Aengus Anderson: My name is Aengus Anderson.

Micah Saul: And I’m Micah Saul.

Anderson: And we’re pro­duc­ing The Conversation.

Historically, there have been all of these moments, moments of social tur­moil where peo­ple have come togeth­er and they have ques­tioned a lot of the com­mon sense of their eras and they’ve torn it to bits. And the result has been kind of…truths, like new truths that become com­mon sense later.

Saul: These con­ver­sa­tions real­ly sort of dra­mat­i­cal­ly change the way that the gen­er­al pub­lic under­stands the world and deals with the world.

Anderson: And this is the part where, for us, look­ing at the world now, I mean you read the head­lines today and it’s like there is a lot of stuff hap­pen­ing, and there’s a lot of new that seems real­ly seri­ous. So we kind of come to this from the back­ground of going, ​“Hmm. It seems like we should be hav­ing the Conversation today.”

Saul: Do you feel like we should maybe talk about why we believe we’re in a state where the Conversation should be hap­pen­ing? I feel like for you and I it seems obvi­ous that things are crazy right now. But I feel like maybe we should go a lit­tle fur­ther into that and explain why we think things are crazy right now.

Anderson: Yeah, I mean it seems like one of the biggest ones for us is the economy.

Saul: Yeah. If you don’t have a doc­tor­ate in eco­nom­ics, how do you even wrap your head around what’s going on. It’s so far out of the con­trol of the peo­ple that it’s sup­posed to be helping.

Anderson: It seems like we start­ed ask­ing these ques­tions prob­a­bly around 2008.

Saul: Right. Suddenly it became real.

Anderson: Yeah, absolute­ly. And it seemed like, oh God it could fall down tomorrow.

Saul: Right. It’s not just this perfectly-crafted machine that just makes mon­ey and makes all of us bet­ter. It’s based on cer­tain things that basi­cal­ly feel like mag­ic, and maybe faulty magic.

Anderson: Also, the alarm of 2008 was that maybe that cri­sis was not solved. We kind of swept the mess under the rug.

Saul: Exactly. But I think anoth­er real­ly impor­tant thing that peo­ple aren’t think­ing about enough, and that I think is real­ly going to affect the future in ways that we don’t under­stand yet is just the rapid rise of tech­nol­o­gy. I’m talk­ing Internet. I’m talk­ing the gad­gets we car­ry in our pock­ets. I’m talk­ing sur­veil­lance. I’m talk­ing just tech­nol­o­gy in gen­er­al feels like it’s advanc­ing at such a rapid pace that we don’t even have an eth­i­cal lan­guage to talk about the ram­i­fi­ca­tions yet.

Anderson: So we’ve got econ­o­my and tech­nol­o­gy, which are of course deeply inter­wo­ven. And then I think envi­ron­ment, too, which is—

Saul: Which is again inter­wo­ven with the pre­vi­ous two, but—

Anderson: And this is why it just has to be one conversation.

Saul: Right.

Anderson: It’s sil­ly to kind of break these things into pieces, but there’s the envi­ron­ment and we know beyond a rea­son­able doubt at this point that we’re chang­ing the tem­per­a­ture of the plan­et. We know that we have finite resources, and we know that our pop­u­la­tion is grow­ing and may lev­el out and may not lev­el out—

Saul: But we’re fun­da­men­tal­ly living…as a species, we are unsus­tain­able at this point.

Anderson: Yeah.

Saul: For some of these resources, we can see in the not-so-distant future, where we just don’t have oil at the lev­el we have now, or we don’t have fresh water at the lev­el we have right now. And that’s scary.

Anderson: And it’s so big. It’s so dif­fi­cult to under­stand. As with the oth­er two issues we’ve just dis­cussed. Whether it’s eco­nom­ics or tech or envi­ron­ment, these things are huge, they’re sys­temic, and they’re things that we sort of col­lec­tive­ly cre­ate. There’s not real­ly any­one you can point to. Which is weird.

Saul: Yeah, it’s very weird. I think we instinc­tu­al­ly feel that there should always be a solu­tion. And these sys­tems are so inter­con­nect­ed, and they’re so big, those easy solu­tions aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly useful.

Anderson: And then when we get to the idea of solu­tions to our prob­lems in what­ev­er field, that gets us back to some of the old­est ques­tions you can find. That gets us back to phi­los­o­phy, like how do you want to live? What are your needs ver­sus what are your luxuries?

