Brandon Ballengée - Biodiversity, muscular hope, and the persistence of life

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 environmental educator.

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Ryan McGranaghan
Announcing Season Five of Origins!

After a few month hiatus, we're back with an exhilarating, generative, spacious season of the Origins Podcast! Join us as we explore threshold topics of our days through the lens we’ve always had: explorations of the spaces between art, science, engineering, and design with the people who live in and shape them, drawn out in ways that will be meaningful to you.

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Ryan McGranaghan
Sara Hendren - Healthy relationality, how we meet the built world, and the curriculum of the future

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. It both describes her well as someone who makes a life-defying categories and is at the same time too small for her expansive presence in this world. She is a brilliant designer, an affecting educator, and just might be the source of language that will transform the way you witness the world.

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Ryan McGranaghan
Michael Hochberg - mystery and our pivotal moments, innovation, and science from cells to societies

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 societies.

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Ryan McGranaghan
Dave Snowden - Sensemaking, complexity, and frameworks for living

For years now I've wanted to speak with Dave Snowden because he has helped me understand complexity and how to navigate a complex world better than perhaps any other thinker. At the same time, it's intimidating to interview someone who draws so widely from all schools of thought and can be so coherent on a topic as immense and complicated as sensemaking.


Dave Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based management-consulting firm specializing in complexity and sensemaking. He's the developer of the Cynefin Framework--a conceptual framework used to aid decision-making across any context.

It is Dave's ability to weave seamlessly across fields of anthropology, ecology, philosophy, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, engineering, and complex adaptive systems theory, pulling together a coherent, inspiring, and actionable fabric of thought that has always drawn me to his work.

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Ryan McGranaghan
Katy Börner - Networks, noticing what we don't expect, and an atlas for navigating our world

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 our society and demands new ways of witnessing them.

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Ryan McGranaghan
(Best Of) Cecilia Conrad - Steward of the MacArthur Genius Grants, 100 million dollars, and transcendent empowerment

Cecilia Conrad reimagines what it means to ‘empower,’ embracing the idea throughout her life and transcending it to radically change the world as the steward of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grants and 100&Change Program. She offers guidance about how to think about empowerment to bring change to our own lives and to connect us with change in the world.

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Ryan McGranaghan
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin - The AlloSphere, a deeper integration of art and science, and the new senses we need now

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer. But the music she writes is more than mere notes. Her 'music' is both song and her research into new modes of immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation, finding new frontiers at the intersection of science, engineering, art, and design. Through art as with science, her work seeks to create as she says, "an exponential rise in consciousness."

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Ryan McGranaghan
Caitlin McShea - Meeting places of art and science, interplanetary thinking, and an imaginative life

Caitlin McShea is that special kind of curious that you cannot help but be inspired by, and she has the intellect to spread that curiosity over any domain. For the past ten years in roles varying from director of art galleries, curator and coordinator of exhibits, and now as a program manager at the Santa Fe Institute, she has been giving language, image, and concreteness to some of the most imaginative and futuristic thoughts of our age.

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Ryan McGranaghan