Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan

Alex 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.

Origins Podcast website

Show Notes: 

• Quaker meeting (09:40)
  • Empowerment
• The skills of listening and gathering (11:40)
• The politics of your social experience (12:10)
• Worldbuilding
  • "Storytelling Shapes the Future" 
  • Every world is a holistic system at multiple scales
• Minority Report (22:00)
• Triangle of narrative design (27:00)
• Relationship to complex systems (27:30)
• Counterfactuals to explore a world (27:50)
• Cultivating interdisciplinary collaboration in teams (28:00)
• Scenius (29:00)
• Building enough of a framework to know what we don't know (31:00)
• Teaching (40:00)
  • The literacies of worldbuilding
  • Work collaboratively in the space of uncertainty
• Experimental Design company (44:30)
• Great 'Askers' (49:00)
• Balancing curiosity and boredom (51:00)
• MIT Media Lab (52:00)
• Scott Fisher (52:30)
• Falling forward (55:00)
• Lightning round (55:15)
  • Book: Neuromancer by William Gibson
    • Cognitive estrangement
  • Passion: Guitar
  • Heart sing: New language for molecular biology
  • Screwed up: Graphic design for record labels
• Find Alex online:
  • Twitter: @worldbldg
  • Website: https://alexmcdowell.design/
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Alex’s playlist

Poetry 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. 

Show Notes:

• Jane Hirshfield (04:30)
• Poets for Science (04:50)
• Francis Weller - how we tend the dead is as important as how we tend the living (09:30)
• Prayer wheels (14:00)
• Buddhist principles of Right Absorption and Right Understanding (17:20)
• Maggie Anderson (21:00)
• Krista Tippet - poetry is the human capacity to articulate truth at the edges of what words can touch (22:30)
  • Poems always acknowledge the limits of what can be said
• Traveling Stanzas (23:10)
• Robert Bly - metaphor is how you say something true about a complicated thing (24:00)
• Donald Hall The Unsayable Said (24:30)
• The art of gathering (27:40)
• Maj Ragain - poetry is the means by which a place comes to know itself (30:00)
• Dear Vaccine (33:20)
  • Naomi Shihab Nye
• Future of social media (35:10)
  • Jonathan Haidt
• William Stafford - poetry is the kind of thing that you have to see out of the corner of your eye and it will disappear without favor (37:00)
• Richard Feynman's Ode to Wonder (39:00)
• Healing the Heart of Democracyby Parker J Palmer (42:00)
• Dear Ukraine (48:20)
• Marge Piercy (50:00)
• Pursuing a question (51:40)
• Lightning round (53:00)
  • Book: New Self, New Worldby Philip Shepherd
  • Passion: Dancing (Teju Cole - sitting in the dark waiting for something to happen)
  • Heart sing: Staging Dear Vaccine
  • Screwed up: Salacious poetry for kindergarteners 
• Find David online:
  • Kent State University
  • Twitter: @DavidWickPoetry
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • David’s playlist

Alicia Juarrero is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Prince George’s Community College 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.

Show Notes:

• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (03:31)
  • Live the questions
  • Duino Elegies
• User Friendly by Cliff Kuang (11:50)
• Herbert Simon and the importance of information diet (12:50)
• The Self-Organizing Universe by Erich Jantsch (15:00)
• Dave Snowden Cynefin Framework (20:00)
  • Dave on Origins
• Aristotelian four causes (22:30)
• Emergence (27:40)
• Network thinking (28:20)
  • Barabási Albert-László
  • Steven Strogatz
• Mereology (31:00)
• Order Out of Chaos by Prigogine, Stengers, and Toffler (32:15)
• Complicated vs complex (38:00)
• John Holland "fail safe and safe fail" (40:00)
• Graceful Extensibilityby David Woods (41:20)
• Vector Analytica (43:20)
• Healthy relationality (54:00)
• Trust (59:15)
• Danielle Allen (01:01:00)
• Flourishing Commons newsletter (01:02:00)
  • Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin 
  • Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom 
• Lightning round (01:03:20)
  • Book: Order Out of Chaos
  • Passion: reading broadly
  • Heart sing: how design creates context that also creates affordances
    • The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman 
    • User Friendly by Cliff Kuang
  • Screwed up: attention to ideas over people-orientated application of those ideas
• Find Alicia online:
  • Website
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Alicia’s playlist

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.

