Chamira Gamage is a Human Rights Advocate at Amnesty International who has been instrumental in campaigning and lobbying for the Assange campaign globally. He has taken a complex and at times unpopular case and ensured it was being given the attention it deserves, based on the core principles press freedom, freedom of expression, and the impact it has on us all, both now and in the future. Chamira is also the Co-Founder and CEO of Thinkrs, a critical thinking Chrome Extension and soon to come Ne...
Nov 02, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Dr. Peter Rohde is an ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Quantum Software & Information at the University of Technology Sydney. Peter is also a mountaineer, musician, cryptoanarchist, and author of the recently released book "The Quantum Internet". EPISODE LINKS: The Quantum Internet Peter's website Peter's Twitter SUPPORT: Contribute to coffee fund Back me on Ideamarket Rate Talk of Today on Apple Podcasts PODCAST INFO Podcast Website Follow Sam on Twitter Support thi...
Oct 20, 2021•1 hr 48 min
Tyson Yunkaporta is an Australian academic, arts critic, researcher, and member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He recently started the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, which is focused on applying Indigenous thinking to issues that complexity scientists and technologists are currently working on across domains including economics, governance, evolutionary dynamics, cognition, and the environment. Tyson is also the author of the world-vi...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr 33 min
Jeremy is CEO of LBRY, a blockchain based protocol which is aiming to do what bitcoin has done for money for publishing. In that, rather than relying upon third parties to aggregate and distribute content, library has built a technology that allows this to be done peer to peer without fear of censorship or demonetisation. He's also CEO of Odyssee, a youtube-like video streaming platform built on LBRY technology. EPISODE LINKS: Jeremy on Twitter LBRY.com Odysee.com SUPPORT: Contribute to coffee f...
Sep 01, 2021•54 min
Victor Kline is the Party Leader of the New Liberals in Australia. He's a Sydney based barrister specialising in the area of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Law. He's founder and director of the The Refugee Law Project as well as editor of the Federal Court Reports and Federal Law Reports. We cover: The need for an Independent Commission Against Corruption with teeth The moral crisis of our immigration policies and some potential solutions Australia's vast potential as an energy superpower Brain drain...
Aug 20, 2021•1 hr 12 min
In this episode I am once again joined by philosopher and economist Prof. Karl Widerquist, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University in Qatar. He was co-founder of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, the first Basic Income network in the United States, and was also co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network from 2008-2017. He's recently coauthored a several of books, two of which served as the basis of our discussion. These are The Prehistory of Private Property which debunks three f...
Aug 07, 2021•2 hr 16 min
This episode is another dive into what is one of the most fascinating and promising fields of our age: complexity science. It's a relatively new field that is transforming how we see and understand the world across multiple disciplines. Most importantly, it's can provide us with a deeper understanding of our collective interactions with the complex biophysical system we call, Earth and how we might avert the catastophes that loom. Joining me today is Professor Karoline Wiesner, Professor of Comp...
Jul 21, 2021•1 hr 36 min
This episode is a bit of a wild one. It's a three hour discussion bringing together a unifying principle for life, the free energy principle (a topic I explored in greater detail in my conversation with Maxwell Ramstead), with several pernicious problems that have plagued us for years, like consciousness, free will, intelligence, and what the hell is going on when we take psychdelic substances. Leading us on a tour of these awe-inspiring, interconnected, mind-bending topics is the scientist Dr. ...
May 24, 2021•3 hr 23 min
Herb is co-founder and treasurer of the Democracy Earth foundation, a non-profit building a blockchain-based open source "liquid democracy" governance platform, with the aim of bringing blockchain-based tools for democracy to the world at large, as well as executive Director of the Independent National Union, a new organisation with the aim of strengthening political power independent from the two-party system to enable the Independent governing of American cities, states and nation. He's a seri...
May 12, 2021•2 hr 2 min
Today we're talking about climate change and the precarious position we are all in, threatened with the very collapse of our societies and the biosphere upon which they rest, all due to our inaction. Joining me to explore this sobering topic is Earth systems scientist Professor Will Steff. Will is a climate change expert and researcher at the Australian National University, Canberra. He's held many positions related to guiding our species back onto a sustainble climate trajectory. He was the Exe...
