The following conversation was originally published on the Pando Populus website. Republished with permission.
Pando co-founders Eugene Shirley and John B. Cobb, Jr. sat down on the occasion of the organization’s 10th birthday to reflect on the past decade. It was more than 40 years ago that Eugene first studied under John as a student. Since that time, they have embarked on a range of project-based ventures together, with the latest and most important of these, Pando, organized to help young people launch ambitious professor-student projects of their own. Pando turns 10 as John is soon to turn 100 (on February 9). On the occasion of John’s birthday, he will officially become Chair Emeritus of the Pando Populus Board of Directors.
Eugene Shirley: Can you believe it’s been 10 years since the official Pando Populus launch? But here I am, talking about Pando at 10 when you’re 99! You always have a way of putting things into perspective.
John Cobb: According to the Chinese calendar, I’m already 100 – because they give you credit for time in the womb.
Ninety-nine or a hundred, it’s astounding what you’ve done for us and the debt that we owe you. In terms of big ideas, your contributions have been across the board — from the philosophy of education to the philosophy of science to metaphysics.
What we think of as the Pando model of education bears your unique stamp – project centered, with projects drawn from the real world and expected to make an actual difference in it; transdisciplinary, because real-world projects don’t fit into disciplinary categories, and explicitly values-oriented, toward the value of saving the world.
A Pando view of nature as being alive and not dead, essential to a full grounding of sustainability, comes from you – even if it is coming now to the mainstream through books like The Light Eaters by the NY Times bestseller Zoe Schlanger (whose book I’ve just read and love, by the way).
And our ability to ground the work we do in such categories as meaning, value, and hope is due to the attention you’ve given to metaphysics over the whole of your career, allowing us to talk about science and faith in the same breath, using the same language for both.
And let me add that you’ve done all this in the most non-dogmatic way possible. I’ve never known anyone so profoundly open to any idea, embarrassing or not, for rigorous examination – and I say this at a time when even college campuses shut down ideas that one side or another can’t tolerate even being thought about, let alone discussed.
This is just on the intellectual side of your contributions to Pando. And I’m only getting started.
Eugene, I am very pleased indeed that you can tell me that — and how some of our ideas have taken shape and even been actualized.
No matter the age of either of us, I’ve always felt between us the continuation of a professor-student relationship. It’s the dynamic of the university environment in which we first met. But it’s never been dictatorial in any way. Your only real insistence has been to remain open to the pull of the future.
My confidence in Pando is because you have expressed yourself through it, creatively and intellectually.
If we had in those early days tried to describe too specifically the form the organization could take and the work it would do in the future, I would have worried that it would be too closely identified with one particular pattern and goal. Our work would have gone stale.
What assures me is that what is decided on and chosen for implementation has the continuity and the ability to change that you are affirming.
I love your dual emphasis – both continuity and change.
I think what you’re doing may be more Whiteheadian now than efforts to follow Whitehead closely, to the letter, would be. It’s more important to imbued by the spirit of something than to follow any detail of this or that.
For readers who don’t know, you’re referencing the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, in whose intellectual tradition of process thought you yourself have long stood at the helm.
I clearly remember ten years back, sitting in your living room, talking to you about the organization that became Pando – we didn’t have a name yet, or even much of a mission. Money of course was key, and you offered to contribute the seed money we needed to get off the ground if I committed to running the organization and make it my full-time work.
I was the son of missionaries and a professor nearly all my adult life, living on a professor’s salary, raising four kids, being reasonably frugal – and amassing over my lifetime some significant savings. I wanted to put them to the greatest use.
It was at about this time that you got in touch with your family members to see if they needed any financial help – because unless they told you otherwise, you were going to give their inheritance away.
I reached out to my kids and grandkids and told them I was going to distribute their inheritance to causes I thought could help save the world unless they told me they needed my money more – and none did.
In early January of every year since that time, you’ve added up the money you’ve saved by not using up funds set aside for advanced medical care during the prior year — and then you have sent the lion’s share of that money to us. That is utterly remarkable.
