Conversations in the Rain

Weaving together the fabric of our stories

Taillights in the Rain © by Dave Graham

It’s been a busy day of driving and hay-bucking here in Ireland. I was off to the local corporate office early this morning to film a short interview with a staff research scientist. There was ice on the windshield and puddled water every 250m or so along the way. Suffice it to say, it was an adventure, one Irish backroad at a time.

I have a certain level of joy in conversing with the unassuming. These people move mountains behind the scenes and are usually the unsung heroes of our progress, either in innovation discoveries or corporate growth. They’re seldom the people who claim the credit; you can be assured that the loudest voices of any corporate shills have done little to move the needle for progress. Instead, it’s the quiet and unassuming those given over to the research into the various collisions between technology, our society, and the inevitability of our human state. These people merit the conversations and consideration, not the Wall Street fat cats who bleat out stale contrivances at beck and call.

The older I get in this industry I’ve called my own, the more I understand this hypothesis to be true. It’s an acknowledgment that innovation comes through novel conversations. The fireside chats in a pub have more momentum than the three gray-carpeted cubicle walls of…