Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Simplifying Complexity
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| Nicholas Gruen vs Rory Sutherland | 14 Apr 2025 | 01:09:36 | |
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, and Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics, have both returned to debate the efficacy and limitations of applying systems thinking to complex problems.
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| How cultural evolution shapes us - Part 2 | 31 Mar 2025 | 00:37:48 | |
In the last episode, Paul Smaldino, Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute discussed how human behaviour is shaped by cultural evolution. In this episode, Paul discusses social learning and identity signalling and how they’re both being affected by rapidly changing technologies.
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| How cultural evolution shapes us - Part 1 | 17 Mar 2025 | 00:33:42 | |
We all know that we are shaped by evolution, but we're also shaped by cultural evolution. In this episode, we’re joined by Paul Smaldino, Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, to explain how cultural evolution has shaped human behaviour.
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| What is your country good at? | 03 Mar 2025 | 00:50:54 | |
Ricardo Hausmann is the Founder and Director of Harvard’s Growth Lab and the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School. In this episode, Ricardo explains how the amount and diversity of knowledge within an economy shapes its current capabilities and influences a country’s possible economic growth.
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| Do you have free will? - Part 2 | 17 Feb 2025 | 00:53:23 | |
In the last episode, Kevin Mitchell, Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, compared human brains with single-celled organisms to introduce us to the impact of genetics on conscious thought. In this episode, Kevin discusses metacognition, or how humans think about thinking, and its implications on free will versus determinism.
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| Do you have free will? - Part 1 | 03 Feb 2025 | 00:33:35 | |
In this episode, Kevin Mitchell, Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, takes us on a journey from single-celled organisms to human consciousness to explore if we have free will.
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| Law and complexity science | 20 Jan 2025 | 00:43:39 | |
Today we're joined by Michal Shur-Ofry, Associate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem law faculty, as she discusses the law and complex systems. In this episode, you'll hear how traditional legal approaches often take an overly simplistic view of the systems they're trying to regulate, how the patent system could be improved by using network science to measure true innovation, and why understanding exponential growth during events like pandemics challenges our conventional legal principles of proportionality.
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| The scientist who made the digital world possible - Part 2 | 06 Jan 2025 | 00:37:35 | |
In the last episode, Jimmy Soni introduced Dr Claude Shannon, whose work laid the foundation for the technologies we use today. In this episode, Jimmy dives into the significance of Dr Shannon’s 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” to the creation of information theory.
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| The scientist who made the digital world possible - Part 1 | 23 Dec 2024 | 00:31:33 | |
Dr Claude Shannon is one of the most influential scientists you’ve likely never heard of whose work laid the foundations for the information age. To explain the significance of Dr Shannon’s impact on modern computing, we’re joined by Jimmy Soni, author of “A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age” and “The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley”.
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| The dynamics of financial instability | 09 Dec 2024 | 00:48:09 | |
Steve Keen is an Economist and Honorary Professor at University College London and is currently lecturing at the University of Amsterdam. In this episode, Steve explains the differences between neoclassical and post-Keynesian economics before discussing how concepts from complexity science and chaos theory can be used to develop economic models that actually factor in booms and busts.
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| The brain as a complex system | 25 Nov 2024 | 00:49:08 | |
How does the brain actually work? In this episode, Christopher Lynn, Assistant Professor of Physics at Yale University, explains how network science can help us understand how our brains work.
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| The diets of half-a-billion-year-old species | 11 Nov 2024 | 00:42:21 | |
In our last two episodes with Professor Jennifer Dunne, the Vice President for Science at the Santa Fe Institute, she explained food webs with a focus on her work in the Gulf of Alaska. In this episode, Jennifer discusses how fossil records are helping researchers reconstruct food webs from half a billion years ago and the insights we can glean from comparing ancient food webs to modern ones.
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| Four pieces of music | 28 Oct 2024 | 00:48:53 | |
Today we're joined again by Dmitri Tymoczko, Professor of Music at Princeton University. Last time, Dmitri discussed the underlying principles that make music sound ‘good’. In this episode, Dmitri explores the integration of music theory into improvisational and algorithmic music. He discusses how modern technology allows musicians to blend traditional and improvisational elements with algorithms to create something completely different from the music of the past.
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| How curiosity works | 14 Oct 2024 | 00:43:54 | |
Today we’re joined by Dani S. Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Perry Zurn, Visiting Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University and Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. In today’s episode, Dani and Perry explore the concept of curiosity.
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| Understanding Cities - Part 2 | 30 Sep 2024 | 00:38:15 | |
In our last episode, Professor Michael Batty from The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London explained the evolution of city planning and the fundamentals needed to understand city structures and models. In today’s episode, Michael delves into various theories and laws for explaining urban systems, the role of different models in understanding and predicting city development, and the need to refine these models to facilitate better management of increasingly complex urban environments.
