Origins Season Five Trailer

Welcome back to Origins, listeners. After a few month hiatus, we're back with an exhilarating, generative, spacious season of the show--the hiatus was in part so that I could focus on research, to launch a new series of 'salons' with the Cultural Program for the National Academy of Science (see here for an example), help ignite a new initiative toward Open Science with NASA, and to do more writing, which you can read a bit about in a new Substack newsletter (The Flourishing Commons) that is an accompaniment to these various activities. The goal of that newsletter is to think about and realize healthier relationality and welcome you to join that conversation. 

All of these activities have influenced what the next season of Origins will be. These conversations will continue to be what they always have been -- explorations of the spaces between art, science, engineering, and design with the people who live in and shape them. They will continue to reveal these individual's network of thoughts, influences, and impacts, and will continue to draw out the relevance to each of you.

But Season Five will center threshold topics we face as a society now: 

How do we facilitate broader collaboration and wider collective intelligence? How can we ask more generative questions and learn the skill of asking better questions? What is the role of context and contextualization in our systems? Where do we need art and science in the future of our democracy and governance? How do we create a slower discourse and cultivate a quality of attention? How do we improve our information diets? 

Amidst all of these, Season five will be about ideas and practices of muscular hope and worldbuilding. It will be about 

The philosophies of living that come from them and the way that these things are a kind of bridge to all domains of inquiry and living; universalizing ideas; ideas around which we might find consilience.We will be exploring the myriad places we find muscular hope and worldbuilding in our cosmos and in our history and in our imagination and the nuanced ways that they are expressed there. We will be learning that there is no one source of these things, that they exist across ways of knowing, not ways that we hold explicitly in our minds and those we have yet to give language and image to

Wittgenstein wrote that "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Let's build a new vocabulary to talk about the problems confronting us; a more muscular and spacious vocabulary  -- one generative of a new world more capable of flourishing. 

We're delighted to bring you guests that embody these ideas. No matter where you come from, what you do in this world, you will find these conversations full of curiosity and insight. 

My work is to draw out how people survive, flourish, grow, keep loving and laughing so that you can bring the ideas into your own life. That is my commitment to you with the dozen or so episodes that follow.