Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan

<div>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.</div>

Mette Miriam Böll - Insisting on compassion

Biologist, philosopher, educator, facilitator, and historian of science Mette Miriam Böll is embodiment of the kind of life that emerges when we accept, recognize, and revere our profound interconnectedness. Her scholarship as her life are nourishment for returning to the task we are all called to: to human well, at once simple and complex, individual and civilizational. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: Tibetan Book of the Dead (04:20)Dzogchen - Tib...

10-28
01:08:29

Dan Jay - Doubt, collectivity, and transformative creativity

Dr. Dan Jay has a mission to inspire where art and science meet. His life has been spent in the liminal and generative space between and among these domains of inquiry that are too often considered separate, distinct, even opposing. Yet, it is transformative creativity only possible from the co-mingling and conversation of art and science that we seem to be called to in the 21st century. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: Falling Upward by Richard Rohr ...

09-16
01:02:56

Zachary Ugolnik - Science & spirituality, heightened states of community, and new conceptions of flourishing

Zachary Ugolnik has for years been charting a new path that refuses the tired and inanimate narrative about the separateness of science and spirituality, reason and religion. In his life we find rich possibility when those old illusory dichotomies are discarded, and from that possibility perhaps new wisdom for creating a society full of care and flourishing, one that embraces our inherent needfulness and borrows from theology, ecology, and the social sciences. Origins Podcast Website ...

07-29
01:05:00

Jennifer Wiseman - Ultra-deep fields, the numinous, and an omnipresent call to wonder and awe

Dr. Jennifer Wiseman gives expression to our cosmos, as a pioneering astrophysicist, an outspoken advocate for science within policy and the public, as well as a person of faith. Her's are sensibilities of a scientist, a theologian, and a human being in awe of the universe, recognizing that these parts of ourselves need not be in opposition but rather in beautiful and enriching conversation. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: Discovery of comet 114P/Wis...

07-01
01:09:29

Susan Magsamen - Neuroscience, NeuroArts, and the mystery that life really is

Susan Magsamen makes her life at the frontier: the frontier of neuroscience, of institutional change, of the intersection of art and science. Her's is a life full of wisdom for how to live amongst mystery and befriend complexity. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: spontaneous "you are my sunshine" (02:00)T. S. Eliot (08:00)implementation science (08:40)therapeutic recreation (11:00)Trabian Shorters and asset framing (15:00)Daniel Kahneman (16:00)neuroplasticity...

05-20
01:10:30

Season Eight Trailer: A meditation on conversation and the collective narrative of our time

Origins Podcast Website Hello friends, a new season of Origins arrives next week, on Tuesday, May 20. This next chapter of Origins is about exploring conversation, that great practice of placing two things next to one another and allowing them to be astonished by the other. It is also about exploring the collective narrative of our time. This trailer is both introduction and meditation on how Origins is more than a podcast: a space for collective inquiry into living well in a frac...

05-16
11:29

David Woods - the science of resilience, graceful extensibility, and facilitating insight

Few concepts are more important to our society than resilience. Agnostic of domain, of nation, culture, and scale (as vital, indeed, to the individual life as to the planetary civilization), it would be impossible to overstate the pressure on us to understand it. If resilience is a core competency of our time, it would not be hyperbole to say that Dr. David Woods one of our most important thinkers. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: three mile island (07...

03-26
01:12:04

Paul Smaldino - Social identities, collective intelligence, and an ambling open life

Paul Smaldino is an explorer. That might seem like an odd way to describe a professor of cognitive science, but anyone who has glanced at his biography will recognize that he lives his life in exploration. His scholarship as his life are inspiration for keeping the lines of inquiry wide open and the things we can discover in doing so. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: The Dancing Wu Li Masters (08:00)The Quantum and the Lotus (12:30)Sagehood (15:00)J. Krishn...

01-28
01:12:20

John Paul Lederach - Peacebuilding, critical yeast, and the language of imagination

I've been following John Paul Lederach's work for years, finding the words he uses inordinately relevant to all of the details and spaces of my life. John Paul is Professor of International Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame. He has been a teacher to me across time and space and I believe the ideas he brings into the world are teachers we all need for the world we are walking into. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter ...

01-07
01:13:09

Creating encounters with flourishing: A 'salon' at the National Academy of Sciences

Flourishing is not a fixed state; it is an unfolding. In this time of rupture we need encounters with flourishing, to know it in our lived experiences individually and collectively. In this transformative event on December 12, 2024, Ryan McGranaghan, host of the Origins Podcast and founder of the Flourishing Salons, engaged in a moving conversation with four profound provocateurs and a wider community of artists, designers, engineers, scientists, educators, and contemplatives. The event was c...

12-24
01:47:03

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 presented by the advent and evolution of digital media. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: Federal Communications Committee "Information Needs of Communities" (08:10)Kathleen Hall Jamieson (08:50)Center for Media Engagemen...

11-05
01:04:35

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 our lives; and his polymathic life might be the example we need to make sense of the world we are walking into, one requiring an evolution to our way of studying and understanding. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: Dav...

10-01
01:16:22

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 unexampled. Her's is a story of exploration, of universe, of planet, of society, and of self. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: Her memoir: A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman (04:40)A Feeling for the Organism b...

08-13
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 wise and winsome voice. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: The Ritual Process by Victor Turner (09:30)nonattachment (14:00)Poem: "My Skeleton" (21:30)Poem: "For What Binds Us" (28:20, read 33:00)Poets for Science (29:10; ...

06-25
01:22:29

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, refreshingly unalloyed sensibility, an uncommon concoction whose life of scholarship and insight illuminate what we all might need to cultivate for the world we are walking into. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: Positional...

05-21
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 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...

04-16
01:14:43

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, toward unsettledness; of discipline, of intellect, of being. Great scientific breakthroughs are discoveries of process, and the great discoveries of society and our own lives will be the same. Thank you for listening and I'm excited to explore together eac...

04-09
07:57

The Great Askers (episode 1): Sara Hendren and Krista Tippett

Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter and the post introducing Great Asking Show Notes: Sara Hendren's Origins Conversationstart of a living conversation (05:20)Ignorance by Stuart Firestein (06:00)questions are the oxygen of imagination (08:00)curiosity is a moral muscle (10:10)The Division of Cognitive Laborby Philip Kitcher (09:20)Sara's substack (10:40)Howard Gardner (11:20)Participatory readiness Danielle Allen (16:40)Living the Questions with Krista (23:30)questions and...

01-30
01:11:40

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 exhilarating, and is a beacon in disorienting times marked by seemingly accelerating paces of change. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Commons Newsletter Show Notes: cultural and knowledge observatories (05:30)Mark Granovetter (09:15)Steve B...

01-09
01:18:13

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 fierce champion of diversity and equality, in math and science, in women's rights, in opportunity. To sit with Ingrid, her math and her life, is to illuminate our world and inspire us to imagine other worlds. Origins Podcast Website Flourishing Co...

11-28
59:44

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