The Conversation

Finally, formally, this is where The Conversation ends. If you've been a contemporaneous listener, thanks for joining on this epic trip. If you're just discovering The Conversation, welcome! This might be a more interesting place to begin than the beginning.

Lisa "Tiny" Gray-Garcia is a writer, organizer, activist, poet, and self-proclaimed poverty scholar. She is the only interviewee in The Conversation who has spent a good portion of her life houseless (a term she prefers over homeless), and a lot of her work has addressed issues of poverty. In addition to being a prolific writer of articles she is the author of Criminal of Poverty, the founder of Poor Magazine, the driving force behind the Homefulness Project. When I recorded this interview in the summer of 2013, I did not expect it to be the final interview I would record for The Conversation, yet it makes a better conclusion that I could have anticipated. Lisa's voice at the end of the project casts the earlier episodes in a different light. This interview reminds us that grand speculation about the distant future—and even mundane speculation about the near future—is often the privilege of affluence, just as it is beset by the blind spots of the affluent. That doesn't cheapen any of the fascinating interviewees in The Conversation, but it does remind us that The Conversation is, almost by definition, not as inclusive as we want it to be. A lot of people are too busy surviving to join in The Conversation. Though this is the final interview, it is not the final episode. Expect that soon.

Rebecca Solnit is an author, activist, and geographer, among other things. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and Men Explain Things to Me. She's also a regular contributor to Harpers, The Nation, and The Guardian.

Peter Gleick researches water and water policy at the Pacific Institute. In addition to co-founding the Pacific Institute, Gleick is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship for his work, and has been instrumental in the United Nation's designation of water as a human right. I learned about Peter through Lawrence Torcello, who you can hear in episode 29 of The Conversation. Unsurprisingly, this conversation is generally about water, though we also spoke about population in more detail than any interview since John Seager. You will also catch a few oblique glimpses of the philosophy of science as I ask Peter about the importance of cultural beliefs versus scientific knowledge in determining policy.

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the biggest names in current science fiction. His most famous work is, arguably, the Mars Trilogy, but he is the author of seventeen novels and several collections of short stories. I could easily overburden you with biographical details and lists of his accolades, but I'll leave that to this very comprehensive fan page. I learned about Stan through my interview with Tim Morton in 2012—they are friends and, at the time, both lived in Davis. It took a year but, when I next passed through Davis, I was fortunate enough to get three hours to sit down with Stan and talk about the future. I was especially interested in Stan's work because he is a thorough researcher and regularly uses his fiction to explore a variety of plausible economic, scientific, ecological, and social futures. In other words, he uses fiction to ask many of the same questions that we have been asking our interviewees throughout the project. The result, I think, is one of the strongest and most wide-ranging interviews in The Conversation.

Rebecca Costa is a self-proclaimed sociobiologist, author of The Watchman's Rattle: A Radical New Theory of Collapse, and host of the radio program The Costa Report. Throughout The Conversation we have regularly talked about the question of cognitive limits in an increasingly complex society, but we have only addressed the idea in passing. Wanting to dedicate a full episode to cognitive limits, we launched a search for interviewees that lead us straight to Rebecca Costa. There are lots of connections in this episode, but the most developed ones are with Joseph Tainter and George Lakoff. The Lakoff connection is especially interesting because, like him, Rebecca calls our attention to the biology of the mind—in essence, calling us to recognize what kind of animal we truly are. Both cite science to support their claims about how we think and behave, yet both have radically different conceptions of what the human animal is and the scope of reason in the mind.

Rainey Reitman is the Activism Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a co-founder of both the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Chelsea Manning Support Network. My conversation with Rainey is, in many ways, the logical extension of my conversation with James Bamford about digital surveillance and privacy. But while Bamford discussed the extent and mechanisms of surveillance, that conversation didn't get into the nuts and bolts of how to cure the problem he diagnosed. Enter Rainey, who spends her days trying to make issues of digital liberties comprehensible and relevant. We only had an hour for our interview, so I wasn't able to pivot from digital liberties towards the bigger picture issues that I usually aim for, but there's still a ton of good material in here. Neil and I were especially interested in analogies between physical and digital space and questions of public versus private ownership.

George Lakoff is one of the most influential living linguists. He has revolutionized how we think about metaphor's role in cognition, the grounding of metaphor in the human body, and the metaphorical basis of mathemetics. Equally important, Lakoff is extremely active outside of the lab, as a teacher, author, speaker, and political consultant. His books include Metaphors We Live By, Don't Think of an Elephant, and Moral Politics. I spoke to George for two hours and, I think it's fair to say, he constructs the largest system of interconnected theories yet featured in The Conversation—which is something you can do when you're a polymath with four decades of research under your belt. Our first hour was spent with me trying to get a comprehensive outline of the system and its various moving parts, while our second hour had a more conversational rhythm as we discussed the philosophy of science and implications of his research. As always, I've edited the full interview down to a manageable size. There were a lot of potential connections between Lakoff and other interviewees in The Conversation but, unfortunately, time constraints made it hard to explore most of the paths that opened up. Despite that, this is an epic conversation and, whether you find it revelatory or maddening, it is worth every minute of your time.

Charles Hugh Smith is an economics writer, former builder, and general renaissance man who blogs at oftwominds.com, a site CNBC ranked as one of their top alternative economics blogs. We talk about (comparatively) rosy collapse scenerios, parallel economies, the possibilities and limits of desktop fabrication, and why you should be out paving a bike lane. There are lots of interesting connections in Charles' interview, notably with Joseph Tainter and Douglass Rushkoff.

