Upcoming Guests

Seth Lloyd

Seth Lloyd is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),  director of the WM Keck Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory at MIT, director of the Program in Quantum Information at the Institute for Scientific Interchange, and Miller Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He earned his A.B. degree in Physics from Harvard University, his Masters of Advanced Study in Mathematics and M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University, and his Ph.D. in Physics from Rockefeller University. 

Seth teaches and performs research in quantum information theory and complex systems. His research focuses on the role of information in physical and mechanical systems, with an emphasis on quantum mechanical systems. He was the first to propose a technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, and has worked with groups at MIT and other institutions around the world to construct and operate quantum computers using quantum optics, nuclear magnetic resonance, quantum dots, and superconducting systems.

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Daniel Schmachtenberger

Renée DiResta

Renée DiResta is the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social and other media networks. Her areas of research include disinformation and propaganda by state-sponsored actors, and health misinformation and conspiracy theories. 

Renee has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and is an Ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic. Her tech industry writing, analysis, talks, and data visualizations have been featured or covered by numerous media outlets. She is a 2019 Truman National Security Project security fellow, a 2019 Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member. She is also co-author of The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand.

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Part 3: Hanzi Freinacht of Metamoderna

Part 1: EP36 Hanzi Freinacht on Metamodernism
Part 2: EP53 Hanzi Freinacht on the Nordic Ideology

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian & sociologist, author of The Listening Society, Nordic Ideology, and the upcoming book The 6 Hidden Patterns of World History. As a writer, Hanzi combines in-depth knowledge of several sciences and disciplines and offers maps of our time and the human condition with his characteristically accessible, poetic and humorous writing style – challenging the reader’s perspective of herself and the world. He epitomizes much of the metamodern philosophy and can be considered a personification of this strand of thought.

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Part 2: Michel Bauwens

Part 1: EP63 Michel Bauwens on P2P & Commons

Michel Bauwens is the founder & director of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Michel is also research director of CommonsTransition.org. He has (co-)published various books & reports in english, dutch and french, such as, ‘Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy’, and P2P, A Commons Manifesto. Michel has been a candidate for the European Parliament, for the Flemish Green Party but as an independent candidate. He is currently working on prototyping a MOOC on commons-based economics.

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William J Perry and Tom Z Collina

William J. Perry served as the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter administration and then as Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration. He oversaw the development of the strategic nuclear systems that are currently in our arsenal. His new offset strategy ushered in the age of stealth, smart weapons, GPS, and technologies that changed the face of modern warfare. In 2007, Dr. Perry collaborated with George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and Henry Kissinger to publish several ground-breaking editorials in the Wall Street Journal that linked the vision of a world free from nuclear weapons with urgent but practical steps that could be taken to reduce nuclear dangers. Perry’s 2015 memoir, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, is a personal account of his lifelong effort to reduce nuclear dangers. He founded the William J. Perry Project to educate the public on these dangers. In 2020 Perry co-authored THE BUTTON: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump. He is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at Stanford University.

Tom Z. Collina is Director of Policy at Ploughshares Fund. He is the co-author with William J. Perry of THE BUTTON. Tom has thirty years of Washington, DC, experience in nuclear weapons, missile defense, and nonproliferation issues, and has held senior positions at the Arms Control Association, the Institute for Science and International Security, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. He has been directly involved with efforts to end U.S. nuclear testing, limit ineffective anti-missile programs, extend the Nonproliferation Treaty, and secure Senate ratification of the New START Treaty. He has published widely in major magazines and journals and has appeared frequently in the national media, including the New York Times, CNN, and NPR. He has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and regularly briefs congressional staff. Tom has a degree in International Relations from Cornell University.

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Joshua Epstein

Joshua Epstein is Professor of Epidemiology in the NYU College of Global Public Health, and founding Director of the NYU Agent-Based Modeling Laboratory, with affiliated appointments at The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and the College of Arts & Sciences.

Prior to joining NYU, he was Professor of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins, and Director of the Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavior, and Health Sciences, with Joint appointments in Economics, Applied Mathematics, International Health, and Biostatistics. Before that, he was Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and Director of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics. His research interest has been modeling complex social dynamics using mathematical and computational methods, notably the method of Agent-Based Modeling in which he is a recognized pioneer. For this transformative innovation, he was awarded the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award in 2008, an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Amherst College in 2010, and was elected to the Society of Sigma XI in 2018.

Joshua & Jim will be discussing his last book, Agent_Zero: Toward Neurocognitive Foundations for Generative Social Science and more.

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Shahin Farshchi

Shahin empowers visionary founders aiming to accelerate humanity and build a fantastic future through feats of engineering. He built brain-machine interfaces for his PhD in Electrical Engineering, hybrids at General Motors, founded a wireless vital sign monitoring company, and as a Partner at Lux, has funded chip (Nervana), rocket (Relativity), satellite (Planet), robotics (Covariant.ai), and driverless car (Zoox) companies. Lux is a $2.4B VC that invests in tomorrow’s transformational companies across healthcare and technology.

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Sam Bowles

Samuel Bowles, (PhD, Economics, Harvard University) is Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute where he heads the Behavioral Sciences Program. He taught economics at Harvard from 1965 to 1973 and since then at the University of Massachusetts, where he is now emeritus professor and at the University of Siena from 2002 to 2010 where he continues to occasionally teach. Bowles’ current research also includes theoretical and empirical studies of political hierarchy and wealth inequality and their evolution over the very long run. 

His most recent book is The Moral Economy: Why good laws are no substitute for good citizens. Other recent books include A Cooperative Species: Human reciprocity and its evolution, The new economics of inequality and redistribution, and Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions and Evolution. He has also served as an economic advisor to the governments of Cuba, South Africa and Greece, to U.S presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, to the Legislature of the State of New Mexico, to the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and to South African President Nelson Mandela.

