of planetary challenges. Origins Podca...

David Sloan Wilson is one of biology’s most prolific and impactful scientists. He is author of paradigmatic contributions to evolutionary theory and how organisms behave, such as multilevel selection and core design principles for the efficacy of groups. But the reach of his work is far beyond the domains of biology and sociology, in whole a toolkit for improving how we live together and weaving b...

Ed Finn might be best described as an imaginer. The rest of the many things that he is and does kind of fall into place with that foundation. He started and for the past decade has been Director of the unexampled Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes : Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (06:20) S...

Alex McDowell is a worldbuilder. He builds future realities to envision worlds that don't yet exist. By working across disciplines to imagine the future, his worlds inform and inspire stories and open eyes to new possibilities. Origins Podcast website Show Notes:  Quaker meeting (09:40) Empowerment The skills of listening and gathering (11:40) The politics of your social experience (12:10) Wo...

Poetry comes up so often in my conversations these days. Our society in crisis seems to be desperate for it, without being able to name that desperation until a poem calls it out of us. For years, award-winning Poet David Hassler has been defining and redefining how poetry enters and moves people and communities.  Show Notes : Jane Hirshfield (04:30) Poets for Science (04:50) Francis Weller - how...

Alicia Juarrero is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Prince George’s Community College and the author of Dynamics in Action , a text that many consider to have laid the foundation for how we think about complexity in our society. So Alicia is a philosopher for this moment in human history. Show Notes : Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (03:31) Live the questions Duino Elegies User Fri...

Brandon Ballengée has a unique quality of attention, one that is not constrained by traditional distinctions between art & science and working & living. He wants to share that capacity to witness to liberate everyone's imagination of what this world can be, a world we are of rather than just in . This ecological consciousness informs his work as a visual artist, biologist and environm...

Welcome back to Origins, listeners. After a few month hiatus, we're back with an exhilarating, generative, spacious season of the show--the hiatus was in part so that I could focus on research , to launch a new series of 'salons' with the Cultural Program for the National Academy of Science (see here for an example ), help ignite a new initiative toward Open Science  with NASA , and...

Subscribe to The Flourishing Commons - a newsletter to accompany Origins episodes and to build a community around a rich forum for exchange. Sara Hendren is a humanist in tech. This may seem like a strange statement, but it may be a perfect place to pick up Sara's trajectory. She is a brilliant designer, an affecting educator, and just might be the source of language that will transform the w...

Michael Hochberg is Distinguished Research Director with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (the French National Centre for Scientific Research) and based at the University of Montpellier, France. His research has for many years spanned fields from ecology to epidemiology to biodiversity to innovation to the communication of science and touches every scale imaginable, from cells to s...

For years Dave Snowden has helped me understand how to navigate a complex world better than perhaps any other thinker. He draws so widely from all schools of thought in forming frameworks for sensemaking . This episode is expanding. It will be with me for a long time and I hope it stays with you, too.  Read more at: https://www.originspodcast.co/episodes-1 Show Notes : Complicated vs complex (08:0...

Katy Börner is one of the great mappers of our age. Her maps tell the history of science, trace how communication has evolved from the stone age to modern day, and reveal the connections across our society. In her work, all of these things become visual and interactive. That is to say she is the perfect person to talk to in this age when complexity lurks behind the most intractable issues facing o...

This episode originally aired on June 4, 2020 .  There are new episodes coming to you soon, so stay tuned.  But now is a good time to revisit wise words from one of my favorite previous guests, Cecilia Conrad, Managing Director of the MacArthur ('Genius') Fellows Program and the 100&Change program.  The 2021 class of MacArthur Fellows was announced in late September 2021. In Cecilia...

Dr. and professor Jessica Flack has been a dream guest for Origins since the beginning - the kind of generous intellect and polymath whose words and work expand everyone around her. She also might be the person we can place our trust in to help us learn how to make sense of an increasingly complex world. Show Notes : Josh Epstein - agent-based modeling (04:20) The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and comp...

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer. But the music she writes is more than mere notes; it embraces art and science and engineering and finds new frontiers at the intersection of them all. Her 'music' is both song and her research into new modes of immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation. Through art as with science, her work seeks to create as she says, "an expone...