The Conversation (Page 2 of 7)

The Conversation #57 – Joan Blades

presented by Aengus Anderson, Joan Blades, Micah Saul

What I’ve seen as a founder of MoveOn is that we’ve become increasingly polarized. And in fact we have gotten to the point where we have separate…realities? when it comes to a whole raft of facts. And so how can we possibly make good decisions together when we don’t even share basic facts? You first have to have a relationship, and you have to have shared values.

The Conversation #56 – Aengus Anderson and Micah Saul at SXSW
A Sheep in Wolf's Clothes: The Myth of Disruption

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul

As the show advanced, we realized that there are a lot of people really really worried about the future, and they’re worried about big, big things. We’re talking things like inequality. We’re talking things like overconsumption of resources and environmental collapse. Social collapse. Community breakdown. General feelings of powerlessness against massive systems. And this seems to be universal.

The Conversation #55 – Ed Finn

presented by Aengus Anderson, Ed Finn, Micah Saul

The Center, one of our core goals, our mission statement, is to get people thinking more creatively and ambitiously about the future. What I mean when I talk about that is that we need to come up with better stories about the future. If you want to build a better world you have to imagine that world first.

The Conversation #54 – Charles Bowden

presented by Aengus Anderson, Charles Bowden, Micah Saul

I don’t understand the fear. And that’s the biggest threat. And the reason it’s a threat is it makes your judgment bad. You never make good decisions when you’re afraid. And it destroys your ability to clearly look at the facts and do something. You choke, in other words.

The Conversation #53 – Carlos Perez de Alejo

presented by Aengus Anderson, Carlos Perez de Alejo, Micah Saul

I personally think that we need to move beyond this sort of grow or die motivation that exists within the current economy. And I think that the cooperative model is suited to addressing those concerns, especially because the co-op model is geared toward serving member needs and not driven by profit at the end of the day. That is something that bodes well for the model in terms of sustainability.

The Conversation #52 – Walter Block

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Neil Prendergast, Walter Block

Benevolence isn’t inefficient and I’m a big fan of benevolence. It’s just that it’s not enough. It’s okay for a group of twenty-five or fifty people where everyone knows everyone. But when you have 300 million in the US or 7 billion in the world, if we were self-sufficient and we had to produce everything for ourselves we’d all die, or 99% of us would die. So we have to cooperate with each other. But the only way to cooperate with each other in such large numbers is through markets.

The Conversation #51 – Phyllis Tickle

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Phyllis Tickle

Historians get really nervous about patterns. That’s changing a bit now. And the truth of it is there’s not much way to avoid the 500-year cycle. You almost have to work too hard to unsay it, it’s so obviously there in every way. And if you say every 500 years we go through one, then you immediately say we’re in the 21st century and baby are we going through one.

The Conversation #50 – The Future of The Conversation

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul

We’ve got so many new conversations. The project is really involved in a lot of ways. You know, we talk all the time about connections we’re seeing. And we want to talk now about connections that we’re not seeing.

The Conversation #49 – Scott Douglas

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Scott Douglas

People think that the Civil Rights Movement and all big epochal movements involve conscience, and they do. They also involve consciousness. I mean, you can’t struggle against what you’re unaware off, right? The Klan as the iconic carriers of violence, the Bull Connor of the iconic southern white male resistance, George Wallace the iconic neopopulist racist. You know, these were historic figures in myth and reality. But we wouldn’t get to what they represented till much later.

The Conversation #48 – Chris Carter

presented by Aengus Anderson, Chris Carter, Micah Saul

When you talk about learning and traditional educational styles, there’s this very common inclination to try and force information upon people rather than having them just kind of discover it of their own volition or discover it by accident.