The Creative Process in 10 minutes or less · Arts, Culture & Society: Recent Episodes
The Creative Process · Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Education, Environment, Theatre, Dance, LGBTQ, Social Justice, Spirituality, Feminism, Technology...
Ten minute highlights of the popular The Creative Process & One Planet podcasts. Exploring the fascinating minds of creative people. Conversations with writers, artists & creative thinkers across the Arts & STEM. We discuss their life, work & artistic practice. Winners of Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Pulitzer, leaders & public figures share real experiences & offer valuable insights. Notable guests and participating museums and organizations include: Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Neil Patrick Harris, Smithsonian, Roxane Gay, Musée Picasso, EARTHDAY-ORG, Neil Gaiman, UNESCO, Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Seliger, Acropolis Museum, Hilary Mantel, Songwriters Hall of Fame, George Saunders, The New Museum, Lemony Snicket, Pritzker Architecture Prize, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Galleries, Joe Mantegna, PETA, Greenpeace, EPA, Morgan Library & Museum, and many others.
The interviews are hosted by founder and creative educator Mia Funk with the participation of students, universities, and collaborators from around the world. These conversations are also part of our traveling exhibition. www.creativeprocess.info
For full episodes, follow The Creative Process - Arts Culture & Society.
Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinovis widely considered one of the most daring voices in contemporary European literature. His acclaimed novel, The Physics of Sorrow, won the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize in 2016, blending ancient myth and quantum physics to chronicle the delicate realities of post-socialist Eastern Europe. Joining him is Angela Rodel, a brilliant linguist, musician, and translator whose profound artistic empathy carries the flowing cadences of the Bulgarian language into vivid English. Together, this extraordinary creative duo made history by winning the 2023 International Booker Prizefor Time Shelter—the first book written in Bulgarian to ever receive the honor.
Time Shelter is a masterfully dark, funny, and prescient novel. It begins with an enigmatic psychiatrist opening a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by meticulously recreating past decades to match their internal clocks. But the experiment quickly escapes the clinic walls, triggering a pan-European crisis where entire nations hold democratic referendums to choose which era of the past they will retreat into. It is a book that holds up a mirror to our own world, exploring what happens when a civilization faces a deficit of meaning and tries to weaponize nostalgia.
(0:00) The Trap of Nostalgia
(1:22) The Nonlinear Approach to Storytelling
(3:53) Translating the Atmosphere
(4:31) The Pandemic of the Past
(6:37) Death and the Gardener
(9:49) The Translators Calling
(11:00) Slowing Down Time
(13:14) Storytelling vs Propaganda
(15:54) Translating the Atmosphere
(18:19) What makes a good life? What has given your life meaning?
(20:56) Reflections on God and the Stories His Grandmother Told Him
(23:43) The Importance of Hugging, Empathy and Storytelling
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
“ I'm a believer in this technology. I believe that the cheaper it is, the more people will use it. So, even if we assume that models will get smaller for the same level of intelligence, the demand to actually have more compute is going to be enormous. And the reason why you want to have the, the compute close to you is not only in terms of performance. As a national security threat, I'm not saying this will happen, but it could happen that, China or US or whoever decides to stop exporting compute to the rest of the world. If that happens today, Europe has zero AI at the scale of data the data center.”
For over a decade, technology has promised to make life easier. Social media was meant to connect us, we were told smartphones would simplify our lives, and now artificial intelligence promises to lift even more daily burdens. Yet these advances also raise an important question: when do tools enhance human creativity, and when do they replace the very experiences that give life meaning? While AI holds immense promise, many people face challenges coping with current technological advancements that ‘redefine’ human communication, work, education, and democratic values. Today, we examine societal and cultural impacts of AI, identity, inclusion, governance, education, and community well-being. And are speaking with Nacho de Gregorio, author of TheWhiteBox, one of Medium's most-followed AI analysts, for a level-headed conversation about both the remarkable potential and the real limitations of AI.
(0:22) The hidden risks of the AI debt bubble
(0:55) Shadow borrowing and the data center boom
(3:12) The AI compute gap and national security
(5:40) Europe's missing infrastructure and tech sovereignty
(8:13) The Jevons paradox and the demand for compute
(10:25) Why open source AI is the best path forward
(12:31) The chess paradox and the future of human art
(12:53) Unmeasurable domains and future-proofing your career
(14:00) Tutoring and AI in education
(15:11) Navigating AI slop and the information ecosystem
(16:24) The Pleasure of Waiting vs. The Hustle
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
If you live in a city, you’ve probably had that moment in the middle of the night. You hear a scratching in the walls, or you catch the glowing eyes of a raccoon peering out from a dumpster, and for a second, the concrete world feels a lot less 'controlled' than we like to pretend. We’ve been taught to think of cities as 'biological deserts'—places where nature goes to die. But my guest today, Dan Werb, says that’s a myth we tell ourselves to feel safe. Dan is an award-winning epidemiologist and a musician, and in his new book, Our Wild Familiars, he explores the 'synanthropes'—the wild creatures that aren't our pets, but aren't quite strangers either. They are the coyotes, the bats, and even the octopuses that are learning to use our cities as laboratories for their own rapid evolution. He’s also the author of The Invisible Siege and City of Omens.
(0:02) The unexpected biodiversity of urban areas and wild familiars
(1:18) What is a Synanthrope?
(4:15) The Myth of the Biological Desert
(8:04) The Ancestral Bond between early humans, ravens, and foxes
(9:15) Crows and Grudges
(12:42) Stepping Stones in the Concrete
(14:20) The Epidemiological Triangle
(17:58) The Illusion of AI Connection
(19:56) The Museum of Memory
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
Salwa and Selma Mikou are the founders of Paris-based Mikou Architecture. Born in Fez, Morocco and educated in Paris, they have spent the last two decades reimagining the relationship between the built environment and the cultural landscape.
After honing their craft under two of the world’s most iconic architects, Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano, they founded their own studio. For them, architecture is a living interaction with landscape and what they call the Atlas of Resonance, interpreting the hidden layers of a territory, geology, memory, and craft. It is a philosophy that rejects the generic, seeking instead to weave together technological innovation with local materials. Whether it is a mosque in the north of England or a hybrid innovation hub in a former royal manufactory, their work asks a fundamental question: How does space shape the way we think, learn and remember? They were selected by Rem Koolhaas to represent Morocco at the Venice Biennale. Most recently, they were commissioned by Hermès to create a 17,000-square-meter facility that bridges industrial performance with poetic expression. At the heart of their practice is a belief that architecture is not just about building—it’s about shaping relationships: between people, between past and future, between technology and craft.
(0:03) Architecture as a Living Transformation
(1:42) The Intuitive Knowledge of Living Art
(2:20) Preserving the Human Core of Expression
(3:14) The Medina and the Geometry of Childhood
(6:35) The Social Spaces of Rooftops
(8:27) The Twin Dynamic and Confrontation with 'l'autre'
(10:21) Contextual Echoes & Traces of the Site
(12:12) The Temples of Water
(13:15) The Mosque as Pure Spatiality
(15:49) Building Culture with Yves Saint Laurent & Pierre Bergé
(16:57) The Wast ed-dar (وسط الدار) and the Heart of a Building
(18:31) The Smells and Sounds of Home
(19:44) Balance, Nature, and Sisterhood
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
Today, we examine how we will adapt to a changing climate and learn to listen to the Earth.(0:00) Abrahm Lustgarten(Reporter, ProPublica) (3:00) Jon Gertner (Author, The Ice at the End of the World) (5:32) Bill Hare (CEO, Climate Analytics) (6:35) Rob Nixon (Prof. Environmental Humanities, Princeton) (8:12) Louis de Jaeger (Co-founder, Food Forest Institute) (10:06) Kathleen Rogers (Pres., EarthDay.org) (11:31) Rebecca Tickell (Filmmaker, Groundswell) (13:42) Ben Goldfarb (Author, Crossings) (14:56) Jane Madgwick (CEO, Plantlife International) (19:23) Jason deCaires Taylor (Sculptor, Underwater Museums) (21:02) William McDonough (Architect, Cradle to Cradle) (23:19) Euan Nisbet(Scientist, Royal Holloway) (26:06) Roland Geyer (Author, The Business of Less) (28:15) Ron Gonen (CEO, Closed Loop Partners) (29:34) Paul Shrivastava (Co-President, Club of Rome) (30:14) Carlo Ratti (Architect, Dir., MIT Senseable City Lab) (31:24) Osprey Orielle Lake (Founder, WECAN) (32:38) Liza Featherstone (Journalist) (33:41) Yolanda Kakabadse (Fmr. President, WWF)
For more, listen to their full interviews
Episode Site: https://www.creativeprocess.info/interviews-featured/anth-regen
Why does our economy treat environmental destruction as an inevitable side effect rather than a massive design flaw? How can shifting our focus from polarizing "talkers" to practical "builders" literally save the planet? We are repeatedly told that the climate crisis is too vast and volatile to solve, but what if the true obstacle is simply bad design?
Tom Chi is a physicist, designer, inventor, and investor whose work has shaped everything from Google Glass and rapid prototyping at Google X to some of the most ambitious climate technologies being built today. He’s now the founding partner of At One Ventures, where he invests in deep-tech companies focused on a bold goal: a world where humanity is a net positive to nature.
Tom’s new book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future, reframes economics itself—not as a fixed law, but as a design discipline that can be reimagined to align with the physical realities of our planet. Drawing on science, systems thinking, and lessons from nature, the book offers a grounded, practical framework for moving beyond both climate doom and empty optimism—and toward real, regenerative solutions. Today’s conversation is about what Tom calls the 4Cs: Capital, Compassion, Climate, and Community—but also about agency, responsibility, and what becomes possible when we stop treating the future as something that happens to us and start designing it deliberately.
0:00) Build Integrity: Choosing Builders Over Talkers
Why prioritizing those who physically create solutions over those who merely debate them is essential for systemic change
(1:21) Overcoming Powerlessness Through Creativity, Critical Thinking, Community Compassion
Utilizing a specific framework of portable skills to move from climate anxiety into meaningful, iterative action
(2:22) Capital Misallocation: Taxing What We Want to See
A critique of current tax structures that burden labor while under-taxing capital and failing to serve societal needs
(3:47) The Volatility Gap: Why Average Temperatures Mislead
Understanding why increasing climate volatility—rather than just average temperature rise—is the true driver of human distress
(6:19) Economics As Design: Redesigning The Global Engine
Moving beyond "physics envy" in economics to treat the global market as a discipline that can be redesigned for better outcomes
(9:11) Depth Over Breadth: Reforming Education Through Experience
(13:30) Local Resilience: How Cities Can Lead The Transformation
Practical, block-by-block strategies for urban adaptation, from expanding tree canopies to improving household efficiency
(16:33) AI and Robotics in Agriculture
(19:12) Human-Centric AI: Flipping The Priority Of Automation
(20:18) Thinking In Pictures: A Language Beyond Words
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
Today, we hear from writers Yann Martel, Carl Safina and David George Haskell on the practice of listening to the living world. Tom Chi discusses the dangerous volatility of a one-degree shift. Clayton Aldern explores how climate change alters brain health and behavior, while Ami Vitale,Osprey Orielle Lake and Martín Von Hildebrand remind us of the kinship we share with nature. Fred Pearce discusses 40 years as a journalist reporting on climate from around the world, while Richard Black of the environmental think tank Ember and Paula Pinho, European Commission’s Chief Spokesperson, talk about policy, hope and the radical empathy required to protect the planet for future generations.
(0:00) Clayton Page Aldern – Finding awe and beauty in the world
(0:40) David George Haskell – On consequences of humans tuning out the sounds of the living world
(2:11) Yann Martel – How animals ask us to step out of our humanity
(3:12) Carl Safina – The interior lives of non-human animals
(5:08) Ami Vitale – Environmental collapse and human conflict
(6:37) Martín von Hildebrand – Indigenous views of nature
(8:00) Richard Black – Transition to clean energy vs. massive fossil fuel subsidies
(10:01) Tom Chi – Climate destabilization
(11:07) Paula Pinho – Europe’s vision for energy independence
(14:04) Osprey Orielle Lake – Māori concept of "I am the river and the river is me”
(16:08) Bill Hare – On limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees
(17:19) Fred Pearce – Finding hope in nature’s resilience
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
@creativeprocesspodcast
Two weeks away from filming her most ambitious film to date, Cherien Dabis and her crew were forced to evacuate Palestine as the devastating events of October 2023 began. Instead of abandoning the project, they adapted, filming across Cyprus, Jordan, and Greece, creating a cinematic love letter to the resilience, joy, and humanity of the Palestinian people.
My guest today is Cherien Dabis. She’s a filmmaker and actress who has spent much of her career trying to fill the silences in the American narrative. In 2022, she became the first Palestinian to receive an Emmy nomination. She has worked on everything from The L Word to Ozark, Only Murders in the Building to the hit Netflix series Mo, always with an eye toward breaking the one-dimensional mold that has historically defined Arab representation in the West. But her latest project is perhaps her most ambitious yet. It’s a film called All That’s Left of You. It follows one Palestinian family across three generations, beginning in 1948 and ending in 2022. It is a story of exile and memory, and it’s Jordan’s official submission for this year’s Academy Awards.
(0:00) The Inheritance of Trauma
Cherien Dabis discusses how collective trauma is passed down and the importance of showing Palestinian resilience and humanity
(1:50) Inherited Trauma: Identity And History The passage of trauma requires a multi-generational lens to truly understand how history and political events shape people
(2:37) The Bakri Acting Dynasty: Collaborative Lineage Collaborating with four generations of the Bakri Family brought immense authenticity to the screen
(4:02) Filming The Nakba: Art Imitating Crisis Evacuating Palestine weeks before shooting forced the crew to adapt amidst devastating, ongoing events
(7:09) The Moment Of Activation: Racism In Ohio Experiencing severe racism during the first Gulf War ignited a lifelong drive to challenge dangerous media stereotypes
(9:34) Psychological Violence: Impact Of Humiliation The film explores how non-physical harassment and humiliation leave devastating, long-term relational scars
(10:48) Broken Distribution: Industry Gatekeepers Navigating systemic fear and gatekeeping in Hollywood distribution remains a profound challenge for Palestinian cinema
(11:37) Previous Films, Television And Craft Directing television hones the craft and expands the creative capacity needed for ambitious feature films
(12:28) Truth Seekers: The Next Generation Hope lies with young people who refuse to accept the broken systems and hidden truths of previous generations
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
"To be in the process of making things, to be in the process of talking to people about what things mean. The creative process is actually, I think, the most meaningful part of life, but it's very hard to measure. When we get shoved towards a world that demands easy measurables, it's very hard to optimize away from the creative process and optimize towards things that are more static."
On this episode of The Creative Process, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen joins us to discuss his new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. He unpacks the profound concept of "value capture"—the moment we stop caring about the rich, subtle experiences of life and start obsessing over simplified, external metrics like grades, likes, and screen time.
Beyond the trap of quantification, C. Thi Nguyen explores the liberating power of games and art. We discuss how true play requires us to step lightly between different rule sets, the difference between art and craft, and how reclaiming our creative process might just be the ultimate meaning of life.
(0:00) THE TRAP OF VALUE CAPTURE How external metrics and scoring systems hijack our personal values and creativity
(7:09) THE LOGIC OF QUANTIFICATION Why simple numbers travel well but strip away vital human context, from screen time to grades
(11:58) THE MAGIC CIRCLE OF PLAY Understanding the difference between a gamified life and the true, disattached beauty of struggle
(14:57) ART, CRAFT, AND METRICS Why taking the hard way leads to genuine creative expression, and how to spot value-laden systems
(19:34) THE POLITICS OF MEASUREMENT Questioning the assumption that complex human traits, like IQ or consciousness, can be quantified on a single scale
(21:31) THE SPIRIT OF PLAY Using constraints to boost collaborative storytelling and learning to step lightly between different rule worlds
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
"The thing that puzzled him was why people don't agree to be fully expressed while they're alive. Why does it only happen in their last moment? Why wouldn't you live being fully expressed?"
My guest today is AL Kennedy. She is one of Britain’s most acclaimed and versatile literary voices, a writer who can inhabit the internal life of a soldier in a POW camp, as she did in her Costa Book Award-winning novel Day, as easily as she can navigate the "professional lying" of a modern civil servant.
Her latest novel, Alive in the Merciful Country, takes place during the 2020 lockdown. It tells the story of a primary school teacher who receives a confession from an undercover police officer who infiltrated her life decades earlier. It’s a provocative investigation into state power, the "Spy Cops" scandal and the search for mercy in an age of surveillance. It’s a book about the breakdown of trust. We talk about her life, her activism, and why she believes fiction is the only way to tell the truth when the facts are forbidden and how she balances the truth of her novels with the relief of stand-up comedy.
(0:00) Finding Your Voice
On the Alfred Wolfsohn voice method and the power of being fully expressed
(2:30) Reading from Alive in the Merciful Country
Kennedy shares a passage from her latest novel, exploring hope and resilience in dark times.
(4:43) The Myth of Shrinking Attention Spans
Challenging the narrative that modern audiences cannot focus, and the importance of engaging storytelling.
(6:22) Education and the Foundation of Democracy
The dangers of dismantling education and how critical thinking protects us from fascism.
(10:26) The Spy Cop Scandal and State Surveillance
Unpacking the reality of undercover police infiltrating peaceful protests and intimate lives.
(13:59) Lockdown: A Global Pause and the Inrush of Empathy
The fleeting moment of unified humanity during the pandemic and how it was ultimately betrayed.
(17:34) Writing Without Theft: The Ethics of Character Creation
Kennedy explains her imaginative process and why she refuses to steal details from real people's lives.
(28:16) AI, Digital Slop, and the Loss of Trust
Reflections on artificial intelligence as an unstable plagiarism machine and its impact on truth.
(30:03) Nature, Spirituality, and the Merciful Country
Finding healing in the natural world and navigating the future with love and awareness.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
“Grief is a particular kind of unrequited love. It wasn't unrequited in the past. Usually, we think of unrequited love as you never got to do it, you never had it for yourself. But, in fact, there can be requited love, which is then unrequited love in the paroxysms of grief.”
Today, we are honored to welcome a writer whose work has long explored the intimate landscapes of the mind, memory and the heart. Siri Hustvedt’s writing moves between the personal and the philosophical, the literary and the deeply human. Her work bridges collections of essays, non-fiction, poetry, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Recipient of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and the Gabarron Prize for Thought, her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Her new memoir, Ghost Stories, is a reflection on forty-three years shared with her late husband, the writer and filmmaker Paul Auster. In its pages, we encounter not only love and loss, but the quiet persistence of presence, memory, and language itself.
(0:00) “We were hugely important to the drama of becoming in our own lives”
(2:04) Grief as Unrequited Love
Siri explores the emotional reality of living without Paul Auster, noting that grief occurs because love does not stop when a person dies.
(3:19) The Shared Space of a 43-year Marriage
(4:36) Reading from Ghost Stories
Siri reads the opening passage of her memoir, detailing how the loss of her husband deranged her sense of time and bodily rhythms.
(7:02) How Loss Changes Our Sense of Time
(11:24) How Powerful Emotions and a Person's Life Can Play a Role in Illness
(13:04) Believing in a Reality that Transcends the Individual
(20:06) Physical Love in Marriage
On the importance of physical intimacy in long-term marriages, a reality often left out of grief memoirs.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
"Within society, we seem to have separated the arts out, so they're not so much a part of our daily lives. Often there's something that we feel we should do as a kind of leisure activity or hobby if we have enough time or if we have enough money to engage in them. And this is so fundamentally different to how humans engaged with the arts. When we look back thousands of years, it just was part of the everyday, and I feel like that's a major loss within contemporary societies."
Daisy Fancourt is a Professor of Psychobiology & Epidemiology at UCL and the author ofArt Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health. A pioneer in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, she directs the WHO Collaborating Center on Arts and Health, where her research influences global health policy and the integration of the arts into medical care.
(0:00) The Healing Power of the Arts: Longevity, Immunity & Wellbeing
(1:17) Singing to Daphne: How Daisy used singing to comfort her premature daughter in the ICU
(2:47) The Story of Russell: How a stroke survivor used art classes to reclaim his life, health, and identity
(5:23) A Planet of 8 Billion Artists: Tracing the evolutionary origins of creativity back 40,000 years
(8:58) Psychoneuroimmunology. Defining the biological mechanisms: how art reduces inflammation and cortisol
(12:42) Art & Longevity. How arts engagement can slow biological aging and alter gene expression
(18:24) Safeguarding Creativity. Why we should use AI for routine tasks but protect the human joy of the creative process
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
Can curiosity and empathy be taught? How can we expand our sense of solidarity through stories? In this episode, we explore the internal dialogues of artists, actors and writers to ask what it means to step into someone else's shoes.
(0:00) Novelist Jim Shepard discusses Literature as a Tool for Emotional Education and Exploring History
(2:05) Tony Award-winning Actor Neil Patrick Harris on Being Moved by Theater and its Ability to Bridge Worlds
(3:55) Novelist Katie Kitamura on How a Book is Made in Collaboration with the Reader
(5:00) Screenwriter, Playwright Laura Eason on Inhabiting the Hearts of Characters Different from Ourselves
(6:03) Academy Award-winning Director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy on the Art of Visual Storytelling
(6:37) Cinematographer, Director Benoit Delhomme on the Freedom of Handheld Cinematography
(7:19) Author Etgar Keret on Looking for Humanity through Shared Intention
(8:18) Viet Thanh Nguyen – Opposing Power through Expansive Solidarity
(9:27) Adam Moss – Author, Fmr. Editor New York magazine on “The Work of Art”
(10:29) John Patrick Shanley – Tony & Academy Award-winning Writer, Director on Finding Value in Ordinary Experiences and the Creative Power of Daydreaming
(11:56) Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist Nicholas Kristof on Why Individual Stories are Necessary to Generate Connection
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
Can curiosity and empathy be taught? How can we expand our sense of solidarity through stories? In this episode, we explore the internal dialogues of artists, actors and writers to ask what it means to step into someone else's shoes.
(0:00) Novelist Jim Shepard discusses Literature as a Tool for Emotional Education and Exploring History
(2:05) Tony Award-winning Actor Neil Patrick Harris on Being Moved by Theater and its Ability to Bridge Worlds
(3:55) Novelist Katie Kitamura on How a Book is Made in Collaboration with the Reader
(5:00) Screenwriter, Playwright Laura Eason on Inhabiting the Hearts of Characters Different from Ourselves
(6:03) Academy Award-winning Director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy on the Art of Visual Storytelling
(6:37) Cinematographer, Director Benoit Delhomme on the Freedom of Handheld Cinematography
(7:19) Author Etgar Keret on Looking for Humanity through Shared Intention
(8:18) Viet Thanh Nguyen – Opposing Power through Expansive Solidarity
(9:27) Adam Moss – Author, Fmr. Editor New York magazine on “The Work of Art”
(10:29) John Patrick Shanley – Tony & Academy Award-winning Writer, Director on Finding Value in Ordinary Experiences and the Creative Power of Daydreaming
(11:56) Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist Nicholas Kristof on Why Individual Stories are Necessary to Generate Connection
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
“They're kind of like a hidden superhero in your body and we just didn't know they existed. Muse cells eat the damaged cells, and they can actually turn into new cells using the cellular machinery.”
Dr. Adeel Khan is a global thought leader in regenerative medicine. He is the CEO and Founder of and founder of Eterna Health, whose work with MUSE cell therapy—developed in collaboration with its discoverer, Professor Mari Dezawa—has made him the go-to expert for world leaders, athletes, and celebrities Chris Hemsworth, Kim Kardashian, and Tony Robbins. In this episode, we move beyond the hype of "anti-aging" to explore the hard science of Muse cells (Multilineage-differentiating Stress-Enduring cells). Dr. Khan breaks down how these unique cells differ from the "medicinal signaling cells" (MSCs) found in most clinics and how they act as a bridge to a future where tissue regeneration is standard care.
(0:00) The "Repair Guys" & The Muse Difference Dr. Khan explains why traditional stem cells (MSCs) often disappoint and how Muse cells offer the "best of both worlds": safety and pluripotency.
(2:19) Smart Cells: How They Find the Damage Understanding the "homing mechanism" that allows Muse cells to sense inflammation and instinctively travel to injured areas like the brain or heart.
(3:11) Curing the Incurable: Diabetes & Alzheimer's The potential of the "cure triad"—stem cells, gene therapy, and FMT—to treat complex autoimmune diseases within the next decade.
(4:40) Biological Noise & The Symphony of Health How "static" in our gene expression indicates aging, and how cellular therapy can reduce this noise to restore the body's harmony.
(6:40) The Viral Monkey Study Dr. Khan discusses a recent study showing significant de-aging in monkeys through high-frequency cell dosing.
(7:32) Unshakeable Foundations: Lifestyle as Medicine
Why advanced therapies must be paired with purpose, community, and mindfulness to create a "bulletproof" body.
(8:44) From Sketchy to Standardized
Navigating the regulatory landscape: why Muse cells are being classified as a drug in regions like the UAE and the path toward FDA approval.
(12:24) A Personal Mission
Dr. Khan shares the origin of his journey: trying to find solutions for his mother's chronic illness when traditional medicine failed.
(14:16) The Cancer Hunter
Unlike other pluripotent cells that risk tumor growth, Muse cells have a unique mechanism that can detect cancer cells and trigger their death.
(18:30)Future Outlook: AI, Nature & Blue Zones Reflections on the risks of AI, the importance of "Blue Zone" city design, and reconnecting with nature in a post-human world.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast
In this special edition, we hear from our guests from across the arts and sciences. From composers and poets to forest ecologists and climate envoys, they tell the story of our planet. Moving beyond the data of destruction, we explore the intelligence of nature, the ethics of what we eat, and the empathy required to save our future.
MAX RICHTER, Composer, Sleep, The Blue Notebooks
CARL SAFINA, Author, Becoming Wild
ADA LIMÓN, 24th US Poet Laureate
CYNTHIA DANIELS, Grammy Award-winning Sound Eng.
SUZANNE SIMARD, Finding the Mother Tree
JOELLE GERGIS, Lead Author, IPCC 6th Assessment Rpt
NOAH WILSON-RICH, CEO, Best Bees Company
INGRID NEWKIRK, PETA Founder
BERTRAND PICCARD, Solar Impulse Foundation
DAVID FARRIER, Author, Footprints
KATHLEEN ROGERS, Pres, Earth Day Network
ODED GALOR, Unified Growth Theory
PETER SINGER, Philosopher
GEOFF MULGAN, Another World Is Possible
CLAIRE POTTER, Welcome to the Circular Economy
CHRIS FUNK, Dir. Climate Hazards Car.
JENNIFER MORGAN, Special Envoy, International Climate Action
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
On Music, Trust and Connection with the Animal World
“Mostly I’ll play in a minor key, something sad, which I think can work for an animal because they can sense the sadness, and they try to reassure me and comfort me. I chose love songs because I'm convinced they are very intuitive and they can sense what I am trying to say to them, and profess my love in a way. I think there's always a way to connect, and if you're being cautious and don't threaten the animals, something beautiful can happen.”
Musician Plumestakes his guitar to the world's most unlikely concert halls—farms, sanctuaries, and wild habitats. A passionate advocate for veganism and animal welfare, we discuss what animals hear, how trust forms, and what music can reveal when it enters a world not made for humans alone.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
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On the urgent need to reclaim our political voices, the forces that silence dissent, and how art and poetry are crucial tools for survival
Our guest today is an activist scholar who believes the classroom is inseparable from the public square. David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and a founding faculty member of Stanford’s Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. But his work has long reached beyond the academy. Through his book, Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back, and his podcast of the same name, he insists that the great global crises of our time—from escalating wars and democratic failures to environmental collapse—are fundamentally crises of value and voice. His recent work has put him on the front lines of campus activism, challenging institutions, resigning his membership from the MLA, a move that highlights the ethical cost of speaking truth to power. We’ll talk about what he calls the "carceral logic" of the modern university, why art and poetry are crucial tools for survival in times of war, and what he tells his students about preparing for a future defined by uncertainty. His perspective is rooted in literature, but his urgency is all about the world we live in now. We will discuss the forces that silence dissent, the "imperial logic" of AI, and what it means to be a moral, active citizen when the systems we rely on are failing.
“There is a dispute about what the American Dream is or how it would play out in different circumstances. The American dream has essentially been narrowed into a white Christian nationalist notion of things so that everything that falls outside what they imagine that to be is not only undesirable, but should be the subject of extermination, deportation, and detention. I am heartened by the fact that more of our 'better angels' are emerging with a more capacious and expansive notion of what the American dream could be.”
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How do writers develop their voice, showing us what is important in life?
ADA LIMÓN(24th U.S. Poet Laureate, Startlement, The Carrying) explains that her poetry begins with a bodily sensation or curiosity, not an idea. She values the space and breath poetry offers for unknowing and mystery, finding solace in the making and the mess, not in answers. She discusses being free on the page to be her whole, authentic, complicated self.
JAY PARINI (Author, Filmmaker, Borges and Me) calls poetry the prince of literary arts—language refined to its apex of memorability. He recounts how his road trip with Borges around Scotland restored him from depression and anxiety following the Vietnam War death of his friend.
JERICHO BROWN (Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet, The Tradition, How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill) discusses the rhythm of black vernacular and capturing "symphonic complexity of black life". He shares how he’s found a way not to think about personal risk as he’s writing.
ADAM MOSS (Fmr. Editor, New York Magazine; Author, The Work of Art) relates David Simon’s concept of the bounce, in which creativity gains momentum as it is passed between people.
VIET THANH NGUYEN (Pulitzer Prize-winning Author, The Sympathizer; To Save and to Destroy) discusses his path to expansive solidarity and capacious grief and how it works against the state's power to divide and conquer. He emphasizes that literature is crucial because authoritarian regimes abuse language; a commitment to the beauty of language is a commitment to truth, and fear is often an indicator of a truth that needs to be spoken.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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How can we use negative spaces in fiction to engage with readers’ imaginations? How are memory and trauma passed onto us through language? How do we become more than the stories we tell ourselves?
KATIE KITAMURA (Author, Audition, Intimacies) emphasizes that a book is created in collaboration with the reader, using negative spaces in the narrative structure to allow for reader interpretation, paralleling the space between audience and actor in performance.
PAUL LYNCH (Booker Prize-winning Novelist, Prophet Song) discusses the richness and slipperiness of the English language in Ireland, shaped by the overlay of English onto Irish grammatical constructions, resulting in unique phrasing and a capacity to create new constructions.
DANIEL PEARLE (Screenwriter, Playwright, The Beast in Me) shares that audiences are fascinated by the unfettered, uncensored ID in characters, reflecting the universal fantasy of acting without consequences. He advises writers to put people who deeply irritate them into a play, as those characters often become the audience's favorites.
HALA ALYAN (Novelist, Poet, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: A Memoir) describes her work as an excavation of the darkest hours and intergenerational trauma carried by her lineage, which has endured repeated exile. She links exile from the body to the larger patterns of not having a place in the world.
T.C. BOYLE(Novelist, Short Story Writer, Environmentalist) shares that the creative process involves a magic in reaching for the unconscious and the surprise of the creative process. He emphasizes that art and nature are our salvations, over money. He advocates for solitude in nature—alone on a beach or in the woods—to connect with the natural world.
ADAM ALTER (Author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough) discusses the axioms of creativity, noting that being around more people, even those who are "deeply incompetent," is generally beneficial for creativity by providing diversity of opinion and information, preceding the necessary time for solitary focus.
SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA (Booker Prize-winning Author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida) explains his decision to write in the second person as a way of exploring the spiritual dimension of the internal voice. He posits that the "you" could be a spirit whispering thoughts, leading people (and nations) astray.
DANIEL HANDLER A.K.A LEMONY SNICKET (Author, A Series of Unfortunate Events) argues that his books for children and adults are not fundamentally different and says everyone's childhood is full of powerful emotions derived from ordinary injustices, noting that we cry hardest over hurt feelings, not global catastrophes.
ADA LIMÓN (24th U.S. Poet Laureate, Startlement, The Carrying) talks about her responsibility as a writer to honor her ancestors, specifically her grandfather, who had to sublimate his creative spirit for safety and belonging, leading her to prioritize grace and freedom in her own writing.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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“ I think we're betting on AI as something that can help to solve a lot of problems for us. It's the future, we think, whether it's producing text or art, or doing medical research or planning our lives for us, etc., the bet is that AI is going to be great, that it's going to get us everything we want and make everything better. But at the same time, we're gambling, at the extreme end, with the future of humanity , hoping for the best and hoping that this, what I'm calling the AI wager, is going to work out to our advantage, but we'll see.”
As we move towards 2026, we are in a massive “upgrade moment” that most of us can feel. New pressures, new identities, new expectations on our work, our relationships, and our inner lives. Throughout the year, I've been speaking with professional creatives, climate and tech experts, teachers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and futureists about how AI can be used intelligently and ethically as a partnership to ensure we do not raise a generation that relies on machines to think for them. It’s not that we are being replaced by machines. It’s that we’re being invited to become a new kind of human. Where AI isn’t the headline; human transformation is. And that includes the arts, culture, and the whole of society. Generative AI – the technologies that write our emails, draft our reports, and even create art – have become a fixture of daily life, and the philosophical and moral questions they raise are no longer abstract. They are immediate, personal, and potentially disruptive to the core of what we consider human work.
Our guest today, Sven Nyholm, is one of the leading voices helping us navigate this new reality. As the Principal Investigator of AI Ethics at the Munich Center for Machine Learning, and co-editor of the journal Science and Engineering Ethics. He has spent his career dissecting the intimate relationship between humanity and the machine. His body of work systematically breaks down concepts that worry us all: the responsibility gap in autonomous systems, the ethical dimensions of human-robot interaction, and the question of whether ceding intellectual tasks to a machine fundamentally atrophies our own skills. His previous books, like Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and Anthropomorphism, have laid the foundational groundwork for understanding these strange new companions in our lives.
His forthcoming book is The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction. The book is a rigorous exploration of everything from algorithmic bias and opacity to the long-term existential risks of powerful AI. We’ll talk about what it means when an algorithm can produce perfect language without genuine meaning, why we feel entitled to take credit for an AI’s creation, and what this technological leap might be costing us, personally, as thinking, moral beings.
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Today’s episode is about something most of us long for: feeling healthy in our bodies and calm in our minds – not by pushing harder, but by letting the body restore itself. Our guest today is LD Chen, an entrepreneur-turned-author who discovered the ancient wisdom that healing doesn’t come from trying harder, but from restoring the body’s natural intelligence. LD believes everyone has the right to live peacefully and free from constant stress and anxiety – to move through life with genuine joy, peace, and appreciation. After quickly building a 1,000-person company and then facing burnout and serious health issues, LD’s life changed when he encountered an ancient standing practice called Oneness. He is now the Head Coach of the Oneness Institute for America and Europe, and author of the Amazon bestseller Oneness: The Self-Healing Secret You Were Never Supposed to Know.
“Oneness is actually not about learning in the usual way. Most teachings tell you how to learn – how to let go, how to calm down, how to manage anger. Oneness does the opposite: we stand, we train the body to correct the heart, and then we live from that heart.”
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TEDx; How AI is changing us- And what means to be human
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“People today are so used to Basquiat's prices being extraordinarily high and rising that it's almost hard for people to understand that wasn't always the case. In the year he died, 1988, a terrific painting by Basquiat might have sold for $30,000. Relative to his other artistic peers, like a great Julian Schnabel painting that cost $800,000. After Basquiat died, some speculative capital entered his market, and his prices did pop, but in the early 1990s, his prices fell apart, and for much of the first half of the 1990s, his work was selling for 80% off what it had been selling before. Auction houses didn't want to include him in their auctions. There was a really good chance he was going to be remembered, but certainly not become a great star. Three key figures believed in him and proceeded to buy almost every available Basquiat in the first half of the 1990s. They were also just passionate believers in his work. But for those three people, it would have taken much longer for Basquiat to achieve acclaim, if ever.”
Today, we’re joined by someone uniquely positioned to unpack the art world’s inner workings and to help us understand one of its most mythic figures — Jean-Michel Basquiat. Doug Woodham is the author of the new biography, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon, the first major life study of Basquiat in over twenty-five years. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews — from family and friends to collectors and curators — Doug traces the rise, fall, and resurrection of an artist who redefined what it means to be a cultural icon. Before turning to writing, Doug served as President of the Americas for Christie’s, one of the world’s leading auction houses. That role gave him an insider’s perspective on how value is created — and mythologized — in the modern art market. In this conversation, we’ll explore not just the man behind the legend, but the powerful machinery that turned Jean-Michel Basquiat into one of the most recognized and commercially successful artists in the world.
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Images courtesy of Doug Woodham and Thames & Hudson. For image credits, see Episode Website.
“How do you render something interior filmically? How do you communicate the details of the lost child, of the amount of time of the stuck creative process, and even the exterior, or the externalization of the house as a kind of hellish thing that's barely staying together—literally flooding with waste—and that you can't afford? So those are the details that we had to carefully figure out how to weave. But, you know, when you look at the first 10 minutes, it could be a horror movie. From that moment, a lot can happen. But what's important about it is that it sets the table for what does happen.” -Howard Gordon
Today, we explore the dark psychology of obsession, guilt, and the thin line between predator and victim. Our guests are two of television's most accomplished architects of high-stakes drama and moral ambiguity: Howard Gordon, the showrunner and executive producer whose work defined a generation of thrillers with 24 and the multi-award-winning Homeland; and Daniel Pearle, an executive producer and writer who brings a distinct, penetrating depth from his background as a celebrated playwright and his work on series like Accused and American Crime Story.
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“I can change my mind. I can reduce anger, hatred. Nothing to do with religion. All religions carry the message of love, loving kindness, and tolerance. With different views, there is a possibility to synthesize new ideas. If majority of the world leaders become female, world become safer. I feel that. Compassion is the key factor. Non-violence, compassion and self-confidence, these are key factors for happy individual, happy community, peaceful world. This century should be century of compassion, century of peace. No more bloodshed. We should develop a big “we,” rather than “we” or “they.” With these wings, you can fly.” -DALAI LAMA
For decades, the Dalai Lama has been a global symbol of peace, compassion, and resilience, a spiritual leader living in exile from his home in Tibet. But how do you capture the essence of his wisdom—the kind that can truly change a life—in a way that feels intimate and personal? My guest today, documentary filmmaker Barbara Miller, has managed to do just that in her new film, Wisdom of Happiness. It’s a beautiful film that feels less like a documentary and more like a private, heart-to-heart conversation, where he invites us into his thoughts and shares practical steps for finding inner peace in a chaotic world. She's dealt with anti-globalization, domestic violence, and the fight for female pleasure in her previous works. We’ll talk about how she shifted from exposing systemic pain to focusing on radical hope and her collaboration with Executive Producer Richard Gere and Manuel Bauer, the Dalai Lama’s personal photographer for the last thirty-five years, who made his cinematography debut with this film. She shares what the Dalai Lama taught her about living in harmony with our body, nature, and the world.
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“So when we decided to do a documentary to follow Ai Weiwei, we knew, of course, it wouldn't be just a simple opera, and we knew he would bring his own very special and original vision. Because, of course, he is not an opera director. From his point of view, it's a challenge, but from another perspective, it’s probably an enrichment for the opera audience because he doesn't follow the rules of opera. And, of course, once you decide to do a documentary about Ai Weiwei, it's in his DNA to be political. Once I started to follow him, the political issues and topics came into the documentary by themselves.”
The renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei has used sculpture, photography, documentaries, and large-scale installations to challenge authoritarian power for decades. But his project at the Rome Opera House, directing Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, may be his most powerful fusion of art and politics yet. Puccini’s original is a fairy tale set in ancient China about a princess whose riddle game costs failed suitors their lives. But Ai Weiwei transformed this story into a stark reflection of the present, weaving in footage of refugee crises, COVID hospitals, and the Ukraine war—a production that became an urgent act of resistance for its Ukrainian conductor and cast. The opera and documentary are a living document of our turbulent times, embodying Ai Weiwei’s belief that 'Everything is Art. Everything is Politics.'
The new documentary, Ai Weiwei's Turandot, goes behind the curtain to capture the artistic struggle and emotional weight of making this work—a process that began with one vision and was fundamentally changed by a global pandemic and a major war.
My guest is the documentary’s director, Maxim Derevianko. He grew up in a family with deep ties to the Rome Opera House, and he offers a deeply personal, intimate look at how in Ai Weiwei’s words, “art competes with reality, but art will have the last word.”
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How do our environments shape who we are and how we care for the world and each other? There are many solutions to climate change, inequality, and poverty around the world. How can we learn from them and transform our society?
Eiren Caffall (All the Water in the World) discusses the importance of embracing complexity and emotional flexibility in facing ecological grief.
Irvin Weathersby Jr. (In Open Contempt) discusses the transformative power of meditation and nature, drawing inspiration from Emerson and Thoreau.
Jay Parini (Biographies of Steinbeck, Frost, Faulkner…) on the significance of place in literature and life.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata (Another World Is Possible) explores the generosity and hope in people’s efforts to build better societies.
Audrea Lim (Free The Land) on how personal experiences with public lands influence our views on conservation.
Katie Kitamura (Audition, Intimacies) reflects on the role of landscape and memory in her novels.
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe (Philosopher, Founder of Emergence Network) discusses his awe for mountains, using them as a metaphor for humility and the search for meaning beyond oneself.
For more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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“At Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, I work with a very international team—people from all over the world, around 50 nationalities in this museum. I’ve never worked in such an environment, and it’s inspiring. When you talk to someone from a different country, you can’t help but be inspired. The most important thing for me is to feel fulfilled, and I find fulfillment in learning something new and being inspired every day. Of course, it doesn’t have to be the same for everyone. People can find fulfillment in charity or teaching kids. Everyone chooses what makes them feel fulfilled, as long as it’s meaningful.”
Art museums have long been pillars of culture, but they are now at a critical juncture, navigating a new era defined by artificial intelligence, immersive technology, and the shifting habits of a global audience. The challenge is immense: how do you honor artistic tradition while building a museum for the future? On Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi is answering this question in a dramatic way, with the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Designed by the visionary architect Frank Gehry, this $1 billion project is more than just a new museum; it’s a statement—a new cultural superpower announcing itself on the world stage. It will be the largest contemporary art museum in the world, several times the size of the Guggenheim in New York, and a key part of their constellation of museums that is expected to contribute an estimated $200 million annually to the local economy. In the lead-up to its 2027 opening, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is embracing a new vision: moving from an "exhibition economy" to an "experience economy," where art becomes a conversation, a laboratory for ideas at the intersection of creativity and technology. Amr Hussein is the Digital Media Manager for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and with a background in major sports broadcasting—from the FIFA World Cup to the Olympic Games—he’s bringing a unique perspective to digital storytelling in the arts. We talk to him about his journey and how he’s helping shape the digital narrative for this landmark museum.
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“This awe that I feel every time I meet an artist who has the courage to deal with what it means to be in the world as a human being and to tackle it from different ways and through different media. I always feel that through the collaborations I have with artists, I learn a little bit more about the world, myself, my feelings or emotions, and how I reflect on things. Getting another person's perspective and taking that in is extremely generous. What we can take with us from the artistic practices we encounter is significant. Again, I think one of the fundamental aspects of art is that it doesn't require agreement, consensus, or rules. It's a place where we can speculate, imagine, and, hopefully, re-courage ourselves in a way, if that's a word. I've always been motivated by working with artists; that personal meeting is always extremely fruitful.”
In the ever-evolving world of contemporary art, some voices rise to shape the conversation in truly profound ways. Marie Nipper has spent her career at the nexus of institutional leadership, curatorial innovation, and artistic collaboration. As the director of the ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark, she is not just leading a museum; she's rethinking its very purpose—from an artistic lab to a public town square. Her journey has taken her from the hallowed halls of the TATE and ARoS to the forward-thinking spaces of Copenhagen Contemporary, all while championing the freedom of artists and the civic role of the museum.
“I think that is one of the places where we are really challenged, especially when we speak to kids and young people, as they often feel they have little agency in creating a better future for themselves. So, I believe we can really give that space to our audiences by showcasing some of these groundbreaking practices that are out there right now in contemporary art.”
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“I feel that when you don't tell your story, it's as if you have a limited existence. We can always have some kind of choice, but I'm saying that the story we choose may be the most crucial choice that we make, because this story will affect all the other choices.”
Etgar Keret is one of the most inventive and celebrated short story writers of his generation, a voice that captures the absurdities and profound loneliness of modern life with a deceptive, almost casual wit. His work, translated into dozens of languages, uses fantastical premises—from alien visitations to parallel universes—to illuminate the most human of truths. His new collection, Autocorrect, explores a world grappling with technology, loss, and the aftershocks of a global pandemic and, more recently, war. His awards include the Cannes Film Festival’s Caméra d’Or (2007), the Charles Bronfman Prize (2016), and the prestigious Sapir Prize (2018). Over a hundred short films and several feature films have been based on his stories. Keret teaches creative writing at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He now has a weekly newsletter on Substack called Alphabet Soup. He's also the new MFA Director of the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he's pioneering a new approach to storytelling. Joining me today from Tel Aviv is the great Israeli writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret.
“When I write my stories, I don't want to solve things in life. I just want to persuade myself that there is a way out. Maybe I am in a cell, maybe I'm trapped. Maybe I won't make it, but if I can imagine a plan for escape, then I'll be less trapped because at least in my mind, there is a way. I think that my parents are survivors. They always talked about this idea of humanity. My parents always said to me, when you look at people, don't look at their political views; that's not important. Look at the way that they look at you. If they see you, if they listen to you, if they can understand your intention, even if it's a failing one, they're your people. And if they can't, it doesn't matter.
I think that when I came with my mother and father, they thought there are people, there are human beings, and there are people who want to be human beings but are still struggling. And you go with humanity; you go with the person who can go against his ideology if his heart tells him something.”
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In this time of rapid technological change, how do we hold onto our humanity? How do stories, traditions, and community help us find meaning in loss and face an uncertain future? How can science, art, and spirituality open new pathways to understanding ourselves and the human experience?
PAUL SHRIVASTAVA (Co-President of The Club of Rome) discusses the need for a holistic, eco-civilizational future, emphasizing that science, technology, and economics are important but not the whole picture. He urges us to design our own lives and livelihoods to meet diverse ecological futures, and later highlights the importance of embodied, emotional, and spiritual learning as essential to evolving human consciousness in a technologically dominated world.
BAYO AKOMOLAFE (Philosopher, Psychologist, Writer & Founder of the Emergence Network) shares a deeply personal story about the loss of his father, describing how it forced him to mature quickly and become the breadwinner for his family. He reflects on the lessons learned from his children, especially his autistic son, who teaches him about grace, possibility, and futurity.
MICHEL FORST (Human Rights Advocate & the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders) explores how theology and meditation serve as ongoing sources of inspiration, shaping his values and career choices in human rights advocacy.
DR. GUY LESCHZINER(Neurologist & Author of The Nocturnal Brain, The Man Who Tasted Words & other books; Consultant Neurologist & Professor at King's College London) analyzes the concept of free will, suggesting that much of what we do is influenced by factors beyond our control. He also discusses the importance of striving to make the world better, the role of sleep and dreams in memory and emotional processing, and the changing nature of mentorship and education.
EIREN CAFFALL (Musician & Author of All the Water in the World) highlights the importance of preserving knowledge and human history, imagining how future generations might rebuild society after catastrophe by holding onto stories, traditions, and the hope of repair.
DR. FERNANDO GARCÍA-MORENO (Neuroscientist, Ikerbasque Research Associate at the Achucarro Basque Centre for Neuroscience) explains that while our brains have not changed biologically for thousands of years, cultural evolution has accelerated. He emphasizes the unique human roles of generating and transmitting knowledge across generations.
NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA (Journalist, Author of Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America From Around the Globe) shares her inspiration from the generosity and hope she encounters in others, and describes how connecting with nature—especially bodies of water—reinforces the importance of conservation policies that integrate human communities into ecosystems.
IRVIN WEATHERSBY JR. (Author of In Open Contempt) reflects on the influence of his church upbringing and family, especially his grandmother, on his writing and creative expression. He discusses the impact of music, particularly hip hop, and the importance of lyricism and cultural heritage in shaping his literary voice.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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"For the last two decades, I've made over 20 films about the environment, starting with oil and carbon emissions. Those films, Kiss the Ground and now Common Ground, talk about how we can stabilize the climate, reverse climate change, grow nutrient-dense food, and help farmers make a profit through biodiversity and regenerative practices and principles.
There's incredible intelligence in nature; it knows how to be resilient. We thought we could do it better, and in trying to mechanize and industrialize the entire system, we created a linear system that doesn’t make sense. We’re growing animals to produce food that we can’t eat so that we can ship it halfway around the world. It’s a system that doesn’t work.
The way to heal, regenerate, stabilize the climate, and reverse climate change is literally one inch and one acre at a time—through communities waking up to the power of soil and biodiversity to sequester carbon for all of us. The oceans can’t handle any more carbon absorption; they’re acidifying and heating up. We need to take the carbon we’ve emitted and put it back into the soil. When we do that, we create thriving ecosystems, biodiversity, and water infiltration, which massively reduces the risks from flooding.
It helps reverse desertification and staves off droughts by retaining water like a sponge. Resiliency comes from having genetic diversity rather than just one of everything."
Today, we explore the work of a filmmaker whose lens is consistently turned toward the most critical issues facing our planet. Rebecca Tickell, in collaboration with her husband Josh Tickell, has created a powerful cinematic catalog of films that are not merely observations, but catalysts for change. They've taken on the complexities of our energy systems, the deep-seated problems within our food supply, and now, with her latest work, Bee: Wild, they explore the essential, fragile, and often unseen world of pollinators.
Their film Kiss the Ground sparked a global conversation about regenerative agriculture, leading to tangible shifts in policy and public understanding. Common Ground continued this exploration, unraveling the intricate web of our food systems. Now, with Bee: Wild, narrated by Ellie Goulding and executive produced by Angelina Jolie,Rebecca brings her characteristic blend of journalistic rigor, personal narrative, and solutions-driven storytelling to the urgent plight of bees, asking us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world.
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“If we look at the entire history of the human experience, if you saw some text or you heard some spoken language, you could 100 percent reliably infer that there was a human who created that. Our experience of having that text or that image generated for us is very akin to the experience of a magic trick, and we sort of pre-subconsciously want to attribute some kind of intelligence to what's going on on the other side.
At the core of the work is that sense of curiosity, that sense of joy, that sense of beauty, and that sense of learning. I've been fortunate to have all kinds of strange and interesting experiences, whether that's seeing weird things in the sky over secret military bases in the middle of the Nevada desert, going scuba diving and finding internet cables on the bottom of the ocean, or tracking spy satellites in the sky and being able to predict when they'll appear in a flash against the backdrop of stars. The world around us is extraordinary and embodied, right? It is not on screens, and I’m very privileged to have that be so much a part of my process.”
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work makes the invisible visible, whether he's photographing secret government sites from miles away or revealing the hidden infrastructures of mass surveillance. He's a geographer by training, and he combines investigative journalism with his art practice to explore the hidden power structures of our time, including military technology and artificial intelligence. His work has been exhibited in major museums around the world, and he's also an award-winning author. His exhibitions, like 'The Black Sites' and 'Limit Tele-photography,’ have earned him critical acclaim, including a MacArthur Fellowship. He's recently opened a new exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York called Cardinals (Jun 26–Aug 15) which delves into the intriguing connections between UFO sightings, AI, and the spread of disinformation.
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“I had to become the father of my family very young because my parents divorced when I was 12. My situation was a little bit unusual in that my father kind of disappeared, and I had been making a fair amount of money as a kid, doing commercials and television and film. We needed money, and I kind of became the breadwinner. But I had this amazing world that I had access to, which was the world of the entertainment industry. My mom was supportive of my taking over and saying, "This is, I think, what we need to do." She liked the idea of moving to New York, so we moved to New York when I was 17 with a play that I had gotten. Then she got cancer and became really sick, so I had to take care of her full time. That lasted for about eight years, and then she died when I was 25. That was a rough go. At the same time, I had an amazing other world, and my other world was the world of make-believe and pretend, which I got to participate in on the soaps, with happy families and Christmases, Easters, miracles, love, weddings, and children. The pretend world that I spent a large amount of time in became a great way to balance what was sort of tragic in my real life.”
Our guest today is Cady McClain. You probably know her from her long and celebrated career in daytime television. She is a three-time Emmy® Award-winning actress. She plays Pamela Curtis on CBS’ Beyond the Gates, and is the Artistic Director of Axial Theatre, and her directorial work includes the documentary, Seeing is Believing: Women Direct, a fascinating look at the challenges and triumphs of women behind the camera. Her memoir, Murdering My Youth, is an honest and sometimes difficult book about growing up as a child actor in the spotlight. Her work across all these different art forms—acting, directing, writing, art, and music—all seems to be connected by a commitment to telling true stories, no matter how complicated.
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“We're living in a fascinating time, and unfortunately, to an extent, Europe and, very much so, North America are trying to hold onto the past while other parts of the world, like China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, are looking to the future. As an Italian citizen and an English citizen, I feel that we’ve left ourselves behind and that others are taking leaps forward. This isn't just about climate science; it’s about big geopolitics. It's about who wins the power battle over the dominant economy, economic thinking, and currencies. Do we have a reserve currency in the petrodollar? All these things are now being questioned in 2025. We're in an extraordinary period of history.”
For decades, the conversation around climate change often felt abstract, a distant threat. But what happens when that threat collides with the very concrete world of finance, with investments, and with the bottom line? Mark Campanale has been at the forefront of this critical intersection for over two decades. He's a veteran of sustainable finance, having helped launch some of the earliest responsible investment funds. But it's his work with the Carbon Tracker Initiative that has truly reshaped how we understand the economic risks of a fossil fuel-dependent future. Carbon Tracker, an independent financial think tank, introduced concepts like the "carbon bubble" and "stranded assets"—terms that have not only become central to the divestment movement but are now indispensable for investors and regulators trying to navigate the path to decarbonization. Mark Campanale and the Carbon Tracker Initiative have made it impossible to ignore the financial implications of a warming planet.
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“We as humans can destroy things in a couple of years that have taken thousands or even millions of years to form. So in the snap of a finger, we can destroy so much work. That's an observation I’ve seen in all biomes, and it's pretty scary. On the other hand, nature regenerates pretty fast. It heals itself. If humans help this healing process, it can go even faster.”
Louis De Jaeger has spent years traveling the world, witnessing firsthand the decline of nature. He is an eco-entrepreneur, a landscape designer, co-founder of the Food Forest Institute, and a leading voice in the regenerative agriculture and food forest movements. He’s founded numerous ventures aimed at creating positive impact and has created over 100 food forest sites around the world. His new book, SOS: Save Our Soils: How regenerative food and farming will save your health and the planet, asks us to consider every meal as a vote for either destruction or regeneration.
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“For us, I think it really is about trust and commitments, and I don't think that has necessarily changed over the years. As we work on that, obviously, we are very much invested in how we can engage an audience and spark the curiosity that people are looking for. The most important thing often is how we can spark that curiosity in ourselves. As a way of working, which I think is the most important framework for an institution, the institution should constantly want to learn and evolve, and it isn't a static place. Particularly coming from the opportunity of not being a collecting institution, we are ever-evolving and ever-changing.”
Nicola Lees is truly pushing the boundaries of what a museum can be. Since 2020, she has been director of the Aspen Art Museum, a non-collecting, artist-founded institution dedicated to experimentation and supporting the most innovative voices in contemporary art. Under her direction, the AAM has just unveiled an ambitious, decade-long initiative called AIR Aspen. From July 26–August 1, 2025, AIR isn't just another program; it's the first artist-led global summit, a bold undertaking that will bring together artists, cultural leaders, policymakers, and influencers for yearly talks, performances, workshops, and an annual retreat. It’s designed to explore the profound role of art in addressing the big questions of our time, from AI to how we relate to one another. The inaugural theme, "Life As No One Knows It," promises to be a deeply engaging exploration of what it means to be alive in an era of rapid technological and environmental change, and it will feature an extraordinary roster of creatives whose work transcends traditional disciplines, including Francis Kéré, Paul Chan, Aria Dean, Glenn Ligon, and Maya Lin.
Before her tenure in Aspen, Nicola Lees made her mark as the director and curator of New York University’s 80WSE and as a curator for Frieze Projects at Frieze London. Today, we’ll delve into her philosophy of art, leadership, and the transformative power of this new initiative.
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“As a writer, I do believe that art and literature in and of themselves are important. I'm going to keep on writing novels, and one of the most important reasons why is because, as you mentioned, language is crucial. Part of the way that states and authoritarian regimes exercise their power is not just through physical violence and intimidation, but through a maltreatment of language itself. Trump is a perfect example of this. Everything that comes out of his mouth in terms of language is horrifying for anybody with any sensitivity to language. The excesses of his language in terms of insults and hyperbolic praise for his fans are perfect examples of how language is used by an authoritarian and by the state to obfuscate reality and intimidate people. That language is ugly from my perspective, and there is something about being committed to literature and to art that awakens us to the importance of beauty.
I think about what John Keats, the poet, said: beauty is truth, truth beauty. You can't separate these kinds of things. If you're committed to the beauty of language, you're also committed to the idea that language has a relationship to truth. You can see that authoritarians don't have a relationship to truth. They have a relationship to the abuse of truth and to lying, not only in content but in the form of their language as well. There is a crucial role for writers here in our relationship to language because language is one of the most crucial ways that authoritarianism extends its power. What I've discovered as a writer is that fear is a good indicator that there is a truth. To speak the truth in a society is oftentimes an act that requires some courage.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen has spent much of his life exploring the stories we tell—and the stories we erase—about war, migration, and memory. His 2015 debut novel The Sympathizer, about a communist double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, won the Pulitzer Prize and a long list of other major literary awards. In 2024, The Sympathizer was adapted into a critically acclaimed HBO series directed by Park Chan-wook.He followed it with The Committed, and his latest work, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, a meditation on writing, power, and the politics of representation.
Nguyen is also the author of Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction, and the short story collection The Refugees. He’s edited collections like The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and most recently the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston, who was once his teacher.
He was born in Vietnam, came to the U.S. as a refugee, and is now a professor at the University of Southern California. He’s received Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, honorary doctorates, and has been named a Chevalier by the French Ministry of Culture. Today, we’ll talk about his books, America’s forever wars, and how the act of writing—across fiction, memoir, and scholarship—can become both a form of resistance and a way of making sense of being, as he puts it in his memoir “A Man of Two Faces.”
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“I guess the book was about giving hope because I realized how much we could do together. I believe that ordinary people are the ones bringing changes here. I believe that the communities gathering together – for example, I am seeing that in this country around the protection of rivers – are the ones that will mark the change. It's not going to come from above; it's going to come from below, up. We all have a role. Working for the protection of what we love the most will make you happy. So get into a positive mindset. Learn all you can. Be part of things that make you feel positive. You will see how you will find your way, and there is no place for feeling disempowered. This is the moment where you should feel very powerful because it is us who are going to make the future of this Earth.”
Monica Feria-Tinta is a British-Peruvian barrister specialising in Public International Law. She has been called one of ‘the most daring, innovative and creative lawyers’ in the United Kingdom, and was shortlisted for “Barrister of the Year” at The Lawyers’ Awards 2020 and at Chambers and Partners UK Bar Awards 2023 for her work in addressing climate change and environmental degradation. In 2020, she acted before the Constitutional Court of Ecuador in Los Cedros case, the first ‘Rights of Nature’ case in the world. In September 2022 her work as Counsel secured a win in the Torres Strait Islanders case, a landmark moment in which the UN Human Rights Committee found a Sovereign state responsible, for the first time in history, for lack of action in addressing climate change. She is the author of A Barrister for the Earth: Ten Cases of Hope for Our Future.
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“I guess the book was about giving hope because I realized how much we could do together. I believe that ordinary people are the ones bringing changes here. I believe that the communities gathering together – for example, I am seeing that in this country around the protection of rivers – are the ones that will mark the change. It's not going to come from above; it's going to come from below, up. We all have a role. Working for the protection of what we love the most will make you happy. So get into a positive mindset. Learn all you can. Be part of things that make you feel positive. You will see how you will find your way, and there is no place for feeling disempowered. This is the moment where you should feel very powerful because it is us who are going to make the future of this Earth.”
Monica Feria-Tinta is a British-Peruvian barrister specialising in Public International Law. She has been called one of ‘the most daring, innovative and creative lawyers’ in the United Kingdom, and was shortlisted for “Barrister of the Year” at The Lawyers’ Awards 2020 and at Chambers and Partners UK Bar Awards 2023 for her work in addressing climate change and environmental degradation. In 2020, she acted before the Constitutional Court of Ecuador in Los Cedros case, the first ‘Rights of Nature’ case in the world. In September 2022 her work as Counsel secured a win in the Torres Strait Islanders case, a landmark moment in which the UN Human Rights Committee found a Sovereign state responsible, for the first time in history, for lack of action in addressing climate change. She is the author of A Barrister for the Earth: Ten Cases of Hope for Our Future.
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“I'm hopeful for revolution. I'm optimistic. I want radical change. I think there's such a disinterest in education in America that it is sickening. I think we are repeating history. We are going through a cycle of fascism and greed, and I think we're going to see a lot of states collapse. As a result of that, I think people are going to be forced back to their primal needs and concerns, but I think they're going to be forced to think about what makes us human. How do we become more human? Because we've lost that. We've given it up to technology. How can we figure out what makes us a really powerful species again?”
Irvin Weathersby Jr. is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. He is the author of In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space. His writing has been featured in LitHub, Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and elsewhere. He has earned an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, and a BA from Morehouse College. He has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.
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“I would encourage you, as I do if you're an actor, to know your own equipment, know your own psychology, and use the great teachers that are synthesized in my favorite teacher's book, Moss, who I studied with later. There is a book called Intent to Live that distills down Uta Hagen, Stella Adler, Bobby Lewis, and Stanislavski. The great teachers at the Group Theatre believed that the method needed to be altered to be constructive rather than destructive to artists.
David Milch's mind is so singular because he uses language in a way that defines character. That's what all good writers do: use language to get to the heart of something. He would use malapropisms to make up words, and Milch loved playing with that. As someone who played the love interest of such a unique character as Andy Sipowicz, I found it fascinating.
Through Sylvia and David Milch's understanding, his wife humanized him. Sipowicz was portrayed as an addict, a very flawed human who had many addictions. David Milch is now suffering from Alzheimer's, so we won't get his words again. However, the words that he has to offer are timeless because he studied Robert Penn Warren and had many mentors throughout his vast literary education. That is key. I love speaking Noël Coward’s words. As a bon vivant, he wrote musically, to charm us and amuse us. So going and reading Noël Coward is important for actors to learn those cadences and the musicality of a certain era.
Of course, Shakespeare comes to mind. I also think of the female playwrights who delight me now, whether it's Caryl Churchill. She has that singular mind and plays with gender so well, challenging gender norms. Seeing ‘Cloud Nine’ when I was in college blew my mind open because men were playing women and women were playing men. Of course, Shakespeare was doing it too, but her work felt more intimate; it was in a small theater. That’s another thing I encourage actors and audiences to do: go see things in small theaters. See it up close because that will excite you and help you learn the craft.”
Sharon Lawrence is an acclaimed actress best known for her Emmy-nominated, SAG Award-winning role as ADA Sylvia Costas on NYPD Blue. She has delivered memorable performances in Desperate Housewives, Monk, Law & Order: SVU, Criminal Minds, Shameless, and Queen Sugar. On stage, she’s earned praise for roles in The Shot (a one-woman play about the owner/publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham), Orson’s Shadow, and A Song at Twilight. Shestarred in Broadway revivals of Cabaret, Chicago, and Fiddler on the Roof. Her recent work includes the neo-Western series Joe Pickett, opposite Michael Dorman, and the films Solace with Anthony Hopkins and The Bridge Partner. Lawrence is also a dedicated advocate, serving on the boards of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, WeForShe, and Heal the Bay, and is a former Chair of the Women In Film Foundation.
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“I think that it all goes back to childhood. I’ve always really been writing about family. I suppose we always are. I do think that it is the original wound, and it's where we are kind of wired and built from those early years. So I think every other relationship just replicates that. It's very natural for me to go there, I suppose because the feelings are most intense there. We just keep recycling these relationships and dynamics over and over again—until maybe someday we can catch ourselves and try to break the bad patterns. It feels the most visceral and real to me, always. You're always looking for that in writing. You want everything to be at this peak intensity, or at least I do. That seems the most natural place to start.
I've thought about that a lot while writing the book. We really are in the age of the grifter, as they keep saying. In some ways, it's the most deeply American type, the hustler of American aspiration. And money, I think that was hovering in my head when I wrote the book. How women persuade and convince one another of things feels particularly complex to me. I think there are so many layers to female relationships. That was really interesting to me to pursue because, in some ways, it's much more veiled and complex. So I tend to write about groups of women a lot, regardless of the field, but particularly the way they communicate or don't communicate, or communicate without words to one another, is an ongoing fascination of mine.”
Megan Abbott is the Edgar award-winning author of twelve crime novels, including Beware the Woman, You Will Know Me, Give Me Your Hand, and the New York Times bestseller The Turnout, the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Paris Review and the Wall Street Journal. Dare Me, the series she adapted from her own novel, now streaming on Netflix. Her latest novel, El Dorado Drive, is available June 24, 2025.
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“The more that you have that evolving relationship with the natural world, that's dynamic and alive to the moment you're in, and that's not afraid of the feelings of fear, hopelessness, grief, or pain that attend paying close attention to the world as it is evolving around you, the better we are able to be flexible in the relationship we need to form with fixing what we can and holding onto what we have. The more we rely on that black-and-white thinking of either being in grief or being out of it, where we have a loss and we have to move on, or we don't and we're fine. The more that happens, the more difficult it is to flow into what we really need in terms of emotional flexibility to get through the staggering changes that are starting to happen regarding climate issues.”
Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician. Her work on loss, oceans, and extinction has appeared in Orion,Guernica, The LA Review of Books, Al Jazeera, and the anthology Elementals. She has received a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and a 3Arts Make a Wave grant. Her work includes her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary, the short film Becoming Oceanthatshe made with Scott Foley, and her novel All the Water in the World.