Apr 26, 2021•1 hr 34 min
Prof. Jason Potts is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at RMIT University and Co-director of the Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT in Melbourne Australia. In our conversation we cover: The economy as a complex adaptive system Why capitalism is a misnomer, and instead, the economic system in which we live might be better characterised as an institutional market society for the growth of knowledge. We explore why innovation actually begins before the creative entrepreneur in what's called an ...
Apr 12, 2021•1 hr 58 min
My guest today is the philosophy professor Jonathan Wolff. Jonathan is the Alfred Landecker professor of values and public policy at the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government. We cover: The Capability Approach Global justice and the nation-state The difficulties of translating philosophy into policy Balancing Life & Liberty in the context of the corona virus, and; Universities in a post-covid world Shownotes Links Jonathan on Twitter Jonathan's Website Jonathan's Faculty Page...
Nov 02, 2020•2 hr 18 min
My guest today is Michael Garfield, a writer, musician, artist, poet-philosopher, paleontologist-futurist who's setting the seeds for a planetary renaissance. With incisive eloquence, he takes the threads of technology, science, and the wonders of the natural world to weave together a cosmic story of Life, one that needs to be shared more wildly. In our conversation we cover: Corona virus and the epistemic crisis Community and fragmentation Evolution as a multi-billion year remix project Psyched...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr 49 min
Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, and as President of the International Bateson Institute, an organisation that integrates the sciences, arts and professional knowledge to create a qualitative inquiry of the integration of life. Her work is focused on the innumerable relationships that define our world and who we are, understanding the role that perception and context plays in our interactions. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, ps...
Oct 20, 2020•1 hr 35 min
Mike is the founder of IdeaMarkets, a stock market for credibility that's currently under development. His team hopes to align financial incentives with the credibility of publishers to help combat misinformation and to really make the truth pay for those who seek it. In our conversation we cover: The promise of distributed ledger technologies, aka crypto Decentralised finance Idea markets and aligning financial incentives with truth seeking Truth as an ordering force in the world China's panopt...
Sep 06, 2020•1 hr 55 min
Topics covered: What is information? What's the difference between computation and information processing? What is order? Emergence and reductionism Cancer through the lens of information Top-down causality I think this episode is on one of the most fascinating topics we've explored so far. Today we're talking about information, a concept that we've only had for less than a century, but one that is proving to be absolutely foundational to our understanding of the universe and the ongoing process...
Jul 13, 2020•1 hr 39 min
The constructal law is a law of physics that predicts natural design and its evolution in biology, geophysics, climate change, technology, social organization, evolutionary design and development, wealth and sustainability. The law states that for a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides greater and greater access to the currents that flow through it. If the second law of thermodynamics is seen as the irreversibility of energy flow, the construc...
Jul 07, 2020•1 hr 42 min
In this episode of Talk of Today we're joined by Richard Bartlett. Richard is an expert in bringing people together and catalysing decentralised forms of organising. He's co founder of Enspiral (Enspiral.com) - a network of people supporting each other to grow up and to get paid for doing meaningful work. He's currently working on a project called Microsolidarity (microsolidarity.cc) that's focused on building and sharing a collection of methodologies for community building, answering the questi...
Jun 26, 2020•1 hr 21 min
The Free Energy Principle is a formal description of how life resist entropy across scales by minimising surprise. Surprise here being an information-theoretic view of how unlikely a particular sensory state of an organism is, not the psychological phenomenon of surprise — though they are definitely linked. The free energy principle describes how organisms attempt to reduce the difference between their model of the world and their perception of it. Joining me to shed light on this topic is Maxwe...
Jun 05, 2020•2 hr 49 min
Matthew Pirkowski (@MattPirkoswki) is one of Twitter's most incisive thinkers, offering penetrating insights in things ranging from representations of value, the many problems of social media platforms and how we interact with them, the evolution of society, and designing emergent systems. In our conversation we cover: - The substance underlying Jordan Peterson's main body of work and its implications for ethics. - The role money plays in scaling social groups - Specialisation as epistemic speci...
