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.