The Conversation

Alexander Rose is the Executive Director at the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based group dedicated to encouraging long-term thinking. He is also the foundation's Clock Project Manager, overseeing the design and construction of a monument-scale clock that is intended to run for 10,000 years in the desert of west Texas. Our conversation began with the clock, both as a physical object and as a statement about our culture's obsession with the short term. This naturally opened up a discussion of the present and how long-term thinking has the potential to transform unsolvable issues into solvable ones. This is our second project-based conversation and, as with Peter Warren, the discussion turned to how we can make The Conversation happen, especially between people who have very different time horizons. Learn more at www.findtheconversation.com

Jan Lundberg is a former oil industry analyst turned environmental activist. He is the founder of Culture Change and the Sail Transport Network. We spoke to him about peak oil, the tension between individualism and community, the innate value of nature, and the difficulty of compromise. He provides an interesting counterpoint to Dr. Max More and approaches environmentalism from a drastically different perspective than Peter Warren. Learn more at www.findtheconversation.com

Andrew Keen, the self-professed Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley, is the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today's User-Generated Media are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values and, more recently, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us.  Our conversation touches on social media, community, the amorphous nature of values , and whether The Conversation, as a concept, has any merit at all.  This conversation has a slew of connections and contrasts with earlier episodes and Andrew's discussion of futurism and community are worth considering next to Max More and Colin Camerer, respectively. Learn more at www.findtheconversation.com

Dr. Colin Camerer is one of the pioneers of neuroeconomics, a combination of neuroscience, psychology, and traditional economic theory. Our conversation began with a discussion of how neuroeconomics critiques the traditional economic belief that people are rational decision makers before moving into the relationship between our economic system and the environment. With each interview, I am developing a greater sense of how this project is going to work and the twists and turns unstructured conversations can take. The results are always fun an surprising, and my talk with Dr. Camerer ended by returning to the mind, the biological limits of knowledge, and the new challenge of sorting through an ocean of information. Learn more at www.findtheconversation.com

The Malpai Borderlands Group is a coalition of ranchers and environmentalists who manage over 75,000 acres of grassland in Southeastern Arizona. Does that sentence look odd to you? The American West isn’t known for friendly hobnobbing between ranchers and environmentalists and often they work at cross purposes, wasting little love on each other. Their cultural division is mirrored in the landscape: ranches are populated almost exclusively by cattle while natural preserves often ban grazing. Two groups, two philosophies of land use, two different economic goals. Nothing to talk about. Deadlock. Antagonism. That’s where Malpai comes in. It’s the story of enemies extending hands in cautious friendship and engaging in a small version of The Conversation. To learn more about Malpai, we talked with Peter Warren of The Nature Conservancy, one of the partners in the group. Learn more at www.findtheconversation.com

Dr. Max More is the CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and founder of the magazine Extropy. He holds of PhD in Philosophy from the University of Southern California and is a leading transhumanist thinker. Our conversation ranged from the use of reason to morality in a physicalist worldview. We even touched on Nietzschean benevolence and whether anything can have intrinsic value. You will hear plenty of contrasts with my conversation with Rev. Fife, but there are also a few similarities that may surprise you. Learn more at www.findtheconversation.com

We plunge into The Conversation with our first interview: Reverend John Fife. Our conversation started with Rev. Fife’s experience with the Sanctuary movement and his perspective on current US/Mexico border issues. From there, we explored the underlying tension between human rights and national sovereignty, finishing up with some big-picture thoughts about crisis, The Conversation, and change. When is the last time you questioned the idea of a nation? I skimmed a chapter of Benedict Anderson's “Imagined Communities” once and almost died, but Rev. Fife tackles similar issues with eloquence, energy, personal experience, and a very different philosophical background–I can’t imagine a better place to start The Conversation. -A. Learn more at www.findtheconversation.com

Welcome to The Conversation. In this brief episode, producers Aengus and Micah explain what The Conversation is, why it matters, and how they hope to approach it with a new genre of media combining audio interviews with online discussion. Learn more at www.findtheconversation.com