Read-Aloud #1: Prologue and Introduction
Welcome to the first audio episode! There are a few things to explain.
The Most Important Problem: Prologue and Introduction - The Most Important Podcast
This episode contains the pre-Chapter 1 material from the current draft of my book, The Most Important Problem. It gives the origin story of my current research, including the interviews I do on this show. If you’re new, this is a good place to st…
- I intend to release 0, or 1, audio episodes a week. They're great when I can find somebody good to interview – they're also a lot of work, between scheduling, recording, and editing+mastering. These are reasons I don't anticipate them being weekly. However I bring this up because if you decide they're your favorite part, then please let me know and there's a good chance things will change. I expect a lot of experimentation with form at the outset, and feedback is invaluable.
- This recording is of the very first part of The Plan – which is currently 300 pages of text. Because I think that's a little forbidding, my current intention is to make it more accessible my doing things like breaking it up into little weekly pieces, and making recordings of them. Right now, I think this is a good idea. But again, if you think this is a terrible idea, and need all 300 pages right now, let me know.
- I will release the text of this episode later this week, which is the format in which I anticipate releasing the majority of it – unless, again, everyone insists I do a LeVar Burton and read the whole thing out loud.
- It will become clear in the recording, and the text, that The Plan is written as a book, and a book that tries to be entertaining. This is intentional. If it is not entertaining, it fails at its most important task – getting people to pay attention to it. Still, coming from academia where dry and boring is almost a professional imperative, I feel a tension between Serious and Fun, so I'll give a half-apology that nobody but me may need: The research is all real, the data is all world-standard, and the numbers are all peer-reviewed. Then I take that, and try to make it so that people pay attention. As with everything else, if you can think of a better way, I am more than happy to listen.
- And last, "The Most Important Podcast" is a play on "The Most Important Problem," which is how The Plan first took shape – an earnest search for the most important problem in the world (and an answer to what that even meant). I have since come to be persuaded that this is a terrible description of what I'm doing, but the world is moving so fast that I haven't had time to update the branding. Hence The Plan, The Most Important Podcast, and The Dovecote Institute (which is the umbrella under which all of these projects take place) form a somewhat inconsistent and confusing ecosystem which I may, or may not, ever straighten out.
Thank you, as always, for listening.