So I kept giving it away. Pando has over the last 10 years I think been the recipient of my largest single financial gift. I wanted to do everything I could to make it be a success — and I still do, in my role as Chair Emeritus.
At the time when you and I started talking about launching Pando, you will remember that I was heading a technology company doing early work in AI that my husband and I founded ten years earlier.
It was a fascinating venture, working with a wonderful group of smart people, with a dream board, and for me a position with built-in life tenure. But you convinced me of just how important this moment in history is for “all hands on deck.” And you did that not only through your ideas, but through your example — your willingness to put it all on the line yourself.
So I stepped down as CEO, turned the company over to a colleague, and became part of the “hands” you were calling for. My esteemed professor was asking for my help in saving the world.
And so Pando was born.
At the time, we were eager that there be some kind of organization to pick up consciously from the 2015 conference we were in the process of pulling together.
I was just delighted that you were willing to do that. I never wanted to run the organization, but I wanted to do all I could to make it possible.
John B. Cobb, Jr. speaking at the 2015 Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization conference
Sitting with you in your living room that day, with you telling me what you were going to do with your money, was deeply motivating to me.
Because we both lived in Los Angeles County, and believed in localism, we wanted to make the focus of our work here. It would also be an excellent test-case opportunity for what might work elsewhere, so we hoped.
When you think that Pando’s programs today are all about project-centered work that grows out of the classroom, it’s no coincidence that Pando itself is the product of just that kind of professor-student relationship.
I had been your student at Claremont Graduate School in 1981 in a general survey course. But then you and I stayed in touch, shared dreams off and on about turning big ideas into projects, and worked on various ones together over the years.
You’ll remember that we almost got a big documentary series off the ground for PBS and BBC in the early ‘90s at a time when I was making documentary films. It was focused on the major themes we’re talking about now. The architect Frank Gehry was involved. David Hockney. David Bohm the physicist. Charles Jencks, the first definer of postmodernism in architecture, was chief consultant. Michael Gill, one of the fathers of the documentary series (“Civilisation with Kenneth Clark,” “Alistair Cooke’s America”), was co-producing. And on and on – an astounding collection of people.
Yes, that would have been remarkable. It seemed like we came very close.
We did indeed. Very close.
It’s important to remember your failures as well as your successes.
I think we were early. Or maybe the concept of making a documentary series out of these kinds of ideas was wrong in the first place — a wrong vehicle for what more generally we were trying to do. I don’t know. But in any case, so many years later the same big ideas animating that documentary project circled back around and fed into the 2015 conference and then consolidated into Pando.
It’s hard to know what will catch on – what idea will work, which one won’t, and when everything will come together in the right way and congeal. It will feel like beating your head against a brick wall. You just have to try things. It’s all a process.
But you can’t be too wedded to a single end goal. You’ve got to stay open. For us, a documentary film series didn’t work out – but years later Pando did.
So many of your students and people you have interacted with at conferences over the years have wound up being deeply influenced by you and your ideas, just like I was.
I met a guy in New York once by chance on a street corner waiting for a traffic light – true story – who said he was so shaken by Whitehead’s and your view of reality that he had to take a few weeks’ time off work to let it sink in and he was never the same.
You’ve had a big influence on many people and life choices and commitments.
The other person who’s been with us through all of this, including the early days, is John Buchanan – Pando’s largest and extremely generous funder. Through his financial support, he’s made the Pando track record of success possible.
I believe the two of you met at a conference he organized at Esalen in the mid-’90s on “Process Philosophy and Transpersonal Psychology.”
That’s right. It launched a wonderful relationship between the two of us ever since.
The point here is that individuals really can make a difference, and John is a wonderful example of that.
Pando wouldn’t have been possible without both Johns – you and John Buchanan. And on the creative side, there’s the other John in the Pando orbit – John Bielenberg, our founding Creative Director. We’ve been blessed with Johns!
Pando has been the result of so many people – many of whom I’d never met before and some I’m meeting even now. There are so, so many who have been involved in making Pando quite a serious player in Los Angeles, and now possibly even beyond.
