From the Episode

About Josh

Josh Berson is a tinkerer, mystic, scryer of long horizons, and fashioner of exploratory fictions. Trained as an anthropologist and historian of science, he has held appointments at the likes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the Berggruen Institute, where he was the inaugural USC Berggruen Fellow in the Transformations of the Human. 

Over the past ten years Josh has pioneered an approach to reasoning about the dynamics of human behavior over time horizons of 10–100,000 years that integrates insights from linguistic and evolutionary anthropology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology with compositional strategies drawn from fiction and generative sound art. 

Between 2013 and 2017, concurrent with his time at the Berggruen Institute, Josh served as an advisor to the Dutch design studio LUST, and from 2020 to 2021 he was the Chief Scientist of the early-stage startup Candle, whose mission was to address disinformation by providing information credibility metrics at the point of search. Since then Josh has served as an advisor to a range of organizations in the futures, health analytics, and venture capital spaces.

Not to be outdone with the pen, Josh is the author of multiple book-length monographs, including the Meat Question, released in 2019, which investigates the full sweep of human economic relationships with other gregarious vertebrates, from the Great Rift Valley three million years ago to the wet markets of China and Southeast Asia just prior to the pandemic. 

Josh is pretty sure he’s alone in publishing regularly in peer-reviewed venues such as PLoS ONE and Comparative Studies in Society and History and in fashion and lifestyle magazines, including 032c and Jane by the Grey Attic. In his spare time you’ll find him swimming in the cold sea off the Hebrides or geeking out about Casio F-91W mods and 32-bit audio recorders.