Jason Kelly Johnson is one of the co-founders of Future Cities Lab, an experimental architecture and design firm in San Francisco, CA. We spoke about cities, buildings, permeability, and nostalgia, among other things.

Joan Blades is the co-founder of Living Room Conversations, a movement dedicated to fostering meaningful dialogue between Americans of different political ideologies. In addition to her work with Living Room Conversations, Joan was also a co-founder of MoveOn.org and MomsRising. She's also partly to thank for the After Dark screensaver and flying toasters, which isn't germane, but is damn cool. I learned about Joan through Mark Mykleby and she immediately found a place on our "Must Interview" list because she was actually creating the very types of discussions Micah, Neil, and I had hoped to spark with The Conversation. Unsurprisingly, Joan and I talk extensively about the value of conversation, where it is (and isn't) possible, and its limits. You'll also hear a lot about American politics—a little more tangible than we usually get in The Conversation—and the role of media and corporate money in shaping thought. Before jumping into the episode, Micah, Neil, and I would like to say hello and welcome back to all our listeners. I was derailed by a variety of things over the past year but I've returned to the land of the living and will, hopefully, be editing the final ten episodes over the next several months. After that, we're going to discuss The Conversation's future more seriously—which could involve sending the project out to sea in a burning longship, continuing it in a limited form, or something less predictable.

After more than half a year away from The Conversation, Aengus and Micah return with a panel they gave at South by Southwest Interactive. The panel, entitled "A Sheep in Wolf's Clothes: The Myth of Disruption" drew extensively from The Conversation to question ideas of progress that are implied by the science/tech industries. This episode is a departure from the rest of The Conversation's format but, rest assured, Aengus, Micah, and Neil will return soon with a new episode.

Ed Finn is the Director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University.  The Center was conceived as a place where people from radically different intellectual backgrounds come together to dream about the future—to "reignite humanity's grand ambitions for innovation and discovery," in their words.  To this end, they sponsor everything from collaborative science fiction projects to big conferences about the future.  We learned about the Center through this article and, if you want to dig a little deeper into their history, it's a good place to start. My conversation with Ed focuses on two interrelated subjects: dreams and narratives.  Are we, as a society, adequately dreaming about the future or have we outsourced our dreams to distant experts?  Do we have adequate time for dreaming?  Has increasing specialization made it difficult for the kind of interdisciplinary thinking needed for the creation of radical new ideas?  Ed advocates "thoughtful optimism" as he segues from dreams into narratives, suggesting that our more ambitious hopes can be realized through the right collective narrative.  You will hear echoes of David Korten and Mark Mykleby, but I think one of the most interesting moments of the conversation comes when we talk about Lawrence Torcello and ask whether ambiguous narratives can get us further than a reasonable conversation. Neil and I conclude the episode by discussing Douglas Rushkoff, Ethan Zuckerman, and whether a fragmented media landscape makes it harder (or impossible) to develop a unifying narrative.  We also explore the idea of an ambiguous narrative in more detail, asking if a vague narrative is more or less likely to bring people together than an Enlightenment-style conversation about the Good.

If you've listened to The Conversation for a while, you know there are numerous reasons we invite guests to join the series. Sometimes we are interested in a new idea and its implications, or an old idea that's being revitalized. We gravitate toward people working on interesting projects that challenge or test the status quo. From time to time, we like discussing conversation itself, whether that's conversation as an art or conversation as a tool. We also think it's important to include guests who remind us that the status quo varies based upon where you live. Todays episode falls into this last category. Our parameters for guests often lead us to people who live comfortable and secure lives, far removed from violence and political instability—but what does the future look like when you spend your time writing about crime in one of Earth's most violent cities? Enter Charles Bowden. Charles is a journalist and author. His writing spans from savings and loan scandals to natural resources, but he is best known for his books about Ciudad Juarez, which include Murder City, Down by the River, and Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future. Over here at The Conversation, we've also been intrigued by Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future. In addition to writing long-form work, Charles is a contributor to Mother Jones and has published in Harper's, The Nation, GQ, and The New York Times Book Review. Charles and I spoke for over four hours and our conversation sprawled in more than a few directions. If you're looking for a concise, point-by-point diagnosis and solution for our woes, you won't find it here. Instead, you'll find a meditation that returns to the subjects of fear, human nature, and the environment. You'll hear about assassins and sandhill cranes, overpopulation and your place in history—which, Charles claims, is simultaneously important and irrelevant.

Carlos Perez de Alejo is a the co-founder and Executive Director of Cooperation Texas, an Austin-based nonprofit that helps organize and raise awareness of worker-owned cooperatives. Economics has been a regular theme in The Conversation but, from David Korten to John Fullerton, many of our discussions have focused on systemic issues and top-down reform. While we at The Conversation love big theories and grand visions, we're equally interested in projects. Worker-owned cooperatives fall in this latter category and, while they are hardly new, the changing economic landscape and success of Spain's Mondragon Corporation have raised their prominence considerably. In this episode, Carlos and I talk about how cooperatives critique our current economic paradigm, even as they function within it. That theme leads into a discussion of whether cooperatives will ever be able to grow large enough to meaningfully change the economic paradigm or if they will always be overshadowed by the competition of traditional corporations. In our concluding discussion of Walter Block, Neil suggested that conversation isn't always possible. Carlos agrees, but also points to situations where people abandon old ideologies without conversation. Micah and I kick these ideas around a bit more in our conclusion.