Saul: Right. So to you and me, it’s fair­ly clear why we need to be hav­ing the Conversation.

Anderson: Yeah. Because if any­one of these inter­re­lat­ed sys­tems has a cri­sis, there are a lot of peo­ple on the plan­et who are only liv­ing because we have these incred­i­ble sys­tems, and if some­thing breaks down, whether that’s a break­down of food deliv­ery due to a fuel thing, or due to some eco­nom­ic seizure that caus­es the poor dis­tri­b­u­tion of goods, these things have real effects.

Saul: Which I guess leads us then to the ques­tion: is any­body talk­ing about this on a holis­tic lev­el, or are we so spe­cial­ized that we can only look at lit­tle cor­ners of this? And I think that’s what we’re try­ing to find. Who is talk­ing about this, and are they talk­ing about it with peo­ple that are look­ing at it from dif­fer­ent angles and dif­fer­ent view­points? Because that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to solve these problems.

Anderson: Which is kind of ter­ri­fy­ing if you think about like, the US rev­o­lu­tion, and the draft­ing of the Constitution if we say that’s a Conversation, and I think there’s a pret­ty damn good case for that hav­ing been a def­i­nite Conversation. The world that those peo­ple lived in had a lot less infor­ma­tion avail­able, and while they were deal­ing with huge prob­lems and mas­sive philo­soph­i­cal issues, in many ways they were very small com­pared to what we’re fac­ing. Not that they were any less sig­nif­i­cant, but maybe that you had a bet­ter chance of get­ting your head around them, the dif­fer­ent par­tic­i­pants in say, the Constitutional Convention could have a com­mon body of knowl­edge and a way where they could com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er. And I won­der if we even can have that now.

Saul: Right, or are we so spe­cial­ized that we don’t even have the com­mon lan­guage to dis­cuss this? You know, it’s fun­ny you men­tioned the draft­ing of the Constitution and the founders. They had read all the same books. You could at that point basi­cal­ly read every impor­tant work of polit­i­cal the­o­ry. You can’t do that anymore.

Anderson: You can’t even mas­ter a field. It feels like we—I mean we’re about to launch this project, but we’ve spent almost five months research­ing, and both of us have opened up all of these new fields and spe­cial­ties and areas of exper­tise that we did not know about before. We’ve dis­cov­ered tons of amaz­ing thinkers, and I feel like I could spend my life fol­low­ing any sin­gle one of them and not have time for the others.

Saul: Well, right, because every­body that we found, every­body that we want to talk to, has spent their entire life in that field. 

Anderson: Right, and they’re prob­a­bly a hell of a lot smarter than us.

Saul: Well, I mean that goes with­out say­ing. But at least in my mind I real­ly feel that the death of the poly­math is in some ways the death of being able to holis­ti­cal­ly look at the world.

Anderson: I do won­der the same thing, like if we’ve reached a point of such infor­ma­tion com­plex­i­ty that it is actu­al­ly beyond the abil­i­ty of even groups of peo­ple to real­ly address, let alone solve, our prob­lems. That’s not a con­clu­sion I want to draw.

Saul: And I think that’s actu­al­ly a rea­son­ably good segue into talk­ing about the project itself, in that we’re try­ing to find a group of peo­ple that are try­ing to look at these prob­lems on an over­all lev­el and break down the walls between their dif­fer­ent areas of exper­tise and actu­al­ly be look­ing at this stuff as a group from the sort of lev­el that say, any one of the founders was able to look at pol­i­tics at the time, where col­lec­tive­ly we have now read all of the impor­tant work.

Anderson: Which gives our project sort of two real prongs. We want to see if the Conversation is out there. So we’re going to go find a cross-section of peo­ple who we think are just amaz­ing thinkers.

Saul: And doers.

Anderson: Yeah, and doers. And we’re going to choose them sub­jec­tive­ly, but at the end of the day we know that there are tons of amaz­ing thinkers, and far be it from us to think that we can even curate a list of 50, but we’re going to give it our best shot. So we’re going to try to find peo­ple from a lot of dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories and ask them is the Conversation hap­pen­ing, and who do you talk to?

