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 Engineerin...
Dec 21, 2012•52 min
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 t...
Dec 14, 2012•59 min
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 a...
Dec 06, 2012•45 min
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 Timo...
Nov 19, 2012•1 hr 4 min
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...
Nov 10, 2012•43 min
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 ...
Nov 07, 2012•17 min
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 Shangr...
Oct 30, 2012•38 min
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 stru...
Oct 22, 2012•48 min
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 con...
Oct 16, 2012•43 min
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 ...
Oct 03, 2012•48 min
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. L...
Sep 27, 2012•41 min
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 onli...
Sep 21, 2012•39 min
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 the...
Sep 14, 2012•52 min
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.
Sep 07, 2012•21 min
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 ...
Sep 02, 2012•45 min
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...
Aug 24, 2012•48 min
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 biocentri...
Aug 18, 2012•46 min
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 conver...
Aug 11, 2012•38 min
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 ...
Aug 08, 2012•41 min
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...
Jul 31, 2012•46 min
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 Whitte...
Jul 24, 2012•32 min
As part of our effort to keep The Conversation transparent, we're taking ten minutes to bring you up to speed on some of the discussions going on behind the project. A few questions have been badgering us: is The Conversation inherently elitist? If not, how can we democratize it more? Speaking of which, how can we spark a more lively online conversation and bring more listener comments into the interviews? Finally, we mention that we're swamped with amazing interviews and not enough time to edit...
Jul 22, 2012•11 min
Cameron Whitten is, in his own words, a "shameless agitator" from Portland, Oregon. He became politically active during the Occupy Portland movement and, at twenty, made a bid to become the mayor of the Rose City with endorsements from the Green Party and Oregon Progressive Party. As of this posting, Whitten is on day 44 of a hunger strike designed to spark the Portland City Council to address issues of housing inequality. We spoke about Occupy, equality, and the idea of The Conversation. For Wh...
Jul 16, 2012•24 min
John Zerzan is an anarchist and primitivist writer and speaker. His books include Against Civilization and Elements of Refusal. We spoke about his critique of technology and civilization, moving on to discuss the origins of the biocentric philosophy that lies at the core of much of his thought. The Conversation itself was a major theme in our talk: John is the only participant in The Conversation (at least at this point) who openly advocates targeted property damage to change minds, so I was...
Jul 10, 2012•36 min
Ariel Waldman is the founder of Spacehack.org, a platform to allow anyone to participate in space exploration. We spoke about the democratization of science, who science is working for, and some of the ideas of "good" that guide scientific research and technological development. As usual, connections with earlier conversations abound. Listen for a continuation of Alexander Rose's claim that, generally, creating more choices is a reasonable way to maximize the good.
Jul 05, 2012•30 min
Gabriel Stempinski is an evangelist of the new sharing economy, author, documentary producer, and San Francisco city ambassador for CouchSurfing. We spoke about how new, sharing-themed tech startups are reshaping the economic and social landscape. Environmental and population issues are at the heart of our conversation and community makes more than a cameo appearance. Gabriel responds directly to Andrew Keen's critique of social media, but there are also some indirect connections to Jan Lundberg...
Jun 25, 2012•31 min
Dr. Lisa Petrides is the founder of ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, a research institute dedicated to studying how educators and institutions use information to make decisions. She is a strong advocate for open education platforms and using information to improve policy. We discussed the state of the education system, some of the underlying goals of education, and the conversation between the worlds of education and business.
Jun 19, 2012•35 min
Dr. Timothy Morton will turn your notion of ecological awareness on its head. Discarding all cozy notions of being one with nature, he has coined the term "dark ecology" and advocates for an appreciation of one's surreal, creepy connection with all other things. He dissolves the concept of nature and sees no clear line between life and non-life. Dr. Morton is the author of Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought, but our conversation ranged far beyond ecology (assuming anything can, in...
Jun 11, 2012•44 min
Aengus and Micah break back into The Conversation for a quick status update on the project: how they have been approaching interviews, some new ways of mapping information, production timeframes, and the death of the Kickstarter campaign. Beware, they will also entreat you (repeatedly) for more online conversation.
Jun 08, 2012•17 min
Let's take this up a level. Dr. Chris McKay is a planetary scientist who spends his days searching for microbial life beyond Earth from NASA's Ames Research Center. Dr. McKay is also active in discussions of bioethics, Mars colonization, and terraforming. We spoke about the search for life on Mars and how it can inform our thinking about life, biodiversity, and ethics on Earth.
Jun 05, 2012•37 min
