Charles Bowden Saying Yes

December 12, 2012, was one of those bright winter days where the sun seems to bleed the landscape of color, leaving Las Cruces, in my memory, as little more than a sequence of drab boxes under a chalky sky. It was early afternoon and Charles Bowden was reclining in a chair, glass of red wine in hand, looking out a large window and telling me about birds. Not knowing where his story would go, I rushed to set up my recording gear.

Most interviews are narrow and targeted. Often, they have a subject that you can meaningfully explore within the confines of a magazine article or a four-minute radio story. The interview that follows is nothing like that, so it deserves a little bit of context. I am an independent radio producer and I had come to Las Cruces to ask Chuck three questions:

What is the crisis of the present, assuming there is one?

What would a better future look like?

What beliefs led to your definition of "the good"?

Those questions were the core of The Conversation, a podcast I produced from 2012 to 2016. The Conversation was motivated by a long-standing personal belief that our institutions and social norms have fallen far out of step with the realities of our world, from economics to the environment. This belief made me wonder about how large systems of thought change, so I launched The Conversation with a conjecture: There are moments in history when status quo ideas fail to address a society's changing needs. This failure usually ends badly but, despite that, some historians will see an efflorescence of new ideas amidst the chaos. For some of the best transformative moments, think of the intellectual ferment of classical Greece, the Meiji Restoration in Japan, or the American Revolution, all of which saw the birth of ideas that seemed radical to contemporaries and natural to later generations. I was interested in those moments. Were they real or the constructions of excitable historians? And if they were real, could we be living in one? Did we need to be?

To explore the idea, I traveled America and recorded in-person interviews with a cross-section of our most interesting thinkers. Some resonated with me personally and influence my thought to this day, such as Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, artist Frances Whitehead, or ecological philosopher Timothy Morton. Others challenged my assumptions, such as Max Moore, who runs the cryonics facility Alcor Life Extension, or Robert Zubrin of the Mars Society, who was one of the strongest techno-utopian voices in the series. I tried to steer away from the most obvious pundits and celebrity-intellectuals because, I reasoned, they had platforms already and were unlikely to want to mar their chiseled public images by veering off script for an interview about a raft of subjects outside of their expertise or their deepest personal beliefs.

The interviews were open-ended, oscillating between the global and the personal. These sorts of sprawling, uninhibited conversations about our collective future are taboo in the media—they're too long for our attention span, too technical for our facile understanding of the world, and too vague to be reduced to a few pithy lessons from a TED talk. They also seem embarrassingly naïve, an activity best left to the smoke-filled dorm rooms of college students. But the big conversation about our future and our beliefs is just as important today as at the most fraught moments of our past.

After almost nine months and sixty interviews, I felt that The Conversation needed Chuck Bowden. Many of my other interviewees lived in major cities and thought about the world from within the cocoons of corporations, nonprofits, or academic institutions. True, some of them were concerned about poverty, violence, or the economic casualties of the global economy, but they were all a long way from Juárez. I wanted Chuck's voice in the project, not because I didn't value the other contributions, but because I hoped he would stride through the series like an Old Testament prophet, yelling about what...