Show Notes:

• biodiversity (07:00)
• trophic networks (13:10)
• ethnography and buffer zones (15:00)
  • citizens getting involved to help biodiversity
  • participatory and co-creative nature of his work
• commons spaces (16:00)
• Garret Hardin Tragedy of the Commons (16:20)
• antiform and antidisciplinary (17:00)
• complexity (17:10)
• Malamp project (19:50)
• evince empathy not fear (21:30)
• consilience (23:15)
• the myth of either/or (24:00)
  • the complexity in us
• how do you do both art and science? (24:30)
• how we might approach conservation - connection (27:30)
• Ghosts of the Gulf exhibit (28:40)
• Stan Sessions (29:00)
• Taylor Energy Spill (32:30)
• What adaptation looks like (33:45)
• how we persist (35:00)
• giving yourself over to culture (38:30)
• Atelier de la Nature(39:00)
• Newton Harrison and ecological art (44:30)
  • Project about cajun prairie
• the impact of our actions (47:30)
  • Rebecca Solnit - Hope in the Dark
  • Poetry Unbound: Yusef Komunyakaa Praising Dark Places
• long view of time, the long arc of change (47:45)
• muscular hope (48:00)
• superorganisms and cooperation (50:00)
• civic engagement (50:30)
• Lightning round (55:00)
  • Book: Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (and EO Wilson's the Future of Life)
  • Passion: food as a way to educate
  • Heart sing: learning about gardening
  • Screwed up: process to make crude oil paintings
• Find Brandon online:
  • Website
  • Twitter: @bballengee
  • Atelier de la Nature
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Brandon's playlist

Welcome back to Origins, listeners. After a few month hiatus, we're back with an exhilarating, generative, spacious season of the show--the hiatus was in part so that I could focus on research, to launch a new series of 'salons' with the Cultural Program for the National Academy of Science (see here for an example), help ignite a new initiative toward Open Science with NASA, and to do more writing, which you can read a bit about in a new Substack newsletter (The Flourishing Commons) that is an accompaniment to these various activities. The goal of that newsletter is to think about and realize healthier relationality and welcome you to join that conversation. 

All of these activities have influenced what the next season of Origins will be. These conversations will continue to be what they always have been -- explorations of the spaces between art, science, engineering, and design with the people who live in and shape them. They will continue to reveal these individual's network of thoughts, influences, and impacts, and will continue to draw out the relevance to each of you.

But Season Five will center threshold topics we face as a society now: 

• How do we facilitate broader collaboration and wider collective intelligence? 
• How can we ask more generative questions and learn the skill of asking better questions? 
• What is the role of context and contextualization in our systems? 
• Where do we need art and science in the future of our democracy and governance? 
• How do we create a slower discourse and cultivate a quality of attention? How do we improve our information diets? 

Amidst all of these, Season five will be about ideas and practices of muscular hope and worldbuilding. It will be about 

• The philosophies of living that come from them and the way that these things are a kind of bridge to all domains of inquiry and living; universalizing ideas; ideas around which we might find consilience.
• We will be exploring the myriad places we find muscular hope and worldbuilding in our cosmos and in our history and in our imagination and the nuanced ways that they are expressed there. We will be learning that there is no one source of these things, that they exist across ways of knowing, not ways that we hold explicitly in our minds and those we have yet to give language and image to

Wittgenstein wrote that "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Let's build a new vocabulary to talk about the problems confronting us; a more muscular and spacious vocabulary  -- one generative of a new world more capable of flourishing. 