Libertarian ideas have been a major theme in The Conversation. They were introduced in our second episode by Max More and have since been elaborated upon by David Miller, Robert Zubrin, Tim Cannon, and Oliver Porter. But while libertarianism has been discussed frequently, it has always been a secondary theme within episodes about, say, transhumanism or space exploration. But libertarianism is too intriguing to discuss obliquely, so we're pulling it out of the background and exploring it in a full episode. We were especially interested in the logical conclusion of libertarian thought and, for that, we turned to Walter Block. Walter Block is a self-described anarcho-capitalist, chair of the Economics Department at Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and a Senior Fellow at the libertarian Mises Institute. Block is also the author of numerous articles and several books, including Defending the Undefendable and The Case for Discrimination. Connections to earlier episodes abound as Block calls John Zerzan crazy, suggests Gary Francione commit suicide, and lambastes the ideas of John Rawls that were advanced by Lawrence Torcello. Whatever you think of this episode, you'll certainly remember it.

Phyllis Tickle founded Publishers Weekly's Religion Department and has written numerous books about modern American Christianity, including "The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why." Phyllis begins our conversation by describing 500-year social, cultural, and religious cycles in parts of the world influenced by Abrahamic faiths. Building upon that, she asserts that our current historical moment lies at the edge of two such cycles. The upshot of this is a breakdown in traditional understandings of authority and a period of chaotic exploration. Emergence Christianity, like other emergent faiths, is developing as a response to this period of transition. Though religion has been a regular theme in the background of The Conversation, this is our first episode dedicated entirely to it. As a result, we introduce a lot of new themes and you will hear fewer explicit connections to earlier episodes. Having said that, there are some interesting ties between Emergence Christianity and the income gap which harken back to Chuck Collins, Francione-like questions of purity versus pragmatism, and more Tim Cannon and Max More-style transhumanism than you'd ever expect.

We swoop in for our first interstitial episode in six months. Neil has the plague, but Micah and I talk about the future of The Conversation, our perpetual need to raise the project's visibility, and our naïve hope for funding another season of production. In light of James Bamford's conversation and my op-ed about digital liberties in Boing Boing, we talk about themes that aren't connected.

Scott Douglas, III, is the Executive Director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, an interfaith organization in Birmingham, Alabama. GBM provides poverty relief, lobbies to reform Alabama's state constitution, and has recently been active in opposing self-deportation laws. My conversation with Scott is a powerful reminder that status quo ideas vary deeply based on location and that equality—or equity, as Scott prefers—remains just as cutting-edge of an idea today as it did fifty years ago. Like Roberta Francis, Henry Louis Taylor, and Carolyn Raffensperger, Scott takes us into the legal structures undergirding our society to find discriminatory systems that are felt more often than seen. History plays a major role in this episode and Scott offers a great account of how people perceive historical moments in the present and in retrospect. You'll hear strong connections with Chuck Collins and Mark Mykleby about wealth and security. Elsewhere, listen for a John Fife-style spiritual critique of the individualism prized by thinkers like Oliver Porter, Richard Saul Wurman, and David Miller.

Chris Carter is a self-taught electrical engineer and founder of MASS Collective, a workspace in Atlanta, Georgia that combines hands-on learning, apprenticeship, and traditional education for students and makers of all ages. We've talked about education with Mark Mykleby, Lawrence Torcello, and Andrew Keen, but our only conversation dedicated entirely to the subject was with Lisa Petrides back in the early days of The Conversation. Lisa's work leaned towards research and the development of new educational models, but Chris is coming at the problem from a very different perspective—as an autodidact who felt underserved by traditional education systems. This episode starts with a discussion of what MASS Collective is before moving into a discussion of creativity, critical thinking, and civic engagement. In an unexpected echo of Joseph Tainter, Chris leaves us with the image of systems—all systems, natural and social—described by a sine wave oscillating between order and chaos.

Oliver Porter designs and implements partnerships between municipalities and corporations, allowing cities to privatize virtually all of their functions. Since his central role in incorporating Sandy Springs, Georgia in 2005, Oliver his moved on to advising numerous other American and Japanese cities through his consultancy firm PPP Associates and has authored two books, Creating the New City of Sandy Springs and Public/Private Partnerships for Local Governments. Before his work in urban privatization, he was an executive at AT&T. Our conversation telescopes from micro to macro, beginning with the story of Sandy Springs' incorporation and ending with an extended back-and-forth about the role of government, human nature, and American decline. You'll want to keep Lawrence Torcello's discussion of John Rawls in mind as Oliver and I discuss the biological and social lotteries—which segues into a contrast with Chuck Collins regarding safety nets and opportunity. Happiness and satisfaction come up as well and we discover a resonance between Laura Musikanski's work and Oliver's interest in making government more responsive to the electorate. Finally, we'll revisit the question nagging at James Bamford: what is democracy good for if it chooses to undermine itself? Let's be honest, nobody's going to answer that question more succinctly than Winston Churchill. Micah and I conclude the episode with a discussion of how Oliver's themes relate to local/central and individual/collective tensions we've seen elsewhere in The Conversation. We'll also touch upon declension narratives, opportunity and historical context, and return (twice) to Mark Mykleby's aphorism that "our assumptions have become our truths."

