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.
Read MoreHello 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 own lives will be the same.
Thank you for listening and I'm excited to explore together each of the coming guests, and the exhilarating glimpses they provide into ourselves and our society along the way.
We are starting a new series called ‘the great askers’ to center the philosophy and practice of asking questions. We will do this be talking with the people asking the most meaningful, searching, even troubling questions and on their process for constructing those questions. The series will be a collective conversation among the people changing the questions that make so much that is new possible. It begins with Sara Hendren and Krista Tippett.
Read MoreJames 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.
Read MoreIngrid 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 illuminate our world and inspire us to imagine other worlds.
Read MoreMark 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.
Read MoreTina Eliassi-Rad is a network thinker, 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.
Read MoreJudith 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, and various other disciplines. She just might be the voice we need for the world we're walking into, one that crosses in-person and online boundaries and must understand interactions across media.
Read MoreThere 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.
Read MoreWe 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 conversation, drawing on science, philosophy, and art.
Read MoreTwins Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn are curious. Their work 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 be a generative narrative of our time.
Read MoreEvery 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.
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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 voices where the universal peeks out from the particular, we are also adapting the show to our changing world, a living experiment and conversation, embracing new ways of being.
Join us as we ground toward flourishing together. Running underneath every episode is curiosity and figuring about what a guest shares says about our flourishing, as individuals and as a society.
Read MoreFrank 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.
Read MoreNicole 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.
Read MoreDavid 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 between areas of thought.
Read MoreEd 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.
Read MoreAlex 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.
Read MorePoetry 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.
Read MoreAlicia Juarrero is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Prince George’s Community College (Maryland) 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.
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