“The real voyage of discovery is not to visit new lands; it’s to have new ryes.)) that; I never looked at that that moment is so critical and is, for me, what a good conversation is all about.

But look at the practices, particularly from childhood, in the last 40 years. We spend hours and hours entertaining ourselves in front of a TV Conversations have become secondhand phenomena. Coaching can be interpreted as the recovery of the ability to have conversations.

Bill. Is it therefore not random that you come from a culture in which conversation is valued, and here you are in the United States?

Julio. Oh, I don’t think it’s an accident.

Bill. One of the fascinating things is that in the United States, we once had rooms called parlors (or parlours). There was a tradition on Sunday of visitations, extended conversations with neighbors. We’ve lost that tradition. I don’t know any home that still has a parlor. So, here you are, wandering in from another culture, one in which conversation is still valued.

Julio. And let me tell you that in countries like Chile, we are losing it, too, because we are so busy imitating the USA. I remember reading Bryan Swimme (1996), the cosmologist. In one of the introductions to his books, he speaks about this precise issue. He indicates that one of the biggest dramas we are living is that our children are deprived of conversation. They spend an amazing amount of hours per year watching TV And  he  said there are people with high studies who look at minds as marketing fields and deliver the messages for people to act and buy and pursue things. He said that kind of atrocity is committed every day, and we have no way to rebel against it. That’s the way he begins a book on cosmology. But he comes from a place of indignation. If we lose our capacity to engage in conversation, how do we live? How do we bring satisfaction, creativity, thinking? How do we deal with our breakdowns in life? How do we have our tears and how do we laugh if conversation doesn’t exist?

I claim that tolerance is postponed rejection. Acceptance is a very different game.

Bill. So, if we are living in a world filled with personal and collective irony, p art of the way to be able to live with that irony is through the conversation that is, to recognize that we’re not alone and that we’re all living with these  profound  contradictions in our own lives. You seem to be saying: “I’m living with this contradiction between having these wonderful conversations with China, and I’m still trying to figure out how to talk with my kid and my wife.”