Simplifying Complexity

By Sean Brady from Brady Heywood

What's Simplifying Complexity about?

Simplifying Complexity is a podcast about the underlying principles of complex systems. On the show, we explore the key concepts of complexity science with expert minds from around the world. Each episode focuses on an interview where we break down a specific concept in detail.

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Simplifying Complexity episodes:

05.27.2024
A puzzle, a problem, and a mess
Gerald Ashley is the Co-founder and Managing Director of St Mawgan & Co, a London-based strategy and risk consulting agency. In today’s episode, Gerald explores the difference between risk and uncertainty, the challenges of managing them in the financial world, and...
05.13.2024
Is complexity economics the answer?
Nicholas Gruen is the CEO of Lateral Economics, Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, and a Visiting Professor at Kings College London. In this episode, Nicholas discusses the limitations of traditional economic models and emphasises the importance of nuanced problem-solving. He...
04.29.2024
Making sense of chaos with Doyne Farmer
J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Baillie Gifford Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and an External Professor at the...
04.15.2024
Decoding the Panama Papers - Part 2
Continuing from our last episode, we’re joined again by Brooke Harrington, Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and Herbert Chang, Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College. In this episode, Brooke and Herbert explore their research findings on the...
04.01.2024
Decoding the Panama Papers - Part 1
In today’s episode, we’re joined by Brooke Harrington, Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and Herbert Chang, Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College, to discuss the world of offshore finance. You’ll hear about how using offshore finance is...
03.18.2024
How cities drive economic progress
What role do cities play in driving economic progress? In today’s episode, we’re joined by Luis Bettencourt, Professor at the University of Chicago and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, who explains how cities allow us to do something magical...
03.04.2024
Big Ideas: The Origin of Life
How does a group of molecules transition into something that is life? And what do even mean when we say 'life'? To explore the origin of life, we’re joined again by Sara Walker, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental...
02.19.2024
In conversation with Rory Sutherland - Part 2
In today’s episode, we continue our conversation with Rory Sutherland, UK Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, where he discusses how our decision making, especially as consumers, while often appearing irrational, is actually the result of us deploying heuristics that have served...
02.05.2024
In conversation with Rory Sutherland - Part 1
In today’s episode of Simplifying Complexity, we’re joined by Rory Sutherland. Rory is the UK Vice Chairman of the iconic advertising agency (and inspiration for the television series Madmen) Ogilvy, where he has worked for close to 40 years. In today’s...
01.22.2024
The geometry of music
Today we're joined by Dmitri Tymoczko, Professor of Music at Princeton University. Dmitri will talk about the geometry and patterns we hear in music, as well as explore its history, particularly from the 1900s onwards. Resources: Spotify playlist of songs mentioned in...
01.08.2024
How can we harness the wisdom of the crowd?
Experts often build models to help predict how systems will behave. But what happens if, instead of asking the experts to build models, we ask laypeople to simply predict outcomes? This is what happens in 'prediction markets'. And it turns out...
12.25.2023
Predicting power grid failure
We’ve spoken previously on the show about the complexity of the power grid. Today we’re focusing on how it fails, in the form of blackouts, and we're joined again by Seth Blumsack. He'll discuss why blackouts are so difficult to...
12.11.2023
The Mathematics of War: Part 2
In our last episode, Neil Johnson explained how there was an underlying power law with a slope of 1.8 that described the number of casualties that occur in wars. Today’s episode digs deeper into where this power law comes from, the...
11.27.2023
The Mathematics of War: Part 1
When we think of what caused a certain number of people to die in a specific war, we tend to think about a number of factors. for example, the terrain or political drivers. But what if the number of deaths...
11.13.2023
Big Ideas: Time
Throughout the history of science, the concept of time has changed many times - from Newton and thermodynamic definitions to the weirdness of relativity and quantum mechanics. And as our understanding of life and the universe continues to grow, is...
10.30.2023
Energy markets and the power grid
Hidden in plain sight over our heads, under our feet, and in the walls of our homes and workplaces, is the backbone of modern society: the power grid. To explain how something as seemingly straightforward as the power grid has become...
10.16.2023
How economic policies are gamed
Economic policies are often gamed by individuals for personal benefit. In this episode, we explore how this gaming takes place and what economics can do about it. To do that, we're joined again by W. Brian Arthur, External Professor at...
10.02.2023
What makes us creative?
In this series so far, we've applied complexity science to a whole range of systems, particularly those more obvious complex systems like economies or cities. In this episode, we're going to do something a little bit different and apply complexity...
09.18.2023
Cities as social reactors
Today we're joined by Luis Bettencourt, Professor at the University of Chicago, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Luis is going to pull apart how cities work, why they work the way they do, what's good about them,...
09.04.2023
How do you map a volcanic plume?
Today, we're going to return to the idea of taking concepts from complexity science and applying them to situations in the real world. In this episode, we're joined again by Melanie Moses, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New...
08.21.2023
How do fireflies synchronise?
Orit Peleg is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Orit has been on the show before, to discuss how bees work as a complex system. In this episode, we're...
08.07.2023
How does a poor kid get ahead? Part 2
In our last episode, you heard all about economic mobility. In this episode (which is part 2 of our conversation), you're going to hear again from Matthew Jackson, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and External Faculty...
07.24.2023
How does a poor kid get ahead? Part 1
If you're a child born into a poor family in the United States, what are the most important factors in your life that will influence whether or not you're able to rise out of poverty? To answer that question, we're joined...
07.10.2023
The sand pile model
When a system fails, how do you think about cause and effect? One way to consider this in complex systems is to imagine a pile of sand, and dropping one grain of sand at a time in random positions onto...
06.26.2023
Big Ideas: Information
When most of us think about information, we think of it as something we can possess or ‘know’. But what if it’s so much more than that? In this episode, we’re joined by Sara Walker, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center...
06.12.2023
The El Farol problem
Imagine you have a bar that comfortably seats 60 people, but every week, 100 people have to decide whether or not they're going to go to the bar on any given night. If too many people go, then the bar...
05.29.2023
The 10 features of complex systems: Part 2
In our last episode, we talked about the four conditions of complex systems: numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback, and non-equilibrium — and we also talked about the concept of emergence. In this episode, which is part two of our two-part...
05.15.2023
The 10 features of complex systems: Part 1
In most of our episodes so far, we've taken a single concept and looked at it through the context of a single example. But in this episode and the next, we're going to pull back the camera to get a...
05.01.2023
Intelligence 2: Is artificial intelligence really intelligent?
In our last episode we talked all about intelligence, specifically about what made us intelligent. In this episode we jump into artificial intelligence, and we're joined again by David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at...
04.17.2023
Intelligence 1: What makes us intelligent?
With the recent release of GPT-4, now seemed like a good time for our episodes on intelligence. And not just artificial intelligence, but intelligence in general. To help us on this journey, we're joined again by David Krakauer, President and...
04.03.2023
When jazz music tips
If there's one type of music that goes particularly well with complexity science, it's free jazz. The sort of jazz that you get when you put a group of musicians together without a conductor or any written music. But despite...
03.20.2023
Can robots cooperate?
Imagine you were going to Mars with a swarm of robots, and you needed to send those robots out foraging. How would you program them? A traditional top-down approach to programming would mean programming what every single robot is going...
03.06.2023
Scaling 3: Why companies die, but cities don't
In the last few episodes, we learnt all about scaling laws or power laws and how they apply to mammals. In this episode, the final part of our discussion of scaling and complex systems, for now, we're looking even bigger. We're...
02.20.2023
Scaling 2: You and I are fractals
In our last episode, you heard all about the relationship between a mammal's weight and its metabolic rate, and how this holds true regardless of the size of the mammal. You heard other examples of so-called scaling laws, and how...
$Scaling 2: You and I are fractals$
02.06.2023
Scaling 1: Why do we live longer than mice?
Have you ever thought about why the average human lifespan is 80 years? Or why smaller animals, like mice, live for much shorter periods compared to large animals like blue whales? To help answer these questions, we're joined by Geoffrey West,...
01.23.2023
How do bees self-organise?
One of the things that make complexity science so fascinating is the diversity of the systems that it applies to. In this series so far, you've learnt about everything from ecologies to economies, tipping points in ecologies and economies, to...
01.09.2023
The Economy and Complexity Science: Part 2
In our last episode, we heard from W. Brian Arthur, who shared his journey in economics as he studied increasing returns. Now, Brian's going to take us to 1987, to a small meeting in the Rockies in Santa Fe. At...
12.26.2022
The Economy and Complexity Science: Part 1
Mitchell Waldrop's 'Complexity' brought complexity science into the limelight with an account of the early days of the Santa Fe Institute. One of the people who appear in this book is W. Brian Arthur, the engineer turned economist who found...
12.12.2022
Modelling the spread of coronavirus in the lungs
How do you model a complex system? Traditionally we would observe how the system is behaving and create equations to mimic this behaviour, but this doesn't work for complex systems. This is because the interactions between agents in a complex...
11.28.2022
What made the Medici family so influential?
A key part of complexity science is understanding the behaviour of networks. Networks are groups of interacting agents, and they're all around us; our friendship groups, our colleagues, and even interactions online are all examples of networks. But what role...
11.14.2022
What makes ant colonies robust?
In our last episode with Tyler Marghetis, we learnt about how a complex system can tip from one state into another. But what happens when systems don't tip or fail? What makes a system robust? In today's episode, we're talking with...
10.31.2022
Can you tell when a system is about to tip?
A fascinating property of a system's behaviour is its ability to change, and change quickly. For example, how does an economy go from boom to bust so suddenly and unpredictably? That is to say, how does it 'tip' from one...
10.31.2022
What is complexity science and why should you care about it?
What is complexity science, and why should you care about it? Well, complexity science is all about understanding the systems that are all around us — systems like the economy, your body, cities, companies, and the environment. To properly understand...

