For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about how digital dialogues can bridge the gaps in our understanding of life’s biggest questions.
Journalist and author Robert Wright is a master of what you might call the split-screen style of conversation. In the early 2000s, during what he calls the “primordial ooze phase of streaming video,” Wright used support from the John Templeton Foundation to launch meaningoflife.tv, a website that streamed Wright’s lengthy in-person interviews with philosophers, scientists, and theologians to discuss the “big questions” surrounding the universe’s origin and meaning. In 2005 Wright co-founded another internet site, bloggingheads.tv, which helped to popularize the “diavlog” format: two webcam streams, displayed side by side, capturing two people in long-distance conversation. The genius of the format is twofold: its stripped-down nature minimizes production logistics, opening up the kinds of discussions that can be created and shared. And by eliminating cutaway editing, the viewer spends equal time watching the participants talk and watching them listen.
In 2015, the Templeton Foundation gave Wright an additional $1 million grant to support him in his role as a visiting professor of science and spirituality at the Union Theological Seminary, and to further his public outreach, including what Wright calls a “resurrection” of meaningoflife.tv for the age of YouTube and podcasting. Wright’s latest grant, which began in 2019, is a continuation of that work with a specific focus on intellectual humility and tribalism, allowing Wright and his associates post new conversations several times a week that touch on those topics.