Musing Mind Podcast

My guest today is Karl Widerquist. Karl has been an active support of Universal Basic Income for 40 years. During that time, he earned two phD’s, one in economics and another in political theory from Oxford. He works on theories of justice and freedom, as the motivation for adopting a basic income. He’s a professor at Georgetown’s Qatar campus, co-chair of the basic income earth network, and a really, spirited, brilliant guy. A few topics we got into: The first half hour or so looks at the relationship between basic income and freedom. Then, around the 37 minute mark, we transition into some logistics, like the cost of basic income, how to pay for it, critiques, alternatives like the negative income tax. Then we dig into some broader economic questions, like the relationship between private property and public wealth, growth and degrowth, and a bunch more.  

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Dr. Zachary Stein. Zak is difficult to introduce because he’s so wide-ranging. He works alongside philosophers Ken Wilber and Marc Gafni at the Center for Integral Wisdom, bringing the heart of integral theory into the discussion of 21st century possibilities. He did his graduate education at Harvard, studying education and human development, and most of his work focuses on education, broadly conceived as the kind of ‘human making forces’ within a society.    His latest book - Education in a Time Between Worlds - is insane. It focuses on what education might become as we transition from what the world was and has been, into what it might become if we decide to value educational abundance and human development as core cultural ideals. And it’s scholarly, which means as far out as his proposals and imaginings go, they’re rigorously researched and supported.   I wanted to speak to him specifically about a chapter titled The 13 Social Miracles. These are what Zak calls practices in ‘design fiction’, or concrete utopian theorizing. Which is to say, if we imagine the absolute best case scenario for human culture over the next 50 years, what are the things that need to happen? And unlike so many philosophers, especially those who are primarily interested in consciousness, Zak gets really political. He offers policies, and global projects, and laws, concrete things that would set the cultural conditions for the flourishing of a more wholesome, complex, and human kind of consciousness.

Erik Hoel studies consciousness & emergence as a research assistant professor at Tufts University. Since growing up in his family-owned bookstore, he’s also a magnificent writer. We discuss consciousness, two of his essays - Fiction in the Age of Screens, and Enter the Supersensorium - why Freud was the best thing to ever happen to television, meditation, and why rediscovering a sense of snobbery might define the meta-modern move.

Andrew Taggart is a nomadic philosopher and contemplative currently writing about ‘Total Work’, where the paradigm of work is becoming the central mechanism of our identities. In our conversation, we dig into the relationship between Total Work and postmodernism, the shortcomings of radical leftists in considering what constitutes ‘the good life’ beyond material subsistence, his experience with meditation, consciousness, and various methods - from education to psycho-technologies - for moving beyond nihilism.

I’m joined by Ron Purser to discuss how mindfulness, rather than starting any meaningful revolution, is feeding right into the neoliberal capitalist ideology, and becoming what Purser calls “the new capitalist spirituality”. Ron is a professor of management at San Francisco State University, as well as an ordained Zen dharma teacher in the Korean Zen Taego order of Buddhism. We discuss the incompatibility between meditation practice and neoliberal capitalism, the difference between democratic socialism and anti/post capitalism, and the flexibility of our experience of time.

A quick introduction to the podcast, and the shenanigans to come.