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

中文翻译：

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查尔斯·鲍登说是

2012 年 12 月 12 日，是那些阳光明媚的冬日之一，阳光似乎让这片土地的色彩黯然失色，在我的记忆中，拉斯克鲁塞斯不过是白垩天空下的一系列单调盒子。下午早些时候，查尔斯·鲍登 (Charles Bowden) 斜靠在椅子上，手里拿着一杯红酒，望着窗外，告诉我关于鸟类的事。不知道他的故事会走向何方，我赶紧去设置我的录音设备。大多数面试都是狭窄的和有针对性的。通常，他们有一个主题，您可以在杂志文章或四分钟的广播故事范围内有意义地探索。接下来的采访不是那样的，所以它应该有一点背景。我是一名独立的广播制作人，我来到拉斯克鲁塞斯问查克三个问题：现在的危机是什么，假设有一个？更美好的未来会是什么样子？是什么信念导致了您对“善”的定义？这些问题是我在 2012 年至 2016 年期间制作的播客 The Conversation 的核心。 Conversation 的动机是长期以来的个人信念，即我们的制度和社会规范与我们世界的现实（从经济学）已经远远脱节到环境。这种信念让我想知道大的思想体系有多大变化，所以我发起了《对话》，其中有一个猜想：历史上有一些时刻，现状的想法无法满足社会不断变化的需求。这种失败通常会以糟糕的结局收场，但尽管如此，一些历史学家还是会在混乱中看到新思想的蓬勃发展。对于一些最好的变革时刻，想想古典希腊的智力发酵，