FutureXplorations

In this, the last interview of the season, I have the privilege to talk  to Dr. Anitra Nelson, among many other things we discussed:

- Inequality
- How CO2 emissions is just the tip of the iceberg in sustainability issues
- How capitalism is connected to our sustainability problems
- Dualism between humans and nature as a wrong way of practicing our lives
- Move beyond production to the market, towards production based on demand
- What degrowth is, and it is not
- Accumulation of wealth
- Health and education key to reduce inequalities
- Have we truly improved as humans, as society? Hint... yes… and no
- Government and powers corrupting it
- Why do we need postcapitalism and what it would look like?
- Going beyond money
- Frugal abundance and conviviality
- Feminist perspective in new economic thinking
- Co-govern, self-govern and direct democracy
- Open re-localization and regenerative culture

On this occasion I had the privilege to talk with Dr. Kent Mullinix,  expert in Agriculture and Food Systems, some of the topics we cover were:  

- Why are we talking about Food Systems?

- What was before we called it a System.

- What it was like to grow and exchange food for thousands of years.

- How the industrial revolution changed the way we grow our food.

- What impact the globalisation of our economy has had in the way we grow our food.

- Our loss of connection with seasonality, with place.

- The price to pay to eat what we want, as much as we want to, whenever we want to.

- The incredible importance of soil and how bad we treat it.

- The role of technology to solve the problems we cause and its ethics.

- Synthetic fertilisers and how they affect soil microbiota, the carbon cycle and oceans.

- What is it and why regenerative agriculture is so important for the  future.

- Water usage in agriculture and its growing scarcity.

- The lack of farmers, today and going into the future!

- Agroecological methods to include introduction of animals in agriculture.

- How it seems to be a link between how we produce food and its decaying nutrient value.

- The troubling disappearance of insects.

- What is the ultimate purpose of agriculture?

- Food production should be aligned with place, with bio regions.

- The interest of young people for agriculture focused on community, rebuilding and ecologically sound community.

- What a sustainable food production future could look like.

This is the ninth interview of this season, I had the honour to talk to Dr. Ellie Perkins, Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto. Some of the topics we talked about:

- The importance of economics in human life and its relation with politics.

- Capitalism’s core objectives.

- How markets equilibrate supply and demand, and its impact on equity.

- How classical economics understands “capital, labour and land”.

- The true costs of our economic system.

- How it connects to globalisation, imperialism, and the climate crisis.

- How the pandemic showed some elements of its failures.

- The intervention of economic powers into our governments.

- What is Ecological Economics and what it proposes.

- What adds a Feminist view to Ecological Economics.

- Ecological footprint.

- How to assign value to things and how Ecological Economics deals with it.

- Ecosystem services and “optimal scale”.

- Women’s influence in demographics, labour market and production systems.

- Where wellbeing comes from, and the relation of wellbeing with material input.

- Feminism in economics and intersectionality.

- Lack of trust in government, democracy, equity and justice.

This is the 8th episode, this time I had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Bernstein about:

- His unique approach to test cognitive development across ages.

- Perspective taking in theory of mind.

- Ceiling performance in cognitive development tests.

- If other factors like education level, cultural background, gender, etc make any difference in these tests.

- Difference between false belief and false memory.

- How and why we develop false memories and false beliefs.

- How memory works and what types do humans have.

- What metacognition is.

- Daniel Kahneman’s work and decision making.

- Non-believed memories.

- Evolutionary advantages for how our memory works.

- Richard H. Thaler’s work in behavioural economics.

- How to approach our climate change challenge.

This time I had an amazing conversation with Dr. Hogan, we covered the following topics:

- Why is philosophy important?

- What is a fundamental assumption?

- What Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato thought about change

- Loss and grieving in the face of change

- Nihilism today

- The purpose of life

- The meaningfulness of life

- The role of philosophy in a polarised world

- Truth, believes and identity

In the 6th episode I had an interesting conversation with Dr. Dastur, we chat about:

- What evolution is in its most basic

- What was Darwin’s contribution

- Natural selection, variability and competition

- Covid and its variants from an evolutionary perspective

- Why is Psychology interested in evolution

- The mind and the brain

- Neuropsychology

- Traits from evolution and from cultural influence

- Chimps and crows abilities for memory and tool usage

- Human nature is both biological and sociological in origin

- Our parasympathetic and sympathetic systems

- Limits in our memory and decision making capacity

- The interface between biology, sociology, psychology and technology

- Artificial intelligence, virtual reality and cyborgs

- Interstellar travel, aliens and the future of human evolution

In this 5th episode of the first season of FutureXplorations, Dr. Gershenson and I talk about: 

- What is complexity, what makes a system complex? 