Col. Mark "Puck" Mykleby is a former marine and co-author (along with Capt. Wayne Porter) of A National Strategic Narrative for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, a document that encouraged broadening the concept of defense to include sustainability. Currently Mark is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy institute dedicated to questions about the American future. We learned about Mark through our 41st interviewee, John Fullerton. There are a lot of ideas packed into this episode: America as an organism in a strategic ecology, sustainability as national narrative that succeeds containment, and the broadening of sustainability to include everything from an engaged populace to new metrics for growth. Mark also talks about America's lack of a society-wide conversation about the future and the difference between being a resident and being a citizen. Topically, there are connections to Laura Musikanski's work at the Happiness Initative, David Korten's new myth, and John Fullerton's financial thinking. You'll also want to ponder the connection between Mark and Lawrence Torcello. Is Classical Liberalism the best path to achieving conversation?

James Bamford is an author and journalist who has written extensively about the National Security Agency. His books include The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory. He has also produced a documentary for NOVA on PBS. We learned about James last year through a Wired article about the NSA's new data center in Bluffdale, Utah. My conversation with James covers several topics that have been missing from The Conversation thus far: privacy, surveillance, and the threat of totalitarian government. As a result, this episode has few overt connections to the rest of the project, but there are underlying commonalities. From Chuck Collins to David Korten, we have heard thinkers concerned with hyperindividualism in its economic and social manifestations. On the other end of the spectrum, we have David Miller and Robert Zubrin who are worried about the possibility for collective regulation to dampen individual creativity and enterprise. James departs from all of these conversations and examines how the individual/community tension plays out in the realm of security and personal liberty. Micah, Neil, and I conclude the episode with an attempt to better integrate James into the rest of the project. Somehow, this leads us into a discussion of what government is for and if an apathetic democracy is worth preserving.

John Seager is the President of Population Connection, formerly Zero Population Growth. Since its founding in 1968, Population Connection has been America's largest grassroots organization dedicated to the question of overpopulation. Prior to his work at Population Connection, John worked for the EPA and in congressional politics. Population has been a regular theme in The Conversation but has not been well developed in previous episodes. John remedies that. He also argues that overpopulation results primarily from gender inequality and a lack of access to affordable contraception—education and affluence matter, but they are secondary to equality. Combatting overpopulation is often thought of in centralized and draconian terms, but John feels that population levels will naturally plateau if individuals are allowed to freely choose the size of their families. Does this make you think of the Constitutional questions discussed in Roberta Francis' episode? Early in The Conversation, Alexander Rose mentioned his concern that a declining population could threaten our economic system. That question surfaced again, albeit in a slightly different guise, when I spoke to John Fullerton about the challenge of decelerating the economy—though we did not talk about population decline, it's worth asking if our appraisals of corporate value assume a growing population.  Seager also gives us another perspective on the ideological purity and social pragmatism discussion that Neil and I had at the end of Gary Francione's episode. Like Francione, Seager is a moral realist in certain areas—gender equality being one—but he also embraces incremental change and makes a case for the word "opportunism." Are purity and pragmatism a false binary? Are they equally effective (or ineffective) modes of achieving social goals? Micah, Neil and I will talk about this more at the end of the episode. One last connection to leave you with: Robert Zubrin. Zubrin claims that overpopulation is a false concept and that, with sufficient freedom and creativity, we can support ever greater populations. Does this make him at odds with Seager? Or does Seager's emphasis on individual freedom and choice make his ideas compatible with Zubrin's? We don't know.

Roberta Francis has been advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment for over thirty years, chairs the ERA Taskforce for the National Council of Women's Organizations and administers equalrightsamendment.org. She has also been active with the New Jersey League of Women Voters. There's something ridiculous about needing to include the ERA in a project about the future—why didn't we take care of this ninety years ago? If the ERA reminds us of anything, it's that old ideas can remain new and common sense can be remarkably controversial. I will revisit this theme in my upcoming conversation with Scott Douglas of Greater Birmingham Ministries. Roberta and I talk about what the ERA is, why it failed, and why it's still necessary to a population that, largely, believes it already passed. We conclude by talking about the tension between individual and collective good, the role of government, and compromise. You will hear echos of Peter Warren, Lawrence Torcello and, in the last coda, John Fife.

Gary L. Francione is an animal rights activist, proponent of veganism, Professor of Law and Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers. Previously he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, worked as an attorney in New York, and clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor. He is the author of several books including Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement and, more recently, co-author of The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation. For all of the talk of biocentrism and anthropocentrism that dominated many of the early episodes of The Conversation, animals have not been a major theme within the project. Chris McKay, Robert Zubrin, and David Keith all discussed animals in passing, but for Gary they are central to a discussion of what he considers the biggest issue of our era: the tension between moral realism and moral relativism. Questions of nonviolence, commodification, and empathy pervade our conversation, but Gary pairs his abstract notions with a lot of concrete examples—this episode deals with the visceral immediacy of everyday life and doesn't threaten to float away in a philosophical balloon. I think you will like this episode, just as I think it will challenge you. In terms of connections, there are points where Gary could almost be responding directly to Richard Saul Wurman's moral relativism. Lawrence Torcello will be on your mind, not merely because I mention him in the introduction, but because Gary's conversation provokes questions of relativism, pluralism, and how we can work towards the broader good. On another note, we're adding a new co-host to The Conversation: Neil Prendergast will be joining the project this episode. Micah and I aren't going anywhere but, as Micah's work schedule gets busier, we wanted to bring another voice on board so we can resume our weekly schedule and have two hosts on deck. We're also excited because Neil brings a fresh sensibility and body of knowledge to our concluding discussions. This will be fun.

