Joshua Foer wants people to be curious about everything
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Why did you start the Atlas Obscura Company?
Atlas Obscura is a company that has a mission to inspire a sense of wonder and curiosity about this incredible planet that we all briefly get to share. My cofounder and friend Dylan Thuras...said 'when we're out traveling around the world or mostly in our own backyards, it's really hard to find the cool, wondrous, amazing places that you need somebody in the know to tell you about. What if we created a website where people could share their knowledge of all of the most incredible places in the world?'
A community attached itself to what we were building, and it just kind of grew and turned into what is now
,
like a decent
-
sized company whose goal is to inspire wonder. We take people all over the world on trips to places that you would never think to go to. One of our most popular trips is to the gates of hell in Turkmenistan, which is a giant, flaming industrial accident in the middle of the Turkmenistan desert. So we either do trips like that or we take you to a place that you think you know, like Paris, and have you experience it in a totally different way. And now we've got a new book called 'Wildlife.'
You referred earlier to 'an Atlas Obscura person.' How would you describe that person?
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It's less of a demographic than a psychographic. It is somebody who is curious about the world and says, 'I think part of my role here as a human being is that I feel a sense of wonder about the planet, the world, and all the incredible people in it.' And we're trying to create a home for people who want to look at the world with that sense of wonder and evangelize a little bit that this is a cool way to go about living a life of being curious. And we think the world could use a little more of that right now.
I was fascinated by the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which for listeners is a huge area surrounding the now-shuttered Soviet nuclear reactor that was the site of the worst nuclear accident in history. And the area now, as your book explains, is teeming with wildlife, despite, I guess, the radioactive contamination.
The border between North and South Korea is also an incredible, biologically diverse ecosystem because there are no people there. And yeah, it does give you a little bit of hope that if we can just stop screwing it up here, like things will bounce back. But they won't bounce back if they're extinct. And that's part of the reason we've got to be so attentive to what we are losing that will never come back.
So we're sitting here in Lehrhaus, which is a tavern you created to be a place of Jewish thought as well as food. What's your relationship to your own Jewish identity?
Well it's changed over time, as probably it should. And for me, this is a place that I started with Charlie Schwartz, who's my cofounder, and we wanted to create the kind of space that we felt was lacking in our Jewish lives. A place that would be warm, accessible, delicious, and a communal space that would be grounded in learning. This ancient Jewish practice of trying to make sense of ourselves and of the world and what we're all doing through engaging with text and trying to interpret that, which is like the essential Jewish act. So we want to take that and make it feel like something that is accessible to anyone.
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