When you look back on the things that Pando has done over the past 10 years, what is it that you are most proud of, or find most interesting.
Well, I thought that what we originally wanted was something local. We weren’t really thinking along national lines at first nor with objectives that had national implications. We were focused on the place where we live, a place we love, and call home.
We wanted specificity, an organization that simply could make sure that the County of Los Angeles kept the issues we care about alive – not only alive rhetorically, but by supporting them in action. And, I have a strong feeling that this is what has happened so far.
My impression is that Pando is taken account of by the operative leadership which focuses on environmental and justice issues. And of course on education.
I am only worried financially what will happen when I die. I had hoped that by this juncture there would be more steady income from other sources. But I think that you, and Ed [Bacon] as the new, incoming board chair, and Paul [Koretz] as vice chair are addressing that and have real reasons for optimism.
I do think that we truly are at a turning point of opportunity. Pando Days is a successful program in higher ed, and unique in what it does. All our other work follows the Pando education model and builds on that success.
We’ve built a methodology for helping young people work in collaboration with their instructors to actually create the future they want to inhabit. With can-do spirit and hope.
From my earliest work in higher education, I had always hoped to effect change in the educational system itself, its assumptions and methodologies, and make it more meaningful to addressing the most pressing problems of the day.
Pando does that. I’m immensely proud.
Pando is an inherently positive organization. At a time where higher education itself is in crisis in so many ways, Pando gets diverse people from diverse backgrounds with diverse interests working together positively to actually accomplish something.
There’s great creative energy to be found at the nexus of professors and students taking on big challenges together — it’s the nexus, as we discussed earlier, in which Pando itself was born and Pando Days (and all our educational programs) operates.
I think we’re the right answer for some of the biggest challenges of the day. And that we’re positioned for long-term effectiveness.
I’m delighted that you feel that the time is ripe now for our model and methodology. In the past, I’m sure we didn’t think in terms of a professor-student model of project collaboration that our work was exhibiting. We just liked working together and shared an interest in getting stuff done, and we kind of instinctively knew how to do it.
But a system that channels the creativity, intelligence and energy of young people and their instructors into working together for the common good is powerful at any level where it can be applied, however it can happen — but especially at the local, community-based levels that Pando is so passionate about.
I hope you realize, John, that you have been the most important influence in developing Pando in this direction.
Well, you have given it far more concreteness. I mean I’ve approved of it but think you’ve got something strong in the Pando education model.
I think I will make it to my 100th birthday. But, I would love this work to have much more continuity in the future.
I am constantly reflecting about what are the new possibilities that are emerging now. I know what I was good at and what I did in the past. But, I certainly don’t want to try to get what I thought years ago to somehow determine how people should think now. I think the Pando framework is designed to support this kind of openness.
It’s extraordinary that you still continue to honor process instead of calcifying at any one point in development. It is hard to do.
It is hard to do. Most NGOs develop a few things that they are good at, and that is it. I prefer to be sensitive to new opportunities as they emerge.
That’s just what I heard from you, that you are sensing particular new opportunities that will keep Pando vital well past the time that I’m gone.
Certainly the Pando model of education is broad enough, and widely applicable enough, that it could be a useful education model and methodology for years and years to come. That’s my very fond hope.
Thank you for all you’ve done to see us through these first ten years and to get us to the place where we are now.
You’re welcome. I always enjoy our conversations.
Eugene Shirley is the Founding President/CEO of Pando Populus. He spent the whole of his life launching projects—in media (honors include a BAFTA nomination, Royal Television Society win, and White House premiere), technology (bridging AI, machine learning, and finance), and education (with Pando’s project-based education model). A long-time Angeleno with Oklahoma roots, for two years Eugene was a Jennings Randolph Fellow at U.S. Institute of Peace, Washington, D.C.
Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr. is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Described by historian Gary Dorrien as one of the two most important North American theologians of the twentieth century, Cobb is the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, and the author of more than fifty books. In 2014, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Cobb is a founding co-director of the Center for Process Studies and Professor Emeritus of Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University.