John Fullerton is the founder of the Capital Institute, a group dedicated to the modest task of rethinking the future of finance. Prior to his work at the Capital Institute, he was the Managing Director of JPMorgan. If there is a moment that encapsulates my conversation with John, it is when he suggests we need a new word to express the interconnected environmental/economic system. Applying an investor's sense of risk management to climate change, John sees our economic status quo as reckless and self-destructive. If we remain transfixed by our model of infinite growth in a finite system, John warns, we are likely to destabilize the natural capital underpinning our economy. If you're hoping John will swoop in with an easy solution here, you're wrong. Transitioning away from an economy based on infinite growth is immensely risky in its own right. Efforts to stabilize the climate would come at the cost of leaving immensely valuable natural resources in the ground, devaluing many of our most important companies, and causing economic havoc. This yields a choice which, John concludes, isn't a choice at all: economic turbulence with a radically altered climate or economic turbulence without a radically altered climate. As The Conversation grows larger and connections multiply, it is becoming harder for me to choose which connections to highlight. Here are a few that I haven't linked back to recently: John is skeptical of the technological/market optimism voiced (however cautiously) by Colin Camerer. At the same time, his association of life with goodness takes us back to Chris McKay. Without any prompting by me, he cites the precautionary principle in a way that supports Carolyn Raffensperger and questions Max More.

Mary Mattingly is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. We learned about her through the Flockhouse Project and traced back to discover the Waterpod and her earlier work. Mary's art explores the environment, sustainability, housing, and community structure, among other things. We have spoken to a fair number of environmental thinkers in The Conversation, but Mary is the first whose work directly explores individual survival in an unstable world. There are lots of reasons you'll like this episode. Aside from the Mad Max/Waterworld quality of our conversation, Mary looks at environmental change in a way that is totally unlike anyone else in the project. Thinkers like Tim Cannon, David Miller, and Robert Zubrin have viewed anthropogenic environmental change as morally relative and potentially positive while others, like John Zerzan, Jan Lundberg, and Wes Jackson, describe it as a crisis to be averted. Mary is somewhere in between, admitting that a future in which humans exert great control over the environment could be dark, yet embraceable. Does this put her in a camp with Tim Morton? Also, the maker economy shows up in Mary's conversation and connects her to Alexa Clay and Douglas Rushkoff though, in Mary's vision of the future, the maker spirit is more of a life-and-death necessity than an economic statement. Her interest in resilience may remind you of the end of Chuck Collins' conversation, too. There's a lot more to talk about. Specifically, we're interested in the coexistence of individualism and communitarianism. Are they in tension or in balance? Micah and I discuss.

Richard Saul Wurman is a designer, author of over 80 books, and founder of several conferences including TED, WWW, and EG. Presently, he is working on Prophesy2025, a conference about the near future.  Richard caught our attention because he is both an architect and connoisseur of conversation. Because of this, we spoke entirely about conversation itself: its forms, rituals, and value. We also spoke about broader conversation and the hypothesis underlying this project. This episode is very different from its predecessors. It does not contain a prescriptive vision of the future, definitions of the broader good, or an exploration of a new phenomenon. It also lacks explicit connections to other interviewees, though you will hear implicit connections and think about Lawrence Torcello more than once. Given these differences, you may wonder why Micah and I chose to include Richard's interview in a project about society-wide conversations and the future. We have two reasons. First, Richard has thought about the details of conversation more than most of us and he provides a useful lens to examine our interviewees and the roles that Micah and I play in The Conversation (apologies for going meta). Second, while broader conversations may exist, Richard has no interest in creating or guiding them. He seeks interesting days for himself and is, generally speaking, a relativist. We think relativism is an important idea to address. Relativism questions the very concept of good and critiques the efforts of every participant in this series, regardless of their agendas. It also challenges The Conversation as a project and presses us to explain why we cling to our naive belief that there is something greater than solipsism and our own pleasure. This is a good challenge. This is why we're posting Richard's conversation. 

Alexa Clay is an author, economic historian, and director of thought leadership at Ashoka Changemakers. She is co-author of The Misfit Economy, a forthcoming book that looks for economic innovation in the black and gray markets of pirates, hackers, and urban gangs, among others. We begin by talking about economics in the 17th and 18th centuries and its close bonds with philosophy and psychology. From there we trace the increasing abstraction of economics into a formalized, quasi-scientific discipline that has become indecipherable to most people affected by it.  This leads to a discussion of agency and other types of economies that have sprung up on the fringes of our global economy.  Can these "misfit economies" offer a substantive critique of our current economic system?  Do they offer better systems or address the problems of endless growth highlighted by Wes Jackson, Jan Lundberg, and David Korten?  Alexa and I talk about these questions in the body of the episode while Micah and I will return to them in our conclusion. Alexa's conversation has a wealth of interesting connections.  Editing has left a few on the cutting room floor, but many remain: Douglas Rushkoff and quantification, Colin Camerer and neuroeconomics, Lawrence Torcello and the philosophy of John Rawls.  There are far more implicit connections, of which Micah and I talk about Gabriel Stempinski and the sharing economy and Laura Musikanski's Happiness Initiative.

