Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan

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.

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

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 innate and seemingly universal tendency of things to connect to each other and all of its implications.
Origins Podcast Website

Flourishing Commons Newsletter

Show Notes:

• Preferential attachment (10:00)
• What he tells his students (13:30)
• Breakthroughs (14:00)
• 'Shelf Time' (14:30)
• The Science of Science (19:00)
• Bridging (network science) (19:00)
• His first and second papers in network science (22:00)
• Danielle Allen (28:30)
• David Lazer (https://lazerlab.net/home) 'network based decision making' (31:00)
• Hélène Landemore epistemic democracy (32:00)
• Northeastern University Network Science Institute (35:30)
• Center for Complex Network Research (36:00)
• Alessandro Vespignani (37:00)
• János Kertész (38:00)
• Jane Hirshfield "Let Them Not Say" (42:00)
• Joan Didion "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means." (44:30)
• His writing practice (44:30)
• His routines (45:00)
• Commonplace book (53:00)
• Robert K Merton "Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery" (56:30)
• What does it mean to flourish? (59:00)
• Lightning Round (01:03:30):
  • Book: Isaac Asimov The Foundation Trilogy
  • Passion: art (Hidden Patterns exhibition; 150 years of Nature)
  • Heart sing: Network medicine
  • Screwed up: Failing to invest in Google
• Find László online:
  • https://barabasi.com/
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series
  • László’s playlist

Logo artwork by Cristina Gonzalez

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