When I was teaching at Yale, Thomas Koberda was a postdoc working with Yair Minsky. Thomas and I got to reconnect two weeks ago at an AMS meeting in DC on “What the heck is a math PhD now?” (My short answer: deeply learning difficult mathematics, being able to orally explain every detail, becoming the human world expert on some (however small) area of mathematical knowledge. Long answer: ams.org/about-us/governance/…) Anyway, we got to chatting over some beers at dinner, and Thomas was much more down on what it all means for mathematics than I was, and we wanted to get to the “bottom” of things; make explicit any assumptions that were underlying our conclusion. We had a very nice chat, not necessarily agreeing on everything, but definitely feeling like we heard each other’s arguments. So the next day, we basically had the conversation again, but this time in a shared Google Doc, at first talking as we type, but eventually just “typing at” each other in silence. We allowed ourselves to interject, to fix what we were saying from the first version, to fact check, to tighten our arguments as much as we saw fit. It was a *wonderful* way to, in good faith, debate/discuss serious topics with serious disagreement. (I would *love* to see other topics discussed this way…) We felt it may be useful to others, so cleaned it up a bit and posted to the arxiv. arxiv.org/abs/2610.14362 I was also contacted by Proofs and Prompts asking for a contribution, so we cross-posted it there. proofsandprompts.com/2026/10… I’m quite eager to hear what people think of the conversation!