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“I think that it's almost like in some ways the specificity of Palestine also becomes kind of a universality, where you can stay in this specific example because there is something about this experience that makes it specific, right? It's happening because it's been sanctioned to happen in this way. Right? Because you can't slaughter tens of thousands of people without consequence unless you have made those people less than people. Unless there has been a very effective project of dehumanization that's been carried out against the people that are being killed.
I think, in some ways, this memoir was a project of sifting through and excavating the darkest hours, both for me and for the lineage and ancestry that I came from. I think the darkest hours were experienced by so many people I come from who have had to leave places they didn't want to leave. I live in exile and have been forced to leave behind houses, land, cities, and people. Oftentimes, this has happened more than once in a lifetime, so they have carried that trauma. Of course, it plays out intergenerationally in many different ways.”
Hala Alyan is the author of the memoir I'll Tell You When I'm Home, the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.
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“I was originally drawn to bees because they're social creatures. And as humans, I always wanted to know about ourselves and how we can be our healthiest selves and our healthiest society. Bees and wasps, and all of these organisms have been around for so long. Bees especially have been around for 100 million years.”
Noah Wilson-Rich, Ph.D. is co-founder and CEO of The Best Bees Company, the largest beekeeping service in the US. He is a 20-time published author and 3-time TEDx speaker. He’s on a mission to improve pollinator health worldwide as a means to support our global food system and support the transformation of urban areas from gray to green. He is the author of The Bee: A Natural History.
Happy World Bee Day! Let’s give thanks for these tiny hardworking pollinators who play a huge role in our ecosystem. They are vital to our food supply and biodiversity. Bees can sense electric fields and navigate using the sun, and have to visit millions of flowers to produce just a pound of honey. Remarkably intelligent, they have excellent memories, they perform a waggle dance to guide each other to nectar, and can even recognize human faces. Yet they are increasingly threatened by climate change. Rising temperatures, shifting blooming seasons, and extreme weather events disrupt their life cycles and food sources, putting both wild and managed bee populations at risk. Without bees, many of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts we rely on would disappear. As we face a changing climate, it's more important than ever to protect them. By planting pollinator-friendly gardens, reducing pesticide use, and taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we can help bees thrive and ensure a healthier planet for all.
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Their blog offers many resources: https://bestbees.com/blog/
www.pollinator.org
Green roof company Columbia Green Technologies columbia-green.com
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How do our personal relationships affect political movements and activism? What can we learn from Native American tradition to restore ecological balance? How can transforming capitalism help address global inequality and the environmental crisis?
DEAN SPADE (Author of Love in a Fcked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together)* shares his reflections on the importance of understanding common relational patterns within activist movements. He emphasizes the need for solidarity and collective action in response to global crises like the conflict in Gaza and ecological disasters. Spade argues for resilience and mutual support within activist communities as essential for sustained efforts toward systemic change.
TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE (Founder · Host · Exec. Director of First Voices Radio · Founder of Akantu Intelligence · Master Musician of the Ancient Lakota Flute) discusses the often-overlooked Native history and the Western historical domination that has shaped contemporary educational perspectives. He highlights the need for reconnection to Native perspectives and calls for an acknowledgment of the spiritual and cultural richness lost through historical and ongoing colonial practices.
ALEXI HAWLEY (Showrunner · Writer · Creator of The Rookie · The Recruit) explores the complexities and challenges of depicting policing on television. Reflecting on the creation of his show "The Rookie" in the aftermath of Philando Castile's murder, Hawley discusses the show's evolution in addressing injustice in the justice system and the effort to portray an aspirational version of policing that acknowledges real-world issues.
JERICHO BROWN (Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet · Director of Creative Writing Program · Emory University · Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill) delves into the complexities of being a Black writer, emphasizing the importance of embracing one's identity rather than trying to transcend it. He discusses how blackness enriches his craft and argues that the power of writing comes from its capacity to create new ways of seeing and understanding the world.
PAUL SHRIVASTAVA (Co-President of THE CLUB OF ROME) analyzes the need for collaborative efforts across various sectors—businesses, governments, and individuals—to address global inequalities and environmental challenges. He underscores the imperative to reshape capitalist principles to reduce extreme inequalities and to foster a sustainable and equitable global system.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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“I want to draw the similarities with alien life, and we have these questions. They're the same questions that we would be asking if we could get a sample from Europa or if we could get a sample from Mars. I think the parallels are partly in how we study them. They're teaching us how to look for strange life, but then they're also teaching us about what’s possible with life, and they're so close to the edge of what is and isn't life that it really helps us to sort of — I don’t know. I don’t know where to draw that line personally, but they at least show us that that line is maybe closer to non-life than we would have thought, than I would have thought.”
Karen G. Lloyd is the Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in leading publications such as Nature and Science. She is the author of Intraterrestrials: *Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth.*
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“I think income inequality really greatly contributes to the rage that people might feel, even as some Americans won't. What don't recognize that a more communal society might benefit them. What they see instead is, why don't I have what that person has? Something's getting in my way. And it's not a lack of, of community, it's: somebody else is keeping me down, you know? And that's, I think that's a theme that emerges in The God of the Woods.
I think there's a certain thread in American history of, like, individualism at all costs. The Van Laars named their house Self-reliance, which is a testament to the idea that they, I think, falsely believe themselves to have, have created their own power, their own capital, their own wealth, and ignore the fact that it's really the labor of the working class community around them- that, and of the people of Albany who've invested their money in the Van Laars Bank - that that really contributed to the acquisition of this enormous wealth that they now have and this enormous power that they now have.”
Liz Moore is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Long Bright River, which was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, and has been made into a Peacock series starring Amanda Seyfried. Set against the opioid crisis and a string of mysterious murders, it’s a love story between two very different sisters and their path to recovery. Moore is winner of the 2014-2015 Rome Prize in Literature. Her other books include The God of the Woods, Heft, and The Unseen World.
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"The country spoke Irish largely before it spoke English. Grammatically, the structure of Irish is different from English. As Ireland adopted the English language, this sort of hybridization started to occur, where the English language was placed on top of Irish grammatical constructions. You get this slipperiness, this ability to move sentences, to place words in interesting places, and to use constructions that you just wouldn't find in England, for example. The thing about being an Irish writer is there isn't a reverence. There’s a sort of implicit freedom to use the language however we like. So long as you have mastery and command of the language, you can push it to the edges."
Paul Lynch is the author of five novels. His most recent novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Peace Prize for Fiction, and other prizes. Prophet Song presents a dystopian vision of Ireland and a mother’s determination to protect her family as her country slides towards totalitarianism. The Booker Prize Jury said, “It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.“ In 2024, Lynch was elected to Aosdána, the Irish academy for the arts, honoring distinguished artists. He was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper. His novels have been translated into 35 languages.
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Paul Lynch is the author of five novels. His most recent novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Peace Prize for Fiction, and other prizes. Prophet Song presents a dystopian vision of Ireland and a mother’s determination to protect her family as her country slides towards totalitarianism. The Booker Prize Jury said, “It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.“ In 2024, Lynch was elected to Aosdána, the Irish academy for the arts, honoring distinguished artists. He was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper. His novels have been translated into 35 languages.
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We are privileged to present the voices of individuals dedicated to effecting change and mitigating the harm inflicted upon our precious planet. These are individuals deeply committed to the core values that drive positive transformation. Thank you for tuning in to our episodes and for your ongoing dedication to stewarding our planet, not just on Earth Day but throughout the year. We can’t save the planet overnight, but by acting mindfully, we can create a better future. Let’s make Every Day, Earth Day!
Composer MAX RICHTER on Nature's Sonic Landscape
Founder of PETA INGRID NEWKIRK on the Shared Traits between Humans and Animals
JULIAN LENNON (Musician and Founder of White Feather Foundation) on Balancing Our Relationship with Mother Earth
BERTRAND PICCARD (Explorer, Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight) discusses his adventures and how climate change will change our quality of life
CARL SAFINA (Author and environmentalist) on the Miracle of Life on Earth
NAN HAUSER (Whale Researcher, President, Center for Cetacean Research & Conservation) on How a Whale Saved her Life
U.S. Poet Laureate ADA LIMÓN on Embracing Hope Amid Environmental Uncertainty
Environmental Writer DAVID FARRIER on Evaluating Our Environmental Legacy
Grammy & Emmy Award-winning Sound Engineer CYNTHIA DANIELS on The Role of Art and Compassion in Transforming Society
Economist ODED GALOR on Education's Role in Addressing Climate Change
President of EarthDay.ORG KATHLEEN ROGERS on Advocating for Global Environmental Education
Lead Author of IPCC 6th Assessment Report JOELLE GERGIS on Learning from Historical Climate Data
Fmr. Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit Director SIR GEOFF MULGAN on Imagining a Circular Future for Society
Free Solo Climber of 200+ of the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers ALAIN ROBERT on The Consequences of Overproduction on the Planet
Director of Climate Hazards Center, UC Santa Barbara CHRIS FUNK on Adapting to a Two-Degree World
Environmental Writer DAVID FARRIER Stretching Time and Empathy for Future Generations
Author of Finding the Mother Tree DR. SUZANNE SIMARD on Trees: Advanced Communicators of the Natural World
“Most Influential Living Philosopher” PETER SINGER on the Ethical Imperative to Respect Animal Life
Fmr. Exec. Director, Greenpeace Int'l, Special Envoy for Int'l Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry JENNIFER MORGAN on the Importance of Resilience in Advocacy
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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“I'm really interested in the relation between performance and ritual. Where do those two separate?”
Richard Sennett grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, attended the Juilliard School in New York, and then studied social relations at Harvard. Over the last five decades, he has written about social life in cities, changes in labour, and social theory. His books include The Performer: Art, Life, Politics, The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Culture of the New Capitalism, The Craftsman, and Building and Dwelling. Sennett has advised the United Nations on urban issues for the past thirty years and currently serves as member of the UN Committee on Urban Initiatives. He is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University.
“I want to show what is kind of the basic DNA that people use for good or for ill. What are the tools they use, if you like, of expression that they use in the creative process?”
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“One of the things that hopefully my books illustrate is that everybody's mind is different. And one of the amazing things about the human experience–and indeed that manifests in terms of art and creativity–is that when we have such different minds, that is why all this creativity, all this art is possible.”
Dr. Guy Leschziner is the author of The Nocturnal Brain, The Man Who Tasted Words, and other books. He is a consultant neurologist and a Professor of Neurology and Sleep Medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. He sees patients with a range of neurological and sleep disorders, and is actively involved in research and teaching. He has presented series on sleep and neurology for BBC World Service and Radio 4. His latest book is Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human.
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“When I was working at the Times and the Times Magazine, on one Tuesday morning, the towers fell. September 11, 2001. The magazine had a 10-day lead time, so it was a weekly that was essentially 10 days old by the time it came out. We came to work and realized the world had changed, and the entire process, the magazine had been made for over a hundred years, had to be thrown out the window. We had to create a new magazine in 36 hours that would in some way speak to this very different, scary, and interesting world we were now in. In those 36 hours, we usually would take months to produce a magazine. If you take all of its aspects, it’s a long journey. However, we made a magazine in 36 hours that, in some ways, was the best magazine I ever made because of the urgency of the moment.”
Adam Moss was the editor of New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and 7 Days. As editor of New York, he also oversaw the creation of five digital magazines: Vulture, The Cut, Daily Intelligencer, Grub Street, and The Strategist. During his tenure, New York won forty-one National Magazine Awards, including Magazine of the Year. He was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times with oversight of the Magazine, the Book Review, and the Culture, and Style sections, as well as managing editor of Esquire. He was elected to the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2019. He is the Author of The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing.
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“So, post-activism is not ‘post-activism’ in the sense of being after activism. It is not supposed to be a through line to results or resolutions or solutions.”
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a philosopher, psychologist, writer, public intellectual, and the founder of the Emergence Network. His work, which he names post-activism, marks an earth-wide effort to sensitize bodies towards new response-abilities and other places of power – a project framed within a material feminist/post-humanist/post-activist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home.
“Post-activism is instead a noticing that the ways we care for ourselves and our causes and our worlds could actually be incarcerated. Another way to put that is to notice that care can often become carceral. I often suggest that we like to embrace things, but sometimes in the squeeze of embrace, it could quickly become asphyxiation, where we choke the air out of each other in trying to care for each other.”
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“This novel is the third in what I see as a little set of books that all feature unnamed female protagonists who have experienced varying degrees of passivity and agency in their lives. They're all women who speak the words of other people.”
Katie Kitamura is the author five novels, most recently Audition and Intimacies, which was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, fellowships from the Cullman Center and the Lannan Foundation, and many other honors. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
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“What I meant when I said there is no AI is that I don't think we serve ourselves well when we put our own technology up as if it were a new God that we created. I think we confuse ourselves too easily. This goes back to Alan Turing, the main founder of computer science, who had this idea of the Turing test. In the test, you can't tell whether the computer has gotten more human-like or the human has gotten more computer-like. People are very prone to becoming more computer-like. When we're on social media, we let ourselves be guided by the algorithms, so we start to become dumb in the way the algorithms want us to. You see that all the time. It's really degraded our psychologies and our society.”
Jaron Lanier is a pioneering technologist, writer, and musician, best known for coining the term “Virtual Reality” and founding VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. He led early breakthroughs in virtual worlds, avatars, and VR applications in fields like surgery and media. Lanier writes on the philosophy and economics of technology in his bestselling book Who Owns the Future? and You Are Not a Gadget. His book Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality is an inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, and philosophy. Lanier has been named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people and serves as Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft’s Office of the CTO—aka “Octopus.” As a musician, he’s performed with Sara Bareilles, Philip Glass, T Bone Burnett, Laurie Anderson, Jon Batiste, and others.
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“When I first started writing this book, it really foregrounded the problems within our land ownership system, which treats land as a commodity. The way we talk about land and issues like racial and food justice reflects this. We tend to focus on the problems, attaching big concepts to them, such as racial justice or environmental justice. I realized that my job primarily consists of going around and talking to activists and community groups about their work. I’m interested not just in the very big problems we face as a society, economy, and political system, but also in how people are trying to think through solutions or approaches to those problems.
Audrea Lim is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist whose work focuses on land, energy, and the environment. Her writing has appeared in TheNew Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Republic, and The Nation. Lim is the editor of The World We Need and the author of Free The Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos. She is a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University and was a 2022 Macdowell fellow.
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The music on this episode is “Snowball” from the album Sunken Cities, performed by Audrea Lim and her band Odd Rumblings.
“The three ills of democracy that I propose to address with this method, which we've perfected over the last several decades. Democracy is supposed to make some connection with the "will of the people." But how can we estimate the will of the people when everyone is trying to manipulate it?”
James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His work focuses on Deliberative Polling, a process of deliberative public consultation that has been conducted more than 150 times around the world. He is the author of Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?, Democracy When the People Are Thinking (OUP) and other books.
“Deliberative democracy is itself, when properly done, a kind of democracy that can speak to the interests of a community. And we need that all over the world.”
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How has feminism changed in light of the way we live now?
DEAN SPADE (Author of Love in a Fcked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up & Raise Hell Together*) on recognizing political conditions in personal relationships.
MARILYN MINTER (Artist, Feminist) on sexual agency, beauty & her creative process.
TEY MEADOW (Author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century) on the necessity of creating an inclusive environment & argues that diverse storytelling is crucial for healthy development.
ELLEN RAPOPORT (Creator, Exec. Producer of Minx) on the evolution of feminism, the divides that emerged in the 70s over pornography & sex work.
LAURA EASON (Emmy-nominated Producer, Screenwriter · Three Women, House of Cards) on the significance of representing ordinary women’s experiences.
SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY (Oscar & Emmy-winning Director of Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge · Forthcoming Star Wars film) on the legacy of von Furstenberg.
SARA AHMED (Author, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook) reclaims the stereotypes, calling for solidarity among feminists.
INTAN PARAMADITHA (Author, The Wandering) reflects on the importance of intergenerational knowledge among women.
DIAN HANSON (Editor) on participating in the sex-positive movements of the 1960s to creating niche fetish magazines.
KATE MUETH (Neo-Political Cowgirls Founder) on the importance of finding meaning in creative work, community & storytelling in human experience.
Listen to full interviews
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“We've lost over 70 percent, 73 percent, I think the latest data indicates, of wildlife and mammals in the last 50 years. That’s just shocking when you get that data, but then you ask, what can I do? What can I do? I wanted to move away from any guilt or compulsion because it doesn't work to talk to people that way. After 50 years of climate being in the news, in science, and in our schools, less than a fraction of 1 percent of people in the world do anything about it on a daily basis. How could that be? This is a civilizational crisis. For less than 1 percent to be engaged and do something means that our communication is flawed. I’m not saying the people are wrong, or the science is wrong, or the facts are wrong, but the narrative as a whole is not one that truly entices people or draws them in with a shared understanding of what we face and what to do about it. “
Paul Hawken is a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist committed to sustainability and transforming the business-environment relationship. He starts ecological businesses, writes about nature and commerce, and consults with heads of state and CEOs on climactic economic and ecological regeneration. He has appeared on the Today Show, Talk of the Nation, Real Time with Bill Maher, CBS This Morning, and his work has been profiled or featured in hundreds of articles, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, Forbes, and Businessweek. He has written nine books, including six national and New York Times bestsellers. He's published in 30 languages, and his books are available in over 90 countries. He is the founder of Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration, which is creating the world's largest, most complete listing and network of solutions to the climate crisis. His latest book is Carbon: The Book of Life.
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Peter Weller is a renowned theater and Hollywood actor. His performances in films such as RoboCop and Naked Lunch garnered him much critical and commercial success over the years. His television acting and directing credits include Sons of Anarchy, Dexter, and 24. Unbeknownst to most, Weller has spent decades honing his appreciation for the visual and musical arts through his studies of the Renaissance era. Earning a Master's in Roman architecture from Syracuse University before moving on to a PhD in Renaissance Art from UCLA. Dr. Weller has just written a book, Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting.
“Art transcends time and culture—the beauty of it. People worry about the world now. I remind them to go live in 1968, a time of preparing to go to the moon while people died for their beliefs. This is a difficult time in a republic that’s supposed to be free, but music was leading the way. It’s actually harmonious, transcending culture and time. That might be the greatest gift of our transcendence.”
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How can we overcome our fears? How can we challenge ourselves, pushing our physical boundaries to achieve the impossible?
Alain Robert is a renowned rock climber and urban climber. Known as "the French Spider-Man” or "the Human Spider," Robert is famous for his free solo climbing, scaling skyscrapers using no climbing equipment except for a small bag of chalk and a pair of climbing shoes. Some of his most notable ascents include the Burj Khalifa, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sydney Opera House, and over 200 of the world's tallest skyscrapers. He is also a motivational speaker and the author of The Spider-man: Free and Unattached, and With Bare Hands: The True Story of Alain Robert, the Real-life Spiderman.
“You are fighting to stay alive. You are fully in the present moment. You don't have time to think about being afraid. You are focused on what you are doing. You struggle to pass another window. You don't have time to think about your problems. The only thing you are concerned about deep down in the back of your mind is that you need to stay alive, and for that, you need to remain calm and focused.”
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JULIE ANDREWS (Oscar, Tony & Pulitzer Prize-winning Actress & Singer · The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins) Andrews shares her experience working on Mary Poppins, revealing behind-the-scenes secrets about the character. She reminisces about her collaboration with Walt Disney and Tony Walton.
ETGAR KERET (Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director & Author) Keret discusses the profound impact of his parents' survival stories from the Holocaust on his work. He explores how extreme human experiences can lead to extraordinary resilience and creativity,
JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY (Oscar, Tony & Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer/Director · Doubt, Moonstruck, Joe Versus the Volcano) Shanley highlights the invaluable lessons and life experiences gained from his time in the Marine Corps. He emphasizes the significance of diverse interactions and communal living, underscoring how these experiences shape both his artistic vision and societal views.
JOY GORMAN WETTELS (Exec. Producer of 13 Reasons Why, UnPrisoned · Founder of Joy Coalition) Joy Gorman Wettels reflects on her theatrical upbringing and the influence of her mother’s passion for Sondheim and Neil Simon. She shares touching memories of the LGBTQ+ community in her life and how these early experiences cultivated her love for storytelling and community theater.
PAUL SCHRADER (Screenwriter/Director · Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, First Reformed) Schrader analyzes the lasting impact of Taxi Driver on his work. He details his technique of immersing the audience into the protagonist’s perspective and psychology.
CHAYSE IRVIN (Award-winning Cinematographer · Blonde starring Ana de Armas · Beyonce: Lemonade · Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman) Irvin discusses using mise-en-scène to represent characters’ psychological states.
MANUEL BILLETER (Cinematographer · The Gilded Age · Inventing Anna · Jessica Jones · Luke Cage) Billeter recounts his early inspirations from masters like Fellini and Antonioni and his invaluable learning experiences while working alongside Alfonso Cuarón.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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“What I have done in my career is just try to assess who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how come we, as animals, are able to walk around and wear pants and dresses and talk on the internet, while the other animals are not. It's been my obsession since I was young. I think if I hadn't become a novelist, I might have been happy to be a naturalist or a field biologist.
There is some kind of magic in the creative process. I am reaching for things in my unconscious that surprise me. I don't know what it's going to be. I'd like to do many, many things. It's all my life's work. I don't want to just write the same book over and over again as some other authors do. I don't want to become formulaic.”
T.C. Boyle is a novelist and short story writer based out of Santa Barbara, California. He has published 19 novels, such as The Road to Wellville and more than 150 short stories for publications like The New Yorker, as well as his many short story collections. His latest novel Blue Skies is a companion piece to A Friend of the Earth. His writing has earned numerous awards, including winning the PEN/Faulkner Award for Best Novel of the Year for World's End.
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“You have all the different languages interplaying with each other. Little scraps of Irish languages and idioms have stories that have been told, but how Ireland actually comes about as an idea, as to where the Irish come from. A lot of these kinds of debates are just placed, you know, in day-to-day conversation, and then they trail off. People start something; they trail off and might come back to it later. That phenomenon of speaking over each other, tales that are known and not known, I always found very interesting. It was literally like a radio that was kept on all day in the kitchen.
You would come in and out, and you would hear certain things, and you'd have to work out the context and the conversation and the speakers. In some way, one of the big personalities in the book is just a radio that’s playing, and some of these conversations are not actually taking place between characters in real-time. They're just snippets that have been overheard on radios.”
Patrick Healy was born in Dublin in 1955. He studied philosophy and Semitic languages at St. Columbans Dalgan Park, Pontifical University Maynooth, and University College Dublin. He has published over 20 books on topics around artists, aesthetic theory, philosophy of science, architecture, art criticism and innumerable essays. He has been a Professor of Interdisciplinary Research at Free International University Amsterdam, 1997-present, and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Architecture from 2020-2022. He is currently completing a new work of fiction entitled Fatal Fragments, a loose follow-up to his novel Beyond the Pale.
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“The fact that technologies are being used and combined to capture our attention is concerning. This is currently being done with no limitations and no regulations. That's the main problem. Attention is a very private resource. No one should be allowed to extract it from us by exploiting what we know about the human mind and how it functions, including its weaknesses. We wrote this paper as a call to regulate the attention market and prevent algorithmic emotional governance.”
Computer scientist Fabien Gandon and research engineer Franck Michel are experts in AI, the Web, and knowledge systems. Fabien is a senior researcher at Inria (Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique), specializing in the Semantic Web, while Franck focuses on integrating and sharing data through Linked Open Data technologies.
Together, they’ve written Pay Attention: A Call to Regulate the Attention Market and Prevent Algorithmic Emotional Governance. Their research unpacks how digital platforms are monetizing our attention at an unprecedented scale—fueling misinformation and division and even threatening democracy and affecting our emotions and well-being.
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“In reality, we're all complex people with feelings and our own sets of baggage. I do think we are very good at self-sabotage, all of us. It's a very easy road to go down. It's safe because it's comfortable, and we know it. When you can find the ways you self-sabotage and try to stop that, it will hopefully lead to a happier life and things that are meaningful. When I was in my late twenties, I got out of a serious relationship and kind of reentered the dating scene. I was shocked by the simplification of a lot of complicated feelings around dating and how women are so easily labeled crazy, and men are so easily labeled assholes.”
Sophie Brooks is a London-born, Brooklyn-based writer and director. Her sophomore feature Oh, Hi! premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Her debut film, The Boy Downstairs, was acquired by Film Rise and HBO at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was produced by David Brooks, Paul Brooks, and Dan Clifton and stars Zosia Mamet, Matthew Shear, and Diana Irvine.
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“There used to be a time when leading men were okay with falling down as a character. Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones is a prime example of that. Even going back to the fifties, they understood that failure and falling down, but getting back up, is an endearing quality. It's a universal human quality. We have gotten to a point in the last 10 or 15 years, or maybe longer, where leading men often want to win every fight. It’s in their contract: "I have to win every fight" or "I can't fail" or "I can't fall down." It's just such a mistake because the audience roots for you more if they see you fail and then get back up again. Noah is totally comfortable playing that character who's just trying to figure it out on the fly. Sometimes, he gets it wrong, but he's never going to give up. You can really feel that coming off the screen.”
Alexi Hawley is the creator of ABC’s The Rookie, starring Nathan Fillion, and Netflix's The Recruit, an espionage drama starring Noah Centineo that, in season two, explores the legal defense tactic 'graymail'. The Rookie, now in its seventh season, takes a look at aspects of policing often overlooked by TV procedurals. Hawley discusses the positive role police can play in communities and how he found his own autodidactic path to becoming a television showrunner. He was previously the executive producer and co-showrunner of Castle and The Following, and recently created the upcoming Hulu drama The Envoy which is inspired by journalist and producer Adam Ciralsky’s June 2024 Vanity Fair story about Roger Carstens and his team at the State Department who have brought home 70 American hostages during the past four years.
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“The position of the United States in the world, economically and politically, is the weakest it has been in my lifetime. I was born in the middle of the 20th century, so I have watched the rise of the American empire and the success of American capitalism in the second half of the 20th century. However, over the last 20 years, I have watched that turn into its opposite—a decline. The decline is visible everywhere. Unless you live in the United States and consume mainstream media, there is a level of denial that will be recorded historically as one of the great examples, not just of a declining empire, which typically has people who cannot face it and who refuse to see it. You can go to Great Britain today and find quite a few people who think we still have the British Empire, even though everyone who isn't crazy knows that is silly. But we are earlier in the decline phase than the British are; they have had to endure it for a century while we have just had to do it for a couple of decades. It is fresh.”
Richard D. Wolff is the co-founder of Democracy at Work and host of their nationally syndicated show Economic Update. He was formerly professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Yale University, the City College of the City University of New York, and the University of Paris Sorbonne. Currently, Wolfe is a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York City.
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How do our personal lives influence the art we make?
JIM SHEPARD (Author of The Book of Aron, Project X, & The World to Come starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, Katherine Waterston · Winner of the PEN New England Award, The Story Prize) explores historical human dilemmas, the emotional imagination and literature's role in extending empathetic understanding. He discusses the importance of self-education and curiosity.
LAURA EASON (Emmy-nominated Producer, Screenwriter, Playwright · Three Women · House of Cards · The Loudest Voice) on how we can live multiple lives through the arts. She highlights the significant role the arts have played in her upbringing and daily life, emphasizing the value of listening to others. As a showrunner, Laura discusses how her work in the theater, where she often adapted literary classics, prepared her for working in the writers’ room of House of Cards, adapting the creator’s vision.
BENOIT DELHOMME (Award-winning Cinematographer · Artist · Director · At Eternity’s Gate · The Theory of Everything ·The Scent of Green Papaya) talks about the intrinsic pleasure found in art and cinematography. He likens operating a handheld camera to playing an instrument and emphasizes the importance of personalizing one's craft to imbue it with soul and freedom.
JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY (Academy Award, Tony & Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer/Director · Doubt · Moonstruck · Danny and the Deep Blue Sea · Joe Versus the Volcano) recounts his personal journey from The Bronx to becoming a writer. He emphasizes the importance of embracing one's life experiences, even the seemingly ordinary ones, as gold for storytelling. Shanley reflects on his collaborations with actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep and their dedication to their craft.
MARK GOTTLIEB (Vice President & Literary Agent at Trident Media Group) explores storytelling as a timeless art form, comparing books to the oil paintings of new media. He comments on the transformative power of stories, which he believes can manifest in various forms—from books to movies and TV shows.
ANTHONY WHITE (Artist) reflects on the role of visual arts in democracy and civil disobedience. Historical events like the Eureka Stockade, with its spirit of rebellion, have inspired his art.
MICHAEL BEGLER (Showrunner · Writer & Executive Producer of Perry Mason and The Knick) discusses the importance of storytelling in understanding our history and emotions. He stresses that the arts, drawing from personal experiences, help us connect on a deeper level beyond hard news.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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“My mandate focuses on the protection of those trying to protect the planet. Protection of defenders is my main topic. When I'm speaking to states or companies, it's always related to cases of defenders facing threats, attacks, or penalization by companies or governments, like the recent case of Paul Watson (founder of Sea Shepherd) in Denmark… When I travel to places like Peru, Colombia, or Honduras and meet Indigenous people, I realize they have a relationship with nature that we don't have anymore. They express that the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe goes beyond just air and food; it represents what they call Pachamama or Mother Earth. This is a cosmovision shared across various communities, not only in Latin America but globally.”
Michel Forst is a prominent human rights advocate and the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention. He previously served as the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders (2014–2020) and has worked with Amnesty International, UNESCO, and the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, championing protections for activists worldwide. Forst’s career is marked by his unwavering commitment to defending those at risk for advancing justice, environmental protection, and human rights globally.
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“Climate change is here. It's already causing devastation to the most vulnerable populations. We are living with an extractive mindset, where we are extracting one way out of the life system of the Earth. We need to change from that extractive mindset to a regenerative mindset. And we need to change from the North Star of economic growth to a vision of eco civilizations. Those are the two main principles that I want to propose and that the Club of Rome suggests that we try to transform our current organization towards regenerative living and eco civilization.”
Paul Shrivastava is Co-President of The Club of Rome and a Professor of Management and Organisations at Pennsylvania State University. He founded the UNESCO Chair for Arts and Sustainable Enterprise at ICN Business School, Nancy, France, and the ONE Division of the Academy of Management. He was the Executive Director of Future Earth, where he established its secretariat for global environmental change programs, and has published extensively on both sustainable management and crisis management.
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“This book has a lot of the wisdom of things that feminists and queers have learned in the community about sexuality, but the book is really for anybody who is political, even those just starting out and beginning to realize that there is something wrong with the systems they live under. I want to be in movements. Our movements are made of relationships. So, if you're just getting into our movements, or if you've been here for years and have been watching the ways we hurt each other and fall apart relationally, this book is about identifying these common patterns.”
Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. He is the author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the next) and Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. His latest book is Love in a Fcked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together*.
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“I think the show conveys to the women watching that their lives matter. They don't have to be some gorgeous aspirational person, although Sloane absolutely fits that mold. But for others living in the Midwest, struggling and feeling unseen, hopefully, the mirrors of Lina and Maggie will help them not feel so alone and remind them that their stories are important and matter.”
Laura Eason is an Emmy-nominated producer, screenwriter, and playwright. Currently, she is the executive producer and showrunner of the Starz drama series Three Women. Based on a book by Lisa Taddeo, the series stars Shailene Woodley, DeWanda Wise, Betty Gilpin and Gabrielle Creevy. Laura’s writing and producing credits for television include The Loudest Voice and four seasons of House of Cards. Laura's many plays include the critically acclaimed Sex with Strangers. She has also adapted many classic novels for the stage, including a highly successful version of Around the World in 80 Days. She has served as Artistic Director of Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago, where she also acted, directed, and produced in upwards of 20 shows.
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How do the arts help us find purpose and meaning? What role do stories play in helping us preserve memories, connect us to each other, and answer life’s big questions?
MAX RICHTER(Award-winning Composer & Pianist · His album Sleep is the most streamed classical album of all time) reflects on the importance of creativity and how literature, music, and visual art offer windows into other people’s perceptions and experiences, fostering understanding and connection.
ETGAR KERET (Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director · Author of Fly Already · Suddenly a Knock on the Door · The Seven Good Years) shares insights from his upbringing and how his mother's storytelling shaped his perception of creativity and authenticity.
ANTHONY JOSEPH (T.S. Eliot Prize-winning Poet, Novelist & Singer-songwriter · Author of Sonnets for Albert) discusses the fragmented documentation of Caribbean life and how his poetry attempts to piece together these fragments.
CLAUDIA FORESTIERI (Emmy Award-winning Writer · Creator of HBOMax’s Gordita Chronicles) talks about the crucial role of immigrants in building and revitalizing America, portraying them as "Born Again Americans."
BRIGITTE MUNOZ-LIEBOWITZ (Showrunner Gordita Chronicles · One Day at a Time) highlights the inevitability of adversity in life and its role in fostering growth. She underscores the importance of a positive outlook in overcoming the challenges of immigration.
JOHNJOE McFADDEN (Author of Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe · Professor of Molecular Genetics at University of Surrey) explores the communicative power of art, detailing how complex ideas and feelings can be conveyed holistically.
SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA (Booker Prize-winning Author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida) discusses his choice of writing in the second person to explore the spiritual dimension.
CATHERINE CURTIN (Actress · Stranger Things · Orange Is the New Black · Homeland) reflects on creative freedom, experimental theater and her work in film and television.
KATE MUETH (Founder/Artistic Director of the award-winning dance theater company The Neo-Political Cowgirls) emphasizes the importance of connecting stories to meaning and how her creative process prioritizes authenticity and personal fulfillment over industry expectations.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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What can we learn from whales, the ways they communicate, and how their life cycle affects whole ecosystems, absorbing carbon and helping cool the planet? How have we contributed to the ecological degradation of the environment? How does language influence perception and our relationship to the more than human world?
NAN HAUSER (Whale Researcher; President, Center for Cetacean Research & Conservation; Director, Cook Islands Whale Research) describes how a whale protected her from a tiger shark during an underwater filming session and reflects on their emotional connection.
DAVID FARRIER (Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils · Professor of the University of Edinburgh) explores the long-term impacts humans have on the environment, emphasizing the material legacies we leave behind for future generations.
DANA FISHER (Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity; Author of Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action) discusses her "apocalyptic optimism," arguing that significant social and environmental change is likely to occur in response to extreme risk events, which will drive mass mobilization.
SIR GEOFF MULGAN Author of Another World is Possible: How to Reignite Social & Political Imagination; Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy & Social Innovation at University College London) on the evolution and potential of the circular economy. He elaborates on how adopting practices that promote reusing and recycling can drastically reduce waste and resource consumption.
LEAH THOMAS (Author of The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet; Founder of @greengirlleah & The Intersectional Environmentalist platform) advocates for an inclusive approach that addresses the specific environmental injustices faced by marginalized communities and encourages incorporating social justice into environmental advocacy.
MAYA VAN ROSSUM (Founder of Green Amendments For The Generations; Leader of Delaware Riverkeeper Network; Author of The Green Amendment: The People's Fight for a Clean, Safe, and Healthy Environment) underscores the profound impact of pollution and environmental degradation on human lives and stresses the significance of storytelling that address these deep-rooted issues.
MICHAEL CRONIN (Author of Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene; Senior Researcher at the Trinity Centre for Literary & Cultural Translation) argues for horizontal relationships with the environment, moving away from hierarchical views, and emphasizes the need to recognize the non-human world.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
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How can we be more engaged global citizens? How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? What influence do billionaires have on politics, journalism, and the technology that shapes our lives?
Lee McIntyre (Philosopher · Author of On Disinformation: How To Fight For Truth and Protect Democracy) examines democracy, and science denial. He delves into how continuous disinformation campaigns not only promote falsehoods but ultimately aim to demoralize the public by making them doubtful about the existence of truth.
Darryl Cunningham (Cartoonist · Author of Elon Musk: Investigation into a New Master of the World) on the problematic nature of extreme wealth concentration among billionaires and the political power they wield.
Debora Cahn (Television creator, writer, and Emmy-nominated showrunner of Netflix’s The Diplomat) on how being a child of Holocaust survivors sparked her interest in moral questions and complex characters.
Julian Lennon (Singer-songwriter and documentary filmmaker, founder of The White Feather Foundation) on the need for supporting education and safety for girls in Kenya.
Arash Abizadeh (Philosopher · Assoc. Editor of Free & Equal) on wealth inequality and how economic disparities create social unrest and political manipulation, suggesting that tackling inequality is essential for the healthy functioning of democratic societies.
Daniel Susskind (Economist · Author of Growth: A Reckoning) explores how involving ordinary citizens in deliberation processes in mini-publics and citizen assemblies can help resolve complex political issues like nuclear policy and climate change.
Carlos Moreno (Originator of the 15-Minute City concept) emphasizes the importance of proximity and social interaction in urban design, highlighting how it counteracts social isolation, reduces radicalization, and helps foster more inclusive, tolerant communities.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
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How can we learn to speak the language of the Earth and cultivate our intuitive intelligence? What lessons can we learn from non-human animals about living in greater harmony with nature? How have we contributed to making our planet a more dangerous place, and how can we work to save it?
COLIN STEEN (CEO of Legacy Agripartners) reflects on his upbringing on a farm in Weldon, Saskatchewan. He highlights the rewarding yet challenging nature of farm life, emphasizing the importance of agriculture and its impact on shaping one's responsibilities and successes in life.
JILL HEINERTH (Canadian cave diver, underwater explorer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker) discusses her experiences exploring underwater caves. She talks about the collaborative nature of her work and her reflections on our connected planet.
NOAH WILSON-RICH (Co-Founder and CEO of The Best Bees Company, Author of The Bee: A Natural History) explores his fascination with bees and their significance to human society. He shares the broader lessons humans can learn from these pollinators.
INGRID NEWKIRK (Founder and President of PETA) discusses the fascinating world of animal communication. She explores the ways animals interact and communicate with each other, the complexity of animal languages and their significance in the animal kingdom.
NEIL GRIMMER (Brand President of SOURCE Global, innovator of the SOURCE Hydropanel) highlights the critical issue of water insecurity and scarcity facing the global population. He underscores the urgent need for innovation and technology deployment to address the increasing water stress and ensure sustainable water resources.
CARL SAFINA (Ecologist, Founding President of Safina Center) offers a critical perspective on human impact on the environment. He emphasizes that while humans are technologically advanced, we are often reckless in our use of these capabilities, leading to severe planetary problems that we struggle to solve.
RICHARD VEVERS (Founder and CEO of The Ocean Agency) stresses the importance of coral reefs as foundational species that support diverse marine ecosystems. He warns of the dire consequences of coral reef destruction and advocates for the protection and conservation of these essential habitats.
WALTER STAHEL (Founding Father of the Circular Economy, Founder-Director of the Product-Life Institute) discusses the necessity of adopting a circular economy to tackle environmental challenges. He argues that creating a low-waste, low-carbon, and low-anthropogenic mass society is essential for preserving natural resources and reducing environmental impacts.
JOELLE GERGIS (IPCC Lead Author, Award-winning climate scientist and writer, Author of Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope) shares insights on coping with the emotional burden of climate change. She highlights the importance of maintaining hope, connecting with like-minded individuals, and finding meaning amidst the ongoing environmental crisis.
JAMES BROWNING (Founder of advocacy group F Minus) explains the insidious nature of fossil fuel lobbying. He reveals how lobbyists representing both harmful industries and beneficial causes can complicate efforts to raise awareness and address the climate crisis effectively.
PAULA PINHO (Director of the European Commission’s DG for Energy) encourages active participation in nurturing values such as peace, democracy, and sustainability. She advocates for using social media and other means to speak out and engage in meaningful discussions to promote these values.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
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Where does our intuition come from? How are lifelong creative partnerships formed and what role do friendship and personal connection play? How do our personal lives influence the art we make?
Erland Cooper (Scottish composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist) explores the emotional and transformative effects of music and visual arts. He underscores how music can transport individuals to different places and evoke emotional responses and relates his personal experiences of homesickness for his native Orkney. [00:08]
Debora Cahn (television creator, writer, and Emmy-nominated showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat) discusses the craft of long-form storytelling in television. She highlights the process of building immersive worlds and the challenge of integrating ideas into narratives that resonate with audiences on a universal level. [01:18] [05:59]
Julian Lennon (singer-songwriter and documentary filmmaker, founder of The White Feather Foundation, and photographer/author of Life’s Fragile Moments) reflects on the influence of his heroes and teachers and remembers the thing his mother taught him. He speaks about the importance of empathy, respect, and positivity, and how these values shape his creative and humanitarian efforts. [02:45] [
Ed Zwick (Academy-Award-winning writer, director, and producer, and author of Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions) analyzes the elusive nature of talent and the magical moments in casting where undeniable potential shines through. Zwick shares insights into the subtle and unspoken aspects of directing that elevate a performance and bring a story to life. [04:08]
Chris Blackwell (Founder of Island Records and inductee of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) highlights the importance of instinct in recognizing and nurturing talent. He recounts his initial hesitation before signing Cat Stevens to Island Records. He shares how artistic partnerships grow out of personal connections and friendship. [07:28] [12:21]
Joy Gorman Wettels (Executive producer of UnPrisoned and the founder of Joy Coalition) highlights stigmatized social issues through her storytelling. She emphasizes that humanizing these issues by creating relatable, empathetic characters can lead to real-world change and understanding. [08:38]
Rick Carnes (Songwriter and President of the Songwriters Guild of America) discusses the fundamental elements of songwriting and how music marks significant moments in people’s lives. He elaborates on his creative process and the importance of mindfulness and emotional awareness in writing meaningful songs. [14:25]
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
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How can we shape technology’s impact on society? How do social media algorithms influence our democratic processes and personal well-being? Can AI truly emulate human creativity? And how will its pursuit of perfection change the art we create?
Daniel Susskind (Economist · Oxford & King’s College London · Author of Growth: A Reckoning · A World Without Work) shares insights on the nature of growth driven by technological progress. He contends that while technology can accelerate growth, its impacts can be consciously directed to reduce environmental damage and social inequalities. According to Susskind, the current trajectory of technological progress needs reevaluation to mitigate potential adverse effects on future working lives.
Arash Abizadeh (Professor of Political Science · McGill University Author of Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics · Associate Editor · Free & Equal) explores the ethical tensions between democratic needs and commercial imperatives of social media platforms. He highlights how algorithms designed to maximize engagement often foster outrage and fear, contrasting these commercial objectives with the requirements for a healthy democratic public sphere.
Debora Cahn (Creator & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell · Exec. Producer Homeland · Grey’s Anatomy · Vinyl · Co-Producer The West Wing) toggles between apprehension and optimism about emerging technologies like AI. She reflects on her father's experience with nuclear technology and ponders the unpredictable impacts of AI, drawing parallels with the unforeseen transformation of the internet.
Julia F. Christensen (Neuroscientist - Author of The Pathway To Flow: The New Science of Harnessing Creativity to Heal and Unwind the Body & Mind) examines the rise of AI and its influence on aesthetics in the arts. She argues that technology drives creators towards superficial beauty conforming to popular standards, thereby cluttering the mind and fostering an obsession with perfection fueled by dopamine signals.
Julian Lennon (Singer-songwriter · Documentary Filmmaker · Founder of The White Feather Foundation Photographer/Author of Life’s Fragile Moments) discusses AI's potential in the medical field, highlighting recent advancements that are paving the way for novel treatments and cures. While acknowledging the importance of copyright issues, he remains optimistic about AI’s positive impact on healthcare.
Brian David Johnson(Author of The Future You: How to Create the Life You Always Wanted · Director of the Arizona State University’s Threatcasting Lab Futurist in Residence · ASU’s Center for Science & the Imagination) emphasizes the importance of maintaining a human-centric approach to technology. He questions the purpose behind technological advancements, urging developers to always consider the human impact and clarify their objectives.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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This episode explores the enduring power of storytelling to shape our world and illuminate the human experience. Writers Neil Gaiman, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, E.J. Koh, Marge Piercy, and Max Stossel discuss creativity, resilience, and the power of words to heal and bring people together.
Neil Gaiman (Writer, Producer, Showrunner · The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Coraline) explores the secret lives of writers, reflecting on the masks they wear in the pursuit of truth and beauty.
Jericho Brown (Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet: The Tradition · Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill) shares “Foreday in the Morning”, highlighting the hard work and resilience in Black America. He examines the vernacular of his poetry and how it intertwines themes of race, nationality, and familial love.
Ada Limón (U.S. Poet Laureate · The Hurting Kind, The Carrying) presents an "apocalyptic love poem" that questions the intersection of despair and hope in today's changing world. She reflects deeply on the personal and universal struggles of finding beauty amidst environmental and existential crises.
Marge Piercy (Award-winning Novelist, Poet & Activist) delves into the emotional weight of words and memories, the terror of child separation, and the impending doom facing our world due to environmental destruction and political negligence.
E.J. Koh (Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet · The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love) recounts a haunting family history from Jeju Island in Korea, emphasizing the lasting impacts of trauma and the collective memory of ancestral sufferings.
Max Stossel (Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker, Speaker, Creator of Words That Move) uses the metaphor of a boxing ring to discuss the complexities of human conflict and connection, encouraging a shift from adversarial relationships to collaborative problem-solving.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
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“I think a lot of joy comes from helping others. One of the things that I've been really focusing on is finding that balance in life, what’s real and what’s true and what makes you happy. How can you help other people feel the same and have a happier life? I think whatever that takes. So if that's charity, if that's photography, if that's documentary, if that's music, and I can do it, then I'm going to do it.
From traveling, especially in Ethiopia, Kenya, and even South America, we just see these scenarios and situations where they don't have enough support or finances. Anything I’m involved in, a good percentage goes to The White Feather Foundation. From what I witnessed, I just wanted to be able to help. My best teacher ever was Mum because I watched her live through life with dignity, grace, respect, and empathy. To me, those are some of the key things that are most important in living life. I think you have to love everybody and yourself. Respect is a real key issue, not only for people but for this world that we live in, Mother Earth. It's of key importance that we honor and respect this beautiful little blue ball that we live on.”
Julian Lennon is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and NYTimes bestselling author of the Touch the Earth children’s book trilogy. This autumn, Whispers – A Julian Lennon Retrospective is being presented at Le Stanze della Fotografia, culminating in the publication of Life’s Fragile Moments, his first photography book. It features a compilation of images that span over two decades of Lennon's unique life, career, adventures, and philanthropy. He founded The White Feather Foundation in 2007, whose key initiatives are education, health, conservation, and the protection of indigenous cultures. He was the executive producer of Kiss the Ground and other environmental documentaries and was named a Peace Laureate by UNESCO in 2020.
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Photo credit: © 2024, Julian Lennon. All rights reserved.
Life’s Fragile Moments, published by teNeues, www.teneues.com, August 2024. 27,5 x 34 cm |10 5/6 x 13 3/8 in., 240 pages, Hardcover, approx. 200 color photographs, texts English & German ISBN: 978-3-96171-614-2
How and when will we transition to a clean energy future? How have wetlands become both crucial carbon sinks and colossal methane emitters in a warming world? What lessons can we learn from non-human animals about living in greater harmony with nature?
Richard Black (Author of The Future of Energy · Fmr. BBC Environment Correspondent · Director of Policy & Strategy · Global Clean Energy Thinktank · Ember) addresses the substantial economic impact of fossil fuel subsidies, noting that the actual costs, when including climate change damages, reach up to six or seven trillion dollars annually, overshadowing the relatively small climate finance provided by Western governments.
Euan Nisbet (Earth Systems Scientist · Royal Holloway University of London) explores the role of methane in the atmosphere, its historical importance in maintaining the planet’s temperature, and its current contribution to global warming. He explains the sources of methane, including natural processes and human activities, and discusses recent trends and challenges tied to rising methane levels.
Julie Pierce (Vice President of Strategy & Planning · Minnesota Power) highlights her company's significant strides in sustainability. She outlines Minnesota Power's decade-long journey towards decarbonization, noting that they have transitioned from a 95% fossil-based portfolio to sourcing 50-60% of their energy from clean sources, including wind, solar, and hydropower.
Arash Abizadeh (Professor of Political Science · McGill University Author ofHobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics · Associate Editor · Free & Equal) reflects on the future we are leaving for the next generations. He underscores the social and political challenges of ensuring that the technologies and resources needed to adapt to climate change are distributed equitably across all societies.
Daniel Susskind(Economist · Oxford & King’s College London · Author of Growth: A Reckoning · A World Without Work) discusses the critical role of technological progress in driving economic growth. He advocates for a shift toward technologies that not only enhance prosperity but also protect the environment and promote social equity.
Ian Robertson(Author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-belief · Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute · Co-Leader of The BrainHealth Project) calls for young people to connect with nature and develop mastery over their minds. He envisions a future where individuals can access the joy of being conscious, embodied beings in a healthy, natural world.
Ingrid Newkirk(Founder & President of PETA · People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) emphasizes the shared traits between humans and other animals, advocating for a compassionate approach to all living beings. She urges listeners to recognize the personhood in animals and to treat them with respect and empathy.
This episode brings together diverse voices discussing critical environmental and ethical issues. From the economic burden of fossil fuel subsidies to the equitable distribution of climate adaptation resources, the importance of technological progress, and the need for the ethical treatment of animals.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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How and when will we transition to a clean energy future? How have wetlands become both crucial carbon sinks and colossal methane emitters in a warming world? What lessons can we learn from non-human animals about living in greater harmony with nature?
Richard Black (Author of The Future of Energy · Fmr. BBC Environment Correspondent · Director of Policy & Strategy · Global Clean Energy Thinktank · Ember) addresses the substantial economic impact of fossil fuel subsidies, noting that the actual costs, when including climate change damages, reach up to six or seven trillion dollars annually, overshadowing the relatively small climate finance provided by Western governments.
Euan Nisbet (Earth Systems Scientist · Royal Holloway University of London) explores the role of methane in the atmosphere, its historical importance in maintaining the planet’s temperature, and its current contribution to global warming. He explains the sources of methane, including natural processes and human activities, and discusses recent trends and challenges tied to rising methane levels.
Julie Pierce (Vice President of Strategy & Planning · Minnesota Power) highlights her company's significant strides in sustainability. She outlines Minnesota Power's decade-long journey towards decarbonization, noting that they have transitioned from a 95% fossil-based portfolio to sourcing 50-60% of their energy from clean sources, including wind, solar, and hydropower.
Arash Abizadeh (Professor of Political Science · McGill University Author ofHobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics · Associate Editor · Free & Equal) reflects on the future we are leaving for the next generations. He underscores the social and political challenges of ensuring that the technologies and resources needed to adapt to climate change are distributed equitably across all societies.
Daniel Susskind(Economist · Oxford & King’s College London · Author of Growth: A Reckoning · A World Without Work) discusses the critical role of technological progress in driving economic growth. He advocates for a shift toward technologies that not only enhance prosperity but also protect the environment and promote social equity.
Ian Robertson(Author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-belief · Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute · Co-Leader of The BrainHealth Project) calls for young people to connect with nature and develop mastery over their minds. He envisions a future where individuals can access the joy of being conscious, embodied beings in a healthy, natural world.
Ingrid Newkirk(Founder & President of PETA · People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) emphasizes the shared traits between humans and other animals, advocating for a compassionate approach to all living beings. She urges listeners to recognize the personhood in animals and to treat them with respect and empathy.
This episode brings together diverse voices discussing critical environmental and ethical issues. From the economic burden of fossil fuel subsidies to the equitable distribution of climate adaptation resources, the importance of technological progress, and the need for the ethical treatment of animals.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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"The state of being in flow and seeking out that state, sort of disappearing from the here and now... it must have been something that has been part of human cultures for many millennia. We know that, for example, dancing can bring you into these states. And we know from many anthropological works that people dance themselves into trance, a type of flow. So, there is that flow in this scientific sense of a state of well-being. And we will speak about what that does to our brain and our broader wellbeing, but also the flow in what cues enter into our senses. So that would be a scientific field that looks at brain synchrony, physiology synchrony, these waves that we see that sort of connect with us.”
Dr. Julia F. Christensen is a Danish neuroscientist and former dancer currently working as a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany. She studied psychology, human evolution, and neuroscience in France, Spain and the UK. For her postdoctoral training, she worked in international, interdisciplinary research labs at University College London, City, University London and the Warburg Institute, London and was awarded a postdoctoral Newton International Fellowship by the British Academy. Her new book The Pathway to Flow is about the science of flow, why our brain needs it and how to create the right habits in our brain to get it.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-julia-f-christensen-36539a144https://www.instagram.com/dr.julia.f.christensen?igsh=cHZkODgxczJqZmxl
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What does it mean to live a good life? How can the arts help us learn to speak the language of the Earth and cultivate our intuitive intelligence? What is the power of mentorship for forging character and creative vision? How can we hold onto our cultural heritage and traditions, while preparing students for the needs of the 21st century?
Alan Poul (Emmy & Golden Globe-winning Executive Producer · Director · Six Feet Under · Tales of the City · Tokyo Vice · My So-Called Life) shares his personal journey and the importance of mentorship in shaping one's creative path. He discusses his experiences with influential figures such as Stephen Sondheim, Paul Schrader, and Robert Wilson, emphasizing the value of learning from those you admire.
Rupert Sheldrake (Biologist · Author of The Science Delusion · The Presence of the Past · Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work) explores the significance of cultural and religious traditions in education. He argues that knowing the open questions in science, integrating arts, and learning by heart are crucial for a well-rounded education.
Jericho Brown (Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet · Director of Creative Writing Program at Emory University · Author of The Tradition · The New Testament) emphasizes the power and agency that young writers have to create change. He encourages persistence and the importance of trying, despite the fear of failure.
Sy Montgomery (Naturalist · Author of The Soul of an Octopus · The Hawk’s Way · Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell) reflects on how animals have been her mentors and teachers. From her Scottish Terrier, Molly, to wild emus in Australia, she shares how her interactions with animals have guided her career and life choices.
Manuela Lucá-Dazio (Exec. Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize · Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale · Dept. of Visual Arts & Architecture) discusses the necessity of reconnecting with cultural heritage and expanding educational tools. She advocates for a more imaginative approach to integrating different fields of knowledge and teaching methods.
Jeffrey D. Sachs (Economist · President of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network · Director of Center for Sustainable Development · Columbia University) highlights the global consensus on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the critical importance of education. He specifically advocates for SDG 4, which focuses on inclusive and equitable quality education for all.
Todd B. Kashdan (Psychologist · APA Award-winning Author of The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively · Curious? · The Upside of Your Dark Side · Leading Authority on Well-being, Curiosity, Courage & Resilience) analyzes the shortcomings of the current education system. He stresses the need to teach critical thinking and develop superior information-gathering strategies.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Founder · Host · Exec. Director of First Voices Radio · Founder of Akantu Intelligence · Master Musician of the Ancient Lakota Flute) offers a unique perspective on our connection to the Earth. He delves into Indigenous wisdom about living in harmony with nature, our ancestors, and recognizing the timeless energy around us.
Erland Cooper (Songwriter · Producer · Multi-instrumentalist · Composer of Folded Landscapes) reminisces about his upbringing surrounded by nature and traditional folk music. He shares how these elements have influenced his work and creative process.
Peter Singer (Philosopher · Author of Animal Liberation · Founder of The Life You Can Save) examines the core philosophical questions about living a good life. He discusses the principles of Effective Altruism and the importance of using our resources wisely to make the world a better place.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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Have we entered what Earth scientists call a “termination event,” and what can we do to avoid the worst outcomes? How can we look beyond GDP and develop new metrics that balance growth with human flourishing and environmental well-being? How can the 15-minute city model revolutionize urban living, enhance health, and reduce our carbon footprint?
Euan Nisbet (Earth Systems Scientist - Royal Holloway University of London) analyzes historical patterns that point to a potential termination event and emphasizes the urgency of addressing abrupt climate changes.
Daniel Susskind(Economist - Oxford & King’s College London - Author of Growth: A Reckoning - A World Without Work) discusses the economic trade-offs involved in pursuing net-zero emissions and the growing public discontent with the costs.
Carlos Moreno (Originator of the 15-Minute City concept - Author of The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time & Our Planet) explores how the 15-minute city model can enhance urban living, promote local commerce, and reduce our carbon footprint.
Richard Black(Author of The Future of Energy - Former BBC Environment Correspondent - Director of Policy & Strategy - Global Clean Energy Thinktank - Ember) explains the future energy landscape, critiques the contributions of oil and gas companies to the clean energy transition, and emphasizes the need for a realistic clean energy transition.
Carissa Carter (Academic Director at Stanford's d.school - Co-author of Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future) highlights the importance of people critically interpreting climate data and understanding its emotional impact.
Gordon Lambert (World Economic Forum Global Council - Energy and Sustainability - Former Member of Alberta’s Climate Change Advisory Panel) shares his personal reflections on the harmony of nature and the necessity of aligning business strategies with renewable energy goals.
Dr. Ben Shofty(Functional Neurosurgeon - Professor - University of Utah) discusses the health benefits of exposure to nature and its positive impact on well-being and creativity.
Julia F. Christensen (Neuroscientist - Author of The Pathway To Flow: The New Science of Harnessing Creativity to Heal and Unwind the Body & Mind) explores the neuroscience behind human interaction with nature and its restorative effects on the brain.
The episode examines critical issues surrounding climate change, economic growth, and urban development. Euan Nisbet highlighted the urgency of addressing abrupt climate changes, while Daniel Susskind shed light on the economic complexities of achieving net-zero emissions. Carlos Moreno presented the revolutionary concept of the 15-minute city, and Richard Black emphasized the need for a realistic clean energy transition. Carissa Carter underscored the importance of understanding and visualizing climate data, while Gordon Lambert, Dr. Julia F. Christensen, and Dr. Ben Shofty provided personal and scientific insights into the benefits of integrating nature into our lives. These conversations give us a deeper look into the challenges and potential solutions for creating a sustainable future.
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
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“There is a tremendous tension between healthy democracy and deep economic inequalities. I don't think that, in the long run, democracies can survive in a healthy way unless we address the problem of economic inequalities. If we have individuals who are living day to day, on the one hand, and we have other individuals who are billionaires in our societies, on the other hand, it will be very difficult for us to have a genuine democracy.”
Arash Abizadeh is the R.B. Angus Professor of Political Science at McGill University. His research has focused on democratic theory, including topics such as immigration and border control. Abizadeh also specializes in 17th and 18th century philosophy and has recently published the book Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics. He is currently working on a book about social and political power and is the Associate Editor of Free & Equal: a Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs.
https://abizadeh.wixsite.com/arash
www.cambridge.org/core/books/hobbes-and-the-two-faces-of-ethics/B565348CE9B53945F4F962784A5842C2
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“We have a choice to change the nature of growth. How we can have growth that is more respectful of place, doesn’t cause as much damage to the environment, doesn't lead to as large inequalities in society, doesn’t disrupt politics, doesn't undermine the availability of good work? We ought to pursue this morally enriched GDP measure which better reflects what we really value and care about as a society.”
Daniel Susskind is a Research Professor in Economics at King's College London and a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University. He is the author of A World without Work and co-author of the bestselling The Future of the Professions. Previously, he worked in various roles in the British Government - in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and in the Cabinet Office. His latest book is Growth: A Reckoning.
www.danielsusskind.com
www.penguin.co.uk/books/446381/growth-by-susskind-daniel/9780241542309
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“It all starts at home. As a university professor, I have observed the process of transformation of different generations. We need to find a sense of life. We need to find a sense of belonging to our humanity, but to have this sense of life, we need to find a sense in our local communities.”
Carlos Moreno was born in Colombia in 1959 and moved to France at the age of 20. He is known for his influential "15-Minute City" concept, embraced by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and leading cities around the world. Scientific Director of the "Entrepreneurship - Territory - Innovation" Chair at the Paris Sorbonne Business School, he is an international expert of the Human Smart City, and a Knight of the French Legion of Honour. He is recipient of the Obel Award and the UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour. His latest book is The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet.
https://www.moreno-web.net/
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+15-Minute+City%3A+A+Solution+to+Saving+Our+Time+and+Our+Planet-p-9781394228140
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“When you think about the evolution of the human brain–just like other animals that have specialized in speed or keeping warm or gathering food–I feel our brain sort of specialized being creative and flexible and being able to generate different solutions to a given problem. To me, this is probably the most fascinating thought process that happens in the human brain. And what I do in neurosurgery–and my subspecialty is called functional neurosurgery–we don't deal with disorders in which there's an anatomical abnormality inside the brain. We deal with disorders in which there is an abnormal connection or abnormal circuitry inside the brain when there's an issue with the way the brain functions. There's no tumor. There are no abnormal blood vessels or anything like that. And that gives us an amazing opportunity to really investigate how different circuits and different areas inside the brain work.
In terms of the more elusive processes like creativity or high-order cognitive functions, we don't really know or understand where they are inside the brain. As you said, there's no creativity cortex, like we have a motor cortex, sensory cortex, or visual cortex.
When we started with this series of projects, we tried to think, if this function just like other higher cognitive functions, cannot be explained by a specific area inside the brain, then what happens? Where does the magic happen? And the answer was that it's a network-dependent function. It doesn't originate from a specific area inside the brain, but it originates from multiple brain networks sort of all of a sudden synchronizing to generate that unexpected function.”
Dr. Ben Shofty is a functional neurosurgeon affiliated with the University of Utah. He graduated from the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Medicine, received his PhD in neurosurgical training from the Israeli Institute of Technology, and completed his training at the Tel Aviv Medical Center and Baylor University. He was also an Israeli national rugby player. His practice specializes in neuromodulation and exploring treatments for disorders such as OCD, depression, and epilepsy, among others, while also seeking to understand the science behind creativity, mind-wandering, and the many complexities of the brain.
https://healthcare.utah.edu/find-a-doctor/ben-shofty
https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awae199/7695856
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“Today, someone is putting the finishing touches on a machine- learning algorithm that will change the way you relate to your family. Someone is trying to design a way to communicate with animals in their own language. Someone is designing a gene that alters bacteria to turn your poop bright blue when it’s time to see the doctor. Someone is cleaning up the mess someone else left behind seventy years ago yesterday. Today, someone just had an idea that will end up saving one thing while it harms another…
To be a maker in this moment— to be a human today— is to collaborate with the world. It is to create and be created, to work and be worked on, to make and be made. To be human is to tinker, create, fix, care, and bring new things into the world. It is to design. You— yes, you!— might design products or policy, services or sermons, production lines or preschool programs. You might run a business, make art, or participate in passing out meals to the poor. You may write code or pour concrete, lobby for endangered species legislation or craft cocktails. Wherever you fit in, you are part of shaping the world. This is design work.”
– Assembling Tomorrow
A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future
Scott Doorley is the Creative Director at Stanford's d. school and co author of Make Space. He teaches design communication and his work has been featured in museums and architecture and urbanism and the New York Times. Carissa Carteris the Academic Director at Stanford's d. schooland author of The Secret Language of Maps. She teaches courses on emerging technologies and data visualization and received Fast Company and Core 77 awards for her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain. Together, they co authored Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future.
www.scottdoorley.com
www.snowflyzone.com
https://dschool.stanford.edu/
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/623529/assembling-tomorrow-by-scott-doorley-carissa-carter-and-stanford-dschool-illustrations-by-armando-veve/
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“The opportunity is that we have never had a public that is more passionate and obsessed with visual imagery. If the owners of the best original imagery in the world can't figure out how to take advantage of the fact that the world has now become obsessed with these treasures that we have to offer as museums, then shame on us. This is the opportunity to say, if you're spending all day scrolling on Instagram looking for amazing imagery, come and see the original source. Come and see the real work. Let us figure out how to make that connection.”
Stephen Reily is the Founding Director of Remuseum, an independent research project housed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Funded by arts patron David Booth with additional support by the Ford Foundation, Remuseum focuses on advancing relevance and governance in museums across the U.S. He works with museums to create a financially sustainable strategy that is human-focused, centering on inclusion, diversity, and important causes like climate change. During his time as director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, Reily presented Promise, Witness, Remembrance, an exhibition in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor and a year of protests in Louisville. In 2022, he co-wrote a book documenting the exhibition. As an active civic leader, Reily has been a part of numerous community organizations and boards, like the Reily Reentry Project, supporting expungement programs for Kentucky citizens, Creative Capital, offering grants for the arts, and founded Seed Capital Kentucky, a non-profit that aims to improve the food economy in the area.A Yale and Stanford Law graduate, Reily clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens before launching a successful entrepreneurial career, experiences he draws upon for public engagement initiatives.
https://remuseum.org
https://crystalbridges.org
www.stephenreily.com
www.kentuckypress.com/9781734248517/promise-witness-remembrance
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“I came to neuroscience from a humanistic perspective. I was very interested to find out who we are. What do we know? What do we think we know? Why do we think we know certain things? How do we see things? How do we perceive them? Ultimately, the question behind curiosity is what things we find interesting in our environment. The way I think about eye movements is that they really are trained in some largely subconscious process.”
Dr. Jacqueline Gottlieb is a Professor of Neuroscience and Principal Investigator at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. Dr. Gottlieb studies the mechanisms that underlie the brain's higher cognitive functions, including decision making, memory, and attention. Her interest is in how the brain gathers the evidence it needs—and ignores what it doesn’t—during everyday tasks and during special states such as curiosity.
www.creativeprocess.info
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“Often when people write or make movies about romances with young adults, I think they are very flippant about it and don't take it seriously. But I think that those friendships and romantic relationships are some of the most important ones because they really set the stage for the rest of our lives. If your first relationship is incredibly toxic and damaging, it can take you years to figure out that that's not normal, and that that's not actually how relationships are meant to be.”