From The Conversation's inception, geoengineering—the deliberate manipulation of the climate through technology—has been high on my list of subjects to include in the series. To address the issue, I spoke with David Keith, a Harvard professor with a joint appointment in Applied Physics and Public Policy. David has spent the better part of two decades researching climate science and geoengineering, was named a Hero of the Environment by TIME in 2009, and is also the President of Carbon Engineering, a startup dedicated to reducing atmospheric CO2. He is also publicly visible, having testified before the US Congress, spoken at TED, and appeared on numerous television and radio programs in an effort to spark a broader conversation about geoengineering. During these appearances, David steps refreshingly beyond science and into the thorny moral and philosophical questions raised by geoengineering—and that is exactly why I invited him to join The Conversation. David's conversation starts with a tiny parcel of information about geoengineering but, within minutes, we're into questions of value. If you've been listening to The Conversation for a while this will feel like we skipped over the usual foundation of information I try to build at the beginning of each episode, so you may actually want to skim the Wikipedia link up top. That out of the way, we return to the anthropocentrism/biocentrism theme that characterized many earlier episodes from John Zerzan to Robert Zubrin. Echoing Carolyn Raffensperger, utilitarian philosophy finds itself in the line of fire again as David argues that utilitarianism is insufficient to justify meaningful environmental preservation. At one point, Wes Jackson (explicitly) and Douglas Rushkoff (implicitly) come up in conversation as we discuss what is knowable and, conflating Jackson and Zerzan, David smacks down Zerzan's neoprimitivism. This list could stretch for pages, but let's conclude here with a connection between David and John Fife, both of whom see the obsolescence of the nation state, though for very different reasons. Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

Ethan Zuckerman is the Director of MIT's Center for Civic Media, a former fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and co-founder of Global Voices, a hub of international news written by bloggers. We spoke about the need for global awareness, the relationship between information and empathy, and the challenge homophily presents to thinking about the public good (homophily is the fancy way of saying "birds of a feather flock together"). This conversation takes us through the the media's power to set the public agenda, three current media paradigms, and Ethan's suggestion for a new, forth paradigm based on the serendipitous discovery of information about the broader world.  And that's just where our conversation begins. Connections? Here's one: Jenny Lee's conversation focused heavily on local media and its power to address local components of national and global problems. Ethan approaches the same issue from the opposite direction, looking first at global awareness and its positive local implications. Jenny also mentioned the problem of excess information and her reliance on social networking as a filter, an issue that Ethan responds to (and remedies?) with his serendipity paradigm. Lawrence Torcello's discussion of liberalism and comprehensive doctrines will be on your mind as Ethan shares a story about a series of conversations he had with a college roommate. Unsurprisingly, Micah and I conclude the episode by getting caught (again) in the traffic jam of conversation, fundamentalism, and the difference between rationality and reason. Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

Chuck Collins directs the Institute of Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He has also co-founder of United for a Fair Economy and Wealth for the Common Good, a network of wealthy individuals who embrace fair taxation to support the broader good. He is also the author of 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It and joined Bill Gates, Sr. to co-author Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes. I learned about Chuck through David Korten, only to realize that I already had Resilience Circles—another project he is affiliated with—on my list of potential episode themes. At this point you have probably guessed that Chuck and I spent a lot of time talking about wealth and class, but it's hard to cover those issues without digging into assumptions about human nature. Are we individualistic and selfish? Social and communal? All of the above? Chuck gives us a glimpse into how he pitches economic equality to the 1%, a pitch that involves the importance of the social and ecological commons while recognizing the importance of individual determination. Education makes an appearance and Chuck stresses that, in addition to the social/civic education Lawrence Torcello discussed, we need to remember that we are embedded in an ecological system. Resilience Circles make a brief appearance and new economies come up towards the end of the conversation. You'll probably notice more commonalities and contrasts with plenty of other thinkers. Obviously there are a fair number of similarities between Chuck and David Korten, though our conversations focused on very different themes. Equally interesting, how do Chuck's assertions about human nature and brain science pair with Colin Camerer? Priscilla Grim and Cameron Whitten have discussed class without sharing the environmental concerns of other thinkers in the project, but Chuck suggests that an awareness of the ecological commons is key to encouraging a robust sense of the social commons. It is easy to find contrasts between Chuck and libertarian-leaning thinkers like Max More and Ariel Waldman, but he also shares their appreciation of individual agency.

Among other things, Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, and documentarian. His books include Life, Inc. and Program or be Programmed, while his documentaries include Frontline's The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders. Our conversation started with Rushkoff's concept of "present-shock" and moved into a larger discussion of the relationship between market thinking, quantification, and what is ultimately measurable and knowable. Connections, you ask? There are lots, especially with Timothy Morton, Wes Jackson, and Frances Whitehead. We also talk about transhumanism a fair bit, so expect some contrasts with Max More and Tim Cannon. Equally important, albeit less obvious, are the nuanced differences between Rushkoff and thinkers like Chris McKay. But to quote LeVar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it.

Priscilla Grim is one of Occupy Wall Street's organizers, co-founder of the website We Are the 99 Percent, and co-editor of The Occupied Wall Street Journal. We talk about her politicization, the current economic system, and the tension between class and environmental concerns. There are predictably strong contrasts with the libertarian philosophies of David Miller and Max More but, in one of the more unexpected connections in the project, Grim takes an attitude towards natural resources that is close to Robert Zubrin and far from Jan Lundberg and Wes Jackson.

Micah and I have been talking about a new interstitial episode for several weeks but, with the election last night, we decided to pick up our microphones and talk about the relationship between the political conversation and The Conversation. Relationship is probably the wrong word there—rupture might be more accurate. Long before we devised this project, both of us were concerned that the American political conversation was divorced from substantive issues, especially the interconnected tangle of economy and environment. In fact, this lack of political substance was one of the concerns that caused us to undertake The Conversation in the first place. Given that, we're going to take this opportunity to revisit these ideas and sharpen our definition of what is (and isn't) The Conversation. We'll also interpret the current political conversation through the lens of systems thought, which featured in my conversations with Morton, Korten, Jackson, and Whitehead.