May 10, 2020•2 hr 16 min
Through the lens of opportunity and freedom — what people can do and be in the world — most Americans are far less free than the rest of the Western world. A vast proportion of Americans are shackled by wage slavery, unable to pursue the American dream. To fulfill the principles laid down by its forefathers, America needs to provide more for its citizens and unleash its latent entrepreneurial potential and become what it once was. You can read the full essay at https://www.samhbarton.com/essays/...
May 03, 2020•14 min
COVID-19 has caused titanic global shifts that are continuing to reverberate across the planet, thrusting our societies into territories unknown and crippling our economies. There have been few out there who have consistently contributed clear insights into the potential risks of a virus like COVID-19, how it can rapidly propagate across our interconnected world and wreak devastation, and most importantly, how to stop it, than Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam. Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam is president of th...
Apr 23, 2020•1 hr 13 min
What makes us happy? What affects do the decisions we make have on our subjective well-being? How does money, or parenthood affect our happiness? What are societies like when the people in them are happier? What affects do new technologies like smartphones, and constant connectivity, have on how happy we think we are? If happiness, subjective well-being, or flourishing is important (which i'm sure we'd all agree it is), answering these questions has profound consequences for how choose to organi...
Apr 18, 2020•1 hr 56 min
What are the universal scaling laws of life and what do they mean for how our societies today function and their survival in the future? The conversation I'm going to share with you today is one of the most important I've had to date. We live in a time characterised by extreme uncertainty, which is, in many ways, being driven by the impacts of insatiable hunger for growth. If we do not tame humanity's rapacious desire for more, it will spell disaster for all of us, and there's maths to prove it....
Apr 10, 2020•2 hr 3 min
Visakan Veerasamy is an eccentric Singaporean who weaves together of sparkling web of insight, wit, and positivity throughout the world of twitter. The community of people he's built around him is eclectic, and the common sentiment i see among them is an overwhelming appreciation for the content he puts out. Some would call him a marketing consultant — but that's underselling him substantially. Marketing could be seen as the best way to categorise and monetise what I think his gift is: understan...
Mar 31, 2020•1 hr 50 min
The topic of today has an importance in our lives than most of us may be unaware of: global insect populations. While these creepy crawlies may inspire disgust in some of us, the value insects bring to the natural world, and of course, to our world cannot be understated — they are inextricable, vital components of our global ecosystem, and the existence of up to 40% of insect species is threatened. Joining me in this episode to talk about this ecological catastrophe is scientist Dr. Francicso Sa...
Mar 19, 2020•1 hr 6 min
This podcast has the potential to significantly change the way you spend your time and money. And i’m not being hyperbolic. In this episode I’m speaking with Rob Wiblin from 80,000 hours, an organisation that looks into how people can spend their most precious resource, their time, but more specifically, the time they spend working, to maximise for humanity’s well being. The number 80,000 hours is roughly how long someone spends working in their lifetime, hence the name. It’s an organisation wit...
Feb 22, 2020•44 min
Tiago Forte is the the man behind the 'building a second brain course'. Among many other things, Tiago helps people build their own trusted digital archive for their most valuable knowledge and ideas. We have a pretty wide-ranging discussion, covering where people go wrong when it comes to organising their information, general thoughts about twitter the social platform responsible for this conversation, his life philosophy servant hedonism, we talk a bit about trauma, and, why he thinks he's an ...
Feb 20, 2020•1 hr 26 min
Our understanding of the biology of emotions has changed dramatically in recent years. We don't experience our emotions, we construct them. Listen to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of 'How emotions are made' talk about the science of emotions and the implications of our new understanding of them. Support this podcast Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/talk-of-today/donations...
Jul 17, 2019•59 min
This is a reading of a blog post I wrote on Design Thinking and the scientific method. Show notes can be found at samhbarton.com Blog post originally posted on buckhamduffy.com Support this podcast Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/talk-of-today/donations
Jul 15, 2019•8 min
