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 th...
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...
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...
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 connec...
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,...
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 c...
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" li...
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 ...
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 w...
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 ...
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 ful...
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 traditiona...
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 Ro...
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 ...
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 privati...
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 thi...
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 totalitari...
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 re...
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 s...
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 anthro...
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 an...
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 episod...
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 differ...
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 disci...
