In this episode, Fraser McGruer, Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Chris Wragg explore one of the most enduring pieces of technical advice: have you tried turning it off and on again?

What begins with a glitchy video call and a reluctant router reboot quickly develops into a wide-ranging discussion about systems, states and the surprisingly deep logic behind rebooting—not just in computers, but in societies, economies and even our own lives.

The team unpack what actually happens when you power cycle a device, from memory leaks and zombie processes to cosmic rays flipping bits in memory. From there, they build a broader framework: what counts as a “state”, what a “good state” might be, and when a system can—or cannot—be reset.

Peter introduces a theory of rebootability, with criteria including whether a system has an external reference point, whether it depends on consensus, and whether it can be restarted from outside itself. These ideas are applied to everything from national constitutions and financial systems to climate change and rainforest collapse.

Along the way, the conversation touches on revolutions, failed societal resets, post-war reconstruction, and the limits of trying to “go back” to a supposedly better past. The episode closes with personal reflections on resets—from Covid lockdowns to life-changing career shifts and the everyday reboot of sleep.

• Why turning something off and on again actually works
• What a “state” is (and why it matters)
• The concept of a “known good state”
• Peter’s theory of rebootability
• Systems that can’t be reset (climate, ecosystems, global economy)
• The role of consensus in rebooting social systems
• Why revolutions and resets often fail
• The appeal of starting over—from software to psychology
• Personal and societal examples of “reboots”

• State: The internal condition of a system that determines how it responds to inputs
• Known good state: A reliable baseline you can return to
• Rebootability: Whether a system can be reset to a functioning state
• Bootstrap problem: A system often needs something external to restart it
• Path dependency / hysteresis: How the past shapes what’s possible now
• Consensus vs reality: Some systems only work if people agree they work
• Tipping points: States from which recovery is difficult or impossible

• Routers, computers and memory leaks
• Chess, board games and “soft locks”
• The climate and rainforest collapse
• Written constitutions as “system blueprints”
• Currency resets (e.g. post-war Germany)
• The French Revolution and failed systemic resets
• Post-war Germany and Japan vs Iraq and Afghanistan
• Religious and mythological “reboots” (e.g. the Flood narrative)
• Sleep as a daily biological reboot

In this episode, we explore a deceptively simple question: what makes a death culturally significant?

The conversation begins with an unsatisfying Reddit-style list of famous deaths by decade and quickly turns into a more analytical discussion. The team teases apart different kinds of significance: the death of an already important person, the death of someone whose future mattered as much as their past, and deaths that became historically or culturally transformative even when the individual was not especially well known.

Along the way, they discuss deaths that mark the end of an era, deaths that act as catalysts for social or political change, and deaths that become mythologised through mourning, media and time. They also consider whether cultural significance can be measured at all, and toy with building a rough model comparing the significance of a person’s life with the significance of their death.

Examples range from Princess Diana, JFK and Julius Caesar to George Floyd, Mohamed Bouazizi, Emmett Till and Jesus, with stops along the way for Harambe, Queen Victoria, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Alan Turing.

The episode closes on a more personal note, as each speaker reflects on a death that feels significant to them personally, from Ray Charles to John Cazale and Alan Turing, before things take an irreverent turn in classic Cognitive Engineering fashion.

In this episode:

• What counts as a culturally significant death
• The difference between a significant life and a significant death
• Deaths that changed history versus deaths that symbolised lost potential
• Whether cultural significance can be measured
• Why time, myth and collective mourning matter
• Personal reflections on deaths that still resonate

People and examples mentioned:

Queen Victoria, Vladimir Lenin, John Lennon, Princess Diana, Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, Queen Elizabeth II, Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Michael Jackson, George Floyd, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Harambe, Mohamed Bouazizi, Kitty Genovese, Emmett Till, Neda Agha-Soltan, Rachel Corrie, Thích Quảng Đức, the Princes in the Tower, William of Norwich, Crispus Attucks, Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King Jr, Jeffrey Epstein, Ray Charles, John Cazale, John Candy and Alan Turing.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

- The Innovations Catalogue http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2957409.stm

- Decline of the Independent Inventor https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w11654/w11654.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

- The ‘bungling inventor’ trope https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BunglingInventor

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