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Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz is a founding principal of The Democracy Collaborative and has had a distinguished career as a historian, political economist, activist, writer, and government official. For 15 years, he was the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, and is a former Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge University; Harvard’s Institute of Politics; the Institute for Policy Studies; and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He is also the president of the National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives.

Gar is the author of critically acclaimed books on the atomic bomb and atomic diplomacy. As a well-known policy expert, he has testified before numerous congressional committees and lectures widely around the country.

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Brent Cooper

Brent Cooper is an independent political sociologist and metamodern philosopher who runs The Abs-Tract Organization, a nonprofit think tank and media project that specializes in abstraction, a mental, social, physical, and material process that defines the expanding complexity of society.

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Part 2: Joe Brewer

Part 1: EP50 Joe Brewer on Earth Regeneration

Joe Brewer is the Executive Director for the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution. He is a complexity researcher trained in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. His work focuses on the converging global challenges that currently threaten the future of humanity. He helped create the Cultural Evolution Society — a scientific organization devoted to advancing the scholarly field of research in this integrative domain. Joe has also helped launch Evonomics magazine to promote the applications of evolution and complexity to the field of economics.

He recently started a study group called Earth Regenerators to build a community of practice around the restoration of planetary health while safeguarding humanity’s future. Joe was formerly a member of the Center for Complex Systems Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and was a research fellow with George Lakoff at the Rockridge Institute in Berkeley.

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Nadav Zeimer

Nadav Zeimer works at the intersection of technology and education. He excelled as a software engineer in Silicon Valley prior to becoming an award-winning physics/robotics teacher, turnaround principal, and public speaker. As a teacher, Nadav integrated podcasting into his curricula and was selected to lead a school design team. Seven consecutive years of breakthrough student outcomes followed, along with widespread recognition for his digital media centered approach to school reform. Based on nearly two decades of experience, he has launched an open source, blockchain ledger of “gold standard” high school credits. Nadav is the author of Education in the Digital Age: How We Get There offers an evaluation of how digital technology and economics are poised to transform education by examining the concept of academic capital.

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Alexander Bard

Alexander Bard is a philosopher, futurologist, and political and spiritual activist, based in Stockholm, Sweden. He is the author of five books: The Netocrats, The Global Empire, The Body Machines, Syntheism – Creating God in The Internet Age, and Digital Libido – Sex, Power and Violence in The Network Society with his co-writer Jan Söderqvist. Bard is a radical process philosopher, merging Hegel and Nietzsche with Whitehead and Deleuze, using humanity as the constant and technology as the variable while working toward the deepest possible understanding of human history, contemporary society, and the intensely technology-driven future that humanity is facing. Bard has also enjoyed a highly successful 25-year-career as a producer and artist in the international music industry, followed by ten years as a tough love, reality-checking judge on TV shows “Swedish Idol” and “Sweden’s Got Talent”, and is an outspoken and provocative YouTube and Twitter celebrity.

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Emery N. Brown

Emery N. Brown is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT; the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School; and a practicing anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. His experimental research has helped define the neuroscience mechanisms of how anesthetics work. His statistics research has developed a broad range of statistical and signal processing methods to improve neuroscience data analysis. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the American Statistical Association, the Institute for Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Brown is the recipient of the Dickson Prize in Science and an honorary Doctorate of Science degree from U.S.C. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. 

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Jason Wiener

Jason Wiener comes to this work with a wide range of experience as an entrepreneur, litigator, activist, organizer and worker-owner. With more than a dozen years of experience as an attorney – his expertise and experience brings an innovative approach to solving client issues. Jason’s work has charted a new and grander course for the potential of democratized economic structures to re-calibrate the hazardous course set by “business as usual.” He has published more than six scholarly law review articles on international, human rights and renewable energy topics and speaks regularly about worker-owned and cooperative business model, non-extractive finance, the future of work, the contemporary and teal practice of law, distributed solar policy and sharing economy legal issues. Jason is an adjunct professor in Colorado State University’s Global Sustainability and Social Enterprise program, where he teaches an MBA course on business law and ethics. He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Colorado Law School’s Entrepreneurial Law Clinic.

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Alexa Clay

Alexa Clay is the co-author of the best selling book The Misfit Economy, named one of the best business books to read by the World Economic Forum, TechRepublic, The Telegraph and Huffington Post. With degrees from Brown University and Oxford, she is the leading expert on subcultures and innovation from unlikely places. Alexa believes the underworld is filled with natural-born-innovators and they have more in common with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or Exxon, than you might think. Today, she is working to create more inclusive innovation ecosystems in cities and regions across the U.S. 

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Morag Gamble

For the past 25 years, as a Global Permaculture Ambassador, Morag Gamble has led programs in 22 countries. Local food systems and permaculture education have seen her teach in communities and universities around the globe – most recently at Schumacher College in England – and leading a Food Politics course at Griffith University. Morag lives amidst an award-winning permaculture education garden in a UN recognised permaculture village, and works with city farmers, school farmers, community gardeners, and educators. She sees the direct social and ecological impact of industrial farming on marginalised farming communities around the world – in Indonesia, India and most recently in East Africa.

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Rob Malda (AKA: CmdrTaco)

Rob Malda, also known as CmdrTaco, is an American Internet content author, and former editor-in-chief of the website Slashdot. After that, he spent his time writing, consulting, and working at the Washington Post’s Labs for a couple years. Today, he’s interested in news aggregation, community moderation, and pretty much all the nerdy techy subject matter he covered at Slashdot.