James Carter served five years as a U.S. Navy hospital corpsman, the combat medic attached to Marine units. These days he calls himself "multi-local" — splitting his time across places rather than settling in one, most recently taking on a building renovation in Morocco. He resists fixed titles, preferring to describe himself as "an organized junk drawer": a working collection of skills and interests picked up along the way, none of which quite belong in any one category.

This is the first FutureCast recorded out in nature.

We get into: the difference between war and conflict and whether humans will ever see the end of either, why he'd rather we'd descended from bonobos than chimps, Buckminster Fuller's idea that you don't repair a broken system but build something new at its edge, how the social contract has been quietly rewritten since the Industrial Revolution, why an organized junk drawer is a better way to hold an identity than a tidy silverware drawer, belonging as a choice rather than a feeling and the gap between being welcome somewhere and truly living there, the study suggesting people end up happier with choices they're not allowed to reverse, Obama's rule about acting at fifty-one percent certainty, why moving somewhere to "pioneer" a community usually backfires and what integrating looks like instead.

Timestamps

6:38 How James introduces himself: medic, neurobiology, multi-local

10:40 The organized junk drawer

17:59 Choosing your chaos vs. chaos imposed on you

24:32 Is the enemy real? Social media and complex systems

28:41 Is war uniquely human?

31:23 The social contract since the Industrial Revolution

34:33 Why record these conversations in nature

40:42 War vs. conflict, and whether it ever ends

42:57 Chimps, bonobos, and resolving conflict

45:55 Seeing people as people

54:25 "Left vs. right" feels antiquated

58:54 You never start from a blank slate — Buckminster Fuller

1:01:21 Going multi-local and finding fertile ground

1:09:01 You don't pioneer a community, you integrate

1:15:16 Neutral ground (and baseball in Morocco)

1:17:49 Fruit pause: rapid-fire silly questions

1:30:33 Why everyone's a "Doctor," and medic vs. doctor

1:35:59 The estimation game: a million vs. a billion

1:42:33 What does it mean to belong?

1:48:40 Welcome vs. belonging; belonging to a story

1:59:45 Choosing, the art study, and Obama's 51% rule

2:07:41 Three virtues for a cult

2:13:54 Sentimental objects, and a gift to a stranger

Find James: in the wild

People & Concepts Mentioned:

• Buckminster Fuller — systems thinker; the geodesic dome, and building new structures at the edges of old ones
• Chimps vs. bonobos — two ways of resolving conflict, and which one we resemble
• Internal vs. external locus of control — acting on the world versus being acted upon
• Barack Obama — deciding once he's about fifty-one percent sure
• Karl Marx — where unequal systems eventually lead
• Mary Poppins — the bottomless bag, as a foil for the junk drawer
• Ramadan & Eid al-Fitr — the village celebration behind the gift-giving story
• The Industrial Revolution — the last comparable pivot in how we organize work and value
• A behavioral-economics choice study — people rated art they couldn't swap higher than art they could