Meaghan Oppenheimer is a screenwriter, executive producer, and showrunner who tells stories driven by flawed, deeply human characters and the relationships between them. She’s behind Hulu’s drama series Tell Me Lies, starring Grace Van Patten and Jackson White and adapted from Carola Lovering’s novel of the same name. Her earlier projects include the 2015 film We Are Your Friends, starring Zac Efron as a passionate young DJ, and the 2018 drama series Queen America, set in Oppenheimer’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma and starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. Season 2 of Tell Me Lies will premiere September 4th on Hulu. Oppenheimer is also currently developing the upcoming Hulu show Second Wife, to star Tom Ellis and Emma Roberts.
www.creativeprocess.info
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"I'm trying to get people to care about a crisis in ways that may bring solutions to it. And that's also how I deal with the terror and the fear to find a sense of purpose in what I do. It's incredibly heartbreaking to see some of the things and hear some of the stories, but at the end of the day, it feels like–inconsistently here and there–you can shine a light on problems, and by shining that light, you actually make a difference."
Nicholas D. Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist and Op-ed columnist for The New York Times, where he was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. Kristof is a regular CNN contributor and has covered, among many other events and crises, the Tiananmen Square protests, the Darfur genocide, the Yemeni civil war, and the U.S. opioid crisis. He is the author of the memoir Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life, and coauthor, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of five previous books: Tightrope, A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes.
www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/720814/chasing-hope-by-nicholas-d-kristof
Family vineyard & apple orchard in Yamhill, Oregon: www.kristoffarms.com
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“The bridge between Out of the Darkness and my previous work, which looked at the transformation of consumer culture in the world, is morality. One thing that became clear in writing Empire of Things was that there's virtually no time or place in history where consumption isn't heavily moralized. Our lifestyle is treated as a mirror of our virtue and sins. And in the course of modern history, there's been a remarkable moral shift in the way that consumption used to be seen as something that led you astray or undermined authority, status, gender roles, and wasted money, to a source of growth, a source of self, fashioning the way we create our own identity. In the last few years, the environmental crisis has led to new questions about whether consumption is good or bad. And in 2015, during the refugee crisis when Germany took in almost a million refugees, morality became a very powerful way in which Germans talked about themselves as humanitarian world champions, as one politician called it. I realized that there's many other topics from family, work, to saving the environment, and of course, with regard to the German responsibility for the Holocaust and the war of extermination where German public discourse is heavily moralistic, so I became interested in charting that historical process."
What can we learn from Germany's postwar transformation to help us address today's environmental and humanitarian crises? With the rise of populism, authoritarianism, and digital propaganda, how can history provide insights into the challenges of modern democracy?
Frank Trentmann is a Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. He is a prize-winning historian, having received awards such as the Whitfield Prize, Austrian Wissenschaftsbuch/Science Book Prize, Humboldt Prize for Research, and the 2023 Bochum Historians' Award. He has also been named a Moore Scholar at Caltech. He is the author of Empire of Things and Free Trade Nation. His latest book is Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942 to 2022, which explores Germany's transformation after the Second World War.
www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8009279/frank-trentmann
www.penguin.co.uk/authors/32274/frank-trentmann?tab=penguin-books
www.creativeprocess.info
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“I think as humans, we forget. We are often limited by our own stereotypes, and we don't see that in everyone there's the potential for beauty and love and all these things. And I think The Architecture of Oppression, both parts one and two, are really a reflection of all the community and civil rights work that I've been doing for the same amount of time, really - 25 years. And I wanted to try and mix my day job and my music side, so bringing those two sides of my life together. I wanted to create a platform for black artists, black singers, and poets who I really admire. Jermain is somebody I've worked with for probably about six, seven years now. He's also in the trenches of the black civil rights struggle. We worked together on a number of projects, but it was very interesting to then work with Jemain in a purely artistic capacity. And it was a no-brainer to give Anthony a call for this second album because I know of his pedigree, and he's much more able to put ideas and thoughts on paper than I would be able to.”
Jake Ferguson is an award-winning musician known for his work with The Heliocentrics and as a solo artist under the name The Brkn Record. Alongside legendary drummer Malcolm Catto, Ferguson has composed two film scores and over 10 albums, collaborating with icons like Archie Shepp, Mulatu Astatke, and Melvin Van Peebles. His latest album is The Architecture of Oppression Part 2. The album also features singer and political activist Jermain Jackman, a former winner of The Voice (2014) and the T.S. Eliot Prize winning poet and musician, Anthony Joseph.
www.creativeprocess.info
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“The SDSN has been set up to mobilize research and science for the Sustainable Development Goals. Each year, we aim to provide a fair and accurate assessment of countries' progress on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The development goals were adopted back in 2015 by all UN member states, marking the first time in human history that we have a common goal for the entire world. Our goal each year with the SDG index is to have sound methodologies and translate these into actionable insights that can generate impactful results at the end of the day. Out of all the targets that we track, only 16 percent are estimated to be on track. This agenda not only combines environmental development but also social development, economic development, and good governance. Currently, none of the SDGs are on track to be achieved at the global level.”
In today's podcast, we talk with Guillaume Lafortune, Vice President and Head of the Paris Office of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), the largest global network of scientists and practitioners dedicated to implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We discuss the intersections of sustainability, global progress, the UN Summit of the Future, and the daunting challenges we face. From the impact of war on climate initiatives to transforming data into narratives that drive change, we explore how global cooperation, education, and technology pave the way for a sustainable future and look at the lessons of history and the power of diplomacy in shaping our path forward.
Guillaume Lafortune joined SDSN in 2017 to lead work on SDG data, policies, and financing including the preparation of the annual Sustainable Development Report (which includes the SDG Index and Dashboards). Between 2020 and 2022 Guillaume was a member of The Lancet Commission on COVID-19, where he coordinated the taskforces on “Fiscal Policy and Financial Markets” and “Green Recovery”, and co-authored the final report of the Commission. Guillaume is also a member of the Grenoble Center for Economic Research (CREG) at the Grenoble Alpes University. Previously, he served as an economist at the OECD in Paris and at the Ministry of Economic Development in the Government of Quebec (Canada). Guillaume is the author of 50+ scientific publications, book chapters, policy briefs and international reports on sustainable development, economic policy and good governance.
SDSN's Summit of the Future RecommendationsSDG Transformation Center
SDSN Global Commission for Urban SDG Finance
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“I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.”
S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.
https://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/sylwiac/
www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33445
https://chbooks.com/Books/T/The-Eyelid
https://ciscm.fr/en/merveilleuse-utopie
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“I've been a climate activist since I was about 12 years old. It began with a deep passion for wildlife. I started taking up litter and telling off my schoolmates, eventually I set up a green council when I was about 13 or 14. As I learned more and more about the climate crisis and how sprawling and interconnected it was, not just with nature, but with the oppression that exists within human society, I started getting more involved and impassioned, getting involved in protests, marches. When I was about 15 years old, I helped shut down an airport for a night. I eventually started going to the UN climate talks. I went to Davos and it started to become my everything. I felt like I was doing something meaningful about the crisis, but also felt a sense of deep despair and loss, both from the perspective of the impending collapse of the biosphere and also a deep dislocation from the dominant culture and the consensus reality. I felt like no one else was feeling the sense of urgency and emergency that I felt. I started to get incredibly anxious. In 2019, when I was 27, I jumped off a six storey building. My memory has blacked it out, but I spent a month in a coma and woke up having lost both of my legs. The five years since have been one of not just physical and mental recovery, but also trying to untangle the messy web of causality as to how and why it was that I lost my mind in the way I did. I try to find some of the gifts in that madness, what it was pointing towards in terms of the unbalance of the ecosphere and how human civilization has begun to operate completely out of step with the ecosphere.”
Charlie Hertzog Young is a researcher, writer and award-winning activist. He identifies as a “proudly mad bipolar double amputee” and has worked for the New Economics Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, the Good Law Project, the Four Day Week Campaign and the Centre for Progressive Change, as well as the UK Labour Party under three consecutive leaders. Charlie has spoken at the LSE, the UN and the World Economic Forum. He studied at Harvard, SOAS and Schumacher College and has written for The Ecologist, The Independent, Novara Media, Open Democracy and The Guardian. He is the author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future.
https://charliehertzogyoung.me
https://footnotepress.com/books/spinning-out/
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“The fact is you've got a lot of industrial and political muscle now coming behind clean energy, especially from China, which is the leading country deploying wind energy, the leading country deploying solar, and the leading manufacturer and user of electric vehicles by miles. As one recent report put it, ‘We have petrostates in the world. China is the first electrostate.’ And China is on its way to becoming the world's most powerful country. So, where China leads, the rest of the world is almost certain to follow. Yes, there are massive air pollution problems in China, of course, but I think it's more than that. It's also about seeing that this is the future that the world is going to have. And if these goods are going to be made anywhere, well, the Chinese government clearly would like them to be made in China. And they've set out, you know, industrial policies and all kinds of other policies for, well, at least a decade now, in pursuit of that aim. It's interesting now to see other countries, India, for example, and the United States now sort of deploying muscle to try and carve out a slice of the pie themselves as well.”
The Five-pronged Clean Energy Future
“I thought about it, and I was wondering, what do we actually need in the world? Because we don't need petrol and we don't need coal. We need energy to power various things. So, we need these energy services. So, what's the simplest way of providing all of the energy services? And it really seems to me that we can basically do it all with about five different types of goods. So the system of the future I put out in the book is first of all, you have the generation of electricity, which is mainly going to be with renewables, mainly with wind and solar because they are the cheapest and they're getting cheaper thanks to Wright's Law. Then you need energy storage and other means of sharing matching demand to supply. So, storage is the one that people will be most familiar with, which can be batteries, for example. And again, the price of batteries has also plummeted about 85 percent price reduction in a decade. And it continues because, again, we have mounting volumes. In a competitive market, there's lots of innovation going on in terms of battery design, in terms of construction, and all of this stuff, new materials coming into batteries. So, that's your first two, that's your renewable generation and your battery storage. Electric vehicles will be the main method of transportation. Already, they dominate sales in the two-wheeler market in China and India. They're already eating into global oil demand. They're taking about 1.5 percent of global oil demand already, and the sales are increasing exponentially in China and other countries as well. They are cost-competitive. It's just on the purchase price in some markets with some models now. And it's going to get cheaper again because battery costs will fall. Heating and cooling, which is a big demand for energy. We can use heat pumps, which are super efficient running on electricity…Hydrogen, that will probably be the fifth prong, but a smaller prong, rather like the little finger on your hand."
Richard Black spent 15 years as a science and environment correspondent for the BBC World Service and BBC News, before setting up the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. He now lives in Berlin and is the Director of Policy and Strategy at the global clean energy think tank Ember, which aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy. He is the author of The Future of Energy; Denied:The Rise and Fall of Climate Contrarianism, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London.
https://mhpbooks.com/books/the-future-of-energy
https://ember-climate.org/about/people/richard-black
https://ember-climate.org
www.therealpress.co.uk/?s=Richard+black
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“As a filmmaker, I've always made films about extraordinary women whose lives are faced with extenuating circumstances who've had adversity thrown at them and who've risen to the occasion. And when I began to look at Diane's story, for me, Diane is a fashion designer, but she's so much more. Her central ethos is woman before fashion, and we felt it was very important to take that ethos and weave it into the spine of our film, and make it about the woman.
In making this film, every single person who we called whose voice we wanted to include wanted to contribute. They wanted to say something about Diane, because she had left such a mark on their lives. Our producers’ jobs, Tracy and Fabiola, was to juggle those schedules. How do you juggle the schedule of secretary Hillary Clinton with Oprah Winfrey? How do you make sure that Anderson Cooper and Mark Jacobs, you know, in the filming time that we had, that we could put all of these people together? But Diane's friendships run deep with people, and people made sure to make time.
You know, she was a single mother, and I think that young single mothers watching this film will feel for Diane, especially single mothers who are trying to be entrepreneurs, and creating businesses, and trying to find their way into the world to be able to raise a family. To do that as an immigrant in a new country is challenging, and Diane shows you just how challenging it is. In making choices about living her life, in being with her children or expanding her business, there were sacrifices that were made, and those sacrifices are boldly put on the screen for viewers to watch.”
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is an Oscar and Emmy award-winning Canadian-Pakistani filmmaker whose work highlights extraordinary women and their stories. She earned her first Academy Award in 2012 for her documentary Saving Face, about the Pakistani women targeted by brutal acid attacks. Today, Obaid-Chinoy is the first female film director to have won two Oscars by the age of 37. In 2023, it was announced that Obaid-Chinoy will direct the next Star Wars film starring Daisy Ridley. Her most recent project, co-directed alongside Trish Dalton, is the new documentary Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge, about the trailblazing Belgian fashion designer who invented the wrap dress 50 years ago. The film had its world premiere as the opening night selection at the 2024 Tribeca Festival on June 5th and premiered on June 25th on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. A product of Obaid-Chinoy's incredibly talented female filmmaking team, Woman in Charge provides an intimate look into Diane von Fürstenberg’s life and accomplishments and chronicles the trajectory of her signature dress from an innovative fashion statement to a powerful symbol of feminism.
www.hulu.com/movie/diane-von-furstenberg-woman-in-charge-95fb421e-b7b1-4bfc-9bbf-ea666dba0b02
https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/diane-von-furstenberg-woman-in-charge/1jrpX9AhsaJ6
https://socfilms.com
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“I would like to preserve a real sense of empathy and humility, which comes with understanding that the world is messy, that people are messy, that defects and imperfections exist, that things don't always necessarily kind of go the way you want, even as much as you wish they could. Imperfection is part of life and I guess my concern is that AI-generated content, which smooths and perfects a version of reality to precisely what you want and forces you or makes you feel pressured to represent yourself in this absolutely perfect way, fundamentally gives you no room for error and kind of detaches you from the reality of growth and life and and how people work. Empathize with other people. Everyone has their challenges. Things don't always have to be exactly perfect to how you want them to be or how other people want them to be. And that involves having some humility about yourself as a messy creature, as we all are. I hope that's retained, but I do see this kind of move towards this sort of smoothed and shaped reality that AI is enabling, potentially creating more of a disconnect between that imperfect, messy, but also quite beautiful world. This sort of polished but ultimately plastic version of reality increasingly is becoming the default for some people over the kind of fleshy, messy human side of things.”
How is artificial intelligence redefining our perception of reality and truth? Can AI be creative? And how is it changing art and innovation? Does AI-generated perfection detach us from reality and genuine human connection?
Henry Ajder is an advisor, speaker, and broadcaster working at the frontier of the generative AI and the synthetic media revolution. He advises organizations on the opportunities and challenges these technologies present, including Adobe, Meta, The European Commission, BBC, The Partnership on AI, and The House of Lords. Previously, Henry led Synthetic Futures, the first initiative dedicated to ethical generative AI and metaverse technologies, bringing together over 50 industry-leading organizations. Henry presented the BBC documentary series, The Future Will be Synthesised.www.henryajder.com
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017cgr
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“One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”
Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.
https://leemcintyrebooks.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyre
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/
https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/
https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/
www.creativeprocess.info
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“I think as there is more automation, there is more kind of emphasis on this question of our choice. The story of the development of things tends to be what do humans decide that they care about? In what direction do they want to go? What kind of art do they want to make? What kinds of things do they want to think about? There is in the computational universe of all possibilities, there is sort of infinite creativity. There's an infinite collection of possibilities, but it's something that's a matter of human choice, which of these infinite things do we actually choose to pursue? There's all these different possibilities out there. But our kind of challenge is to decide in which direction we want to go and then to let our automated systems pursue those particular directions.”
Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. He received his PhD in theoretical physics at Caltech by the age of 20 and in 1981, became the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Wolfram authored A New Kind of Science and launched the Wolfram Physics Project. He has pioneered computational thinking and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.
www.stephenwolfram.com
www.wolfram.com
www.wolframalpha.com
www.wolframscience.com/nks/
www.amazon.com/dp/1579550088/ref=nosim?tag=turingmachi08-20
www.wolframphysics.org
www.wolfram-media.com/products/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/
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“There is magic everywhere. There's wonder everywhere. There's wondrous complexity that is so complex, so difficult to conceptualize, to grasp, to articulate that it might as well be magic for all intents and purposes, but we can gradually start to unpick how the tricks are done, how nature learned to do these wonderful tricks. And that's the wonder of science, gradually learning what's happening behind the scenes and how these marvelous effects are produced.
I'm probably best known for my work on consciousness. My view about this is often caricatured, I think, as a kind of heartless, materialist one, because I'm resistant to all forms of dualism about the mind. I think that's a very unhelpful way of thinking.
Some people think that I do that because I have a sort of crass materialist attitude to the world, that there's only things you can measure and weigh and bump into and everything else is just nonsense and fancy and different. What I like about the sort of view I have is that it represents us as fully part of the world, fully part of the same world. We're not sealed off into little private mental bubbles, Cartesian theaters, where all the real action is happening in here, not out there. No, I think we're much more engaged with the world… Another one of my heroes is Daniel Dennett's great friend, Nicholas Humphrey, who has a wonderfully rich range of experience. He's been described as a scientific humanist. What he does is he knows his science, including cognitive neuroscience and psychology, but he's also steeped in literature, art, music, and painting, and he brings all this together in his wonderful book on consciousness Soul Dust, published in 2011, suggests the idea that the soul is actually made of dust, which is a fantastic concept.”
Keith Frankish is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete. Frankish mainly works in the philosophy of mind and has published widely about topics such as human consciousness and cognition. Profoundly inspired by Daniel Dennett, Frankish is best known for defending an “illusionist” view of consciousness. He is also editor of Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness and co-edits, in addition to others, The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science.
www.keithfrankish.com
www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-cognitive-science/F9996E61AF5E8C0B096EBFED57596B42
www.imprint.co.uk/product/illusionism
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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“We and all living beings thrive by being actors in the planet’s regeneration, a civilizational goal that should commence and never cease. We practiced degeneration as a species and it brought us to the threshold of an unimaginable crisis. To reverse global warming, we need to reverse global degeneration.”
Can we really end the climate crisis in one generation? What kind of bold collective action, technologies, and nature-based solutions would it take to do it?
Paul Hawken is a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist committed to sustainability and transforming the business-environment relationship. A leading voice in the environmental movement, he has founded successful eco-friendly businesses, authored influential works on commerce and ecology, and advised global leaders on economic and environmental policies. As the founder of Project Regeneration and Project Drawdown, Paul leads efforts to identify and model solutions to reverse global warming, showcasing actionable strategies. His pioneering work in corporate ecological reform continues to shape a sustainable future. He is the author of eight books, including Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.
https://regeneration.org
https://paulhawken.com
https://drawdown.org
https://regeneration.org/nexus
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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“Living in California, I've just come to accept the unsettledness of this era we're moving into. And I think that's really how I see the future. You know, we're living in an era of disruption, and there are others I talk to and write about in the book who also muse about the possibility of a more nomadic future. That maybe home isn't a permanent place with deep roots but is a transient place with shallow roots or two places that you alternate between. In addition to a lot of other dramatic changes that the book is about, a change in our sense of home and our sense of place is a part of this story.”
Abrahm Lustgarten is an investigative reporter, author, and filmmaker whose work focuses on human adaptation to climate change. His 2010 Frontline documentary The Spill, which investigated BP’s company culture, was nominated for an Emmy. His 2015 longform series Killing the Colorado, about the draining of the Colorado river, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Lustgarten is a senior reporter at ProPublica, and contributes to publications like The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic. His research on climate migration influenced President Biden’s creation of a climate migration study group. This is also the topic of his newly published book, On The Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America in which he explores how climate change is uprooting American lives.
https://abrahm.com
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374171735/onthemove
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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“One of the things I think about a lot is this. I vividly remember the desire throughout pretty much most of my twenties and certainly my teen years to be a famous artist and win big awards. And when you dig down into what you actually want from that, it's connection. The teen brain, in particular, is extremely geared toward connection and gets different brain chemical payouts for different things than adults. So certainly, when I think of like teenagers, I think of that drive for connection and fitting in and being accepted is so strong. And that was a part of my artistic output or desire as well was like, okay, if I write, you know, something world-changing, like then it could be like a really well-regarded composer and get that respect. Or if I go more of the songwriting and film route, I can be beloved or have people love my music and have this emotional experience with my music. There were all these dreams that I had that I think largely boiled down to just wanting to be accepted. And you can get that outside of your career and outside of the arts.”
How can we learn to flourish because of who we are, not in spite of it? What is the sensory experience of the world for people with autism and ADHD? How can music help heal trauma and foster identity?
Mattia Maurée is an interdisciplinary composer whose work centers around themes of perception, body, sensation, trauma, and resilience. Their scores for critically acclaimed films have been played in 13 countries. Their poems have been featured in Boston City Hall as part of the Mayor's Poetry Program, Guerrilla Opera, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Mattia composes and performs on violin, voice, and piano, and has taught music for over 20 years. They have received a Master's of Music in Composition at New England Conservatory and a Bachelor's of Music from St. Olaf College. They also are an AUDHD coach, host the AuDHD Flourishing podcast and help other neurodivergent folks heal and find their creative flow in their course Love Your Brain.
http://mattiamauree.com
https://studio.com/mattia
https://mattiamauree.com/love-your-brain
https://www.audhdflourishing.com/hello
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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“I call myself an apocalyptic optimist. In other words, I do believe there is hope to save ourselves from the climate crisis that we have caused. However, I also believe that saving ourselves will only be possible with a mass mobilization that is driven by the pain and suffering of climate shocks around the world. A generalized sense of extreme risk can lead to peaceful and less-peaceful mass mobilizations at the levels needed to stimulate an AnthroShift. Only a global risk event (or numerous smaller events that are seen as threatening social and economic centers of power) will motivate the kind of massive social change that is needed. In other words, without a risk pivot—be it driven by social or environmental change—an AnthroShift that is large enough to respond adequately to the climate crisis and open a large enough window of opportunity postshock is improbable.
At this point, it is impossible to predict if such a shock will come from ecological disaster, war, pandemic, or another unforeseen risk. What is certain, though, is that without such a shock that motivates an AnthroShift large enough to reorient all the sectors of society to respond meaningfully to the climate crisis, it is hard to envision the world achieving the levels of climate action needed. Instead, the best we can hope for is incremental change that does not disrupt the dominant nodes of political and economic power; such incremental change has the potential to reduce the gravity of the crisis, but it will not stop the coming climate crisis.”
– Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action
Dana R. Fisher is the Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity and Professor in the School of International Service at American University. Fisher’s research focuses on questions related to democracy, civic engagement, activism, and climate politics. Current projects include studying political elites’ responses to climate change, and the ways federal service corps programs in the US are integrating climate into their work. She is a self-described climate-apocalyptic optimist and co-developed the framework of AnthroShift to explain how social actors are reconfigured in the aftermath of widespread perceptions and experiences of risk. Her seventh book is Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.
https://danarfisher.com
https://cece.american.edu
www.acc.gov
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“There’s a lot of greenwashing that's going on these days. It is great marketing. And that was really the reason why I wrote this book. I had started to see the patterns. You can start to tell them the companies that are genuinely doing it versus the companies that are just talking about it. So that was one indicator, you know, a company that would send out a press release about their goals and what they anticipated to do in the next 5 to 10 years was very different from companies who had said, you know what, this is what we've achieved. Regenerative started coming into the lexicon, the term in 2017, 2018. And regenerative means to regenerate, means to bring life into something. To sustain means to keep the status quo. And regenerative looks at things from a very holistic lens. You know, it's like if you're going to run a regenerative farm, it's all the different components of the farm and the ecosystem ideally come within the ecosystem.”
Esha Chhabra has written for national and international publications over the last 15 years, focusing on global development, the environment, and the intersection of business and impact. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and other publications. She is the author of Working to Restore: Harnessing the Power of Business to Heal the Earth.
www.eshachhabra.comwww.beacon.org/Working-to-Restore-P2081.aspx
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How can we ensure that AI is aligned with human values? What can AI teach us about human cognition and creativity?
Dr. Raphaël Millière is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of AI at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His research primarily explores the theoretical foundations and inner workings of AI systems based on deep learning, such as large language models. He investigates whether these systems can exhibit human-like cognitive capacities, drawing on theories and methods from cognitive science. He is also interested in how insights from studying AI might shed new light on human cognition. Ultimately, his work aims to advance our understanding of both artificial and natural intelligence.
“I'd like to focus more on the immediate harms that the kinds of AI technologies we have today might pose. With language models, the kind of technology that powers ChatGPT and other chatbots, there are harms that might result from regular use of these systems, and then there are harms that might result from malicious use. Regular use would be how you and I might use ChatGPT and other chatbots to do ordinary things. There is a concern that these systems might reproduce and amplify, for example, racist or sexist biases, or spread misinformation. These systems are known to, as researchers put it, “hallucinate” in some cases, making up facts or false citations. And then there are the harms from malicious use, which might result from some bad actors using the systems for nefarious purposes. That would include disinformation on a mass scale. You could imagine a bad actor using language models to automate the creation of fake news and propaganda to try to manipulate voters, for example. And this takes us into the medium term future, because we're not quite there, but another concern would be language models providing dangerous, potentially illegal information that is not readily available on the internet for anyone to access. As they get better over time, there is a concern that in the wrong hands, these systems might become quite powerful weapons, at least indirectly, and so people have been trying to mitigate these potential harms.”
https://raphaelmilliere.com
https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/raphael-milliere
www.creativeprocess.info
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“Bookselling captured my imagination and my heart as soon as I started working at the bookstore because I could see the potential for this great, amazing community-oriented work. Of course, it's a thrill to be around books, to meet authors, to read all this stuff, and to spend all day with people who love books, but what I think I really fell in love with was the sense of community, the people behind it, and the way a bookstore can really be an engine for positive social change within its community and in a broader sense as well. My whole nonfiction book project started with a tweet thread. It was about how every bookseller has to be prepared to have this discussion: a customer comes in, and they're like, this book is 50 percent off on Amazon. Why should I buy it here? So, I don't think about it quite as withholding from Amazon as much as contributing to these local community-oriented businesses.
The thing that unites my poetry and the nonfiction writing is my main obsession as a writer. It's the question of, how do you live meaningfully in late capitalism? As corporations and global capitalist forces take over the world, what does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life? I think the proliferation of objects might reflect that. A lot of what we do in this world is collect objects, and regardless of whether it's good or bad, you build a nest. I think that in Picture Window in particular, I wanted to write about the domestic in a way that I hadn't written in so far. And then the pandemic happened, so I was forced into this weird, uneasy, claustrophobic domesticity. When your attention is so focused within your own home and within your own family, every object in your house takes on a new resonance. So, when a tennis ball that you've never seen somehow shows up in your house, that's weird. It's poetic. It feels dreamlike.”
Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the books How to Protect Bookstores and Why and How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, Lit Hub, Diagram, HAD, and Barrelhouse. He's a co-owner of The Raven Bookstore, Publisher's Weekly's 2022 Bookstore of the Year.
www.dannycaine.com
www.ravenbookstore.com
www.creativeprocess.info
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“It gets back to this core question. I just wish I was a young scientist going into this because that's the question to answer: Why AI comes out with what it does. That's the burning question. It's like it's bigger than the origin of the universe to me as a scientist, and here's the reason why. The origin of the universe, it happened. That's why we're here. It's almost like a historical question asking why it happened. The AI future is not a historical question. It's a now and future question.
I'm a huge optimist for AI, actually. I see it as part of that process of climbing its own mountain. It could do wonders for so many areas of science, medicine. When the car came out, the car initially is a disaster. But you fast forward, and it was the key to so many advances in society. I think it's exactly the same as AI. The big challenge is to understand why it works. AI existed for years, but it was useless. Nothing useful, nothing useful, nothing useful. And then maybe last year or something, now it's really useful. There seemed to be some kind of jump in its ability, almost like a shock wave. We're trying to develop an understanding of how AI operates in terms of these shockwave jumps. Revealing how AI works will help society understand what it can and can't do and therefore remove some of this dark fear of being taken over. If you don't understand how AI works, how can you govern it? To get effective governance, you need to understand how AI works because otherwise you don't know what you're going to regulate.”
How can physics help solve messy, real world problems? How can we embrace the possibilities of AI while limiting existential risk and abuse by bad actors?
Neil Johnson is a physics professor at George Washington University. His new initiative in Complexity and Data Science at the Dynamic Online Networks Lab combines cross-disciplinary fundamental research with data science to attack complex real-world problems. His research interests lie in the broad area of Complex Systems and ‘many-body’ out-of-equilibrium systems of collections of objects, ranging from crowds of particles to crowds of people and from environments as distinct as quantum information processing in nanostructures to the online world of collective behavior on social media. https://physics.columbian.gwu.edu/neil-johnson https://donlab.columbian.gwu.edu
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“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”
Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
www.bengoldfarb.com
https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896
www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperback
www.creativeprocess.info
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“Philosophy is both an academic discipline and also something that everybody does. Everybody has to have reflective views about what's significant. They also have to justify to themselves why it's significant or important. The nature of justice itself, and the various opinions that have been written about in philosophy about justice, can get to a very high level. So there's this unusual connection between philosophy and human life. We've inherited from the Middle Ages, this incredible tradition that's now developed into a chance for young people to spend four or five years, in a way, released from the pressures of life. The idea to pursue your ideas a little further in these four years you have, exempt from the pressures of social life, allows philosophy to have a kind of position unique in the academy. In confronting what the best minds in the history of the world have had to say about these issues, the hope is that they provide for the people who are privileged enough to confront philosophy a better and more thoughtful approach to these fundamental questions that everybody has to confront.”
What is the importance of philosophy in the 21st century as we enter a post-truth world? How can we reintroduce meaning and uphold moral principles in our world shaken by crises? And what does philosophy teach us about living in harmony with the natural world?
Robert Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago where he teaches in the College, Committee on Social Thought, and Department of Philosophy. Pippin is widely acclaimed for his scholarship in German idealism as well as later German philosophy, including publications such as Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, and Hegel’s Idealism. In keeping with his interdisciplinary interests, Pippin’s book Henry James and Modern Moral Life explores the intersections between philosophy and literature. Pippin’s most recent published book is The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy.
https://socialsciences.uchicago.edu/directory/Robert-Pippin
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo208042246.html
www.creativeprocess.info
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“We've got four billion years of biological accidents that created all of the intricate aspects of everything about life, including consciousness. And it's about what's going on in each of those cells at the time that allows it to be connected to everything else and for the information to be understood as it's being exchanged between those things with their multifaceted, deep, complex processing.”
Joseph LeDoux is a Professor of Neural Science at New York University at NYU and was Director of the Emotional Brain Institute. His research primarily focuses on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions, such as fear and anxiety. He has written a number of books in this field, including The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human, The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, Anxious, and The Deep History of Ourselves. LeDoux is also the lead singer and songwriter of the band The Amygdaloids.
www.joseph-ledoux.com
www.cns.nyu.edu/ebi
https://amygdaloids.net
www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674261259
www.creativeprocess.info
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“The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state. This is a metaphor for people who travel. I came up with the idea for this novel in 2009 when I was an Indonesian international student studying for my PHD in New York. When I went back to Jakarta, I felt like I was not at home, but New York wasn't my home either, so there's a feeling of being neither here nor there. I wanted to capture the sense of being everywhere, which is liberating, but also the sense of displacement.”
Intan Paramaditha is a writer and an academic. Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK), translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, English PEN Translates Award, and PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short story collection Apple and Knife, the editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series of Tilted Axis Press and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (forthcoming 2024). Her essay, “On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel,” was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.
https://intanparamaditha.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/626055/the-wandering-by-intan-paramaditha/9781787301184
www.creativeprocess.info
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Environmentalists, writers, artists, activists, and public policy makers explore the interconnectedness of living beings and ecosystems. They highlight the importance of conservation, promote climate education, advocate for sustainable development, and underscore the vital role of creative and educational communities in driving positive change.
00:00 "The Conditional" by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón
01:27 The Secret Language of Animals: Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA
03:03 A Love Letter to the Living World: Carl Safina, Ecologist & Author
04:11 Exploring the Mysteries of Soil and Coral Reefs: Merlin Sheldrake, Biologist, Author of Entangled Life
04:47 Exploring Coral Reefs: Richard Vevers, Founder of The Ocean Agency
05:56 The Importance of Climate Education: Kathleen Rogers, President of EarthDay.org
07:02 The Timeless Wisdom of Turtles: Sy Montomery, Naturalist & Author
07:38 Optimism in the Face of Environmental Challenges: Richard Vevers
08:32 Urban Solutions for a Sustainable Future: Paula Pinho, Director, Just Transition, Consumers, Energy Efficiency & Innovation, European Commission
08:57 The Circular Economy: Walter Stahel, Founder & Director of the Product-Life Institute
09:39 The Power of Speaking Out for Sustainability: Paula Pinho
10:16 Empowering the Next Generation Through Education: Jeffrey Sachs, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
www.creativeprocess.info
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www.maxrichtermusic.com
https://studiorichtermahr.com
Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.
Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.
“As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.”
How is being an artist different than a machine that is programmed to perform a set of actions? How can we stop thinking about artworks as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences? In this conversation with Max Cooper, we discuss the beauty and chaos of nature and the exploration of technology music and consciousness.
Max Cooper is a musician with a PhD in computational biology. He integrates electronic music with immersive video projections inspired by scientific exploration. His latest project, Seme, commissioned by the Salzburg Easter Festival, merges Italian musical heritage with contemporary techniques, was also performed at the Barbican in London.
He supplied music for a video narrated by Greta Thunberg and Pope Francis for COP26.
In 2016, Cooper founded Mesh, a platform to explore the intersection of music, science and art. His Observatory art-house installation is on display at Kings Cross until May 1st.
https://maxcooper.net
https://osterfestspiele.at/en/programme/2024/electro-2024
https://meshmeshmesh.net
www.kingscross.co.uk/event/the-observatory
The music featured on this episode was Palestrina Sicut, Cardano Circles, Fibonacci Sequence, Scarlatti K141. Music is from Seme and is courtesy of Max Cooper.
www.creativeprocess.info
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"I want to be wowed by the world. I want to gaze at it in awe and wonder. And I think when we take a step back and begin to appreciate the complexity of the interactions around us. We're taking note of a very porous between the self and the rest of the world. We are literally observing our enmeshment in our environment. And it's that kind of a reference frameshift that I think is going to help us move out of some of the darkness. My mother is an artist, and I think growing up surrounded by her practice exposed me to the creative process and is probably that which afforded me a certain sympathy for those tools and those modes of exploring the world later in life."
Clayton Page Aldern is an award winning neuroscientist turned environmental journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Economist, and Grist, where he is a senior data reporter. A Rhodes Scholar, he holds a Master's in Neuroscience and a Master's in Public Policy from the University of Oxford. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. He is the author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains, and Bodies, which explores the neurobiological impacts of rapid environmental change.
https://claytonaldern.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717097/the-weight-of-nature-by-clayton-page-aldern
https://csde.washington.edu
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"Right from the beginning, in talking with Park Chan-wook, we wanted this sort of multiplicity of narrative voices and devices. In a way, it's about how the story, in this case of the Vietnam War, has been told, what the expected story is, at least, for American viewers, which they may mainly know through the movies and through visual representations. And it's how our lead character, The Captain, who is writing the story, who has divided loyalties. How can we capture the contradictions within that story? And we tried to make that complexity part of the actual fabric of the show."
Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner.
He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook.
www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph
www.imdb.com/title/tt14404618/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_the%20sympa
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Photo courtesy of HBO
"We ended on such a cliffhanger with Isaac presenting the wrench at the police station to Jeff Daniels' character. It allowed us to sort of start from a place of what's going to happen next? And I think because what is drawn in the novel and because of what Danny brought into the original script of the first season and all the ideas he brought in. The biggest thing we talked about was the relationship between Del Harris and Grace Poe and what is the ambiguity there? And I think when, when you start answering questions on either side of that too firmly, I think it allows the audience to disconnect from it and then they go, Oh, he's a monster, or she's a monster. And then you just have this sort of a good and bad guy, good and bad woman narrative that is oversimplified all too often in our culture."
"It felt to me like a lot of the drive of season two is about payback. There are people who feel they're owed things. They want payback. There are people who feel like they have to get back at people because they've been wronged in some way. In a way, every character has something, some way that they're trying to right the wrong that was done to them or that they did in the first season. Jeff Daniel's character, Del Harris, is really driven by trying to right what he sees as wrongs that he did in the first season. And he's staying a little bit away from Grace because he doesn't know how much to blame her or how much were his own decisions or how much she kind of drove him to do things. So that was fun to explore."
Dan Futterman is creator, executive producer, and writer of Amazon Prime's American Rust, the acclaimed crime drama starring Jeff Daniels, Maura Tierney, and David Alvarez. Previously, Dan has written screenplays for Capote, Foxcatcher, In Treatment, and Gracepoint. He served as executive producer on The Looming Tower. Dan is also an actor, director, and two-time Oscar nominee.
Adam Rapp is the executive producer and writer of American Rust. He has written plays, films, and series, including Red Light Winter, The Sound Inside, In Treatment, Blackbird, The Looming Tower, and Dexter: New Blood. His latest novel is Wolf at the Table. He recently wrote the book for the new Broadway musical, The Outsiders.
www.imdb.com/name/nm0001246
www.imdb.com/name/nm1452688/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
www.imdb.com/title/tt1532495/
https://outsidersmusical.com/
www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-rapp/wolf-at-the-table/9780316434164/?lens=little-brown
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“What I think will stay with you for an entire lifetime is to be equipped with the capacity and the tools to find wonder in the world. And that is to find a language for that world, which is supplied through a folk tale, mythology, literature, poetry, and song. And then to also to have the kind of knowledge basis. I still think we suffer from this terrible division between the humanities and the sciences. These two worlds are sundered. I think we need to bring them together. Anybody who has for a moment studied the operations of photosynthesis in a plan or capillary action in trees is just astonished by the miracle of these operations. So I think we need to infuse a kind of a syncretic knowledge, but that would have as its central or its core point of value a rediscovery of wonder in the world. And of course, a world that you wonder at is a world that you cherish and a world that you cherish is a world that you want to preserve. And that, I think, is our only hope.”
Michael Cronin is an Irish academic specialist in culture, travel literature, translation studies, and the Irish language. He has taught in universities in France and Ireland and has held visiting research fellowships to universities in Canada, Belgium, Peru, France, and Egypt. He's a fellow of Trinity College Dublin, an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a senior researcher in the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. He is the current holder of the Chair of French (est. 1776) at TCD. He is the author of Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene, Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene, and other books.
www.tcd.ie/French/people/michaelcronin.php
www.cambridge.org/core/books/ecotravel/24263DF8E2E021915FEF4F937F146D25
www.routledge.com/Eco-Translation-Translation-and-Ecology-in-the-Age-of-the-Anthropocene/Cronin/p/book/9781138916845
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Dustin O’Halloran is a pianist and composer and member of the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen. Winner of a 2015 Emmy Award for his main title theme to Amazon's comedy drama Transparent, he was also nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA for his score for Lion, written in collaboration with Volker Bertelmann (aka Hauschka). He has composed for Wayne McGregor (The Royal Ballet, London), Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Ammonite starring Kate Winslet, and The Essex Serpent starring Claire Danes. He produced Katy Perry’s “Into Me You See” from her album Witness and appears on Leonard Cohen’s 2019 posthumous album Thanks For The Dance. With six solo albums under his name, his latest album 1 0 0 1, which explores ideas of technology, humanity and mind-body dualism, is available on Deutsche Grammophon.
"The album 1 0 0 1 is really like a journey from our connection with nature to where we are now, in this moment where we're playing with technology. We're almost in this hybrid space, not fully understanding where it's going. And it's very deep in our subconscious and probably much greater than we realize. And it sort of ends in this space where the consciousness of what we're creating, it's going to be very separate from us. And I believe that's kind of where it's heading – the idea of losing humanity, losing touch with nature and becoming outside of something that we have created."
https://dustinohalloran.com/
www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/artists/dustin-o-halloran
www.imdb.com/name/nm0641169/bio/?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
Music courtesy of Dustin O’Halloran and Deutsche Grammophon
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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Jeffrey Rosen is President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He is the author of seven previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law. His essays and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; on NPR; in The New Republic, where he was the legal affairs editor; and in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer. His latest book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
https://constitutioncenter.org/about/board-of-trustees/jeffrey-rosen
www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Pursuit-of-Happiness/Jeffrey-Rosen/9781668002476
https://constitutioncenter.org/news-debate/podcasts
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"For years, people spoke about how awkward or embarrassing it was to perform the intimate content. And what they're speaking about is feeling horrible. If something's awkward, that squirm, that ring in the body, it feels embarrassing. That's actually an emotion that is not professional. That is not allowing the actor to stay feeling listened to, heard, empowered, autonomous. And so that they can just get on without any of those concerns and do their job to their best ability. And that's the awareness that we brought. So, we're saying, it is not suitable in our workplace for anybody to feel harassed or abused.
The awareness in the industry, with acknowledging the injury from all those who came forward around the Weinstein allegations is the injury of when someone's coerced into doing something or that their career being threatened is emotional, psychological injury. It's really clear if you've got a stunt and someone's going to be jumping from roof to roof, they might fall down the cracks and break an ankle. Of course, the producers need to mitigate that risk and put in place everything so that the risk that you can perceive might happen is mitigated."
Ita O’Brien is the UK’s leading Intimacy Coordinator, founder of Intimacy on Set (and author of the Intimacy On Set Guidelines). Her company, set up in 2018 provides services to TV, film, and theatre when dealing with intimacy, and is a SAG-Aftra accredited training provider of Intimacy Practitioners. Intimacy on Set has supported numerous high-profile film and TV productions including Normal People & Conversations With Friends (BBC3/Hulu), Sex Education 1&2 (Netflix), I May Destroy You (BBC/HBO), It’s A Sin (Channel 4), (Neal Street Prods / Searchlight Pictures).
https://www.itaobrien.com/
https://www.itaobrien.com/intimacy-on-set-guidelines.html
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1357677/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"A friend had asthma as a child, and she couldn't have a pet, but she loved animals. So she watched the ants crawl on the asphalt roof of her apartment when she was a kid. And she is a biologist now who studies tree kangaroos in Papua New Guinea, but it all started with watching ants. So there is wildness and wonder all around us and we can all help preserve that wildness and wonder.
It makes a human feel less lonely. So many humans I know, they're just suffering terribly from loneliness even though they're in a sea of other humans. Well, I never feel lonely. And I can be alone, so-called, in a landscape with no other human anywhere, and I feel nested and safe and at home. And I know you do, too, because there are all these other lives around us. And when you think of, as Mary Oliver said, 'our wild and precious life,' I mean, I certainly cherish my one precious single life. But the life with a capital L all around me is so much more precious and so much more glorious, and being part of that just opens up my soul and frees me from everything."
Author Sy Montgomery and illustrator Matt Patterson are naturalists, adventurers, and creative collaborators. Montgomery has published over thirty acclaimed nonfiction books for adults and children and received numerous honors, including lifetime achievement awards from the Humane Society and the New England Booksellers Association.
Patterson’s illustrations have been featured in several books and magazines, such as Yankee Magazine and Fine Art Connoisseur. He is the recipient of Roger Tory Peterson Wild American Art Award, National Outdoor Book Award for Nature and the Environment, and other honors. Most recently, Patterson provided illustrations for Freshwater Fish of the Northeast.
Their joint books are Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell and The Book of the Turtle. Montgomery’s other books include The Soul of an Octopus, The Hawk’s Way and The Secrets of the Octopus (published in conjunction with a National Geographic TV series).
www.mpattersonart.com
https://symontgomery.com
www.harpercollins.com/products/of-time-and-turtles-sy-montgomery?variant=41003864817698
www.harpercollins.com/products/the-book-of-turtles-sy-montgomery?variant=40695888609314
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/F/bo215806915.html
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"If you want to check in and get some clarity on what you believe, I tell people, well, just write something really honest and emotionally naked and read it back to yourself, and you'll see a lot of what you believe, think, fear, regret, desire, etc.
We always reveal ourselves in our work. The truth is, I identify far more with those on the outside than on the inside. And even though from the outside it looks like I'm on the inside – you know, I'm a successful author, professor, white, privileged, educated, straight male from the United States – you can't get more privileged than that in a patriarchal, misogynistic, racist society. But I don't identify with those people. And I don't know if it's because of my youth or just how I am in the world. When you read that passage from Ghost Dogs back to me about my hatred of all those things. That hatred for those kinds of injustices has never left me. In fact, they've just grown sharper."
Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies. His novel, House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His most recent books are the novel, Such Kindness and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin.
Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
www.andredubus.com
www.andredubus.com/ghost-dogs
www.andredubus.com/house-of-sand-and-fog
www.andredubus.com/such-kindness
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"In a lot of regions of the world, ecology has started to be a hostage of political parties. You have the left wing, which takes ecology as its flagship. You have the right wing, which is fighting against ecology because they want to fight against the left wing, and they use all the arguments of ecology to destroy ecology. It's very strange that the people who want to protect the environment are not able to make their cause much more appealing. This is what I try to do with the new narrative of the Solar Impulse Foundation: to show the opportunities more than the risks. To show the solutions more than the problems."
Bertrand Piccard is a notable Swiss environmentalist, explorer, author, and psychiatrist. His ventures include being the first to travel around the world in a non-stop balloon flight and years later in a solar-powered airplane. He is regarded as a pioneer in clean technology. Piccard is also the founder of the Solar Impulse Foundation, which has identified over 1500 actionable and profitable climate solutions and connects them with investors. As a UN Ambassador for the Environment, his goal is to convince leaders of the viability of a zero-carbon economy, which he will demonstrate via his next emission-free project Climate Impulse, a green hydrogen-powered airplane that can fly nonstop around the earth.
"In a lot of regions of the world, ecology has started to be a hostage of political parties. You have the left wing, which takes ecology as its flagship. You have the right wing, which is fighting against ecology because they want to fight against the left wing, and they use all the arguments of ecology to destroy ecology. It's very strange that the people who want to protect the environment are not able to make their cause much more appealing. This is what I try to do with the new narrative of the Solar Impulse Foundation: to show the opportunities more than the risks. To show the solutions more than the problems."
http://www.solarimpulse.com
https://climateimpulse.org/
https://bertrandpiccard.com/
Photos:
Bertrand Piccard with Ilham Kadri, CEO Syensqo (main technological partner of Climate Impulse)
Bertrand Piccard @ Solar Impulse, Jean Revillard
“This book is not just about Neanderthals. It's a book about us. I wanted to warn humans, to say there is something in us that is so efficient and dangerous. We've effectively collapsed many things and are now inducing the collapse of natural environments on the planet. And after that, we might even cause the collapse of ourselves as Homo sapiens.”
Ludovic Slimak is a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toulouse in France and Director of the Grotte Mandrin research project. His work focuses on the last Neanderthal societies, and he is the author of several hundred scientific studies on these populations. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, the New York Times, and other publications. He is the author of The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature.
http://ww5.pegasusbooks.com/books/the-naked-neanderthal-9781639366163-hardcover
https://lampea.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article3767
www.odilejacob.fr/catalogue/sciences-humaines/archeologie-paleontologie-prehistoire/dernier-neandertalien_9782415004927.php
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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"So, to be able to develop an ecological mind, one must be ecological minded and really understand what it means to be interdependent and interconnected. So that brings together every kind of species we can think of, and we need to filter this way of thinking because when we are in a natural environment, we feel energized and uplifted. But how long does it last? And what do we do with it? To me, ecological mindedness, the topic of ECHIC (European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres) is exactly this: being committed, developing a commitment towards the environment and towards well-being. It's only when we are really interdependent that we can thrive. And this was the core of this conference from various perspectives in an attempt to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue."
Paola Spinozzi is Professor of English Literature at the University of Ferrara and currently serves as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Internationalisation. She is the coordinator of the PhD Programme in Environmental Sustainability and Wellbeing and the co-coordinator of Routes towards Sustainability. Her research encompasses the ecological humanities and ecocriticism, utopia and sustainability; literature and the visual arts; literature and science; cultural memory. She has co-edited Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies and published on post/apocalyptic and climate fiction, nature poetry, eco-theatre; art and aesthetics, imperialism and evolutionism in utopia as a genre; the writing of science; interart creativity.
https://docente.unife.it/paola.spinozzi https://www.unife.it/studenti/dottorato/it/corsi/riforma/environmental-sustainability-and-wellbeing
https://www.routesnetwork.net
https://www.routledge.com/Cultures-of-Sustainability-and-Wellbeing-Theories-Histories-and-Policies/Spinozzi-Mazzanti/p/book/9780367271190.
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"I have always thrown myself into everything, and that includes terrible things because I want to have the whole experience. Even if I know it's going to hurt for better or for worse, that has been how I've lived my life. And so it's given me a lot of information and allowed me to play a lot of different roles and understand a lot of different points of view.
I'm the kind of person who – I don't do well in lectures - I don't like sitting for a very long time, but if I can listen while I'm drawing or painting, then I will actually retain more of what I'm hearing because it's connected now to what I've actually made while I'm listening to it. When I look at my paintings, I remember what I was reading at each section of the painting, so that's the way my brain works. And I think a lot of people who are creative, that's the way their brain works, where we need to develop one skill in order to develop another. And using your imagination is key to all of it."
From her role as Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the hit Fox series House M.D, to her starring role as Abby McCarthy in Bravo's first scripted series Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce, Lisa Edelstein's range of roles are as diverse talent. Some of Edelstein's feature credits include Keeping the Faith, What Women Want, Daddy Daycare, As Good as It Gets, and Fathers and Sons. She played a Holocaust survivor and adopted mother in the drama television series Little Bird. The story centres on a First Nations woman who was adopted into a Jewish family during the Sixties Scoop, as she attempts to reconnect with her birth family and heritage.
Lisa’s career began by writing, composing, and performing an original AIDS awareness musical Positive Me at the renowned La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City. In the wake of COVID, Lisa began to paint using old family photographs as starting points. Her incredibly detailed paintings capture intimate relationships and spontaneous moments with honesty and compassion.
https://lisaedelstein.komi.io/
www.lisaedelsteinpaintings.com/
www.imdb.com/name/nm0249046
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Artworks:
“Beach Day”, “Marsha”, “Karen” Courtesy of the Artist
Lisa Edelstein in the Studio
Photo credit: Holland Clement, Courtesy of the artist
The Making of Moon Man“So, as we started talking and going through what this could look like. I run a creator-owned superhero universe at Image Comics called the Massive-Verse, which is spearheaded by the main book I write called Radiant Black. I like to describe it as it's like Power Rangers with adult problems. It's very contemporary kind of reimaginings of superhero storytelling for the 2020s. So in that context, talking about what any type of new superhero and, in this case, what a new black superhero in 2024 could look like, what the threats would be, what the world might look like if it's maybe not even five minutes in the future. I would argue it's like two and a half minutes in the future. And then what kind of really complex, emotionally layered journey we could put this character through?”
Kyle Higgins is an Eisner award-nominated #1 New York Times best-selling comic book author and award-winning filmmaker known for his work on DC Comics’ Batman titles as well as his critically-acclaimed reinventions of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers for Boom! Studios/Hasbro, Ultraman for Marvel Comics, and his creator-owned series Radiant Black, NO/ONE and Deep Cuts for Image Comics. Kyle is the founder and creative director of Black Market Narrative and The Massive-Verse.
Karina Manashil is the President of MAD SOLAR. After graduating from Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production, she began her career in the mailroom at WME where she became a Talent Agent. In 2020, she partnered with Scott Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to found MAD SOLAR. Its first release was the documentary “A Man Named Scott” (Amazon), and she then went on to Executive Produce Ti West trilogy “X,” “Pearl” and “MaXXXine” (A24). Manashil received an Emmy nomination as an Executive Producer on the Netflix animated event “Entergalactic." She also produced the Mescudi/Kyle Higgins comic book “Moon Man” which launched through Image Comics. She is next producing the upcoming Mescudi/Sam Levinson/The Lucas Bros film “HELL NAW” (Sony) and the animated feature “Slime” from auteur animator Jeron Braxton.
moonmancomics.com
https://imagecomics.com
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3556462/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Audio of Scott Mescudi courtesy of Mad Solar and Moon Man Comic Book Release and Revenge Of (Eagle Rock, CA, Jan 31, 2024)
"Climate change gives us a chance to re-imagine the world in a way that every single human being can participate in. And so whether you're in a remote part of the United States or some other country, when you learn about climate change, it shouldn't just be the science. It should be the opportunity." –Kathleen Rogers
Excerpts of interviews from One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process.
Voices on this episode are:
KATHLEEN ROGERS
President of EarthDay.ORG
POORVA JOSHIPURA
Senior VP, PETA UK - Author of Survival at Stake: How Our Treatment of Animals is Key to Human Existence
DAVID FENTON
Founder of Fenton Communications - Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator
BRITT WRAY
Author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis
Researcher Working on Climate Change & Mental Health, Stanford University
DR. FARHANA SULTANA
Co-author: Water Politics: Governance, Justice & the Right to Water
Fmr. UNDP Programme Officer, United Nations Development Programme
ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON
Icelandic Writer & Documentary Filmmaker
Author of On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Not Ok
THOMAS CROWTHER
Ecologist - Co-chair of the Board for UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration - Founder of Restor
DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR
Fmr. European Chair for Sustainable Development & Climate Transition - Sciences Po
PAULA PINHO
Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy
ARMOND COHEN
Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force
MAYA K. VAN ROSSUM
Founder of Green Amendments For The Generations - Delaware Riverkeeper
Author of The Green Amendment: The People's Fight for a Clean, Safe, and Healthy Environment
Max Richter’s music featured in this episode:
“Spring 1” from The New Four Seasons – Vivaldi Recomposed
“Vladimir’s Blues” from The Blue NotebooksMusic is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises,
and Mute Song.
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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Photo courtesy of Unsplash
Photo credit: Valdemaras D.
“The natural world has its own sonic language. Its own fingerprints. And that's one of the beautiful things about being out here. There is another acoustic environment, another sort of sonic fingerprint, and it is always changing. Every day is a sort of a different sound picture. I walk out the door and you do hear it changing over time. The leaves are coming in now, different kinds of bird song. The wind sounds different. It's a wonderful thing to be around and experience.” —Max Richter
Excerpts of interviews from One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process
SY MONTGOMERY
NYTimes Bestselling Author of Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell, Secrets of the Octopus, The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty, and other books
MAX RICHTER
Award-winning Composer, Pianist & Environmentalist (The Blue Notebooks, Waltz with Bashir, Arrival, Ad Astra) His album SLEEP is the most streamed classical record of all time. Cofounder of Studio Richter Mahr
MERLIN SHELDRAKE
Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021
THOMAS CROWTHER
Ecologist - Co-chair of the Board for UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration - Founder of Restor
TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE
Founder/Host of First Voices Radio - Master Musician of the Ancient Lakota Flute
ERLAND COOPER
Nature’s Songwriter - Composer of “Folded Landscapes”
RICK BASS
Environmentalist & Story Prize Award-winning Author of “Why I Came West”, “For a Little While” - Fmr. Geologist - Organizer of Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest
PETER SINGER
“Most Influential Living Philosopher” - Author, Founder of The Life You Can Save
KATHLEEN ROGERS
President of EarthDay.ORG
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
www.maxrichtermusic.com
https://studiorichtermahr.com
Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.
Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.
Photos courtesy of Unsplash
Photo credit: Kyle Johnson, Sebastian Unrau, Abner abiu Castillo diaz, Deepak Nautiyal
"I wanted to both look at the kind of vast, rich tapestry of spiritually adjacent practices among millennials and younger people, particularly in the unaffiliated world, but more broadly, what is the underlying ideology underpinning it all? This idea that religion is something for us because the goal of religion is to make us live our best lives, and it doesn't matter, which is the sort of shadow side of this, if it's true or not. If it's real or not. What matters is if it 'works for you.'"
Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity, to be published by Convergent in late 2025. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, Granta, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
www.taraisabellaburton.com
www.simonandschuster.com/books/Here-in-Avalon/Tara-Isabella-Burton/9781982170097?fbclid=IwAR30lnvlXMrDJtCq_568jUM3hvzr6yUz_GUUZSkbR2RarreOF6PMcvhabBg
www.amazon.com/dp/B07W56MQLJ/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=strange+rites+tara+isabella+burton&qid=1565365017&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmr0
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Microplastics and nanoplastic pollution are currently blanketing the planet. They are in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink, infiltrating our bodies and even brains and human embryos. Coca-Cola alone sells 100 billion+ single-use plastic bottles each year, ending up in landfills and the ocean. Earth’s population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2050. Two-thirds of humans will become city dwellers. Our waste will drive a mounting worldwide crisis.
Highlights from our interview with Kathleen Rogers, the President of EarthDay.org. The full episode will be published next week.
Planet vs. Plastics
Sign The Global Plastic Treaty Petition
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"I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from."
Alan Poul is an Emmy, Golden Globe, DGA, and Peabody Award-winning producer and director of film and television. He is Executive Producer and Director on the Max Original drama series Tokyo Vice, written by Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers and starring Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe, as an American journalist in Japan and his police detective mentor. Poul is perhaps best known for producing all five seasons of HBO's Six Feet Under, all four of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City miniseries, My So-Called Life, The Newsroom, Swingtown, and The Eddy, which he developed with director Damien Chazelle. His feature film producing credits include Paul Schrader's Mishima and Light of Day, and Ridley Scott's Black Rain.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0693561
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2887954/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"My intention was to write about my experiences, obviously, but also I felt that there was a little bit of a counterintuitive approach, which is to talk about some of the inner experiences of the creative process and being a director, being a writer, and I felt that that would open the window a little bit wider. I liked that it wasn't just a behind-the-scenes look. It is that, and I think it's full of fun anecdotes and little reveals, but it is to be a real book. It presumes to be a memoir, like many of the memoirs that I have loved of creative people in the past."
Ed Zwick is a writer, director, and producer who's been active in the film industry for over 40 years. He has been nominated for two Golden Globes for directing the films Glory and Legends of the Fall and received an Academy Award as one of the producers of Shakespeare in Love. Zwick continues to work with his longtime friend and partner, Marshall Herskovitz, at their company Bedford Falls, where they created the widely loved TV show Thirtysomething. His memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions details many of his greatest experiences in the film industry.
www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Ed-Zwick/212290077
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001880/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"I wrote Survival at Stake because I've been working in animal rights for nearly the past 25 years. Throughout that time, one common question has been asked: Well, shouldn't we deal with human issues first. But animal rights are human rights. Animal rights is environmentalism. These things are not distinct. And that's the point I was really trying to make in my book. I was inspired to write it because of the COVID-19 crisis. It just brings us back to the point of why it is so important to teach people, young people, and young men the importance of being kind to everyone, animals included. If you teach them that, I think the other lessons start to much more automatically transfer over."
Poorva Joshipura is PETA U.K. Senior Vice President. She is the Author of Survival at Stake: How Our Treatment of Animals is Key to Human Existence and For a Moment of Taste: How What You Eat Impacts Animals, the Planet and Your Health.
https://usw2.nyl.as/t1/24/2jdwp5ogezjqb5wxg76eqfqeq/0/14474d94f4e832cd573ffc39be471e57616314b12314a26ca7dd9c2bbf559ac0
www.harpercollins.com/products/for-a-moment-of-taste-poorva-joshipura?variant=39399505592354
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"What are you trying to do with the portrait? On a basic level, you're trying to communicate something about the essence of who someone is. You're trying to figure out who they are, not necessarily who they present themselves as. The two things can quite often be different. And then, you're trying to find ways of showing that through their face, their posture, or any other context. My instinct is always to try to reduce down to the essential elements. We read faces. It's obviously very, very deep in our DNA, really our survival instinct. We are programmed to read faces in a very fine-tuned way.
Painting is a two-dimensional thing. You're basically taking real, three-dimensional things and making them into fake, two-dimensional ones. When you get into the 3D space, some of those distinctions aren't there anymore. I remember when I showed David Hockney the VR project I'd been working on a few years ago, and he put his finger on this quite well. Most art is about perspective. Certainly, for what he is interested in. As soon as you see something in 3D, whether it's a physical sculpture or a virtual object, that's not there anymore because you're in the space with whatever's being shown, so you're in a very different place."
Jonathan Yeo is one of the world’s leading figurative artists and portrait painters. From celebrated figures such as Sir David Attenborough, peace activist Malala Yousafzai, the Duke of Edinburgh, Nicole Kidman, and Tony Blair, sitting for a portrait with Yeo is a provisional necessity for any 21st century icon. His work, which has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, is the subject of several major mid-career retrospectives in the UK and internationally. Yeo’s course on portrait painting is available now on BBC Maestro.
www.jonathanyeo.com
www.bbcmaestro.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Images courtesy of Jonathan Yeo
"The challenges facing our society at the moment effectively are the unintended consequence of a solution we found in the late 1700s when society was running out of energy, we had no more timber, and we realized we could dig underground for ancient fossilized woodland, which is basically what coal is from about 300 million years ago. The consequence of burning all that coal and then oil was a release of carbon dioxide, changing our atmosphere and warming the planet. So, it's a problem born out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness, but I'm confident that we will find the solution out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness."
How have our psychology and cognitive biases altered the course of human history? What would you do if you had to rebuild our world from scratch?
Lewis Dartnell is an author, researcher, and holds the Professorship in Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He researches astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. He also works as a scientific consultant for the media and has appeared in numerous TV documentaries and radio shows. Dr. Dartnell has won several awards for his science writing and outreach work. He has published five books, including The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch; Origins: How the Earth Made Us; and Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History.
http://www.lewisdartnell.com
http://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb/2013/11/the-knowledge-how-to-rebuild-our-world-from-scratch
www.penguin.co.uk/books/433955/origins-by-lewis-dartnell/9781784705435
www.penguin.co.uk/books/442759/being-human-by-dartnell-lewis/9781847926708
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Photo credit: Shortlist/Paul Stuart
"The way I got into this field was working on the environmentally beneficial applications of AI, and I do believe that that's an impactful way of using AI techniques because there's so much data about the climate, satellite data, and sensor data, and the way to go about this is to work with domain experts. AI is never going to solve the problem on its own, but it can be a tool. So I think that there's a lot of promise there."
What are the pros and cons of AI’s integration into our institutions, political systems, culture, and society? How can we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable?
Dr. Sasha Luccioni is a leading scientist at the nexus of artificial intelligence, ethics, and sustainability, with a Ph.D. in AI and a decade of research and industry expertise. She spearheads research, consults, and utilizes capacity-building to elevate the sustainability of AI systems. As a founding member of Climate Change AI (CCAI) and a board member of Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Sasha is passionate about catalyzing impactful change, organizing events, and serving as a mentor to under-represented minorities within the AI community. She is an AI Researcher & Climate Lead at Hugging Face, an open-source hub for machine learning and natural language processing.
https://www.sashaluccioni.com
https://huggingface.co/
http://www.climatechange.ai
https://wimlworkshop.org
"I'm kind of concerned when people put the promise on silver bullets of regenerative agriculture or growing a trillion trees or sucking carbon through CCS technologies. Because what happens then is people take comfort that there is a practice or a technology around the corner. Hydrogen is another one. Fusion energy is yet another. And I think we need to be going kind of full throttle on all of those, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that we give up on mitigation or we give up on climate risk management, which I think is technically the correct term to say, rather than adaptation. How do you manage the risk of a changing climate? How do you then emit less and basically get fossil fuel out of your system? And that again is long-term. It's not for the next five to ten years. So, when you have these kinds of promises, invariably the market signal is aha. So now, we don't really need to do much on mitigation because something is there around the corner, whether it's regenerative agriculture, which holds enormous promise, or through reforestation, green hydrogen. We're not anywhere close to scaling up, and some of them really have deep technological challenges."
Dr. Shiv Someshwar is a Development Clinician, diagnosing development of cities and nation states. A Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York and at Sciences Po, Paris, he was the founder chair-holder of the European Chair for Sustainable Development and Climate Transition at Sciences Po. He helped set up the initial national and regional networks of the global Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
His publications cover a range of issues: planning, institutions and governance of sustainable development; climate change mitigation, adaptation, risks and offsets; and ecosystem management. He edited Re-living the Memories of an Indian Forester: Memoirs of S. Shyam Sunder and is presently writing The Fallacy of Evidence-Based Policy Making.
He convened and chaired the Independent Task Force on Creative Climate Action. Dr. Someshwar received a Ph.D. in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and he was a Bell-MacArthur fellow at Harvard University. He has two masters’ degrees, on housing and on environmental planning, and is also trained as a professional architect. He has previously worked at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, and the World Bank in Washington D.C.
https://www.sciencespo.fr/psia/sites/sciencespo.fr.psia/files/ITFClimateReport_Web.pdf www.amazon.com/Reliving-Memories-Indian-Forester-Memoir/dp/9388337131
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"Global restoration really means finding and empowering the millions of local communities, indigenous populations, and farmers who are promoting biodiversity. Restor is a digital platform, sort of like Google Maps, but for restoration. So rather than seeing coffee shops and supermarkets, you will see conservation projects and Indigenous-led restoration initiatives. And that means you can find a currently on Restor - I think we have around 140, 000 - so you can go on there for free right now and find thousands and thousands of these amazing heroes of nature. And you can zoom in and you can see every single tree on the ground. You can see every bush and you can fund them or you can buy their coffee or you can go visit their projects and do ecotourism. There's a myriad of ways that we can all support their efforts by also improving our own lives.
We need to be cutting our emissions so that we can allow nature to thrive and help us along the way. For far too long people have been squabbling about emissions. We should do this or we should do that. Climate change is way too big for us to be squabbling about things. We need to do everything now. When we grow the same crops every year, the soil gets more depleted and all the nutrients are lost. I've heard quotes that if we cannot find agricultural systems that rejuvenate the soil instead of depleting it, we are signing our death warrant. It's like we need to be promoting healthy soils if we're going to have any agriculture in the future."
Although they comprise less than 5% of the world population, Indigenous peoples protect 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. How can we support farmers, reverse biodiversity loss, and restore our ecosystems?
Thomas Crowther is an ecologist studying the connections between biodiversity and climate change. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich, chair of the advisory council for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and founder of Restor, an online platform for the global restoration movement, which was a finalist for the Royal Foundation’s Earthshot Prize. In 2021, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader for his work on the protection and restoration of biodiversity. Crowther’s post-doctoral research transformed the understanding of the world’s tree cover, and the study also inspired the World Economic Forum to announce its Trillion Trees initiative, which aims to conserve and restore one trillion trees globally within the decade.
https://crowtherlab.com/about-tom-crowther
https://restor.eco/?lat=26&lng=14.23&zoom=3
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“I think like a scientist and my interest in stunted trees probably goes back to my upbringing. I had a difficult childhood with a father who insisted that he was right about everything all the time.
