Episode Notes [00:00] The Importance of Questioning [01:21] Introduction to Curated Questions [02:20] Meet Kevin Kelly [03:56] Kevin Kelly's Mentor: Stewart Brand [05:33] The Role of Questions in Intellectual Traditions [06:47] Disequilibrium and Growth [10:21] Embodied Questions and Exploration [11:11] Balancing Exploration and Exploitation [11:50] The Inefficiency of Questioning [15:53] The Abundance Mindset [18:39] The Inevitable and Quality Questions [19:26] Hill Climbing vs. Hill Making [22:28] The Challenge of Innovation [24:13] The Beauty of Engineering and Innovation [24:34] Navigating the Frontier of New Technologies [25:33] The Role of AI in Question Formulation [26:43] Challenges in Advancing AI Capabilities [29:11] The Long Now Foundation and the 10,000 Year Clock [29:56] Transmitting Values Over Time [31:03] Ethics in AI and Self-Driving Cars [33:26] The Art of Questioning [34:04] Photography: Capturing vs. Creating [36:12] The Inefficiency of Exploration [38:36] Daily Practice and Long-Term Success [40:17] The Importance of Quantity for Quality [43:22] Final Thoughts and Encouragement on Questioning [46:24] Summary Takeaways Resources Mentioned Wired Magazine Whole Earth Review WELL Hackers Conference What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly Cool Tools Project Long Now Foundation Stewart Brand Socratic Method Koan René Descartes Conde Nast Vouge Olivetti Typewriter Trolley Problem Terry Gross Lex Friedman Tim Ferriss KK.org Kevin2Kelly on Instagram Recomendo Newsletter Excellent Advice for Living Beauty Pill Producer Ben Ford Questions Asked When did you first understand the power of questions? Can I do that? Can that be something that you can learn? How did questions function differently between Eastern versus Western intellectual traditions? What role do you think embodied questions those we explore through doing rather than thinking play in developing wisdom? What's on the other side of the hill? What happens if you go to the end? What's the origin of this? How should one think about the exploratory in one's life? Is there anything that you would add to your list of 15 statements that define what makes a quality question? Is there a qualitative difference between the questions humans are asking and the questions our AI systems are beginning to formulate? What do you think would help them get there? Any idea on a forcing function on how we get them [LLMs] to ask the better questions so that they might improve in that direction? What were some novel questions that broke your brain at the time in thinking about this 10,000-year clock or beyond? What's it good for? What would you use it for? What else could you do over the long term for 10,000 years? How do you transmit values over time? How do you evolve values that need to change, and how do you make a difference? How do even know what you don't want to change? What do you want to continue? What's the most essential aspects of our civilization that we don't want to go away? What are the rules? What is the system? How do you pass things along in time and not change the ones you don't wanna change, and make sure you change the ones that are more adaptable so they can adapt? What do you think about questioning itself as an art form? How has being a photographer influenced the way you question reality, visually compared to verbally? Are you a photographer that takes photos or makes photos? What will happen? What will happen next? What are your right now questions that you are wrestling with or working with in your life? Can someone else do what I'm trying to do here? Am I more me in doing my art or more me in doing the writing? Do you have any other thoughts or encouragement about questions that we haven't explored? What makes a good question? How do you ask a good question? What questions do you dwell on to be in purposeful imbalance? What is your practice in embracing the inefficient nature of questions to achieve breakthroughs? What are the new hills you can build and frontiers you can explore? How can you use your curiosity and humanity to pursue questions that trend toward the fringes?…
Listen as two old friends and collaborators gradually fashion a podcast from nothing but their shared history by gently agitating whatever enters their field of perception, watching for some meaning or significance to eventually come tumbling out. Avenues of inquiry include, but are not limited to, their mutual hometown of Chicago, experimental theatre, the current cultural and political climate in the U.S. and Europe, and just what this podcast is all about, anyway. Occasionally some humor also arises. Aaron Kahn co-hosts (and produces) from his home in Paris, Ira S. Murfin co-hosts from Chicago.
Listen as two old friends and collaborators gradually fashion a podcast from nothing but their shared history by gently agitating whatever enters their field of perception, watching for some meaning or significance to eventually come tumbling out. Avenues of inquiry include, but are not limited to, their mutual hometown of Chicago, experimental theatre, the current cultural and political climate in the U.S. and Europe, and just what this podcast is all about, anyway. Occasionally some humor also arises. Aaron Kahn co-hosts (and produces) from his home in Paris, Ira S. Murfin co-hosts from Chicago.
