Description: Boyd talks about the world's cosmopolitan elite.

Question: Whom would you like to interview, and what would you ask?

Transcript: Well of course what gets lost here in these conversations is a sense of the different cultures around the world . . . people who are not traveling in elite circles. There’s . . . There is a . . . There is an emerging cosmopolitan elite that really sees the entire world as their city: cosmopolitan. And that’s a . . . that’s a good thing, because that’s a binding agent that does . . . does help keep people together. I imagine the list of people you’re interviewing . . . you’re interviewing mostly come from what you would consider to be sort of that cosmopolitan elite. If you could go and interview a subsistence farmer in India, I imagine you’d find, of course, great human . . . human commonality. But also it’s just a very different . . . it would have to be a different mindset about what . . . what . . . if you were worried about just if the rain is coming. And of course that . . . If you were to interview that subsistence farmer about the concern about the rains coming, what happens if the rains don’t come? It would lead you back to the climate crisis because that’s what’s gonna happen. If we don’t figure this out, you’re gonna have a billion people in this place who, next year or the year after, the rain simply won’t come and they won’t have a choice.

Recorded on: 7/5/07