And in my early years as a scientist, I was trying to find some system that would not argue back to me. I loved working with organisms that were themselves repressed by nature. It's a wonderful thing to stand like Gulliver on top of an entire ecosystem that's only three inches tall. And ask yourself, am I any happier than it? And I wasn't. And I found that tremendously thrilling to have a different perspective.”
What can thousand-year-old trees teach us about living sustainably? If we want to be sustained by this planet indefinitely, we need to stop trying to suck it dry.
Doug Larson is an award winning scientist, author, and Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Guelph. He is an expert on deforestation and regularly contributes to The Guardian and other publications. His books include Cliff Ecology: Pattern and Process in Cliff Ecosystems, The Urban Cliff Revolution: New Findings on the Origins and Evolution of Human Habitats, Storyteller Guitar, and The Dogma At My Homework.
https://experts.uoguelph.ca/doug-larson
https://volumesdirect.com/products/the-dogma-ate-my-homework
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cliff-ecology/7502E52B487789BEA2CACC4553AA663B
https://www.amazon.com/Urban-Cliff-Revolution-Evolution-Habitats/dp/1550419927
https://www.amazon.com/Storyteller-Guitar-Doug-Larson-ebook/dp/B00B9VZQXU
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Image courtesy of Doug Larson
"The original edition of The Paradox of Choice came out in 2004, and the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?"
Does having too many choices make us unhappy? How can we learn practical wisdom?
Dr. Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor Emeritus of Social Theory and Social Action in the psychology department at Swarthmore College. He is the author of many books, including Why We Work, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, and co-author of Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing.
www.swarthmore.edu/profile/barry-schwartz
www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Work/Barry-Schwartz/TED-Books/9781476784861
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-paradox-of-choice-barry-schwartz?variant=32207920234530
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307231/practical-wisdom-by-barry-schwartz-and-kenneth-sharpe
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Photo credit: Bill Holsinger-Robinson - CC BY 2.0
"The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws. I mean, after all, dogs and cats don't obey laws. And in tribes, they don't even have laws. They have customs. So it's only in civilized societies that you have laws. And then if we think through that metaphor, then actually the laws do change.
All artists are influenced by other artists and by things in the collective culture, and I think that morphic resonance as collective memory would say that all of us draw unconsciously as well as consciously on a collective memory and all animals draw on a collective memory of their kind as well. We don't know where it comes from, but there's true creativity involved in evolution, both human and natural."
How do we navigate ambiguity and uncertainty? Moving beyond linear thinking into instinct and intuition, we might discover other sources within ourselves that lie beyond the boundaries of science and reason.
Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. His many books include The Science Delusion, The Presence of the Past, and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work. At Cambridge University, Dr. Sheldrake worked in developmental biology as a fellow of Clare College. From 2005 to 2010, he was director of the Perrott Warrick Project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College Cambridge. He was among the top 100 global thought leaders for 2013, as ranked by the Duttweiler Institute.
www.sheldrake.org
www.amazon.com/Science-Delusion/dp/1529393221/?tag=sheldrake-20
www.amazon.com/Science-Set-Free-Paths-Discovery/dp/0770436722/?tag=sheldrake-20
“I drove for like a half an hour into absolute nothingness, and I left the car. It was three o'clock in the morning. It was minus 17 degrees and it was absolutely still. I've never experienced stillness such as that. I mean, it's like you feel like you can feel your atoms move or not move because it's so cold. And the sky is full of the Northern Lights. So you are already in a remote place, but you want to go further. And I think maybe those themes of going out into the wilderness are motivated by the urge to connect. And I think Issa López has really incorporated it beautifully into the script. And the show tells of this great disconnect between people. So not only are we disconnected from our environment, but we are disconnected from each other.
When we were shooting I sometimes thought, there is this beauty about collaboration between a director, cinematographer, and production designer, and all these key people. And I'm more and more convinced there's some kind of conscious thing happening. And there's also something subconscious happening.”
How does the place we’re born influence our beliefs? What would it be like to live in a world run by women, where it’s perpetually night, and the dead can speak to the living? In this episode, we discuss the new season of HBO’s True Detective: Night Country with award-winning cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister.
Known for his work on Tár, Pachinko, Great Expectations, and most recently, the new season of True Detective, he's also known for his collaboration with director Terence Davies on the films The Deep Blue Sea and A Quiet Passion. His work on Great Expectations earned him an Primetime Emmy and a BAFTA in cinematography, and in 2022, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on Tár.
http://florianhoffmeister.de/
www.hbo.com/true-detective
www.imdb.com/title/tt2356777/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Photo: Jodie Foster, Kali Reis · Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBO
“If we say Mitakuye Oyasin, we don't really mean all my relations. It's like, no, we're talking about what you can formulate into E = mc2 and beyond. It's beyond what you see. And that energy you don't see with these eyes, which only see a certain range of color and light refraction is what we are also understanding. Our body is, people would say the brain is...there is no disconnection. And so are we fully understanding or do we have a full spectrum perspective of what tools of the Earth really mean? Like a bird we think has no intelligence. It just flies here and flies there, right? But we also understand that that bird is also using the tools as the tools of the Earth correctly or properly when...what does that mean?
Now, if you go deeper into Indigenous peoples, you can see the modernity and then so-called primitive people. You don't need to be in contact, in relationship, and in communication, have a language with all other life-technology taking us away from Earth because we feel like we're elite to anything having to do with Earth. That's why we want to go to a dead planet called Mars. So they're about controlling, getting you and all of us away from being magic...is how to use tools of the Earth properly. Not, you know, we should not abuse water, the air, the land, the food, anything. So when it comes to animacy, I think it's a Western term also, and so we get away from the Western terms. We start seeing that, oh, we are becoming Earth as we're born into this physical dimension. We are becoming Earth. And then as we are living during this time, we're alive. We are becoming Earth. And when we are finished with this body, we are becoming Earth.”
Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and has a long history with Indigenous activism and advocacy. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”) for the last 31 years in New York City and Seattle/Olympia, Washington. In 2016, he received a Nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from the International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy. Other recent recognitions include: Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Fellowship in Music (2016), National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship Nominee (2017), Indigenous Music Award Nominee for Best Instrumental Album (2019) and National Native American Hall of Fame Nominee (2018, 2019). He also was recently nominated for “Nominee for the 2020 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities”. He is the Founder of Akantu Intelligence.
https://firstvoicesindigenousradio.org/
https://akantuintelligence.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Songs featured on this episode are “Butterfly Against the Wind”
And from the album Somewhere In There
“Spatial Moon” and “Sunrise Moon”
Composed by Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Alex Alexander
Music on this episode is courtesy of Tiokasin Ghosthorse.
"These ideas go as far back as Ancient Greece, which basically gave birth to two lines of thinking, two ideologies, materialism and idealism. And the idealist thinkers like Plato regarded reality as a projection of our minds, as something that is not real. And the only thing that is real is our consciousness and our minds and everything else around us is just constructs of our proception and projections. And that was a philosophy that was opposed to materialism, which regards the world as in a materialistic way, made up of atoms and matter and our minds are a product of these chemical reactions and the matter is coming together and forming our minds and consciousness. And everything in the world exists regardless of our consciousness or our minds and the universe is there and it's a materialistic view of the world. So these are two competing ideologies, and this is actually how we see the world today in a materialistic way.
What the simulated universe philosophical idea belongs to is this idealistic view of the world. And the idealism philosophy morphs into something else in this simulation hypothesis where not only everything is a simulated construct, but our minds and our consciousness are part of it.
So for example, Plato saw our minds and, if you want, our spirit as a fundamental central piece and the only real thing, and everything emerged from this. The simulated hypothesis assumes that everything, including our minds and consciousness, is part of a simulation. So it's a bit of a modern iteration of idealism which has been triggered by these recent developments in advancing technologies and computing science that began in the 1940s with the development of silicon technologies, early microchips, and digital computers creating digital memories.
This highly accelerated rate of development, in terms of our technological progress, in less than a hundred years going from analog technologies means we are entering a new era of quantum computers, like generative AI, and artificial intelligence, and all these VRs are a reality today. So this development has helped in some ways to lead to the emergence of this simulated universe concept because we are now reaching a new technological level where we see that we are beginning to simulate virtual realities and they are becoming more and more immersive and sophisticated."
Dr. Melvin M. Vopson is Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Portsmouth, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Chartered Physicist and Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Information Physics Institute, editor-in-chief of the IPI Letters and Emerging Minds Journal for Student Research. He is the author of Reality Reloaded: The Scientific Case for a Simulated Universe. Dr. Vopson has a wide-ranging scientific expertise in experimental, applied and theoretical physics that is internationally recognized. He has published over 100 research articles, achieving over 2500 citations.
https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/our-staff/melvin-vopson
https://ipipublishing.org/index.php/ipil/RR
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"It's a study of adult lifespan development and when it was started in 1938, it was actually radical to study normal development for two reasons. One is that most of what had been studied was about what goes wrong in development, which we still do because we want to try to help people who are having developmental problems. So that makes a lot of sense, but to study what goes right in development, that was unheard of. The other thing is that for a long time, we certainly thought about children as developing because you can watch children change every day. That change happens so fast, but many people thought that once you got to be in your 20s, you were kind of done with development. You found a partner, you found a line of work, you were set with regard to your personality, and that was it, then you just lived your life.
And of course, now we understand that there's so much that changes and develops through the course of adult life, but my predecessors (I'm the fourth director) were really, insightful in their understanding of how much there was to learn about all the changes that happen across the adult lifespan."
What makes a good life? How important are relationships in helping us lead happy and meaningful lives?
Dr. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, and cofounder of the Lifespan Research Foundation. Dr. Waldinger received his AB from Harvard College and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he directs a psychotherapy teaching program for Harvard psychiatry residents. He is also a Zen master (Roshi) and teaches meditation in New England and around the world. His TED Talk about the Harvard study “What makes a good life?” has been viewed more than 42 million times and is one of the 10 most watched TED Talks ever. He is co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.
https://www.robertwaldinger.com/
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Good-Life/Robert-Waldinger/9781982166694
https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/https://www.lifespanresearch.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“I play the double bass as a professional musician. I don't consider myself a piano player, but I play a little bit of piano, of course. Every musician should play a little bit of piano to understand harmony. And if you want to compose or to arrange music, you need to know basic piano. So I play a little bit of piano. Actually, I started to play guitar before the double bass, because it was not so easy to get a double bass 40 years ago. My father was a bass player, but he never had a bass at home. So I started to play guitar first, and I was really into Bossa Nova and those chords from João Gilberto, and it was a big influence in my early years. But then I found a double bass when I was sixteen or seventeen– it was a terrible double bass, but it was enough to start with. Today, that sounds kind of late to start learning an instrument, but back then it wasn’t so terrible. Now you have small double basses that kids of nine, ten years old can start playing. In the eighties, if you were small, you could not play double bass, basically.”
Bernardo Moreira is one of the most active Portuguese double bassists. He has performed as a guest soloist with Gulbenkian, Metropolitan de Lisboa, and Nacional do Porto orchestras, and gained prominence for his collaborations with international artists, including the legendary Benny Colson, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Art Farmer, and Kenny Wheeler. He is a regular collaborator with many jazz musicians in Portugal, participating in formations such as the Maria João/Mário Laginha quartet, the Mário Laginha trio, and singer Cristina Branco. In 2021, he released Enter Paredes, and in 2022, he led Cantina’s de Main and SUL.
www.clavenamao.org
https://open.spotify.com/artist/0Yse2njeXg2XDiQmmxhAc5
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Music on this episode:
António Marinheiro, Bernardo Moreira Sextet, from the album Entre Paredes
PROMESSAS MIX V3 ULT from SUL
Courtesy of Bernardo Moreira
"One of the things that we need to remember is that we are data stakeholders and not data subjects. We're often called data subjects if you look at the way legislation is written and tech companies talk about the users of their technology as data subjects.
Being a subject casts this sort of 'you can't help but have this happen to you' effect. But we're actually data stakeholders for the reason that data cannot be created without us. If companies were incentivized to follow data minimization for example, where they only collect the data they need, that would change the way we interact with digital technologies."
Does privacy exist anymore? Or are humans just sets of data to be traded and sold?
Wendy H. Wong is Professor of Political Science and Principal's Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of two award-winning books: Internal Affairs: How the Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights and (with Sarah S. Stroup) The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs. Her latest book is We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age.
www.wendyhwong.com
https://mitpress.mit.edu/author/wendy-h-wong-38397
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"I thought, wow, how are they going to bring this across in a way that isn't shoving things down people's throats? It's presenting information in a way that is creative, but also in a way that drives your curiosity into understanding, number one, why are we in the position that we're in? And number two, how can we fix this? What can we do to change all of this?
And so, I initially got involved as an executive producer on Kiss the Ground, and I was blown away by how that film came out at the end. How well rounded it was, the flow of the film, the storytelling, and really feeding me information that I didn't even know previously. And so also watching that become a platform around the world was jaw-dropping. I mean, the fact that the belief and the understanding and the wisdom that came out of that project has touched so many hearts, minds, and souls around the world, that people are really single-handedly almost making change for the better around the world.
Now, when Common Ground was presented, I did love that concept because Kiss the Ground had been very much a broad approach and about America, for the majority, really, and Common Ground was a much more...I mean, we're still dealing with the same subject matter obviously, but I think it felt great to come from a more personal aspect."
How can the arts inspire us to lead lives of greater meaning and connection? What kind of world are we leaving for future generations?
Julian Lennon is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and NYTimes bestselling author of children's books. Executive Producer of Common Ground and its predecessor Kiss the Ground, which reached over 1 billion people and inspired the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to put $20 billion toward soil health. The natural world and indigenous people are also the focus of Lennon’s other documentaries Whaledreamers, and Women of the White Buffalo. In 2007, Julian founded the global environmental and humanitarian organization The White Feather Foundation, whose key initiatives are education, health, conservation, and the protection of indigenous culture, causes he also advances through his photography, exhibited across the US and Europe. His latest album Jude spans a body of work created over the last 30 years. Julian was named a Peace Laureate by UNESCO in 2020.
https://julianlennon.com
https://commongroundfilm.org
https://kissthegroundmovie.com
https://whitefeatherfoundation.com
https://julianlennon.lnk.to/JudeWE
https://julianlennon-photography.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
What gave Taxi Driver its edge? What was Mary Poppins secret life? If filmmaking is all about “creating lies”, when does the lie become more real than the truth?
Featured film discussions from screenings at Sag Harbor Cinema, following on our interview with April Gornik, community activist/organizer and artist. She is a director of Sag Harbor Cinema and was Campaign Chair for the restoration of the Cinema after a fire nearly destroyed it in 2016. Today the SHG screens a variety of contemporary and classic films, hosting events and public screenings in the presence of filmmakers and actors.
You can hear our full interview with Gornik and other artists brought to the stages of Sag Harbor Cinema and The Church Arts & Creativity Center on The Creative Process podcast.
Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center is dedicated to presenting the past, present and future of the movies and to preserving and educating about films, filmmaking, and the film-going experience in its three state-of-the-art theaters and in the surrounding community. The Cinema engages its audiences and the community year-round through dialogue, discovery, and appreciation of the moving image – from blockbusters to student shorts and everything in between. Revitalized and reimagined through unprecedented community efforts to rebuild the iconic Main Street structure after a fire nearly destroyed it in 2016, SHC continues a tradition of entertainment, education, and enrichment in the heart of Sag Harbor Village.
https://sagharborcinema.org/
www.aprilgornik.com
www.thechurchsagharbor.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Audio courtesy of Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center.
How we think, feel, and experience the world is a mystery. What distinguishes our consciousness from AI and machine learning?
Liad Mudrik studies high level cognition and its neural substrates, focusing on conscious experience. She teaches at the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel Aviv University. At her research lab, her team is currently investigating the functionality of consciousness, trying to unravel the depth and limits of unconscious processing, and also researching the ways semantic relations between concepts and objects are formed and detected.
https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/mudriklab
https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/mudriklab/people/#gkit-popup
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“Coral reefs are the most biodiverse habitat on the planet, despite covering less than 1 percent of the ocean area, over a quarter of all marine life exists in these rainforests of the sea. And if you think of a coral reef as a rainforest, the trees are the coral themselves. Which are incredible organisms, so, magic is really the right word to describe them. They're these animals that are one of the original forms of animal life, the second branch of the animal kingdom is actually Cnidaria, which includes coral and jellyfish. So, an ancient animal, but they have a symbiotic relationship with algae, and so inside the animal tissue are these zooxanthellae, these algae that do photosynthesis, like algae do, like plants do. It's able to capture sunlight and convert it into sugars and energy. And so, it's an animal, but it's got plants that live inside it, this algae, and then even more wild - it grows a skeleton that is rock!
So coral skeleton is actually calcium carbonate, which is limestone. And most of the limestone that exists on the earth was grown by these organisms. And so they're animals with plants inside of them that grow rock as skeleton. And the rock skeletons form these incredibly intricate structures that are coral reefs that can grow for thousands of miles and the corals can live for thousands of years to be seen from space and to create these essential ecosystems that are really the cornerstone of all of life in the ocean and, and therefore much of life on Earth.”
Coral reefs are the most biodiverse habitat on the planet, despite covering less than 1 percent of the ocean. Over a quarter of all marine life exists in these rain forests of the sea.
Gator Halpern is the Co-founder and President of Coral Vita, a mission-driven company working to restore our world’s dying coral reefs. He is a lifelong entrepreneur who is passionate about starting projects that can help create a better harmony between society and nature. His work has earned him a number of awards including being named a United Nation’s Young Champion of the Earth, a Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur, and an Echoing Green fellow. Before founding Coral Vita, he worked on development projects in Brazil, Peru, and South Africa. During his career, he has helped distribute millions of baby fish for aquaculture to remote villages in the Amazon, he’s analyzed the environmental effects of land-use change projects on three different continents, and worked for the World Wildlife Fund Global Marine Program. Gator founded Coral Vita during his graduate studies at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and he lives and works in the Bahamas where Coral Vita operates the world’s first commercial land-based coral farm for reef restoration.
https://coralvita.co
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"So I think the first step is definitely awareness. I know when I was the only Black student in my environmental science program, I didn't quite understand why I really wanted to focus on the environmental injustices that were going on in my neighborhood. Or the concept of racial justice was always kind of intertwined with my environmental advocacy. So it's something that I want other communities of color to understand that that's okay, that you can show up to this field and also have empathy for your own community and that you don't need to separate your identity from your environmental practice. And including your cultural background can actually enhance the work that you do because I think it's such a beautiful thing that we all have different identity aspects, whether that's religion, race, gender, etc.
So I think that's the first step, making sure that representation is there so all people can see themselves reflected in environmental education and feel empowered to know that they belong and they can take their identity with them and that enhances their environmental practice. And secondly, through The Intersectional Environmentalist Platform, we love to platform students who are working on climate justice research and share it through kind of untraditional means. So they might not be published in a scientific paper, but it's something they can share amongst their peers in our community of about half a million people, etc. So it's another way for them to share their research at the intersection of identity and environmentalism with more people. And that's something I really enjoy with our work, just letting people know that, yeah, your work is important, even if it's not published in a scientific paper. There is a really big community of people out there who are interested in learning and might even relate to that research."
Leah Thomas is an intersectional environmental activist and eco-communicator based in Southern California. She’s passionate about advocating for and exploring the relationship between social justice and environmentalism and was the first to define the term “Intersectional Environmentalism.” She is the founder of @greengirlleah and The Intersectional Environmentalist platform. Her articles on this topic have appeared in Vogue, Elle, The Good Trade, and Youth to the People and she has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, W Magazine, Domino, GOOP, Fashionista, BuzzFeed, and numerous podcasts. She has a B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy from Chapman University and worked for the National Park Service and Patagonia headquarters before pursuing activism full time. She lives in Carpinteria, California. She is the author of The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet, and Winner of the Creative Force Foundation Award 2023.
www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com
www.instagram.com/greengirlleah
www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/leah-thomas/the-intersectional-environmentalist/9780316281935/?lens=voracious
Season 2 of Business & Society focuses on CEOs , Sustainability & Environmental Solutions
Business & Society is a limited series co-hosted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"It's a really good point because I think that the modern sensibility and certainly the post-modern sensibility tells us that everything is self-referential. That if we have a certain feeling, it's because of our chemistry, it's because of our sexuality or urges that come within ourselves. But the older way of thinking is that we're in a relationship with a world that actually is reflected in our mind. And I think that that older sensibility is probably closer to the truth. It explains a lot more. It makes a lot more sense of things.
So every writer knows this, that he's not actually drawing so much from himself as some kind of literal inspiration, some kind of breathing into him that connects him, his own experiences, his childhood experiences, life experiences, his mental experiences with something that is very real outside him. And what he's trying to do in art, I think, is communicate that experience to other people in the only way possible. You can't describe it, you can't put adjectives into it. You have to dramatize it or paint a picture of it or write a song about it. That's the way human beings communicate the experience of being human."
What makes a good drama? What advantages do human storytellers have over their AI counterparts? Where do ideas come from? And what do spiritual beliefs share with artists' faith in the creative process?
Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas, Empire of Lies and When Christmas Comes. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He wrote the screenplays to A Shock to The System starring Michael Caine, One Missed Call starring Edward Burns, and Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer starring Dean Cain. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, his political satire videos have been viewed by tens of millions of people, and he hosts a popular podcast The Andrew Klavan Show at the Daily Wire. He is also the author of a memoir about his religious journey The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ and the USA Today bestseller The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus. His latest crime novel is The House of Love and Death, the third book in the Cameron Winter series.
www.andrewklavan.com
www.amazon.com/House-Death-Cameron-Winter-Mysteries/dp/1613164467
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“So I wrote this book and it was a lot of fun because I had to learn so much. The book examines three iconic teachers: Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus. And I look at how each of those teachers encourage a certain kind of student. The student as follower, someone who will take on the path that you've developed. In the case of Socrates, the student as critical interlocutor or critical conversation partner, someone who will, in dialogue with you, learn what they don't know, how to take things apart. And in the case of Jesus and the apostles, I look at trying to imitate a way of life to transform themselves to strive towards being the kind of person that Jesus incarnated. And so that's the beginning of the book, these models of studenthood, if I could use that word, and being a teacher. And then I look at the way in which these ideas reverberate in the West across a long period of time. So I'm interested in the idea of the student before there were schools. What did we expect young people to learn even when they weren't going to school?”
What is the purpose of education? How are we educating students for the future? What is the importance of the humanities in this age of AI and the rapidly changing workplace?
Michael S. Roth is President of Wesleyan University. His books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters and Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses. He's been a Professor of History and the Humanities since 1983, was the Founding Director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute, and was the Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute. His scholarly interests center on how people make sense of the past, and he has authored eight books around this topic, including his latest, The Student: A Short History.
https://www.wesleyan.edu/academics/faculty/mroth/profile.html
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300250039/the-student/
www.wesleyan.edu
https://twitter.com/mroth78
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"Let's talk about technology and the role of humanity and the role of being human and what it means to be present in that. We need to keep humans at the center of everything that we do, that everything that we do in our life is about humans. It begins with humans and ends with humans. There might be technologies and businesses and all these things in between, but we should measure the effect on humans.
When I talk to people about artificial intelligence or technology, I'm generally asking them two questions. What are you optimizing for? What's the effect that you're trying to get? Developing technology for technology's sake, although it can be kind of interesting...then is why you're doing it because you think it's interesting? But then ultimately, if you're doing it beyond your own gratification, why are you doing it?
So much of what I do in that is talking to governments and militaries and large organizations to say we always have to keep humans in the loop. You have to keep humans in the center because it's about us. That really is incredibly important. And that's one of the central ideas in the future. The future should be about humans, and where are humans going. And what do we want as humans? And how are we using technology to make us more human, or healthier, or happier, or more productive?"
Brian David Johnson is Futurist in Residence at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and the Director of the ASU Threatcasting Lab. He is Author of The Future You: How to Create the Life You Always Wanted, Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, 21st Century Robot: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories, Humanity in the Machine: What Comes After Greed?, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing, and the Devices We Love.
https://csi.asu.edu/people/brian-david-johnson/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"It's been surprising to me how quiet things have been in the humanities. Maybe we're all just taking it in, but I also think that - and this really makes me sad - the tech leaders have been looked at by the media and probably by the politicians themselves as being the important voices at the table for the implications of technology. And there's been a lot of confusion about scientific development versus speculation. So you're seeing everybody wanting to interview the CEOs at the big tech companies or the big AI researchers. And then all of a sudden the idea that they somehow have a monopoly on ideas about conscious machines, for example, or merging with AI. Elon Musk never stops with philosophical claims, and a lot of times you have to wonder what they're supposed to be doing for his stock values as opposed to whether they're true or not. But people just take this, sadly, as what the scientists or AI companies say. You know, well, 'they know the science, so it's got to be true.' But that is not the case. That's where the humanities should be more involved. And it's been a slow plotting situation to see people really step up. I've just been sort of taking it all in, and I've been doing a lot of advising in Washington. So maybe we're all waiting to see where this all goes, right? But I think at this point, I finally achieved a sort of confidence about how I think it's going to play out."
Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government’s first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI’s impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity?
Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.
www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index
www.fau.edu/future-mind/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
What will the future look like? What are the risks and opportunities of AI? What role can we play in designing the future we want to live in?
Voices of philosophers, futurists, AI experts, science fiction authors, activists, and lawyers reflecting on AI, technology, and the Future of Humanity. All voices in this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast.
Voices on this episode are:
DR. SUSAN SCHNEIDER
American philosopher and artificial intelligence expert. She is the founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. Author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness.www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index
NICK BOSTROM
Founder and Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, Philosopher, Author of NYTimes Bestseller Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Bostrom’s academic work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He is a repeat main TED speaker and has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice and was included in Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15.
https://nickbostrom.com
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk
BRIAN DAVID JOHNSON
Futurist in residence at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the Director of the ASU Threatcasting Lab. He is Author of The Future You: How to Create the Life You Always Wanted, Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, 21st Century Robot: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories, Humanity in the Machine: What Comes After Greed?, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing, and the Devices We Love.
https://csi.asu.edu/people/brian-david-johnson
DEAN SPADE
Professor at SeattleU’s School of Law, Author of Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), and Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law.
www.deanspade.net
ALLEN STEELE
Science Fiction Author. He has been awarded a number of Hugos, Asimov's Readers, and Locus Awards. of the Coyote Trilogy, Arkwright, and other books. His books include Coyote Trilogy and Arkwright. He is a former member of the Board of Directors and Board of Advisors for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He has also served as an advisor for the Space Frontier Foundation. In 2001, he testified before the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives in hearings regarding space exploration in the 21st century.
www.allensteele.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Q: Who is David Byrne?
David Byrne: ...I have no idea.
Most people know me through music, but when I was in high school I saw science and the arts as being equally creative fields. More recently, I just started taking an interest in how the brain works, and there's been this explosion of literature. As much as I love reading about neuroscience, I realize that experiencing some of the phenomena is just on a different level. I wanted to create an experience that shows us we're not who we think we are. Theater of the Mind is an immersive Science Theater project. With this show, I've tried to marry a narrative to the experience of different scientific phenomena that reveal how malleable our perception memory, and identity really are.
To make a production like this work, it's a big invisible team. There's actors, lighting designers sound designers, technical people so it's a really complicated system. This is the Theater of the Mind. How do we operate in a world where we're not sure what's real and what's not. If things are unreliable, then what do we trust? People think of science as being intimidating, but it also doesn't mean that you can't understand it or can't enjoy it. Our emotions, our sense of self, our relationship to other people is all connected to our perception, that you can't separate one of these things from another. They all work together to make us what we are.
What is consciousness? The mind produces thoughts, sensations, perception, emotions. How can these inner felt experiences be produced within the darkness of the human skull?
Nicholas Bruckman is founder and CEO of People's Television, a production studio and creative agency that produces independent films, and video storytelling for brands. Collaborating with the The Simons Foundation through their 'Science Sandbox' Initiative, he directed Theater of the Mind, which takes audiences into the creative inner workings of Musician and Artist David Byrne’s brain, showcasing Byrne’s immersive theater performance, which attempts to conceptualize the idea of our sense of self and how malleable the mind truly is.
He directed the award-winning healthcare justice documentary Not Going Quietly, executive produced by Mark and Jay Duplass.
John Tracey is Program Director of Science, Society and Culture projects at the Simons Foundation whose mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences to unravel the mysteries of the universe. The foundation champions basic science through grant funding, support for research and public engagement.
Ian Moubayed started his career as a cinematographer, collaborating with Emmy, Peabody, and Oscar-winning filmmakers. His work includes Netflix’s The Great Hack, NBC Peacock’s The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show, and HBO’s The Vow.
www.youtube.com/@sciencesandbox
www.davidbyrne.com
https://nickny.com/bio
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/people/john-tracey/
https://peoples.tv/director/ian-moubayed/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"I was just saying to Eric yesterday, we were walking down the quay and talking and suddenly I said, "People just don't think about place enough. We don't recognize the importance of place." I think it's a little bit the social media environment that we're living in now where we're all bent over a screen, but to try to locate yourself in a place is reifying. It's identifying. It gives you a sense of positive self-consciousness. I think if you find that you're comfortable or not, just being able to feel out the positive or negative effects of a space or place is really important. And I don't think people spend enough time affording themselves that contemplation of place. And, to go back to my work, that's a little bit what I'm doing...I've been trying to sort of locate myself outside of myself as a way of reflecting back on who I am as a person."
In this fractured world, how do the arts build community, understanding, and inspire change? How does art help us define who we are and our place in the world?
April Gornik is known for her large scale landscape paintings which embrace the vastness of sea and sky. Her imagined landscapes, built up through a series of underpaintings are meditations on light and time. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
She is a director of the board of the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center and co-founded The Church arts, exhibition space, and creativity center, which is a sanctuary for visual, performing, literary artists, and other creatives. Together with her husband the artist Eric Fischl, they are at the center of Sag Harbour’s arts district, and in this episode, we’ll also hear from some of the talented artists they’ve brought to their stages.
www.aprilgornik.com
www.thechurchsagharbor.org
www.milesmcenery.com/exhibitions/april-gornik2
https://sagharborcinema.org/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Kimiko Ishizaka - Bach - Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 - 01 Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846
Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain
"For me, I don't start a project unless I have a really clear understanding of who the main characters are and why this is a journey that's necessary for them to take. And why are these both the best and the worst people to be in this series? That's the question I ask myself all the time because you need to know: What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? What are the dramatic tension points going to be where these specific people can really succeed or really fail in this scenario?
I love people who are passionate, and Quentin Tarantino is just so passionate. And I've never been in a writer's room or even really in any kind of development experience where a director was just so passionate and so full of kind of energetic ideas. And that was really inspiring. Somebody who just completely knows their own point of view and gets excited by their own ideas is just fun to watch.
I was about to shoot Pet Sematary: Bloodlines. I was finishing up my work on Star Trek 4, which I had to leave to do Pet Sematary, so I had been working with J. J. Abrams closely for a while on the script, and so I just asked if he had any advice, in terms of just practical stuff on set. And I mean, I've been on so many sets, but still, he's a director who's done so many projects. So he did give me some great advice just about, you know, making it through such long days and taking time for yourself and just kind of keeping your sanity that was kind of the focus of the advice. And he was just very generous and sweet about that.”
Lindsey Anderson Beer wrote and executive produced the hit Netflix original dramedy Sierra Burgess is a Loser before making the jump to direct the horror genre with Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, starring Jackson White and Natalie Alyn Lind. The story is based on an untold chapter of Stephen King's self-proclaimed, scariest property of all time. Up next, she will helm Paramount’s Sleepy Hollow reboot as the writer, director, and producer. She also has several projects in various phases of development and production, including Disney's live action remake of Bambi, New Line's Hello Kitty, and Universal's Fast and Furious spinoff, which she wrote with Geneva Robertson-Dworet. Under her production banner Lab Brew, Lord of the Flies will be directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Patrick Ness for Warner Bros.
www.imdb.com/name/nm5170222/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“The legal system is a colonial legal system that is designed to preserve capitalist extraction and all the racial dynamics required to produce racial capitalism. The system is already completely captured by our opponents. And anything that looks like it's good for us is probably actually not. People don't get what they're supposed to get. It's undermined in several ways, or it can get flipped all the time. Like the law in the books is not happening on the streets. The police are not supposed to kill people all the time, and they just do. There is no rule of law. We live in lawless, brutal domination under a set of systems that are incredibly resilient and can reframe and sometimes be extra-legal, and that works out fine for them.”
Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Spade has been organizing racial and economic movements for queer and trans liberation for the past 20 years. Spade's books include Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. His writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs.
www.deanspade.net
www.southendpress.org/2010/items/87965
www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/
https://srlp.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"So the why really depends on where you are. People are not all the same. There is no such thing as the public. There are many, many, many different publics within a state, within a country, within the world, right? So one of the first cardinal rules of effective communication is know your audience. Who are they? What do they know? What do they think they know? Who do they trust? Where do they get their information? What are their underlying values? And it's only once you know who they are that you as a communicator can go more than halfway to try to meet them where they are not where you are. Where they are. That's so easy to say, but it's actually so hard for so many of us within the climate community to do because we're steeped in this issue. We want to talk about things."
Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D. is the founder and Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. He is an internationally recognized expert on public climate change beliefs, attitudes, policy support, and behavior, and the psychological, cultural, and political factors that shape them and conducts research globally, including in the United States, China, India, and Brazil. He has published more than 250 scientific articles, chapters, and reports and has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Harvard Kennedy School, the United Nations Development Program, the Gallup World Poll, and the World Economic Forum, among others. He is a recipient of the Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education, the Mitofsky Innovator Award from the American Association of Public Opinion Research, the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication from Climate One, and an Environmental Innovator award from the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2020, he was named the second-most influential climate scientist in the world (of 1,000) by Reuters. He is also the host of Climate Connections, a radio program broadcast each day on more than 700 stations nationwide.
https://environment.yale.edu/profile/leiserowitz
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu
www.yaleclimateconnections.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"I'm really very glad. I was happy to see that within my lifetime that the prospects of not just Mars, but in fact interstellar space is being taken seriously. I've been at two conferences where we were talking about building the first starship within this century. One of my later books, Arkwright, is about such a project. I saw that Elon Musk is building Starship One, I wish him all the best. And I envy anybody who goes.
I wish I were a younger person and in better health. Somebody asked me some time ago, would you go to Mars? And I said, 'I can't do it now. I've got a bum pancreas, and I'm 65 years old, and I'm not exactly the prime prospect for doing this. If you asked me 40 years ago would I go, I would have said: in a heartbeat!' I would gladly leave behind almost everything. I don't think I'd be glad about leaving my wife and family behind, but I'd be glad to go live on another planet, perhaps for the rest of my life, just for the chance to explore a new world, to be one of the settlers in a new world.
And I think this is something that's being taken seriously. It is very possible. We've got to be careful about how we do this. And we've got to be careful, particularly about the rationale of the people who are doing this. It bothers me that Elon Musk has lately taken a shift to the Far Right. I don't know why that is. But I'd love to be able to sit down and talk with him about these things and try to understand why he has done such a right thing, but for what seems to be wrong reasons."
What does the future of space exploration look like? How can we unlock the opportunities of outer space without repeating the mistakes of colonization and exploitation committed on Earth? How can we ensure AI and new technologies reflect our values and the world we want to live in?
Allen Steele is a science fiction author and journalist. He has written novels, short stories, and essays and been awarded a number of Hugos, Asimov's Readers, and Locus Awards. He’s known for his Coyote Trilogy and Arkwright. He is a former member of the Board of Directors and Board of Advisors for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He has also served as an advisor for the Space Frontier Foundation. In 2001, he testified before the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives in hearings regarding space exploration in the 21st century.
www.allensteele.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Photo from a field trip to Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth NH, now closed. Photo credit: Chuck Peterson
"The way I measured time for a very large part of my life was I was always in preparation. I remember as a child I was preparing to make my first communion, then I was preparing to go to junior high. There are always these lapses that existed ahead of us, where we were progressing through time predicated on noteworthy events. So I was always functioning as though there was going to be a significant event, which occurred in some kind of concept of the future. And that coincided in parallel with the fact that when you're young, you feel essentially immortal because the idea of being old or dying is so abstract. It's so far away.
So now that I'm in this phase of my life where all I'm interested in doing is maintaining my health, doing my push-ups, and profiting from as much time as I have left. Because now I'm at the very peak of my powers as a photographer. I'm getting pictures much faster and in greater ratio, and I'm moving through the experience at a rate that I always had yearned towards. And in terms of exhibitions and publications and all that I had everything I wanted when I was 40."
How does the mind influence the mind? The mind cannot function without memory. And memory is just the mind aware of itself. So how do images tell us how we see and who we are?
Ralph Gibson is one of the most interesting American photographers of our time. His international renown is based on his work, which is shown and collected by some of the world’s leading museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J.P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Creative Center for Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.
Gibson’s works reveal a meticulous aesthetic and visual territory edging on the surreal. His recent books include his memoir Self Exposure, Sacred Land: Israel before and after Time, and Secret of Light, which accompanied his exhibition at the Deichtorhallen House of Photography in Hamburg. He is a Leica Hall of Fame Inductee and has been awarded the French Legion of Honor. In 2022, The Gibson | Goeun Museum of Photography devoted to his work opened in Busan, South Korea.
www.ralphgibson.com
www.deichtorhallen.de/en/ausstellung/ralph-gibson
www.gibsongoeunmuseum.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“The book probes the science and neuroscience behind the idea that confidence can be learned, or whether it is something you inherit. Optimism, hope, and self-esteem are all concepts that are easily confused with confidence. But, as I show, they differ in one fundamental way - confidence empowers action. You can be an optimist who is hopeful that things will work out okay in the end without ever believing that you can play a part in that outcome, or indeed have any realistic grounds for that optimism. And you can have high self-esteem and feel good about yourself without feeling confident that you can achieve a particular goal.”
How important is confidence? Psychologists say confidence is a series of mental, physical, and emotional habits that can be learned. What makes some people overconfident while others are realistic about their abilities and why are both outlooks important to succeed in life?
Ian Robertson is Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute (Trinity College Dublin and University of California at San Francisco) and Co-Leader of The BrainHealth Project at University of Texas at Dallas. A trained clinical psychologist as well as a neuroscientist, he is internationally renowned for his research on neuropsychology. He has written five books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles and comment pieces in the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Irish Times, Time magazine and New York magazine, amongst others. He has appeared on BBC Radio and featured in several major television documentaries. He is a regular speaker at major futurology and business conferences in Europe, the USA and Asia.
https://ianrobertson.org
www.gbhi.org
www.penguin.co.uk/books/441931/how-confidence-works-by-robertson-ian/9781787633728
https://centerforbrainhealth.org/project
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"So it's just a great joy to be passing this guitar made from the wood of an 800-year-old tree around to musicians and asking them to play a song of resistance or celebration. And that's what we're going to do at Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest. We're going to have it be an annual event like Farm Aid. And we want it to be big. We want it to be Woodstock in its pivot point. The way the Children's Trust court case was pivotal, the way this Black Ram court case we had and won was pivotal.
We want Climate Aid to be a celebration. And this one guitar exploring the question: Can one tree save a forest? Can one song save a forest? And we think the answer is yes. We believe it will be. What we want to do with the forest that the guitar came from is establish it as a climate refuge, a place dedicated to storing as much carbon and long-term safekeeping as possible.
We want the climate refuge to be really big. We want it to store a ton of carbon. We want it to be a focal point for increased scientific and artistic inquiry. We've brought in the world's leading climate scientists, and they've analyzed it, and they're proposing studies that should happen there. We've brought in our country's leading artists and they have experienced it and responded to it in their own way. We've had performance artists come and play music in the forest. So we want to establish the nation's first climate refuge. There is no such designation. We want it to be in Black Ram. This forest that almost got erased, a forest that was a thousand years old and almost went away. But we're getting a second chance. We saved it. Now we want to preserve it for another thousand years to study it, but we don't want to stop there. We want the government to establish a series of climate refuges all along the northern tier of the United States. What we think of as a necklace of green, a curtain of green. And from there to go around the globe, across northern Europe and northern Asia, and back around to Alaska. The amount of carbon that can be kept safely sequestered there is extraordinary. The numbers are almost unbelievable."
Rick Bass, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his memoir Why I Came West, was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana's Yaak Valley for almost three decades. His short fiction, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous times in Best American Short Stories, has earned him The Story Prize, multiple O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes in addition to NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.
He’s an organizer and speaker at Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest, a fundraiser event to benefit the grassroots environmental movement of Protect Ancient Forests & The Montana Project. Featuring Maggie Rogers and more great performers and speakers. The evening will advance the efforts to protect the Black Ram forest by designating the region as the nation’s first Climate Refuge. Portland, Maine, on Sunday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. ET, at the Merrill Auditorium. Tickets available at the Merrill’s box office and online at PortTIX.com.
www.rickbass.net
www.protectancientforests.org
www.montanaproject.org
www.PortTIX.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"I don't think a lot of people realize how absolutely important whales are, and not just because they're beautiful and they make people happy, but whales carry nutrients from the depths they feed back to the surface. And there's this liquidy plume of fecal matter, and it's called the whale pump. And they bring all these nutrients upward with their tails by swimming up and down the water column, it's like an upward biological pump. And there's an incredible amount of nitrogen that's released in these plumes. And we get this great soup of nutrients. We get more from this nitrogen than all the rivers combined. And in the past, we recognized microbes and plankton and fish and that they recycled nutrients in the ocean, yet whales and other marine mammals have largely been overlooked and that's too bad because they are bioengineers. They help the climate so much because of all this creates more plankton by circulating the nutrients and fertilizing the phytoplankton with their poo. For instance, sperm whales alone in the Southern Ocean help sequester over 19 million trees worth of carbon. They are bioengineers of their ecosystems and our ecosystems too. They promote the growth of phytoplankton, which absorbs carbon. So, if we just leave them alone, that could be an incredible solution for us to help with the mess we've made. And there's also the whole thing about the whale fall. When a whale dies and the crabs and the worms and the clams and everything start to eat it, the whale carcass itself transports about 190,000 tons of carbon. That's what is produced by about 80,000 cars every year. So when you think about saving the whales, you're thinking about saving the planet and people, whether it's your family or your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren or whatever. This is a really big issue for me because I have nine grandchildren, and I worry about what we are leaving them because we are leaving them a big mess. We need to think beyond immediate results and consider the next steps and the consequences. And I think we tend to forget to do that because otherwise, they're going to get stuck with it."
Nan Hauser is the President and Director of the Center for Cetacean Research & Conservation and the Director and Principal Investigator of Cook Islands Whale Research. Currently she's in the field studying the migration of the Southern Humpback Whale population that is currently passing through the Cook Islands, where she resides on the main island of Rarotonga. Her research includes population identity and abundance, acoustics, genetics stable isotopes behavior, and the navigation of cetaceans.
https://whaleresearch.org
https://whaleresearch.org/saved-by-a-whale
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination. I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility."
How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?
Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.
https://jimshepard.wordpress.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"Australia is generally considered one of the most vulnerable developed countries to the impacts of climate change, and I've been in the climate science space for more than 30 years, but I have to say this last month has been particularly confronting. We're seeing all sorts of tipping points that scientists have been warning about for decades and they are really real right now. I've never had such climate anxiety, and it's sort of new for me to be struggling with that because I think I've been pretty resilient to sort of eco-anxiety. Talking about averages all the time is a real problem in climate science because the temperature on any one day goes up and down a lot more than 1.5 or 2 degrees. So we have to keep working on relating those average global temperatures to the extremes that people experience in their lives on the ground where they live. We have to keep reminding people that that is the sort of thing that we are going to see more and more often. It isn't a one-off event. It's a message about the future."
Now in the 21st century, with an abundance of renewable technologies, why is the world still using 18th-century energy technology? How can each of us harness our unique skills to help solve the climate crisis?
Lesley Hughes is a Distinguished Professor of Biology and Interim Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science & Engineering at Macquarie University. She is an ecologist whose main research interest has been the impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems, and the implications of climate change for conservation. She was a Lead Author of the IPCC’s 4th and 5th Assessment Report, Director for the WWF Australia and federal Climate Commissioner and is now a Councillor and Director with the Climate Council of Australia. She is also a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.
https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/lesley-hughes
www.climatecouncil.org.au
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"The lobbyists that represent the fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, Koch companies, and the American Petroleum Institute, they knew for years that the climate crisis would happen, and they've been telling us that it wouldn't. And right now in every state capital, the lobbyists are doing everything they can to slow the transition from fossil fuel to renewables. The sad fact is, these oil and gas lobbyists will never wake up one morning and say: I am worried about the climate crisis. I'm worried about my children. I am going to cut off ties with these oil and gas companies and stop taking their money. That will never happen. And I'm sad to say this, but it's been a long, long road to try to change their behavior with facts or reason."
Why are fossil fuel lobbyists also allowed to work for communities, schools, businesses, and nonprofit organizations being harmed by the climate crisis without declaring their conflict of interest? Why divestment from fossil fuels should include divesting from lobbyists which play for both sides.
James Browning is the founder of F Minus, a research and advocacy group that tracks the extent to which fossil fuel lobbyists also represent victims of the climate crisis. He is also a writer and game designer, and his novel The Fracking King was named one of the best 100 books of 2014 by Amazon.
https://fminus.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"So this was the decision to write in the second person. A lot of people ask me: why? There are not many examples of this technique. The reason I opted for that is I was trying to figure out interviewing a ghost. And one of the challenges was: what does a disembodied voice sound like? The narrator's body has been chopped up and chucked in a lake.
So, I figured that if anything survives the death of your body, it's perhaps the voice in your head. The voice in my head is in the second person. I don't know about your head or anyone else's head, but in mine, it's the second person.
It's almost like someone else telling me: Yeah, you should have worn a better shirt for this interview. You should have read a better chapter. And it's almost like someone is talking to me. And I tried this technique, and I think Maali Almeida also questions. Who is the you that's telling the story? And this is addressed. We've all had experiences where we've done something or said something and we've thought: what was I thinking? Why did I do that? And what made me do that? And so Maali also ponders: Is the voice telling the story, is that me, or is it someone else? Is there a spirit? Because he observes that spirits, because they're so bored - because I have to also figure out what ghosts do all day? Because we know in horror movies, ghosts turn up and be scary. And I don't know if there are resolutions in the book, but there is the idea that maybe are your thoughts your own? Or is someone else whispering them to you?"
What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be? In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning?
Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the Booker Prize 2022 for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In addition to novels, he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories. Born in Colombo, he studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam, and Singapore.
www.shehanwriter.com
https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324064824
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"I don't know why we would really want to tell stories without being connected to the meaning.
And I think that's especially for women, but I do think for human beings, that is how we can work as hard and be able to get up the next morning and keep going. Because we are working through the meaning, and it feeds us as we're like making sense of it all, trying to make sense of it, and for being in community and communion, if I dare say that, as an ex-Catholic too.
Like sharing as a witness what it is to be human and what it means, and through this work, tell our story. So yeah, I feel like it's a bit of a crushing experience, as an industry goes. And I often feel like I'm way flung out to the side in the process of how I do the work versus how the industry wants it done, expects it done, and how the money is made and having it done. And there's an unhappy marriage between art and commerce right now. We've changed as a society, and the internet and AI have changed the world. But I kind of don't care because I get one life that I'm aware of, and I just want to do it in a way that feels good and the art feels true for me." -Kate Mueth
Why do we make art? What can the performing arts teach us about how to engage in dialogues to overcome conflict and division?
Our guests today are actress Catherine Curtin and artistic director Kate Mueth. Curtin is known for her roles on Stranger Things, Homeland, and Insecure. She played correctional officer Wanda Bell in Orange Is the New Black, and for this role she was a joint winner of two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series.
Mueth is the Founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning dance theater company The Neo-Political Cowgirls that seeks to deepen and challenge the ways in which audiences experience stories and awaken their human connection. Based in East Hampton, New York they have performed to audiences in America and Europe.
www.imdb.com/name/nm0193160/
www.npcowgirls.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"Pretty much everything we do in our lives from the moment we wake up and take a shower, we're using water – that's shared resources. We're using energy that, for most of us, unfortunately, still comes from fossil fuels. We are making decisions about what we eat. We're making purchases that have an impact on the planet and on other animals based on where they came from and what they're made of. There are so many entry points for people to take action and start making changes in their own lives. And that's really important for people to start with what feels right to them. That's a great way to start getting involved in this."
How can we take inspiration from our love for animals to protect wildlife and change the world? How can we take action and start making changes in our lives? What if we measured success based on happiness and on the health of communities?
Stephanie Feldstein leads the Center for Biological Diversity's work to highlight and address threats to endangered species and wild places from runaway human population growth and overconsumption. Previously Stephanie worked for Change.org, where she helped hundreds of people start and win online campaigns to protect wildlife. She has years of experience in organizing, outreach and communications. She is the author of The Animal Lover’s Guide to Changing the World, and the series aimed at young adults Take Action: Save Life on Earth.
https://biologicaldiversity.org/about/staff/#sfeldstein
https://biologicaldiversity.org
www.abebooks.com/9781250153258/Animal-Lovers-Guide-Changing-World-1250153255/plp
https://cherrylakepublishing.com/series/445-take-action-save-life-on-earth
https://takeextinctionoffyourplate.com/
https://endangeredspeciescondoms.com/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"One of the things we have to do is we have to increase the rate of learning. We are entering into increasingly uncharted territory and not just in terms of climate change, but in many other areas of activity, AI being one of those, of course. And I think what we need to do is we need to find ways to learn more quickly, as a society, as communities, as villagers, as professional groups. And there are advantages of using some of those technologies in terms of accelerating that learning.
We need to be discerning about the technologies we use, and we need to think about the relationships between those technology and social outcomes, environmental outcomes, how to redesign our systems, and how to redesign our governance. So I think there's going to be a need for a lot more thought and creativity in the future."
Our window to adapt to a warming world is narrowing quickly. What it will take to avert the climate crises?
Mark Howden is Director of the Climate Change Institute at The Australian National University and a Vice Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a member of the Australian National Climate Science Advisory Committee. He has been a major contributor to the IPCC since 1991, with roles in the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and now Sixth Assessment Reports, sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with other IPCC participants and Al Gore. He was on the US Federal Advisory Committee for the 3rd National Climate Assessment and contributes to several major national and international science and policy advisory bodies. Mark has worked on climate variability, climate change, innovation and adoption issues for over 30 years in partnership with many industry, community and policy groups via both research and science-policy roles.
https://iceds.anu.edu.au/people/academics/professor-mark-howden
https://iceds.anu.edu.au/
www.ipcc.ch
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"It's felt very anxious to imagine going towards the next few decades. And I do get a real sense of solidarity and hope by how wolves are navigating these change landscapes and moving through them and raising new generations. In the face of it, a wolf pack will pass on territory potentially through multiple generations.
We have to rekindle the herd instinct. Cows right now are bred just for meat. They are bred to exist within capitalism. The cows have forgotten how to interact with each other and protect each other. They are stewards of the land and what can we learn from that?"
The lone wolf is actually alone because it's looking for connection. They leave in order to find a mate and form their own pack. If loneliness is an epidemic, what can wolves teach us about loneliness, courage, and connection?
Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Her essays in journalism appear in Outside, Wired, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Guernica, among other publications. Berry has taught workshops for teenagers and adults at Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the New York Times Student Journeys in Oxford Academia.
www.ericaberry.com
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250882264/wolfish
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters?
In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the written word. Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
"As writers, it's our job to write what will become clichés. Not to write clichés, but to be original enough that we make something that people are still saying for hundreds of years to come. And if that's what you're doing, that's pretty powerful.
When I'm writing a poem I'm making a world. And if I can stick to that, then I have to believe that once a poem is out in the world, another world has been made, another way of living, another way of thinking, another way of seeing things."
www.jerichobrown.com
www.harpercollins.com/products/how-we-do-it-jericho-browndarlene-taylor?variant=40901184684066
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"Our culture and the way that we carry out capitalism is that we have allowed businesses to create a mess. And then the taxpayers are the ones that pay to clean it up. Corporations need to be held accountable for the environmental harm that they cause. And that way it's not going to be left to us. Corporations are caught in a system and the way that we carry out capitalism now is that profit is above everything, including people's health. And these corporations feel that if they don't maximize profit, they could be sued by their shareholders because their shareholders are basically holding them accountable for profit only. One of them that's worked quite well in Europe, and it's just starting to emerge in America, is to require that corporations report on their environmental impact. So right alongside their financial report would be environmental risk and environmental impact reporting.”
Sue Inches is an advocate, author, and teacher. She has worked in public policy for over 25 years, serving as the Deputy Director of the State Planning Office, and as a Director at the Maine Department of Marine Resources. She is author of Advocating for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power and Take Action, and teaches college and high school workshops on same. Her consulting work focuses on strategic planning, program development, and environmental campaigns.
https://sueinches.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670609/advocating-for-the-environment-by-susan-b-inches
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.” – ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER
Is there any better example of the American Dream than Arnold Schwarzenegger? What does it take to make your vision a reality? How do you cultivate iron focus to overcome any obstacle and realize your dreams?
On the publication of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s limited edition two-volume book published by TASCHEN, we sat down with Senior Editor and Writer Dian Hansen to discuss Schwarzenegger’s life, accomplishments, and history of unforgettable performances. The book has been a decade-long collaborative process and along with portraits by leading photographers Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Francesco Scavullo, and Andy Warhol, it is also filled with photos from Arnold’s private archive and exclusive interviews. Dian’s other works include The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta.
"It's not just that he grew up in a rural environment too. He was born on July 30th, 1947. And most of us today don't have any understanding or relationship to what Europe was like right after World War II. The winter of 1946/1947 in Austria was the most brutal in decades. The people already had too little food. They were in an occupied country.
The summer potato crops failed. As Arnold has said, his mother had to go from farm to farm to farm, begging for food to be able to feed her children. His father, like all the men in the village, was defeated by the war. I mean, they were not just defeated by their side losing, but realizing what their side had stood for, that they were the bad guys.
And he saw them all physically, emotionally, intellectually defeated and taking it out on their wives and children, that he was beaten and his mother was beaten. All the neighbor kids were beaten, and they were beaten into a kind of placid defeat. And he alone would not accept that. He could not see that life for himself.
And he was, as a child, searching for ways to get out of that. And bodybuilding became that when he learned about bodybuilding as a very poor boy. They lived on the top floor of a house. They had no plumbing. They all bathed once a week in the same tub in the kitchen. And his brother and he had to bring the water in. His mother heated it, and they took baths one by one. Mother first, father second, older brother third, Arnold last in the tub of dirty water. And so he wanted out of that. And as a poor boy, he had nothing but his body to work with. That was it. There was not going to be any college. There was not going to be any of that. There was going to be some kind of menial job, or he could use what he had - his body - to get him out of there."
www.taschen.com/en/limited-editions/film/03105/arnold-collector-s-edition
www.schwarzenegger.com
www.creativeprocess.info
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Image courtesy of Taschen.
Photo credit: ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER IN VENICE, CALIFORNIA. PHOTO BY ALBERT BUSEK, 1980
"The activists need to pay attention to mass awareness. Political change is a function of gaining political power through mass awareness, mass mobilization, and mass unification. And we're in a period on the left right now, which has happened in history before, where there's a lot of internal focus about the fairness of the processes within NGOs and activist organizations. And the legacy of racism in these organizations and gender and identity issues, all of which are essential and important and valid, but those are not the pathways to mass awareness and mass unity. If you overemphasize those kinds of issues, it's a kind of sectarianism, which is the opposite of how you unify people to get political power. If you don't assemble majority support - majority sentiment doesn't mean everybody - it means majority, then you can't take power. And if you can't get power, guess what? You can't help the vulnerable. You can't help the oppressed. This is, like most things in life, a question of balance. If you overfocus on the legitimate feelings and plight of subgroups of the population, by necessity, you won't establish what Reverend Jesse Jackson used to call the Rainbow Coalition. And without the Rainbow Coalition, you don't win. So, what I hope is that the scientists and the activist community can pay as much attention to cognitive science as they do to climate science. And then we'll get somewhere definitely."
How can we effectively communicate that we're moving beyond climate change to a state of climate crisis? The trapped heat energy on Earth is equal to a million Atomic bombs going off every single day. Today we talk to someone who's been mobilizing the public mind for over 50 years.
David Fenton, named “one of the 100 most influential PR people” by PR Week and “the Robin Hood of public relations” by The National Journal, founded Fenton in 1982 to create communications campaigns for the environment, public health, and human rights. For more than five decades he has pioneered the use of PR, social media, and advertising techniques for social change. Fenton started his career as a photojournalist in the late 1960s – his book Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal was published in 2005. He was formerly director of public relations at Rolling Stone magazine and co-producer of the No-Nukes concerts in 1979 at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and other artists. He has also helped create JStreet, Climate Nexus, the Death Penalty Information Center, and Families for a Future. He sold Fenton a few years ago to work on climate change full time. He is the author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator.
https://davidfentonactivist.com
www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Activists-Media-Handbook/David-Fenton/9781647228668
https://fenton.com
X / twitter @dfenton
IG @dfenton1
facebook.com/davidfentonactivist
www.creativeprocess.info
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All photographs © 1968-2022 David Fenton
"When I was growing up, it was all about representation. I think that was the thing that was being championed: we need more people of color in books, movies, across all media. And then I think what we saw was an extremely cynical and capitalistic-minded ruthless optimization of that, where someone said: Oh, you want representation? Then we'll just throw in token people of color into projects. And then we'll check that box. And I think that became so prevalent in so many pieces of media that that became what we thought of as representation. I think it's a salvageable concept because, I mean, when I encountered books growing up, they were all with white people in them. Front to back, start to finish. It was just white characters. And so when I started writing stories of my own in school as a middle schooler they - surprise - they had white people in them, right? There were just white people talking about other white people. I went to public school in Queens. I knew very few white people. And so I think what representation does at its best is that it informs the boundaries of possibility. By seeing yourself represented in media, you become able to imagine your own stories transpiring in media and being made available for everybody else to witness.
And so I think the point of representation is not just if we do a checklist of this piece of media, can we find a person of color. But I think the idea of representation is more that we want to be expanding the realm of storytelling, expanding what's possible by telling these stories that are not normally told.”
How can we retell the story of America? In the United States of Amnesia, why does the Western celebrate cowboys but not all people who built this country? What does a Chinese-American hero look like in the 21st Century?
Tom Lin is an American writer whose 2021 debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu chronicles the story of a Chinese American outlaw seeking revenge during America's railroad boom. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, making Lin the youngest Carnegie winner in the prize’s history. Tom Lin is currently pursuing an English doctorate at the University of California Davis.
https://twotreeforest.com
www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tom-lin/the-thousand-crimes-of-ming-tsu/9780316542173/?lens=little-brown
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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Image courtesy of Little, Brown and Company & Tom Lin
"The Chicago School in the 1970s said: Capitalism has been doing really well. What we need to do is take their training wheels off and get rid of regulation, because they believed this would lift everybody out of poverty. That didn't happen. What happened was, if you don't regulate markets, suddenly all of that money goes to the top. So I'm going to give you an example of how skewed our global system is. There are currently eight billionaires in the world, and they're all white males who own the same wealth as the bottom 4 billion people. That suggests that neoliberalism has not worked."
Can we imagine a world where we leave half the earth to the natural environment and use the other half for ourselves? Can we change history and protect the Indigenous, the vulnerable, and the very poorest in society?
Mark Maslin is a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London. Maslin is a leading expert in understanding the anthropocene and how it relates to the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. He has written a number of books on the issue of climate change, his most book is How to Save Our Planet: The Facts.
www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/people/academic-staff/mark-maslin
www.penguin.co.uk/books/320155/how-to-save-our-planet-by-maslin-mark/9780241472521
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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Image courtesy of Mark Maslin
"Music has the ability to transport you to a place and create a sort of internal landscape. And we all have life-changing things that happened to us. And I remember I made it as a way to kind of ease a busy mind. And perhaps I was missing home. I still call Orkney home, even though I'm not there every day. I'm a thousand miles away today, and I still call Orkney home. For example, when I hear the voice of the curlew, it transports me back to Orkney with such a jolt. In a heartbeat. And music can do that too. It's very transformative. Visual arts have the ability to do that too. And you could stare at a Rothko painting and cry and not quite know why. It can take days to figure out perhaps certain meanings from it. But music I think is quite instant. It can really do that."
How has music transported you? Where do you find inspiration from the natural world? Where do you find moments of every day magic?
Erland Cooper is a Scottish composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist from Stromness, Orkney. He has released three acclaimed studio albums, four additional companion albums, and multiple EPs, including a trilogy of work inspired by his childhood home. His work combines field recordings with traditional orchestration and contemporary electronic elements. Through music words and cinematography, he explores landscape, memory, and identity. Cooper also works across mixed media projects, including installation, art, theater, and film. He is widely known for burying the only existing copy of the master tape of his first classical album in Scotland, deleting all digital files, and leaving only a treasure hunt of clues for fans and his record label alike to search for it. The tape has recently been found.
www.erlandcooper.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Photo by Alex Kozobolis
What is a spin dictator? What does tyranny look like in the 21st century? Why is populism on the rise? And how do we reinvent democracy?
Sergei Guriev is the co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Guriev is Provost and a professor of economics and at Sciences Po in Paris. He is a former Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London, and a former Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow in 2004-13.
"In Russia, I ran a university, a new economic school. And as an economist and a public intellectual, I was engaged in interactions with the government, including with Vladimir Putin. And there, of course, the situation was that Russia was already a nondemocratic country, meaning that it was a country where elections were not free and fair and partial censorship was already in place. Yet in those years, we could express ourselves openly, not on national TV, but at least in newspapers and on radio. And that eventually brought me into trouble with Vladimir Putin, who at some point suggested that I talked too much and I should not be in the same country. He's never expressed that clearly to me. He passed this message through various common friends. I was also interrogated. My office was searched. And at some point, common friends told me, 'Look, you shouldn't be here.' And I bought a one-way ticket for the next day and just left Russia."
https://sites.google.com/site/sguriev/
https://spindictators.com/
www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/en/researcher/sergei-guriev.html
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
What if museums weren’t confined to buildings but could be part of the natural world? What if sculptures could not only celebrate our oceans, but also provide habitats for marine life?
Jason deCaires Taylor is a sculptor, environmentalist, and underwater photographer. His works are constructed using materials to instigate natural growth and the subsequent changes intended to explore the aesthetics of decay, rebirth, and metamorphosis. DeCaires Taylor's pioneering public art projects are not only examples of successful marine conservation but also works of art that seek to encourage environmental awareness and lead us to appreciate the breathtaking natural beauty of the underwater world.
www.underwatersculpture.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"There's this real emergence of young people doing incredible things enabled by bio-modern technology and a more globalized and connected world and access to amazing educational resources about what the environment does and means for humanity.
People typically have quite a dire view of the state of the world but have a positive view of the local environment, which is very interesting. So it's the potential of every individual to make an impact and to spend a little bit of time thinking about their actions and, and how they can influence the way that other people also care about the environment.
Because when you have young, impassioned people involved in environmental work, there's a magnetism there that draws other people in, and that's what I've seen from the young pioneers and the emerging scientists that they can generate a lot more excitement and momentum within their peer groups and their age groups."
We have lost around 85% of oyster reefs. That’s not only the loss of oysters but also the habitat they provide other marine animals and plants. Oysters are amazing, not only do some create pearls but as sequential hermaphrodites, they can switch between male and female almost on a daily basis.
Dr. Dominic McAfee is a researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia. His work centers around restoring lost marine ecosystems, specifically shellfish reefs. Along with employing novel technology and reef restoration projects, he seeks to understand how oysters enhance the resilience and function of coastal ecosystems. He seeks to develop conservation messaging strategies that enhance public engagement via conservation optimism.
https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/dominic.mcafee
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Does becoming a mother mean forgetting who you were before? How can we reclaim our lives as women, while still being mothers to our children? What does traveling alone teach us ourselves and those we love?
Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A contributor writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Air Mail, Vogue, BBC Travel and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News, for most of those years producing for Barbara Walters. She lives in Connecticut.
"I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away."
www.miafunk.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Photo credit: Elena Seibert
Nicholas Royle is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Sussex, England, where he has been based since 1999. He has also taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Tampere, and the University of Stirling; and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Århus, Santiago del Compostela, Turku, Manitoba, and Lille. He is a managing editor of the Oxford Literary Review and director of Quick Fictions. He has published many books, including Telepathy and Literature, E.M. Forster, Jacques Derrida, The Uncanny, Veering: A Theory of Literature, How to Read Shakespeare, and Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing, as well as the novels Quilt and An English Guide to Birdwatching, and Mother: A Memoir. In addition, he is co-author with Andrew Bennett of three books: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing, and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory Sixth edition, 2023. Royle’s current projects include a detective novel, a collection of essays about new approaches to narrative theory, and a collaborative work with Timothy Morton on Covid-19. His latest book, David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, is due to be published in November 2023.
Mother: A Memoir
“Pre-word In my mind's eye she is sitting at the circular white Formica-top table in the corner. Morning sunlight fills the kitchen. She has a cup of Milky Nescafé Gold Blend and is smoking a purple Silk Cut. She is dressed for comfort in a floral bronze-and-brown blouse and blue jumper with light gray slacks and blue slippers. She is absorbed in a crossword (The Times) but not oblivious. She does what always takes me aback. She reads out one of the clues. As if I would know the answer. Her gift for crosswords is alien to me. I get stuck at the first ambiguity or double-meaning. Whereas she sweeps through all illusions allusions red herrings and anagrams and is done most days by lunchtime. But her fondness for crossword puzzles is inseparable from my interest in words. Where they come from. What they might be doing. Earliest recorded use of 'In my mind's eye': Shakespeare's Hamlet (around 1599). Referring to the Ghost.
My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.”
www.routledge.com/An-Introduction-to-Literature-Criticism-and-Theory/Bennett-Royle/p/book/9781032158846
https://myriadeditions.com/creator/nicholas-royle/
https://quickfiction.co.uk/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Marge Piercy’s 17 novels include NYTimes Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It, and her critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. She’s written 20 volumes of poetry. The most recent is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. Born in Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.
www.margepiercy.com
www.miafunk.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“Home of the Brave” performed by Laurie Anderson & Dickie Landry on The Late Show. Laurie Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects.
