Tag: Innovation

Michael Muthukrishna on Developing a Theory of Everyone

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape | 30 October 2023 | 1h 17m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Michael Muthukrishna about his book A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. Brings together ideas from cultural evolution, energy engineering, economics, and psychology to outline an integrated theory providing basic organising principles for society based on how people relate to each other and to the physical resources available spelled out as ‘laws’ of energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution.

Have you bought this book yet? You really must. The highest praise I can give it is that it feels like the next book that Matt Ridley might have written.

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Joseph Henrich: Cross-Cultural Research, Intelligence, Mating Systems, and Religion

The Dissenter | 28 August 2023 | 0h 58m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Joseph Henrich discussing how culture shapes human psychology; human universals, and cognitive phenotypes; how different fields reacted to the WEIRD problem; the replication crisis; how to understand biases, like the prestige bias; what drives innovation, and cumulative culture; the collective brain hypothesis, and reframing how we think about intelligence and IQ; assortative mating, human mating systems, and the relationship between polygyny and inequality; religion, Big Gods, and theory of mind; the best methods to study psychology historically; and the overreliance on English speakers in the study of human cognition, and the need for people from more diverse cultural backgrounds in science.

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Michael Muthukrishna: A Theory of Everyone

The Dissenter | 25 September 2023 | 1h 40m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Michael Muthukrishna about his book A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. Discusses the premise of the book; the four laws of life: energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution; how cooperation expands in human societies, and what distinguishes us from other animals; intelligence and IQ, and the collective brain and the idea of “genius”; the importance of institutions and cultural norms, and the role of ideas; multiculturalism, and how to solve the “paradox of diversity”; our current energy ceiling, and the problems that derive from it and how to solve them; and the challenges of studying human behavior cross-culturally.

It’s finally here! Michael Muthkrishna launched what will surely be the most important book this year in conversation with Matthew Syed at the London School of Economics. You can watch the launch on LSE’s YouTube channel (the presentation starts 7 min 15 s into the video. You should definitely subscribe to his Substack.

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Alex Tabarrok on Innovation

EconTalk | 26 December 2011 | 1h 08m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Alex Tabarrok about his book Launching the Innovation Renaissance. Argues that innovation in the United States is being held back by patent law, the legal system, and immigration policies. Suggests how this might be improved to create a better climate for innovation, leading to higher productivity, and a higher standard of living.

See another 50 posts on innovation.

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Daron Acemoglu on Innovation and Shared Prosperity

EconTalk | 31 July 2023 | 1h 06m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Daron Acemoglu about his book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, co-authored with Simon Johnson. Argues that the productivity and prosperity that results from innovation is not always shared widely across the population and makes the case for regulating new technologies to ensure that the benefits of innovation are distributed equitably.

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The Innovators Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas

MIT Press Podcast | 24 June 2023 | 0h 15m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Michael Schrage about his book The Innovator’s Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas. Argues that testable hypotheses rather than good ideas are the key to innovation. Also introduces his 5×5 framework: giving diverse teams of five people up to five days to come up with portfolios of five business experiments costing no more than $5,000 each and taking no longer than five weeks to run.

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The Economics of Innovation

The New Bazaar | 18 May 2023 | 1h 11m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Heidi Williams and Caleb Watney about the economics of innovation. Considers the evidence that the Great Stagnation may have ended (increased startups, mRNA vaccines, GPT-4, etc). Discusses policy settings and institutional designs to encourage new technologies and innovations and discusses new ideas for how scientific institutions should approach the process of scientific discovery.

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The History of Bell Labs With Jon Gertner

FourWeekMBA | 2 March 2023 | 1h 00m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Jon Gertner about his book The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Discusses the history of Bell Labs, digging into the factors responsible for its role as an incubator of innovation and birthplace of many influential technologies.

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