What are we to make of the social and financial phenomenon of cryptocurrency? Will it spell the democratization of money free from government control, or is it simply a bubble that is going to pop? The Progress Network founder Zachary Karabell sits down with Wences Casares, a technology entrepreneur and one of the early advocates of Bitcoin, who believes that it will prove to be bigger than the Internet.
This recording was first released on January 23rd, 2018.
Ideas start wars and movements, undergird societies and governments, and shape the daily experiences of our personal lives. We ignore or underestimate the power of ideas to our detriment. And yet they can feel slippery to reckon with; difficult to see, tougher still to understand their complex movement through the world.
Join The Progress Network for a wide-ranging discussion on ideas—which ones are significant now, which may be significant in the future, and how we can participate in ideas' power ourselves—with Joan Blades, co-founder of Living Room Conversations and MoveOn.org, and public intellectual Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now and several other books. Zachary Karabell, founder of The Progress Network, moderates.
At its worst, today’s capitalism is risky, reckless, and rapacious, unmindful of its impact on society and addicted to the motto that more is always more. Surrounded by these conditions, we might forget that it doesn’t have to be this way—today’s capitalism is just one of many capitalisms, and we can choose to swim in new waters instead. Editor-at-large for the Financial Times (US) Gillian Tett and The Progress Network Founder Zachary Karabell discuss.
Is higher education due for a makeover? The pandemic has only accelerated the trends disrupting the traditional model of higher ed. So it’s an opportune time to look ahead and discuss what's coming next, from closing the gap that has opened between elite schools and the rest to the waning of standardized admissions tests to the rise of online and hybrid learning from the fringe to the center. Along the way, of course, we'll be answering the ever-acute question of what it is all supposed to be for.
Join us for a conversation on the future of higher ed with Sylvia M. Burwell, president of American University, Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, and Scott Galloway, the founder of Section4, a content platform for accessible business education. Zachary Karabell, founder of The Progress Network, moderates.
When we think about our environmental future, it's no wonder that many of us feel an overwhelm bordering on defeat. We've been hearing for years about the damage humanity has done to our world and the coming climate apocalypse, which if you listen to some is now impossible to avert. There's no denying that climate change is a real and significant issue. But is the narrative of climate catastrophism accurate, and is it doing us any good?
Join The Progress Network for a conversation with Ted Nordhaus, cofounder of The Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center, Bina Venkataraman, author of The Optimist’s Telescope and a former senior climate change advisor in the Obama White House, and Jason E. Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy at Columbia University, about a more helpful approach to meeting the challenge of climate change. The discussion, moderated by our founder, Zachary Karabell, begins with the premise that planetary doom is not inevitable. It might not even be likely.
We're back with part 2 of our Web Summit episode, bringing you conversations with people who are trying to make the world a better place.
Today we talk with Sonia Jorge, Executive Director for Alliance for Affordable Internet and Head of Digital Inclusion Program at Web Foundation, to hear how they are creating the conditions for affordable Internet in countries worldwide and what they have learned along the way. Next, we sit down with Robert Barrow, the CEO of MindMed, a company that researches and develops psychedelic-inspired medicine, about what they see as the future of mental illness and addiction treatment.\
We recently attended Web Summit, a conference that brought together more than 30,000 people and over a thousand startups of all sizes. While we were there, we sat down to talk with a few people whose companies aim to make the future brighter.
Our first conversation is with Donnel Baird, the founder of BlocPower, an NYC-based company that "turns buildings into Teslas." BlockPower retrofits residential buildings to wean them off dirty energy and make them green. The second is with Bobby Healy, the founder of Manna, a drone delivery company in Ireland that is replacing gas-guzzling delivery trucks, boosting local business, and making lives much more convenient.
We all want a more generous world, but how do we design the future we want? In our Season 1 finale, Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter and founder of The Bento Society, talks with us about rethinking our self-interests and imagining and creating a better tomorrow.
Does it feel impossible trying to maneuver through the minefield of free speech, inclusivity, and "wokeness"? Or are we experiencing a much-needed disruption to the status quo? Today we're joined by Suzanne Nossel, Chief Executive Officer of PEN America, the leading human rights and free expression organization, to talk about navigating and defending free speech and free expression while also cultivating a more inclusive public culture.
How do global changes affect us on the local level, and vice versa? Today, writer and journalist James Fallows, and the founder of FutureMap, Parag Khanna, join us to discuss the interplay between the tectonic forces of geopolitics and the specific currents of the everyday. They contrast the narratives that are animating different regions of the world—especially in the United States and Asia around inequality, optimism, and defeatism—and forecast a future of migration and climate change adaptation.