For nearly half a century, Richard “Dickie” Landry was at the center of the New York avant-garde. Born in the small Louisiana town of Cecilia in 1938, he began making pilgrimages to the city while still in his teens in search of the city’s most cutting edge gestures in jazz, and relaxed there not long after, falling in with a close knit community of artists and composers like Keith Sonnier, Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matt Clarke, Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Lawrence Weiner, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and Robert Wilson. Landry remains one of the few artists of his generation who made important waves within numerous creative idioms. Having been trained from a young age on saxophone, not only is he a remarkably respected solo performer and bandleader, but he was an early and long-standing member of Philip Glass’ ensemble, playing on seminal records like Music With Changing Parts, Music in Similar Motion / Music in Fifths, Music in Twelve Parts, North Star, and Einstein on the Beach, and played with Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and jazz giants like Johnny Hammond, Gene Ammons, and Les McCann. He was also one of the most important photographic documenters of the New York Scene, until he left the city for his native Louisiana, following 9/11. Listen to his music on Unseen Worlds.
http://www.dickielandry.com
https://unseenworlds.com/collections/dickie-landry
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
"There's a lot of apprenticeship in our industry because historically it had to be that way, otherwise what you would have in publishing - there's still a lot of this - is a bunch of English majors trying to make sense of how to run a business, right?
Because book publishing or working at a literary agency - a talent agency for authors like I do - is at the crossroads of creative and business. And if you didn't have that kind of apprenticeship, someone to learn from at the company where you work, then we would all just be English majors just trying to feel our way in the dark.
I think that the important thing for people to really know about storytelling is that books are sort of like the oil paintings of the new media. It's a very fine art form, an old art form, and a story exists in everything, whether it's a photograph, a painting, a song, or a movie, it all began with a story. And stories have been here from the dawn of time. They're going to forever be in our existence, but I think people should just always have curious minds and seek out stories and storytelling and try to see the story in everything, not just look at things for face value."
Mark Gottlieb is a Vice President and top-selling literary agent at Trident Media Group. He represents a wide range of authors across genres, many of whom have been awarded prestigious prizes and have secured places on the New York Times bestseller list. Among other achievements, Mark has successfully optioned and sold books to film production companies where they were adapted into blockbuster hits, beloved by audiences and critics.
In addition to his work as an agent, Mark lectures on his experiences and craft at such noted venues as the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Cambridge University’s MSt in Creative Writing program, Columbia Publishing Course, and Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute. He founded Emerson College's Wilde Press, and the Stamford Literature, Arts & Culture Salon (SLACS), where he currently serves as president.
www.tridentmediagroup.com/agents/mark-gottlieb
www.tridentmediagroup.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome’s Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.
www.miafunk.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Alice Fulton’s books include Barely Composed, a poetry collection; The Nightingales Of Troy, linked stories; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her book Felt received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, awarded to the best book of poems published within a two-year period. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Ingram Merrill Foundation. Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, Palladium, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, and an essay collection, Feeling As A Foreign Language. She lives in Ithaca, NY.
www.alicefulton.com
www.miafunk.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Robert Plant is a singer and songwriter, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band Led Zeppelin. Regarded by many as one of the greatest singers in rock music, he’s known for his flamboyant persona and raw stage performances. He’s also collaborated outside of the rock genre. Here he performs with Lil' Band O' Gold. For nearly half a century, Richard “Dickie” Landry was at the center of the New York avant-garde. Born in the small Louisiana town of Cecilia in 1938, he began making pilgrimages to the city while still in his teens in search of the city’s most cutting edge gestures in jazz, and relaxed there not long after, falling in with a close knit community of artists and composers like Philip Glass, Keith Sonnier, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matt Clarke, Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Lawrence Weiner, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and Robert Wilson.
Landry remains one of the few artists of his generation who made important waves within numerous creative idioms. Having been trained from a young age on saxophone, not only is he a remarkably respected solo performer and bandleader, but he was an early and long-standing member of Philip Glass’ ensemble, playing on seminal records like Music With Changing Parts, Music in Similar Motion / Music in Fifths, Music in Twelve Parts, North Star, and Einstein on the Beach, and played with Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and jazz giants like Johnny Hammond, Gene Ammons, and Les McCann. He was also one of the most important photographic documenters of the New York Scene, until he left the city for his native Louisiana, following 9/11.
http://www.dickielandry.com
https://unseenworlds.com/collections/dickie-landry
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
www.jerichobrown.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Portrait of Jericho Brown by Mia Funk www.miafunk.com
Happy World Oceans Day! Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists and artists with music courtesy of composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Erland Cooper.
Voices on this episode are
GIULIO BOCCALETTI
Author of Water, A Biography
Natural Resource Security & Environmental Sustainability Expert
Chief Strategy Officer 2016–2020, The Nature Conservancy
PAULA PINHO
Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy
RON GONEN
Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners
Fmr. Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYC
MARCIA DESANCTIS
Journalist, Essayist,
Author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life
JEAN WEINER
Goldman Environmental Prize Winner
Founder of Fondation pour la Protection de la Biodiversité Marine, Haiti
DERRICK EMSLEY
Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel Co.
DR. FARHANA SULTANA
Co-author: Water Politics: Governance, Justice & the Right to Water
Fmr. UNDP Programme Officer, United Nations Development Programme
NEIL GRIMMER
Brand President of SOURCE Global · Innovator of the SOURCE Hydropanel: Drinking Water Made from Sunlight and Air
ALAN JACOBSEN
Director of Photography
Emmy & Sundance Special Jury Award-Winning & Oscar Nominated Documentaries
RICHARD VEVERS
Founder & CEO of The Ocean Agency
BRIAN WILCOX
Chief Engineer & Co-founder of Marine BioEnergy
Grows Kelp in the Ocean to Provide Carbon-neutral Fuels
SETH M. SIEGEL
Entrepreneur, Public Speaker & NYTimes Bestselling Author
Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World
Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink
JOELLE GERGIS
Lead Author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Author of Humanity’s Moment
JAY FAMIGLIETTI, Fmr. Senior Water Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Exec. Director, Global Institute for Water Security, Host of "What About Water?" Podcast
ROB BILOTT
Environmental Lawyer, Partner Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP
Author of Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont
JILL HEINERTH
Explorer, Presenter, Author of Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver
OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE
Founder & Executive Director of the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network International
Author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature & Artist
JESS WILBER
International Outreach Citizens’ Climate Lobby
Coordinator, Senior Stewards Acting for the Environment
BERTRAND PICCARD
Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight, Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation
IBRAHIM ALHUSSEINI
Founder & CEO of FullCycle Fund
GARY GRIGGS
Global Oceans Hero Award-Winner · Distinguished Professor of Earth Sciences
Director Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz 1991 to 2017
Sample Credits:
BBC News Excerpt, Public broadcast, 19th July. Fair usage, courtesy Simon Gurney, BBC Studios Limited.
BBC News Excerpt, Public broadcast, 19th July. Fair usage, courtesy Simon Gurney, BBC Studios Limited.
UN Broadcast Excerpt, Greta Thunberg, Young Climate Activist at the Opening of the Climate Action Summit 2019, United Nations license 24 October 2022.
CBS News Excerpt 1970. Fair usage, archive courtesy Leah Hodge, CBS
www.erlandcooper.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Artworks by Mia Funk www.miafunk.com
Music from Folded Landscapes courtesy of Erland Cooper and Universal Music Enterprises.
E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, winner of the Washington State Book Award and the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award. For her poetry collection A Lesser Love she received the Pleiades Press Editors Prize. She is the co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is completing the PhD program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a recipient of MacDowell and Kundiman fellowships.
IG @thisisejkoh
www.instagram.com/p/CRB8O69BWQJ/
www.miafunk.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"Putting design first, it really enables us to shape a future that we don't yet know. But we need to be super tactile and practical about it as well. And then seeing that is something that design very much has the ability to do. And at the same time, having this growing frustration that wherever you go, wherever you talk about sustainability, it was a compromise. It was something that meant uglier, less convenient, more expensive, all these different things, but then diving into the Danish Design heritage, seeing that what set them apart was that after the World Wars, they had a social purpose of democratizing and rebuilding the welfare state, and that was not something that lessened the final result. On the contrary, it heightened the ambition, the final design, and the solutions."
Ditte Lysgaard Vind is a renowned circular economy and design expert and author of Danish Design Heritage & Global Sustainability (Routledge 2023) and A Changemakers Guide to the Future. She is the Chairwoman of the Danish Design Council and founder of The Circular Way. She is known for pioneering new materials as well as business models, while sharing the knowledge gained from practice through teaching and thought leadership, and is a member of the Executive board of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation as well as the global SDG innovation lab UNLEASH.
www.thecircularway.com
http://danishdesigncouncil.dk/en
www.routledge.com/Danish-Design-Heritage-and-Global-Sustainability/Vind/p/book/9781032198200
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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The Creative Process and One Planet Podcast wishes listeners Happy World Environment Day. For this special episode we celebrate the natural world with Artpark Bridges, the Parkinson's Community, independent living adults with Parkinson's disease, and People Inc, the Arts Experience, a day habilitation program for adults with developmental disabilities.
Artpark Bridges is a year-round community engagement program led by interdisciplinary artist Cynthia Pegado, dedicated to empowering adults of diverse abilities and backgrounds through expressive arts workshops and performance opportunities. Serving the Buffalo-Niagara Falls region of New York State, Artpark Bridges connects citizens with a sense of inclusion and purpose, healing and creative expression.
Cynthia Pegado
Teaching artist and movement expert, Cynthia Cadwell Pegado, weaves her passion for immersive performance into the creative process of site-specific work for people of all abilities. Ms. Pegado is an eight-time New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Community Arts awardee, for “Art Moves Me”, her interpretive dance program based on visual art, designed for the Burchfield Penney Art Center and "Sound Dance" designed for Artpark. She has choreographed performance works for students in Parkinson’s specific classes as well as public programs which include Global Water Dances (a worldwide network of choreographers advocating for water quality)
Muriel Louveau
French vocalist composer Muriel Louveau has been invited by Sonia Kozlova Clark ,director of Artpark festival, as an international artist in residence at Artpark in 2022 to create and customize virtual expressive voice classes facilitated by Cynthia for Artpark Bridges groups including the Parkinson's and People Inc communities. This ongoing program of classes focuses on vocalizing skills and communal art-making with a theme of universal humanity.
"For me it is an artistic exchange but foremost a human experience. I cannot describe in words how this collaboration with the Artpark Bridges community inspires me, touches me, and opens my heart." Muriel Louveau, Artpark Bridges Sound Moves Me Artist-in-Residence.
These recorded pieces have been developed with their students during "Our Garden " vocal workshop Poem "'Lily" written and read by Nancy (People Inc), "Nature" by Ed (PD group), "Fragile Beauty" by Nancy and Cynthia, "Garden of Love" by Cammie (People Inc).
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Flower Duet - Leo Delibes
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Conducted by Philip Milman https://pmmusic.pro/
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, CNN.com, National Geographic News, and other publications. He is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace.
"So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy.
The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being."
www.safinacenter.org
www.carlsafina.org
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Photo: Carl Safina in Uganda
Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician who moved from Trinidad to the UK in 1989. A lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck College, he is particularly interested in the point at which poetry becomes music.
As well as four poetry collections, a slew of albums, and three novels – most recently Kitch – Joseph has published critical work exploring the aesthetics of Caribbean Poetry among other subjects. He performs internationally as the lead vocalist for his band The Spasm Band. Sonnets for Albert is his first poetry collection since Rubber Orchestras.
“Calling England Home” and “Language (Poem for Anthony McNeill)” were released in 2021 by Anthony Joseph and appear on his album "The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running For Their Lives”.
www.anthonyjoseph.co.uk
https://open.spotify.com/artist/622cbugSJevUkEanSBCab9
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“A mentalist is a kind of magician, an illusionist. And a mentalist uses whatever techniques are at that person's disposal to create the illusion of being able to read minds or being able to contact a supernatural presence…The only rule is that that part is fake, but then you can use techniques for magic or from stagecraft or from psychology. A mentalist is really someone who creates this illusion of having an almost supernatural ability. Having said that, today a mentalist sort of has come to mean something else, mainly due to popular culture TV series like The Mentalist and so on. And now there's this understanding of a mentalist as someone being able to read body language and influence behavior. It sort of ties into it all. And I've had a lifelong passion for magic, and it started when I was seven. Because I was always interested in the question: what if there's a color in the sky that we can't see? What if a handkerchief actually can vanish? What does that mean in terms of how the world works?
So that was one part of it. I always longed for there to be something else. And I think one of the reasons for that was because I was quite the socially awkward child. I didn't have the skill set to interact in a frictionless way with my classmates, which meant that I was a weird guy. I was the one who got beaten up every single day at school, but I was also quite extroverted. So I didn't confine myself to my place in the corner. I was still there every Friday because on Fridays there was an open hour in class where you can perform or just show something. And I was always there to do magic because I had a skill. I could do something that the other guys couldn't. And then they beat me up again for it. But I do think that that realization that there's something going on here, that sort of set off something in my mind that this is something I needed to solve. I wanted to understand my bullies. This wasn't a conscious reflection on my part, but it was there. It basically felt like everyone else had been handed a handbook on social intelligence.”
Henrik Fexeus is an internationally bestselling author, lecturer, performer, and star of the TV show Mind Melt. An expert in psychology and communications, he travels the world "reading minds" and teaching others how to understand and manipulate human behavior through body language and persuasion. Henrik has studied mental skills like NLP, hypnosis, acting, and magic.
https://henrikfexeus.se/en/
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Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022.
Photo credit: Lucas Marquardt
www.adalimon.net
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Neil Gaiman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Stardust, Coraline, Norse Mythology, Neverwhere, and The Graveyard Book. He’s adapted many of his books for television and film. Among his numerous literary awards are the Newbery and Carnegie medals, and the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner awards. He is a Global Goodwill Ambassador for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In this episode, Gaiman reads his poems “A Writer’s Prayer” and “These Are Not Our Faces”. To hear our full interview with Neil Gaiman, visit The Creative Process Podcast: Arts, Culture & Society.
www.neilgaiman.com
www.imdb.com/name/nm0301274/
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"In today's world, feeling happy is no longer simply a state of mind. It's become a marker of mental health and success. On the flip side, pain and sadness are viewed as signals of failure and sickness. If we're not happy, then there is something wrong with us, and we need to fix it. It is no wonder that the painkiller and antidepressant markets, already worth billions of dollars, continue their rapid expansion. We've come to treat even commonplace experiences of pain and sadness as pathological, as things that need to be medicated and eradicated."
Brock Bastian is author of The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living and a professor at University of Melbourne’s School of Psychological Sciences. His research and writing focus on pain, happiness, morality, and wellbeing. In his search for a new perspective on what makes for the good life, Bastian has studied why promoting happiness may have paradoxical effects; why we need negative and painful experiences in life to build meaning, purpose, resilience, and ultimately greater fulfilment in life; and why behavioural ethics is necessary for understanding how we reason about personal and social issues and resolve conflicts of interest.
www.brockbastian.com
www.abebooks.com/9780141982106/Side-Happiness-Embracing-Fearless-Approach-0141982101/plp
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"If you look at the Himalayas, the frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water. The real tragedy is if the Himalayan glaciers go the same way as Iceland. In many places in the world, glaciers are very important for agriculture and the basic water supply of people. So that's where I go into mythology in On Time and Water because in Nordic mythology, the world started with a cow, a frozen cow made of frost and snow. And it never made sense to me. But if you look at the Himalayas, how these frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water that is better than normal water, then it makes total sense. Of course, the frozen cow - it's a glacier."
Andri Snær Magnason is an award winning author of On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Story of the Blue Planet. His work has been published in more than 35 languages. He has a written in most genres, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, non fiction as well as being a documentary film maker. His novel, LoveStar got a Philip K. Dick Special Citation, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in France and “Novel of the year” in Iceland. The Story of the Blue Planet, was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Award and has been published or performed in 35 countries. The Blue Planet received the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award in Poland 2000, the UKLA Award in the UK and Children's book of the Year in China. His book – Dreamland – a Self Help Manual for a Frightened Nation takes on these issues and has sold more than 20.000 copies in Iceland. He co directed Dreamland - a feature length documentary film based on the book. Footage from Dreamland and an interview with Andri can be seen in the Oscar Award-winning documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson. His most recent book, Tímakistan, the Time Casket has now been published in more than 10 languages, was nominated as the best fantasy book in Finland 2016 with authors like Ursula K. le Guin and David Mitchell. In English six books are currently available: Bónus Poetry, The Story of The Blue Planet, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Casket of Time, (Tímakistan) and On Time and Water.
www.andrimagnason.com
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"There's no question, we are in a state of conservation emergency. And we have a real situation on our hands and it's so fragile that if we take a step back, we could say goodbye to two types of chimpanzee species and the forest is also on the brink of disappearing forever. And when I started as a conservation researcher, there was kidnapping and insecurity throughout the Nile Delta region, and it was immersed in a lot of oil politics and civil conflicts. Kidnapping and insecurity ran throughout that region. Let's not forget that Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation now. We are over 200 million people in the country, and it's a growing population of young people who are looking for means of livelihood and on the lookout to find space to live. So parts of the forest within one year would suddenly become a new village."
Rachel Ashegbofeh Ikemeh is a Whitley Award-winning conservationist and Founder/Director at the Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project, a grassroots-focused conservation initiative that has been dedicated to the protection of fragile wildlife populations and habitat across her project sites in Africa’s most populous nation. Rachel won the award in 2020 for her work on chimpanzee populations in Nigeria and is aiming to secure 20% of chimpanzee habitat in Southwest Nigeria. She is also the winner of the National Geographic Society Buffet Awards for Conservaton Leadership in Africa, a Tusk Conservation Awards Finalist.
She works to protect some of the most highly threatened forest habitats and primate populations in southern Nigeria. For example, Rachel’s determined efforts has helped to bring back a species from the brink of extinction – the rare and critically endangered Niger Delta red colobus monkey, also, considered one of 25 most endangered primates in the world. She has helped to establish two protected areas and have also taken on the management of these PAs to restore habitats in these very highly threatened ecosystems which are also areas of high-security risks in the country.
Rachel is the Co-Vice Chair for the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group African Section and Member of the International Primatological Society (IPS) education committee. Through her strategic positions in these networks, Rachel has been committed to championing the need to increase conservation leadership amongst Africans as she co-founded the African Primatological society in 2017. She’s trained the 55 persons that make up her team from local institutions and local communities.
https://swnigerdeltaforestproject.org.ng
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"So the book is divided. In the first section, summer, the equivalent of summer is Heat. And then there is Flood, which in Australia does tend to happen sort of towards the beginning of autumn, particularly if there have been tropical cyclones in the north of the country. And then winter I've given Tremor. Australia is not somewhere that particularly experiences earthquakes. And so I was interested in introducing something, sort of climactic form of extremity that doesn't happen very often. And then the end of the book, the springtime is Fire. So that was how it came into form because I was interested in talking about the ways in which humans have created an idea of what nature should be in the way that we make our human culture and human meaning from the weather in our environments. And that was not the case where I was from, and it's not the case anymore. So to sort of undo some of that idea of the four seasons being harmonious."
Madeleine Watts is an Australian writer based in New York. Her first novel The Inland Sea was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her essays and stories have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, The Guardian, The White Review, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York. Her second novel, Elegy, Southwest, is forthcoming.
www.madeleinewatts.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667704/the-inland-sea-by-madeleine-watts
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"This is a point in philosophy that the world as it is can never be directly apprehended by our minds. We are shielded from it by what's called a sensory veil. There are, for instance, no such thing as colors that are out there. As the artist Cezanne said, 'The colors are where the brain and the universe meet.' And color is, I think, a really good example because it is, in a sense, less than what's there because our eyes are only sensitive to three wavelengths of this huge electromagnetic spectrum, which goes all the way from x-rays and gamma rays to radio waves. And we live in a tiny, thin slice of that reality. But then out of those three wavelengths we experience our brains generate many more than three colors and almost an infinite palette of colors. So there's no sense in which our perception could ever reveal the world as it really is, that it reveals the world in a way that's very useful for us as organisms hell-bent on continuing to live and to survive."
Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and public speaker who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than twenty years. He is the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, as well as the best-selling 30 Second Brain, and other books. He is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is Co-Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and is Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, and of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness. He has a TED talk on consciousness and appeared in several films, including The Most Unknown and The Search. He has written for Aeon, The Guardian, Granta, New Scientist, and Scientific American. He was the 2017 President of the British Science Association (Psychology Section) and winner of the 2019 KidSpirit Perspectives award. He has published more than 180 academic papers and is listed in 2019 and 2020 Web of Science ‘highly cited researcher’ index, which recognizes the world’s most influential researchers over the past decade.
www.anilseth.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566315/being-you-by-anil-seth
https://perceptioncensus.dreamachine.world/
https://dreamachine.world/
@anilkseth
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"I think you could certainly make the case that creativity has been useful for a long time in human evolution and probably in our pre-human ancestors as well. So it's not surprising that that creativity is manifest in all kinds of ways from building a trap to catch a critter, to musical improvisation, to making a sculpture.
If I were to look at a brain scan and someone said, 'Point to me the region that has the sense of self.' I don't know that I could actually do that. So in other words, I accept this notion as a higher-level explanation that can be really useful. I would say our ability to reduce that to brain regions and brain activities now is still really not there. I'm not saying it will never be there. It may emerge, but it hasn't emerged yet. Sense of self is a really, really interesting idea and it's something that fascinates me because it is used both kind of at a very high level, in a cognitive way, but neuroscientists think of sense of self more in terms of our senses that literally point inward. So when we think about the senses, we usually think about things like touch or vision or taste or smell or hearing that are designed to tell us, not about our own bodies, but about the external world. But we also have all these senses that are interoceptive rather than exteroceptive. And they're telling me things like, how is my head oriented relative to gravity? That's my balanced vestibular system. Where are my limbs in space at this moment that I can do, even with my eyes closed? I know where my arm is even with my eyes closed because I'm getting information from my muscles that is being sent to my brain. I know how distended my bladder is and whether I'm going to need to go to the bathroom soon. I know my immune state, my breathing, my blood chemistry, my digestion. All of these things are senses of self and the degree to which they influence higher cognitive processes is to me one of the really fascinating questions of neuroscience right now and one that we're just really starting to understand."
David J. Linden is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, and Touch: The Science of the Hand, Heart, and Mind. His laboratory has worked for many years on the cellular substrates of memory storage, recovery of function following brain injury and a few other topics.
www.davidlinden.org
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Listen to Part 4 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast:
INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
JEFFREY D. SACHS, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, Economist, Author
JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry
MERLIN SHELDRAKE, Biologist & Bestselling Author of “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures”, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021
WALTER STAHEL, Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy, Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute
ARMOND COHEN, Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force
PIA MANCINI, Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, YGL World Economic Forum
RON GONEN, Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners, Former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYC
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, Poet & Author of “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments”
ANA CASTILLO, Award-Winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist & Artist
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www.maxrichtermusic.com
https://studiorichtermahr.com
Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.
Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.
Artwork: Saudade, Mia Funk
Listen to Part 3 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.
Voices on this episode:
PAULA PINHO, Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy
PIA MANCINI, Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, YGL World Economic Forum
JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry
WALTER STAHEL, Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy, Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute
MERLIN SHELDRAKE, Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021
RON GONEN, Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners, Former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYC
MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO, Executive Director, Pritzker Architecture Prize, Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale, Visual Arts & Architecture Dept.
NICHOLAS ROYLE, Co-author of "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory”, Author of “Mother: A Memoir”
MARK BURGMAN, Director, Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, Editor-in-Chief, Conservation Biology
MIKE DAVIS, CEO of Global Witness
JAY FAMIGLIETTI, Fmr. Senior Water Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Exec. Director, Global Institute for Water Security, Host of "What About Water?" Podcast
BRITT WRAY, Author of “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis”, Researcher Working on Climate Change & Mental Health, Stanford University
RICHARD VEVERS, Founder & CEO of The Ocean Agency
ARMOND COHEN, Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force
BILL HARE, Founder & CEO of Climate Analytics, Physicist, Climate Scientist
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU, Activist, Professor & Author of “Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back”, Host of Speaking out of Place Podcast
IBRAHIM ALHUSSEINI, Founder & CEO of FullCycle Fund
GAIA VINCE, Science Writer, Broadcaster & Author of “Transcendence” & “Adventures in the Anthropocene”
INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
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www.maxrichtermusic.com
https://studiorichtermahr.com
Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.
Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.
"You grow up wherever you grow up. And there are things there, and there are other things that are not there, and the things that are not there, you can imagine. And I did a lot of imagining in the Bronx because there were a lot of things that I gravitated toward that just weren't there: the fantastic, The Thief of Baghdad, magic, beautiful clothes, beautiful places, the exoticism of that. And then at another later point, I thought, I am missing my whole life from my work. I am writing about all these things that are not my life. Because I think everything that I actually saw and heard and felt is so ordinary that it's not worth repeating. And I think most of us feel that way, and we're dead wrong. That in fact, those things are gold. Those are the things that we actually have to write about. And you can write about anything when you start with those things and embrace them. Embrace your own life."
John Patrick Shanley is from The Bronx. His plays include Prodigal Son, Outside Mullingar (Tony nomination), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, Italian-American Reconciliation, Welcome to the Moon, Four Dogs and a Bone, Dirty Story, Defiance, and Beggars in the House of Plenty. His theatrical work is performed extensively across the United States and around the world. For his play, Doubt, he received both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the arena of screenwriting, he has ten films to his credit, most recently Wild Mountain Thyme, with Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, and Christopher Walken. His film of Doubt, with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, which he also directed, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay. Other films include Five Corners (Special Jury Prize, Barcelona Film Festival), Alive, Joe Versus the Volcano (which he also directed), and Live From Baghdad for HBO (Emmy nomination). For his script of Moonstruck he received both the Writers Guild of America Award and an Academy Award for best original screenplay. In 2009, The Writers Guild of America awarded Mr. Shanley the Lifetime Achievement In Writing.
www.imdb.com/name/nm0788234
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Listen to Part 2 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.
Voices on this episode:
MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO - Executive Director, Pritzker Architecture Prize - Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale, Visual Arts & Architecture Dept.
BRITT WRAY - Author of “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis”, Researcher Working on Climate Change & Mental Health, Stanford University
WALTER STAHEL - Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy - Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute
MATHIS WACKERNAGEL - Founder & President of the Global Footprint Network - World Sustainability Award Winner
JAY FAMIGLIETTI, Fmr. Senior Water Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Exec. Director, Global Institute for Water Security, Host of "What About Water?" Podcast
RICHARD VEVERS - Founder & CEO of The Ocean Agency
ARMOND COHEN - Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force
PAULA PINHO - Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy
MARTIN VON HILDEBRAND - Indigenous Rights Activist - Winner of Right Livelihood & Skoll Awards - Founder of Fundacion Gaia Amazonas, named #40 NGOs of the World by The Global Journal
HAROLD P. SJURSEN - Professor of Philosophy - Science, Technology, the Arts - NYU, Beihang University, East China University
BILL HARE - Founder & CEO of Climate Analytics, Physicist, Climate Scientist
SIR ANDY HAINES - Tyler Prize Award-winner for Environmental Achievement - Professor of Environmental Change & Public Health
LISA JACKSON PULVER - Deputy Vice-Chancellor of University of Sydney's Indigenous Strategy & Services
Max Richter’s music featured in this episode:
“Spring 1” from The New Four Seasons – Vivaldi Recomposed
Vladimir’s Blues” from The Blue Notebooks
"Lullaby From The Westcoast Sleepers” from 24 Postcards in Full Colour,
Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.
www.maxrichtermusic.com
https://studiorichtermahr.com
www.creativeprocess.info
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"I think that we like to look at somebody who's in a leadership position and say, look at what they did. And we don't recognize the fact that there's a huge team of people creating this thing that we attribute to an individual. And certainly, that's the case in political environments. I didn't work in Washington for a long time, but I worked there a little bit, and I very much got a sense of the incredible talent of a group of people who are standing behind somebody who's an elected leader, helping them make decisions and in research and the forming of strategies.
We're attributing to one mind what is the work of 20. I think that's what so many of the characters in that place are bringing to Kate Wyler (played by Keri Russell). And it takes her a while to kind of figure out does she trust them? Does she think that they're really value-added? Is she going to have to do this by herself? Sometimes it takes time to embrace that and be able to utilize the skills that are around you, but nobody does it by themselves. I think that's a myth."
Debora Cahn is the Emmy-nominated showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat, a political thriller series starring Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell. She’s worked with television’s leading showrunners, including Shonda Rhymes, Terence Winter, Steven Levinson, and Howard Gordon. Her career began working on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing which has led to projects such as the hit Showtime series Homeland, ABC’s long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, and HBO’s Vinyl, which was co-created by Martin Scorsese. She’s the winner of two Writers Guild of America Award for The West Wing and FX’s limited series Fosse/Verdon.
www.imdb.com/name/nm1263223
www.netflix.com/tudum/the-diplomat
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Images courtesy of Netflix/Alex Bailey
Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers. Enjoy Part 1 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.
Voices on this episode are
MAX RICHTER
INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder of PETA
BERTRAND PICCARD, Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight, Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation
CARL SAFINA, Ecologist, Founding President of Safina Center
CLAIRE POTTER, Designer, Lecturer, Author of “Welcome to the Circular Economy”
ADA LIMÓN, U.S. Poet Laureate, Host of The Slowdown podcast
CYNTHIA DANIELS, Grammy and Emmy award-winning producer, engineer, composer
JOELLE GERGIS, Lead Author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Author of “Humanity’s Moment”
KATHLEEN ROGERS, President of EARTHDAY.ORG
ODED GALOR, Author of “The Journey of Humanity”, Founder of Unified Growth Theory
SIR GEOFF MULGAN, Fmr. Chief Executive of Nesta, Fmr, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit Director & Downing Street’s Head of Policy, Author of “Another World is Possible”
ALAIN ROBERT, Rock & Urban Climber known for Free Solo Climbing 150+ of the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers using no Climbing Equipment
NOAH WILSON-RICH, Co-founder & CEO of The Best Bees Company
CHRIS FUNK, Director of the Climate Hazards Center at UC Santa Barbara, Author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes
DAVID FARRIER, Author of “Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils”
DR. SUZANNE SIMARD, Professor of Forest Ecology, Author of “Finding the Mother Tree”
PETER SINGER, “Most Influential Living Philosopher”, Author, Founder of The Life You Can Save
JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry
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www.maxrichtermusic.com
https://studiorichtermahr.com
Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.
Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.
“For me, the creative process is a sort of a continuous thing in the sense that I'm writing kind of all the time, at some level. And that doesn't mean I'm sitting at my desk all the time, but it does mean that I've got a continuous thought process, a continuous engagement with the material I'm trying to shape. And it's many different kinds of processes. First of all, obviously an intention. You need to have an intention. What is it I'm trying to do? But then you get a process of making things, and then you get into a process of dialogue with the things you've made where they start to take on properties and it feels like the material has intentions of its own.
So then you are trying to - it's like herding cats, you know? - sort of corralling this material into some kind of structure, some kind of formed object. Then it becomes like a sculptural process on the large scale.”
Composer Max Richter is known for his ability to translate profound human emotions into music. Max’s record Sleep is the most streamed classical album of all time and his catalogue has surpassed 3 billion streams.
A prolific collaborator, he scored and performed for Kim Jones for the Dior shows, and the new Wayne McGregor and Margaret Atwood ballet MADDADDAM, and arts collective Random International on the Rain Room installation.
Max has collaborated with film directors Denis Villeneuve, Martin Scorsese, and Ari Folman, and scored film & TV including Ad Astra, Black Mirror, Shutter Island, The Leftovers, Arrival and his Emmy-nominated score for Taboo.
He’s the co-founder of Studio Richter Mahr, with his partner and artist Yulia Mahr in Oxfordshire, UK. Max and Yulia built the studio around an old tractor barn, and have powered it with cutting-edge solar and heat-pump technology. It’s a haven for their family and community of musicians and artists which regularly come through. Set within 31 acres of woodland, Max and Yulia have a huge passion for using the land to farm and provide a sustainable working environment as well as using creativity as an elevating force within society. Operating as a free space for artists to develop their work, the studio also works with local partners to support the local community.
www.maxrichtermusic.com
https://studiorichtermahr.com
Photo by William Waterworth
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Max Richter’s music featured in this episode is "On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks.
Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.
“There are so many things that I would like to see in the future, including the outcomes of research into it. For instance, things like Tinder and the ways that young people find their partner for life. It's my impression from my broad network that very view of these digitalized friends or partner apps work simply because there are so many things that are important, in touch and smell and the direct nonverbal communication of the body also that you don't see in all these things, that's so extremely important. So I think that many of these apps will simply not survive. That's my optimistic view, again, because young people will learn that this is not the way that they get to the important things in life.
I think that from my perspective as a stress researcher, young people should engage in training themselves with meditation and think hard about what they want later in life. Not everything is about earning money. And I would like to see young people in schools be more in contact with nature. Go outside and see what nature does for you. I mean, for us. When I was younger it was so natural to go outside and play in the green. In this little village where I live, there are many places where the kids can play, but we never see them. In the last 20 years, we never see them outside. That cannot be good. They should go outside not only for their mental health, which reduces stress, but also to learn what nature does for their immune system when they play outdoors. And the other is to refrain from so much social media. It's so important. We have to get them off of their smartphones to learn to deal with the real world and find real friends.”
Dr. JF Brosschot is a professor of health psychology at Leiden University. He is one of the first to show that stress affects the immune system. Through his research of psychophysiological mechanisms of stress in daily life, while researching stress as a worldwide epidemic, Brosschot also recognizes the importance of where all this stress stems from and why this is happening. Now, his specific inquiry of how unconscious and prolonged physiological stress responses affect our mental and physical well-being has opened up the conversation to mental health and its tangible effects.
www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/jos-brosschot
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00:25 JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of “The Tradition” & “The New Testament”
00:39 JILL HEINERTH - Explorer, Presenter, Author of “Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver”
01:02 ALICE FULTON - Poet - Recipient of MacArthur “Genius”, NEA & Guggenheim Fellowships
01:31 BERTRAND PICCARD - Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight, Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions
02:31 CHRIS BLACKWELL - Founder of Island Records - Bob Marley, U2, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Amy Winehouse…Author of “The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond"
03:31 ALICE NOTLEY - Poet & Artist - Academy of American Poets Award Winner
04:08 MIA FUNK - Artist, Writer & Host of The Creative Process reads “In My Dreams"
04:45 MAX STOSSEL - Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker, Speaker - Creator of "Words That Move”
05:04 GERALD FLEMING - Poet, Author of the collections “The Choreographer”, “One”, “Night of Pure Breathing”, among others
05:29 MARGO BERDESHEVSKY - Award-winning Poet - "Kneel Said the Night”,"Before The Drought”, “Between Soul & Stone”
05:56 SAM LEVY - Award-winning Cinematographer of “Lady Bird” “Frances Ha” “While We’re Young” “Confess, Fletch”
06:31 CHAYSE IRVIN - Award-winning Cinematographer - “Blonde" starring Ana de Armas, “Beyonce: Lemonade”, Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman”
06:57 KARINA MANASHIL - President of Mad Solar - Creative Confidante for Kid Cudi - Executive Producer of Netflix’s “Entergalactic”, A24’s “Pearl”, “X”
07:37 CARL SAFINA - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author of “Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace”, among others
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Flower Duet - Leo Delibes
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Conducted by Philip Milman https://pmmusic.pro/
“Well, it's because of the situation we face. We can tell from the science that we have to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050. And common sense tells you that bringing them down for the second 50% is going to be harder than the first 50%. So we have to take care of the first 50% by about 2030, and it's 2023 already. We literally must - if we're going to keep climate change from becoming even more dangerous than it is - is to do a very great deal in the next seven or eight years. And a huge amount between now and 2050. So it's not that this problem is the most important of all possible problems. There are other problems like preventing nuclear war, but this is a problem that either we get a grip on it now, or there's a real possibility that it will escape from our control.
So, we need to be hardheaded about this and look very hard at what people are actually doing. Carbon credits could be a good thing, but they would need to be carefully regulated, and we would need institutions to police them and be sure people are actually doing what they say they're doing. And meanwhile, we should concentrate on reducing emissions because in theory, the carbon credits would get you to the same place but only if what they promised is actually delivered. And it very often isn't. There's a very recent study saying that something like 90% of promised carbon offsets are not actually being implemented. I don't know if it's that bad, but there's a lot of hanky-panky going on.”
Henry Shue is Professor Emeritus of Politics and International Relations at University of Oxford’s Merton College. He's the author of Basic Rights, as well as The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now, among many other publications. In 1976, he co-founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He was a supporter of the successful campaign by Virginia's Augusta County Alliance to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and now works primarily on explanations for the urgency of far more ambitious policies to eliminate fossil fuels in order to avoid irreversible damage for future generations.
www.merton.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-henry-shue
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691202280/basic-rights
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691226248/the-pivotal-generation
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“I've been fortunate over the last 13 years to meet some of the world's leading conservationists. Dr. Sylvia Earl, David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, his Royal Highness Prince Khaled bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia, who came to the film festival in 2014, where we showed some films from his foundation. And there have been a number of others, award-winning filmmakers, and a number of celebrities that have come to the film festival, Academy Award Winner James Cromwell. We've had other celebrities, from Paul Giamatti to Alec Baldwin to Sigourney Weaver, all of whom may have a passion for, if not saving wildlife, then for the environment. And I have found them very humble, very easy to speak to, and I'm immensely grateful that they took the time to come to WCFF from their busy schedule. And we hope to build more relationships.
So, we continue to grow, we continue to evolve. These global partnerships are helpful. And there have been a number of challenges. The biggest challenge right now that I have is I have the biggest fight of my life. In September of 2021, I was diagnosed with stage three liver cancer. And unfortunately, it's progressed now to where it's stage four and, you know, it's something that I have to fight with every day. Today I have a lot of energy. I feel good. Some days I do not get out of bed, and unfortunately, the cancer that I have is contracted by maybe 1% of the population. It's a cancer delivered by bile ducts. So there's not a lot of research on it. There's not a lot of studies on it. My physicians have been very candid with me. They cannot cure this. So I don't know how much time I have, whether it's five months, five years, or 50 more years. What they're doing right now is holding it at bay and keeping me alive.”
Christopher J. Gervais is an award winning producer. His animated film Dream won a 2017 Golden Lion for film and a Silver Lion for music at the 64th Annual International Festival of Creativity. He is environmental and marine scientist and has decades of experience in field work and research with multiple academic institutions and natural history museums. A former science and social studies teacher, later an administrator, he became the youngest principal of a public school in the state of Florida. While a graduate student, Christopher conducted fieldwork and research to study the Pleistocene Mega fauna and their fossils that were deposited over 10,000 years ago. His study of these extinct species informs his concerns for preserving biodiversity and was a significant factor in the founding of the WCFF. Christopher was one of the first scientists to conduct underwater vertebrate paleontology research. He is a professional, advanced scuba diver with NAUI, PADI, SSI and NASDS with over 2,500 logged dives. Christopher founded the WCFF in 2010 using his life savings to get the organization off the ground and has maintained the operations since then. He is a philanthropic supporter of conservation organizations across the globe. Christopher is President of the International Exploration Society, Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, member of the Ocean Geographic Society, friend of American Philosophical Society.
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“I call it the percolating trauma inside him, and I think that it's a combination of things with Matthew Rhys who plays Perry Mason. Again, it's holding onto this trauma that happened a dozen years ago in the war, that this is not something that he has really dealt with. And I think that you can't take that lightly. It doesn't go away with time. It doesn't heal. It's still inside you, and it's still informing who you are. And I think that was important in coming into season two because here is a man who's now thrust into this whole other battle. He's now an attorney. And how does he put lives in his hands?
So he is gone through this in season one, and now we're coming into season two knowing that he's haunted by the fact that he thought he saved somebody. He put Emily Dodson's life in his hands only to have her commit suicide. So now he's wrestling deeply with the flaws in himself and his character that these soldiers put their lives in his hands in the war.
Emily Dodson put her life in his hands in the trial. And now he's going to take on these two boys who could swing on a noose. Does he want that? Does he have enough inside him? And that's why we play with the imposter syndrome because he doesn't know if this is who he really is. And does he still have that fight inside him?
And so I think that's the sort of push-pull I think that you're alluding to inside and that he's trying to hold it in and trying to hold it all together. And we do see those moments when he can't hold it back. When he punches the guy in the face in episode four when he steals the horse. These are things that he needs to release that valve because it's so much he's trying to hold onto to get to the result that he wants to win the fight because he hasn't fully won a fight yet. And that's hard.”
Michael Begler is showrunner, writer, and executive producer of Perry Mason, which debuted as HBO’s most-watched series in nearly two years upon its premiere in June 2020. The critically-acclaimed show stars Emmy-winner Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Katherine Waterston, Hope Davis. In the second season of the Emmy-nominated series, the scion of a powerful oil family is brutally murdered. Power, social justice, immigration, LGBTQ rights, and what it truly means to be guilty, are among the issues raised by the series.
Begler’s previous series include the Peabody Award-winning The Knick, starring Clive Owen, directed by Steven Soderbergh, writing/producing credits also include comedy series The Tony Danza Show, The Jeff Foxworthy Show and the film Big Miracle starring Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski.
www.imdb.com/title/tt2077823
www.instagram.com/perrymasonhbo
www.imdb.com/name/nm0066764
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“Even if the current system sucks, we still need to vote. That for me is something that I keep repeating. We cannot leave vacuums in the political system because someone else is going to fill them. So that for me is the number one thing. We change everything we want and work on change, but we need to make sure that the right people are voting or otherwise, it's going to be a lot harder. So we need to play both games, I guess. And then I think that we've had time to experience and experiment with these institutions for hundreds of years. And whenever we propose something new, there is this expectation that completely replaces what exists. And it always gets compared like, ‘Oh, but this happened, but…' We need to experiment. We need to be honest about this, and we need to say like, we don't know if we have unintended consequences. Like what I was saying before about our use of social media, we missed it. And so I think that we can, at the grassroots level, do a lot of experimentation and organizing kind of collectives that self-govern in different ways and use different tools and really experiment with what happens at a human level when certain technologies are used, when certain governance structures are used. So I think that's the game we will all need to play. It's twofold. On the one hand, we need to build a new system. And that makes the existing system obsolete. And we need to do this by finding sandboxes of political innovation and experimenting with political structures ourselves, but at the same time, we need to keep the pressure on the existing system to make sure that it doesn't go to hell. So it's these two things, that's our generational challenge."
Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, political scientist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She has worked in politics in Argentina as the Chief of Advisers and Deputy Secretary of Political Affairs, Government of the City of Buenos Aires and CIPPEC think tank. She has developed technology for democracy around the world and is a YC Alum, Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum). She co-founded DemocracyOS & The Net Party (Partido de la Red).
www.piamancini.com
https://opencollective.com
https://democracy.earth
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“I was using this jazz technique called woodshedding where you basically isolate yourself, and you come up with harmonic devices that then you can put in your pocket and play during the set. And it's sort of like you create events where you can stimulate happy accidents.
So I was doing that I think over a six-month period, and I came up with a lot of different ideas, for example, the sequence where Marilyn Monroe is in the ménage à trois, and she's having a three-way sex scene, and the image is . I found that idea when I went to Canal Plastics in New York, and I ordered a piece of polycarbonate that was mirrored on one side, and I was able to bend it and I would shoot stuff in my studio collaborating with Jack Martinez, a photographer, who would cast different people and we would shoot things together. And I basically, through pre-production, I created I couldn't even count how many cinematic devices, and they were happy accidents in a lot of ways, but in other situations, they were gifts that were given to me by collaborators. And I just had those in my pocket. And a lot of times they would come out spontaneously, like if I saw a scene, and I felt like there was a moment in which we could articulate in a more abstracted point of view...there's a sequence like when Marilyn is coming to the premier, and it's a frenzy and the fans are looking like they're going to consume her. And that sequence, the way it's written, I can interpret that as almost, to go back to the same musical analogy, in jazz would be a moment where the images get to give a solo on the song, on the theme and express it strictly through metaphor and distort notions of reality as long as it's in harmony with what's happening psychologically.”
Chase Irvin is a Canadian American cinematographer making waves in the film industry. Chayse has received immense critical acclaim for his vision and style. He has worked on features, shorts, and visual albums, most notably in his collaboration with Director Kahlil Joseph on the film Beyoncé: Lemonade. He lensed Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which received 6 Academy Award nominations, winning for best adapted screenplay. Chayse’s first feature film Medeas won the prestigious Best Cinematography Debut at the Camerimage Film Festival in 2013. Hannah, starring Charlotte Rampling, won a Silver Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival. Chase is a member of the Canadian Society of Cinematographers. His latest films are Netflix’s Blonde starring Ana de Armas and A24’s God's Creatures starring Emily Watson.
www.chayseirvin.com
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“So for me being born in a place like Naples helped me absorb and to be constantly open and curious about other cultures, simply because they were part of my own culture. So it's a challenging city, I must say. And it's incredible how you more easily communicate with other people when you are in a place that you feel is a public place, but it belongs to you. It belongs to everyone. It's a space for the community. So this was the first lesson that I learned studying architecture because then you start to read the places in a more organized, scientific way. And I think maybe this dimension passed into my DNA.
So from my point of view, a prize is not just to establish the most beautiful building, the most expensive building, or the tallest building in the world. It's rather to foster the discussion to bring forward critical points to be discussed. To bring forward contradictions, to really enhance the discussion about what is relevant for our society or for society in a specific moment.
So this, for me, is the role of a prize, to highlight critical issues and to foster the discussion, to face them, and to find solutions, to find new paths. So in the case of the Pritzker Prize, the mission has been very clear since the very beginning. So it's to acknowledge a living architect or architects for a body of built work that has produced a consistent and significant contribution to humanity and to the built environment through the art of architecture.”
Manuela Lucá-Dazio is the newly appointed Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. In this capacity, she works closely with the jury, however, she does not vote in the proceedings. She is the former Executive Director, Department of Visual Arts and Architecture of La Biennale di Venezia, where she managed exhibitions with distinguished curators, architects, artists, and critics to realize the International Art Exhibition and the International Architecture Exhibition, each edition since 2009. Preceding that, she was responsible for the technical organization and production of both Exhibitions, beginning in 1999. She holds a PhD in History of Architecture from the University of Roma-Chieti, Italy and lives in Paris, France.
www.pritzkerprize.com
www.pritzkerprize.com/jury#jury-node-2236
www.labiennale.org/en
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“I think that was definitely a pattern that I unknowingly replicated when I first started traveling. I think that's how the travel industry has kind of marketed to us, right? This idea that, you know, bucket lists and wanting to like check boxes of things you're going to do in each place and becomes this thing of, rather than consuming a product that's an actual physical thing, you're consuming a country or consuming an experience. It's the same framework. We're still grasping at things. We're still compulsively trying to do XYZ without really thinking about its impact, without really thinking about the relationships that we're making in those places, without really thinking about reciprocity. And a lot of it comes from a deeply colonial mindset also, right? So much of the travel industry was built on the idea of colonialism which really makes us all inherit this idea that whatever we need in life is going to come from seeking it elsewhere and grabbing it from somewhere else, right? Which I think is the more modern 2023 way that we kind of replicate that colonial travel mindset of–My life right now is not great. I'm going to take a vacation. I'm going to take a break and go somewhere else where I can get what I need? Which I think is in a lot of ways can describe what I did at 24 as well.
I think looking at that. Really deeply and really thinking about what is lost from that mindset and the harm that is caused by it has been something I've been trying to do over the last few years. And a lot of that has to do with land trauma, right? Like really acknowledging where our settlement of land comes from and how we can heal that in the ways that we travel.”
Amanda E. Machado is a writer, public speaker and facilitator whose work explores how race, gender, sexuality, and power affect the way we travel and experience the outdoors. She has written and facilitated on topics of social justice and adventure and lived in Cape Town, Havana, Mexico City, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities. She has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York Times, NPR, and other publications. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that expands how we tell stories about nature in a way that considers ancestry, colonization, migration trauma, and other issues.
www.amandaemachado.com
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“I have a granddaughter who's just going into high school, and she is filled with idealistic thoughts and is optimistic. She's a person who is both in love with art and in love with science. She's vivacious and just everything about her seems like life is beautiful, and 'I'm going to be able to do this and that.' And, of course, when I talk to her, I do everything I can to encourage this kind of openness and optimism, and belief in herself and her ability to do worthwhile things. And not be too concerned about is she going to be able to have a job with enough income to be where she wants to be.
She's not thinking on those levels. And so it’s how to perpetuate and strengthen that kind of spirit and hope, that it can be validated by giving this generation the opportunity to do things. Because I believe that if she and people who think and feel like her were really given the opportunity to be influential and to do things that would have a tremendous shift in the way the world is going. She doesn't think in terms of quarterly profits. She thinks in terms of human happiness and human good, human fairness, and the beauty of nature. And all of these things that naturally come together in our head. And so that's what I think we need to do. I think the universities can play a part. Schools play a part, but there has to be a broader general sense that this is how we should conceive the future. And, you know, galleries, podcasts, books, newspapers, universities, schools, every kind of institution needs to offer something to help this.”
Harold P. Sjursen is an educator and administrator having served on the faculty of both a liberal arts college and school of engineering. His background is in the history of philosophy, but since childhood has sustained an interest in science and technology. His current research interests focus on the philosophy of technology, global philosophy, and technological ethics. His engineering education projects address issues related to the internationalization of higher education, the integration of the liberal arts and engineering and ethics beyond the codes for engineers.
http://harold-sjursen.org
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“I'm big on if you ban a book that kids love, I'm probably going to come and adapt it. I'm probably going to come after it because adults fail children all the time. Because we are afraid of their feelings. We are afraid of what they can get themselves into until it's too late. And we're avoidant as a culture with them. And we've also left them a pretty screwed-up world where they're living in a terrible state of anxiety. They've got lockdown drills in kindergarten. They don't know if a gunman is going to walk into their school. And they've got so many images coming at them. good and bad.
There's a lot of good that comes from TikTok and YouTube as well. It's just we're still in the beta phase of knowing. iPhones only came out in 2007. We're still figuring out truly how it's going to affect our brain development. So I think that 13 Reasons Why came at a time when we had all been really concerned about mental health. Brian Yorkey is my dear friend. We went to college together. Brian and Tom Kitt wrote Next to Normal, which was the very first Broadway show that dealt with mental health and mental illness. I had a grandmother who was bipolar and institutionalized, and when Brian told me when we were like 21 years old that he was writing a musical about electro-shock therapy, I was like, great idea! 10, 12 years later, and many iterations and workshops later with Tom and Brian, the show went to Broadway and got the Pulitzer and 11 Tony nominations, and it was groundbreaking. And it was before you could put Broadway on YouTube. And we were the first Broadway show on Twitter, nobody even had Twitter. I remember signing up for Twitter because I had to follow the Next to Normal tweets. So we were always ahead of the mental health conversation among teenagers and parents and trying to break the silence in a way.”
Joy Gorman Wettels is the founder of Joy Coalition, an impact producing venture with a focus on creating purpose-driven film and television content for a global audience. She executive-produced the newly-released UnPrisoned, and is currently working on a multi-part storytelling ecosystem inspired by landmark civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize. Her body of work includes, notably, the critically acclaimed series Home Before Dark, the influential 13 Reasons Why, created by Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright Brian Yorkey and directed by Oscar-winner Tom McCarthy (Spotlight).
Other works include The Meddler, named Vanity Fair's #1 film of 2016, and the forthcoming adaptation of Little House on the Prairie. She serves on the Advisory Council for UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers and the Advisory Board for Hollywood, Health and Society at USC. As part of their commitment to social change, Joy Coalition works in collaboration with the Office of the Surgeon General in response to the youth mental health crisis. She’s accepted a Sentinel Award, Television Academy Honors for advancing social change, and the 2018 Mental Health America Media Award.
www.joycoalition.com
www.imdb.com/name/nm2229726
www.imdb.com/title/tt20228406/mediaviewer/rm1596470273/?ref_=tt_ov_i
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“I think maybe what we've learned is how important family and community are. What I noticed in Madagascar is how genuinely happy they are despite not having a lot in life. We have so many material possessions here in the US, and not to say that's all bad if people want to pursue that, but I just definitely noticed how it wasn't so much about what you have, but like who you are as a person. I would want them to know that anything is possible. You just need to persevere and that can have such a huge ripple effect. Not only one person's life, but anybody, whether that's a community or the whole world on a global scale. I wouldn't want people to feel discouraged because I think there are definitely moments along the way of that and people will just not want to try to do that because people around them may say ‘It's not possible.’ But if you keep going, then it will eventually come to life.”
Maggie Grout is the founder and CEO of Thinking Huts, an international NGO that increases global access to education with innovative, humanitarian-driven technology solutions. Founded by Maggie 8 years ago, when she was15, Thinking Huts seeks to empower young people, especially girls, to achieve more opportunities by obtaining an education. Grout gave a TEDx talk in 2021 on “how we can tackle the global education crisis with 3D printing.”
Grout was born in a rural village in China and adopted at a young age, but where she came from largely shaped her outlook on life and subliminally led her to start Thinking Huts in 2015. Growing up in London and Colorado, Grout was exposed to the melting pot of cultures in British and American society, but she often wondered why so many people were unaware of how others lived an ocean away. She understood what poverty looks like firsthand and how education empowers people to attain greater opportunities.
www.thinkinghuts.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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“I definitely believe at the moment that fashion brands, big fashion in particular, they just exist to exploit people. It's an excuse to exploit the poor, basically. I see fashion as part of this very extractive global economic society where 100, 150 years ago, that extraction was very obvious. You had the enslavement of people. You had taxation. You had literally armies turning up and occupying the land that they wanted and just taking resources or land. These days it's more subtle, but the brands are still following those colonial pathways.
I'm like sat here in London and, you know, there's a reason why British brands go to India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, following the same colonial trade routes. It's also a system very much based on really unfair debt and a total lack of debt justice whereby Global South economies are having to earn foreign capital by opening themselves up to these export industries, whether that's cotton or coffee or garments. 80% of everything that Bangladesh exports are garments. It is a ludicrous position for an economy to be in. And it's very deliberate exploitation as well. Brands make these sourcing decisions very, very deliberately.
They go where they think that workers' rights will be suppressed and environmental legislation will be suppressed. And if anything does happen that the government will step in and do the suppressing and just give them a sort of carte blanche to do whatever they want.
So at the moment, it's very difficult to point at any part of the fashion industry and go, that's not exploitative. You know, that's exploiting the land, that's exploiting these people, that's based on fossil fuels. Those toxic dyes are going into the river. It's a deeply exploitative, industry.”
Tansy E. Hoskins is an award winning author and journalist who investigates the global fashion industry. She’s the author of The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion, Foot Work, and Stitched Up. This work has taken her to Bangladesh, India, North Macedonia, and to the Topshop warehouses in Solihull.
www.plutobooks.com/9780745346618/the-anti-capitalist-book-of-fashion/
www.amazon.co.uk/Foot-Work-What-Your-Shoes-Are-Doing-to-the-World-Tansy-Hoskins/dp/1474609856/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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“In terms of the impacts of climate change on health when we started 30 years ago, because there was very little data then, so we made suggestions as to what we thought the health outcomes we thought would be affected like vector-borne diseases, crop failures, water availability, sea level rise, increasing disasters related to climatic extreme events, and obviously the effects of extreme heat on vulnerable populations. In particular, elderly people, but not just elderly people. So we suggested a whole range of different health impacts that could occur. And I think, in general, those ideas have stood the test of time, but of course, as the situation has moved on, we've also become much more preoccupied with what kind of action we need to take.
So when we started, we were mainly talking about the effects of extreme heat without being able to attribute them to climate change because obviously heat waves have occurred throughout history, and populations are more or less adapted to different climates. But now I think the science has moved on, and we can be much more competent about attributing either some extreme events or trends in extreme heat exposure, for example, to human-induced climate change. So it isn't just natural fluctuation. So that's a change. And as the evidence becomes stronger, of course, it also strengthens the case for climate action, which sadly, as we know at the moment, is not sufficient to really have the desired effect.
So our knowledge has advanced, but the actions that we need to put into practice have not gone at the same speed. And so we're really facing an increasing climate emergency. And we don't know quite where it's going to end up, but it could end up 2.5%, 3% hotter than pre-industrial times on global average as we reach the end of the century.”
Andy Haines was formerly a family doctor and Professor of Primary Health Care at UCL. He developed an interest in climate change and health in the 1990’s and was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the 2nd and 3rd assessment exercises and review editor for the health chapter in the 5th assessment. He was Director (formerly Dean) of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine from 2001- October 2010. He chaired the Scientific Advisory Panel for the 2013 WHO World Health Report, the Rockefeller /Lancet Commission on Planetary Health (2014-15) and the European Academies Science Advisory Council working group on climate change and health (2018-19). He currently co-chairs the InterAcademy Partnership (140 science academies worldwide) working group on climate change and health and is also co-chairing the Lancet Pathfinder Commission on health in the zero-carbon economy. He has published many papers on topics such as the effects of environmental change on health and the health co-benefits of low carbon policies. His current research focuses on climate change mitigation, sustainable healthy food systems and complex urban systems for sustainability. He was awarded the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 2022.
www.lshtm.ac.uk
https://tylerprize.org
www.interacademies.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“I am the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Conservation Biology. It is the original journal for the Society for Conservation Biology, which was established in the United States in the 1980s. And the journal was created to provide a home with substantive scientific advances that form the basis for the underpinnings of action and conservation science. So we try and provide the techniques, the procedures, and the scientific experiments that underpin the actions we take to conserve biodiversity globally. It's been running since June 1985, and I've been the editor for 12 years. We receive between 900 and 1,000 papers a year. We publish about 150 or 200 of those. The topics are tremendously variable. They range from straight ecology through mathematical modeling to the psychology of human behavior and the ethics of trophy hunting, and everything in between. And so, it's a wonderfully diverse and interesting journal to read.”
Mark Burgman is Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Conservation Biology. He is author of Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts. Previously, he was Adrienne Clarke Chair of Botany at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He works on expert judgement, ecological modelling, conservation biology and risk assessment. He has written models for biosecurity, medicine regulation, marine fisheries, forestry, irrigation, electrical power utilities, mining, and national park planning. He received a BSc from the University of New South Wales, an MSc from Macquarie University, Sydney, and a PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He worked as a consultant ecologist and research scientist in Australia, the United States and Switzerland during the 1980’s before joining the University of Melbourne in 1990. He joined CEP in February, 2017. He has published over two hundred and fifty refereed papers and book chapters and seven authored books. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2006.
www.imperial.ac.uk/environmental-policy
www.conbio.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"I had never seen anything like Forsythe’s Choreography for Step Text, and I thought, “This is possible?”...The articulation, the structures, the musicality, and the curtain coming in and out was just radical and amazing. I just wanted to be a part of it. If you remain curious just about anything as an artist, you can make it compelling...it reminds me of what a beautiful visual artist, Jack Whitten, talks about. He said that when people ask me (him) what art is about, I (he) say its giving structure to feelings. Also this notion that we can give meaning to something without it being a singular narrative. Something can have an individualized meaning. If it is meaningful in the conveyance of the dancer, everyone seeing that dancer or the group of dancers performing will receive something different that resonates with them in their life."
Jill Johnson is an internationally renowned dancer, choreographer, artistic director, educator, producer, stager, movement consultant, and advisor. Her leadership in the dance field brings into service over three and a half decades of experience and a vast knowledge of diverse repertoires and methodologies to realize visionary, world-class programming, develop the next generation of artist leaders, and reimagine how the arts engage, intersect, and interact with all people. Ms. Johnson choreographs for film, television, dance, theater, opera; has danced in over 60 tours on 5 continents including A Quiet Evening of Dance; was a soloist with the National Ballet of Canada; principal dancer and researcher with William Forsythe for over three decades; stages Forsythe’s work worldwide. Director of Harvard Dance Center, Founder/AD Harvard Dance Project, and faculty, at Harvard University, 2011-2021, where she designed an innovative interdisciplinary program of study in dance and was a campus leader in DEIJ. Amongst her recent projects: LA Dance Project, Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala, Boston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Harvard Choruses, Dries Van Noten/Louvre Museum, V (Eve Ensler), American Repertory Theater, PBS’s Poetry in America, Sadler’s Wells Theater, and Equity Based Dialogue for Inclusion (EBDI).
www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/arts/dance/william-forsythe-a-quiet-evening-of-dance-review.html
https://ofa.fas.harvard.edu/dance-deij-letter-strategic-priorities
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Mother: A Memoir
“Pre-word In my mind's eye she is sitting at the circular white Formica-top table in the corner. Morning sunlight fills the kitchen. She has a cup of Milky Nescafé Gold Blend and is smoking a purple Silk Cut. She is dressed for comfort in a floral bronze-and-brown blouse and blue jumper with light gray slacks and blue slippers. She is absorbed in a crossword (The Times) but not oblivious. She does what always takes me aback. She reads out one of the clues. As if I would know the answer. Her gift for crosswords is alien to me. I get stuck at the first ambiguity or double-meaning. Whereas she sweeps through all illusions allusions red herrings and anagrams and is done most days by lunchtime. But her fondness for crossword puzzles is inseparable from my interest in words. Where they come from. What they might be doing. Earliest recorded use of 'In my mind's eye': Shakespeare's Hamlet (around 1599). Referring to the Ghost.
My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: 'the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.' In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own aging and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realization and loss. A memoir is 'a written record of a person's knowledge of events or of a person's own experiences'. 'A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.' So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record.”
Nicholas Royle is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Sussex, England, where he has been based since 1999. He has also taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Tampere, and the University of Stirling; and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Århus, Santiago del Compostela, Turku, Manitoba, and Lille. He is a managing editor of the Oxford Literary Review and director of Quick Fictions. He has published many books, including Telepathy and Literature, E.M. Forster, Jacques Derrida, The Uncanny, Veering: A Theory of Literature, How to Read Shakespeare, and Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing, as well as the novels Quilt and An English Guide to Birdwatching, and Mother: A Memoir. In addition, he is co-author with Andrew Bennett of three books: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing, and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory Sixth edition, 2023. Royle’s current projects include a detective novel, a collection of essays about new approaches to narrative theory, and a collaborative work with Timothy Morton on Covid-19. His latest book, David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, is due to be published in November 2023.
www.routledge.com/An-Introduction-to-Literature-Criticism-and-Theory/Bennett-Royle/p/book/9781032158846
https://myriadeditions.com/creator/nicholas-royle/
https://quickfiction.co.uk/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"I really admire how James Baldwin always talks about jazz as a kind of model for his writing style. But music has certainly had a profound influence on the way I see the world, especially in terms of the social world. One of the big problems we have in all sorts of different places around the world is the question of how to coordinate difference. All sorts of people have different modes of living, different cultural rhythms, and different ideas about the future. Jazz is brilliant at a lot of things, but it notably brings together different people and allows them to retain their own sense of time and rhythm while playing together. It's a really profound model of social coordination. Now, of course, it says something particularly pressing about the United States, but I think as a model for how differences go together, jazz is perhaps unparalleled."
Bruce Evan Barnhart is an associate professor of American literature and culture at the University of Oslo and co-director of the project Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. He is the author of Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture. His work has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, and Novel. His latest publications are Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature, co-edited with Marit Grøtta, and LeRoi Jones, Jazz, and the Resonance of Class. His research interests include African American literature, post-Marxist theory, jazz, and Caribbean aesthetics.
www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/people/aca/bruceb
www.routledge.com/Temporal-Experiments-Seven-Ways-of-Configuring-Time-in-Art-and-Literature/Barnhart-Grotta/p/book/9781032350240
https://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/groups/temporal-experiments/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“I love podcasts and things like that, if only to listen to people who've done incredible things. We live in a kind of unusual time where we can hear firsthand people talking about their own experiences, and what they went through when they were creating something. And while artists differ greatly from one another in terms of the specifics of their process, what certainly seems to be the case is that they're extraordinarily interested in their own mind, and they have what we would call a metacognitive awareness. They know almost quite precisely, at least what doesn't work for them. They're very cued into what to avoid and how to sort of generate the mental conditions that are necessary in order to be as generative or as creative as they're likely to be in a specific situation. So that is a deep medical awareness that they have about their own process that is really quite something. They know themselves very well.”
Anna Abraham, Ph.D. is the E. Paul Torrance Professor and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia (USA). She investigates the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying creativity and other aspects of the human imagination, including the reality-fiction distinction, mental time travel, social and self-referential cognition, and mental state reasoning. She is the author of the 2018 book, The Neuroscience of Creativity (Cambridge University Press) and the editor of the multidisciplinary volume, The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (2020).
www.anna-abraham.com
https://coe.uga.edu/directory/torrance-center
www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/elements/elements-in-creativity-and-imagination
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“If I die, it will be in the most glorious place that nobody has ever seen. I can no longer feel the fingers in my left hand. The glacial Antarctic water to see through a tiny puncture in my formerly waterproof glove. If this water were one-tenth of a degree colder, the ocean will become solid. Finding the knife-edged freeze is depleting my strength, my blood vessels throbbing in a futile attempt to deliver warmth to my extremities. The archway of ice above our heads is furrowed like the surface of a golf ball, carved by the hand of the sea. Iridescent blue, Wedgewood, azure, cerulean, cobalt, and pastel robin’s egg meld with chalk and silvery alabaster. The ice is vibrant, right, and at the same time ghostly. The beauty contradicts the danger. We are the first people to cave dive inside an iceberg. And we may not live to tell the story.”
