Walt Mossberg and Richard Saul Wurman Chat

Walt: He invented the TED conferences, the best conferences I'd ever seen.  And he sold it, but it's not the same conference as it was when he ran it.  Sort of like going to college for 3 days.  Only got the best professors, and each only allowed to talk for 15 minutes.  Nobody ever left the room while people were speaking.  Saul said his conference was the dinner party he always wanted to have.  Larry Ellison followed by Billy Graham followed by jugglers who explained the mathematical principals behind juggling, then Yo You Ma, then Normal Lear, then Jeffrey Katzenberg.  On and on and on.  Storytellers, singers, three nobel prizewinners.

Saul: 18 years. It was geeks and geezers - everyone was over 70 or under 30.

Walt: He looks younger than he is.  There's a tremendous opportunity online.  I've been online every day since 1983.  There was a community, you made friends with people you never met in real life.  What is it about conferences, why do we do this?

- there's a sidtrack about how Wurman can only type in caps and doesn't like to push shift.

Saul: Marriage is about a conversation.  It's not about sex, it's about having dinner with somebody.  You're never taught how to have a good conversation, the things that allow you to communicate with another human being.  Underneath it all, you're making a connection.  I support Witness, the Peter Gabriel charity that distributes video cameras.

I never have the head of a company speak, or a politician.  Legally, they can't tell the truth publicly about their company.  And I want people to tell the truth.  I'm not joking.  A politician of course, forget about it.  We applaud candor because we don't expect a public official to have candor and actually tell the truth.  Steve Jobs isn't a truthful person in public, he can't be.  I'm out here telling my truth.  It might not be factual, but it's my truth.  (audience laughs).  You want at least that.  Them thinking it's their truth.

Walt: Let's talk about your new deal.

Saul: The problem about atlases is you don't drive across the USA alphabetically.  Every state is a different size, so every map is a different scale since they only have one page each.  What used to be 10 minutes is now an hour.  There's no comparative information on the cities of the world.  So I thought I'll do that project.  19 cities that have 20 million people each, a clever title "19,20, 21".  A way of selling, a clever title.  We'll make transparent how we put it down.  So I'm starting to do it, I have 3 partners: chairman and president of Radical Media; others.

Have a conference coming up: http://the-eg.com/ . An exhibit that will be live.