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 …

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: Co…

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 work…

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, …

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 Corrupti…

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…

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…

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 …

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 stre…

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 Austr…

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 ins…

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 c…

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. I…

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,…

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…

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'v…

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…

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 M…

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 o…

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 Jor…

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 ci…

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 interc…

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-be…

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 insat…

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 consulta…

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 exis…

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 …

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 twitte…

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 — htt…

This is a reading of a blog post I wrote on Design Thinking and the scientific method. Show notes can be found at samhbarton.comBlog post originally posted on buckhamduffy.com Support this podcast Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/talk-of-today/donationsPor Sam Barton

This is an audio essay on the issue of state sovereignty in an interconnected world, inspired by Trump's recent address to the UN General Assembly. The essay is available on talkoftoday.com and on medium -@shbarton. Links and sources can be found there as well.You can support the podcast at www.patreon.com/talkoftoday or at talkoftoday.com/support …

Chris Timmerman is a PhD student in the Psychedelic Research Group from Imperial College in London. He's currently conducting brain imaging experiments on people under the influence of the psychedelic drug DMT. In this episode, we talk about the psychedelics in general, ego dissolutionment and DMT.You can support this podcast at www.patreon.com/tal…

Meditation has exploded in popularity in recent years. Once thought of as a purely spiritual practice, the physical and mental benefits of it are now being recognised by science. Secular institutions like schools and corporations are jumping onto the Zen train to reap these benefits, which range from increases in productivity, improved sleep qualit…

In this episode, we explore the technologies that will shape our future as outlined in the book 'The Inevitable' by Kevin Kelly. It takes the vast swathes of technological developments that we’ve seen over the past few decades, and paints a marvellous picture of what they could, and most likely will inevitably mean for the future. Topics covered in…

Today's episode is a bit different from the rest. Instead of talking about developments in science, tech and society, I'm chatting to a man called Gosife Okenta about the ongoing subjugation and suffering of his people in Nigeria. He would not call himself Nigerian, however. Gosife is from Biafra, a secessionist state in eastern Nigeria that existe…

Aging could become a thing of the past. Not in 100 years, but within our lifetime (whatever that means) In this episode, I'm joined by Aubrey de Grey. Aubrey is a British biomedical gerontologist, chief scientist and founder of the SENS Research Foundation, an institution focused on using regenerative medicines to repair damage underlying the disea…

There aren't too many decisions that we make daily that can have as much of an impact on the world as what we choose to eat. Today, we're joined by Dr Liz Specht from the Good Food Institute to talk about the future of food. In our conversation, we talk about what's going on in food-tech, why are these developments so important, and when will we ta…

This episode is with Dr Fatima Nasrallah, a senior scientist and researcher from the Queensland Brain Institute.This is a discussion on concussions, yo. What do we know about them, how do we measure them, what are the long term impacts, and how should you use this information? Show notes available at talkoftoday.com/podcast-3Links: www.talkoftoday.…

We now have a new way of observing the universe. Over a century ago, Einstein’s seminal work on the theory of general relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves which are ripples within the very fabric of the universe itself. In February of 2016, the existence of gravitational waves was confirmed by measurements made by the Laser Int…

This episode is a bit different to the rest! Topics discussed are: - What the podcast is about and what to expect - Why I started the podcast - Brief bio on me(Sam Barton)- An explanation of the Global Citizenship concept I've discussed on other podcasts.Links mentioned: www.globalcitizenship.todaywww.talkoftoday.comwww.patreon.com/talkoftodayInsta…

Blockchain technology has potential to transform society. It's described as 'the trust machine' - an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value. My guest for this episode is Kary Bheemaiah -a researcher, lecturer, writer, technology consult…

DMT(dimethyltryptamine - more like dimethyltripdaeffout) is a psychedelic substance that's found throughout nature and within the human body. It's a substance that, after more scientific enquiry, could bridge the gap between science and spirituality due to the life-changing, and some would say, mystical experiences it can facilitate. Dr Rick Strass…

The Earth Charter is an international declaration of fundamental values and principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century. It "seeks to inspire in all peoples a sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the human family, the greater community of life, and future ge…

Today's guest is Brett Lewis, a marine researcher from the Queensland University of Technology. He was a part of the team that filmed video of coral bleaching in action that ended up going viral. In today's episode ,we find out exactly what coral bleaching actually and what does it mean for the great barrier reef? Why is reef actually important, an…

We can now take our evolution into our own hands. Amal Graafstra is Chief of Awesome and Dangerous Things, a Biohacking company based out of Seattle, Washington. He's one of the guys that put biohacking on the map, with the RFID chip he's got implanted in his hand, that allows him to access his car and house without keys - and that's just the start…

Universal Basic Income - an answer to our automated future and the beginning of a utopian future?An idea backed by people on both sides of the political spectrum, technologists and futurists, a basic income may not just be philosophically appealing, it may be necessary.Today's conversation is with Dr Karl Widerquist, a political philosopher and eco…

What makes an idea stick? What is it about an idea that causes it to plant itself in the mind and spread? In this episode, I talk to Dr Brendan Markey-Towler, an economist from the University of Queensland, about a paper he wrote called 'Competition of Ideas in the Public Sphere'. Basically, what Brendan does in this paper is break dow what form an…