Claire Evans is half of YACHT, a "band, business, and belief system" started by Jona Bechtolt in 2002. In addition to her musical/artistic adventures, she's also a writer and regular science blogger. Unlike most bands, YACHT has a developed a detailed and public philosophy (read their FAQ or visit the YACHT Trust for more details) and they regularly explore ideas about the future in their work. I was especially intrigued by the themes of utopia and dystopia which tie together their album ​Shangri-La​.

Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. is the Director for the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Buffalo and the Project Coordinator for the Perry Choice Neighborhood Initiative. His work has focused on the intersection of urban planning, regional development, and history in both the United States and Cuba. Dr. Taylor also studies the relationship between urban planning, race, and class. Our conversation focuses on inequality, racism, reconfiguring government institutions, and the physical structure of neighborhoods—several large, tangible issues that have been inadequately discussed or completely ignored by earlier interviewees. American exceptionalism is an early theme that leads into the mental frameworks that distort how we view the world. Dr. Taylor offers some concrete ideas about refocusing policy to foster stronger neighborhoods and ends musing on humanity's slow march towards the light. For both Micah and myself, listening to the final edit of Dr. Taylor's conversation was a good, if unsettling experience: we're almost half a year into production and this will be the first time race has been seriously discussed. As a result, this conversation has remarkably few explicit connections to the rest of the project because Dr. Taylor has had to build a new wing of the conversation from scratch. We find this embarrassing because it reflects the whiteness of the project back at us, from our choices of interviewees to the priorities of the interviewees themselves. Micah and I have been talking about race and our own perspectives a lot recently and we're going to dedicate the next interstitial episode to putting some of those thoughts down in audio.

Dr. Lawrence Torcello is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Micah and I learned about him through his article "Is The State Endorsement of Any Marriage Justifiable?" in Public Affairs Quarterly. Having said that, we barely touched the idea of marriage privatization. Lawrence had listened to the entirety of The Conversation before we spoke, so this is the first meta-conversation in the project: we spend a lot of our time discussing how one can bring conversation about in a pluralistic world. To tackle the idea, Lawrence takes us through the thought of John Rawls, Enlightenment liberalism, and a good dose of his own thinking. This was an incredibly fun conversation to record and a tremendously frustrating one to edit—because Lawrence knew the project so well, our conversation covered more diverse themes than I could fluidly integrate into a single episode. To keep the discussion manageable, I have focused his conversation narrowly on liberalism and education. I made this choice for obvious reasons: liberalism hasn't appeared in the series yet and it opens up new ideas about managing diversity, while education has been woefully under discussed. Listen for a memorable response to Andrew Keen. While I feel that this episode works as a coherent unit, there is more I want to include and I may post a few short MP3s on the site for those of you curious to hear our discussion of scientism, transhumanism, and climate-denialism. There's no shame to geeking out.

Tim Cannon is a co-founder of Grindhouse Wetware, a group of open-source biohackers in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. What does that sentence mean, you ask? Biohacking is the process of augmenting the human body to do new things, whether with technology or biology. Max More introduced the theme of transhumanism back in Episode 2, but Tim is going to take the idea and run with it—the Grindhouse crew are actively developing and implanting technologies in themselves now.  Tim and I don't dwell on current augmentation technologies for long. Instead, we plunge into a conversation about the nature of humanity and why he wants to leave biology behind. As always, questions of value crop up and we oscillate between nihilism and iterative, socially constructed moralities. Determinism, inevitability, and collective versus individual rights are also major themes. You'll hear lots of connections with other conversations. Tim directly responds to the neoprimitivism of John Zerzan, but he also offers an indirect critique of Max More by discussing the political (and classist) implications of human augmentation. If all that makes you feel like your head is about to explode, may we suggest Grindhouse's Thinking Cap to over-clock your brain?

Patrick Crouch is the Program Manager at the Earthworks Urban Farm in Detroit, Michigan. The farm is a project of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen and is the only certified organic farm in the city.  Agriculture's urban history is an early theme in our conversation, as is the need to make food a human right rather than a market commodity. We also discuss how the structure of modern civilization, from our urban planning to our economy, encourages us to value people solely for their productive capacity. Like Wes Jackson, Patrick walks between two ideological poles we have seen in this project. His outlook is at once physicalist, secular, and scientific, but he is unimpressed by scientific utopianism. At the same time, while he encourages communing with the world and appreciating its intangible qualities, he rejects biocentrism as impossible and argues that one can find other life intrinsically valuable without spirituality.

Jenny Lee is a co-director of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit organization focused on the intersection of media and social justice. AMP stages the annual Allied Media Conference and, partnered with the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, organizes on a variety of media education and outreach programs for communities marginalized by traditional media. Jenny and I talk about digital justice, inequality, media landscapes (or should we call them ecologies?), the relationship between offline and online community, narratives, and the myth of individualism. You will hear echoes of systems thinking that has appeared in Frances Whitehead, Wes Jackson, and David Korten.  Speaking of Korten, he appears directly when we discuss narratives. Gabriel Stempinski's ideas are present but offstage, especially when we discuss whether the internet can foster meaningful physical communities.