We're delighted to bring you guests that embody these ideas. No matter where you come from, what you do in this world, you will find these conversations full of curiosity and insight. 

My work is to draw out how people survive, flourish, grow, keep loving and laughing so that you can bring the ideas into your own life. That is my commitment to you with the dozen or so episodes that follow. 

Subscribe to The Flourishing Commons - a newsletter to accompany Origins episodes and to build a community around a rich forum for exchange.

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. 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.

Show Notes:

• critique and repair (06:55)
• Generous Thinking Kathleen Fitzpatrick (22:00)
  • Epistemic humility
• Relational model of change (22:50)
• The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle (24:40)
  • Becca Rothfeld 'friendship as a recognition-relation' 
• Danielle Allen 'healthy relationality' (28:30)
  • Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century
  • Education for American Democracy: Excellence in History and Civics for all Learners K-12
• Curriculum of the future (30:00)
  • Danielle Allen What is education for?
• Trabian Shorters 'asset framing' (36:30)
• Jonathan Adler and narrative identity (40:00)
• Theologian William May 'an openness to the unbidden' (43:00)
• Book: What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World (47:00)
• New America Think Tank (55:00)
• Lightning Round (57:00)
  • Book: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard 
  • Passion: Philosophy and Fiction
    • Worldbuilding
  • Heart Sing: Medieval philosophy and theology 
    • Deep Time
  • Screwed up: Losing perspective on time passing while her children were small
    • Boyhood
• Find Sara online:
  • What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World
  • Newsletter "Undefended/Undefeated"
  • Website
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Sara’s playlist

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.

Show Notes:

• the magic of doing science (04:20)
• Howell Daley (13:00)
• Some of the breadth of Michael's publications (13:30)
  • Ecology drives the worldwide distribution of human diseases
  • An ecosystem framework for understanding and treating disease
  • Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies
• An Editor's Guide to Writing and Publishing Science (13:40)
• The richness of the evolutionary perspective (14:00)
• social parasitism (22:00)
• How social interactions factor into how he sees the world (34:00)
  • Chinchorro culture
  • Marquet et al., Emergence of social complexity among coastal hunter-gatherers in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile
  • The connection of climate change and culture change
• Essence of innovation (44:20)
• The adjacent possible - Stuart Kauffman (44:30)
  • Origins of Order by Stuart Kauffman 
• Article: Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies (46:10)
• Parallel between mutation in biology and invention in technology (47:00)
• Are We Publishing Too Many Articles? (51:30)
• The knowledge commons (51:45)
• The hedonic treadmill (52:10)
• Science and art (55:30)
• Evaluation culture (55:50)
• Lightning round (01:05:20)
  • Book: Exercised by Daniel Lieberman
  • Passion: Listening to and playing music music
  • Heart sing: blogging
  • Screwed up: Remaining in certain collaborations too long
• Find Michael online:
  • Blog: https://mehochberg.wixsite.com/blog
  • Twitter: @HochTwit
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Michael’s playlist

For years Dave Snowden has helped me understand how to navigate a complex world better than perhaps any other thinker. He draws so widely from all schools of thought in forming frameworks for sensemaking.

This episode is expanding. It will be with me for a long time and I hope it stays with you, too. 

Read more at: https://www.originspodcast.co/episodes-1

Show Notes:

• Complicated vs complex (08:00)
  • Paul Cilliers
  • Dynamics in Action Alicia Juarrero 
• Lecture: "How not to manage complexity"
• The Patterning Instinct Jeremy Lent (16:00)
• Tropes in narrative theory (17:50)
• Assemblage and 'lines of flight' -- Gilles Deleuze (18:10)
• Jacques Derrida 'Aporia' (22:20)
• How the light gets in Festival (29:15)
• Flourishing Salons (29:40)
• Cynefin Framework (24:00 & 32:50)
• Nora Bateson Origins episode (37:00)
• Bateson-Snowden "When Meaning Loses Its Meaning" (37:00)
• Stacey Matrix (39:00)
• Daily routines (50:00)
• Hope (51:10)
  • Hope in the Dark Rebecca Solnit
  • Theology of Hope Jürgen Moltmann
  • Hope Without Optimism & Radical Sacrifice Terry Eagleton
  • Krista Tippet 'muscular hope'
• Lightning Round (55:30)
  • Book: Spirit in the World Karl Rahner
  • Passion: Walking and rugby
  • Heart Sing: New framework 
  • Screwed Up: senior leadership course at IBM
• Find Dave online:
  • Twitter: @snowded
  • LinkedIn
  • The Cognitive Edge (Dave's blog)
  • Sensemaker ethnographic tool
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Dave’s playlist

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.

Show Notes:

• Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit (07:00)
  • Helping anyone find their place in science
  • The value and beauty and complexity of science
• Trajectory of a person's education (09:30)
  • Martin Storksdieck Origins Episode
• Interactive data visualization (10:30)
• Long view of time (11:45)
• The ubiquity and importance of networks (14:45 and 21:00) 
• How we map what we don't know (16:15)
• Human BioMolecular Atlas Program Consortium (HuBMAP) - map the human body at a single-cell resolution (16:50)
  • Human Cell Atlas Project
  • HuBMAP massive open online course (MOOC)
• Douglas Hofstadter and Indiana University Cognitive Science Program (22:00)
• Indiana University Advanced Visualization Lab (22:10)
• Mentorship and advice (23:20)
• The Atlas series of books (27:00)
  • Atlas of Science: Visualizing what we know
  • Atlas of Knowledge: Anyone can map
  • Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures
• Capacity for communication (36:00)
• Organization and curation (36:10)
• Team science (36:30)
• Networks and network science (43:00)
  • Indiana University Network Science Institute
• Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall (45:00)
• Morning Routine (45:30)
• Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit (47:00)
• Lightning Round (49:00)
  • Book: Edward Tufte
  • Passion: Cooking
  • Heart Sing: Atlas of the human body
  • Screwed up: Impatience and the impact it has on certain people/relationships
• Find guest online:
  • Website
  • Twitter: @katycns
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Katy’s playlist

This episode originally aired on June 4, 2020. 

There are new episodes coming to you soon, so stay tuned. 

But now is a good time to revisit wise words from one of my favorite previous guests, Cecilia Conrad, Managing Director of the MacArthur ('Genius') Fellows Program and the 100&Change program. 

The 2021 class of MacArthur Fellows was announced in late September 2021. In Cecilia Conrad's words, “As we emerge from the shadows of the past two years, this class of 25 Fellows helps us reimagine what’s possible. They demonstrate that creativity has no boundaries. It happens in all fields of endeavor, among the relatively young and more seasoned, in Iowa and Puerto Rico. Once again, we have the opportunity for exultation as we recognize the potential to create objects of beauty and awe, advance our understanding of society, and foment change to improve the human condition.”

There are themes that have emerged from this show that I didn't think when I launched it would become central to what we explore in these conversations. One of those themes is the breadth of awe in this world and how we experience it individually and collectively, how it disarms each of us to our most elemental and constellates the world to its greatest height. 

The way that Cecilia empowers and imagines the world of awe that could be in her life as in her work was one of the powerful influences for this theme on Origins. 

Like a book read at different times, this conversation will take on new life for whatever the pivotal moment you are in right now, the ones realized and the ones we may only see in hindsight. 

If you enjoyed this conversation, check out these other episodes:

• Dan Goods - design at NASA, life's throughlines of wonder, and the museum of awe
• Episode 25: César Hidalgo - Information and complexity, learning and leading, rethinking technology in society
• Episode 23: Giorgia Lupi - Harmonizing life and data through design