Conversation with Tracy, part 1

Here’s the first installment of a conversation I had yesterday with Tracy Gustilo. We had sent each other a half dozen questions prior to getting on Zoom. In this first episode, I answer a question of Tracy’s about my background and then she describes the multi-level approach she takes to the Anthropocene. I end at a point where we’re setting up the next couple of topics, sort-of as a teaser of what will be in the next installment. I edited this using Descript, and I’m just beginning to learn how the app works and what’s available in it. I think I’ll get better at this as I learn, but it seems pretty good, so far. Transcript: D: So we have a half a dozen questions for each other. Shall we just go ping pong back and forth? Because I think that would be probably more useful than trying to go through one list or the other. I suspect responses are going to generate more questions and more of a conversation if we do them one at a time. T: Okay. Sounds good. Yeah I'm really new to the whole video recording, video casting, the multimedia thing is really challenging for me at this point. It's hard enough for me to have my words out there in public, much less my face, my voice, my mannerisms. D: Yeah, it does actually bring everybody down to, their basic humanity. And here am I, trying to start growing a beard or so the worst time for me to probably be appearing on video. But it is what it is. T: Oh you always carry your presence through and that's, that , that gift of engagement is really great. And it's good, the ideas need to get out there and having real people behind them is, it's a unique opportunity, which, you know okay, so I'm, I should ask you first. Is that what you're saying? D: Yeah, I think that would make sense. T: Okay, so here's my first question. If I remember correctly, you have a background in economics, specifically agricultural economics, is that correct? And then how do you see the relationship between economics and then your present occupation, which is history, specifically American history? D: Yeah, I got into agricultural economics accidentally. When I was coming out of high school, I had a lot of interests, a lot of potential, but not a lot of focus or direction. And so I went to the University of Massachusetts. There were different people wanting me to go different places. My parents were both high school teachers at the time. And they were both college educated. So there was an expectation certainly that I would go through that At least undergraduate process at that both at that time, both of them just had bachelor's degrees. And there was some talk about me going to an Ivy League school or even to a big name school, although my dad wanted me to go to a kind of a Bates or a Bowdoin, a small liberal arts college liberal arts college. But I went to UMass for a variety of reasons. And it was, even at the time, there was 25, 000 people on the campus, in the community and it had all of these programs, and it was an R1 university, and so I got to just try everything, I just looked at the catalog, and I thought what interests me? And so first I tried to be a landscape architect in the environmental design program because they didn't have an architecture program. But I bombed out of drawing because I couldn't get my this was in the age of pencils And I could not get my line weights right. And so I got, for the first time ever, I got like a C or D or something and I got a bad grade. I think it may have only been a C, but I was shocked and appalled. T: And we won't talk about calculus. It was my first C. D: Calculus crushed me, but that was later in my career. I was, I hadn't really done that much math or science in high school, but so then I tried English and I took a Yeats and Joyce course, which I loved. And I took a Frost course with a guy who had taught with Robert Frost at Amherst college. And was still around, and had stories to tell, and that was fabulous, I loved that, and a modern novel course, and all these, and kind of honors courses and stuff, and then they told me I had to take, four semesters of, 18th century British romantics or something, and I said, nope, I'm out and I moved on to something else, And and then I got interested in farming and, agriculture and, because we had a little backyard garden where we had grown, our vegetables and stuff in the summertime, but I grew up in the burbs and I had no connection really with actual agriculture. So I got involved in that and that was in a college at the time, UMass had a college of food and natural resources. And so I took some animal science, I took some plant science and then I gravitated towards this agricultural economics which actually also was a chance for me to do micro instead of just doing a very theoretical esoteric macroeconomics and also interesting. I was also becoming interested in free markets and libertarianism and all that. And I had just, I had just read, the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and I was very, so that was my flirtation. T: That's the male Sophomore college thing to do, especially back in the day. D: Yeah. And all of the people in economics and the formal economics department at UMass were Marxists and they were all of the Marxists that had been thrown out of Harvard and MIT and, all of the big East Coast. colleges or, if not thrown out, encouraged to move on in the 60s. And so they had all migrated to Western Massachusetts and were holing up at UMass. So that the really conservatives were like Keynesians in that department. And so straight economics wasn't going to be a good fit. And I was also actually starting to read the Austrians who really, firmly held that macro wasn't a thing, that if, in Mises’ idea, if all value is subjective, then how do you aggregate it? It's a dog that won't hunt kind of thing. So I did micro, I did econometrics and I actually did some like graduate level ag economics stuff. And then I went off and decided get into business and specifically get into the securities industry and I just went to work for a Wall Street based company and T: Oh, wow. I didn't know that. I didn't know you were on Wall Street. You really have done everything from the farm to Wall Street in a couple of years. That's pretty good. A Marxist to the ultra capitalists. Nice. D: It was brutal though, because it was really the Glen Gary, Glen Ross office I worked except with one addition that you don't see in the show, which is the cigarette smoke. Because every Monday, as people were sitting, cold calling to get their, their appointments for the week, it was just, long tables with phones and a lot of times just white pages of the phone book and cigarettes everywhere and butts in half drunk styrofoam cups of coffee. It was just crazy. Terrible. As bad as you can imagine it. And so I did that for a few years. And that and then I got involved in high tech. And then it wasn't until after 20 years down the line, I retired from high tech and once I had moved out to Minnesota, I started taking some extra courses. I just started taking courses at the university at night and things again, interested me. And it, I found that it was going towards history and there were some history courses that I was enjoying and partially it may have just been the coincidence that there were history courses available at night that I could take but I went and then once I retired, then I was additionally taking some during the day I took a course that was really a big influence on me about the enlightenment that was taught by a guy who I'm still friends with who, on the first day welcomed us into, participate in the enlightenment project. T: Wow, that this is a community and it's a dialogue. A living community. It's not just some academic esoteric historical thing. Yeah. It's living. It's alive now. We're enlightened. D: And, that the discourse had continued. And so he was inviting us to participate in that. So I ate that up. And there was something that we talked ab… This is a public episode. 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