Saul: And then more broad­ly, what they think the prob­lems are that we’re fac­ing right now. And also ask them what their vision of the idea future is. How do we solve these prob­lems? Not nec­es­sar­i­ly even how do we solve these prob­lems, but if these prob­lems were solved what would the world look like? And why their vision is good.

Anderson: Right, which I think is fun. We’re sort of ask­ing a cri­tique of the present and then a utopi­an future. And we’re know­ing full well that it’s real­ly easy to cri­tique the present, and it’s real­ly easy to have a utopi­an future and that not a sin­gle one of these is ever going to come true. But those ideas com­bined togeth­er will be maybe some of the ingre­di­ents that actu­al­ly will end up form­ing what­ev­er the future looks like.

Saul: I guess maybe we should start talk­ing about the struc­ture of the actu­al project? Aengus is going to, in a day or two actu­al­ly, is going to hop on his motor­cy­cle and start dri­ving around the coun­try seek­ing out this list of thinkers and doers that we’ve assem­bled and inter­view­ing them.

Anderson: And hope­ful­ly I’ll be talk­ing to one thinker and I’ll be ask­ing them about the American present and the American future, and I’ll go to the next thinker and I’ll try to put those ideas in con­ver­sa­tion. But that’s some­thing where as peo­ple lis­ten we’re real­ly hop­ing that they will lend their own exper­tise and their own thoughts.

Saul: Absolutely. We want lis­ten­ers to take an active role in this and be com­ment­ing. If we’ve missed some­thing, let us know. If one of our inter­vie­wees says some­thing that you know is patent­ly false, tell us. If you can give us cita­tions, even bet­ter. We want this to be a thriv­ing web com­mu­ni­ty that is real­ly inter­est­ed in hav­ing the Conversation. We want to put the inter­vie­wees in con­ver­sa­tion with you. So we’ll be let­ting you know who we’re talk­ing to next. If you have a press­ing ques­tion that you feel needs to be addressed, let us know. This isn’t just a soap­box for inter­est­ing peo­ple talk­ing about their inter­est­ing new projects. This is a give and take. This is a conversation.

Anderson: I think that’s one of the things that’s going to be real­ly run about this project, is that we don’t real­ly know exact­ly who I’m going to talk to. There are going to be a lot of peo­ple who we’re going to meet along the way. I mean, who knows where it’s going to go? It could be a total dis­as­ter. But it could also, I hope, real­ly be thought-provoking.

Saul: I guess it’s prob­a­bly time for some disclaimers.

Anderson: It is always time for dis­claimers. [crosstalk]

Saul: It’s always, always, time for disclaimers.

We just want to make it absolute­ly clear up front that we’re not jour­nal­ists, and that this isn’t doc­u­men­tary. We’re curat­ing, in some ways, and we hope that you’ll help us curate. This is in fact a com­plete­ly new genre of media, in our mind, and we’re not sure what to call it. 

Anderson: No, I mean it’s fun­ny. It’s named The Conversation, but kind of as a genre, it also seems like it’s a con­ver­sa­tion. So by par­tic­i­pat­ing in the project as a lis­ten­er, or if you’re com­ment­ing, you’re real­ly join­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with us. And so it’s got ele­ments of jour­nal­ism and it has ele­ments of doc­u­men­tary, but it def­i­nite­ly isn’t those things.

Saul: It’s some­thing new, and I think it is just a con­ver­sa­tion. So maybe it’s not some­thing new. Maybe it’s some­thing very very old that has­n’t real­ly been done in this form before.

Anderson: Yeah. It should real­ly just be sort of a group exper­i­ment, and if it works then we should real­ly be talk­ing about some of the most impor­tant issues. This is fun­da­men­tal stuff. If we’re not hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion, we’re check­ing out from our own future.

Saul: So that’s The Conversation. We think it’s going to be real­ly inter­est­ing. We hope that you do as well. I believe the plan is to be post­ing a few inter­views a week, if possible?

Anderson: I want to shoot for two, and maybe there will be some weeks where I’ll record more and maybe edit one over the week­end. These’ll all be pret­ty long for­mat. We don’t think that The Conversation is some­thing that you can just have in soundbites.

Saul: Yeah. So we hope this sounds inter­est­ing to you, and we hope you keep lis­ten­ing, and we real­ly real­ly hope that you get involved and start talk­ing about this stuff with us and with each other.

Let’s get the con­ver­sa­tion started.