What's Simplifying Complexity about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Simplifying Complexity episodes:

A puzzle, a problem, and a mess

Is complexity economics the answer?

Making sense of chaos with Doyne Farmer

Decoding the Panama Papers - Part 2

Decoding the Panama Papers - Part 1

How cities drive economic progress

Big Ideas: The Origin of Life

In conversation with Rory Sutherland - Part 2

In conversation with Rory Sutherland - Part 1

The geometry of music

How can we harness the wisdom of the crowd?

Predicting power grid failure

The Mathematics of War: Part 2

The Mathematics of War: Part 1

Big Ideas: Time

Energy markets and the power grid

How economic policies are gamed

What makes us creative?

Cities as social reactors

How do you map a volcanic plume?

How do fireflies synchronise?

How does a poor kid get ahead? Part 2

How does a poor kid get ahead? Part 1

The sand pile model

Big Ideas: Information

The El Farol problem

The 10 features of complex systems: Part 2

The 10 features of complex systems: Part 1

Intelligence 2: Is artificial intelligence really intelligent?

Intelligence 1: What makes us intelligent?

When jazz music tips

Can robots cooperate?

Scaling 3: Why companies die, but cities don't

Scaling 2: You and I are fractals

Scaling 1: Why do we live longer than mice?

How do bees self-organise?

The Economy and Complexity Science: Part 2

The Economy and Complexity Science: Part 1

Modelling the spread of coronavirus in the lungs

What made the Medici family so influential?

What makes ant colonies robust?

Can you tell when a system is about to tip?

What is complexity science and why should you care about it?