Jill Heinerth is a Canadian cave diver, underwater explorer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker. She is a veteran of over thirty years of filming, photography, and exploration on projects in submerged caves around the world. She has made TV series, consulted on movies, written several books and is a frequent corporate keynote speaker. Jill is the first Explorer in Residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, recipient of Canada’s prestigious Polar Medal and is a Fellow of the International Scuba Divers Hall of Fame. In recognition of her lifetime achievement, Jill was awarded the Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration from the RCGS and the William Beebe Award from the Explorers Club.
www.intotheplanet.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“I think you need to be aware and see people be open to what can happen and get a feel, get an instinct. I think I've been blessed with instinct. I mean, I did not do well at school. I passed zero exams. I'm unemployable, but I've been blessed with having instincts. The instinct of U2 was seeing their determination, the fact that the music itself initially wasn't close to what most of my music was because most of my music was bass and drum. And most of their music was vocal, so it wasn't a certain kind of music that I like all the time. I like music from all different kinds of levels…I absolutely felt for Bob Marley to really make it worldwide as it were, he needed to change something a little bit. I didn't want him to change what he was doing, not his lyrics and everything else like that. It was more the instrumentation of it. I felt for Bob to be able to reach a wider audience that he needed to move away a little bit from that and focus more and more on his lyrics.
When I finally met Cat Stevens, and we just sort of sat down and then when he played the song ‘Father and Son,’ then suddenly the lyrics of the song and what it meant and everything, I suddenly felt this guy is fantastic. You know, the I person I'd seen on television had nothing to do with this person sitting in front of me. And so that's really when I said to him, I opened up to him and I said, ‘Honestly, I wasn't really interested to meet, but this song that you've just sung for me is such an incredible song.’ I felt that I could definitely connect with him. ‘Where Do the Children Play', that was the one that, just the fact that he was somebody who was thinking like that.
There was one time when Mick Jagger asked me to come and meet with him because I think he'd heard the records that were coming up from me, mainly Jamaican records and things, and that's why he wanted me to come and meet with him. He was leaving Decca, and wanted to go to another level. And I said, ‘It makes absolutely no sense for you to come to my label because you already are huge.’
Grace Jones, she's a stunning-looking lady. They put on the record and there was a drum machine, and all it played was a drum machine. There was no vocal, there were no instruments, nothing for about two and a half to three minutes before I heard a voice. I thought, Oh my gosh, this is a disaster. This is going to end in tears. And then suddenly I heard the voice, and the voice sounded great.”
Chris Blackwell, an inductee of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, is widely considered responsible for turning the world on to reggae music. As the founder of Island Records, he helped forge the careers of Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, U2, Roxy Music, among many other high-profile acts, and produced records including Marley’s Catch a Fire and Uprising. Blackwell currently runs Island Outpost, a group of elite resorts in Jamaica, which includes GoldenEye—the former home of author Ian Fleming. He received the A&R Icon Award in recognition of his lasting influence on the music business. He is author, with Paul Morley, of The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond.
www.islandoutpost.com
www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Islander/Chris-Blackwell/9781982172701
www.islandrecords.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"Are we looking at intelligence wrong? There are an awful lot of people who have graduated from top schools who become leaders who are worse than incompetent. They make their countries worse rather than better. And the conclusion I came to is that we made a mistake, in that intelligence was originally defined by the founders of the field Alfred Binet, David Wechsler, and others, as the ability to adapt to the environment a requirement. And answering a vocabulary problem for an obscure word is not about adapting to the environment. So I began to wonder where we lost the train of thought. And the conclusion I came to is that colleges just forgot the original message of the founders of the field, and so we got immersed in these numbers that turn out not to mean that much. So I wrote about intelligence as the ability to get along in the world and hopefully make the world a little bit better. And what I argue in the book is that we not only need to develop this kind of intelligence, we need to recognize that it's important, that getting A's in school and top scores on standardized tests, that's not what intelligence is about. So there are people who make serious efforts to make the world better, who fight pollution, who try to be good at what they do, you know, as judges or lawyers or as cleaning people or car mechanics, or doctors, but those aren't the ones you hear about. The ones you hear about are often those who have prestigious degrees and can't seem to do much with them.”
Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is a past winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, and the William James and James McKeen Cattell Awards of the Association for Psychological Science. Sternberg has served as President of the American Psychological Association, and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. His latest book is Adaptive Intelligence: Surviving and Thriving in Times of Uncertainty.
www.robertjsternberg.com
www.cambridge.org/fr/academic/subjects/psychology/cognition/adaptive-intelligence-surviving-and-thriving-times-uncertainty?format=HB&isbn=9781107154384#bookPeople
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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Today's complex problems demand a radically new way of thinking — one in which art, technology, and science converge to expand our creativity and augment our insight. Creativity must be combined with the ability to execute; the leaders and innovators of the future will have to understand this balance and manage such complexities as climate change and pandemics. The place of this convergence is THE NEXUS. In this provocative and visually striking book, Julio Mario Ottino and Bruce Mau offer a guide for navigating the intersections of art, technology, and science.
Julio Ottino is an artist, researcher, author, and educator at Northwestern University. He is the author, with Bruce Mau, of The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World - The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. He was the founding co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. In 2008, he was listed in the “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era”. In 2017, he was awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education from the National Academy of Engineering.
www.juliomarioottino.com
www.thenexusbook.com
www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/about/leadership/profiles/ottino-julio.html
Florian Hoffmeister is a prolific director of photography. Recent works by Hoffmeister include his lensing on the Apple TV+ series Pachinko, the critically-acclaimed political thriller Official Secrets starring Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, and Matt Smith, and TÁR starring Cate Blanchett. Hoffmeister is well-known for his collaboration with Terence Davies on feature films The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russel-Beale, and A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Ehle. His work on Brian Kirk’s television phenomenon Great Expectations earned him further distinction as well as numerous accolades, including a Primetime Emmy, a BAFTA, and an ASC Award.
"Technology has very much changed the way we read and take in information and shortened it into quick bursts and attention spans. We're living in a new world, for sure. And how do we communicate in this new world? Not just in a way that gets the reach, because there are whole industries aimed at what do I do to get the most likes or the most attention, and all of that, which I don't think is very fulfilling as artists.
It's sort of a diminishing of our art form to try and play the game because then we're getting the attention and getting the hits, as opposed to what do I really want to create? How do I really want to create it? How do I want to display this? And can I do it in a way that breaks through so that if I do it my way, it's still going to get the attention, great. But if it doesn't, can I be cool with that? And can I be okay creating what I want to create, knowing that that's what it's about. It's about sharing in an honest, authentic way what I want to express without letting the tentacles of social media drip into my brain and take over why I'm literally doing the things that I'm doing."
Max Stossel is an Award-winning poet, filmmaker, and speaker, named by Forbes as one of the best storytellers of the year. His Stand-Up Poetry Special Words That Move takes the audience through a variety of different perspectives, inviting us to see the world through different eyes together. Taking on topics like heartbreak, consciousness, social media, politics, the emotional state of our world, and even how dogs probably (most certainly) talk, Max uses rhyme and rhythm to make these topics digestible and playful. Words That Move articulates the deep-seated kernels of truth that we so often struggle to find words for ourselves. Max has performed on five continents, from Lincoln Center in NY to the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney. He is also the Youth & Education Advisor for the Center for Humane Technology, an organization of former tech insiders dedicated to realigning technology with humanity’s best interests.
www.wordsthatmove.com/
www.instagram.com/maxstossel/
www.humanetech.com
https://vimeo.com/690354718/54614a2318
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"I need a balance of light and dark. It can't be just one thing. I want you to be laughing one minute and by the end I want you to be crying. For me, character study is what is the most important. It all comes down to the characters. It's less about action or things like that, which you can have some of that, but it tonally, has to be female-centric and you have to be crying and laughing. There's so many interesting shows that walk that line of light and dark. I want to always live in the gray area with characters. Always. Nothing is ever black or white. It's always a weird gray area.”
"I like to say that Ginny & Georgia is a show about women by women for everyone. And I will say women in charge, they do things differently. I think that women, we tend to do relationships differently than men do. It's very, very important to me - and I'm not saying that men don't do this - but as a woman, as a female showrunner, it's very important for me to uplift young up-and-coming writers."
Debra J. Fisher is a writer, producer, and director. She currently serves as the showrunner, writer, and executive producer of the Netflix series Ginny & Georgia. Season one of the hit series was watched by over 52 million subscribers in its first month on the platform, gathering a devoted fan base. The highly anticipated second season premiered on January 5th. Ginny & Georgia is Debra’s first time in the showrunner’s seat. Through her long and varied career, she has worked her way up the ladder on numerous beloved TV shows including Alias, The O.C., Charmed, and Criminal Minds, among others. With a wealth of experience from her own professional journey, she works to pay it forward by mentoring the next generation of creatives.
www.instagram.com/debrajfisher
www.tiktok.com/@debrajfisher
www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/ginny-and-georgia-season-2-release-date
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"So there are analog solutions to the digital problem. I think the single biggest solution, for most people, at least in terms of low-hanging fruit, the most obvious place to begin is to just say, I'm going to carve out time every day, create habits where I will not be near my devices at certain times of the day. It might be dinner time, maybe no matter where I am, whom I'm with, or what I'm doing, I will not during dinnertime use a device. Or it might be the first hour of the day. A lot of people do that, spend the first hour of the day tech-free. Have a cup of coffee, if that's what you like to do, read a physical newspaper, or just read a book - whatever you want to do. Or be with your kids or loved ones, depends what your situation is. And then the same before bed. So between 60 and 90 minutes before bed, don't use a phone. And even those small changes, no phone at dinner time, no phone first hour of the day, no phone an hour before bed. That will change your life.
It gives you back about two and a half hours of your day, which people when they start doing it, say, I can't believe I've lost that much time. So I think that there are many things we can do. We just have to make the decision to do them."
Adam Alter is a Professor of Marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the Robert Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow. Adam is the New York Times bestselling author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, and Drunk Tank Pink, which investigates how hidden forces in the world around us shape our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. He has written for the New York Times, New Yorker, The Atlantic, Washington Post, and a host of TV, radio, and publications. His next book Anatomy of a Breakthrough will be published in 2023.
https://adamalterauthor.com
www.penguin.co.uk/books/431386/irresistible-by-adam-alter/9781784701659
www.simonandschuster.com/books/Anatomy-of-a-Breakthrough/Adam-Alter/9781982182960
www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/adam-alter
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Dr. Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer at the Australian National University. She served as a lead author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and is the author of Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia. Joëlle has also contributed chapters to The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg, and Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua.
http://joellegergis.com
https://climatehistory.com.au
www.blackincbooks.com.au/authors/jo-lle-gergis
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"And I think that from a young age I've kind of learned that there are good stories, great stories, but none of them is your story. And that you have to kind of make up your own story, not feel just good enough kind of picking up one. And it doesn't matter if it's about Flat Earths or some conspiracy or wanting to clear the world of plastic or going vegan. So just this idea of joining some kind of boy scouts or wearing some kind of uniform or supporting some sports club and saying, Okay, now I don't have to think, I'm the New York Knicks fan! So if they win, I'm happy. If they lose, then I'm sad. I think that there is something, both with my mother and my father, being Holocaust survivors, being orphaned, basically, they had to seek the narrative. They didn't inherit one.
It's not like my parents always said, You do like this, you know, and then you can either do what your parents said or rebel against them. It's this idea of What the hell do I do? And I'm looking Outside and Inside to find my narrative, to find my ethics, to find my values.”
Author, Screenwriter, and Director Etgar Keret is a recipient of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the Charles Bronfman Prize, and the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Jellyfish, which he directed with his wife Shira Geffen. Most recently, they created the TV mini series The Middleman (L’Agent Immobilier) starring Mathieu Amalric. His books include the short story collections Fly Already, Suddenly a Knock on the Door, and his memoir The Seven Good Years. Etgar’s work has been translated into forty-five languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review,The New York Times, and This American Life.
A frequent collaborator with visual and performing artists, an exhibition inspired by his mother called Inside Out is currently showing at the Jewish Museum in Berlin until February 5th, 2023.
www.etgarkeret.com
The Middleman www.imdb.com/title/tt11523800
www.jmberlin.de/en/exhibition-inside-out-etgar-keret
https://etgarkeret.substack.com
Jellyfish http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0807721
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Photo credit: Lielle Sand
"What I think made me want to pursue film or what started my fascination with film and cinema were definitely Fellini, Antonioni, and Bertolucci; the masters, if you will, that kind of make you dream - make you just go to a movie theater, enter this space, and just have a communal experience. I know looking at the screen and just being completely immersed and experiencing stories or experiencing things that make you understand life more - or make you understand life less - and create a dialogue between you and the rest of the world.
After that, Alfonso Cuarón, obviously the collaboration was incredibly important and I learned a lot and I carry a lot of that in me, undeniably. Then, I also had the very good fortune of working as a camera assistant, and a camera operator with other cinematographers, so I learned a lot from them. And they became mentors in a way. And it was kind of like a fortunate path to becoming a cinematographer myself.
The camera is my tool of choice. It's what I've been given to express what needs to be expressed, what needs to be told. So I'm definitely very particular about composition or lens choices or camera placement."
Cinematographer Manuel Billeter has worked across a variety of iconic and groundbreaking shows and films including Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Law & Order, Person of Interest, Orange Is The New Black, Lawless, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también. Most recently he has been Director of Photography on the HBO Max series The Gilded Age, starring Carrie Coon and Christine Baranski, and Netflix’s Inventing Anna, starring Julia Garner.
https://manuelbilleter.com
www.imdb.com/name/nm1193850/
www.imdb.com/title/tt4406178/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8740976/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast/
"So, in terms of going into the UK as a first-time showrunner. Of course, the UK and the US systems are quite different. Really the showrunner model is very much the American system. While the UK historically has a much more lead writer who then hands over the scripts to the producer who then hands them over to the director.
But I was clear that I do feel that if one has the desire and the ability to be a much more big-picture showrunner, I think that's to the best. That benefits the show because there's a creative voice running all the way through. This isn't a movie, where it's a director's medium. It is the writer's medium, so I think the writer should be across producing and also empowering the director, but there is a clear vision.
In terms of leadership, it wasn't very much about ultimately starting to say, Okay, this is what it is, and being confident in that. And also acknowledging when one makes mistakes, you know, because you're making a lot of decisions in a very short period of time.
And I think it's important to give credit where it's due as well and that was also true of being a director. It's important to give credit. So have a vision, and work with those people to have the vision. Listen to what they're saying, listen to their ideas. And making television just makes it crucial to sort of have a vision, but be able to pivot."
Abby Ajayi is a British Nigerian writer and director who serves as a show creator, executive producer, and writer on the Amazon Series Riches, which is currently on Amazon Prime and premiers on ITVX in the UK on December 22. She has previously worked on the shows Four Weddings and a Funeral, How to Get Away with Murder, Inventing Anna, The First Lady, and Eastenders. As a result, she had the opportunity to learn under the likes of Shonda Rhimes, Pete Nowalk, and Tracey Wigfield. Abby’s next project is the Onyx Collective on Hulu’s limited series The Plot with Mahershala Ali. She is adapting the eight-episode series from Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel of the same name.
www.imdb.com/name/nm2184926
www.amazon.com/Riches-Season-1/dp/B0B8MTCYVM
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
“Digital advocacy organizations are recognized as influential actors by the media, politicians, and some academics. In 2016, GetUp, an Australian digital advocacy organization, was named by the Australian Financial Review as one of the top ten actors with ‘covert power’ in Australia.1 Campact in Germany has powerfully mobilized public opinion against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. MoveOn was one of the ‘leading advocacy organizations’ mobilizing people against the Iraq War in the United States. Meanwhile, Leadnow, a digital advocacy organization in Canada, helped to unseat Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the 2015 Canadian federal election. This new model of advocacy organization has spread around the world. Nineteen digital advocacy organizations claim to have a total of over 20 million members. What drove the global spread of digital advocacy organizations?”
- Nina Hall
Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local
Nina Hall is an Assistant Professor in International Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Europe). She previously worked as a Lecturer at the Hertie School of Governance, where she published her first book Displacement, Development, and Climate Change: International Organizations Moving Beyond their Mandates? Her latest book is Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local. She holds a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and is the co-founder of an independent and progressive think tank, New Zealand Alternative. She has been a Senior Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute (the German Internet Institute) and a Faculty Affiliate at the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University.
https://ninahall.net
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/transnational-advocacy-in-the-digital-era-9780198858744?cc=fr⟨=en&
https://sais.jhu.edu/users/nhall20
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
"At this very moment, millions of people around the world are working hard to bring to life. A handful of these ideas will turn out to be stunning successes and will have a major impact on the world and culture. The next polio vaccine, the next Google, the next Harry Potter. Others will become smaller, more personal, but no less meaningful successes...
Most people believe that they either are or will be in the first group—the group whose ideas will be successful. All they have to do is work hard and execute well. Unfortunately, we know that this cannot be the case. Most new products, services, businesses, and initiatives will fail soon after they are launched—regardless of how promising they sound, how much their developers commit to them, or how well they execute them. This is a hard fact to accept. We believe that other people fail, because they don’t know what they are doing…just as I had reached new heights of confidence and hubris, the Beast of Failure wrapped its tentacles around me and bit me in the ass…I could lick my wounds or bite back. I decided to bite back. Failure became my nemesis. Defeating it, my obsession. Teaching others how to defeat it, my mission.”
– The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed
Alberto Savoia was Google’s first engineering director and is currently Innovation Agitator Emeritus, where, among other things, he led the development and launch of the original Google AdWords. He is the author of The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed, a book that provides critical advice for rethinking how we launch a new idea, product, or business, and gives insights to help successfully beat the law of market failure: that most new products will fail, even if competently executed.
He is a successful serial entrepreneur, angel-investor and an expert practitioner in pretotyping and lean innovation. He is based in Silicon Valley where he teaches his uniquely effective approach to innovation at Google, Stanford. He has also taught and coached many Fortune 500 companies, including Nike, McDonald’s, and Walmart, as well as the US Army.
www.albertosavoia.com
https://harperone.com/9780062884671/the-right-it
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
"Actually, awareness doesn't help. We are on the campaign to produce a desire for that transformation. Information is useless unless it's empowering. And of course, it has to be factual. If it's not factual, then it's going to be found out, and it also has to be relevant because otherwise, it's irrelevant. But if it's just relevant, it actually may just be counterproductive because if people see it as relevant but not empowering, they will use their brain to fight it. So that's why I think awareness campaigns don't work. We can only work on motivation, helping people to find a greater desire to get there, to say, yeah, that's what I want. A sense of agency that they say I can do something about it. Also, a sense of curiosity because we really don't know how to get there eventually.
So, it takes a bit more than just awareness and that's what we learned a bit painfully, obviously, over the last 30 years or painfully because in the beginning we just thought, Oh, why don't people just measure how many planets we have compared to how many we use? And once they see the number, it would be very obvious to them. So we were the first to start to - and still are I think - the main accounting approach to compare directly how big human activities are compared to what the planet can renew.”
Mathis Wackernagel is Co-founder and President of Global Footprint Network. He created the Ecological Footprint with Professor William Rees at the University of British Columbia as part of his Ph.D. in community and regional planning. Mathis also earned a mechanical engineering degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Mathis has worked on sustainability with governments, corporations and international NGOs on six continents and has lectured at more than 100 universities. Mathis has authored and contributed to more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, numerous articles, reports and various books on sustainability that focus on embracing resource limits and developing metrics for sustainability. Mathis’ awards include the 2018 World Sustainability Award, the 2015 IAIA Global Environment Award, being a 2014 ISSP Sustainability Hall of Fame Inductee, the 2013 Prix Nature Swisscanto, 2012 Blue Planet Prize, 2012 Binding Prize for Nature Conservation, the 2012 Kenneth E. Boulding Memorial Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics, the 2011 Zayed International Prize for the Environment (jointly awarded with UNEP). He was also selected as number 19 on the en(rich) list identifying the 100 top inspirational individuals whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures.
www.footprintnetwork.org
www.footprintnetwork.org/tools
www.overshootday.org/power-of-possibility/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
“Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?"–Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig
"I really love that line in the script. It's an incredible script that Greta Gerwig wrote. It's not obvious, that sentiment that she says. I think that's why she has to point it out to the Lady Bird character, but I think if we're lucky in our lives, we can choose the path that we want to go down, whether it's something creative or in the arts or something else. And I think if you're lucky, you can spend your life or your career following something you really love or spending time following the path, whether it's a hobby or your career. And spending that time paying the attention that the craft or the hobby or the creative pursuit wants."
Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We’re Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie’s Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.
https://samlevydp.com
www.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/
www.instagram.com/samlevydp/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
"If someone comes to me, and they say, 'Oh, I have a new brand. It's a startup.' First of all, I have to like the person, they have to like me. It's a two way street. And that's the most important thing with anyone in life, not just work. In life, why do we make friends with who we make friends with? They are relationships. And if you connect with someone, magic will happen. If you don't connect with someone, and someone doesn't understand or have the same aesthetic or a similar way of thinking – you have to have something in common with someone. And if you have those qualities, which I look for, honesty and loyalty, and they're genuine, and you just know if you're going to get on with someone or not.”
Oberon Sinclair is the CEO and founder of the creative and branding agency, My Young Auntie. Since she founded the company in 1997, Oberon has collaborated with and managed an array of notable clients from the high luxury, art, fashion, food and lifestyle sectors, including Hermès, Vivienne Westwood, Fabergé, the Richemont Group, Jack Spade, ArtForum, Selfridges, Rizzoli Books, Island Records, David Lee Roth, among others. Oberon is known as the Queen of Kale for reviving an interest in the superfood across the world. She’s a Founding Member of NeueHouse where she moderates talks.
https://myyoungauntie.com
www.instagram.com/myyoungauntiepr
www.neuehouse.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Photo: Oberon in conversation with artist and fashion designer Jason Wu at NeueHouse
"In some ways, our insistence on dominating is actually destroying us."
"It definitely is destroying us. It definitely destroys ecosystems. And I think part of the reason that this story of cooperation among living things appeals to me so much. I mean, in my book Sweet in Tooth and Claw, I look at the work of lots of scientists who studying how nature works and discovering all these incredible connections among living things that certainly help them thrive and help ecosystems thrive.
But I think it's this story of cooperation is important in terms of the story that we tell ourselves about nature, and seeing as how we are part of nature, it's important that we see ourselves as possibly a partner instead of a destroyer. I think that we have held onto the perspective that nature is all about competition and conflict. And when we shift that, when we look at nature as this vast web of interconnection and cooperation, and of course competition and conflict in there obviously in some places. But when we look at this vast web of cooperation and collaboration, I think that it changes our view. It changes our view of what's possible.
You know, instead of us trying to make order out of chaos, largely out of the chaos that we've created, we can instead look at the world as being held together and look for the places where the connections have been snapped, where the connections have been broken, and where we can roll back some of the damage that we've done and help those connections heal.”
Kristin Ohlson is the author of Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World. Her other books include The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet, and Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil. Olson appears in the award-winning documentary film Kiss The Ground, speaking about the connection between soil and climate. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, Discover, New Scientist, Orion, American Archeology, and has also been anthologized in Best American Science Writing, and Best American Food Writing.
www.kristinohlson.com
www.patagonia.com/stories/sweet-in-tooth-and-claw/story-123959.html
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
"Einstein on the Beach, it's a masterpiece. America, in 1976, was to be celebrating its 200th year of existence, and Michel Guy, the French Minister of Culture, came to New York to offer a commission to Philip Glass and Robert Wilson to write an opera. This was the gift that France would give for America's two-hundredth anniversary. That was the first time I met Robert Wilson."
"My son had died, and I had taken to two years to recover. So I went to New York. I had dinner with Laurie Anderson, and as I was getting up to leave, she said, 'What are you doing in New York?' I said, "I'm looking for work' She said, 'What are you doing next week?' I said, 'Well, I'm supposed to be in Atlanta, Georgia doing a music film with David Byrne and Talking Heads. Well, what do you have?' She said, 'I'm doing a piece next week at Brooklyn Academy of Music with Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg, Set and Reset. Why don't you come? Bring your sax, we'll work it out then.' Two weeks after that concert, Laurie's manager called and said, 'Do you want to go on a 20-city tour of America with Laurie? Home of the Brave?' Of course, we did that. That was the beginning of the reconstruction of my career in New York through Laurie Anderson."
For nearly half a century, Richard “Dickie” Landry was at the center of the New York avant-garde. Born in the small Louisiana town of Cecilia in 1938, he began making pilgrimages to the city while still in his teens in search of the city’s most cutting edge gestures in jazz, and relaxed there not long after, falling in with a close knit community of artists and composers like Keith Sonnier, Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matt Clarke, Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Lawrence Weiner, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and Robert Wilson.
Landry remains one of the few artists of his generation who made important waves within numerous creative idioms. Having been trained from a young age on saxophone, not only is he a remarkably respected solo performer and bandleader, but he was an early and long-standing member of Philip Glass’ ensemble, playing on seminal records like Music With Changing Parts, Music in Similar Motion / Music in Fifths, Music in Twelve Parts, North Star, and Einstein on the Beach, and played with Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and jazz giants like Johnny Hammond, Gene Ammons, and Les McCann. He was also one of the most important photographic documenters of the New York Scene, until he left the city for his native Louisiana, following 9/11.
http://www.dickielandry.com
https://unseenworlds.com/collections/dickie-landry
Music on this episode courtesy of Dickie Landry:
E-mu & Alto Saxophone composed by D.L. for Robert Wilson's production of "1433 The Grand Voyage" based on the story of Zheng He. Premier National Theater Taipei, Taiwan 2009
Philip Glass’"Einstein on the Beach”. Original recording on Tomato Records 1977. D.L. on flute
“Home of the Brave” on the Late Show with Laurie Anderson
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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"I just feel there is already a connection, something I have to come to, but that I'm trying to search it out or see what's already there. I feel that we are truly connected as a world. And I'm just trying to make people aware of an existing connection we already have, to send that message out there. And I like to do it in the form of...I guess you'd call it a mundane image, where it's not really about bells and whistles, but it's about something in it makes you want to look, and you want to know why. And it's because you've been there before, regardless of whether you are a dancer or that particular guy in the subway, you know you've been in his head in that mood that he's experiencing."
Gloria Pacis is a painter dividing her time between New York City and Hoboken, where she has her studio. She received her BFA from the University of Washington in 1976. She credits her years working as a set designer and scene artist for the dramatic, character-based elements of her paintings. She has participated in exhibitions at public institutions and universities, including Wing Luke Museum, Mana Contemporary, University of Washington, Henry Art Gallery, Monroe Arts Centre, Seattle University, Act Theatreand Seattle Center Art Museum, where her work was chosen to showcase International Women’s Day. She has designed sets for many leading theatres, including notable productions of A Christmas Carol, Hamlet, The Doctors Dilemma, Hedda Gabler, and Salome.
IG @gloriapacis
www.artofgloriapacis.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Image: The Dancers, Acrylic on canvas, Gloria Pacis
"It's interesting, as I've gotten older, I've really started to reflect back on that early time growing up on a farm. And I'm fiercely, fiercely proud of where my roots are. And Weldon, Saskatchewan, it's a town of 160 people there today. And just being in a spot where every day you have cattle to feed, you've got a grain crop you're trying to grow, right? The things are subject to weather. The sort of ups and downs of farm life are so dependent on the 6 pm news and the weather forecast each night. It's at times very stressful, but most times incredibly rewarding, right? There's nothing like sitting in a combine at harvest time with all the fruits of your labors all coming in at the same time. It's a great experience. We had cattle, which is just a never-ending thing, right? You know, our vacations were tied around going to cattle shows, cattle sales, bull sales, cow sales, anything that revolved around the farm. And we had a ton of fun on our vacations going to these events and seeing sites in those areas where we went to. But at the end of the day, you know, your life revolves around the cattle on the farm. It revolves around the farm. There's no sort of, we'll take four months off and not worry about it, right? Those cows have to be fed twice a day and looked after. So it's a lot of responsibility, and it's a great way to get yourself ready for life as an adult."
Colin Steen is CEO of Legacy Agripartners. He has had a lifelong career in agriculture, spending over 25 years with Syngenta in a variety of commercial leadership and Venture Capital roles before joining Legacy Seed Companies (now Legacy Agripartners) in July 2020. His prior experience in running Golden Harvest Seeds has given him a deep understanding of the needs of the U.S. farmer. Colin grew up on a grain and cattle farm in Weldon, Saskatchewan, and holds a B.S. in Agriculture from the University of Saskatchewan and an MBA from the University of Guelph.
https://legacyagripartners.com
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"We're really talking about principled rebels. And when we talk about insubordination, we're talking about most of us live in these social hierarchies, and there's the idea, this started in the military and still goes on, where if someone at a lower rank questions or challenges a command or a norm that someone of a higher rank, that's considered an act of insubordination. And one of the main problems of that, I think anyone who's listening can acknowledge, is it depends on the quality of the idea of the person who's raising the question.
I just realized there was this whole body of literature on minority influence that no one had put together into a book for the general public, and considering the racial reckoning that occurred during COVID-19, the extra attention to diversity, to disadvantaged groups, every moment of society, it just feels like it's more and more relevant of what I've been working on. If you don't have the numbers, if you lack status or you lack power, the way to be persuasive towards a group is much different than if you do have the title or are socially attractive in that group."
Todd B. Kashdan, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at George Mason University, and a leading authority on well-being, curiosity, courage, and resilience. He has published more than 220 scientific articles, his work has been cited more than 35,000 times, and he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively, Curious? and The Upside of Your Dark Side, and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. His research is featured regularly in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time, and his writing has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, National Geographic, and other publications. He is a keynote speaker and consultant for organizations as diverse as Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Prudential, General Mills, The United States Department of Defense, and World Bank Group.
https://toddkashdan.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690674/the-art-of-insubordination-by-todd-b-kashdan-phd/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
"First of all, yes, I need to know what I will be climbing, whether it's on rocks or whether it's on buildings. And then there is physical preparation. And regarding the mindset, it's more something that became a bit automatic over the years because I have been free soloing for almost 50 years. So it is pretty much my whole life. So that means that for me, being mentally ready, it's kind of simple. It's almost always the same mental process, meaning, I can be afraid before an ascent, but I know myself actually very well. And I know that once I am starting to climb, I feel fine. I put my fear aside, and I'm just climbing.
Most people don't know that actually, my background is on rock. It's not on buildings. What I did on rocks free soloing is much more impressive than what I did on buildings.”
Alain Robert is a renowned rock climber and urban climber. Known as "the French Spider-Man” or "the Human Spider," Robert is famous for his free solo climbing, scaling skyscrapers using no climbing equipment except for a small bag of chalk and a pair of climbing shoes. Some of his most notable ascents include the Burj Khalifa, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sydney Opera House, as well as other of the world's tallest skyscrapers. He is also a motivational speaker and the author of With Bare Hands: The True Story of Alain Robert, the Real-life Spiderman.
www.alainrobert.com
www.instagram.com/alainrobertofficial/?hl=fr
www.blacksmithbooks.com/books/with-bare-hands-the-true-story-of-alain-robert-the-real-life-spiderman/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Image courtesy of alainrobert.com
"The circularity, of course, has existed in nature for a long time. Actually, nature's circularity is by evolution. There is no plan, there is no liability, and there are no preferences. It's simply the cycles such as marine tides, CO2, and water cycles, plants and animals, and basically by evolution, the best solution wins. Also, there is no waste. Dead material becomes food for other animals or plants. Now, early mankind survived by depending on these local natural resources sharing a non-monetary chaotic symbiosis dominated by nature, then poverty or necessity-based society changed when humankind used science to overcome shortages of everything. In other words, the Anthropocene. With nuclear energy, petrochemicals, metal alloys, we became independent from nature, but we overlooked the fact that these new manmade anthropogenic resources or synthetic resources were unknown to nature, so nature could not deal with them. And that means that we, humankind, has to take responsibility for it."
Walter R. Stahel is the Founder-Director of the Product-Life Institute (Switzerland), the oldest established consultancy in Europe devoted to developing sustainable strategies and policies. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Circular Economy Research Centre, Ecole des Ponts Business School and Visiting Professor in the Department of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey. He is also a full member of the Club of Rome. He was awarded degrees of Doctor honoris causa by the University of Surrey, l’Université de Montréal, and the 2020 Thornton Medal of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. He is the author of The Circular Economy: A User’s Guide.
www.product-life.org
www.routledge.com/The-Circular-Economy-A-Users-Guide/Stahel/p/book/9780367200176
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
"I'm an addiction psychiatrist. When I use the word addiction, I'm really talking about having crossed the line from basically healthy use with an occasional slip to somebody who's really caught in the vortex of compulsive overconsumption with consequences and typically needing help from others, whether or not they are professionals, but feeling like, Oh boy, this is unmanageable, as they say in Twelve Steps, "My life has become unmanageable." It's one of the main points of my book, Dopamine Nation that we are living in this addictogenic world where almost all human behaviors and substances have become drugified in one way, right? Social media has drugified human connection. Our food has been drugified by the addition of salt, fat, sugar. Reading is drugified, the way that these genre novels fill this sort of gaping hole of compulsive consumption among their readership, people always wanting more. The Netflix binges, where you get the next episode automatically fills unless you do something to stop it. You know, these are all little ways in which our lives have been engineered to keep us clicking and swiping and eating and smoking and drinking to the detriment of the globe. I mean, 70% of global deaths are due to diseases caused by modifiable risk factors, and the top three are smoking, inactivity, and overeating or diet. So we're literally titillating ourselves to death."
Dr. Anna Lembke is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. A clinician scholar, she has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries. She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations, has testified before various committees in the United States House of Representatives and Senate, keeps an active speaking calendar, and maintains a thriving clinical practice. Dr. Lembke explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine overloaded world in her NYTimes bestselling book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Her previous book Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop was highlighted in the New York Times as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic.
www.annalembke.com
https://med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/patient_care/addiction.html
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624957/dopamine-nation-by-anna-lembke-md/
www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/11360/drug-dealer-md
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"Well, I got the idea in 2013 when I was a wee young 23-year-old activist, and I had been studying history at Los Angeles City College, and I took this class on genocide that had a huge impact on me, and it also coincided, just the timing, with the Occupy Wall Street movement. So then two years later in 2013, I was reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and the book is about how mass incarceration is like a modern-day racial caste system. And I just heavily related to the book. I grew up around some impacted people. I had a mentor who was formerly incarcerated named Alexander, who was actually Muhammad Ali's bodyguard.
And I just got the idea to do an album, because I was listening to a lot of concept albums like Pink Floyd, The Wall. And it started from there, just a little seed and a spark of just this idea for this one album. And then over time, it just evolved into an EP, and then a record label and a nonprofit. And here we are."
Fury Young and BL Shirelle are the powerhouse team behind Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated musicians. DJC Records’ mission is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison in America by amplifying the voices of our artists. As a pair, Fury Young and BL Shirelle form a perhaps unlikely, but unstoppable duo. Young is a Jewish New Yorker who has not experienced incarceration. Shirelle is a queer, Black woman from Philadelphia who has been heavily impacted by police violence and incarceration. The two formed an inseparable bond. As friends, musical collaborators and now Co-Executive Directors of Die Jim Crow Records, their leadership and commitment to values of representation, fairness, passion for the cause, and a love for art, are at the core of DJC.
www.diejimcrow.com
http://www.blshirelle.com
http://www.furyyoung.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“What is a Green Amendment? It is language that recognizes the rights of all people to clean water and clean air, a stable climate, and healthy environments, and obligates the government to protect those rights and the natural resources of the state for the benefit of all the people in the state, or if it was a federal green amendment in the United States, and they become obliged to protect those environmental rights and those natural resources for the benefit of both present and future generations, that's functionally what it does. But to help people understand what it accomplishes, a green amendment actually obligates the government to recognize and protect our environmental rights in the same, most powerful way we recognize and protect the other fundamental freedoms we hold dear. Things like the right to free speech, freedom of religion, civil rights, and private property rights. We all know how powerfully they are protected from government overreach and infringement. Well, when we have Green Amendments, now the environment and our environmental rights are added to that list of highest constitutional freedoms and protections."
Maya K. van Rossum is the founder of Green Amendments For The Generations, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring passage of Green Amendments in every state constitution across our nation, and also at the federal level when the time is right. She is an environmental attorney, community organizer, and the Delaware Riverkeeper, leading the regional advocacy organization, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, for over 30 years. The Delaware Riverkeeper Network works throughout the four states of the Delaware River watershed (NY, NJ, PA & DE) and at the national level using advocacy, science and litigation to protect the Delaware River and its tributaries. She is the Author of The Green Amendment: The People's Fight for a Clean, Safe, and Healthy Environment.
www.ForTheGenerations.org
www.delawareriverkeeper.org
https://forthegenerations.org/the-green-amendment/
https://twitter.com/MayaKvanRossum
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"So I have a background in conservation biology and have been a science communicator for well over a decade and a half now, and of course, doing that work you're confronted with climate, environmental reports and studies, which were a consistent part of my emotional baseline, just being aware of the fact that this is not all going well, which every now and then would make me feel low, for sure, in a way that was quite noticeable. But it became much more poignant in my life in 2017 when my partner and I started considering whether or not to have a kid, and I hadn't connected the reproductive part of life to the climate crisis. And all of a sudden this topic was the only thing I could really think about because it became such a dilemma for me personally, as to whether or not I felt comfortable having a child, given what the science says about where we're headed and what the lack of historical action means for the future of any child born to date, even one with privilege and protection from its parental outset. So that then, you know, eco-anxiety and climate anxiety and eco-grief in these terms that we now have as kind of household items that people are familiar with, that we have lots of journalism around, which has especially emerged in the last three years or so.
At that time, I didn't have words to describe what I was feeling and I felt very deviant for even questioning whether or not it was okay to have kids in the climate crisis. I didn't really see it reflected. I figured, Okay, this is probably me getting a little bit loopy here, and I ought to do something to bring more perspective into my line of view. And that started me on a research project looking at the psychological impacts of the climate crisis writ large beyond just the reproductive angle, but that was my on-ramp."
Britt Wray is the author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. She's a writer and broadcaster researching the emotional and psychological impacts of the climate crisis. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, she is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she investigates the mental health consequences of ecological disruption. She holds a PhD in Science Communication from the University of Copenhagen. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post Guardian, and Globe and Mail, among other publications. She has hosted several podcasts, radio, and TV programs with the BBC and CBC, is a TED Resident, and writes Gan Dread, a newsletter about staying sane in the climate crisis. She is also the author of Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction.
www.brittwray.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/647141/generation-dread-by-britt-wray
https://greystonebooks.com/products/rise-of-the-necrofauna
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"I think water is taking a backseat and personally, I feel like water is the messenger that delivers the bad news of climate change to your front door. So in the work that I do, it's heavily intertwined, but it's taking a backseat. There are parts about water that are maybe separate from climate change, and that could be the quality discussions, the infrastructure discussions, although they are somewhat loosely related to climate change and they are impacted by climate change. That's sometimes part of the reason why it gets split off because it's thought of as maybe an infrastructure problem, but you know, the changing extremes, the aridification of the West, the increasing frequency, the increasing droughts, these broad global patterns that I've been talking about, that I've been looking at with my research – that's all climate change. Just 100% climate change, a hundred percent human-driven. And so it does need to be elevated in these climate change discussions.”
Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist, a professor and the Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where he holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley tech startup, Waterplan. Before moving to Saskatchewan, he served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. From 2013 through 2018, he was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the California State Water Boards. He has appeared on CBS News 60 Minutes, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, as a featured expert in water documentaries including Day Zero and Last Call at the Oasis, and across a host of international news media. He is the host of the podcast What About Water?
https://jayfamiglietti.com
What About Water? podcast with Jay Famiglietti
Twitter @WhatAboutWater
GIWS https://water.usask.ca
www.waterplan.com
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
“I live my life embodying the teaching my grandmother instilled in me – that no matter which lens I walked on, I had to learn how to build relationships with the land and the Indigenous peoples whose land I reside on to become a welcome guest. As a displaced Indigenous woman, my longing to return to my ancestral homelands will always be there, and this is why I continue to support my communities in the diaspora. However, my relationships are not only with my community, but also the Indigenous communities whose land I am displaced on, and this is the foundation of my work while residing in the Pacific Northwest. I strongly believe that in order to start healing Indigenous landscapes, everyone must understand their positionality as either settlers, unwanted guests, or welcomed guests, and that is ultimately determined by the Indigenous communities whose land you currently reside on or occupy. This teaching has also helped me envision my goals in life. Every day I get closer to becoming an ancestor because life is not guaranteed but rather a gift we are granted from our ancestors who are now in the spiritual world.”
Dr. Jessica Hernandez (Binnizá & Maya Ch’orti’) is a transnational Indigenous scholar, scientist, and community advocate based in the Pacific Northwest. She has an interdisciplinary academic background ranging from marine sciences to environmental physics. She advocates for climate, energy, and environmental justice through her scientific and community work. Her book Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science breaks down why western conservationism isn’t working–and offers Indigenous models informed by case studies, personal stories, and family histories that center the voices of Latin American women and land protectors. In 2022, she was named by Forbes as one of the 100 most powerful women of Central America. She holds appointments at Sustainable Seattle, City of Seattle's Urban Forestry Commission, and the International Mayan League. Fresh Banana Leaves received the Bruce Piasecki and Andrea Masters Award on Business and Society Writing (2022).
www.jessicabhernandez.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675699/fresh-banana-leaves-by-jessica-hernandez/
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"Essentially, what the thesis of the book is that science is really about finding simple solutions. And I guess one of the other themes of the book is that life appears like a scientist. It finds the simplest solutions to problems, and that's because there's a mechanism in natural selection, whereby stuff that is unnecessary gets removed by mutations. We lose stuff that is no longer useful for us. Like tails, for example, our ancestors had tails, and we don't because natural selection tends to go for simple solutions, and that's really what's made natural selection so successful, and it's also what makes science so successful too."
Johnjoe McFadden is the author of Life is Simple, How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. He obtained his PhD at Imperial College London and went on to work on human genetic diseases and then infectious diseases, at the University of Surrey. Professor McFadden has specialised in examining the genetics of microbes such as the agents of tuberculosis and meningitis. His other books are Quantum Evolution: Life in the Multiverse, and Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (co-authored with Jim Al-Khalili). He has published more than 100 articles in scientific journals on a wide range of subjects and lectures around the world. His present post is Associate Dean (International) and Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey.
www.surrey.ac.uk/people/johnjoe-mcfadden
https://johnjoemcfadden.co.uk
www.basicbooks.com/titles/johnjoe-mcfadden/life-is-simple/9781549112119
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"Scott [Kid Cudi] is the most beautiful, kind, goodhearted man, but also he's brilliant. He's a generator of ideas. I feel like by being next to him, your role is to take all of these concepts that he's crafting and ideating and bring them to fruition, so it's a really beautiful gift where you feel like you're paired with an artist who is the source of so much. Scott was also really important to me in a lot of ways from our very beginning."
"So the animated series Entergalactic tells the story of a black modern love story in New York City. It's simple in its core. Jabari, the character Scott plays, is a graffiti artist, and Cosmic Comics has decided to option his character and turn it into a comic book. So he's at this point in his life where he is moving into the loft apartment of his dreams, everything seems to be working for him when he meets Meadow, who's his neighbor. And she is this amazing woman, photographer, coolest cat on the planet. And essentially this show follows their meet-cute and their love story and the will they-won’t they of if they'll end up together. So there's something very warm in its aesthetic. But what's so interesting is that the love story is very nostalgic. It's, it just hearkens back to what a romance feels like.”
Karina Manashil is the President of Mad Solar Productions. She began her career in the mailroom at WME (William Morris Endeavor) where she became a talent agent. She represented notable clients including Scott Mescudi, known by his stage name, Kid Cudi, and built her career taking talent into new arenas.
In 2020, she partnered with Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to launch Mad Solar, which is backed by BRON Studios. Manashil then went on to Executive Produce SXSW fan-favorite X and its sequel, Pearl, directed by Ti West. Manashil is an Executive Producer on the Netflix animated series Entergalactic directed by Fletcher Moules. Entergalactic was created by Kid Cudi and features voiceover from Jessica Williams and Timothée Chalamet. It was released alongside its album of the same name from Kid Cudi on September 30th. Manashil is a native of Los Angeles and graduated from Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production.
Manashil www.imdb.com/name/nm3556462/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
www.kidcudi.com
Mad Solar https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?companies=co0831164
Entergalactic www.netflix.com/title/81053303
Pearl www.imdb.com/title/tt18925334/
X www.imdb.com/title/tt13560574/?ref_=tt_trv_trv
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"Jean-Michel Basquiat's combination of words and images, this visual poetry, just from a cultural standpoint has been so important. When I met him in 1983, black people were not allowed in the art market, pretty much. And you see that he broke down this barrier, which opened the door for all this multiculturalism within the art market. And you can't diminish the importance of that at all. It's helped to give a voice and an audience to all these incredible artists that might not have had that."
Lee Jaffe, a cross-disciplinary visual artist, musician, and poet, took photos of his friend, Jean-Michel Basquiat, when they traveled abroad in 1983. As a photographer, Jaffe had a connection to Basquiat, and their time spent together resulted in an archive of imagery that captured one of the art world’s true legends through an unfiltered and authentic lens.
“For me, watching him [Jean-Michel] paint reminded me of the times I would sit and play harmonica while Bob Marley, with his acoustic guitar, would be writing songs that were eventually to become classics,” Jaffe says. “With Jean and Bob, it seemed like they were channeling inspiration coming from an otherworldly place.”
Basquiat and Jaffe connected over reggae music. It was the early 1980s in New York. Jaffe had been a member of Bob Marley’s band, producer on Peter Tosh’s first solo album. and collaborated with art world figures Helio Oiticica, Gordon Matta Clark, and Vito Acconci. Jaffe is the author of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads.
www.leejaffe.com
www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847871841/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"We present ourselves and our bodies every day in public, and the way we do that is profoundly important. It's the way we establish a sense of self in a social domain. And clothing is the most direct way that's accomplished, and so of course it has political significance, and that's why it's always been regulated. Something that's trivial and superficial doesn't inspire a lot of rules and laws, but in fact, in our society up to the present day, there are lots of rules and laws around what people can wear. So those statements that are made can have profound significance at an almost subconscious level.
That's why people were worried when African Americans [started dressing] in refined clothing because it suggested - against the dominant ideology of the time of white supremacy - that African Americans were refined and sophisticated. That's what that clothing suggests. When women [began wearing] masculine clothing, it suggested that those women could assert masculine privileges and masculine liberties because that's what that clothing suggested. It suggested that the women were not only refined, but also sober, practical, industrious - all of the things that women were denied in that context, and that made it a threat to the existing social order. And this is still true today."
Richard Thompson Ford is the George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. His scholarship combines social criticism and legal analysis, and he writes for both popular readers and for academic and legal specialists. He's written for the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. He’s a regular contributor for Slate and has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show, The Colbert Report, and other programs.
His most recent book is Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History. His books The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse and Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality have been selected by the New York Times as Notable Books of the Year. In 2012, On Being a Black Lawyer called him one of the most influential black lawyers in the nation.
http://richardtford.law.stanford.edu
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"The human mind is both genius and pathetic, brilliant and idiotic. People are capable of the most remarkable feats, achievements that defy the gods. We went from discovering the atomic nucleus in 1911 to mega- ton nuclear weapons in just over forty years. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and developed genetically modified tomatoes. And yet we are equally capable of the most remarkable demonstrations of hubris and foolhardiness. Each of us is error-prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. It is in- credible that humans are capable of building thermonuclear bombs. It is equally incredible that humans do in fact build thermonuclear bombs (and blow them up even when they don’t fully understand how they work). It is incredible that we have developed governance systems and economies that provide the comforts of modern life even though most of us have only a vague sense of how those systems work. And yet human society works amazingly well, at least when we’re not irradiating native populations.
How is it that people can simultaneously bowl us over with their ingenuity and disappoint us with their ignorance? How have we mastered so much despite how limited our understanding often is?"
– The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
Philip Fernbach is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Leeds School of Business. He’s published widely in the top journals in cognitive science, consumer research and marketing, and received the ACR Early Career Award for Contributions to Consumer Research. He’s co-author with Steve Sloman of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, which was chosen as a New York Times Editor’s Pick. He’s also written for NYTimes, Harvard Business Review, and his research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Washinton Post, National Public Radio, and the BBC. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown and his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Williams College. He teaches data analytics and behavioral science to undergraduate and Masters students.
www.colorado.edu/business/
www.philipfernbach.com
The Knowledge Illusion
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"I co-founded what has become EDGE for gender and intersectional equity back in 2009, and at that time workplace gender and intersectional equity were still very much seen as a societal issue rather than a business issue. Organizations were asking themselves if it's within their role to tackle these issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace, or if they are the mere recipients of what is going on in societies, following the beliefs around what men and women should be doing at work and at home.
So at that time we wanted to contribute to this transition from making gender and intersectional equity a business issue and help organizations see that how they manage their talent and how they are able to attract, develop, motivate, and retain diverse talent is a key component of their sustainable business success."
Aniela Unguresan is Co-founder of EDGE Certification, the leading global assessment methodology and business certification standard for gender equality. Launched at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in 2011, EDGE Certification measures where organizations stand in terms of gender balance across their pipeline, pay equity, and effectiveness of policies and practices to ensure equitable career flows, as well as the inclusiveness of their culture. EDGE Certification has been designed to help companies not only to create an optimal workplace for women and men, but also to benefit from it. EDGE stands for Economic Dividends for Gender Equality and is distinguished by its rigor and focus on business impact. Their customer base consists of 200 large organizations in 50 countries across five continents, representing 30 different industries.
Prior to co-founding EDGE Certified Foundation, Aniela acquired extensive professional experience as a consultant with Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting, as a trader and project manager with TXU Europe and SIG Geneva, and as the CEO of CT Technologies.
https://edge-cert.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy.
The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being."
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, CNN.com, National Geographic News, and other publications. He is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace.
www.safinacenter.org
www.carlsafina.org
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"Well, I had a wonderful teacher in second grade who kind of inspired me to start writing and really stuck with me through elementary school and beyond as I made attempts to find my voice, but think part of the reason it never really went anywhere for me as a young person was because I was too afraid to share that with anyone except for that one teacher. I never showed friends. I didn't even really show family. I just always felt that it wasn't quite good enough. And so the thing I always tell writers now if they ask for, you know, "What's one tip?" It's let someone else tell you no, because I just told myself no for pretty much my entire young adulthood. And once I let other people tell me no, they did a lot, you know, but that is how I got better."
Karen M. McManus is a #1 New York Times and international bestselling author of young adult thrillers. Her books include the One of Us Is Lying series, which has been turned into a television show on Peacock and Netflix, as well as the standalone novels Two Can Keep a Secret, The Cousins, You’ll Be the Death of Me, and Nothing More to Tell. Karen's critically acclaimed, award-winning work has been translated into more than 40 languages.
https://www.karenmcmanus.com
@writerkmc
on Twitter - Instagram
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"The field of synthetic biology, which is known by some as extreme genetic engineering – that's a name mostly used by people who don't like it - amounts to a set of tools that humans have developed to be able to very precisely and accurately change the genetic code, the DNA of living organisms in order to get those organisms to do things that humans want. So the applications in medicine are predominantly devoted to trying to make us healthier people, and they range from some really exciting work on tumor biology to work on the microbiome, which is all of the thousands and tens of thousands of species that live on our lips, our mouths, our guts, our skin. And in agriculture, it's primarily directed at crop genetics, trying to improve the productivity of crops, the nutritional value of crops, the ability of crops to respond to climate change, and a whole variety of other things. Some people may have heard of one of these tools called CRISPR used to very precisely alter the sequences of DNA.
This book that Bill and I wrote is about the impending intersection between synthetic biology and the field of nature conservation, not an examination of the technologies per se, but an examination of the way that we are going to end up needing to think about the intersection between our ability to change DNA, and what it means to be natural, and what it means to conserve things and whether or not we want to conserve things that we have altered."
Kent H. Redford is a conservation practitioner and Principal at Archipelago Consulting established in 2012 and based in Portland, Maine, USA. Archipelago Consulting was designed to help individuals and organizations improve their practice of conservation. Prior to Archipelago Consulting Kent spent 10 years on the faculty of University of Florida and 19 years in conservation NGOs with five years as Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Parks in Peril program and 14 years as Vice President for Conservation Science and Strategy at the Wildlife Conservation Society. For six years he was Chair of IUCN’s Task Force on Synthetic Biology and Biodiversity Conservation. In June 2021 Yale University Press published Kent’s book with W.M. Adams: Strange Natures. Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300230970/strange-natures/
https://archipelagoconsulting.com
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"Most bees are quite short-lived, not all bees. So queen bees can live for many years, up to seven years, and some stingless bees, the queens can even live much longer than that, but their lives are less exciting in a sense that they are, most of their lives, cave animals, where most of what they do is egg laying.
So when we're talking about intelligence tests and bees, these are mostly done with the worker bees, and they only live for a few weeks. And it might be surprising to many people that an animal this short-lived can learn anything at all because, of course, in humans, the process of acquiring crucial life skills takes much longer, many years typically. So when a bee first emerges from the pupa - bees spend their first few days as little grubs inside a wax pot. And this larval stage, of course, there isn't much learning going on. They have a very pampered and easy life in that they are basically immersed in the food that they're required to grow. And then they pupate and turn from what are formerly little helpless grubs into adult bees.
Once the bee emerges from the pupa, they have a number of different tasks waiting for them, which in honey bees a fairly defined sequence where the bee might in her first few days simply be involved in the many duties inside the hive – to clean cells, to build wax comb, to feed the larva – and then to transition to their life as a forager.”
Lars Chittka is professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, where he founded a new Research Centre for Psychology in 2008 and was its scientific director until 2012. He is the author of The Mind of a Bee and is the coeditor of Cognitive Ecology of Pollination. He studied Biology in Berlin and completed his PhD studies under the supervision of Randolf Menzel in 1993. He has carried out extensive work on the behaviour, cognition and ecology of bumble bees and honey bees, and their interactions with flowers. His discoveries have made a substantial impact on the understanding of animal intelligence and its neural-computational underpinnings. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles, and has been an editor of biology’s foremost open access journal PLoS Biology since 2004. He is an elected Member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), a Fellow of the Linnean Society and Royal Entomological Society, as well as the Royal Society of Biology.
http://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/Lars.html
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691180472/the-mind-of-a-bee
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"I do think though that there is a real possibility that within the lifetime of many people who are here today, we will see the arrival of transformative AI, machine intelligence systems that not only can automate specific tasks but can replicate the full generality of human thinking. So that everything that we humans can do with our brains, machines will be able to do, and in fact do faster and more efficiently. What the consequences of that are, is very much an open question and, I think, depends in part on the extent to which we manage to get our act together before these developments. In terms of, on the one hand, working out our technical issues in AI alignment, figuring out exactly the methods by which you could ensure that such very powerful cognitive engines will be aligned to our values, will actually do what we intend for them to do, as opposed to something else. And then, of course, also the political challenges of ensuring that such a powerful technology will be used for positive ends. So depending on how well we perform among those two challenges, the outcome, I think, could be extremely good or extremely bad. And I think all of those possibilities are still in the cards."
Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is the most-cited professional philosopher in the world under the age of 50.
He is a Professor at Oxford University, where he heads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias, Global Catastrophic Risks, Human Enhancement, and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, a New York Times bestseller which helped spark a global conversation about the future of AI. He has also published a series of influential papers, including ones that introduced the simulation argument and the concept of existential risk.
Bostrom’s academic work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He is a repeat main TED speaker and has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice and was included in Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15. As a graduate student he dabbled in stand-up comedy on the London circuit, but he has since reconnected with the heavy gloom of his Swedish roots.
https://nickbostrom.com
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"There are four modes of communicating: preacher, prosecutor, politician, and scientist. So those three Ps are very important modes, but if you spend all your time in these modes, you will learn very little because all of them are kind of outward-looking modes. You're trying to convince others, and you don't learn very much when you're in those modes. Now, I would argue that most of us need to spend a good chunk of our time in a scientist mode. If you are in a scientist mode, then you are doing what Seneca said, "time discovers truth."
So in the scientist mode, everything you look at is a hypothesis, and then all you're trying to do is just trying to figure out if your hypothesis is right or wrong. And therefore in the debate, you're trying to understand the other person's side, not necessarily be in prosecutor mode to convince the person to change his or her mind.
We want to be very careful that ideas don't become our identity because once they do, we can't change it. In fact, I would argue, we have to be very mindful and evaluate our identity because a lot of times our identity is formed through completely random experiences."
Vitaliy Katsenelson was born in Murmansk, Russia and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1991. He is the author of Soul in the Game, The Art of a Meaningful Life. He is the CEO of Denver-based value investment firm IMA. Vitaliy has also written two books on investing. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” He’s written for the Financial Times, Barron’s, Institutional Investor and Foreign Policy. Vitaliy lives in Denver with his wife and three children, where he loves to read, listen to classical music, play chess, and write about life, investing, and music.
https://soulinthegame.net
https://contrarianedge.com
https://imausa.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is really a bill which is using the financial structure of the country to stimulate business. This is a very different kind of solution than one might have conjured up some years ago. Back in 2010, Congress tried to do something on climate change and the main solution under consideration was a carbon tax. So that was also an effort to use the financial system, but this is a very different approach.
This is putting out stimulus so that the business community can do what's necessary to build a clean energy economy. And so consumers can help support the growth of that clean energy economy by purchasing all those products that will allow individual people, families, and communities to be part of the solution by owning electric cars, by putting solar panels on their homes, by buying heat pumps to put in their homes, by improving the insulation in their private homes or buildings and thereby cutting their heating and cooling costs.”
Dr. Mona Sarfaty is the Executive Director and Founder of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, comprised of societies representing 70% of all U.S. physicians. She founded the Communication in 2016 in conjunction with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change. Under her leadership, the Consortium has grown into a nationwide coalition of societies, organizations, and advocates mobilizing support for equitable policies that address the health impacts of climate change.
Edward Maibach is Director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, a distinguished University Professor and communication scientist who is expert in the uses of strategic communication and social marketing to address climate change and related public health challenges. His research – funded by NSF, NASA, and private foundations – focuses on public understanding of climate change and clean energy; and the psychology underlying public engagement. In 2021, Ed was identified by Thompson Reuters as one of the world’s 10 most influential scientists working on climate change.
https://medsocietiesforclimatehealth.org
https://twitter.com/docsforclimate
www.climatechangecommunication.org/all/climate-change-american-mind-april-2022/
www.climatechangecommunication.org/all/politics-global-warming-april-2022/
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"Sonnet’s Shakespeare itself came out of thinking about the form of erasure, what working in that form could do and mean. And at the time there were conversations about appropriative poets where there were specific instances of pretty shady power dynamics around certain poets taking certain texts and presenting them as their own and saying, 'This is just an appropriative poetics move.’ And I was looking at critical writing about it, and I couldn't find anything that talked about the role of the poet who is doing that as censorial or as somehow violencing the original text. I was thinking about my resonance with the word erasure and thinking about censoring and deleting what somebody else has already said resonates with me as an analogy for being black, being mixed race, being racialized, and non-European in spaces that are predominantly Anglo-Canadian and in rooms where, classrooms where, playgrounds where, churches where, certain signifiers of difference would make fitting in harder.
One tries very hard. At least I did as a child to just try to fit in and make my visible difference as minimal, as invisible as possible. So it's a way of thinking about erasing the self. And so I took that theme and thought, How do I show through a poetic erasure this dynamic of self-erasure and feeling erased?”
Sonnet L'Abbé is a Canadian poet, songwriter, editor and professor. They are the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet's Shakespeare. Sonnet's Shakespeare was a Quill and Quire Book of the Year. In 2014 they edited the Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology. Their chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bpNichol Chapbook Award. They teach Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University, and are a poetry editor at Brick Books.
https://www.instagram.com/sonnetlabbe/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2017/12/tree-i-invented-a-new-form-of-poem
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"So this was maybe nine months after the fire in Notre Dame, and I had been struck visually by the fire, the yellow smoke, which is a telltale indicator of lead. The fact that 400 tons of lead constituted the covering of the roof of the cathedral. And a lot of that had volatilized, presumably, but no one really knew how much. So that got me thinking, and I happened to be in Paris at the time, so I thought if it's so much lead, could it be that it affected the population living within say a kilometer of the cathedral? I thought there wasn't really a lot of clear information about what had happened, and what had been measured. I thought some more openness and transparency was needed."
Geochemist Lex van Geen is a research professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and is member of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. His research focuses on ways to reduce the impact of the environment on human health. For two decades, he coordinated earth-science on the origin and health effects of elevated levels of arsenic in groundwater. His other projects focus on fluoride in groundwater in India, bauxite dust in Guinea, or soil contaminated with lead from mine-tailings in Peru, and fallout of lead over Paris following the fire in Notre Dame. Dr. Van Geen is a firm believer in the more widespread use of field kits by non-specialists to reduce exposure to environmental toxicants.
www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~avangeen
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
“When you dig into the medical literature, 7 out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States are diet-related chronic diseases. And so one of the hopeful messages that I think comes out of The Hidden Half of Nature, Growing a Revolution, and What Your Food Ate is that what we do to the land, essentially we do to us. And what's good for the land is good for us.
So if we think about farming differently, we can actually enjoy ripple effects that are not only beneficial to the farmers in terms of reduced costs for fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel - the three of the big costs in farming today. If we can farm and grow as much food using less of those kind of synthetic inputs, we'll all be better off. And farmers will be better off and more profitable, but it could also translate into better human health outcomes at a population level.”
David R. Montgomery teaches at the University of Washington where he studies the evolution of topography and how geological processes shape landscapes and influence ecological systems. He loved maps as a kid and now writes about the relationship of people to their environment, and regenerative agriculture. In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is the author of award-winning popular-science books (King of Fish, Dirt, and Growing a Revolution) and co-authored The Hidden Half of Nature, The Microbial Roots of Life and Health and What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health with his wife, biologist Anne Biklé.
https://www.dig2grow.com/
https://twitter.com/Dig2Grow
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"The life of Caribbean people is not really documented. So this idea of Caribbean life being fragmented is something that I've had in my mind for a long time. So when I came to write this collection for my father, I realized that it was the same process and what I had were fragments, especially with him, because he wasn't around in a physical sense all the time. So all I had were little photographs, scattered memories, and remembrances. They're little parts of his life and parts of my experience with him... I never disliked my father. I always loved him and always was fascinated and captivated by him."
Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician who moved from Trinidad to the UK in 1989. A lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck College, he is particularly interested in the point at which poetry becomes music.
As well as four poetry collections, a slew of albums, and three novels – most recently Kitch – Joseph has published critical work exploring the aesthetics of Caribbean Poetry among other subjects. He performs internationally as the lead vocalist for his band The Spasm Band. Sonnets for Albert is his first poetry collection since Rubber Orchestras. His most recent album is The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives.
www.anthonyjoseph.co.uk
https://open.spotify.com/artist/622cbugSJevUkEanSBCab9
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"I found my first fossil when I was six years old. And I found my first dinosaur bone when I was eight, my first dinosaur skeleton when I was 13. When I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a paleontologist, and I didn't think there was much hope for it, though. I was doing very poorly in school. I think I was always a pretty positive kid. And so even though I wasn't doing well in school, I was really happy about the fact that I was finding all these cool fossils, and I was making collections. I don't know when it came to me that I would do this, but I think I just was born this way."
Jack Horner is a severely dyslexic, dinosaur paleontologist. He attended the University of Montana for 14 semesters without receiving a degree. He has since received two honorary doctorates of science and a plethora of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship. Jack was Curator and Regent’s Professor of Paleontology at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana for 34 years. He has more than 300 publications. He was the technical advisor for all of the Jurassic Park/ Jurassic World movies. At Chapman University where he now teaches, Jack encourages his honors students and dyslexic mentorees to challenge their preconceived ideas.
https://jackhornersdinosaurs.com
Horner Science Group
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"I think music has changed the world. I think if you look at most social movements that have challenged the status quo and challenged even just the establishment at the time, there's been a soundtrack to those movements. And I think that is what maintains and fosters the movement and fosters the people to get behind it. So there's no question that music can change the world. It already has.
It's actually right in our mission statement that 'we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.' And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry."
The GRAMMY Museum believes that music is a gateway to learning. Their mission is to explore and celebrate the enduring legacies of the creative process behind all forms of music through immersive and interactive exhibits and essential music education programs. Michael Sticka serves as President/CEO. He’s responsible for the creation of the Museum's growth and sustainability as an independent nonprofit arts organization, overseeing the Museum Foundation™’s national programming, including GRAMMY In The Schools®, grants for music research and preservation and national affiliates. Their many projects include the multimillion-dollar renovation of the Museum in downtown Los Angeles, building the only gallery dedicated to Latin music in California; GRAMMY Museum at Home, a collection of virtual exhibits, artist programs and educational content available free to educators and music lovers worldwide; and their official streaming service COLLECTION:live™. An advocate for accessibility, the GRAMMY Museum became the only museum named as a Certified Autism Center™ in California.
Prior to joining the Academy, Sticka consulted for nonprofit organizations and co-founded the Zoot Theatre Company in Dayton, Ohio.
Grammymuseum.org
IG, FB, TW: @grammymuseum
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“Remembering the stories of our parents and our grandparents, our aunts and uncles, and the struggles that they have gone through. Struggles and the joy - I don't always want to frame the stories of our forbearers in the context of struggle, although a lot of Asian-Americans have had to deal with that. There's a lot of joy to be found in those stories as well. And I hope that those are stories that are passed on and remembered because, as is the case in our movie, it's about the moments that we are able to share with our family, in which we experience happiness and laughter and joy, that are most important, at least to me.
And so I hope that's something that we can reflect in our storytelling moving forward as well. You know, I think we've seen a lot of stories framed around the noble struggle, which is what I call it. And I hope we can start diversifying our storytelling a little bit so that we can share a little bit more of the happy pleasures and joys that we experience as families and immigrants as well.”
Ken Cheng is a writer/producer who has previously written for Wilfred, Betas, and Sin City Saints. Ken’s feature comedy Easter Sunday, which he co-wrote, and executive produced for Amblin Partners, Rideback, and Universal, is inspired by the life and comedy of standup comedian Jo Koy. Forthcoming projects include writing and executive producing the half-hour comedy series, House of Chow, for HBO, co-writing – along with his creative partners at Crab Club, Inc. - a feature film adaptation of the GQ Magazine article, “The Great Chinese Art Heist”, for Warner Bros., Conde Nast, and director Jon M. Chu, and writing/producing a feature adaptation of the New York Magazine article “Chateau Sucker” for Bound Entertainment.
www.crabclubinc.com
Ken Cheng IMDB
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"I'm very, very concerned that we are already in a time of being lost, that a lot of people feel lost, and they feel like the world has kind of moved out from under them, and that they have lost their bearings. They've lost their anchor, and they don't have what it takes to actually navigate.
