Upcoming Guests

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.

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.

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.

Part 1: EP43 Daniel Christian Wahl on a Regenerative Future

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.

Daniel Schmachtenberger

Philip Howard

Philip N. Howard is the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, and is a professor of sociology, information and international affairs. He is the author, most recently, of Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up.

Max Borders

Max Borders is a futurist, a theorist, a published author and an entrepreneur. He is the author of The Social Singularity and the founder and Executive Director of Social Evolution—a non-profit organization dedicated to liberating humanity through innovation. Max is also co-founder of the Voice & Exit event and former editor at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).

Nick Chater

Nick Chater joined Warwick Business School (WBS) in 2010, after holding chairs in psychology at Warwick and UCL. He has over 200 publications, has won four national awards for psychological research, and has served as Associate Editor for the journals Cognitive Science, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science. He was elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2010 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012. Nick is co-founder of the research consultancy Decision Technology; and is on the advisory board of the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insight Team (BIT), popularly known as the ‘Nudge Unit’.

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.

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.

Kamal Sinclair

Kamal Sinclair, is the Executive Director of the Guild of Future Architects and Senior Consultant to Sundance Institute’s Future of Culture Initiative. She also serves as External Advisor to MacArthur Foundation’s Journalism & Media Program, Creative Advisor to For Freedoms, MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, Starfish Incubator,  and Eyebeam. Previously, she was the Director of Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Program, which supports artists working at the convergence of film, art, media and technology. She also consults for the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program on a research project aimed at furthering equality in emerging media, which resulted in “Making a New Reality.”

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.

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.

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.

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.