Category: Podcast

June 20, 2025

Shaping AI for Good: Prosocial Hybrid Intelligence for a Thriving Future - A conversation between Cornelia Walther and David Sloan Wilson

Free Live Discussion and Q&A with the Speakers

May 23, 2025

Democracy’s Deep Roots: From Hunter-Gatherers to Modern Society A conversation between Vivek Venkataraman and David Sloan Wilson

Free Live Discussion and Q&A with the Speakers

April 23, 2025

Decolonizing Ecology: Rethinking Nature in a Broken World with Madhusudan Katti & Amitangshu Acharya

A thought-provoking dialogue exploring how colonial world views have shaped modern ecology—and what it means to decolonize our relationship with nature in an era of social and environmental upheaval.

February 21, 2025

Depolarizing Economic Theory and Practice, with Paul Dragos Aligica

Generalized Darwinism as a new paradigm for economics and public policy doesn't fall into any current ideological camp.

January 22, 2025

Curing Economics' Addiction to Unreal Theories: A Conversation with Nat Dyer

Economist David Ricardo became so mesmerized by his models that he gave them priority over the more complicated real world—just like the neoclassical economists of today.

January 10, 2025

Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Human Origins, and Modern Democracies: A Conversation with Vivek Venkataraman

Hunter-gatherer societies have much to teach us about modern Democratic governance.

October 21, 2024

Performance Management through the Lens of a New Paradigm, with Jan Pfister.

Join a conversation about the field of performance management and how the evolution/complexity paradigm offers a new perspective, compared to the neoclassical economic paradigm.

September 16, 2024

Barry-Wehmiller’s Bold Experiment in Prosocial Cultural Evolution

Join us for a discussion about a company that has created an extraordinary culture of caring for itself, and has replicated its culture in over 140 other adopted companies.

August 27, 2024

Ecological Economics through the Lens of a New Paradigm, with Robert Costanza

August 10, 2024

Evolving Prosocial Cities, with Jonathan Rose

Complex systems science and generalized Darwinism can help to catalyze prosocial cultural evolution at the scale of whole cities.

August 9, 2024

Theory and Practice of Environmental Property, with Michael Cox

All groups require boundaries to organize their internal governance and external relations with other groups.

August 7, 2024

Assessing the Complexity/Evolution Paradigm, with Eric Beihocker

Join us for a discussion with the leading expert on an economic paradigm based on complex systems science and evolutionary science.

June 17, 2024

The Relevance of Thorstein Velblen and His Era for Rethinking Economics in the Present, with Charles Camic

Join our discussion on the emergence of economics as a profession and the divide between marginalist and evolutionary thinking that is still very much with us today.

May 20, 2024

Updating Darwin and Tocqueville on Self Interest, Rightly Understood, with Robert Putnam

Charles Darwin and Alexis de Tocqueville both embarked upon voyages that would change the way we view the world today.

May 10, 2024

Conscious Capitalism, Viewed through the Lens of a New Paradigm, with Raj Sisodia and Bob Chapman

Conscious capitalism is well known as a business movement that goes against almost everything that is taught in business school.

May 10, 2024

The B-Corp Movement, Viewed through the Lens of a New Paradigm

The B-Corp movement, which envisions "business as a force for good", started in 2006 and currently numbers over 8000 companies worldwide.

May 10, 2024

The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory, with Elliott Sober

Philosophers have a major role to play in scientific inquiry, with topic areas such as physics and biology raising different sets of issues.

May 10, 2024

A Theory of Everyone as a New Paradigm, with MIchael Muthukrishna

Generalized Darwinism can improve our ability to accomplish positive change in the real world.

April 1, 2024

The Theory and Practice of Cultural Evolution: Past, Present, and Future, with Peter J. Richerson

Join us as we discuss the past, present, and future of the vitally important topic of Nature vs. Nurture.

February 29, 2024

Wicked Problems and How to Solve Them

Join us as we discuss the general nature of wicked problems and how Binghamton and Binghamton University can become a city and university that is adept at solving them.

January 24, 2024

Integrating Evolutionary Science and Complex Systems Science with Graham Boyd

Evolutionary science and complex systems science are foundational bodies of knowledge for any positive change effort.

March 1, 2023

Anti-Trust from a Multilevel Evolutionary Perspective with Denise Hearn

Can Multilevel Cultural Evolution provide a new paradigm for anti-trust law, along with the rest of economics?

October 10, 2022

What Happened to Selfish Genes? with J. Arvid Agren

January 14, 2021

Atlas Hugged and the Nature of Fiction, with Brian Boyd

We discuss Atlas Hugged and Brian's biography-in-progress of the legendary philosopher of science, Karl Popper, who pioneered the study of epistemology from an evolutionary perspective.

January 14, 2021

Atlas Hugged and Catalyzing Positive Change in the Real World, with David Korten

David Korten is the renowned futurist, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning among many other books, founder of YES! Magazine, and a prominent member of the Club of Rome.