As you will soon learn, Frances Whitehead is a remarkably difficult person to put a label on. Artist, designer (designist?), planner, environmental thinker, dot-connector, collaborator... the list could go on. Our conversation spanned two recording sessions, totaling 7.5 hours and producing 5.5 hours of tape. I have edited this down to 36 minutes and, of course, sacrificed an immense amount of content and nuance. So view this as a fast and condensed introduction to Frances' thought. And what themes come up, you ask? Complexity is a unifying theme, tying together the prospect of an environmental crisis with the new role of art and artists. We also talk about how excess irony can cripple change, the difference between intentionality and morality, and the necessity of creating new knowledge on the borders of specialties.

Aengus and Micah return to interfere with your podcast enjoyment. In their third status update, they attempt to synthesize some of the broader trends in The Conversation to date, from the rift between anthropocentrists and biocentrists to the difference between tech optimists and tech skeptics. They also look at the appeal of teleological explanations and concept of historical progress. The update concludes with a dissection of the (flawed?) concept of The Conversation.

Carolyn Raffensperger, JD, is the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network and the author of Precautionary Tools for Shaping Environmental Policy and Protecting Public Health and the Environment. Not surprisingly, she is well known for her work on the precautionary principle, but her thought ranges across a wide variety of questions that address the relationship between law and the environment. This is the first substantive discussion of law in The Conversation but, as always, we range over a variety of other topics including science as a social institutions, the tension between the individual and the collective, and spirituality. Utilitarianism is a large part of this conversation and Carolyn argues that it is the invisible idea beneath much of our socially and environmentally reckless behavior. Carolyn's episode connects to a large number of other conversations in the project, from moments of resonance with Timothy Morton and Wes Jackson to a sharp critique of Max More, David Miller, and Robert Zubrin. The back-and-forth between More's proactionary principle and Raffensperger's precautionary principle is especially intriguing. The episode concludes with a suggestion that The Conversation is not amongst our interviewees, but between interviewees and audience. Does Carolyn's critique destroy the hypothesis beneath this project? Rest assured, Micah and I will discuss.

Dr. Wes Jackson is the founder and director of The Land Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to rethinking agricultural practice and creating new farming systems which result in conservation and ecosystem resilience. Wes's conversation begins with soil and rapidly expands to address how we make choices about the massively complex and intertwined systems we live within--there is definitely a resonance between Wes Jackson, Timothy Morton, and David Korten. The problem of scientific fundamentalism also arises and Wes presents a thorough critique of many ideas put forth by Robert Zubrin and Max More (would Colin Camerer fall into that category? You tell us). Hubris, creativity, limits, and the fallacy of unlimited growth are all major themes as well.

Dr. Robert Zubrin is the president of The Mars Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the exploration and colonization of Mars. We begin by discussing why space exploration and colonization is good but, as with my conversation with Chris McKay, Robert and I use space as an entry to discussing issues back on Earth. A major theme of this conversation is environmentalism, which Robert classifies as a form of anti-humanism, offering a strong anthrpocentric response to the biocentrism of Jan Lundberg and David Korten. This flows into a conversation about how we define progress and where we find value, in which John Zerzan's ideas make their inevitable cameo. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of Robert's mixed feelings about the transhumanist ideas discussed by Max More.

David Miller is a state representative and mineral explorer in Wyoming. Rep. Miller was the architect of Wyoming's House Bill 85, the so-called "Doomsday Bill," which created a committee to study Wyoming's response to a collapse of the US Federal Government. Our conversation spans themes from across the entire project, from the transhumanism of Max More to the primitivism of John Zerzan to the scientific optimism of Ariel Waldman. This conversation also grows naturally out of the previous conversation with Dr. Joseph Tainter. Similar themes of debt and complexity arise and Rome makes another appearance, but the context is different this time. The episode concludes with Micah and Aengus discussing the role of facts in the project and if one can be a technological positivist without opening the door to transhumanism.

Dr. Joseph Tainter is an anthropologist and historian who has studied collapse in numerous ancient civilization and penned The Collapse of Complex Societies. This is our first deeply historical episode and Dr. Tainter begins by offering his definition of complexity and taking us through the story of Western Rome's collapse. Extrapolating from the past, Dr. Tainter paints an alarming scene of our possible future. In our conversation, he critiques the primitivism of John Zerzan, the transhumanism of Max More, and the technological optimism of Ariel Waldman and Colin Camerer. What are we left with? Not optimism, not pessimism but, perhaps, Ragnarok.

David Korten is an economist, author, and progressive activist with a background in international business. He is the president of the Living Economy Forum, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, co-founder of YES! Magazine, and a member of the Club of Rome. His books include When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. Our conversation covered a broad range of topics from economics to ecology, cultural myths to systems thinking. As you would expect, connections abound: questioning the purpose of an economy ties David's conversation directly to Laura Musikanski, Timothy Morton's mesh returns in a different form, and we hear a bit of the biocentric/anthropocentric tension that appeared in my conversation with Chris McKay.

Laura Musikanski is the co-founder of the Happiness Initiative and the former Executive Director of Sustainable Seattle. We spoke about her efforts to encourage governments and citizens to rethink gross domestic product as a measure of progress. In lieu of viewing progress in strictly material terms, Larua is advocating a future in which policy decisions are guided by a model of happiness quantification adapted from Bhutan. Laura's conversation has several points of resonance with Cameron Whitten, both because of her focus on social justice and her prioritizing collaborative conversation over specific methods of reform. Her methods of measuring and promoting happiness make an interesting complement (juxtaposition?) to the neuroscience and behavioral economics of Colin Camerer.