Season Six: A season of flourishing

After a generative break from new episodes, Origins Podcast is back with Season Six!

2023 has been a year of rapid change even as we carry the rupture of the last three years. It is precisely into this evolving landscape, that we are excited to announce that Origins Podcast returns with its Sixth Season! While it will continue to be a forum to explore the pivotal moments for a diverse array of voices where the universal peeks out from the particular, we are also adapting the show to our changing world, a living experiment and conversation, embracing new ways of being.

Over the past few weeks we have taken a short pause from new episodes. While focusing on new work and new community at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a young daughter at home, this has not been idle time, but it has been a change of pace and with different breath so, too, has come rejuvenation and unexpected generativity. Both have influenced the show.

A Commitment

First, a note about the commitment of Origins.

In a changing media and information landscape, one should consider the decision to like, share, upvote, spread anything as morally consequential. Origins is built around this moral responsibility and what we create, what we choose to share reflects that. Every episode, link shared, and word written is deeply considered and reflects this responsibility. We need healthier practices of sharing information and connecting through it, especially in this cultural moment with Artificial Intelligence. The sixth season will delve into these themes.

What to expect

Now a few notes on what to expect in the season to come.

We're going to explore how we might use the space differently.

Part of our adaptation this season is how we use the space to support emergence. Emergence is possible when new things are brought together and allowed to interact. Origins Podcast plans to bring new things together and to create the space in which they can make music together. This requires creating new forums, formats, arrangements, and heights of inclusivity and pluralism, such as fishbowl-like conversations, panels, and more than one guest on an episode. To listen will be to become part of emergence, to be opened to the vitality and creativity of life.

The outro, too, will be used in new ways. I might share things I've been reading or paying attention to as a way of bringing the ideas of an episode into a broader network of ideas.

All of this needs to happen generously and generatively, in a spirit of intellectual freedom.

Flourishing

Origins is a space for all of us to ground toward flourishing. It has always been about flourishing. Running underneath every episode is curiosity and figuring about what a guest shares says about our flourishing, as individuals and as a society.

Anthropologist James Suzman says that flourishing is using our wealth well to enrich ourselves spiritually, enrich ourselves mentally, and doing social good. Political philosopher, Danielle Allen, says it is to be empowered not only in your personal lives but also in your co-participation and co-ownership of our public spaces and public lives.

Flourishing is an unfolding, a process, not a thing and certainly not static.

In this era of twin crises of inattention and disconnection, Join us as we explore the question of flourishing, figuring out what it is, what it looks and feels like in our lives, an orientation that requires compassion. We will dive deep into both, scientifically and spiritually.

Through it all, we'll be asking more spacious, generative questions, creating different narratives of our time and pulling us beyond ourselves and our categories; questions we can all bring into our lives and that might reweave our civic communities.

Themes

Finally, a note about some of the themes we will be exploring:

The art of inquiry and curiosity
Artificial Intelligence and society
What we are talking about when we talk about collective intelligence and our knowledge commons
Anthropology and ethnography, these sciences of cultural excavation
Healthy relationality
The civics and philosophy of science
And in all things, the connection to flourishing, of science, of society, of life and joy.

Please join in this living conversation.

We have created a free Substack newsletter,The Flourishing Commons, to be a space for exchange to enrich these episodes.

All of this is punctuated by new music and a new logo by friends of the show and kindred minds, Agasthya Pradhan Shenoy and Cristina Gonzalez.

Ryan McGranaghanMay 6, 2023