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| Understanding Cities - Part 1 | 16 Sep 2024 | 00:29:08 | |
In this episode, we’re joined by Michael Batty, Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London and Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, to discuss the evolution of city planning and the shift away from traditional mechanical views. In today’s episode, Michael lays the groundwork for understanding cities that will be essential for part two of this conversation.
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| In conversation with Jason Fried | 02 Sep 2024 | 00:46:02 | |
Jason Fried is the Co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the software development firm behind Basecamp (a project management app), and HEY (an inbox and calendar app). In this episode, Jason dives into what 25 years of business has taught him. He shares his advice for hiring staff, getting meaningful insight from reference checks, and why you should always hire a candidate who is the better writer.
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| Food webs, humans and cod - Part 2 | 19 Aug 2024 | 00:41:02 | |
In this episode, we continue our conversation with Professor Jennifer Dunne, the Vice President for Science at the Santa Fe Institute. In this episode, Jennifer discusses her work to understand ‘human-centred interaction networks’ - how humans interact with non-human species in a range of ways, including for food - by examining Indigenous cultures around the world and historical migration to Polynesian islands.
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| Food webs, humans and cod - Part 1 | 05 Aug 2024 | 00:34:54 | |
In this episode, Professor Jennifer Dunne, the Vice President for Science at the Santa Fe Institute, explains how you build a food web, focusing on her ecological work in the Gulf of Alaska.
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| Stereotypes and crime | 22 Jul 2024 | 00:40:31 | |
We're joined again by Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Barnard College at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute to explore the intersection between stereotyping, crime, and the justice system to understand criminal behaviour beyond simplistic explanations.
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| The city of the future | 08 Jul 2024 | 00:37:31 | |
What will the city of the future be like? To explore the future of our cities, we’re joined once more by Luis Bettencourt, Professor at the University of Chicago and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, as he explains how urban areas will need to evolve in terms of infrastructure and sustainability to match pace with growing populations around the world.
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| Governing the power grid | 24 Jun 2024 | 00:33:13 | |
In today’s episode, we’re once again joined by Seth Blumsack, Professor of Energy Policy and Economics and International Affairs in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, to talk about the power grid. In the past, we’ve spoken to Seth about the history of the power grid and how the power grid fails. In today’s conversation, we discuss how it is governed.
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| What makes music sound ‘good’? | 10 Jun 2024 | 00:41:10 | |
Today we're once again joined by Dmitri Tymoczko, Professor of Music at Princeton University. Last time, Dmitri talked about the geometry and patterns we hear in music and its history, particularly from the 1900s onwards. In this episode, Dmitri delves into some underlying principles that make music sound ‘good’.
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| A puzzle, a problem, and a mess | 27 May 2024 | 00:41:35 | |
Gerald Ashley is the Co-founder and Managing Director of St Mawgan & Co, a London-based strategy and risk consulting agency. In today’s episode, Gerald explores the difference between risk and uncertainty, the challenges of managing them in the financial world, and how it can be powerful to split issues into either puzzles, problems, or messes.
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| Is complexity economics the answer? | 13 May 2024 | 00:48:03 | |
Nicholas Gruen is the CEO of Lateral Economics, Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, and a Visiting Professor at Kings College London. In this episode, Nicholas discusses the limitations of traditional economic models and emphasises the importance of nuanced problem-solving. He advocates for critical thinking and an interdisciplinary approach to decision-making within complex economic systems, and asks if embracing another paradigm, in this case, complexity economics, is really the answer.
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| Making sense of chaos with Doyne Farmer | 29 Apr 2024 | 00:39:15 | |
J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Baillie Gifford Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
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| Decoding the Panama Papers - Part 2 | 15 Apr 2024 | 00:38:43 | |
Continuing from our last episode, we’re joined again by Brooke Harrington, Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and Herbert Chang, Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College. In this episode, Brooke and Herbert explore their research findings on the offshore financial system and discuss why policy interventions to date targeting wealth management have largely failed. They then explore how the findings of their research offer a way forward.
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| Decoding the Panama Papers - Part 1 | 01 Apr 2024 | 00:46:07 | |
In today’s episode, we’re joined by Brooke Harrington, Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and Herbert Chang, Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College, to discuss the world of offshore finance. You’ll hear about how using offshore finance is akin to eating at a restaurant and skipping out on the bill, and how Brooke trained to be a wealth manager to better understand how the industry works. Brooke and Herbert then discuss how they used the data from the Panama, Paradise and Pandora Papers to undertake quantitative research into the networks that make offshore finance possible.
