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:

• Positionality (04:20)
• Interest in the transcendent (06:15)
• Willingness to contend with complexity (11:30)
• Awe and beautify of biology and anthropology (14:20)
• Eric Wolf '[anthropology is] the most scientific of humanities, the most humanistic of sciences' (16:20)
• Phyllis Dolhinow (18:00)
• Karl Popper and falsifiability (22:00)
• Margaret Lock and local biologies (24:00)
• Dialectic (24:30)
• Curriculum for the future (25:00)
• Myth of 'evolution as progress' (26:00)
• Teju Cole (33:00)
• Complexity: connecting the micro and macro (37:00)
• Approach to teaching and sharing knowledge (40:00)
• Cultural moment with the idea that we need to hold two truths at once (42:30)
• 'healing comes in the return' (46:40)
• Jeff Tweedy on writing (49:00)
• Lightning Round (50:00)
  • Book: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • Passion: Travel, being on planes
  • Heart sing: Book he's writing (and his prior book Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You)
  • Screwed up: a couple of relationships and guitar
• Find Agustín online:
  • Website
  • Princeton
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series
  • Agustín’s playlist

Logo artwork by Cristina Gonzalez

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

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<

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 each of the coming guests, and the exhilarating glimpses they provide into ourselves and our society along the way.

Episode transcript, with links

Origins Podcast Website

Flourishing Commons Newsletter