“Virginia Postrel.” Virginia is an author, columnist, and speaker who looks at a broad range of topics, from social science to fashion, concentrating on the intersection of culture, commerce, and technology. She is the author of “The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion,” “The Substance of Style,” and “The Future and Its Enemies.” Download this episode …
Visionaries – 10.09.17
“Christine Peterson and Nanotechnology.” Christine is Co-Founder, former President, and Projects Director of Foresight Institute. She lectures and writes about nanotechnology, AI, and longevity. She is co-author of Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution(Morrow, also free online) and Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work (knOwhere Press, also free online). She advises the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Global Healthspan …
Visionaries – 10.02.17
Download this episode (right click and save) “Stop Progress?” After thousands of years of little progress, human achievement took off in the 1700s with the Enlightenment, and remained in an upward direction — until the 1970s, when we managed to stop it. What now?
Visionaries – 09.25.17
“Tina Seelig.” Tina is Professor of the Practice in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Tina is also a faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the entrepreneurship center at Stanford University’s School of Engineering. She teaches courses on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. She is the author of “What I Wish I Knew When I …
Visionaries – 09.18.17
“Visionary Creativity in Business: Part 3.” Continuing our discussion of our world of genomic clusters of interconnected fractal networks, computationally generating themselves and each other, we observe that: If you wanted to make an oak tree, you would not put a pole in the ground, nail sticks to it, and glue leaves to the sticks. You would, of course, put …
Visionaries – 09.11.17
“Visionary Creativity in Business: Part 2.” What does it mean that the world and we have become genomic clusters of interconnected fractal networks, computationally generating themselves and each other? And what does it say about Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla? Download this episode (right click and save)
Visionaries – 08.21.17
“Visionary Creativity in Business.” In 1982, in a climate of panic over American business “decline,” Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman released a book titled “In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies.” The book is important to this day and has been followed by similar books, for example James C. Collins’s 2001 book, “Good to Great: Why Some …
Visionaries – 08.14.17
“Jeremy Lent.” Our guest is Jeremy Lent, author of “The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning.” Jeremy is a writer and the founder and president of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. You’ll find the Liology Institute at liology.org. We discuss Eastern and Western …
Visionaries – 08.07.17
“Creative Thinking.” In his book, “The Act of Creation,” Arthur Koestler proposes a general theory of creativity the he calls “bisociation” – a blending of elements drawn from two previously unrelated lines of thought into a new matrix of meaning. Today we look at some examples of this kind of thinking. Today, particularly in academia, we are discouraged from going …
Visionaries – 07.24.17
A hundred and fifty years ago we began to feel the impact of industrialization. Before, artisans made the things we used. After, industrial designers designed prototypes that would then be mass produced. But the era of mass production is ending. Today we talk about new ways of making that will change everything about our lives. We will look at some …