And in that kind of environment, it's a very rich environment for fascism and for the worst kind of political movement, for the worst kind of political actors to take advantage of that feeling of powerlessness and fear and disconnection. Design is a methodology that is an empowering methodology within a condition of being unmoored.
So when you don't know what to do, design is a methodology of figuring out what to do, and it's why we're doing a project that we call Massive Action, which is to really give people the tools of empowerment to give them the power to design their life because over the coming couple of decades people are going to see a level of turmoil and change that has not happened in human history. The foundation of any culture is energy, and we have to change fundamentally our source of energy, which is going to change everything else. And I really worry that it's going to be a time – and we're already seeing it - it's going to be a time where the forces of autocracy and totalitarianism and fascism will find fertile ground if we don't actually help people navigate those conditions."
Designer, author, educator and artist Bruce Mau is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for life-centered design. Across thirty years of design innovation, he’s collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. Mau became an international figure with the publication of his landmark S,M,L,XL, designed and co-authored with Rem Koolhaas, and his most recent books are Mau MC24: Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work and, with co-author, Julio Ottino, dean of Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World – The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. Mau is co-founder and CEO of Massive Change Network, a holistic design collective based in the Chicago area.
www.massivechangenetwork.com
www.Brucemaustudio.com
Mau MC24
The Nexus
Image Courtesy of Massive Change Network
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.”
David Farrier's books include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (2020) and Anthropocene Poetics (2019). Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St. Aubyn award and has been translated into nine languages. He is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh.
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils
www.ed.ac.uk/profile/david-farrier
Anthropocene Poetics
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away."
Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A contributor writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Air Mail, Vogue, BBC Travel and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News, for most of those years producing for Barbara Walters. She lives in Connecticut.
https://marciadesanctis.com
A Hard Place to Leave
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"What's trending now with beginning farmers is that it is creating this kind of community connection. It's bringing people to the farm. It's connecting them to their food source. That creates community. It helps cultivate culture and connectivity, and so I think overall, it's like the landscape and agriculture as a whole is shifting towards a different direction."
John and Emily Beaton have created a multi-enterprise farming business in Northeastern Minnesota near Duluth and the shores of Lake Superior. They founded Fairhaven Farm with a spirit of community building, a focus on soil health, and a desire to see a thriving local food system.
They sell starter plants each spring for home gardeners, grow food for over 50 families through their CSA program, and are launching a new Pizza Farm enterprise where the couple will serve wood-fired pizzas on the farm featuring all locally sourced ingredients—including fresh tomatoes and vegetables right from their field!
www.fairhaven.farm
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"Happiness is another interesting thing. I've been thinking about this lately. You know, people take aim at happiness. I don't know if you can actually do that, if you can have a recipe for attaining happiness. Happiness is something that just happens as a byproduct of something else going on in your life, and that is having a day where you're experiencing equanimity. You don't have this abundance of negative emotions, where you value the things you've already got, where you value the relationships you've got, where you feel good inside your own body. You like being who you are. And I think, if all that happens, then suddenly, you know, it'll dawn on me. 'Gosh, I guess I'm happy...' "
William B. Irvine is emeritus professor of philosophy at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, USA. He is the author of eight books that have been translated into more than twenty languages. His A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy played a key role in the Stoic renaissance that has taken place in recent years. His subsequent The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient provides a strategy for dealing, in proper Stoic manner, with the setbacks we experience in daily living. He is currently at work on a book about thinking critically, but with an open mind, in the age of the internet.
www.williambirvine.com
The Stoic Challenge
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“My mom and my dad would often go to protests. They would organize movements. They'd be part of multilateral indigenous people's movements, not only nationally, but internationally, that were operating at the grassroots level. Activism, it’s a tradition in my family for indigenous rights. I have aunts and uncles that were very involved as well. So as a kid, I was often at those protests. I was running around as a little Native kid with all the other little Native kids, when our parents would be in meetings discussing how to move forward discussing indigenous rights.”
Victor A. Lopez-Carmen is a Dakota and Yaqui writer, health advocate, and student at Harvard Medical School. He is cofounder of the Ohiyesa Premedical Program at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), which supports Indigenous community and tribal college students to pursue healthcare education. He also founded Translations for our Nations, a grant funded initiation that translated accurate COVID-19 information into over 40 Indigenous languages from over 20 different countries. For his work, he has been featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 and Native American 40 under 40 lists. He is Co-Chair of the UN Global Indigenous Youth Caucus.
Forbes 30 under 30 - Healthcare 2022
Translations for our Nations
Ohiyesa Premedical Program
www.globalindigenousyouthcaucus.org
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"This is really what life, I think, is about - learning to not believe your thoughts. Watch your thoughts, see their patterns and learn that you are not at the whim and beck and call of your thoughts. You can watch your thoughts, and you can choose to let go of thoughts and just be present and let go of the complaints. And that then opens up a level of creativity that's surprising. It could be in dance, science, it could be in music, or art. Wherever you have creative expression, letting go of thought and having this balance between thinking and no thinking, going into complete silence and then pulling ideas back for your art, your science, your dance, whatever it might be, is really the dance of life."
Donald D. Hoffman is a Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes. His research on perception, evolution, and consciousness received the Troland Award of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution of the American Psychological Association, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and is the subject of his TED Talk, titled “Do we see reality as it is?”
http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/
The Case Against Reality
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Kevin Trenberth is a Distinguished Scholar at the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder and an Honorary Academic in the Department of Physics, Auckland University in Auckland, New Zealand. From New Zealand, he obtained his Sc. D. in meteorology in 1972 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 Scientific Assessment of Climate Change reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize which went to the IPCC. He served from 1999 to 2006 on the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and chaired a number of committees for more than 20 years. He is the author of "The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System".
"The whole social fabric that we have is based upon the past climate, and so once we cross that threshold, it's what I call the Straw that Breaks the Camel's Back Syndrome. And so you have a relatively modest change, which I estimate to be in the neighborhood of 5 to 20 percent, typically. And that is enough to nudge us. Instead of 1 billion dollars in damage from a hurricane, we end up with 100 billion dollars. Now, that's just one example. There are many other cases, but the sort of things that happen are indeed that something floods, the amount of water can no longer be tolerated, something completely dries out, there's a drought, and subsequent wildfires when buildings burn down, and so on. Suddenly you've gone from something to nothing. That's an extreme non-linearity. And another extreme non-linearity is, of course, when people die, you don't recover from that."
The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System
www.ipcc.ch
https://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"So this is why I prefer to speak with a really down to earth language. So maybe the people who love nature are going to say, 'Oh, Bertrand Piccard, now he is too down to earth. He's speaking about profitable solutions. He's speaking to the industries that are polluting,' but we have to speak to the industries that are polluting and bring them profitable solutions, otherwise the world will never change, or humankind will never change. And don't forget one thing, what we are damaging is not the beauty of nature. What is being damaged is the quality of life of human beings on Earth because we can still have beautiful things to see, but if we have climate change, if we have tropical disease in Europe, if we have heat waves, floods, droughts, millions of climate refugees, life will be miserable, even if nature is still beautiful.”
Psychiatrist, aviator and explorer, Bertrand Piccard made history in 1999 by accomplishing the first ever non-stop round-the-world balloon flight, and a number of years later the first round-the-world solar-powered flight. Piccard has dedicated his life to demonstrating sustainable development opportunities. He is Founder and Chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation, which has assembled a verified portfolio of over 1400 actionable and profitable climate solutions. As a pioneer of new ways of thinking that reconcile ecology and economy, he uses his exploration feats to motivate governments and industries to take action. He is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment and Special Advisor to the European Commission. He’s author of Réaliste, Changer d’Altitude, and other books.
Solar Impulse Foundation
bertrandpiccard.com
Solar Impulse Solutions Explorer (1400+)
Réaliste
Changer d’altitude
Photo credit: Solar Impulse/ Stefatou
Abu Dhabi, UAE, March 1st, 2015, Solar Impulse 2 second test flight over Abu Dhabi
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
Dr. Charles D. Koven is an Earth System Scientist, working in the Climate Sciences Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He investigates feedbacks between climate and the carbon cycle. Dr. Koven’s primary research focus is on high-latitude feedbacks to climate change, and in particular the role of soil carbon in permafrost soils, and its response to changing climate. Dr. Koven is a lead author on the IPCC report as part of Working Group I, The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change.
“Looking into the future, as a scientist, what I've learned how to do is hold multiple futures in my head at the same time because we just don't know. We don't know what the future holds. We need to fight for the futures that we want, and against the futures that we don't want. All I can really say is that it's up to us. It's up to us to fight and advocate for the future we want, and what does that look like, and how do we get there?”
Charles D. Koven
www.ipcc.ch
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"That's something that I would want all of the next generations to have in some way or another, to have the ability to access and be amazed by how staggeringly beautiful, complicated - awful in some ways and just brutal - the natural world is, but then really sit and think about how the natural world just gets on and does it.
And every species is benefited from everybody else. And you could remove humans from that equation, and nature would just carry on doing its thing. So that's what I would love for people to see and to realize is that nature is so incredibly beautiful and diverse. And so are we. So how can we take the beauty and diversity of the natural world and actually learn a lot more and stop thinking we're separate from nature because we are pretty much, we are all part of that same biosphere on the planet."
Claire Potter is a circular economy designer, researcher, lecturer and author based in Brighton, UK. Claire is the Course Convenor of the BSc/BA Product Design course at the University of Sussex, runs her own award-winning circular economy design studio, is a volunteer Regional Rep for Surfers Against Sewage and a working group co-ordinator at the Global Ghost Gear Initiative. In 2021, she published her first book “Welcome to the Circular Economy - the next step in sustainable living”.
www.clairepotterdesign.com
www.onecircular.world
www.sussex.ac.uk
www.sas.org.uk
www.ghostgear.org
Welcome to the Circular Economy book
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
“I kind of thought there was justice in the criminal justice system and that there was care for people, like you matter to me within the system, and in that moment it hit me. There wasn't. And in fact, it's the opposite. In order for the system to work the way it does, it needs to de-humanize the people that it puts in these cages.”
Growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, Stanley Andrisse began making poor decisions at a very young age. He started selling dope and was arrested for the first time at fourteen years old. By his early twenties, dope dealing had exponentially multiplied, and he found himself sitting in front of a judge facing twenty years to life on drug trafficking charges. The judge sentenced him to ten years in a maximum-security prison.
Upon release, and after several rejections, Stanley was accepted into a PhD program. He completed his PhD/MBA simultaneously and became an endocrinologist and impactful leader at Johns Hopkins Medicine, specializing in diabetes research.
Dr. Andrisse is Executive Director and Founder of From Prison Cells to PhD, board member on the Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network, founder of the Diversity Postdoctoral Alliance, member on several local and national committees aimed at community outreach, youth mentor, motivational speaker, and community activist. His book From Prison Cells to PhD: It is Never Too Late to Do Good recounts his inspiring story.
www.fromprisoncellstophd.org
From Prison Cells to PhD book
Asst. Professor, Howard University
The Classical Theatre of Harlem provides theatrical productions, educational and literary programs for free or at little cost to Harlem residents, organizations, and all who seek Harlem as a cultural destination. Its productions have received a Drama Desk, OBIE, and New York Times Critics Pick Awards. From July 5th to 29th they bring an Afrofuturistic take on Twelfth Night to Marcus Garvey Park.
NAACP and OBIE Award Winner, Ty Jones is Producing Artistic Director responsible for creating the Uptown Shakespeare in the Park series and other community initiatives.
Allen Gilmore has played Othello, Iago, and created the role of James Hewlett in The African Company presents Richard The Third at the Public Theater. He makes his CTH debut in Twelfth Night.
“I believe that these plays are living arguments and that when you actually read the full text, not cut down versions of them, but the full text, you'll see that Shakespeare was commenting on the ruling class, and for some reason, he found a way to comment on the workings of folks who make decisions in society. Now, I think what's tended to happen over the years is that the ruling class has essentially taken over how we see these plays… We hope that we can move people, and we hope that these are the kind of plays that ignite discourse. I hope that at the end of seeing that piece of art, their hearts begin to beat in sync. I believe all progress begins with a conversation.”
www.cthnyc.org
www.cthnyc.org/dt_team/ty-jones-producing-artistic-director-cth-actor
www.cthnyc.org/twelfth-night
www.allengilmore.com
Twelfth Night photo credit: Richard Termine
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"We all are looking for a little magic in our lives, and I think that's what art and the creative process allow for, above all. In a world that can be either way too predictable and mundane and create tedium, the creative mind, for me, is the curious mind and the mind that's always learning and allowing yourself to make mistakes. To generate from your core, from your soul, and from your experience something new and experimental and something that is unique to yourself.”
Cynthia Daniels is a Grammy and Emmy award-winning producer, engineer and composer working extensively in film, television, and music. Her career has led her around the world, initially specializing in orchestral pop from Big Band Jazz to Broadway, and then crossing over into producing records for young and seasoned artists in the rock, country, and folk-rock world. She is owner and chief engineer at The Hamptons first world-class recording studio, MonkMusic. She has hosted or engineered sessions for Chaka Khan, Beyonce, Coldplay, Paul McCartney, Nile Rogers, Alec Baldwin, Julie Andrews, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Billy Porter.
www.cynthiadaniels.net
Monk Music Radio
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"Water insecurity and water scarcity is affecting all people in almost every part of the world. At this point, by 2025, we expect 1.8 billion people to suffer from water scarcity, which means they have no access to clean, safe drinking water within a 30-minute walk of their home.
You fast forward to 2050, we expect 6 billion people will have water scarcity. So the rate at which this problem is increasing is far greater than the current infrastructure that has supported water for humans. And that's where innovation and rapid deployment of technology at scale is really essential. And that's what we're in the business to do."
Neil Grimmer is Brand President of SOURCE Global, innovator of the SOURCE Hydropanel, a renewable technology that uses the sun to transform water vapor in the air to clean, safe and perfectly mineralized drinking water. The Public Benefit Company’s mission is to bring perfect drinking water to every person, every place, and Neil leads its marketing, consumer packaged goods and last-mile water solutions for community, consumer and commercial customers in more than 50 countries.
www.source.co
How it Works
www.source.co/team/neil-grimmer
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"When you immigrate, it's kind of like you're going through adolescence because you're in a new place. You feel weird in your own skin. You're learning new things. Everything is changing. You feel awkward. So that also helped us connect the adult stories to the children's stories.”
“To me, America is about coexisting. It's about a million different journeys happening all at once, but really it being the same journey, which is to self-actualization to be seen, to be loved. I know that's not very capitalistic or whatever, but that's what I really see, especially in the immigrant community. It's self-actualization and not just for yourself, but to create that opportunity for your progeny, for your legacy.”
"When I think of America, what America is, it's the nation built by immigrants that continues to succeed in large part because of the influx of immigrants to this day. Sometimes I describe the United States as like a club, right? It's a wonderful club, so many people want to be a part of it, and you need new members. And immigrants are like the new members that are kind of like the born again Americans that come here, and they're the ones that believe in America the most because everything is new to them, and they've sacrificed so much to be here. So something that I wish people could garner from this series is the fact that immigrants built this nation, and we continue co-creating this nation with those who aren't immigrants, as well."
Claudia Forestieri and Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz serve as the creator and showrunner of the Latin-focused comedy series for HBO Max, Gordita Chronicles, making them the first female Latinx showrunner and creator duo. The series is executive produced by Zoe Saldana and Eva Longoria.
Inspired by Claudia’s own life experience, the show centers around a Latina reporter looking back on her childhood as a chubby, willful and reluctant Dominican immigrant growing up with her eccentric family in 1980s Miami. The lighthearted series addresses themes around immigration, xenophobia, and body positivity and stars newcomer Olivia Goncalves, Diana Maria Riva, and Juan Javier Cardenas.
Gordita Chronicles on HBO Max
IMDB
Claudia Forestieri
Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz
“Every time I ask, ‘What do you need? What do I want? What does the director want? How do we collaborate? What is generated during the collaboration? What ideas, questions come across? And then I can start constructing something like a look.”
Florian Hoffmeister is a prolific director of photography. Recent works by Hoffmeister include his lensing on the Apple TV+ series Pachinko, the critically-acclaimed political thriller Official Secrets starring Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, and Matt Smith, and the forthcoming film TÁR starring Cate Blanchett.
Hoffmeister is well-known for his collaboration with Terence Davies on feature films The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russel-Beale, and A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Ehle.
His work on Brian Kirk’s television phenomenon Great Expectations earned him further distinction as well as numerous accolades, including a Primetime Emmy, a BAFTA, and an ASC Award.
http://florianhoffmeister.de
Pachinko
Great Expectations
Official Secrets
The Deep Blue Sea
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“Climate change is certainly going to affect biodiversity. Some species will benefit from climate change, but others will not, and we'll have different ecosystems, different biotic communities as a result of this. I think the impacts that are likely are pretty clear, and I think that's a pretty good reason to do all those things we can do without completely destroying our economies and our communities because those things have moral value as well. It's not just the environment that we think is important. We also think humans are important. So doing the things we can do now, do the less painful things first. We should have done them already. We should be now thinking about how to do the harder things.”
Jonathan Newman is an ecologist who studies plant–animal interactions in the context of species invasions and climatic change. He is the lead author of two books: Climate Change Biology, and Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics, and co-editor of Grasslands and Climate Change. He is the author of more than 100 other scientific publications.
WLU Webpage
https://wlu.ca
Climate Change Biology
Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics,
Grasslands and Climate Change
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life... The second part of what I think being a mentor or being a parent or being an adult or a teacher with regard to climate change means helping younger people sit with the terror, sit with the grief, the sense of unknown, and not push it away and not repress it and not try to find a way to just move past it without dealing with it, but to really inhabit that space of unknowing and fear and grief because that's the reality that we live in.”
Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We’re Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He’s an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative.
http://royscranton.net
Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
“I think that is often what tourism is starting to move towards. Is this existential authentic? And what that means is that you're not even really looking to meet expectations or validate that the thing in front of you is what it says it is. You are trying to recreate who you think you should be in a time that is disconnected from your usual life. Because we're a pretty jaded and suspicious society now. 'Is it a deep fake?' We live in this world of make-believe and fakeness, and you want to get to something that's real. And what's more real than yourself and the story that you tell to yourself about yourself. And if you can really connect to that, you'll feel really good.”
David A. Banks is the Director of Globalization Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY and the author of the forthcoming book The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America published by University of California Press. He is also a delegate to the Troy Area Labor Council and the co-host of the podcast Ironweeds.
www.davidabanks.org
www.e-flux.com/architecture/software/337954/where-do-you-live/
https://reallifemag.com/true-ish-grit/
www.reallifemag.com/new-haunts/
The attention economy of authentic cities https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1882947
https://ironweeds.podbean.com
“Degrowth as an idea has intellectual roots in the environmental critiques of the sixties and seventies found in landmark works like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which was a seminal piece of economic theory that applied the laws of thermodynamics to the economy and was very influential for ecological economics, which is intertwined with degrowth.
Degrowth was first formulated in 1972 by French philosopher André Gorz in a public debate where he used the term décroissance to question whether planetary stability was compatible with capitalism.”
KC Legacion is a Master of Environmental Studies candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. His research presents a reimagined understanding of social media through the lens of degrowth—this project will culminate in a short film set to premiere in September of this year. Outside of their research, KC is a team member of the web collective degrowth.info and a member of a nascent housing cooperative in West Philadelphia.
www.degrowth.info
www.kclegacion.com
www.decidim.org
www.joinmastodon.org
www.iNaturalist.org
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
“I guess the work that we're doing here at the Climate Hazards Center is trying to build out the science to cope with a two-degree world. And I think that we can do that. It's not going to be easy, but I think that's definitely within our capabilities, and it is already making human beings be smarter together in very empowering ways. And these are examples of people in Boulder, Colorado getting ready for the next big flood event and having conversations between the National Weather Service and local communities, or me on a zoom call at seven in the morning with my friends in East Africa as they're getting ready to cope with the next extreme. There are great examples of radio clubs in Niger who are working with their meteorological agencies and local farming communities that are pulling data that we're producing here in Santa Barbara, precipitation estimates, but then using them to decide whether they should fertilize their millet crops or not. And so there are ways that we can counter climate hazards and weather hazards by being smarter.”
Chris Funk is the Director of the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) at UC Santa Barbara. He works with an international team of Earth scientists to inform weather and famine-related disaster responses. Chris studies climate and climate change while also developing improved data sets and monitoring/prediction systems. He’s the author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes and co-author with Shrad Shukla of Drought Early Warning and Forecasting. While his research interests are quite diverse, a central theme uniting Chris’ work is developing both the technical/scientific resources and the conceptual frameworks that will help us cope with increasingly dangerous climate and weather extremes.
www.chc.ucsb.edu
www.chc.ucsb.edu/people/chris-funk
Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"Societies in which the population is larger are polluting planet earth seven times more than societies in which most of the country, most of the income is coming from a richer population. This implies that if we reduce population growth by 1% in the world economy, we can have growth in income per capita at a level of about 7% and still hold carbon emissions unchanged. Namely, by reducing population, we can permit growth in income per capita without polluting planet earth more than otherwise. So this is very important because it suggests to us that policies that target say gender equality, that target the diffusion of contraceptive methods, that target the increase in the rewards of education are policies that could mitigate population growth and ultimately permit the growth of income per capita without the liability of greater carbon emissions.”
Oded Galor is Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University and the founding thinker behind Unified Growth Theory, which seeks to uncover the fundamental causes of development, prosperity and inequality over the entire span of human history. He has shared the insights of his lifetime’s work in this field at some of the most prestigious lectures around the globe and has now distilled those discoveries into The Journey of Humanity, which is published in 30 languages worldwide.
www.odedgalor.com
www.brown.edu/academics/population-studies/people/person/oded-galor
The Journey of Humanity
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
“Before coming on board Under the Banner of Heaven, I had very little knowledge of Mormonism, but having read the script by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who is also the showrunner for the show, I resonated deeply with Jeb Pyre (played by Andrew Garfield) when it comes to his growing ambivalence and his crisis of faith.
And the more he learned about the gruesome, grisly history of the founding Mormonism, and also about the case that he was investigating, the more disillusioned and disenchanted he was becoming. And that resonated with me because I was raised Catholic in the Philippines. I was born and grew up in the Philippines, which is the most predominantly Catholic country in Asia. In fact, 95% of Filipinos are Roman Catholic, but as I grew older, actually went to Catholic schools and universities from kindergarten until college, and then the more I learned about the history of the Catholic Church and the atrocities and the injustices that it has committed, especially in the name of colonialist and imperialist pursuits in the Middle ages, the more I questioned its control over me and my life.”
Redefining being a multi-hyphenate for artistic control and representation, Sandoval made her television debut directing the 6th episode for the new FX limited series, Under the Banner of Heaven based on the New York Times best seller by Jon Krakauer.
Isabel Sandoval is a Filipina filmmaker who made history with the World Premiere of Lingua Franca at the 2019 Venice International Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori section and was the first film directed by and starring a trans woman of color ever to screen in competition. In honor of her achievements with the film, Sandoval was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the 2021 Film Independent Spirit Awards. Her early film works debuted last summer on The Criterion Channel platform, displaying her growth and evolution as a creator, able to embrace new mediums.
www.fxnetworks.com/shows/under-the-banner-of-heaven
The Criterion Channel
www.imdb.com/name/nm4583383/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“One thing that we should remember as young people is that everything allowed us is political by nature. We shouldn't be really scared of getting ourselves into different political aspects of issues around us. Be bold enough to speak out on the biggest challenges that are around you. And at the same time, it's in us to understand what kind of environment I am in? What is it that I can contribute to the problems that I am facing? That young people or people in general facing? So just go on. Be a part of that, and you'll be surprised that you will be the biggest game-changer.”
Memory Banda is a human and girls’ rights activist, and the founder and executive director of Foundation for Girls Leadership; a not-for-profit organization in Malawi working to advance and promote girl’s rights, their leadership and their active participation in driving positive change. Girls in Malawi are denied their rights to education, sexual reproductive health, and have fewer opportunities to participate in development and economic activities. They are often victims of sexual gender based violence. Memory led a campaign called “I will marry when I want” that contributed to the passing and enactment of the new law and amendment of Malawi constitution that criminalizes marriages of minors.
www.f4gl.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“We're trying to help the world's forestry organizations collectively plant a trillion trees in the next decade and cover 3 billion acres of net new forest. That's a very, very large number. Some of the very largest tree-planting organizations in the world collectively plant something like half a billion to three-quarters of a billion trees per year. And even that number sounds large, too, but then you realize that's actually three full orders of magnitude smaller than the actual number we need to hit in the next decade. So we actually need to take all of the world's largest forestry organizations as a group and multiply by a thousand their efforts. So that's a very large undertaking, and I just can't underscore enough the scale at which we as a human species seeks to operate when we talk about tree-planting and forestry operations.”
Terraformation builds and deploys tools to tackle the largest bottlenecks to mass-scale reforestation. Its technology includes off-grid seed banks that process and store millions of seeds, tracking and monitoring platforms to enable project transparency, solar-powered desalination and more. Its current partner network spans five continents, including in South America, East Africa and Central Asia, and includes public- and private-sector landowners and organizations. Terraformation’s goal in 2022 is to establish the world’s largest decentralized native seed banking network.
www.terraformation.org
Photo credit @pkworldwide
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"The great thing about a complex society is there is space for lots of different kinds of people. There's space for wildly visionary poets and accountants and actuaries and engineers. And they all have a slightly different outlook, but it's the combination of this huge diversity, which makes our societies work. But what we probably do need a bit more of are the bilingual people, the trilingual people who are as at ease spending a day, a week, a year designing how a criminal justice system could look in 50 years and then getting back to perhaps working in a real court or real lawyer's office.”
Sir Geoff Mulgan is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London. Formerly he was chief executive of Nesta, and held government roles (1997–2004), including as the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit director and as Downing Street’s head of policy. He is the founder or co-founder of many organisations, from Demos to Action for Happiness, and the author of Another World is Possible, Social Innovation: how societies find the power to change, Big Mind: how collective intelligence can change our world, and other books.
geoffmulgan.com
hurstpublishers.com/book/another-world-is-possible
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“We're not attempting to invent super smart AI to replace human cognition. We are inventing dumb AI to supplement human interaction. Are there simple forms of artificial intelligence, simple programming of bots, such that when they are added to groups of humans – because those humans are smart or otherwise positively inclined - that help the humans to help themselves? Can we get groups of people to work better together, for instance, to confront climate change, or to reduce racism online, or to foster innovation within firms?
Can we have simple forms of AI that are added into our midst that make us work better together? And the work we're doing in that part of my lab shows that abundantly that's the case. And we published a stream of papers showing that we can do that.”
Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist and physician who conducts research in the areas of biosocial science, network science and behavioral genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University and is the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. Dr. Christakis has authored numerous books, including Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society published in 2019 and Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live published in 2020. In 2009, Christakis was named by TIME magazine to their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
humannaturelab.net/people/nicholas-christakis
Human Nature Lab humannaturelab.net
Yale Institute for Network Science yins.yale.edu
TRELLIS - Suite of software tools for developing, administering, and collecting survey and social network data trellis.yale.edu
The Atlantic: “How AI Will Rewire Us: For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for altruism, love, and friendship”
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“So while there is no kind of one size fits all story, there are plenty of times when...kind of like clusters of activity. And some kids don't come out as trans. They come out as wanting to begin a process of exploration around gender, wanting to sort of bend things a little bit or begin to present themselves in slightly different ways without a concrete cross-identification. So it's really a pretty diverse range of phenomena.”
Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she teaches courses on gender and sexuality, queer theory, qualitative methodology, law, and the analytics of risk and uncertainty. Meadow’s published work focuses on a broad range of issues, including the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, the international politics of family diversity, the creation and maintenance of legal gender classifications, and newer work on the ways individuals negotiate risk in intimate relationships.
Meadow is the author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2018), and the co-editor of the volume, Other Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology (University of California Press, 2018). She has published essays in academic journals like Gender & Society, Politics & Society, Sexualities, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Transgender Studies Quarterly and multiple edited volumes.
· https://teymeadow.com
· https://sociology.columbia.edu/content/tey-meadow
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Interlude music: “Di zun vet aruntergeyn”
Words by Moishe-Lieb Halpern
Melody by Ben Yomen
Performed and produced by Beila Ungar
“I think to pursue mystery and beauty, these things are a bit subjective, so you can't really tell people exactly what it shouldn't be about. And also I have to preserve these things for myself. I primarily make the work for myself, so if I don't have some questions that are unanswered, even for me, then there's not really an interest to like keep going otherwise. So it's also sort of protection and a preservation mindset that I have about leaving things really open for other people and for myself.”
Petra Cortrightis a Los Angeles-based digital artist known for her elaborate paintings, videography, and digital media. Crafted from massive digital files on Photoshop, her paintings are often composed of physical and digital images, simulated brushstrokes, and marks that blend both abstract and figurative elements. Petra has exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Hammer Museum, in addition to solo exhibitions around the world. Her work is featured in permanent collections at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Miami’s Péréz Museum, and the Moderna Museeit in Stockholm–amongst many others.
· www.petracortright.com
· Show at Societé in Berlin: BALEAF GYS AKADEMIKS MAAMGIC BROKIG:
https://societeberlin.com/exhibitions/baleaf-gys-akademiks-maamgic-brokig/
· Show at Foxy production at the beginning of this year: https://www.foxyproduction.com/exhibitions/1756
Petra Cortright
BENGAL TIGER_beurteilungsschreiben Better Homes and Gardens, 2021
Digital painting on anodized aluminum
149.9 x 215.9 x 3 cm
59 1/2 x 85 x 1 1/2 in
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“I was originally drawn to bees because they're social creatures. And as humans, I always wanted to know about ourselves and how we can be our healthiest selves and our healthiest society. Bees and wasps, and all of these organisms have been around for so long. Bees especially have been around for 100 million years.”
Noah Wilson-Rich, Ph.D., is co-founder and CEO of The Best Bees Company, the largest beekeeping service in the US. He is a 20-time published author and 3-time TEDx speaker. He’s on a mission to improve pollinator health worldwide as a means to support our global food system and support the transformation of urban areas from gray to green. He is the author of The Bee: A Natural History.
· Book: The Bee: A Natural History
tinyurl.com/beenoah
· Their blog offers many resources:
https://bestbees.com/blog/
· National Pollinator Week June 20 - 26
www.pollinator.org
Many events all week
· Green roof company
Columbia Green Technologies columbia-green.com
· Noah-Wilson Rich’s website:
https://www.noahwilsonrich.com
Image courtesy of The Best Bees Company
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
"What drew me to the time period of the 70s was the real story of these magazines Playgirl, Viva, Foxy Lady, all the magazines that existed in this period. So it was a natural outgrowth of trying to tell a story that was inspired by, to some extent, real-life events. When I started developing Minx, what struck me about the 70s, in particular, is just how similar it was to our time. It seems like the magazines were covering all the same issues that we're now talking about. Obviously, we all saw with the leaked decision in Roe vs. Wade just how close we are to that time period and how far we haven't come.”
Ellen Rapoport is the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of the breakout hit comedy series, Minx, for HBO Max. The series, which aired on the platform on March 17, takes place in 1970s Los Angeles and follows the story of an earnest young feminist who joins forces with a low-rent publisher to create the first erotic magazine for women. In May, it was announced that the series was renewed for a second season. Executive produced by Paul Feig and starring Ophelia Lovibond, Jake Johnson, and Lennon Parham among others, the series became an instant hit for its clever writing, evocative imagery, and its championship of feminist ideals from the 70s era. TV Guide called it “…a bouncy, feel-good show that taps into the elation of creating something new where there was nothing before.”
Previously, Ellen co-wrote the screenplay for Paramount’s feature Clifford the Big Red Dog, as well as Netflix's Desperados.
· MINX: www.hbomax.com/minx
· Ellen Rapoport: www.imdb.com/name/nm0710784/
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“I think art can engage with the body, the mind, and the imagination in so many different ways that can compliment modes of thinking, other modes of creating, thinking through, working through and devising.
I was thinking about this in relation to the last 18 months and how the sciences have rightly been heralded as the great way of getting ourselves out of this pandemic, but culture is the way and art is the way that we've been getting through the pandemic. So many people have been watching Netflix, reading, singing music, playing music, making images, and making art as a way of getting through very difficult times and reflecting through that process. And in that sense, science compliments the arts, and the arts compliment the sciences because you can't get out of a situation without getting through it. So in order to get to the end of this sort of crisis, we have to be able to work through them.
And so art becomes a very important means and space and time for being able to reflect, but also delve into thinking through and thinking where the situations we have at hand and the situations we find ourselves in.”
Anthony Gardner is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford, where he was the Head of the Ruskin School of Art from 2017 to 2020. He has published widely on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories. His books include Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy, and Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art, co-authored with Charles Green.
· https://www.rsa.ox.ac.uk/people/anthony-gardner
· https://www.rsa.ox.ac.uk
· https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Biennials%2C+Triennials%2C+and+Documenta%3A+The+Exhibitions+that+Created+Contemporary+Art-p-9781444336641
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“It's a complicated issue. I think a lot of those bird disappearances come from the fact that we have massively intensified our agriculture. Large areas of North America and Europe are now under intense agriculture. They are sprayed with a whole variety of pesticides, which I think is also responsible for the fact that many insects have disappeared, so species that depend on farmland have clearly declined dramatically, but it isn't all birds and there is a piece of this complicated story that involves water birds. Herons and egrets and ducks. Those species both in North America and Europe, are now much more common than they were 30, or 40 years ago. That comes from active conservation of protecting wetlands, making sure we don't shoot our wetland birds. So it’s not all doom and gloom. There are some success stories. There are many things we can do. I think 50 years ago, there were only something like 300 bald eagles in the lower 48 states. Bald eagles are now nesting in every state apart from Hawaii. Our conservation efforts have done a great job.”
Stuart Pimm is a world leader in the study of present-day extinctions and what can be done to prevent them. His research covers the reasons why species become extinct, how fast they do so, the global patterns of habitat loss and species extinction and, importantly, the management consequences of this research. Pimm received his BSc degree from Oxford University in 1971 and his Ph.D. from New Mexico State University in 1974. Pimm is the author of over 350 scientific papers and five books. His commitmnt to the interface between science and policy has led to his testimony to both House and Senate Committees on the re-authorization of the Endangered Species Act. In 2019, he won the International Cosmos Prize, which recognised his founding and directing Saving Nature, a non-profit that uses donations for carbon emissions offsets to fund local conservation groups in areas of exceptional tropical biodiversity to restore their degraded lands.
· https://nicholas.duke.edu/people/faculty/pimm
· Saving Nature: Rescue endangered habitats and vulnerable communities from environmental destruction: https://savingnature.com
· Connect with Nature - Share your Observations of the Natural World www.inaturalist.org
· NatGeo’s Big Cats Initiative: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/big-cats-initiative/
· The World According to Pimm: A https://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Audits-Earth-Stuart-Pimm/dp/0813535409/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3A29YJYQ1JPOM&keywords=The+World+According+to+Pimm&qid=1652772158&sprefix=the+world+according+to+pimm%2Caps%2C130&sr=8-1
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wants to acquire so much, and they forget to just be thankful for the little things in life. To slow down, how you move through the world and how selfless you are, holding open a door for someone, or just telling someone to have a good day. Those are all things that can have a lasting effect on another person and make them want to be better as well.”
Best-selling author Courtney Peppernellis from Sydney, Australia. Her poetry collection Pillow Thoughts was a worldwide success. Her Young Adult novels and poetry books have struck a chord with young readers and the LGBTQ+ community. Her other works include I Hope You Stay, Watering the Soul, as well as Hope in the Morning, profits of which were donated to assist relief efforts for injured wildlife affected by Australian bushfires.
· https://www.peppernell.com
· https://www.instagram.com/courtneypeppernell/
· WIRES, Australia’s largest wildlife rescue organisation
https://www.wires.org.au
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“The struggle for a planetary future calls for a profound epistemological shift. Indigenous ancestral knowledges are now providing a foundation for our work against climate change, one based on what I refer to as Indigenous economies of abundance—as opposed to capitalist economies of scarcity. Rather than seeing climate change as apocalyptic, we can see that climate change is bringing about the demise of capital, making way for Indigenous lifeways that center familial relationships with the earth and elemental forms. Kānaka Maoli are restoring the worlds where their attunement to climatic change and their capacity for kilo adaptation, regeneration, and tranformation will enable them to survive what capital cannot.”
Candace Fujikane is an author and professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa, teaching aloha ʻāina and the protection of Hawaiʻi. Having grown up on the slopes of Maui’s Haleakalā, Candace has stood for the lands, waters, and political sovereignty of Hawaiʻi for over 20 years. Her newest book, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, contends that “Indigenous ancestral knowledge provides a foundation for movements against climate change, one based on Indigenous economies of abundance as opposed to capitalist economies of scarcity.”
· english.hawaii.edu/faculty/candace-fujikane/
· www.dukeupress.edu/mapping-abundance-for-a-planetary-future
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Wench, and Balm. She was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction, and she was awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She lives in Washington, DC with her family and teaches at American University. She discusses her latest novel Take My Hand, along with the importance of family, legacy, and history, particularly in regards to race.
In 2017, HarperCollins released Wench as one of eight "Olive Titles," limited edition modern classics that included books by Edward P. Jones, Louise Erdrich, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Dolen is the current Chair of the Board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. On behalf of the foundation, she has visited nearly every public high school in the District of Columbia to talk about the importance of reading and writing. She is currently Associate Professor in the Literature Department at American University and lives in Washington, DC with her family.
· www,dolenperkinsvaldez.com
· www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/113386/dolen-perkins-valdez/
· www.penfaulkner.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"When are we all going to start to care about one another? Because all of our individual choices do have impacts. And I just think the demands that we place on this planet, on the ecosystems, are what are driving conflict and human suffering. In some cases, it's really the scarcity of resources, just like water. In others, it's the changing climate and the loss of fertile lands to be able to grow food. But in the end, it's always the people living in these places that really suffer the most. All of my work today, it’s not really about wildlife, and it's not just about people either. It's about how deeply interconnected all of those things are. People and the human condition are the backdrop of every one of the stories on this planet."
Photographer and filmmaker Ami Vitale shares her personal odyssey—from documenting the heartbreaking realities of war to witnessing the inspiring power of an individual to make a difference. Her award-winning work illuminates the unsung heroes and communities working to protect our wildlife and find harmony in our natural world. Hear her awe-inspiring stories of the reintroduction of northern white rhinos and giant pandas to the wild, as well as Kenya’s first indigenous-owned and run elephant sanctuary.
Ami has traveled to more than 100 countries, bearing witness not only to violence and conflict, but also to surreal beauty and the enduring power of the human spirit. She has lived in mud huts and war zones, contracted malaria, and donned a panda suit— keeping true to her belief in the importance of “living the story.”
Ami is an Ambassador for Nikon and a contract photographer with National Geographic magazine. She has documented wildlife and poaching in Africa, covered human-wildlife conflict, and concentrated on efforts to save the northern white rhino and reintroduce pandas to the wild. She is a six-time recipient of World Press Photos and published a best-selling book, Panda Love, on the secret lives of pandas. She lectures for the National Geographic LIVEseries, and she frequently gives workshops around the world.
After more than a decade covering conflict, photographer and filmmaker Ami Vitale couldn’t help but notice that the less sensational—but equally true—stories were often not getting told: the wedding happening around the corner from the revolution, triumphs amidst seemingly endless devastation. As a result, she re-committed herself to seeking out the stories within and around “the story.” Her belief that “you can’t talk about humanity without talking about nature” led her to chronicle her journey from documenting warzones to telling some of the most compelling wildlife and environmental stories of our time, where individuals are making a profound difference in the future of their communities and this planet.
She is Executive Director of Vital Impacts whose mission is to support grassroots organizations who are protecting people, wildlife and habitats. She is also a founding member of Ripple Effect Images, a collective of scientists, writers, photographers and filmmakers who document challenges facing women and girls in developing countries. She is chair of the Photographers Advisory Board for National Geographic magazine photographers and also a member of the Executive Advisory Committee of the Alexia Foundations Photojournalism Advisory Board. · www.amivitale.com
· vitalimpacts.org
· www.rippleeffectimages.org
· Print sale for Vital Impacts: https://vitalimpacts.org/collections/impact-now
· https://newhouse.syr.edu/centers/the-alexia
· IG: @amivitale
· IG: @vital.impacts
· IG: @wild.lifeincolour
Joseph Wachira comforts Sudan, the last living northern white rhino on the planet, moments before his death on March 19, 2018 at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in northern Kenya.
Ⓒ Ami Vitale
Mario Alberto Zambranois the Associate Director of Juilliard Dance. He was born in Houston, danced for Batsheva Dance Company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Nederlands Dans Theater II, and Ballet Frankfurt between 1994 and 2005. He then returned to school and earned an MFA in English at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received a John C. Schupes fellowship for excellence in fiction. His first novel, Lotería (Harper Collins), was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick in 2013 and a finalist for the 2014 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Zambrano, who was awarded the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story “Some of You,” has been a YoungArts Presidential Scholar in the Arts and a Princess Grace Award winner. He has been awarded literary fellowships to MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle. Before joining Juilliard, he was a lecturer in theater, dance, and media at Harvard. He serves as program director for Orsolina28’s summer program and curates The LIT Series, a library of interdisciplinary thinking consisting of series of lectures, interviews, classes and discussions.
“In both writing a first draft and in the improvisation of a dancing body, what is so key and relevant and exposed is voice. That internal voice of the artist of what they're writing on the page or what they're writing in space. If you go to fiction workshop, you talk about plot, structure, and you talk about character development, but there are very few classes within a dance curriculum where you break down an improvisation and you talk about voice, point of view, metaphor, or musical composition within a phrase. The lifespan of a phrase. And so this realisation is helping me understand that a one minute post of improvisation or even a ten-minute span of improvisation if it’s recorded is very similar to a first draft of creative writing, where then the artist is in a position to evaluate those 10 minutes and identify what is the setting? What is the voice that has come out of my experience of writing this first draft of an improvisation? And how can I give it structure? How can I give it form?”
· IG @juilliardschool
· IG @malberto777
· IG @thelitseries
· www.thelitseries.com
· www.juilliard.edu/dance/faculty/zambrano-mario-alberto
· marioalbertozambrano.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Photo by Julien Benhamou
“We drastically misuse our mind and have neglected a very important part of the way our mind works in the modern world. I think preindustrial people and our ancestors used this very well. And that is that we have a whole right hemisphere of our brain which doesn't think in words, which takes in the holistic picture of everything around us. Anyone who is listening to this podcast will be aware that sometimes you have got feelings about things. They are signals that are sent from the right hemisphere of the brain, picking up things that we can't consciously interpret or read. It goes through our amygdala, which is our alarm system, and straight down the vagus nerve, and we feel it down in the middle of our body. What the books argue, if you want to be able to parent effectively, and live your life effectively, is to stay in touch with that. Include those signals as part of your mental checking out. Expand your awareness because you can read that every few seconds all the time. And your life will be very different. There are feelings below your feelings. They are not always right, but they're always worth listening to.”
Steve Biddulph (AM) is a renowned parent educator. A retired psychologist of 30 years, he continues to write and teach, authoring books such as The Secret of Happy Children, Raising Boys, The New Manhood, and 10 Things Girls Need Most, which have influenced how we view childhood development and mental health. Voted Australian Father of the Year in 2001, Steve has since been made a member of the Order of Australia for his work in youth mental health, and remains a patron of the Sanctuary Refugee Trust and Australian Religious Response to Climate Change.
· www.stevebiddulph.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“We have to be unwavering in our commitment to principles of justice and freedom and be harbingers of hope. So for me, this is a lifelong thing, and I think of it as ancestor work that I one day will be somebody's ancestor, and I want them to be proud of the work that we did to give them a world that’s a little better of an inheritance than the world that I was born into. And I think that is how we mark progress in more nuanced ways, in more honest ways. It doesn't need to be a straight line towards freedom, more of a journey with wins and losses, setbacks and victories.”
“It's what can feel like regression that’s happening. It’s like, okay, there is. I'm thinking about in the country right now, we’ve had these incredible moments, seeing a show like “Pose” on television with so many queer, trans, black, and brown actors. You have Laverne Cox on the cover of TIME, a really wonderful documentary “Disclosure” about trans representation, and some really positive steps made towards trans healthcare. And right now we're seeing all of these bills popping up across States criminalizing trans youth, and it is important for us to recognize at that moment part of that backlash is because certain progress was being made. Because we were starting to question gender and its fixity today and the ways that transphobia operates. Because people were becoming aware of how vulnerable trans people are in our world to violence. And, so of course, we see a response, which means we have to retool and keep fighting. That’s the charge. The struggle is at this point still in an ending one, but it doesn't mean that along the way that certain victories haven’t amassed that give us hope to propel us forward and be ready when the next attack on freedoms, on rights, on justice emerges, because it will. Right? We’re pushing in ways that are uncomfortable because we’re disrupting the center. We’re disrupting the default. We’re disrupting power. And Power it's not just going to concede because we're demanding it.”
Treva B. Lindsey, PhD is a Black feminist historian and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships including the ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellowship, The Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University, and The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. Lindsey is the founder of the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative at Ohio State and the co-founder of Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House in Columbus, Ohio. Her latest book entitled America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and The Struggle for Justice explores contemporary violence against Black women and girls and how they mobilize to halt violence against them.
· https://trevablindsey.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“There's a real decrease in functional connectivity between regions of the brain that modulate the ego and a sense of self for Gabriela Montero when she's improvising. That's not a region of the brain in particular, it’s the connections between a lot of them and that together as well and also our sense of self and also our conscious memory and our ability to anticipate and plan for the future. So our knowledge of ourselves in these different spheres of time, the light of that activity is dimmed during improvisation. There really is a biological reason behind her feeling that she gets out of the way and something else comes to the fore. The study asks why are her improvisations still so coherent, why did they hold together in time. They refer to it as this form of embodied creativity or embodied cognition, where it’s a deeper kind of memory. a more physical memory in her fingers in her body that know how to play and kind of takes over and allows for ego to kind of dissolve in that moment as she performs.”
Born and raised in Denver, Natalie Hodges has performed as a classical violinist throughout Colorado and in New York, Boston, Paris, and the Italian Piedmont, as well as at the Aspen Music Festival and the Stowe Tango Music Festival. She graduated from Harvard University, where she studied English and music, and lives in Denver, Colorado. Uncommon Measure is her first book.
· www.nataliehodges.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"The heart also reports to the brain and receives from the brain. So our bodies are in dialogue with the brain. And we don't really know where consciousness is, we sort of imagine it's somewhere in the head. We have no real reason to suppose that it's just we identify it with our sight and we, therefore, think it must be somewhere up there behind the eyes, but it's something that takes in the whole of us and to which the whole of us contributes.”
“We think in the west of resistance as something negative but it's actually part of the creative process. Without resistance nothing new can come into being, so the very things that we think of as perhaps obstructing or negating are the very things that will lead to something new and greater. We need to get over this idea. For example, we're only able to move in space because there is friction. Friction is a force that stops you moving but without a degree of friction, you cannot actually move. You wouldn't have anything to move in relation to. So perfection is itself an imperfection. And in a number of traditions, this is memorialized by the idea that when you create something there should deliberately be some imperfection in it.”
Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London.
He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.
He is the author of a number of books, including The Matter with Things, and The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
· https://channelmcgilchrist.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“I think believing in something is also part of the responsibility of the believer to sift through these things. So there are a lot of people saying I'm green because they do something less badly. So for me, it’s not green yet, it's just less bad. It's not really good yet. It's not really fabulous, but that just means there's an opportunity to keep going to share information and help each other because in the end, I think what we're dealing with now is the recognition that the world has a very serious issue with climate, that's very clear now. So how can we help each other? The question is no longer what is wrong with the way you're doing it. The real question now is how can I help you?”
McDonough advises leaders on ESG strategies through McDonough Innovation, is an architect with William McDonough + Partners, and provides product assessments through MBDC, the creators of the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Program.
He has been active with the World Economic Forum for 25 years and served as the inaugural chair of their Meta-Council on the Circular Economy. He recently articulated the Circular Carbon Economy, a framework for carbon management, and presented the concept at COP25 and at 2020 G20 workshops.
William McDonough is a globally recognized leader in sustainable design and development. He has written and lectured extensively on design as the first signal of human intention. He co-authored Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.
McDonough advises leaders on ESG strategies through McDonough Innovation, is an architect with William McDonough + Partners, and provides product assessments through MBDC, the creators of the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Program.
He has been active with the World Economic Forum for 25 years and served as the inaugural chair of their Meta-Council on the Circular Economy. He recently articulated the Circular Carbon Economy, a framework for carbon management, and presented the concept at COP25 and at 2020 G20 workshops.
McDonough has co-founded not-for-profit organizations, including Fashion for Good, GreenBlue, Sustainable Packaging Coalition, and the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute. He has been on the faculty of Stanford University (2004-present) and is a Distinguished Research Professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) focused on Circular Carbon Economy.
Time magazine recognized him as a “Hero for the Planet,” noting: “His utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that—in demonstrable and practical ways—is changing the design of the world," and in 2019 Fortune magazine named him #24 of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders.
· https://mcdonough.com
· mcdonoughpartners.com
· https://mcdonoughpartners.com/projects
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“It’s basically a seed bank of genetic and metabolic diversity. The Earth’s entire microbiome is just a tremendous treasure trove of history, evolution, and diversity. So I would say we have no idea what’s in a lot of that diversity. It's like the dark matter of the universe. People call it the dark matter of the microbiome, and we're still figuring out what that matter does. We know that they're tremendously diverse. The sequencing revolution that happened over the last 20 or 30 years has made it possible to measure the diversity, but we don't know what that diversity is really doing or how to harness it if we need it. So would be wise not to disrespect it.”
Dr. Steven Allison is a Professor of Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a PhD in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. As part of the University of California’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative, Dr. Allison was named the UC Irvine Climate Action Champion in 2016. He teaches ecosystem ecology and directs the Ridge to Reef Graduate Training Program, an interdisciplinary program focused on skills development for students pursuing careers in environmental fields. His research addresses the resilience of microbial communities to drought and the effect of rapid climate change on carbon losses from southern California ecosystems. Dr. Allison is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Editor-in-Chief at the interdisciplinary journal Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. Since 2021, he has served as a member of the Green Ribbon Environmental Committee for the City of Irvine and director of UC Irvine’s Newkirk Center for Science and Society.
· allisonlab.bio.uci.edu/
· newkirkcenter.uci.edu
· https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.ted.com/talks/steven_allison_earth_s_original_inhabitants_and_their_role_in_combating_climate_change?language=en
“It's always difficult to avoid charges of being nostalgic if we talk about going back to things. Back to the past or forward to the past, but there are principles that existed in preindustrial/early industrial cities and which were overturned by key technological inventions of the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly the railway, the motorcar, of course, the internal combustion engine on which it’s based and which led to the vast expansion of towns and cities and, crucially, suburbanization where people who could afford it moved out of the more polluted densely populated inner areas into low density, better lifestyle-oriented suburbs and even beyond the suburbs into surrounding rural areas and were able to commute in by fast means to their workplace in the city, but the result of that is what we now face as the challenge of unsustainability. And as you rightly say, the key feature that still characterizes many European cities today–London, Paris, Berlin, many others, is the idea that they are composed ultimately of a series of–in London they like to call them villages–neighborhoods and areas that have multiple land uses and dense social networks of interaction within a small area. That principle, what is now called by Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, and being popularized more widely by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Network and others as the 15 or 20 Minute City or 15 or 20 Minute Neighbourhood. The idea underpinning it is that a higher proportion of the goods and services, the activities, the social interactions that we need are obtainable within a 1 1/2 to 2 km radius of one's home, which means a far higher proportion of one's individual trips or multiple purpose journeys can be done on foot and by bicycle, therefore, you use your vehicle if you have one more sparingly. You use the bus or minibusses to reach slightly more distant places, and then you have transport interchanges is where you connect with the metro system or the best rapid transit or the railway to reach other parts of large cities or indeed for inner-city journeys. And that is what is now becoming the new best practice in terms of urban planning redesign both of existing urban areas to try to revitalize inner-city areas, other areas that are depressed and in need of economic regeneration and principles on the basis of which we need to design new areas, whether they are on the outskirts of bigger cities or in the context of middle and low-income countries designing entirely new cities which are going to be built over the coming 20 or 30 years and which, in terms of the number of people who live in them and the number of hectares or square kilometers that they will cover of the earth’s surface, will be equivalent to that built between the beginning of urbanization and the present day. It's a staggering thought, but if you think about it that way, it highlights the importance of new build, new design, according to our latest understanding of sound sustainability principles.”
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography and Director for External Engagement in the School of Life Sciences and the Environment, Royal Holloway, University of London. He was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, Gothenburg, Sweden from 2014–2019. A former Rhodes Scholar, he specialises in cities, climate change and sustainability, and the relationships between theory, policy and practice, on all of which he has published extensively. At Mistra Urban Futures, he led the pioneering methodological research on comparative transdisciplinary co-production. His extensive experience includes sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the UK, Sweden and USA. From 2020-21, served as a Commissioner on the international Commission on Sustainable Agricultural Intensification (CoSAI), 2020-21. His most recent books as author, editor or co-editor are Rethinking Sustainable Cities: Accessible, green and fair (Policy Press, 2016), Urban Planet (Cambridge Univ Press, 2018), Holocaust Escapees and Global Development: Hidden histories (Zed Books, 2019), Key Thinkers on Development (2nd edn, Routledge, 2019), Comparative Urban Research from Theory to Practice: Co-production for sustainability (Policy Press, 2020), and Transdisciplinary Knowledge Co-production for Sustainable Cities: a Guide (Practical Action Publishing, 2021).
· pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/david-simon(69b08a6c-d133-4157-b1f2-eb0036b4d6e6).html
· bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/global-social-challenges-journal
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I would say that I write liminal fantasy. I write surrealist work and literary fiction. I write horror. Horror is probably the genre that speaks to me the most. I feel horror is the genre that I feel the most affinity towards. For me, that is the sweet spot where the beautiful and the grotesque meet each other. It's very interesting to me, and I think encouraging people to look at certain ideas that are horrifying, making them beautiful and interesting, that intersection of beauty and pain, humor and darkness, it’s the most interesting place.”
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."
· carmenmariamachado.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“What is societal progress? I think the last 70 years, clearly, in the post World War II period, we have been thinking of economic growth and have been equating that with societal progress. To an extent of course that's right. To an extent, we need this economic growth to lift people out of poverty. We’ve kind of lost the reasoning. We have been following only this economic growth paradigm measured by the GDP, the Gross domestic product and we have forgotten that it measures many things, but it doesn't actually measure progress. It doesn't measure how healthy people are, how educated they are, how clean the environment is, how safe it is, how secure it is. Interestingly, even Simon Kuznets who conceptualized GDP knew this, but it somehow happened. I’m not saying the GDP is a measure we shouldn't be using, it has its values clearly, but it shouldn't be the only measure that we are focusing on. There are some countries and some cities also who have set alternative or additional goals.
I feel that there was a time around 5 to 10 years ago when a lot of people were talking about this. There were a lot of initiatives and I feel that it's still there. Bhutan is mentioned a lot as a country with an alternative framework to measure progress, namely the gross national happiness, which is very much built on these indicators that cover what I've just said. Education, healthcare, housing, security, and community. So it's clearly also about making people understand that we're not asking anyone to lead a life that's worse than the life that they've been leading before. It’s just changing to a much fuller realization of what is actually good for you. And it's a difficult position because who are we to tell people what's good for them, but to the extent, we can measure that. We can measure burnout rates. We can measure mental health issues. We can measure addictions to mobile phones. It’s something where we really need to do a lot to transform those mindsets and, in the end, understand that sustainability is about making their lives better and not worse.”
Alice Schmidtis a global sustainability advisor who has worked in 30 countries on 4 continents with 70+ organisations of all shapes and sizes. She has a deep passion for creating opportunities and win-wins across the social, environmental and economic spheres. Many of her experiences are highlighted in the new book “The Sustainability Puzzle: How Systems Thinking, Climate Action, Circularity and Social Transformation Can Improve Health, Wealth and Wellbeing for All”.
·www.aliceschmidt.at
· www.sustainability-puzzle.org
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I do feel that we are infinite choice makers. You make millions of choices all the time. Make the right choice and if you make the wrong choice, understand that mistakes are great teachers. Learn from that and move on. I do have this sense of responsibility of passing something on a love of dance history that really informs my process. Speaking in old language in a new way with a contemporary accent.
Something so wonderful about dance and the arts is that you never stop learning. It is like always just this long process, and I continue. Students teach me every day. It is such a gift.
It is probably the most important thing I can think of. Especially when I think of two things. In terms of history, the humanities show us how we were, why we were, and while we were...But then I also think about the future. What are we doing now? What seeds are we planting to inform the future?...And I said it earlier about making sense out of a chaotic universe where bad things happen to good people. Arts will help you figure that out.”
Seán Curran began his dance training with traditional Irish step dancing as a young boy in Boston, Massachusetts. He went on to make his mark on the dance world as a leading dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. He received a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for his performance in Secret Pastures. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Curran was an original member of the New York City cast of the Off-Broadway percussion extravaganza Stomp, performing in the show for four years. He has performed his solo evening of dances at venues throughout the United States as well as at Sweden’s Danstation Theatre and France’s EXIT Festival. Current and recent projects for Curran include productions of Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for The Shakespeare Theater, the twentieth anniversary production of Nixon in China and Street Scene at Opera Theater of St. Louis; choreography for the New York City Opera productions of L’Etoile, Alcina, Turandot, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Capriccio, and Acis and Galetea; the Playwrights Horizons’ production of My Life with Albertine; Shakespeare in the Park’s As You Like It. He recently made his Metropolitan Opera debut choreographing Romeo and Juliette. Curran’s work has appeared on Broadway in James Joyce’s The Dead for Playwrights Horizons and The Rivals at Lincoln Center Theater. He has created works for Trinity Irish Dance Company, American Ballet Theatre’s studio company, Denmark’s Upper Cut Company, Sweden’s Skanes Dance Theater, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Ririe Woodbury Dance Theater, and Dance Alloy, as well as for numerous college and university dance departments.
· www.seancurrancompany.com
· tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/dance/109207637.html
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“It's kind of a scary thought. We've got these PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), you hear them now referred to as forever chemicals because these chemicals–none of these existed on the planet prior to World War II–they're fairly recent invention and they have this unique chemical structure that makes them incredibly useful in a lot of different products, manufacturing operations, but also that same chemical structure makes them incredibly persistent and incredibly difficult to break down once they get out into the environment, into the natural world, into our soil, into our water. They simply, many of them, particularly the ones with eight or more carbons in their structure, don't break down under natural conditions. Or it may take thousands or millions of years for those chemicals to start breaking down. But not only that. Once they get into us, they get into people, they tend to accumulate in our blood and build up over time. They not only persist, they bioaccumulate. Unfortunately, as the science has slowly been revealed to the world about what these chemicals can do, we are seeing that they can have all kinds of toxic effects And unfortunately, we’re finding that those things can happen at lower and lower dose levels.”
“I can't speak highly enough of Mark Ruffalo and what he was able to accomplish with the film. He just did an amazing job. He reached out to me after reading the story that appeared in The New York Times Magazine back in 2016 about this situation down in West Virginia along the Ohio River and was really shocked when he read about it because it was really highlighting an environmental contamination problem that had potentially nationwide, if not worldwide implications but that he had never heard of, and you know he was active in the environmental arena and active in water issues and was surprised that he had not heard of this before and really wanted to find a way to help bring the story out to a wider audience so that we could hopefully start seeing some change in the way type of situations not only develop but how we deal with them. He was able to team up with the folks at Participant Media, who, if you go on their website, and see the types of films they've produced are just incredible filmmakers. Teamed up with Todd Haynes who is an incredible director, and just a terrific cast. Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins and others. Really they were very dedicated to making sure they did the story and brought it to film in the right way, to show what really happened, not only legally and scientifically, but also to real people. What kind of impact these situations have on real people in real communities. What these people went through for 20 years in this community waiting for this process to unfold. So I think they did a tremendous job in taking a very complicated story that involves a lot of science and a lot of law and conveying it in a way that really impresses upon people why this is a story that matters to all of us and why this is a story that really is one that hopefully is inspiring because, as we discussed, it shows that things can be changed. Things that look impossible can be overcome.”
Rob Bilott is a partner in the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky offices of the law firm, Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, where he has practiced in the Environmental and Litigation Practice Groups for over 31 years. During that time, Rob has handled and led some of the most novel and complex cases in the country involving damage from exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (“PFAS”), including the first individual, class action, mass tort, and multi-district litigation proceedings involving PFAS, recovering over $1 billion for clients impacted by the chemicals. In 2017, Rob received the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” for his decades of work on behalf of those injured by PFAS chemical contamination. Rob is the author of the book, “Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont,” and his story is the inspiration for the 2019 motion picture, “Dark Waters,” starring Mark Ruffalo as Rob. Rob’s story and work is also featured in the documentary, “The Devil We Know.” Rob is a 1987 graduate of New College in Sarasota, Florida and a 1990 graduate of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Rob also serves on the Boards of Less Cancer and Green Umbrella and is frequently invited to provide keynote lectures and talks at law schools, universities, colleges, communities and other organizations all over the world. Rob is a fellow in the Right Livelihood College, a Lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, and an Honorary Professor at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina. Rob also has received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from both Ohio State University and New College.
· www.taftlaw.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“We all have things to learn when it comes to these diversity-related issues or issues of identity. We have so much to learn. Just because, let's say, you’re a person of color, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to be accepting of transgender individuals. You might have some real hangups. Or you could be transgender and have some hangups around people of color, all around the spectrum. You can be a woman who doesn't support women. You can be a woman who doesn't support women trans-women. There are all of these kinds of things that I think we have to be open to, and we have to be open to learning and also open to making mistakes because sometimes people are going to make mistakes around these issues.
And this just goes back to the whole benefit of diversity. So one of the reasons why I feel that I benefit so much from the people that I work with is because they are so diverse in many ways, and they are open to talking and interacting and making sure that you're up to speed.”
Marybeth Gasman is the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair, a Distinguished Professor, and Associate Dean for Research at Rutgers University. Her areas of expertise include U.S. history, HBCUs, racism, philanthropy, and leadership. She is the author or editor of 30 books, including Envisioning Black Colleges (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), Educating a Diverse Nation (Harvard University Press, 2015), Making Black Scientists (Harvard University Press, 2019), and Doing the Right Thing: How to End Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring (Princeton University, 2022). She is Executive Director of Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice & Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions.
· www.marybethgasman.net
· Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice & Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions: https://proctor.gse.rutgers.edu/
“I think humans really need to feel valued and loved. The question is where do you get your value from? And I try to get my value from–faith plays a big part of my life, but not everyone has that way of thinking about the world, so I'm not going to major on that, but that's only part of it, the sense that I believe there's a God who thinks I'm of worth, but it's more than that. I believe that my closest friends and my family think I'm of worth. That's it. That will do. And if 100 or 1,000 people think I'm an idiot, that’s a bit annoying, but it's not totally the end of the world. And they’re not going to think about it after a week because they’re going to have other things to think about. And so I think that's probably made me more comfortable in saying that if I do stand up and it’s a disaster, it doesn't matter that much. If I start a charity and it fails, and I have started things that fell apart, it's not the end of the world.”
Jon Yates is Executive Director of the Youth Endowment Fund, a £200 million charitable fund focused on integrating young people into society. After graduating from the University of Oxford, he started his career as a community worker in the London Borough of Newham, before joining McKinsey and Company, where he advised charities, companies and government on strategy and organisational development. He has co-founded a series of charities and initiatives including The Challenge and More in Common aimed at improving life chances and understanding. These programmes now reach 1 in 6 Britons in their lifetime.
· www.youthendowmentfund.org.uk · www.creativeprocess.info · www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“What we deal more in the second season with how your online persona and your real-life persona sometimes can't help but be at odds with one another. In the first episode back we get into how women are treated, how women in relationships are treated online. In a later episode, we deal with how women are or are not allowed to express their anger online as content creators. So it’s something we talked a lot about in the room. That fracturing of self, that even in a goofy show that's very lighthearted and entertaining, it’s something that we do discuss and try to sneak little tidbits in there.”
“Net-zero is a big idea. It’s a big theme. And, unfortunately, what's going up are many ways to look like you're doing net-zero when you're not. So in the ideal world, getting to net-zero means essentially reducing your emissions, and then, where you have residual emissions left, that means you might need to have negative emissions. For example, it's relatively easy to decarbonize the power sector completely, and you can do it quickly and cheaply in most places, but you’re always going to be left with some levels of emissions from agriculture.”
Bill Hare is a physicist and climate scientist with 30 years of experience in science, impacts and policy responses to climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion. He is a founder and CEO of Climate Analytics, which was established to synthesize and advance scientific knowledge on climate change and provide state-of-the-art solutions to global and national climate change policy challenges.
He was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, for which the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Hare has contributed actively to the development of the international climate regime since 1989, including the negotiation of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement in 2015.
Hare is a graduate of Murdoch University in Western Australia and a visiting scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
· https://climateanalytics.org
· https://climateactiontracker.org
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“The figure in my work is me. The figure in my work is you. It's me placing objects. It’s me putting things together. It’s you standing near it. It’s you in proximity moving back and forth, moving around it. It’s us. One of the reasons I make the things I do the way I make them is because I can't imagine them. I make things that I couldn't draw or even think about clearly. I can only look at them. I enjoy the complexity that I make because I'm striving to see it.”
John Powers was born in Chicago. He is a sculptor. After doing an apprenticeship on the West Coast with the sculptor Tom Jay, he moved to New York where he studied at Pratt and Hunter College. His artwork has been shown at MoMA PS1, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bruges Triennial, and PostMasters Gallery, among others. He was recently featured in the New York Times after injuring his hand.
