We recently connected with Mauricio & Andrew and have shared our conversation below.

Mauricio & Andrew, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us the backstory behind how you came up with the idea?

The concept for Bar Talk came to Andrew and I, as you might expect, on a night out of our own. We were kicking it at the bar, talking about literature. We’re both writers, the buzz kicked in, maybe the music got a few notches louder. In any case, we began discussing Literature with a capital L, leaving behind the particulars of our own work. We were dreaming, we were philosophizing, we were hopelessly rambling. Then we abandoned the topic altogether and all of a sudden we were back to ourselves, the tiny ways in which we have left marks on the world, the visions we both had of maybe, one day, producing something restorative and significant. Our souls were spent by the end of the night. When we asked for the check, we realized we were both curious about what revelatory conversations others might strike up once they reached that tipping point. People completely different from us. We took it a step further. Imagine an archive of all those conversations—all that wonder and joy and heartbreak—happening in NYC, right now. And the next day Bar Talk was born.

Mauricio & Andrew, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Bar Talk is a docuseries of unscripted conversations between everyday New Yorkers. Each week, we invite a new pair of friends to sit down at the bar and have a chat like they normally would on a night out. The aim, over the course of the show, is to create a portrait of the city through all its walks of life, in a casual tone.

We’re fascinated by the authenticity of this kind of discourse—conversations that aren’t fragmented and sensational but rather relaxed, intimate, longform. There’s also something a little tantalizing about that conversation a few seats down at the bar, the one we keep catching snippets of… What are they talking about, we wonder? What’s their story? Maybe we’re all a little more honest, a little more curious and open, when we get together with friends and imbibe. And maybe these seemingly trivial conversations are actually much more than meets the eye. A kind of keyhole view into the abundant reality we all share. The day-to-day frustrations, dreams, and conspiratorial musings that can make a city sizzle with life.

The show, at its heart, is about rekindling conversation and community. A decade of political polarization, a global pandemic, an exodus from urban centers, all of us buzzing around our apartments all day doing remote work… It’s hard in some ways to look around and feel that something hasn’t been lost—our social dialogue, our sense of togetherness. When did we stop talking to one another? Where in our multiscreen lives do we still have the space to catch up, to reminisce, to aspire?

The guest list runs the gamut from playwrights to performance artists, Broadway composers to grunge rock bandmates, dancers, theatre directors, independent filmmakers, twin co-authors, tattoo artists, yogis, nurses, sommeliers, itinerant roadies living in a bus next to McCarren Park, gospel musicians, rappers, reparations activists, and more. One week, we’re hosting NYU’s Dean of Humanities Una Chaudhuri, and the next we’re treated to a special holiday visit from Mr. and Mrs. Claus. Of course, identity goes far beyond anyone’s day-to-day vocation, and in applying these “archetypes” we are continually reassured by the many ways in which our guests subvert them. One can’t help but wonder, as the evening progresses, whether labels such as these aren’t artifacts of daylight, to be shed as we converge on more humane ground.

Andrew and I met in college and had been looking for a chance to collaborate. I am a documentary director, and Andrew recently left his job in finance to pursue full-time his more creative ventures, such writing and working with a non-profit on rainforest advocacy. When Bar Talk occurred to us, we didn’t think twice about turning a night’s idea into a fully realized project.

About Mauricio:
Mauricio is a documentary filmmaker and writer. He was born in Ciudad Juárez, México and later raised in El Paso, TX. He holds a BA in Physics from Princeton University. In addition to his own projects, he has worked as a researcher, assistant editor, and production assistant on various productions by the Oscar- nominated Danish company, Final Cut for Real. Some of these include this year’s three-time Oscar-nominated documentaries FLEE (2021) and A HOUSE MADE OF SPLINTERS (2022), along with PRESIDENT (2021), SCHOOL SHOOTERS (2021), and SONGS OF REPRESSION (2020). His directorial debut, A WORD FOR HUMAN (2019), premiered at CPH:DOX and screened at the US National Gallery of Arts.

About Andrew:
Andrew is a filmmaker, writer, and former derivatives trader. When he’s not on set, he works on tropical rainforest advocacy at the nonprofit Health in Harmony. He has worked at Valhalla Entertainment production company, ran the interest rate options trading book at Credit Suisse, and published short fiction and essays in the Nassau Literary Review and Tortoise: A Journal of Writing Pedagogy. Andrew holds a B.A. in Public & International Affairs from Princeton University.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

To date, we’ve published 30 bar talks—each of them its own 40-minute world—and we’re not stopping any time soon. Our interest is partly anthropological; we want to create an archive of community that can be studied by scholars 50 years from now like a time capsule, as well as enjoyed by viewers today. Surely, there is value for posterity in making a record of any time and place, but we can’t help but be drawn to the chaotic flux of this one: New York, the most diverse city in the world, rising from the ashes of a catastrophic pandemic. What are the people saying tonight? How do we interact with the people we love, in the absence of an agenda? What are we struggling with, fighting for, loving on? These aren’t questions any one person can answer. So we have to ask as many people as possible.

The series is already beginning to feel like a cross-section of the city. We’ve captured conversations between people of every age and socioeconomic background, skin colors and ethnicities (white, black, brown, LatinX, AAPI), as well as genders and sexual orientation (cis, trans, gay, straight, and more). The show’s doors are, and always will be, open to everyone.

How did you build your audience on social media?

We began by making 40-minute episodes and uploading them on YouTube – in line with our original goal of building an online archive of conversations. After about 33  episodes, we decided that it would be a good idea to make highlight clips and upload them as Instagram or TikTok reels. The results were immediate. We started getting tens of thousands of people watching these reels, while our YouTube remained more obscure. Then, we had the NYU Dean for the Humanities on our show, and she lit up social media with her incredibly sharp and thoughtful opinions on several social justice topics. She managed to articulate difficult opinions so effortlessly, such as the feeling that her own generation, the Baby Boomers, had failed the world. She argued that this generation that had promised world peace and equality in the 70’s got distracted by materialism and status as they grew older and into higher paying jobs. She did all this in the span of 90 seconds while having a drink with her niece. Naturally we identified this as a moment worth sharing as a highlight clip on social media, and when this reel hit social media, our Instagram and TikTok exploded. She is largely responsible for putting our show on the map. Ever since, we’ve been putting in a lot of effort into our reels, trying to select a variety of topics to see how the public responds to them. In the best of cases, we manage to kick off thought-provoking discussions. When that happens, there’s always a handful of comments that contribute a nuanced opinion, something we personally hadn’t thought of before. It’s those moments of edification and expansion that feel like we are doing something good in the world.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bartalkseries.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/bartalkseries
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/@bartalkseries
• Other: tiktok.com/@bartalkseries linktr.ee/bartalk www.mauriciogonzalezaranda.com/bartalk

Image Credits
The image labeled “Brooklyn Paper Photo” belongs to Kirstyn Brendlen. All other belong to Mauricio & Andrew.