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| How cities drive economic progress | 18 Mar 2024 | 00:29:57 | |
What role do cities play in driving economic progress? In today’s episode, we’re joined by Luis Bettencourt, Professor at the University of Chicago and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, who explains how cities allow us to do something magical - they allow us to specialise.
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| Big Ideas: The Origin of Life | 04 Mar 2024 | 00:37:47 | |
How does a group of molecules transition into something that is life? And what do even mean when we say 'life'? To explore the origin of life, we’re joined again by Sara Walker, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Associate Professor in Earth and Space Exploration and Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.
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| In conversation with Rory Sutherland - Part 2 | 19 Feb 2024 | 00:35:13 | |
In today’s episode, we continue our conversation with Rory Sutherland, UK Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, where he discusses how our decision making, especially as consumers, while often appearing irrational, is actually the result of us deploying heuristics that have served us well in situations of low trust or when we don't have all the information.
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| In conversation with Rory Sutherland - Part 1 | 05 Feb 2024 | 00:45:01 | |
In today’s episode of Simplifying Complexity, we’re joined by Rory Sutherland. Rory is the UK Vice Chairman of the iconic advertising agency (and inspiration for the television series Madmen) Ogilvy, where he has worked for close to 40 years. In today’s conversation, you’ll hear how Rory became interested in complexity science, how bees build resilience, why short-term rationality can lead to long-term irrationality, and why efficiency is a bad proxy for effectiveness.
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| The geometry of music | 22 Jan 2024 | 00:47:57 | |
Today we're joined by Dmitri Tymoczko, Professor of Music at Princeton University. Dmitri will talk about the geometry and patterns we hear in music, as well as explore its history, particularly from the 1900s onwards.
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| How can we harness the wisdom of the crowd? | 08 Jan 2024 | 00:35:06 | |
Experts often build models to help predict how systems will behave. But what happens if, instead of asking the experts to build models, we ask laypeople to simply predict outcomes? This is what happens in 'prediction markets'. And it turns out that in some situations, the 'wisdom of the crowd' often outperforms experts' models. To break down what prediction markets are and how they work, we're joined by Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Barnard College at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
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| Predicting power grid failure | 25 Dec 2023 | 00:28:16 | |
We’ve spoken previously on the show about the complexity of the power grid. Today we’re focusing on how it fails, in the form of blackouts, and we're joined again by Seth Blumsack. He'll discuss why blackouts are so difficult to understand, and whether or not it's possible to model them. Seth is a Professor of Energy Policy and Economics and International Affairs in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, co-director of Penn State Center for Energy Law and Policy, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.
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| The Mathematics of War: Part 2 | 11 Dec 2023 | 00:45:01 | |
In our last episode, Neil Johnson explained how there was an underlying power law with a slope of 1.8 that described the number of casualties that occur in wars. Today’s episode digs deeper into where this power law comes from, the route that Neil's research took to explain it, and how the arrival of the internet finally provided the missing datasets required to understand the underlying structure of something seemingly as chaotic as war. Neil is Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University.
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| The Mathematics of War: Part 1 | 27 Nov 2023 | 00:28:27 | |
When we think of what caused a certain number of people to die in a specific war, we tend to think about a number of factors. for example, the terrain or political drivers. But what if the number of deaths that occur in a war is actually dictated by something far less obvious? Neil Johnson, Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University, has returned to explain how studying the casualties of war can give us a greater understanding of the causes of war.
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| Big Ideas: Time | 13 Nov 2023 | 00:36:18 | |
Throughout the history of science, the concept of time has changed many times - from Newton and thermodynamic definitions to the weirdness of relativity and quantum mechanics. And as our understanding of life and the universe continues to grow, is it again time to reevaluate how we think about time? To explore this mind-bending idea, we’re joined again by Sara Walker, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Associate Professor in Earth and Space Exploration and Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.
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| Energy markets and the power grid | 30 Oct 2023 | 00:38:36 | |
Hidden in plain sight over our heads, under our feet, and in the walls of our homes and workplaces, is the backbone of modern society: the power grid. To explain how something as seemingly straightforward as the power grid has become one of the greatest socio-technical systems on the planet, we’re joined by Seth Blumsack, Professor of Energy Policy and Economics and International Affairs in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, co-director of Penn State Center for Energy Law and Policy, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.
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| How economic policies are gamed | 16 Oct 2023 | 00:36:54 | |
Economic policies are often gamed by individuals for personal benefit. In this episode, we explore how this gaming takes place and what economics can do about it. To do that, we're joined again by W. Brian Arthur, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center, formerly Xerox PARC.
