Years ago I was walking a friend’s dog through their suburb and noticed every other house had another dog in it that went absolutely nuts when we walked past — not from territorial aggression, but loneliness and the desperate desire to leap through the window and smell another dog. It hit me like a brick how like those dogs we all are in this screen-based society, and how important it is that we get at least a little time in the dog park.
I was already going to festivals at that point but from there on out they became a kind of religion. From 2007-2020 I had thousands of amazing conversations while painting at (mostly small to mid-sized) festivals, and the art felt mostly like an excuse to spend an entire weekend just riffing with whoever else showed up. At some point people started telling me that our easel-side chats had changed their lives. Being willing to talk about deep stuff with anyone at any time, I wasn’t trying to inspire strangers to change their career path or identity. But it kept happening, and these people kept telling me “You should start a podcast.” So I did.
It was several years before I realized that a podcast isn’t intimate and open-ended in the same way. You can introduce people to awesome ideas, you can model a different kind of thinking, but you can’t ask questions. I’d framed Future Fossils Podcast as a museum for the “trace fossils” of conversations but even in a deliberately exploratory dialogue-not-interview format, the host-guest relationship is also performative in a way that dinner table conversation isn’t.
When COVID effectively killed festival culture in the USA and I got sucked into an apparently permanent limbo of remote work, I started feeling like the most important quality of those lively, spontaneous, vulnerable encounters that had once characterized my life had gone entirely missing. And then I worked for Mozilla for a while researching innovation and learned that every single one of the most legendarily creative organizations in my sample had a physical campus — a place where people could just bump into each other and where serendipity emerged through unplanned banter. This is the lifeblood of culture, the secret ingredient of “scenius”: people need places where they can hang out and rap with one another, in real-time, with no specific goal in mind.
Sometimes I feel like society is trying to maintain a long-distance relationship entirely on text messaging and voice notes. Like we’ve forgotten that being in the same place at the same time matters. But as someone who has spent much of my professional and romantic life in complicated long-distance partnerships, I recognize that even if video calls are a lousy substitute for in-person time together, they’re still a huge step up from being totally uncoupled in space and time. I’ll take what I can get.
Even just writing this post has felt isolating and weird — immediately thrown into sharp relief when my daughter burst into my office to show me her Legos. I want more of that with you fine people. Maybe you do, too. The parasocial relationship I have with you as “author” or “host” and “reader” or “listener” is all well and good when it comes to crystallizing an idea, but broadcast media sucks for relationship building. And the crazier the world gets, that distinction only feels more and more important.
Do I even need to mention how many people are turning to chatbots because this is a fundamental human need and we are being systematically thwarted in our efforts to satisfy it? Companionship — no matter how ephemeral — is the air and water I once took for granted. I don’t anymore. And I want to offer it to people, especially now, when it feels like civilization is coming apart at the seams.
Which is all just to say, I hope you’ll join us for our next monthly hangout. Or if not this one, then the next.
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