Ira and Aaron welcome Ira’s friend and collaborator Seth Zurer, longtime Chicagoan recently transplanted to Southern California. The starting point is a piece of family history that Seth recounted in the 2007 performance about utopias through which he and Ira first met. It is the little-known story of Clarion, a short-lived early-20th century Jewish agrarian settlement in Utah where his grandmother was born. From there, the conversation drifts to Seth’s own westward move to Riverside, CA, where he has discovered The Cheech, Cheech Marin’s museum of Chicano art, and started navigating California’s cottage industry laws to sell his home-baked bread and fruit preserves. An oral history that Seth shared, which his mother, Diana, gave to the Yiddish Book Center about her lifelong relationship to Yiddish culture, provides a point of reference throughout. Underlying the conversation is the ever-charged topic of when, how, and where Jews gather together identifiably as Jews, particularly in the American context where doing so has largely become a choice. Examples range as widely as the Catskills vacation colony founded by descendents of residents of Clarion to ecstatic dancing and singing with Israeli Hasids at a Rainbow Gathering in the Wyoming wilderness. In the end, Aaron just wants to know how a nice Jewish boy ends up starting Chicago’s largest festival celebrating cured pork? NOTE: This episode has been in the hopper a long time before being released. It was recorded in August 2023, two months before the October 7th 2023 Hamas attack in Israel and the subsequent and ongoing Israeli war in Gaza. There is some discussion of American Labor Zionism in the mid-20th Century in the episode, but not much reference to present-day Israel-Palestine. However, if it seems strange that the post-Oct. 7th world is not acknowledged, that is why. Diana Woll Zurer's Oral History @ Yiddish Book Center Zurer Bread in Riverside, CA Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
For JIALIO’s first tri-national episode and first episode with more than one guest, Aaron and Ira are joined by former Chicagoans Tony Macaluso and his son Giulio from Chapel FM, the community radio station Tony runs in Leeds, UK. They discuss a road trip they took the previous summer exploring places meant to offer alternatives to mainstream society in the American West, including the urban design project Arcosanti in Arizona, where Ira and Aaron have both lived. What unfolds is a quite nuanced, yet accessible, overview of Arcosanti, including some of the tensions and contradictions that have shaped and defined the project. These include the slowness of construction and what that has made possible, and the tension between the design of the project and the life lived inside of it. Ultimately, Tony, who has long worked with archives (including the archive of Studs Terkel’s radio show) remarks on the coexistence of Arcosanti with its own archive, which is housed onsite. Arcosanti is itself a document of its own making, and it contains all of the documentation of its design and construction, and still more designs for projects envisioned and unrealized. Documents within documents within a document, like Russian nesting dolls - archives all the way down. Arcosanti Original Arcosanti design from Arcology: City in the Image of Man (1969) Chapel FM (Leeds, UK) Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
Following a thread about falling into things, Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open welcomes a surprise third guest, who also happens to be the grandson of the podcast’s first guest, and Aaron's first cousin once removed. Jesse Schumann stops by the virtual podcast studio with a tale to tell about the last six weeks. Since taking a temporary break from college for some self-discovery and recalibration, Jesse has practiced mindful self-compassion on a Canadian meditation retreat, launched a rap career in collaboration with his Venezualen barber in Argentina, and started gathering material for a novel about his grandfather and himself covering, in part, these last six weeks. Additional topics along the “corridors of self-revelation” include the role of mushrooms in the development of human consciousness, pop songs named after famous people, the family trees of Jewish Mormons, and perceptions of the most intimate of human interactions in popular culture. Find Jesse and his music on the internet: Spotify Apple Music YouTube (music video) Jesse's Instagram @jeschum Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
For only the second time in its short history, Jiggle It A Little It’ll Open welcomes a guest. Melissa Lorraine, Artistic Director of Chicago’s Theatre Y, discusses her company’s journey from its founding as a venue for the work of Romanian playwright András Visky to its recent move from the neighborhood of Lincoln Square, where it was one of over 250 theatre companies dotting Chicago’s North Side, to North Lawndale on the city’s West Side. Melissa talks about what it means for a historically white arts organization to move to a predominantly black, under-resourced neighborhood with the aim of driving revitalization without triggering gentrification, and the inevitable mistakes they are making along the way. She shares their experiences creating youth programming for the first time, learning to listen to her critics in new ways, and addressing needs beyond a theatre company’s usual purview, such as providing much-needed public space during the day and piloting a geothermal home heating project to reduce utility costs and help keep their neighbors in their homes. Plus, as befits a tale with this many twists and turns, there will also be a labyrinth. Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
