Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan

Dr. and professor Jessica Flack has been a dream guest for Origins since the beginning - the kind of generous intellect and polymath whose words and work expand everyone around her. She also might be the person we can place our trust in to help us learn how to make sense of an increasingly complex world.

Show Notes:

• Josh Epstein - agent-based modeling (04:20)
• The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and complex systems thinking (07:30)
  • Mark Newman and network science
  • Murray Gell-Mann
• The Synergism Hypothesis by Peter A. Corning (14:00)
• The Biology of Moral Systems by Richard D. Alexander (16:00)
  • Indirect reciprocity
• Collective Computation Group (C4) (19:20)
  • Coarse-graining
  • How do everyone's coarse-graining converge?
  • Jim Crutchfield
• John Hopfield (23:30)
• Studying social dynamics in macaque societies (29:40)
• People in her close network (37:00)
  • Rob Boyd
  • Dave Bacon
  • David Krakauer
  • John Baez
  • Nihat Ay
• Physical fitness (41:00)
  • The Sports Gene by David Epstein
• Scale by Geoffrey West (41:20)
• Morning routine (47:00)
• Lightning round (49:00)
  • Book: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 
    • Jorge Luis Borges
  • Passion: Cooking and Walter Fontana "Functional self-organization in complex systems"
  • Heart sing: Surfing
  • Screwed up: Mathematical skills training
• Find Jessica online:
  • Website
  • Twitter: @C4COMPUTATION
  • Instagram: jcflack1
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Jessica’s playlist

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

Show Notes:

• Pythagoras - a rock is music frozen in time (09:00)
• Evolving according to where our culture is (11:20)
• Iannis Xenakis (12:30) 
• Peripersonal and Extrapersonal space (15:40)
• AlloSphere (17:00 and 36:00)
  • TED Talk - a new way to see
  • Data sonification 
  • Origins episode #7 with Matt Russo
• Buddhist principle of impermanence (22:10)
• In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (23:00)
• New field of "Digital Multimedia" (28:30)
  • Computer science and electrical engineering
  • Signal processing and programming
  • Music and visual arts
• Media Arts and Technology Program (29:50)
• Proprioception (39:10)
• Paideia (40:30)
• How do we go from the familiar to the strange? (47:00)
• Morning routine (48:00)
• The Impersonal Life by Joseph Benner (49:00)
• Bardo (53:30)
• Lightning Round (54:00)
  • Book: 
    • Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda
    • The Simarillion by JRR Tolkien
  • Passion: Running, riding, exercise on a mountain
  • Heart sing: the AlloSphere and the proximity to the frontier of science and art; Students dreams
  • Screwed up: Preoccupation with work over family
• Find JoAnn online:
  • Website
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • JoAnn’s playlist

I have trouble wrapping any adequate labels around this episode’s guest, Paco Nathan. Paco is a technologist, data scientist and an evangelist of a brighter data and technology future. He has an uncommon ability to synthesize the gaps and trends in this complex and evolving space, and gives me hope that we can create a more flourishing future within it.

Show Notes:

• Origins of Artificial Intelligence and mentors (06:00)
  • Humberto Maturana ("What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain")
  • Fernando Flores
  • Francisco Varela
  • Terry Winograd
• Cybernetics by Norbert Weiner (06:30)
• Project Cybersyn (07:00)
• Autopoiesis and Cognition by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
• Expert systems (13:20)
• Bell Labs (16:30)
• Hopfield network (16:50)
• Systems thinking (22:30)
• What is data science? (22:45)
  • DJ Patil
  • John Tukey
• The complexities of today's world (29:50)
• Complexity and emergence (31:00)
• How Learning Works by Susan Ambrose (32:00)
• Panama papers (39:00)
• How to think in graphs daily (41:30)
  • Have a shape in mind, even if you don't have the labels yet
• Ambiguity aversion (47:40)
  • "Unknown unknowns"
• Dave Snowden and Cynefin Framework (47:45)
  • Complex areas: no deterministic approach will arrive at a 'right answer'
• Medium posts: Sense and Scalability and Graph thinking (51:00)
• derwen.ai (52:30)
• How he takes notes (58:00)
• Lightning Round (01:01:00):
  • Book: Ecotopia Emerging by Ernest Callenbach
  • Passion: cooking
  • Heart sing: sustainability and regenerative processes (open science)
  • Screwed up: book store
    • Recommender system
• Find guest online:
  • Twitter: @pacoid
  • Website: https://derwen.ai/paco
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Paco’s playlist

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.

Show Notes:

• Life's Edge Carl Zimmer (03:00)
• Four Lost Cities Annalee Newitz
• Our conversation on the Alien Crash Site podcast - youtube or audio (06:10)
• The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) (07:00)
• Interplanetary Project (16:50)
• 'Wicked' problems (24:45)
• What is complexity? (25:30)
• Murray Gell-Mann (26:50)
• Gilles Deleuze (27:30)
• Valery Plame (34:00)
• James Drake (35:00)
• Feynman diagrams (35:10)
• David Krakauer (36:30)
• Jorge Luis Borges (39:20)
• How Emotions are Made Lisa Feldman Barrett (41:40)
• Two types of entropy in communication - Vanessa Ferdinand (50:00)
• Ted Chiang "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (52:30)
• Roadside Picnic the Strugatsky Brothers (53:00)
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Haruki Murakami (58:00)
• Lightning Round (59:00)
  • Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • Passion: Visual arts
  • Heart sing: Charcuterie
  • Screwed up: Education
• Find guest online:
  • Twitter: @SantaFeMcShea
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Caitlin’s playlist

Professor Anima Anandkumar is a meteor in the field of artificial intelligence or AI. Her rise in the space has been a phenomenon to behold and her voice is a refreshing and inviting one that might just alter the trajectory of AI and society.

Show Notes:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) (01:00)
• Love of the liminal spaces (03:20)
• Philosophy and connection to AI (07:30)
  • Advaita Vedanta
• The science of creativity (10:00)
• Never run out of problems to solve (11:20)
• Supervised and Unsupervised Learning (14:00)
• Doris Tsao at Caltech (15:30)
• AGI = Artificial General Intelligence (16:30)
• TED talks (19:40)
  • 2018 "Trinity of Artificial Intelligence" 
  • 2021 "Can Artificial Intelligence be conscious too?"
• What can you not do by simply scaling up? (20:20)
• Bongard-LOGO Challenge (21:00)
• Edge AI (23:30)
• Doris Tsao - what is the role of feedback in how we study things? (26:10)
• “What I cannot create, I do not understand” -Richard Feynman (26:40)
• The alignment problem (28:40)
• GPT model (37:00)
• The importance of metrics (38:50)
• Flourishing (39:00)
• Nick Bostrom paper clip thought experiment (39:50)
• Social media (41:00)
• Advocacy for women and minorities (43:00)
  • Timnit Gebru (44:00)
  • Joy Buolamwini (44:00)
  • AI4All (45:30)
  • Caltech Wave Program (45:40)
• me too. Movement (47:40)
• Curriculum for a flourishing society (50:00)
• Frederick Eberhardt at Caltech
• Lightning Round (54:20)
  • Book: Michio Kaku Hyperspace
  • Passion: Dancing
  • Heart sing: Rethinking how we interact with the world; yoga
  • Screwed up: Twitter presence
• Find Anima online:
  • http://tensorlab.cms.caltech.edu/users/anima/
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anima-anandkumar/
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Anima’s playlist

Dan Goods is a leader among the community of creatives at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so he's an imaginer among imaginers. A creator among creators. He's one of the most innovative minds I've come across, and someone who embodies selflessness and that most wonderful and contagious quality that is an insatiable curiosity. 

Show Notes:

• How he decided to go to art school (08:00)
• Out of Control by Kevin Kelly (10:30)
• David Kremers (10:30)
  • Long view of time 
• Roland Young (11:30)
• Teachers as cultivators of attention (13:45)
• How movable is your current perception of the limit? (14:10)
• The bridge to nowhere in LA (18:30)
• Echo mountain in LA (19:20)
• The places Los Angeles forgot (20:00)
• Design philosophy (21:00)
  • Is it awesome?
• Tools for new perception (23:30)
  • Dials metaphor (Lou Danzinger)
  • Turning something upside down
  • Using your thumb to block things out (restrict the senses)
• Story of getting to NASA JPL (26:30)
• Giving to others the gifts you have received (36:30)
  • Reciprocity
• Exoplanet Travel Bureau (40:30)
• Life is your PhD (46:00)
• JPL's The Studio (47:00)
• Curriculum for design thinking (47:10)
• Help someone think through their thinking (54:00)
• Dan's TED talk "The museum of awe" (55:30)
• Re-sensitizing ourselves to life (56:40)
  • Beginner's mind; Curiosity studies; Cognitive science: Exploration over exploitation
• Erwin McManus
  • It is a gift and privilege to be alive
• Lightning Round (01:02:30)
  • Book: Dr. Seuss
  • Passion: Exercise and perseverance 
  • Heart sing: Listen to a million people singing at once
  • Screwed up: Learning to lead a team
• Find guest online:
  • Website: http://www.directedplay.com
  • Twitter: @dangoods
  • Instagram: @iamdangoods
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Dan’s playlist

During two years spent at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, curiosity-driven coffee conversations every morning with people who surprised and inspired me sparked an endless fascination with the pivotal moments across a life. Travels to leading art, science, engineering, and design institutions around the world nourished my passion and blossomed into the conversations you hear on Origins every other week. 

On Origins we bring you conversations with thought-leaders across an eclectic mix of disciplines (science, engineering, art, and design), crafted specifically for the category-defying society that we live in. Join us as we explore the people expanding our world along with their network of thoughts, influences, and impacts, and what meaning they hold for you. 

Over the past 18 months we have published 33 mind-expanding, path-altering conversations. The craft of the show has evolved over that time (just go back and listen to the first few episodes to see just how far it has come) and we welcome these changes as the only way to respond to our uncertain society. Today we release Season Four as the next step in that evolution. 

We have used the personal 'trajectory' as a way of organizing things. Trajectories are not always best experienced in a sequential way and I believe there are better dimensions for organizing them. That is the structure of this podcast - the complex exploration of these trajectories to meet the complex lives of our guests and so that you can relate them to your own. On this season we will lean in to that complexity at a time when the world demands this kind of rethinking of each of us. 

Over the next dozen or so episodes we will explore topics central to our society today, including: the philosophy of design and what it means for science and society, the deeper view of artificial intelligence, becoming a planetary civilization and the science and engineering we need, thinking collectively rather than individually and the groups and institutions that are showing us how, the global commons, what it means to flourish as individuals and as groups, and much much more. 

The thought-leaders you will hear from over the next dozen or so episodes come from around the globe and are those that are creating the waves that will shape our society of the future. I cannot overstate how excited I am for you to hear each one.  

The speakers we bring to the show are much more than the conversation we can possibly have in an hour. They are worlds and they bring us into contact with many other worlds. We use the show notes to be a kind of network of those worlds, helping you take the ideas into your own life and explore the web of information. 

If you enjoy the show, it goes a long way to helping others discover it and experience whatever joy or expansion you have by rating us on Apple Podcasts and leaving a review. 

You can find and share Origins wherever you get your podcasts (Apple, Google, Spotify, etc.) and we are appreciative of any posts on Instagram or Twitter to thoughts an episode sparked in you. Help us create a community around these brilliant conversations.

Finally, we are always drawing inspiration from new people and looking to bring those voices to Origins. Please share who is inspiring you and that you might like to hear on the show. Drop us an email from our website OriginsPodcast.co or send me a note on Twitter (@AeroSciengineer). 

Peter Turchi takes the art and act of writing as an irresistible analog for the art and the act of living. His work is part of a long tradition of fascination with processes of writers and he is among the masters at relating that process in a way that reaches all domains of society. For anyone who has ever thought about writing - the craft of it, its centrality in the human experience, its analog for life itself - this conversation is for you.

Show Notes:

• How he began writing (04:30)
• Dealing with rejection (12:00)
• Richard Russo writer (18:00)
• Maps of the Imaginations: The Writer as Cartographer (18:30)
• The Power of Maps by Dennis Woods (21:30)
  • Other brilliant books on maps
• Jorge Luis Borges (19:00)
• Origins - Melanie Mitchell (28:30)
• Lisa Feldman Barrett (28:45)
• The Atlas of Cyberspace by Rob Kitchin (29:30)
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte (30:15)
• Origins - Giorgia Lupi (31:20)
• Origins - Matt Russo (31:30)
• MFA Program at Warren Wilson (34:40)
• Productivity-driven culture (38:15)
• Alison Gopnik - Explore/Exploit paradigm (41:30)
• Charles Ritchie artist (45:30)
• E.O. Wilson - “A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree” (46:40)
• A Muze and a Maze (46:00)
• The Book of Sand by Borges (51:30)
• Joan Dideon “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear” 
• Peter's daily routine (53:45)
• Lightning round (58:00):
  • Book: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 
  • Passion: Music
  • Making heart sing: Sonoran Desert
• Find guest online:
  • http://www.peterturchi.com/
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Peter’s playlist

Ethan Zuckerman is a voice that you need to know. He’s a pioneer for the use of media as a tool for social change, for cultivating international development with technology, and for the activation of new media technologies by activists. Ethan is uncommonly insightful about the currents and trends of our society. In this conversation he helps us understand the shape of our public discourse, and relates it to the world of today and tomorrow.

Show Notes:

• Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - Sonder (05:00)
• Book: Rewire (08:00)
• MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media (12:00)
  • Nathan Matias (Cornell)
  • Catherine D'Ignazio (MIT)
  • Molly Sauter (University of Maryland)
• The Good Citizen Michael Schudson  (16:00)
• The Social Machine Judith Donath (16:20)
• Rachel Barenplat: the velveteen rabbi (18:40)
• QAnon (22:30)
• Global voices  (28:40)
• Small communities doing digital connection well (29:50)
  • Michael Wood Lewis - Front Porch Forum
  • Esra'a Al Shafei
  • Sara Lomax-Reese - WURD Radio
• Origins episode with Richard Bartlett and Microsolidarity (33:45)
• The slow professor by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber (35:00)
• Mistrust (37:00)
• Twilight of the elites Chris Hayes (38:30)
• Black lives matter and defund the police (40:30)
• Problem with a zero sum view (44:30)
• The sum of us by Heath McGhee (47:45)
• Lightning round (50:40):
  • Book: The Creation of the Media by Paul Starr
  • Passion: Music and ethnomusicology
  • Heart sing: Traveling (blog) and board games
  • Screwed up: Relationship
    • Joke answer: invented the pop-up ad
• Find guest online:
  • Twitter: @EthanZ
  • https://ethanzuckerman.com/
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Ethan’s playlist

We find ourselves in a world that feels incongruent and unfamiliar, changing socially and technologically at paces that expose conventional explanations as inadequate. Climate change, pandemics, political unrest have punctuated this new century and feel like clarion calls for new ways of being and being together. Enter Richard D. Bartlett — someone who has been a pioneer in thinking about these new modes.

Show Notes:

• Apologetics (06:30)
• What is community? (06:50)
• The concept of flourishing (08:15)
• Having a gift/role in the world (12:00)
  • Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass "The most important thing that each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world" 
• Occupy movement (12:00)
  • J.P. Lederach's "Critical Yeast" from The Moral Imagination
• Governance strategies for our time (18:30)
• What it takes to scale community authentically? (25:00)
• Does change need to be orchestrated from a central point? (28:00)
• Complexity (31:00)
• Microsolidarity (31:30)
  • Enspiral
  • 'Crews'
• How to weave social fabric blog post (43:00)
• Morning routine (43:10)
• Adrienne Maree Brown We Will Not Cancel Us (44:00)
• Writing practice (45:00)
• Sendhil Mullainathan Scarcity (49:45)
• Lightning Round (50:30)
  • Books: 
    • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsig
    • The listening society Hanzi Freinacht
    • Sandtalk Tyson Yunkaporta
    • On Orality and Literacy Walter Ong
  • Tomas Björkman Origins episode
  • Passion: inventing instruments
  • Sonification - Matt Russo Origins episode
  • Heart sing: nonlinear and nonlogical use of language
  • Screwed up: Cheating on a partner, violating the terms of a relationship
• Find guest online:
  • Twitter: @RichDecibels
  • Follow Richard on Medium
  • Richard's website
  • https://www.thehum.org/
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series  
  • Richard’s playlist