· www.johnpowers.us
· www.creativeprocess.info
“In Edo Japan, basically life was pretty good, and they recycled everything. Everything was reused, upcycled. Waste was considered taboo. A person who was wasting was considered an ugly person. So there is a lot that we could talk about: design, the layout, scale. Buildings were rarely taller than two stories. Very good use of environmental features, microclimates, use of wind for cooling, passive solar heating. Good use of planting, gardens, etc. But regarding cities of the future, I think the main thing is it needs to be a place where people feel like they belong and want to take responsibility.
I'm from New Orleans, and I am very interested in the fact that cities and the places we live in teach us. They shape us, as much as we shape them. And New Orleans was a wonderful place to grow up in because you wouldn't have said it was sustainable, but the vernacular traditional architecture was naturally cooler in summers because of the way it was built with high ceilings with deep eaves from the roof, with verandas shaded with lots of breezes and lots of gardens, plus it is full of older buildings. And things become gentle over time.”
Azby Brown is a leading authority on Japanese architecture, design, and environmentalism and the author of several groundbreaking books, including Just Enough, Small Spaces, The Japanese Dream House, The Very Small Home, and The Genius of Japanese Carpentry. He is lead researcher for Safecast, a global citizen-science organization that pioneered crowdsourced environmental monitoring. Azby Brown has lived in Japan since 1985.
· azbybrown.com
· www.safecast.org
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“We are getting further and further away from the way of life that people had 150, 200 let alone 500 years ago. And it's odd that in some ways, certainly for the middle class, it could be that people had a more satisfactory lifestyle in the 19th century than we have today with all the love the luxuries and comforts we have which they do not have. Of course, there is less poverty, that's a good thing, but we need a revolution of sorts, a mental revolution, a revolution in our expectations of life. I am mostly concerned with analyzing the structure of the change.
Lots of people have written books both optimistic and pessimistic about the Internet. It's a wonderful thing, it gives an opportunity to broaden our experience. I think in many ways the Internet is the only hope if you want to eliminate racism and want to raise the bar across the world, but at the same time, the inequalities are completely ridiculous. They've reached a point of insanity, and we have a moral issue. Is one person ever worth twice as much as another person? Can you justify one human being owning 10 times as much as another person? I don't think you can. I don't think that the president of the biggest cooperation in the world is worth 10 times the poorest person in the world, but that's not what we have. Sometimes he may be “worth” a million times more, a hundred thousand times more. That’s crazy.”
Merlin Donald was born and raised in Montreal and received his Master’s in Psychology from the University of Ottawa, and his doctorate in Neuropsychology from McGill University in 1968. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association, the World Academy of Arts & Science, and the Royal Society of Canada, he is the author of two influential books: Origins of the Modern Mind and A Mind So Rare His early work on human cognitive evolution was unique in its incorporation of both technology and culture into a theory grounded in brain function and brain evolution. He is currently working on an issue that concerns us all: the potentially radical effect of high technology on human cognitive evolution.
· www.queensu.ca/psychology/merlin-donald
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I mentioned before that one of the reasons why we haven't been able to overcome many of the climate crisis factors is because people don't understand what it means. What is it about? What can I do? Usually, when we hear these experts speak about the climate crisis, at least me, I don't understand 9/10ths of the speech or the document. Simplifying the message, allowing that difficult scientific knowledge to become popular language that I can use when explaining to a child, to a rural person, to someone who has a different type of education, that knows much more about the planet but not necessarily about university, explaining those difficult issues will make a difference. And we have to invest much more in that. Speaking difficult scientific language is not helpful to the majority of society.
Few are producers, all of us are consumers. So we all have to participate in how we produce, what we produce and that means from infrastructure for a city to the way that a road is designed or that a marketplace builds its operations. To do it in a responsible way, in a sustainable way, you need the contribution of all.
I would say that it's one of the most difficult challenges that humanity has–addressing the urban problems. Basically, because you cannot change a city from one day to the other, but I think that the starting point has to be change the citizen. And being a citizen has a lot of implications because the moment you realize you are a citizen you also need to accept that you have to be active, that you have to be an agent of change. We cannot expect this city to change, if the citizens don't want to mobilize an agenda to push for something, to request changes, to participate. I think the word participation is absolutely key. And we find in Latin America and in all continents that very often we have governments that curtail the capacity of citizens to be active, that tell the population to wait for a change, to be passive, to let the government do their job. And that's absolutely wrong because government is the one that defines court, the game that the citizens are going to play. And that game is called defining the rules of the game and allowing the citizens to be active participants of change.”
Yolanda Kakabadse’s work with the environmental conservation movement officially began in 1979, when she was appointed Executive Director of Fundación Natura in Quito, where she worked until 1990. In 1993, she created Fundacion Futuro Latinoamericano, an organization dedicated to promote the sustainable development of Latin America through conflict prevention and management. She was the Executive President until 2006 and remains as Chair of the Advisory Board. From 1990 until 1992, Yolanda Kakabadse coordinated the participation of civil society organizations for the United Nations Conference for Environment and Development (Earth Summit). From 1996 to 2004 she was President of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), President of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) 2010-17, and Member of the Board of the World Resources Institute (WRI) during the same period. Yolanda was appointed Minister of Environment for the Republic of Ecuador, position she held from 1998 until 2000. She is a Member of the Board of Arabesque, and Chairs the Independent Science and Technology Panel of Fundacion Renova in Brazil. Yolanda is also a Member of the Board of Sistema B and the B Team.
· World Conservation Union: www.iucn.org
· WWF International: worldwildlife.org
· Fundacion Futuro Latinoamericano: www.ffla.net/en/
· Sistema B: sistemab.org
· B Team: bteam.org
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“There are a lot of distractions in cities. So it's always good to maybe take some time out, be in a quieter place with no distractions so you can let your thoughts run. And that leads into the creative process because new ideas, new thoughts and where they come from. They come from following the garden path of associations in your mind. One thought leads to another, leads to another until your mind is in a new place it's never been before. Or you put two thoughts together that were never together before, but now they are because you managed to somehow follow this garden path of thoughts from one thought to the other. That's where creativity comes from, that's where your ideas come from, seeing things in a new way, seeing things that were never together before. And if you have constant distractions that interferes with that process.”
Earl K. Miller is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience in the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Miller studies the neural basis of executive control, the ability to carry out goal-directed behavior using complex mental processes and cognitive abilities. This work has established a foundation upon which to construct more detailed, mechanistic accounts of cognition and its dysfunction in diseases such as autism, schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder. He’s the recipient of a variety of awards and his paper with Jonathan Cohen which presented a new framework for understanding the prefrontal cortex, ranks fifth all-time in citations in neuroscience.
· ekmillerlab.mit.edu
· www.creativeprocess.info
“To explore different worlds, essentially. That’s what literature has taught me. Reading has taught me how difficult it is to write well, to do you something other than the mundane or the expected, so all those things point to a kind of human creativity and a human capacity to both create and also to learn. To learn about life in different ways and to pass on those lessons to other people. One thing I think great teachers do is to embody what they talk about, the values that they profess, the things they feel are important in their everyday lives outside of the literature. So when I become involved in politics or a cause, it’s a reflection of what I've learned through any number of things including literature. Literature doesn’t stand alone. Literature is part of the world. That’s another thing I think is very important. As much as we should enjoy those moments when we’re alone reading a book and we're isolated and just in a meditative state, we should understand that literature is always about something else besides itself.”
David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, and Professor of Comparative Literature, at Stanford University. He has written widely on culture, literature, human rights, and politics, both in his books and also in venues such as Truthout, The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, Al Jazeera, and others.
· www.palumbo-liu.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Tony Walton was an award-winning director and production designer. His work was vast and stretches from Broadway productions and operas to films and television. Over the course of his long and coveted career Tony was honored with 16 Tony Award Nominations for his Broadway sets and costumes. Of those nominations he received awards for Pippin, House of Blue Leaves, and Guys and Dolls. In his television career he worked on over 20 films and received tremendous recognition for his work on Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz where he won an Oscar and Death of a Salesman where he received an Emmy. In 1991, Tony Walton was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame. Until his passing in 2022, he lived in New York City with his wife Gen LeRoy Walton.
www.tonywalton.net
www.creativeprocess.info
“This is a very important question because cities are really living labs of everything that we're doing in terms of energy policy, and it’s extremely important that whatever we are putting forward in terms of policy, if it is not embraced by the citizens in cities on the local level, the best policies will not serve any purpose if they not really taken up by citizens.
Of all of the Sustainable Development Goals, I think quality education is really the basis, I would call it really the foundation for practically all the Sustainable Development Goals. If you ensure quality education, all the rest will be easier.
I think we could do much more from much earlier on in a structured manner to raise awareness, bring it into school programs, how important it is to care for the planet. How it can be done by every single one of us in the way we consume not just energy, but our choices, of what we buy in the supermarket. There's much more that can be done.”
Paula Pinho is Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy. She was responsible for Energy Strategy and Policy coordination and then for Renewables and Energy System Integration Policy and Decarbonisation and Sustainability of Energy Sources. She was Acting Director for Energy Policy where she has overseen notably the work of international energy relations, financial instruments and inter-institutional relations.
Paula has also been Member of Cabinet of EU Commissioners, including Commissioner for Energy Günther Oettinger both in his quality of Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society and during his mandate as EU Commissioner for Energy. She was then responsible for energy security and infrastructure and the overall coordination of the international dimension of energy policy.
As a member of the Cabinet, she has been involved in the trilateral gas talks between the EU, Russia and Ukraine. While Head of Unit responsible for Energy Strategy and Policy Coordination, Paula has coordinated the preparation and adoption of the “Clean Energy for all Europeans” package. Paula represented the Commission in the negotiations of the Commission Proposal for a Regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union and was responsible notably for the overall coordination of the assessment of the national Energy and Climate Plans. Paula speaks fluently Portuguese, German, English and French, as well as Spanish and Italian.
· https://energy.ec.europa.eu/index_en
· https://energy.ec.europa.eu
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“The political struggle is really hard today and I feel like we haven't been winning, but I think it's important not to think of this as either we win it, or there's catastrophe and that's the end. We win or lose, and there’s this big tidal wave that kills us all. That's not the way the climate crisis is going to play out. It’s going to be a long, slow, attritional crisis punctuated by forms of natural disaster that will decimate populations, but it's also going to be something that people will be impacted by for generations and that people will continue to mobilize around, so I think it's important to keep that in mind.”
Ashley Dawson is currently Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He currently works in the fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial ecocriticism. He is the author of three recent books relating to these fields: People’s Power (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities (Verso, 2017) andExtinction (O/R, 2016). Other areas of interest of his include the experience and literature of migration, including movement from colonial and postcolonial nations to the former imperial center (Britain in particular), and from rural areas to mega-cities of the global South such as Lagos and Mumbai.
· ashleydawson.info
· www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/climate-action-lab
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I like the idea that your actions in the world can be motivated by both idealism and realism about how to achieve those ideals. I like the idea that morality is not simple. There is this idea that there are the heroes and there's the villains and you can easily tell who's who, and that's not so true as it used to be in comics and that's meaningful. One thing that is interesting about the Marvel story is there’s basically nobody who's just a bad guy to be a bad guy. Everyone has their reasons. Almost everyone is capable of redemption in some way, even the worst of the worst are capable of tremendous heroism and tremendous idealism and genuinely wanting to heal the world make it a better place.
I think communicating what those ideals are and how they can change and need to change as time passes is really special, and I think that addressing those through stories, through things where there’s not necessarily a one-to-one meaning, where this is not a parable, where this is not something where character X stands for concept Y in always exactly the same way. That’s important that things can shift, that things can be different, that a better world is possible and that you can make it so, that your abilities may be things that you work very hard for for a very long time or they may come to you. Your body may be transformed in ways that are wonderful or horrible, and you can make something of it.”
Douglas Wolk is the author of the NYTimes bestseller All of the Marvels, and the Eisner Award–winning Reading Comics and the host of the podcast Voice of Latveria. A National Arts Journalism Program fellow, Wolk has written about comic books, graphic novels, pop music, and technology for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Believer, Slate, and Pitchfork. He has lectured and moderated panels at Comic-Con International, the Experience Music Project Pop Conference, the Center for Cartoon Studies and other events.
· douglaswolk.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
Born out of Boston’s public housing system, JP Ouellette moved to Los Angeles after graduating film school. He has assisted creatives such as Richard Kelly, Michael Ohoven, Gary Fleder, and James Manos, Jr., before being hired to write the horror film “Captured” and launching his own creative shingle, Circa 1888, Inc. JP has since written a true war adaptation “Qaddafi's Point Guard” for a major studio, and an unannounced Biopic centered on the music industry. JP is currently producing the feature film “Little Brother” in New Mexico.
Dylan Matlock has been on the physical production side of over 50 film and television projects, including HBO's The Wire, Live Free or Die Hard, and Project X. He worked as an associate producer for the hit Comedy Central show "Review” and writer/producer on the theatrically-released horror feature Along Came the Devil. Since producing Mass, Dylan has produced the feature Little Brother, and Do Not Watch.
JP and Dylan produced Mass, which premiered at Sundance in 2021 and was then bought by Bleecker Street. The film is currently creating Oscar buzz for the 2022 Awards season.
· www.imdb.com/name/nm1965594/
· www.imdb.com/name/nm1837175/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
· www.creativeprocess.info
Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Chair of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, Co-Chair of the UN Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, Commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, academician of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah Honorary Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Development at Sunway University. Sachs has been Special Advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres. Sachs was twice named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders, and has received 38 honorary doctorates. He received the Legion of Honor from France in 2021 and the Order of the Cross from Estonia in 2019.
Jeffrey Sachs hosts “The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs” podcast featuring renowned authors of scintillating, inspiring and remarkably important books about history, social justice, and the challenges of building a decent world. Previous conversations feature Mariana Mazzucato, author of “Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism,” and Robert Lustig, author of “Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine” among others.To learn more, visit
· www.bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org/
· www.jeffsachs.org
· sdgacademy.org/
· www.unsdsn.org/
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Photo EFA 2019
“Is this true that we test for fewer than 100 chemicals in water, but in fact, there are thousands that go untested?”
“There are thousands just like there are in air, just like there are in food. We sometimes compartmentalize too much. We forget, but what is food? Food is made up of chemicals. And I think we need to be broader in our understanding because, for example, we all have on us and within us our Microbiomes and we think about the GI bacteria and we now know that if people are obese they have very different microbial content in their gut compared to people who are not obese. And we know that a baby born by C-section section has a different position than a baby born vaginally. And we know that these things have impacts. We know that many of the bacteria have the ability for example to metabolize the contaminants as well as things in our food. And we know that you can have a different response depending upon what people are eating.”
Dr. Linda Birnbaum is a scientist emeritus and former director of the National institute of Environmental Health Sciences and of the National Toxicology Program. She is also a Scholar in Residence at the Nicholas School of the Environment of Duke University, and an adjunct full professor at Duke, University of North Carolina, and Yale University School of Public Health. She is the author of more than 1000 peer reviewed articles, book chapters, and reports. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, has multiple honorary doctorates and awards. Best of all, now that she is retired after 40 years of government.
· sph.unc.edu/adv_profile/linda-birnbaum-phd/
· www.niehs.nih.gov
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“Each day you wake up you make decisions that shape your own fate, your ascent, position, your own creativity. I like to think of it as fate is a personal construct. When I was at Cornell they had me teach an Emerson essay called “Freedom and Fate” where he said that fate was so overwhelming in some traditions that it’s as though we were each involved in a shipwreck and we were each thrown off the ship and all we had a chance to do was look at each other. I’ve come to believe is that not only is the future near you can design your own life.”
Bruce Piasecki, PdD., NYT bestselling author (A New Way to Wealth, Doing More with Teams, Missing Persons, 2040: A Fable), is founder of AHC Group, Inc. a global management consulting firm advising major corporations on social response capitalism, sustainability, and innovation. Piasecki has been an agent of climate solutions for over 40 years. He’s also co-founder of Creative Force Foundation, Inc which annually awards young writers globally on business and society issues.
· www.ahcgroup.com
· www.brucepiasecki.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“Thinking about the future of the environments more broadly and the challenges of global development, we need to remember that freedom from infectious disease is not a privilege that is universally shared. And so in order to continue to improve global public health, it's vitally important that people in poor countries have access to opportunities for economic growth
Human well-being is both a question of social development in a very holistic sense that people have jobs that provide adequate food and clean water as well as the elimination of dangerous microbes, and so the question is how do societies continue to develop in a way that's globally equitable and sustainable and that's really one of wicked hardest problems on the planet is how do we continue to experience growth without having carbon emissions that make growth and impossible, that continue to hold societies in poverty, and that continue to imperil human health.”
Kyle Harper is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, Professor of Classics and Letters, Senior Advisor to the President, and Provost Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma. Harper’s fourth book, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, is a global history of infectious disease spanning from human origins to COVID-19. It tells the story of humanity’s long and distinctive struggle with pathogenic microbes. His scholarly works use natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to deepen our understanding of human expansion as a planetary force.
· www.kyleharper.net
· https://www.amazon.com/Plagues-upon-Earth-Princeton-Economic/dp/069119212X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1629378421&sr=8-1
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“Artistic creativity and it’s crucial to artistic creativity amongst many other things. In artistic creativity, from my viewpoint, is that you start off with an idea and you’re shaping and you’re totally in control and it doesn’t matter if it's music or sculpture or painting or a novel, eventually the thing sparks its own life, becomes itself, and at that point, the role of the artist is to stand back and let it become what its got to become. And that’s where you get the great art.”
Dr.George Ellis is a South African theoretical physicist who is considered to be a world leader in relativity theory and cosmology. He has published over 500 scientific papers and several books including The Large scale Structure of Space Time, which he co-authored with Steven Hawking in 1973. He is an active Quaker and won the Templeton Prize in 2004 for his exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension. He is also a past President of the International Society for Science and Religion.
· math_research.uct.ac.za/~ellis/
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I’m not just taking beautiful pictures. I’m collecting their voices, collecting their movement, collecting different aspects, and preserving this moment because they will not always be here. I don’t just see myself as a photographer, an artist. I also see myself as an archiver. Someone who is archiving as a researcher.”
Etinosa Yvonne is a self-taught documentary photographer and videographer born and raised in Nigeria. Her work focuses on the human condition and social injustice. She has received grants from Women Photograph, National Geographic in partnership with Lagos Photo and Art X and an award from the Royal Photographic Society for her project; It’s All In My Head. In 2020, she was one of six photographers selected the World Press Photo 6*6 Global talent in Africa.
· www.etinosayvonne.me
· www.creativeprocess.info
“These were my bedtime stories stories. I remember listening to them before I could speak. I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking at all and with learning and also just simply getting into school. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate.
Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. Once they immigrated to the States. And my grandmother, my father’s mother, who raised me was speaking Japanese, that was her private language. It was a remnant of the past and sort of the past of the occupation with Korea being occupied by Japan. My mother and father spoke in Korean, and this was a much more intimate language that I wanted to have access to but would also keep me away from the English that they hoped me to get. And all of this was compounded by my difficulty with speech. So there was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.”
E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, winner of the Washington State Book Award and the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award. For her poetry collection A Lesser Love she received the Pleiades Press Editors Prize. She is the co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is completing the PhD program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a recipient of MacDowell and Kundiman fellowships.
IG @thisisejkoh
· www.instagram.com/p/CRB8O69BWQJ/
· www.creativeprocess.info
"This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful."
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022.
Photo credit: Lucas Marquardt
· www.adalimon.net
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“How do you get people to have a sense of urgency to actually take action and do something different? What we're finding is the learnings from business very much do apply to other spheres and also more generally to challenges like climate change. We’re facing the question of how do you get more people to actually be willing to take real meaningful action.”
Gaurav Gupta is Director of Kotter International · Change Management & Strategy Execution and co-author of Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard to Imagine Results in Uncertain & Volatile Times. He translates strategy into implementation and develops learning-focused teams. Gaurav has worked with clients in industries as diverse as food and beverage, oil and energy, healthcare, chemicals, and finance. Gaurav draws on his extensive global (having worked in over 10 countries) and diverse functional experience in collaborating with business leaders to develop and implement effective transformation efforts. Gaurav lead the operations for the European office of Stroud International, a management and operations consulting firm. He combines his passion for international development and education in serving as an executive board member for a non-profit, Medic to Medic, that sponsors medical students in Uganda and Malawi. Gaurav holds a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Middlebury College and a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University.
· https://www.kotterinc.com/team/gaurav-gupta/
· www.kotterinc.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“Nature is my home because. It doesn't matter where I am. It’s available and it's there and it's always giving me the same sort of nourishment. All of us have had to develop a sense of home elsewhere. With me in particular, I've been traveling and living in different countries for the last 20 years since I was 22, so it's not even that I've had a geographical place that is my new home because I've moved around every four years. I'm in a new place a new community and new friends, so nature is my home.”
Claudia Bueno is an internationally recognized Venezuela born artist renowned for creating immersive technological wonders using light, sculpture, painting and sound. Claudia creates large scale, multi-sensory experiences that communicate a profound sense of wonderment and awe. Lights, motors, wind, and video power her creations with pulsations and movements. Detailed drawings, meticulous cutouts and elaborate structures leave evidence of the intimate dedication the artist has with her work. Claudia fills her art with a quality of mystical curiosity that mirrors her personal fascination with Energy, Consciousness and Nature - ultimately transforming her art into a celebration of Life and Creation.
· www.claudiabueno.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Instagram @ClaudiaBuenoArt
Photo credit: Laurent Velazquez, "Pulse" Meow Wolf Las Vegas
Ms. Johnson is a 30-year veteran of the dance field, has appeared in over 50 tours and taught for dance companies and colleges on five continents. An honors graduate of the National Ballet School, she was a soloist with The National Ballet of Canada and principal dancer and researcher with Ballet Frankfurt.A world-renowned expert on choreographer William Forsythe, Ms. Johnson has been a close collaborator of Forsythe’s for over two decades. She stages and produces Forsythe’s ballets on companies worldwide, including The Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala, The Norwegian National Ballet, Alterballetto, Netherlands Dans Theater, Scottish Ballet, Finnish National Ballet, The National Ballet of Canada, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Batsheva Dance Company, American Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, and Boston Ballet. Her recent choreographic work includes The Copier for Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet; Room/Room for NYU; 27 for 17 for The New School University; As Yet Unnamed for the Movement Invention Project Collective; Folding Articulation for Princeton University, Waterline for Barnard College at Columbia University, Solo for Jeff for The Juilliard School; Strut for Boston Ballet II (2017 premiere), and a new commissioned work for The National Ballet School of Canada’s Assemblée Internationale 2017.At Harvard, Ms. Johnson choreographed 13 original works for students including, The Art of Survival, for Harvard’s 10th Anniversary Observance of September 11th and a collaboration between the Mahindra Center for Humanities and the American Repertory Theater 2011; RE: RE: RE: a dance installation in 2011/12, and works which were a part of curricular courses: The Sound of Distance in Itself in 2012, Dog in a Sweater in 2013, Paper Wing and SEESAW in 2014, LOOK UP and Degrees of Difference in 2015, and WHAT MOVES YOU? with Francesca Harper and Mario Zambrano and WUNDER with artist-in-residence Sidra Bell for the Harvard Dance Project in 2016.
· https://ofa.fas.harvard.edu/dance/about-dance
· www.creativeprocess.info
“A lot of people think climate change is about avoiding the extinction of mankind. In my opinion, climate change is about putting pressure on society and disrupting society to an extent that it can't function properly anymore. So my greatest fear is that if we don't combat climate change, the weather extremes will hit us with a frequency and intensity that we will not be able to recover after each impact. And then we will start to fight with each other.”
Anders Levermann is a professor at the Physics Institute of Postdam University, Germany, as well as an adjunct senior research scientist of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York. Levermann’s research focuses on climate dynamics and its social-economic impact. His work is used to advise political and economic stakeholders on the issue of climate change. Levermann has been involved in the assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2004. He is a member of the scientific advisory body of UNEP Finance Initiative’s Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance. He is also the head of global economic stability project Zeean.
· www.pik-potsdam.de/~anders/
· www.pik-potsdam.de/en/output/transfer/projects/zeean
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Marian Macgowan is a producer with a global imprint, working across film, documentary and television mediums. As principal of the independent Australian production company Macgowan Films, her company develops, finances and produces feature films, television, and documentaries. Currently preparing for Season 3 of the critically acclaimed Emmy, Critics Choice nominee for Best Comedy Series, and Golden Globe nominee for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy, THE GREAT.
Marian Macgowan has produced or executive-produced international films as LILIAN’S STORY, with Toni Collette; Gregor Jordan's TWO HANDS, with Rose Byrne, Bryan Brown, and Heath Ledger; Tony McNamara's THE RAGE IN PLACID LAKE, starring Rose Byrne, Ben Lee, and Miranda Richardson; SOUTH SOLITARY, directed by Shirley Barrett, with Miranda Otto and her father Barry Otto; and the documentaries BOXING FOR PALM ISLAND directed by Adrian Russell Wills, and WOMEN HE’S UNDRESSED, directed by Gillian Armstrong. The latter is about legendary Oscar-winning costume designer Orry-Kelly.
· www.macgowanfilms.com/about
· www.hulu.com/series/the-great-238db0d4-c476-47ed-9bee-d326fd302f7d
· www.creativeprocess.info
“There are some recurrent threads in indigenous cultures across the world. One of those is–We don’t own the land. The land owns us. It’s not seen as property first. It’s seen as inalienable in that sense because you don’t own it in the first place. What we’re seeing now is a kind of movement where more and more indigenous people are living kind of amphibious lives. On the one hand, they have their indigenous cosmologies. And the other hand, in order to increase the likelihood that they can keep out big corporations, mining, logging, and so forth, their presence on the land needs to be bureaucratically recognised is to have recognition that “this is your property.” So in one sense many of these communities I find are both inside and outside private property regimes.”
Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and the Barron Family Professor in Environmental Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently writing a book on environmental martyrs and the defense of the great tropical forests.
He writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon and elsewhere.
Much of his writing engages environmental justice struggles in the global South. He has a particular interest in understanding the roles that artists can play in effecting change at the interface with social movements.
· english.princeton.edu/people/rob-nixon
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“For nature and natural beauty to survive, people have to want it. If they don’t ever experience it, why should they want it? What could see of value in it, something that you not only have never experienced but don’t ever expect to. We intellectually know that the Amazon is an important thing because it stores carbon and it’s home to many species, but I’ve been there. That’s a different thing entirely to be able to appreciate it on that level and care about it for the sheer beauty and magic and joy of being in a place that’s still so big and so wild. So that I think is the most important thing for the next generation.”
Rob Pringle is a professor of ecology, biodiversity, and conservation at Princeton University. He’s fascinated by nearly all facets of ecology and conservation and his research in his lab addresses a correspondingly broad sweep of questions. His work on these questions is motivated by curiosity. The questions are united by a single goal: to understand how wild ecosystems work by studying their modular components and emergent properties.
· https://pringle.princeton.edu
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
"I have a strong feeling that at the moment, especially in the United States, people are much more interested in the culture and backgrounds of minorities than they are in the cultures where those minorities originally came from. I think it’s a sign of people drawing inwards more and more. That goes for the Right Wing populists and White Supremacists just as much. They’re also drawing the wagons around what they see as their identity, and I think that’s exactly not the way to go…I can only emphasize that in terms of education is that everything should be fostered to open people’s minds. Open minds to the past, to other cultures and not to have minds closed by limiting ourselves more and more to the circumstances of our birth.”
Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals by the Foreign Policy magazine.
· www.bard.edu/faculty/details/?id=153
· www.creativeprocess.info
Seth is a lawyer, activist, entrepreneur, public speaker and New York Times Bestselling Author. He is an expert in water management and conservation. His first book Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World talks about how a government in one of the driest regions in the world revolutionised water managed. His second book Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink, presented an ambitious agenda for a fundamental rethinking of America’s drinking water system. Seth’s most recent book, Other People's Words: Wisdom for an Inspired and Productive Life.
His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and in leading publications in Europe and Asia. Seth is a Senior Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Water Policy, and is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Seth is a widely sought-after speaker, having spoken hundreds of times on water and other issues throughout the US and around the world. Among the places he has spoken include the US Congress, the United Nations, the World Bank, Davos and at Google’s headquarters, and on more than 40 college campuses, including Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford.
Seth is the co-founder of several companies, including Beanstalk, the world’s leading trademark brand extension company, which he sold to Ford Motor Company. He was also a Producer of the Tony Award-nominated Broadway revival of Man of La Mancha. Seth sits on the board of several not-for-profit organizations. All of the royalties from sales of Seth’s books are donated to charity.
· http://sethmsiegel.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“You can criticize many things in the United States, but there are taboos and the number one taboo is that you cannot criticize Capitalism. That is equated with disloyalty…This story about Capitalism being wonderful. This story is fading. You can’t do that anymore. The Right Wing cannot rally its troops around Capitalism. That’s why it doesn’t do it anymore. It rallies the troops around being hateful towards immigrants. It rallies the troops around “fake elections”, around the right to buy a gun, around White Supremacists. Those issues can get some support, but “Let’s get together for Capitalism!” That is bad. They can’t do anything with that. They have to sneak the Capitalism in behind those other issues because otherwise, they have no mass political support.”
Richard D. Wolff is Founder of Democracy at Work and host of the show Economic Update. Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne). Wolff was also regular lecturer at the Brecht Forum in New York City. He is the author of The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself.
· www.rdwolff.com
· www.democracyatwork.info
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“The kelp plant itself can grow to 30 meters easily, and sometimes 40 meters, so it’s a huge plant…When people look around the world today, seeing the news, making the world a better place is getting increasingly important. People have to pay attention to what they can do as individuals to make the world a better place. The world is not going to become a good place on its own. If there weren’t for thousands and millions of people, phenomenal sacrifices that people make. When you see what some people do and the risks they take. I have basically found my job for the remaining years that I have on the earth to try to make the world a better place.”
Brian Wilcox is the chief engineer and co-founder of Marine BioEnergy, Inc. Marine BioEnergy was founded to grow plants in the open ocean to provide carbon-neutral fuels so that eventually fossil fuel use can be eliminated. Previously, Brian spent 38 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on robots for planetary exploration and other extreme environments. At NASA, he was the Supervisor of the Robotic Vehicles Group for over 20 years, and Manager of the Space Robotics Technology Program for another nearly 15 years.
· www.marinebiomass.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“The good thing about our species is that we create our own environment. What we’ve been doing so far is creating an environment where we’re much more successful. We live a lot longer, we’re much healthier than we have been in the past. There are many, many more of us, so we’re very successful as a species and that’s been at the expense of other ecosystems, but what’s happened is we are now dominating the planet to a dangerous degree, but we are also self-aware. We’re capable of understanding that.”
Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has featured in newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, The Times and Scientific American. She also writes and presents science programmes for radio and television. Her research takes her across the world: she has visited more than 60 countries, lived in three and is currently based in London. In 2015, she became the first woman to win the Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize solo for her debut, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. She is author of Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty & Time.
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
"I think any time we are closer to the earth, we can feel the struggles of other human beings as well. I encourage young women to find whatever it is they are passionate about and invest their entire soul in it and go for it! Because you’ll be happy if you’re passionate about your work." –Mary Edna Fraser
"Southern Africa, south of the Sahara, they’re expecting within this century 200 million climate refugees. Where are they going to go? Who wants those refugees. We have the same thing happening in Central America. Where are they going to go? All over the world, we’re seeing because of climate change we’re seeing vast changes affecting all aspects of society. It’s very worrisome and that’s something that we’ve not been able to face politically. We need to do that.” – Orrin H. Pilkey
Duke University Professor Emeritus Orrin H. Pilkey is one of the rare academics who engages in public advocacy about science-related issues. His collaborator, Mary Edna Fraser, is an artist who highlights environmental concerns in large silk batiks and oils. They are the co-authors of A Celebration of the World’s Barrier Islands and Global Climate Change: A Primer. Their traveling exhibits, “Our Expanding Oceans” and “Shifting East Coast Barrier Islands” creatively merge science and art.
· www.maryedna.com
· www.deleteapathy.com
· https://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/orrinpilkey
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Wetlands naturally absorb twice the amount of carbon than all the world’s forests combined.
“I think everybody at school learns about the water cycle. That rings a bell with everybody. Maybe this is a good hook to show the place of wetlands in capturing and purifying and the story of water. And then in turn how this links to what we’re seeing every year: droughts, floods, fires, heat waves which are devastating and life-threatening. I think this may be one of the easiest routes in educating people, connecting wetlands with water and the direct impact of that.”
Jane Madgwick is an ecologist and author with 30 years of experience of working internationally on the science, policy and practice of wetlands and water management. Since 2004, she has been CEO of Wetlands International, leading a network of 20 offices operating in over 100 countries. Wetlands International works to mobilise the conservation and restoration of wetlands, connecting science, policies and practices for biodiversity, resilient communities and reduced climate risks.
· www.wetlands.org
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“A key part of how I go about doing my research is being involved in policy discussions, policy conversations, and also by following the international climate negotiations very closely. Actually, I started my research career as a part of the Presidency of the International Climate Negotiations in 2009. After that I remained an advisor to country delegations in the international negotiations, particularly small island development states or least developed countries. That really helped me to get a sense of what the real questions are that they are struggling with.”
Dr. Joeri Rogelj is Director of Research at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College and also at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. He studies how societies transform towards more sustainable futures, connecting Earth sciences to policy. He publishes on 1.5°C pathways, UN climate agreements, carbon budgets and net zero targets. He is a long-serving author on authoritative science assessment reports of the UN Environment Programme and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
· www.imperial.ac.uk/people/j.rogelj
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“There’s a wide range of reasons that we really need to understand the root causes of a lot of our social ills and environmental ills. I think we need to continue to come back to this question of how we heal this imposed divide between the natural world and human social constructs. And that healing is key to how we’re going to really unwind the perilous moment that we face right now. How do we reconnect with the natural world? Not just intellectually, but in a very embodied way.”
Osprey Orielle Lake is the Founder and Executive Director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International dedicated to accelerating a global women’s climate justice movement. She works nationally and internationally with grassroots and Indigenous leaders, policy-makers and scientists to promote climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition to a decentralized, democratized energy future. She serves on the Executive Committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and Osprey is the Co-Director of the Indigenous Women's Divestment Delegations, and actively leads WECAN’s advocacy, policy and campaign work in areas such as Women for Forests, Divestment and Just Transition, Indigenous Rights, a Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal, and UN Forums. Osprey is the author of the award-winning book,"Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature."
· Global Women's Assembly for Climate Justice: Solutions from the Frontlines and the Protection and Defense of Human Rights and Nature https://www.wecaninternational.org/womens-assembly
· WECAN COP26 Analysis Blog: Despite Government Failures at COP26, Peoples' Movements Continue Rising to Transform our World - https://www.wecaninternational.org/post/despite-government-failures-at-cop26-peoples-movements-continue-rising-to-transform-our-world
· WECAN Programs: https://www.wecaninternational.org/our-work
- WECAN Women Speak Storytelling Database: https://womenspeak.wecaninternational.org/
· Join the WECAN Network: https://www.wecaninternational.org/join-the-network
· WECAN Social Media Handles:
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/WECAN.Intl/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WECAN_INTL
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wecan_intl/
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and bestselling author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. Merlin received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Entangled Life won the Wainwright Prize 2021, and has been nominated for a number of other prizes. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, Head of Science and Communications Strategy for the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation.
· www.merlinsheldrake.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Dr. Farhana Sultana is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University, where she is also the Research Director for Environmental Collaboration and Conflicts at the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflicts and Collaboration (PARCC).
Dr. Sultana is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar of political ecology, water governance, post‐colonial development, social and environmental justice, climate change, and feminism. Her research and scholar-activism draw from her experiences of having lived and worked on three continents as well as from her backgrounds in the natural sciences, social sciences, and policy experience.
Prior to joining Syracuse, she taught at King’s College London and worked at United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Author of several dozen publications, her recent books are “The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles” (2012), “Eating, Drinking: Surviving” (2016) and “Water Politics: Governance, Justice, and the Right to Water” (2020). Dr. Sultana graduated Cum Laude from Princeton University (in Geosciences and Environmental Studies) and obtained her Masters and PhD (in Geography) from the University of Minnesota, where she was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
She was awarded the Glenda Laws Award from the American Association of Geographers for “outstanding contributions to geographic research on social issues” in 2019.
· www.farhanasultana.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“The search for identity is something I think everyone goes through in their lives. It’s a constantly evolving answer. I think all of us can relate to the sense of belonging and what is home. Us being so far away from our families…Alicia Vikander’s scene was memorable to me. One of the rare times I cried while operating the camera.” –Ante Cheng
“There’s not really many stories about people who look like me in Australia, so I was just making films. How do I be invisible in a way and transcend whatever I’m shooting? It wasn’t until I came to the U.S…it was the first time I had to think about me being Asian and my experiences and how does that relate to what we’re telling in this film.” –Matthew Chuang
Ante Cheng and Matthew Chuang are collaborating cinematographers on the 2021 dramatic release Blue Bayou, directed by Justin Chon. Ante Cheng is known for his collaboration on director Chon's previous films, namely the Sundance Award Winning Gook (2017) and Miss Purple (2019). Together with Blue Bayou, these films form a trilogy meditating on the Asian American experience. Matthew Chuang, a newcomer to this project, has shot and directed a number of music videos, short films, and other creative projects.
· http://www.adopteesunerased.com
· chengante.com
· www.matthewchuang.com
· www.imdb.com/title/tt11121664/
· www.creativeprocess.info
“The difference between stage and screen acting is vast, but it's the same root. It's just some of the techniques are very different. I really know theater because that's where I started. I went at it in a very haphazard way. I had a very haphazard approach. It was not orderly at all. I didn't go to a proper school or anything like that. After fooling around in Europe for almost a couple of years, just because I'd gotten out of the army...and didn't really know what to do or how to do it. And so I just went and while there I did some acting, but nothing very remarkable except doing a nightclub with William Burroughs. That was great fun. I did a little bit of studying here or there...Jeff Corey (and at one class in New York) someone said something that helped me a great deal. And then I just learned by doing it.”
Harris Yulin has appeared on Broadway in Hedda Gabler, The Price, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Visit, A Lesson From Aloes, and Watch On The Rhine. His off-Broadway credits include Raindance at Signature Theatre; Don Juan In Hell at Symphony Space; Steve Tesich’s Arts And Leisure at Playwrights Horizons; Tina Howe’s Approaching Zanzibar at Second Stage; Hamlet, King John, Richard III, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at New York Shakespeare Festival; and Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Hedda Gabler at Roundabout. Regional credits include Finishing the Picture at Goodman Theatre; a recent appearance in the title role of King Lear at New Jersey Shakespeare Festival; The Talking Cure at Mark Taper Forum; Tartuffe at the Guthrie and Arena Stage; Henry V at Hartford Stage; and The Tempest at Shakespeare & Co. Mr. Yulin’s directing credits include Horton Foote’s The Prisoner’s Song at Ensemble Studio Theatre; Conor McPherson’s This Lime Tree Bower at Primary Stages; Don Juan In Hell in London (Riverside Studios) and in New York (Symphony Space), Steve Tesich’s Baba Goya (Second Stage), Adele Shank’s Winter Play at Second Stage; Candida at the Shaw Festival; and The Front Page and The Guardsman at Long Wharf. His television credits include “Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight,” “Mister Sterling,” “24,” “Buffy The Vampire Slayer,” “Frasier” (Emmy Nomination), and “La Femme Nikita” (Emmy Nomination). His film credits include Fur, The Place Beyond the Pines, The Emperor’s Club, Training Day, The Million Dollar Hotel, The Hurricane, Looking for Richard, Murder at 1600, Multiplicity, Clear and Present Danger, and Scarface.
· www.imdb.com/name/nm0950867/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I think the next crisis is going to be a materials crisis. The whole point of moving from a zero-sum game–like who makes the best cheapest product at the lowest price and can find lowest labor somewhere around the world so someone can be happy with a new laundry machine and buy another one in five years–that’s not going to work for us.”
Tiemen ter Hoeven is founder and CEO of Roetz, a manufacturer of circular bicycles and e-bikes. In the Netherlands alone, about 1 million bicycles are discarded every year - whilst many parts can still be used perfectly well. In the Roetz Fair Factory, the parts are cleaned, repaired, and reassembled into new bicycles by people with poor job prospects. Roetz’ mission is to bring circular design and innovation to the bike industry and beyond.
· roetz-bikes.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“Just getting to know what is Buddhism, which is the foundation of every monastery. The Shaolin Temple is in the core, first of all it’s a Buddhist monastery and when you are starting to read about Buddhism, one of the key sentence in the beginning is: With your thoughts you are creating the world…So it’s very rarely clearly stated that it is the thoughts that are creating the world. Nevertheless, if you are now looking at the practices that the Shaolin Temple offers, that is quite physical. There is a lot of physicality in there, so you might think but why are you saying with thoughts you create the world, but you have so many different physical activities. It is because if you want to have mental freedom. If you want to approach freedom, you cannot just approach freedom by doing things or trying to chase freedom. The freedom that we are looking for is the type of freedom that is derived and that is very closely related to its counterpart, which is very hard restriction or very hard structure. So if you want to experience what freedom is, look at the restrictions of your life.”
For more than 30 years, Master Shi Heng Yi has been studying and practicing the interaction between mind and body. His strength is the ability to smoothly combine this knowledge with physical exercises and to practice Martial art –Kung Fu and Qi Gong. He has an academic background but he prefers to live at the Shaolin Temple Europe, Monastery located in Otterberg, Germany. Since 2010 he has been taking care of the settlement and he personifies sustainable development and spreading Shaolin culture and philosophy.
· www.shihengyi.online
· www.shaolintemple.eu
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Gary Griggs received his B.A. in Geological Sciences from the University of California Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from Oregon State University. He has been a Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz since 1968 and was Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences from 1991 to 2017. His research and teaching have been focused on the coast of California and include coastal processes, hazards and engineering, and sea-level rise. Dr. Griggs has written over 185 articles for professional journals as well as authored or co-authored eleven books.
In 1998 he was given the Outstanding Faculty Award at UC Santa Cruz and the Alumni Association honored him with a Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006. The California Coastal Commission and Sunset Magazine named him one of California’s Coastal Heroes in 2009. He has served on three National Academy of Sciences Committees. He has served on the Science Advisory Team to the Governor’s Ocean Protection Council since 2008 and in 2015 was appointed to the California Ocean Sciences Trust.
· eps.ucsc.edu/faculty/Profiles/fac-only.php?uid=griggs
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I just want to make the poems like a living being…There are moments that I’m not at the desk, but I’m living life. And living life is actually what leads to writing. You have to have experiences to write about. Whether or not you are aware of those experiences as you are writing them down because if you’re doing music first, maybe you’re not aware of what you’re writing. And yet, those experiences are what come to fruition in your writing. You become aware. Oh, I did come on that roller coaster that time that I haven’t thought about in twenty years. Oh I did make love to that cute person that I haven’t thought about in ten years, but you’ve got to make love, you’ve got to get on roller coasters, you’ve got to get your heart broken. You’ve got to dance. You gotta get out and do things and that, too, is a part of writing. You have to trust you’re a writer by identity. And if you can trust that you’re a writer by identity, then you don’t have to be at a desk.”
Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
· www.jerichobrown.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“One of the things of the things that is dying is our planet. We hear these sirens every single day. We’re being warned daily by experts and concerned people how vast that squandering is going. It’s a case of urgency and it’s astounding and a very sad, a very pathetic comment on modern life that most people are ignoring those signs. As a poet, it seems to me that one of the tasks that the poet takes on, it’s a vocation that’s born with it, it’s this consciousness, this serving as witness.”
Xicana activist, editor, poet, novelist, and artist Ana Castillo, was born and raised in Chicago. She is known for coining the term “xicanisma” which is defined in her book the Massacre of the Dreamers as, “a sociopolitical movement in the United States that analyzes the historical, cultural, spiritual, educational, and economic intersection of Mexican American women that identify as Chicana.” The term cross bred Chicana feminism, which came to include the indigenous ancestry of Mexican Americans, unifying us with our sisters on the other side of the border.
· www.anacastillo.net
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“Literally during the last week of production, we kept having this conversation. We are part of a cultural moment and we know we are, which is a very out of body experience… Any iconic black show, did they know? Because a lot of those when you look back at their history they were one the bubble, and I always think about Girlfriends and Living Single––did they know that people would still be talking about them?”
Amy Aniobi is a writer, director and Executive Producer on HBO’s Emmy-nominated comedy, “Insecure,” starring Issa Rae. “Insecure” will premiere its fifth and final season on October 24th with Aniobi behind the camera as director of the seventh episode (#507) to be broadcast on December 5th. She also served as showrunner/head writer/EP for season one of the HBO stand-up special “2 Dope Queens.” Under her new production shingle “SuperSpecial” and overall deal with HBO, Aniobi already is in development on several projects, as well as two features set up at Universal. Amy recently directed the award-winning short film, "Honeymoon," which explores a modern-day Nigerian couple's arranged marriage. She also co-created, co-directed and starred in the web series, “Lisa and Amy Are Black,” created the web series, “The Slutty Years” and wrote for both seasons of “Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.” Amy is Nigerian, hails from North Texas, graduated from Stanford University and UCLA, and has lived both in the US (New York, the Bay Area) and abroad (France, Morocco).
· amyaniobi.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
(Photo Credit: Merie W. Wallace/HBO)
Writer and producer Rebecca Walker has contributed to the global conversation about race, gender, power, and the evolution of the human family for three decades. Author and editor of seven bestselling books on multiracial identity, Black Cool and ambivalent motherhood, she has co-founded the Third Wave Fund, which makes grants to womxn and transgender youth working for social justice. For her efforts, she has been named by Time as one of the most influential leaders of her generation.
· www.rebeccawalker.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
INSTAGRAM @creativeprocesspodcast
www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“I think the environmental community has been guilty of a lot of catastrophism, a lot of statements like ‘Game Over for the Planet’, and we’ve painted a lot of very dark pictures about where we’re going, but when you look across these different sectors and all the solutions that are out there, there’s no reason to believe that our grandchildren couldn’t live in an incredibly exciting world.”
Samuel Myers, MD, MPH studies the human health impacts of accelerating disruptions to Earth’s natural systems. He is a Principal Research Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is the founding Director of the Planetary Health Alliance. Sam’s current work spans several areas of planetary health including global nutritional impacts of CO2, health impacts of land management, or impact of animal pollinator declines on human nutrition. He is the lead editor of the book: Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves.
· www.planetaryhealthalliance.org
· www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cZ0zBSJz_g
· environment.harvard.edu/about/faculty/samuel-myers
Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves· www.islandpress.org/books/planetary-health
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“Take care of yourself. Bring that love and kindness and compassion into your dealings with self and others. And this world will change dramatically. I think you’ll find great reason for optimism and hope and viewing the way our world can go, but it absolutely involves a change from the status quo from our current direction.”
Eben Alexander, MD, was an academic neurosurgeon for over 25 years, including 15 years at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School in Boston. He experienced a transcendental Near-Death Experience (NDE) during a week-long coma from an inexplicable brain infection that completely transformed his worldview. A pioneering scientist and modern thought leader in the emerging science that acknowledges the primacy of consciousness in the universe, he is the author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Proof of Heaven, The Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe.
· ebenalexander.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“What frame, what scene, ultimately what story is going to capture the most emotion to make you feel something? Because those are the films that have always resonated the most with me. Those films that actually make you feel. They stop you and they make you feel and make you think. They really jar you.”
Director of photography John Matyśiak’s career has focused on shooting internationally recognized independent films, which have screened at over 50 festivals worldwide, including the Festival de Cannes. Matyśiak is widely admired for his arresting, contemporary images, which evocatively support and amplify his directors’ vision.
He recently shot Meet Cute, a genre-defying dark comedy starring Pete Davidson and Hayley Cuoco, directed by Alex Lehmann and produced by Akiva Goldsman. Prior to shooting Old Henry, which premiered at TIFF 2021, Matyśiak achieved the Best Cinematography award at the 25th Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Film Festival for his work on the feature films, Two Shadows and Model Minority.
His commercial clients include: Audi, Jameson, Nissan and Lexus. Matyśiak studied film at the Czech National Film School, FAMU, in Prague and Emerson College in Boston, MA. He is a member of the International Cinematographers Guild, Local 600. He is based in Los Angeles, CA.
· www.johnmatysiak.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“We’re coming out of one of the worst times for resource exploitation, waste and everything related to that waste of resources, so trying to set the example, especially for my kids, recycling, trying to be reasonable about purchasing things, about where things end up after you’re done using them, just in general being careful about what you do, what impacts there are down the line. Even for them already, they’re 18 and 20 now–What are you going to do to try to protect the planet for your kids? Already trying to put that mindset for them because it’s very difficult for our generation to change the way it has done things for so long, but trying to at least bring that change. Be responsible, be reasonable, think about the impacts.”
Born and raised in Haiti, Jean Weiner has worked on coastal and marine since 1991. In 1992, Jean founded Haiti’s first coastal and marine environmental non-profit the Foundation for the Protection of Marine Biodiversity. He is the head of the organization today and he specializes in coastal and marine sciences, environmental monitoring and management, and community development, and has executed a wide range of projects including resource assessments, association building, environmental rehabilitation, community needs evaluations, as well as pure scientific research for institutions as diverse as the Ministry of Environment of Haiti, the UN. He is Haiti’s most awarded environmentalist and has received the Goldman Environmental Prize.
· www.foprobim.org
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I went to the Amazon and I got a canoe and I started rowing into the forest. It was absolutely like going back into the 17th century! I went around for six months on my own and that was fantastic because in this part of the Colombian rainforest there were absolutely no roads, no towns, no electricity, no flowing water. You are with the indigenous group. They are all still in their loincloths. They speak different languages. I went through about eight different ethnic groups. They all spoke different languages. I couldn’t understand what they said. They couldn’t understand what I said, but we got along well.”
Martin Von Hildebrand has dedicated the last five decades strengthening indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon. During this time he obtained the recognition of their rights in the National Constitution, including the collective ownership of their land and the development of their governments. They now own 26 million hectares of continuous rain forest, their rights have been recognized, and they have set up many of their governments.
Currently, Martin, along with NGOs, indigenous organizations, civil society, governments, and private enterprises, is coordinating the protection of the largest stretch of rainforests on the planet (the northern part of the Amazon between the Andes and the Atlantic, 260 million hectares).
He is an ethnologist, with a doctorate from the University of Paris VII, founder, and the current president of the Gaia Amazonas Foundation. He has been awarded a dozen international awards, such as The Right Livelihood Award, the Talberg Award, The Golden Arc award, the Special Irish presidential Award for Irish Abroad, and the Colombian National Environmental Award.
Gaia Amazonas Foundation
· gaiaamazonas.org
Alianza Noramazónica website
· alianzanoramazonica.org
RAISG website
· amazoniasocioambiental.org/es/
Why is the Amazonia important?/¿Porque la Amazonia es tan importante?
· youtube.com/watch?v=_mO1bf8iTMI
Netflix: "El Sendero de la Anaconda"
Flying rivers/Los rios voladores en la Amazonia. El Corredor Andes Amazonas Atlantico
bbc.com/mundo/noticias-41038097#:~:text=Son%20%22r%C3%ADos%20voladores%22.,m%C3%A1s%20agua%20que%20el%20Amazonas
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I like uncovering truth about behaviour, about history. I think all artists are attracted to unveiling truth. I think it’s a mirror of our society, of our world. It’s the soul of our world.”
Jim Jermanok is an award-winning writer, director, producer author and speaker based in NY. He is currently directing and producing a feature documentary about the life and art of Oscar-winning actor Martin Landau. Jermanok wrote and produced the highly acclaimed romantic comedy, Passionada. His film Em won the Grand Jury Prize at the Seattle International Film Festival and the Criterion International Inspiration Award.
Jim also speaks and has conducted over 300 workshops worldwide on the subject of his recent bestseller, Beyond The Craft: What You Need to Know to Make A Living Creatively!
· jimjermanok.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn’t know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall’ to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my office after the kids went to bed and just started writing about plants and animals that I loved from my childhood.”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.
Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She’s the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
· aimeenez.net
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“One of the things I’ve noticed is that a lot of those younger people are actually much nicer than they need to be. And they have to realize that this is going to be your world. It turns out the way you want to make it and so you should be thinking now about what you want out of this. What do you want that world to be? Do not wait around until the two generations beyond you have gone ahead and done it the way they want it because, by the time they get done, you’re not going to have the chance to shift it to where you want it. So start thinking now about where do you want to be? What is the future you want? And don’t be nice about it, just go ahead and start planning it now.”
Mike Pondsmith is an accomplished roleplaying, tabletop, and video game designer. He is best known for his work with the publisher R. Talsorian Games where he developed the majority of the company’s roleplaying games since its founding in 1982. He is credited as the author of several tabletop roleplaying games such as Mekton, Cyberpunk, and Castle Falkenstein and was recently involved with creating the universe of CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077.
· rtalsoriangames.com
· www.cyberpunk.net
· www.creativeprocess.info
“The problem doesn’t really reside there. The problem is that people have gotten used to thinking about water as a technical issue that can be solved by somebody sitting in a room somewhere with a white coat. The reality is that the history of water shows that this is probably the most political and salient issue of society–How we share the resources that make it possible for us to live is a fundamentally political problem. And in nations that live together under a social contract is fundamentally a constitutional problem. So my hope is that we elevate water to a much higher level of political discourse.”
Giulio Boccaletti, Ph.D., is a globally recognized expert on natural resource security and environmental sustainability. Trained as a physicist and climate scientist, he holds a doctorate from Princeton University, where he was a NASA Earth Systems Science Fellow. He has been a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a partner of McKinsey & Company, and the chief strategy officer of The Nature Conservancy, one of the largest environmental organizations in the world.
He is an Honorary Research Associate in the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. He writes on environmental issues for news media, and is an expert contributor to the World Economic Forum, which elected him as one of its Young Global Leaders. His work on water has been featured in the PBS documentary series H2O: The Molecule that Made Us. His new book, "Water, A Biography" is published by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House. He lives in London.
· www.giulioboccaletti.com
· www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602733/water-by-giulio-boccaletti/
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“All the themes are very contemporary. I think what moves this story is the search for instantaneous celebrity. That’s what the girls are all about, Roxie and Velma. They want to be famous. Of course everything that you cited, corruption, crimes, the press focusing on sensational stories–it’s all there. And I think that’s why the public relates so much to it.”
Paulo Szot won the Tony as Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his Broadway debut at Emile de Becque in the 2008 Tony-winning revival of South Pacific. This performance also netted him Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Theatre World awards. Szot’s opera credits include performances at the Metropolitan, Scala di Milano, Paris Opera, Carnegie Hall, and others. He’s currently starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history.
· chicagothemusical.com
· chicagothemusical.com/cast/#cast-gallery-3
· www.creativeprocess.info
“Now with this crisis even the IMF, even the economists are saying we’re not going to go back to the neoliberal era. And they were defending this era for decades. So, I have hope that maybe we can now transition to something like a Wellbeing Era, where countries are already saying “we want to be a wellbeing economy. New Zealand is telling every ministry: Tell us how you are improving the wellbeing of the New Zealand people. So that means wellbeing has become the cop who rulesoverthe others. There are countries like Bhutan who have thirty years of experience of doing that. They call it Gross National Happiness.”
Through his work as the Senior Policy Officer Economic Transition at the European Environmental Bureau (the largest network of environmental citizens’ organisations in Europe) Meynen exposes what causes the burning out of people and planet and works on wellbeing for all. He is also the author of four books, including his most recent Turning Point: The pandemic as an opportunity for change, publishes essays and opinions, gives lectures and takes direct action.
· eeb.org
· https://eeb.org/library/turning-point/
· eeb.org/library/escaping-the-growth-and-jobs-treadmill/
· eeb.org/library/towards-a-wellbeing-economy-that-serves-people-and-nature/
· goodreads.com/author/show/6442056.Nick_Meynen
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org · www.creativeprocess.info
Poem read in the podcast is by Nick Meynen, Bastiaan Lochs & Marie-Amelie Brun
“That’s just always been something that’s been inspiring to me which is helping people from the wrong side of the tracks, the misunderstood, the addicted, helping people step into their power and believe in themselves.”
Jessa Reed is a comedian and host of her own podcast called Awakening Orientation Dept. She describes herself as an 8th dimensional being disguised as a comedian. Reluctantly sharing pointers for “life in the Matrix”. She is also the host of her other podcast Soberish. Jessa has been featured on Comedy Central, This Is Not Happening, and more. She’s a bridge between worlds, a storyteller, a “galactic ambassador to the 3rd dimension”.
· www.jessareed.com
· podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/awakening-od/id1542888792
· www.soberishpod.com/page/1?season=1
· www.creativeprocess.info
“If you go fill up your car with gas in the United States, chances are high that probably about 10% of your gas is not actually coming from fossil fuels. It's coming from ethanol.You don't even contemplate the fact that there's ethanol in your gas. And I think that meat maybe come like that, where people will obtain meat. But the norm will be for that meat not to be totally animal in its nature. And I think that people will just have a different view of what meat is, and it will be far more diverse than what it is today.”
Paul Shapiro is the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, the CEO of The Better Meat Co., a four-time TEDx speaker, and the host of the Business for Good Podcast.
· www.bettermeat.co
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Ron Gonen is the Founder and CEO of Closed Loop Partners, a New York Based investment firm that focuses on building the circular economy. In his fulfilling career, Ron has been recognized as the “Champion of Earth” by the United Nations Environment Program. Serving as the Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling and Sustainability in New York City under the Bloomberg Administration, Ron Gonen is a visionary and his idea of the circular economy is certainly the way of the future.
In 2021, he released his first book with Penguin Random House, The Waste Free World: How the Circular Economy Will Take Less, Make More, and Save the Planet, highlighting how companies that utilize circular economy business models will generate the most value and lead their industries.
Earlier in his career, Ron was the Co-Founder and CEO of RecycleBank from 2003-2010. He started his career at Deloitte Consulting. Ron was a Henry Catto Fellow at the Aspen Institute and past term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a number of technology and business method patents in the recycling industry.
· www.closedlooppartners.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“They’re single-purpose engines doing one thing in extraordinary ways, and they’ve been encouraged in that by the ecosystem around them, by the funding that’s being pumped into them by people whose only motivation is simply to make more money–and you can see the results of that in the world as this technology has grown from a little acorn to now being the biggest Sequoia in the forest. And it’s shading every other tree, it’s taking all the light, it’s taking all the energy from the forest, and it’s distorting so much in the world.”
Ben Pring is the director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. In 2018 he was a Bilderberg Meeting participant and in 2020 was named one of world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers 50.
He co-authored Monster: A Tough Love Letter On Taming the Machines that Rule Our Jobs, Lives and Code Halos with Paul Roehrig, and Future, What To Do When Machines Do Everything with Roehrig & Malcolm Frank
· www.cognizant.com/futureofwork/author/details/benjamin-pring
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“They’re single-purpose engines doing one thing in extraordinary ways, and they’ve been encouraged that by the ecosystem around them, by the funding that’s being pumped into them by people whose only motivation is simply to make more money–and you can see the results of that in the world as this technology has grown from a little acorn to now being the biggest Sequoia in the forest. And it’s shading every other tree, it’s taking all the light, it’s taking all the energy from the forest, and it’s distorting so much in the world.”
Ben Pring is the director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. In 2018 he was a Bilderberg Meeting participant and in 2020 was named one of world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers 50.
He co-authored Monster: A Tough Love Letter On Taming the Machines that Rule Our Jobs, Lives and Code Halos with Paul Roehrig, and Future, What To Do When Machines Do Everything with Roehrig & Malcolm Frank
· www.cognizant.com/futureofwork/author/details/benjamin-pring
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a report titled something like An Abrupt Climate Scenario. They asked some independent researchers to look at what would happen in a worse case scenario. They found that the United States and Australia. They said that they would have to put up defensive fortresses ‘to stop unwanted starving immigrants’…”
Todd Miller is an author and independent journalist. He has researched and written about border issues for more than 15 years, the last eight as an independent journalist and writer. He resides in Tucson, Arizona, but also has spent many years living and working in Oaxaca, Mexico. His work has appeared in the New York Times, TomDispatch, The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Guernica, and Al Jazeera English, among other places. Miller has authored four books: Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders (City Lights, 2021), Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World (Verso, 2019), Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City Lights, 2017), and Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (City Lights, 2014). He’s a contributing editor on border and immigration issues for NACLA Report on the Americas and its column “Border Wars”.
· www.toddmillerwriter.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I’m grateful for the fact that through my work I’ve had a lot of opportunities to go to places that a lot of people just simply won’t ever get a chance to go. I like having those opportunities to try to share with people what that’s like. I honestly had no idea I would ever be here. I’m from a working-class background, didn’t have a huge amount of opportunities but now I can and that’s one thing that I particularly enjoy.”
Antonella Wilby is a PhD Candidate and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the Contextual Robotics Institute, UC San Diego, and a National Geographic Explorer. Her current research focuses on the development of autonomous underwater robots and vision-based algorithms for mapping and exploration of ocean environments, with the ultimate goal of better understanding and protecting our blue planet. She holds Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego.
· antonellawilby.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“As a child, music felt very natural for me. I didn’t feel I needed to put any effort into learning the piano. I wanted to find all the musical information that was there. What was the purpose of studying the piano? Suddenly the whole thing became so creative. I felt that the sound is something malleable and you can have an infinite number of possibilities and ways of phrasing and expressing, so that opened a whole new area of possibilities and I found this just fascinating.”
Lorenda Ramou, PhD, is a pianist, musicologist, piano teacher and concert curator, with a particular interest in 20th and 21st c. repertoire. She has appeared in many festivals and concert tours in Europe, USA and Chile. She has extensively researched, published and lectured on Greek piano repertoire; her numerous CD recordings for BIS, ECM, NAXOS and Athens Music Society include, among others, solo and chamber music works by Nikos Skalkottas, Dimitris Dragatakis, Konstantia Gourzi and Yiannis Ioannidis. She collaborates as Project Manager for contemporary music projects with Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens. Eager to transmit her knowledge of 20th and 21st century’s piano repertoire to a younger generation of performers, she is teaching a yearly workshop on the subject at the Athens Conservatory. She had collaborated with composers Mauricio Kagel, Maurice Ohana, Frederic Rzewski and with French author Pascal Quignard. She had received guidance by pianists Claude Helffer, Marie-Françoise Bucquet, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Steve Drury, while studying at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMDP), City University, London, and New England Conservatory, Boston. Her projects have been supported by the French Ministry of Culture, the British Council, Fulbright Foundation and the Center of Hellenic Studies, Harvard University.
· www.onassis.org/people/lorenda-ramou
· www.creativeprocess.info
“Is it okay that you benefit at the expense of everyone and everything else? Is that a way that you really feel like you are winning at life? If not, then reconsider what you’re doing and just realize that we all live in this inextricably connected closed sphere in the middle of space. Anything that harms one area harms every area. There is nobody who can escape dirty air, dirty water, dirty food, economic political disruptions, etc. We’re all in this together. So don’t fool yourself by thinking somehow you’re going to come out this unscathed and having ‘won’ while everybody else loses.”
Ibrahim AlHusseini was born in Jordan and raised in Saudi Arabia by parents who are Palestinian refugees. He emigrated to the United States in the 1990s to attend college at the University of Washington and he currently resides in Los Angeles.
AlHusseini is a venture capitalist, sustainability-focused entrepreneur, and environmentalist. He is the founder and CEO of FullCycle, an investment company accelerating the deployment of climate-restoring technologies. AlHusseini is also the founder and managing partner of The Husseini Group.
· fullcycle.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Jennifer Morgan took the helm ofGreenpeace International in April 2016. She was formerly the Global Director of the Climate Program at the World Resources Institute. A climate activist, she has been a leader of large teams at major organisations, and her other ports of call have included the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Climate Action Network, and E3G.
· www.greenpeace.org
·www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
National Magazine Award finalist McKenzie Funk writes for Harper’s, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. His first book, Windfall, won a PEN Literary Award and was named a book of the year by The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Salon, and Amazon.com. A former Knight-Wallace Fellow and Open Society Fellow, he’s a cofounder of the journalism cooperative Deca and a board member at Amplifier.
· www.mckenziefunk.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“For many years I wrote, taught, and published about climate change from a more philosophical, existential point of view, especially thinking about deep time, but I did come back to fuels with my Fuel book in part for the fact that so much of the press and so much of public discourse confuses fuel and energy, and it’s still happening today. I thought about this so long and the same themes, the same tropes are still being recycled.”
Karen Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is a minor graduate field member in Studio Art and a Faculty Fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.
For more than a decade, Karen has been working between Italian studies and environmental humanities with a focus on climate change. She is Editor of Diacritics. Her books include Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary, Clocking Out: The Machinery of Life in 60s Italian Cinema, exploring issues around labor, automation and repetition in Italian art, literature, design and film of the 60s, and the forthcoming Subsurface, Narrative, Climate Change.
· romancestudies.cornell.edu/karen-pinkus
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“As an administrator for 15 years, I still tried to do science and it was difficult because being a dean, every day there is a problem. Every day you have to solve some personal issues, so it’s difficult to concentrate and what I would do was, whenever there was an opportunity to go to a conference away from the university, particularly in a different country, I would sit in the conference room listening to these lectures. You know how it is with meetings, maybe 10% of the speakers are exciting and interesting. What I found is even when I was not listening because I was in this atmosphere of people talking about physics, my mind was set free and would just start percolating. And all of a sudden ideas would come completely unrelated to what the speaker was talking about, except that they were scientific ideas. And I would jot them down and I found that this was really quite an interesting process because it was kind of an immersion process where you actually are not concentrating on what is exactly in front of you, but it puts you in this mood. The brain turns on a different lode and I think by association other ideas come up.”
Pierre Sokolsky is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy and Dean Emeritus of the College of Science at the University of Utah. He has been a leader in the field of Particle Astrophysics, with a specific interest in the highest energy particles produced by natural processes in the universe. