Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan

Flourishing Commons Newsletter

Show Notes:

• Tsundoku (09:00)
• The cost of honesty (09:30)
• theory of mind, MIT Media Lab, and Marvin Minsky (13:00)
• Roger Schank (13:30)
• cultural metaphors (14:00)
• Ocean Vuong (17:15)
• The Architecture Machine by Nicholas Negroponte (19:30)
• Bell Labs (20:15)
• Vienna Circle (20:20)
• Sociable Media Group (22:40)
• The Social Machine by Judith Donath (23:05)
• Fernanda Viégas (35:20)
• Chat Circles (35:30)
• Gossip, Grooming, and the Evolution of Language by Robin Dunbar (39:00)
• The Strength of Weak Ties by Mark Granovetter (43:20)
• Berkman Klein Center (47:00)
• Signalling Theory (49:00)
• Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey (56:00)
• The Experimental Novel by Émile Zola (59:00)
• C Thi Nguyen Origins (59:20)
• Lightning Round (01:00:30)
  • Book: The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
  • Passion: Crossfit's way of thinking about metrics
  • Heart sing: Street photography
    • Teju Cole
  • Screwed up: Traditional academia
• Find Judith online:
  • Website
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Judith’s playlist
• Flourishing Salons
• Learning Salon AI

Artwork Cristina Gonzalez

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 Harrington (07:20)
• The Great Endarkenment Elijah Millgram (09:20)
• Trust and Antitrust Annette Baier
• Hostile Epistemology (21:20)
• The natural selection of bad science Paul Smaldino (26:40)
• The Grasshopper Bernard Suits (32:20)
• Context Changes Everything Alicia Juarrero (36:00)
• Finite and Infinite Games James Carse (36:30)
• Ulysses and the Sirens  Jon Elster (39:20)
• Andrea Westlund and Anita Superson (44:40)
• How Twitter gamifies communication (47:40)
• Reiner Knizia (48:30)
• On Being Bored out of Your Mind Milgram (56:30)
• Childhood as a solution to the explore-exploit tradeoff Alison Gopnik (59:30)
• Explanation as orgasm Gopnik (01:01:30)
• Adrian Currie (01:02:20)
• Cailin O'Connor, Kevin Zollman, Philip Kitcher (01:02:40)
• Lightning round (01:08:00)
  • Book: Rules: A Short History of What We Live By Lorraine Daston
  • Passion: Game playing
  • Heart sing: porting information; fly-fishing
  • Screwed up: three unpublished novels
• Thi online:
  • https://objectionable.net/
  • Twitter: @add_hawk
• Thi’s Five-Cut Fridays playlist
• Tyler Cowen 'reading in piles'

Artwork Cristina Gonzalez

Music swelo

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 conversation, drawing on science, philosophy, and art.

Origins Podcast Website

Flourishing Commons Newsletter

Show Notes:

• Buckminster Fuller (07:40)
• Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead (09:00)
• Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin (11:00)
• Commonwealth Grants Commission (13:10)
• Range by David Epstein (15:00)
• David Krakauer (15:20)
• Claude Shannon and information theory (17:10)
• Chaos by James Gleick (20:00)
• Duncan Watts, Barabási Albert-László , and network analysis (24:20)
• Networks the lingua franca of complex systems (25:20)
• Stephen Wolfram (25:30)
• Open Science (28:20)
• Australian National University School of Cybernetics (28:50)
• Australian Research Data Commons (29:50)
• Genevieve Bell (31:20)
• Ross Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (32:30)
• Sara Hendren on Origins and Sketch Model (36:30)
• What he tells his students (38:00)
• Alex McDowell on Origins (41:00)
• The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent and Fritjof Capra (47:30)
• Tao Te Ching (48:20)
• Morning routine (49:30)
• Lightning round (53:40)
  • Book: Special relativity and Dr. Seuss
  • Passion: Music
  • Heart sing: Stitching together cybernetics, complexity, and improvisation 
  • Screwed up: Many things
• Find Paul online: https://cybernetics.anu.edu.au/people/paul-wong/
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Paul’s playlist

Logo artwork by Cristina Gonzalez

Music by swelo on all streaming platforms or @swelomusic on social media

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:

• Homeschooling (05:00)
• Epistemology (09:00)
• multiple discovery (16:30)
• foregrounding bravery (21:00)
• Curious Minds(25:00)
• Julio Ottino on Origins (28:30)
• Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit (32:00)
• Power of curiosity for social movements (34:30)
• Three types of curiosity (40:30)
• David Lydon-Staley University of Pennsylvania (44:00)
• Cognitive flexibility and the discovery of neuroplasticity (45:30)
• Talking to Strangers by Danielle Allen (47:00)
• Amartya Sen - democracy is a knowledge and a process of social discovery (53:00)
• How thought moves (54:00)
• Dani's course 'the goals of scientific inquiry (55:15)
• Hippocampal system and mapping conceptual spaces (56:30)
• Networks as the lingua franca of complex systems (58:00)
• Lightning round (59:00)
  • Book: Dani - Follow My Leader by and A Room of One's Own by Virginia Wolff; Perry - Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and books that make him slow down
    • Susan Sontag 'I no longer trust novels which fully satisfy my passion to understand.'
  • Passion: Perry - methods, ways of asking questions; Dani - analogical power
  • Heart Sing: Dani - Spring; Perry - punctuation marks
    • On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong 
  • Screwed up: Dani - leaving nursing school; Perry - some breakups
• Find Dani online:
  • Website
  • Twitter: @DaniSBassett
• Find Perry online:
  • Website
  • Twitter: @perryzurn
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Dani and Perry’s playlist

Logo artwork by Cristina Gonzalez

Music by swelo on all streaming platforms or @swelomusic on social media

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

Flourishing Commons Newsletter

Show Notes:

• Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka influences (07:10)
• his first book: The Mathematical Foundations of Mixing(08:00)
• emergence (14:20)
  • multiple discoveries
• cultivating patience and tolerating tension (21:00)
• Oliver Sacks (24:30)
• hardest thing to teach (25:00)
• specialists vs. generalists (26:00)
• Dario Robleto at the Block Museum (29:00)
• enrich your set of possible ideas (30:00)
• mental library (30:15)
• whole brain engineering (32:00)
• Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) (38:00)
  • Emergent disciplines: synthetic biology, computational social science, finite Earth 
• measuring complexity (43:0)
  • capacity for emergence 
• science of science (44:30)
• Luis Amaral (45:30)
• Daniel Diermeier (45:30)
• Dashun Wang (47:40)
• Brian Uzzi (48:30)
• Noshir Contractor (50:00)
• Nexus book (51:30)
• An epistemology of collectivity (54:15)
• the myth of the lone genius (54:30)
• Primo Pensiero - first thought (57:00)
• Find Julio online:
  • www.juliomarioottino.com/
• Lightning round (01:01:00)
  • Book: Collected Fictionsby Jorge Luis Borges
  • Passion: documenting his life in cartoons
  • Heart sing: limits of artificial intelligence
  • Screwed up: managing people
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Julio’s playlist

Logo artwork by Cristina Gonzalez

Music by swelo on all streaming platforms or @swelomusic on social media

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.  

Over the past few weeks we have taken a short pause from new episodes. While focusing on new work and new community at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a young daughter at home, this has not been idle time, but it has been a change of pace and with different breath so, too, has come rejuvenation and unexpected generativity. Both have influenced the show.

Origins is a space for all of us to ground toward flourishing. Running underneath every episode is curiosity and figuring about what a guest shares says about our flourishing, as individuals and as a society. 

Anthropologist James Suzman says that flourishing is using our wealth well to enrich ourselves spiritually, enrich ourselves mentally, and doing social good. Political philosopher, Danielle Allen, says it is to be empowered not only in your personal lives but also in your co-participation and co-ownership of our public spaces and public lives. 

Flourishing is an unfolding, a process, not a thing and certainly not static. 

In this era of twin crises of inattention and disconnection, Join us as we explore the question of flourishing, figuring out what it is, what it looks and feels like in our lives, an orientation that requires compassion. We will dive deep into both, scientifically and spiritually. 

Through it all, we'll be asking more spacious, generative questions, creating different narratives of our time and pulling us beyond ourselves and our categories; questions we can all bring into our lives and that might reweave our civic communities.

Finally, a note about some of the themes we will be exploring: 

• The art of inquiry and curiosity
• Artificial Intelligence and society
• What we are talking about when we talk about collective intelligence and our knowledge commons
• Anthropology and ethnography, these sciences of cultural excavation
• Healthy relationality
• The civics and philosophy of science
• And in all things, the connection to flourishing, of science, of society, of life and joy. 

Please join in this living conversation. 

We have created a free Substack newsletter,The Flourishing Commons, to enrich these episodes. 

All of this is punctuated by new music and a new logo by friends of the show and kindred minds, Agasthya Pradhan Shenoy and Cristina Gonzalez. 

