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 asking the most meaningful, searching, even troubling questions and on their process for constructing those questions.

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Hello friends, a new season of Origins arrives on June 30!

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 response to bewilderment is not certainty but deeper conversation. That has always been the purpose of Origins: A person bewildered by the world turning toward another person and asking: How do you live here?

So strangely, out of vulnerability there is capacity. Out of confusion there is hope.

The episodes in this season are meant to be companions in that work. They are certainly companions in mine.

What we do now will be oriented toward creating those sites at which vulnerability becomes capacity: belonging and solidarity. I hope each episode becomes an encounter with flourishing. 

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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 environmental prosperity, a decoupling that destabilizes our planet.

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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.

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Francesca Samsel is crafting a new language for our world. Crossing art, science, and visualization, her work raises our capacity to collaborate, and in the process, alters our sense of what scientific inquiry is and can (and perhaps needs to) be.

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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 imagined future.

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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 interconnectness. 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.

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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.

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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 needfulness and borrows from theology, ecology, and the social sciences.

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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.

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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.

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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 Origins is more than a podcast: a space for collective inquiry into living well in a fractured world.

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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. 

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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.

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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 teachers we all need for the world we are walking into.

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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 community of artists, designers, engineers, scientists, educators, and contemplatives. The event was co-hosted by Flourishing Salons and the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS) DC Art and Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER).

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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.

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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 of studying and understanding.

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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.

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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.

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