January 14, 2021

Atlas Hugged and Our Moment of Choice, with Kurt Johnson

Kurt Johnson wears many hats--a distinguished evolutionary biologist, a leader of the Interspiritual Movement, an authority on the scientific career of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov

November 2, 2020

The Study of Nature in Early America: A Conversation with Lee Dugatkin

Darwin was an integral part of the Enlightenment and was avidly pursued by early Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and the portrait artist Charles Willson Peale, who created the most famous museum of the Revolutionary era.

November 2, 2020

Human Nature at Work with Andrew O'Keeffe

TVOL guest host Max Beilby talks with Andrew O'Keeffe about his work helping leaders make better sense of the human dimension of their role, so that they can work with, rather than against, human nature.

November 2, 2020

Managing the Human Animal, with Nigel Nicholson and Max Beilby

Max Beilby and Nigel Nicholson discuss the application of evolutionary psychology to the world of business and management.

September 2, 2020

[BONUS] Robert Kurzban On the Modular Mind

In this bonus archive episode, David talks with evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban.

September 2, 2020

Cultural Evolution with Alex Mesoudi

In the last 30 years, evolutionary theory has undergone explosive growth in studying humans as a fundamentally cultural species.

August 16, 2020

A Tale of Two Evolutionary Processes, with Rita Colwell

Rita Colwell pioneered the study of microbial ecology and genetics and served as Director of the National Science Foundation during 1998-2004.

August 16, 2020

Positive Deviance as the Third Way: A Conversation with David K. Hurst

Positive Deviance has been used to prevent child malnourishment in Vietnam, female circumcision in Egypt, and even improve an American pharmaceutical company's outreach to doctors.

August 10, 2020

The Third Way of Entrepreneurship with Victor Hwang

August 9, 2020

Peter J. Richerson: Morality from an Evolutionary Perspective

August 4, 2020

[BONUS EPISODE] Geoffrey Hodgson on Evolutionary Thinking and Its Policy Implications for Modern Capitalism

Hodgson's research has applications to the understanding of organizations, organizational change, innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development.

August 2, 2020

Morality from an Evolutionary Perspective with Simon Blackburn

David discusses morality from an evolutionary perspective with analytic philosopher Simon Blackburn.

July 30, 2020

The Nordic Third Way with Nina Witoszek and Atle Midttun

The Nordic countries are identified as exemplars of good governance and the Third Way.

July 13, 2020

Ecosystems are Probably Not What You Think: A Conversation with Tom Whitham

What are ecosystems? Do they achieve some kind of balance in their natural state? Do they evolve in a way that can't be explained by the evolution of their component species? I take a deep dive with Tom Whitham into territory that is controversial even among the experts.

July 6, 2020

Development and the Third Way with Scott Peters

June 29, 2020

The Third Way in the Internet Age with Tim O’Reilly

June 22, 2020

Smart Cities and the Third Way with Dan O'Brien

Urban planning represents one kind of positive change effort that has suffered from excessive reliance on laissez-faire in some instances and centralized planning in other instances.

June 15, 2020

Science as a Moral System with Robert T. Pennock

June 15, 2020

Libertarianism and the Third Way

June 11, 2020

Economics, Public Policy, and the Third Way

June 4, 2020

Socialism, Capitalism, and the Third Way of National Governance

Geoffrey Hodgson, a scholar of economics and the social sciences, explains how both forms of national governance fail in their pure forms.

May 24, 2020

Pragmatism and the Third Way with Trygve Throntveit

May 23, 2020

Evolving the Future of Corporations: A Conversation with Toby Shannan

A major corporation is teaming up with evolutionary scientists to help achieve its laudable goals and provide a model for other corporations.

May 5, 2020

Tightening and Loosening Up for the Coronavirus Pandemic with Michele Gelfand

TVOL's first podcast with Michele Gelfand explored an axis of cultural variation from "tight" (strong norms, strongly enforced) to "loose" (tolerant of individual differences).

April 26, 2020

Finding Purpose in Evolution Education: A Conversation with Susan Hanisch and Dustin Eirdosh

March 28, 2020

Evolutionary Mismatch in the Workplace with Mark van Vugt and Max Beilby

March 6, 2020

PsychTable.org: A Digital Classification Table of Human Evolved Psychological Adaptations. A Conversation with Niruban Balachandran and Daniel Glass

February 26, 2020

Evolution Doesn't Make Everything Nice: A Conversation About Primate Societies with Joan Silk

January 29, 2020

Dugnad as Part of Norway's Culture of Cooperation: A Conversation with Carsta Simon and Hilde Mobekk

October 21, 2019

Lynette Shaw on Social Constructionism and Finding Academic Common Ground

October 21, 2019

Elliott Sober on the Origins of Multilevel Selection

October 21, 2019

Peter Gray on Education as a Biological Phenomenon, Learning from Hunter-Gatherers, and Letting Children Lead

October 20, 2019

Michele Gelfand on Tight and Loose Cultures