The world is full of unmarked doors that some people know how to find and how to get through, and some people - by design or otherwise - do not. Aaron and Ira are thinking about ways that controlled access can both exclude and protect. When we offer each other access, what are we offering? And what are we giving up? Nascent online communities, clandestine cocktail bars, and city neighborhoods all maintain barriers to entry of one sort or another, until they don’t. And we can rarely control what happens then. But, as always, it seems to matter who gets and grants access, and who benefits from denying or providing it. Just remember, if you miss the Mega Mall, you can always hit the small Target. Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
Immersion is all around us, and perhaps it always has been. But we keep discovering it anew every time an experience is unique enough that we notice we are having it. From Greek tragedies and Medieval passion plays to 1960s happenings and environmental theatre to installation art, live action game play, and pricey Instagram-ready themed “experiences,” immersion as aesthetic approach and marketing ploy always offers irresistible novelty amidst the ordinary. Immersive theatre and art over the last few decades in particular has walked a line between deliberate obscurity and globally marketed phenomenon, sometimes, as in the cases of companies like Punchdrunk and Meow Wolf, with little space between. Aaron and Ira discuss the relative value of the hard-to-find experience that rewards pursuit, but of necessity must exclude, and discuss the need for some critical distance, and the impossibility of maintaining that distance while on mushrooms. But is putting it all on Gossip Girl the only democratizing alternative? Some things to consider over a few bites of the World’s Largest Sandwich. ¿Conoces la mayonesa? Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
The hour or so spent in this episode on the concept of process orientation both illustrates something about the topic, and demonstrates how slippery it can be. Ever gravitating to theatre no matter what the topic, Aaron and Ira weave a network of connections between resisting perfection, eschewing deliberate meaning, and valuing participation, hoping to find process orientation cocooned someplace within. The clouds start to part a bit around the parallels that become evident between holistic models of verisimilitude and the rejection of authorial intention in favor of pure chance, when viewed through a process lens. Robert DeNiro, psychotherapy, Oklahoma!, Jerzy Grotowski, improv, the Wooster Group, and Sacred Harp singing all put in appearances as your hosts consider what theatre might be good for if not primarily for putting on a show. This is perhaps particularly relevant in light of an insight offered to Aaron by one of his most objectively successful friends just before heading onstage to meet a roomful of screaming fans, that in the third decade of the 21st century “only theatre people like theatre.” Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
The idea of the collective suggests a set of possibilities that do not rely upon personal vision or independent will. It can expand upon, enable, and obscure individual contribution – sometimes all at once – and, at its best, it surprises everyone. But the collective also requires a certain level of individual sacrifice to larger organizing principles – be they theatre, yoga, or architecture. It can be easy to confuse the collective impulse with a desire for what may actually be its opposite: absolute individual autonomy. All too often that becomes the only opening that those who value neither need in order to exploit others and do harm. Aaron and Ira begin by thinking about the ephemeral processes of collective theatre-making. They end up discussing two very concrete prototype habitats, each built by an unusually collected group of people in the Arizona desert. One of these projects counterintuitively turns out to also have its roots in collective theatre-making, though it is remembered and evaluated as a scientific laboratory. The other is intentionally and explicitly a laboratory, a specifically urban one, in the form of an incipient model city that may or may not still be in progress. Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
Either Aaron and Ira have become mature adults, or they’re rationalizing their own failure, but either way, ambition no longer seems to hold the same power for them that it once did. As Ira puts it, “We do not want to live our lives as sacrifices to what might happen in the future.” So is ambition by definition a young person’s game? And is letting go of it a sign of maturity, or resignation? Gradually abdicating long-held and largely unexamined ambitions, a couple of middle aged guys might start to notice something that can feel like a kind of success, uncoupled from rubrics of notoriety, power, or wealth. At the same time, ambition will always to some extent be shaped by the historical and technological moment – whether that is Restoration England, 1920s Hollywood, or post-COVID America and Europe – and by the particular identities and inheritances with which everyone has to grapple. Still, it might be nice if a few people knew who you were when you died. Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
