The Conversation

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.

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, so we're going to slow the pace of the project to a single conversation per week and try to stretch The Conversation out over a longer production timeframe. This will allow us to include a huge variety of new voices but, at the same time, it will cost more. Apologies in advance, but you're going to hear us ask for money at some point during this brief episode.

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 Whitten, The Conversation is a first step to addressing issues of class inequality, which he considers the greatest crisis our era.  This marks the first extended discussion of class in The Conversation, but it is worth juxtaposing Whitten's view next to the belief in incremental improvement that pervaded my talks with Max More, Colin Camerer, Chris McKay, and Ariel Waldman.

Interestingly, Whitten also brushes aside the issue of population growth that has surfaced in conversations from Jan Lundberg to John Zerzan.  There are abundant resources, Whitten claims, rather the question is of distribution.

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 especially curious to ask whether his ideas can participate in The Conversation or if they are uncompromising. Micah and I discuss this more at the end of the episode.

There are an abundance of intellectual connections in this episode. My actual talk with John lasted nearly four hours but the edit you are hearing is only 25 minutes long, so a lot of interesting material didn't make it in, but we do discuss Gabriel Stempinski's ideas of community and Timothy Morton's deconstruction of "nature." Coming back-to-back with Ariel Waldman, John's conversation offers a very different measure of "progress."

One more thing of note: Micah and I feel that it is extremely important to include John Zerzan in the project because his ideas question just about every commonly held assumption about normality. At the same time, it would be impossible to include his voice without mentioning that many people associate him with anarchist violence during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle and Theodore Kaczynski. Both stories are amply discussed online and I encourage you to do your background research. For my part, I wanted to steer our conversation away from events and towards philosophy--Kaczynski and the WTO protests only make brief appearances to illustrate examples. We're all big kids here, but I think it's worth stating the obvious: the opinions of the interviewees are theirs alone. Micah and I believe it should be possible to discuss any idea without endorsing it or suggesting that it is held by other participants in the project, even when we draw intellectual connections between thinkers.

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.

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's sense of an energy crisis and Alexander Rose's discussion of long-term thought.

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.

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 fact, be beyond ecology).  So shake your brain out of its torpor and brace yourself for a deluge of fascinating ideas and more than a few awesome metaphors.  Object oriented ontology, anyone?

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.

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.