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| What makes us creative? | 02 Oct 2023 | 00:23:07 | |
In this series so far, we've applied complexity science to a whole range of systems, particularly those more obvious complex systems like economies or cities. In this episode, we're going to do something a little bit different and apply complexity science to something not so obvious: creativity. To do that, we're joined again by Tyler Marghetis, Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced. Tyler has been on the show before to explore tipping points, and tipping points in jazz music. Today, he wants us to take our traditional approach to what makes someone creative, and pull the camera back. Instead of looking at creativity as what happens inside a person's brain, Tyler wants to explore what happens when we consider creativity through the context of society as a complex, cognitive system.
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| Cities as social reactors | 18 Sep 2023 | 00:41:10 | |
Today we're joined by Luis Bettencourt, Professor at the University of Chicago, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Luis is going to pull apart how cities work, why they work the way they do, what's good about them, and what's bad about them. He's also going to talk specifically about slums, and the challenges that exist in raising people out of poverty.
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| How do you map a volcanic plume? | 04 Sep 2023 | 00:22:53 | |
Today, we're going to return to the idea of taking concepts from complexity science and applying them to situations in the real world. In this episode, we're joined again by Melanie Moses, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She's going to share with us about her recent trip to Iceland to study active volcanoes. More specifically, Melanie is going to explain how you can program a swarm of drones to fly in formation and map the CO2 plume of a volcano.
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| How do fireflies synchronise? | 21 Aug 2023 | 00:25:56 | |
Orit Peleg is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Orit has been on the show before, to discuss how bees work as a complex system. In this episode, we're staying within the animal kingdom, as Orit talks to us about fireflies. In this episode, Orit is going to explain how thousands of fireflies over very significant areas can synchronise their flashing in the night sky. She'll break down the work she has been doing to study this complex system of individual agents and share the lessons we can learn from these fireflies and use them in other applications. For example, what can we learn from these synchronised fireflies that could help us to program a swarm of small robots to work together to lift something?
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| How does a poor kid get ahead? Part 2 | 07 Aug 2023 | 00:22:00 | |
In our last episode, you heard all about economic mobility. In this episode (which is part 2 of our conversation), you're going to hear again from Matthew Jackson, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. We finished the last episode by saying that if you want to increase a child's economic mobility, the factor that has the greatest impact is economic connectedness. In this episode, Matthew is going to talk about economic connectedness in our workplaces, our religious gatherings, and our schools.
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| How does a poor kid get ahead? Part 1 | 24 Jul 2023 | 00:18:13 | |
If you're a child born into a poor family in the United States, what are the most important factors in your life that will influence whether or not you're able to rise out of poverty? To answer that question, we're joined again by Matthew Jackson, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. This is part one of a two-part series, and in this episode, Matthew is going to introduce us to a study he was involved in that looked at the data of 21 billion friendships in the US that asked the question: what is it really that allows a child to get ahead?
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| The sand pile model | 10 Jul 2023 | 00:26:30 | |
When a system fails, how do you think about cause and effect? One way to consider this in complex systems is to imagine a pile of sand, and dropping one grain of sand at a time in random positions onto the pile. As time passes, you'll start to form little hills. Eventually, a grain of sand will hit one of these hills, and you get an avalanche. Do you believe that the avalanche was caused by the last grain of sand falling onto it, or do you believe that the avalanche happened due to the shape of the hill itself? To explore this sand pile model, we are joined today by Neil Johnson, Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University.
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| Big Ideas: Information | 26 Jun 2023 | 00:31:12 | |
When most of us think about information, we think of it as something we can possess or ‘know’. But what if it’s so much more than that?
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| The El Farol problem | 12 Jun 2023 | 00:37:30 | |
Imagine you have a bar that comfortably seats 60 people, but every week, 100 people have to decide whether or not they're going to go to the bar on any given night. If too many people go, then the bar is too crowded, and everyone has a miserable night. But if not enough people go, then that's a missed opportunity to go out. This is the basis of the El Farol problem, which asks us to consider how people make this decision. It's a beautifully simple problem that not only makes you think but also has profound implications. To help us through this problem, we're joined again by its inventor, W. Brian Arthur, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Researcher at Palo Alto Research Center. Brian's going to help us understand how this problem is more than just the story of a bar, but a problem that gives us an incredible insight into how the economy works.
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| The 10 features of complex systems: Part 2 | 29 May 2023 | 00:33:19 | |
In our last episode, we talked about the four conditions of complex systems: numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback, and non-equilibrium — and we also talked about the concept of emergence. In this episode, which is part two of our two-part series on the features of complex systems, we're joined again by Karoline Wiesner, Professor of Complexity Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam in Germany. In this episode, Karoline explains the six emergent features of complex systems:
By the time you've finished this episode, you'll understand the underlying principles of complex systems that hold together the wide variety of topics we talk about in this series.
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