As Aaron observes early in this episode, the relationship between art and life is something that has been considered by everyone from Stanislavsky to Ani DiFranco, but JIALIO decides to give it a whirl anyway. The discussion of art and life quickly becomes a meditation on how to live a life in art, and what is required to do so. It seems that money, scale, yoga, and happiness each may help, or get in the way, depending on which way one is heading. The words of a surprisingly insecure AI language model, working in both song lyrics and dramatic prose, offer little clarifying perspective, only something between empty platitudes and rote sincerity. Reminded of a remarkable phone call he once overheard Aaron’s end of, Ira is shocked to learn that Aaron has somehow retained no memory of what might be the most unusual Craigslist roommate inquiry quite possibly in all of history. Then the Angels sing. Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
Aaron and Ira return to the podcast studio for a new batch of episodes after a 6-month hiatus from recording. The thread they choose to pull from the previous episode, and the whole first season, is comedy. Comedy may actually be one of the key threads running through their friendship, which was cemented in part over Aaron’s concept for a still-as-yet-unrealized, obscurely comic short film. What makes something funny, anyway? Who gets to be funny? Should Aaron try stand-up? Is US Senate Minority Leader Micth McConnel really who he says he is? Things get more personal in a discussion of Aaron’s liberal use of accents, and how that might have figured into his expatriation. In the end, Aaron and Ira once again acknowledge that they are not drive-time DJs in the 1980s Minneapolis/St. Paul commercial radio market, and never will be. The ghost of Leonard Cohen closes things out with a surprisingly suggestive take on “I Have a Little Dreidel.” Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
Inaugurating JIALIO’s new format, your hosts choose the topic of work, specifically the value produced by labor, as a thread they want to pick up from the previous episode. They begin with jokes that deliberately do not work as jokes. This leads to a discussion of French humor and the tendency of French comic artists – from Moliere to Jacques Tati – to appropriate, in the name of refinement and elevation, comedic aesthetics originally found elsewhere in the world. Finally getting around to a conversation specifically about work, they find themselves focusing on vacation and debt, comparing (as they so often do) attitudes and practices in France with those in the U.S. Ira struggles to articulate his experience of the relationship between professional and personal identities in the U.S. context and, thanks to Aaron’s time in Lithuania, learns the term “Free-Air Director,” a euphemism for unemployment he can put on his business cards. If he doesn’t hit it big as a Jeopardy! champion first, that is. Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
This is what we call a shorty. After the duration and weight of the previous episode, Aaron and Ira spend significantly less time covering a greater variety of topics than usual, beginning with Aaron’s plans for the estival solstice, and moving on to a meaningful recent conversation with their mutual friend and collaborator, the weird internal logic of the song “Doctor Worm” by They Might Be Giants, and an invented experimental Chinese restaurant. This leads to some discussion of the strange ways that time moves now (“now” being either the post-pandemic era or middle age, or both), the economic impact and non-impact of the pandemic shutdown, and its salutary culinary ripple effects in Chicago and Paris. Marking their milestone 9th episode, which statistically most podcasts never get beyond, they propose a new device to thread episodes together, without sacrificing the podcast’s signature indeterminacy. Before this shorty concludes, some awkward attempts to lure sponsorship deals are made, and both Aaron and Ira somehow manage to draw a blank on the word “proliferation”. Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
JIALIO is not a current events podcast, but Aaron and Ira exist in real time, and this episode constitutes something of a time capsule. Recording back in May 2022, shortly after the US Supreme Court’s majority draft opinion overruling Roe v. Wade was leaked, Aaron and Ira respond at length to the news from their positions as Americans who were born after Roe was decided in 1973, as people who cannot themselves get pregnant, and as individuals living, respectively, in Paris, France and Chicago, Illinois, USA specifically. As in episode 3, on the war in Ukraine, they find themselves grappling with how to make sense of an occurrence that had previously seemed unimaginable, and what might come after. It would be dishonest to say things do not get bleak. Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
After hosting JIALIO's first guest on the previous episode, Aaron and Ira hash out how that decision was made back in episode 5, and how it might impact the direction of the podcast going forward. At issue, in part, is the value of centralizing difference and conflict versus prioritizing solutions, a tension which has characterized much of the collaboration between Aaron and Ira over the years. Their conversation veers between the metaphysical and the pragmatic, touching on the eschatalogical hypotheses of Architect Paolo Soleri and Jesuit/Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, before concluding with the seductive, but empty, pleasures of The Amazing Race. Music: “Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio. “Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger Miller Arranged and recorded by: 80 Foots ( https://www.facebook.com/80FPM )…
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