- Interaction and emergence 

- Why the success of reductionism? 

- How computation gave us the power to study complexity 

- How ancient Greek philosophy and Buddhism deal with change 

- Change in lower and higher scales in systems 

- Aristotle’s view on emergence, and Dr. Gershenson’s definition 

- Upwards or downwards emergence 

- How social norms are properties of the collective and how they influence individual behaviours 

- Scales in complexity 

- Downward causation, behaviour at higher scale that can cause behaviour at a lower scale 

- Work, effort, value and monetary value 

- System’s dynamics, robustness and adaptation 

- Increased complexity in life and how plan for the long term 

- What is self-organisation? 

- Physical limits, physical boundaries and extended mind theory 

- What is autopoiesis? 

- Control and efficiency in distributed decentralised and centralised systems

In the fourth interview of this series I had the incredible opportunity to chat with PhD candidate Kendra Jewell, we talk about:

-What anthropology was for in the past and today

-Culture and its constant state of flux

-Privilege in climate adaptation

-What empathy is about

-Climate change denial

-What happens when worldviews are challenged

-How these worldviews are built

-Queer thinking

-Mitigating climate change

-What white supremacy is

-Geoengineering, a necessary evil?

-Failure and grieving

In the third episode I had the honour to chat with Dr. Love-Ese Chile, chemist and COO / Technical Director at Regenerative Waste Labs. These were some of the topics we cover:

• Waste as a human-made concept
• Homeostasis and why is all about balance
• How humans built on “sameness” and why that makes us so fragile
• How can we make human-made systems more flexible and adaptable to change
• Entropy as a measure of order and why we need to change our mindset about it
• Circular Economy
• The differences between recycling, repurposing and other “Rs”
• The chemistry of down and up cycling
• 3 reason why we can recycle all our materials properly
• From circular to regenerative economy
• Empowerment through technology, knowledge, community and collaboration
• How are we limiting ourselves
• From impoverishment state to a better resource allocation

In this second interview I had the honour to chat with Dr. Jacquelyn Gill, Associate Professor of Paleoecology at the University of Maine. These are some of the topics we talked about:

• How do we define what is alive and what is not?
• Origins of life on Earth
• CO2 concentration in Earth’s atmosphere, how back data can go, how do we measure it?
• Ice cores, seafloor cores, plant fossils
• Tectonic plates
• Migrations thousands of years ago and its drivers
• What drives CO2 levels in the atmosphere, long-term, short-term and now
• Natural ways of carbon capture
• Milankovitch cycles
• Can we use plants to manipulate climate?
• Geoengineering
• Carbon capture technology and drivers
• Geopolitical implications and ethics
• The importance of immediate action
• The real problem… consumption and inequality
• Planetary stewardship

In this my first interview I had the honour to chat with Dr. Eva Noyola observational astronomer.
Some of the topics we cover:

How the Universe changes, and how we can get to know of those changes, how light is the magic tool for it.

The expansion of the Universe and its curvature and how we are not in any special part of the universe, there is no centre of the universe.

Knowledge as one of the most fast changing things in human life.

Dark energy, which we have no idea what it is, but we know is the force that is making the universe expand and accelerate.

Dark matter creates a gravitational field that pulls objects together, and the work of Vera Rubin.

The possible fates of the Universe.

Exoplanets and the continuous discovery of more in nearby stars. Until now we know of 4,000 or so and how only a few could be Earth-like.

What an Earth-like exoplanet is and why is this important, rocky, not too far or to close to its star, and how much we still need to understand.

The scale of our solar system and how hard is to comprehend the vastness and emptiness of space.

Space exploration the need for a base on the moon, as well as a cautionary approach to the idea of space "colonization", the ethics of space exploration.

Dyson spheres and the energetic problem of space travel.

The interesting possibility that we might be the most advanced civilisation, at least in our galaxy, and what could it mean for life on Earth.

Planet B and the danger of giving up on Earth.

En este primer episodio presentamos la idea general del podcast así como sus objetivos. No olvides suscribirte para escuchar los nuevos episodios, comenzamos en 2022!

In this first short episode we introduce the podcast's topics and goals. Don't forget to subscribe to get all new episodes starting in 2022!