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 akin to eating at a restaurant and skipping out on the bill, and how Brooke trained to be a wealth manager to better understand how the industry works. Brooke and Herbert then discuss how they used the data from the Panama, Paradise and Pandora Papers to undertake quantitative research into the networks that make offshore finance possible.

 

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• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

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 - they allow us to specialise.

 

Resources:

• Luis Bettencourt on Simplifying Complexity - Cities as social reactors
• Geoffrey West on Simplifying Complexity - Scaling 3: Why companies die, but cities don't 

 

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• Simplifying Complexity on Twitter
• Sean Brady on Twitter
• Sean Brady on LinkedIn
• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

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 Concepts in Science, Associate Professor in Earth and Space Exploration and Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.

 

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• Simplifying Complexity on Twitter
• Sean Brady on Twitter
• Sean Brady on LinkedIn
• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

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 us well in situations of low trust or when we don't have all the information.

 

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• Simplifying Complexity on Twitter
• Sean Brady on Twitter
• Sean Brady on LinkedIn
• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

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 conversation, you’ll hear how Rory became interested in complexity science, how bees build resilience, why short-term rationality can lead to long-term irrationality, and why efficiency is a bad proxy for effectiveness.

 

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• Simplifying Complexity on Twitter
• Sean Brady on Twitter
• Sean Brady on LinkedIn
• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

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 this episode

 

Connect:

• Simplifying Complexity on Twitter
• Sean Brady on Twitter
• Sean Brady on LinkedIn
• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

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 that in some situations, the 'wisdom of the crowd' often outperforms experts' models.

To break down what prediction markets are and how they work, we're joined by Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Barnard College at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

 

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• Simplifying Complexity on Twitter
• Sean Brady on Twitter
• Sean Brady on LinkedIn
• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

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 understand, and whether or not it's possible to model them.

Seth is a Professor of Energy Policy and Economics and International Affairs in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, co-director of Penn State Center for Energy Law and Policy, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.

 

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• Simplifying Complexity on Twitter
• Sean Brady on Twitter
• Sean Brady on LinkedIn
• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

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 route that Neil's research took to explain it, and how the arrival of the internet finally provided the missing datasets required to understand the underlying structure of something seemingly as chaotic as war.

Neil is Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University.

 

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• Simplifying Complexity on Twitter
• Sean Brady on Twitter
• Sean Brady on LinkedIn
• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

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 that occur in a war is actually dictated by something far less obvious?

Neil Johnson, Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University, has returned to explain how studying the casualties of war can give us a greater understanding of the causes of war.

 

Connect:

• Simplifying Complexity on Twitter
• Sean Brady on Twitter
• Sean Brady on LinkedIn
• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.