Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan
Origins are 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. We explore the thoughts, passions, and stories that defined these pioneers’ fascinating trajectories, arriving at the origins of the pivotal moments across their lives. Draw inspiration for your own trajectory from the intellectual and spiritual electricity of these eclectic conversations.
Episodes
72 episodes
Talia Stroud - Digital communities, civic signals, and connective democracy
Natalie (Talia, as she goes by) Stroud has for years been studying the ways that our lives online show up in and shape our lives together. Her scholarship as her life are unexampled guides to the tumult, the challenges, and the opportunity pres...
•
Season 7
•
Episode 7
•
1:04:35
Simon DeDeo - Studying society, the science of science, and collisions with the strange
Simon DeDeo's inquiry takes on the most immense topics: astrophysics, history, epistemology, culture. He brings the precision of a physicist, the capability of a data scientist, and the sensibility of a philosopher to thinking about how we live...
•
Season 7
•
Episode 6
•
1:16:22
Lindy Elkins-Tanton - Recognizing flourishing, leading teams, and an education for living
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is one of the world's foremost scientists. Couple that with an unprecedented understanding of how teams work and a sense of care that is exceedingly rare in our world and you recognize her for what she is: altogether unexamp...
•
Season 7
•
Episode 5
•
56:30
Jane Hirshfield - Possibility, Poetry, and a Life of Attention
It would feel wrong to place labels on Jane Hirshfield. Language would fail to reach there, ironic for someone who has devoted their life to the practice of poetry and the practice of Zen Buddhism. Jane is a modern master, change-maker, and wis...
•
Season 7
•
Episode 4
•
1:22:29
Agustín Fuentes - A master class in anthropology and a life lived among complexity
Agustín Fuentes reads a multi-million year history of our world, a student of its myriad lessons that often subvert unquestioned modern narratives and the problematic ways we've arrived at them. His is an anthropological, ecological, refreshing...
•
Season 7
•
Episode 3
•
57:14
Albert-László Barabási - Network science, breakthrough orientation, and a life made around discovery
Albert-László Barabási thinks in networks and his scholarship, as his life, is embodiment of the explorative, imaginative, and generative nature of networks. It would be difficult to imagine a person better suited to steward us through the inna...
•
Season 7
•
Episode 2
•
1:14:43
Origins and Ongoingness: Thoughts on Season Seven
Hello friends, a new season of Origins is coming NEXT WEEK. Last season of this show was a season of flourishing. The episodes ahead we not be a season of something in particular but a movement toward process, toward open-endedness, to...
•
Season 7
•
Episode 1
•
7:57
The Great Askers (episode 1): Sara Hendren and Krista Tippett
Origins Podcast WebsiteFlourishing Commons Newsletter and the post introducing
•
Season 6
•
Episode 11
•
1:11:40
James Evans - Cultural observatories, knowledge communities, and a life resplendent with ideas
James Evans' life is one resplendent with ideas. His trajectory into research and learning in areas as wide as network science, collective intelligence, computational social science, and even how knowledge is created, is as irreducible as it is...
•
Season 6
•
Episode 10
•
1:18:13
Ingrid Daubechies - The "Godmother of digital image" on the beauty of the world
Ingrid Daubechies is endlessly, irrepressibly, beautifully curious. She is a Belgian physicist and mathematician whose scientific achievements have rippled across society in all directions for the past 35 years. But, more than that, she's a fie...
•
Season 6
•
Episode 9
•
59:44
Mark Granovetter - Weak ties, living questions, and the history and future of social science
Mark Granovetter has made and remade our understanding of social networks, social theory, collective action, and economic sociology, making and remaking our world in the process. It would not be hyperbole to say that few living scholars have ha...
•
Season 6
•
Episode 8
•
1:00:57
Tina Eliassi-Rad - A master class in network thinking and the kind of life it makes
Tina Eliassi-Rad is a network science pioneer, and an intrepid explorer of where network science shows up in our world and how we understand that. Her work, as her life, falls across network science, complexity, artificial intelligence, and com...
•
Season 6
•
Episode 7
•
58:37
Judith Donath - Technology, trust, and what holds society together
Judith Donath is a design thinker for some of the most important theory for how people interact in online spaces, drawing on evolutionary biology, architecture, ethnography, cognitive science. She just might be the voice we need for the multi...
•
Season 6
•
Episode 6
•
1:14:05
C. Thi Nguyen - This conversation will change how you see the world
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 c...
•
Season 6
•
Episode 5
•
1:15:39
Paul Wong - Reinventing cybernetics and composing a life
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 undeni...
•
Season 6
•
Episode 4
•
1:03:57
Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn - Understanding curiosity, nourishing a life, and how thoughts move
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...
•
Season 6
•
Episode 3
•
1:08:49
Julio Ottino - chaos, the capacity for emergence, and timeless ideas
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, techno...
•
Season 6
•
Episode 2
•
1:07:27
Season Six Trailer: A season of flourishing
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 exci...
•
Season 6
•
Episode 1
•
5:13
Frank White - The Overview Effect and a planetary civilization
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...
•
1:01:28
Nicole Stott - Ambassador to the cosmos and to our humanity
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 co...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 8
•
1:01:20
David Sloan Wilson - Archipelagos of knowledge, commons, and the science of cooperation
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 ...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 7
•
1:06:37
Ed Finn - Thoughtful optimism, intellectual voyaging, and a Center for Science and the Imagination
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 C...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 6
•
1:17:42
Alex McDowell - A master class in worldbuilding and designing holistic spaces
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.
•
Season 5
•
Episode 5
•
1:04:15
David Hassler - Leaping thought, authoring a life, and a spirit of passionate inquiry
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 defin...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 4
•
1:02:47
Alicia Juarrero - the philosopher who will change how you think about complexity
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 Al...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 3
•
1:08:37