Follow us on Apple, Google, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 

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

Flourishing Commons Newsletter

Show Notes:

• The Overview Effect & The Cosma Hypothesis(03:00)
• Being a part of something larger than yourself (06:30)
• The overview effect as an experience (13:00)
• Gerard K. O'Neill and the Space Studies Institute (14:00)
• Hope in the Darkby Rebecca Solnit (23:40)
• Holonomy: A Human Systems Theory by Jeff Stamps (27:30)
• Nurturing a movement (29:00)
• "The further out human beings look the further inward we see" (30:00)
• Pale blue dot (30:00)
• Overview Institute (31:00)
• Space Frontier Foundation (31:10)
• 'boundary objects' (38:00)
• Institute of Noetic Sciences (40:00)
• Human Space Program (40:30)
• Edgar Mitchell and virtual reality (41:20)
• William James and noetical quality (43:00)
• Bring indigenous thinking to the conversation (47:00)
• Dan Hawk (47:00)
• Orbital Assembly Corporation (48:00)
• Danielle Wood (51:00)
• Atul Gawande "What Matters in the End" (51:00)
• From Age-ing to Sage-ing by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald Miller (52:00)
• Maria Popova on the supreme art of living (56:00)
• Lightning Round (56:00)
  • Book: The High Frontier by Gerald K O'Neill
  • Passion: spirituality
  • Heart sing: artificial intelligence
  • Screwed up: not getting PhD
• Find Frank online:
  • Twitter: @fwhite66
  • Website: https://frankwhiteauthor.com/about
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Frank’s playlist

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 Podcast Website

Flourishing Commons Newsletter

Show Notes:

• Early mentors (06:30)
• Keeping wonder alive (11:15)
• The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance by Alex Vuocolo (11:15)
• Exceptional collaboration (14:45)
• Collaborative capacity (18:20)
• Crewmates on spaceship Earth (18:30)
• How is conflict addressed on the space station? (19:00)
• Oliver Wendell Holmes 'the simplicity on the other side of complexity' (22:30)
• Her book Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet and Our Mission to Protect It.(23:10)
  • We live on a planet, we are all Earthlings, only line that matters is the thin blue line of our atmosphere 
  • Living and cooperating in space a guide for how to live and cooperate on Earth
• Morning routine (29:00)
• The Overview Effect by Frank White (31:00)
• Concluding astronaut career (36:00)
• Space for Art Foundation (40:30)
• Social and relational 'technologies' (41:30)
• Curiosity for difference (42:00)
• Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker Palmer (43:00)
• David Vaughan (45:00)
• Parenting (47:30)
• Messages of hope (45:50)
• Lightning Round (53:40)
  • Book: West with the Nightby Beryl Markham
  • Passion: Art and creativity side
  • Heart sing: Women in space & Space for Art Foundation
  • Screwed up: Self-confidence
• Find Nicole online:
  • Website
  • Twitter: @Astro_Nicole
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Nicole’s playlist

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 between areas of thought.

Origins Podcast Website

Flourishing Commons Newsletter

Show Notes:

• Atlas Hugged (06:30)
• Sociobiology by EO Wilson (12:00)
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Steven C Hayes (21:00)
• Science proceeds by seeing really good reasons for not believing the current model for reality Lindon Eaves (25:40)
• Elinor Ostrom (26:15)
• EO Wilson (26:15)
• Elliott Sober (27:00)
• Ostrom design principles for governing the commons (31:00)
• The Tragedy of the Commons [Hardin, 1968]  (34:20)
• The Neighborhood Project by Sloan Wilson (41:30)
• Richard A Kauffman (David's graduate student)
• Core competencies of prosociality (48:50)
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (49:10)
• The knowledge commons (51:00)
  • The Noosphere and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• Lynn Margulis (53:50)
• Dual inheritance theory (55:00)
• Lightning round (01:01:00):
  • Book: Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and The Secret of our Successand The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich
  • Passion: being stewards of the natural world
  • Heart sing: stewarding prosociality
• Find David online:
  • Website: https://davidsloanwilson.world/
  • Twitter: @David_S_Wilson
  • Prosocial Commons: https://thisviewoflife.com/introducing-the-prosocial-commons/
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • David’s playlist

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)
• Specialization vs generalization (07:00)
• N Katherine Hayles (12:00)
• We have never been modernby Bruno Latour (19:00)
• Franco Moretti (24:15)
• Center for Science and the Imagination (26:15)
• "Innovation Starvation" by Neal Stephenson (28:00)
• Meeting Neal Stephenson (31:40)
• Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future co-edited by Ed Finn (33:30)
• Thoughtful optimism and hope (36:30)
• Adjacent possible (38:00)
• David Foster Wallace "This is water" (41:00)
• Collaborative Imagination: A methodological approach (42:30)
• What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn (48:20)
• Effective computability (50:00)
• Halting Problem (50:30)
• Turing Machine (50:30)
• Curriculum of the future (57:30)
  • "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid" by Jonathan Haidt (58:20)
• Flourishing Salons with the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (01:03:00)
• Lightning Round (01:04:00): 
  • Book: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
  • Passion: travel and the fine art of hospitality
  • Heart sing: veteran's imagination project and K-12 futures literacy
  • Screwed up: conference calls
• Find Ed online:
  • Center for Science and the Imagination
  • Twitter: @zonal
  • Website
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Ed’s playlist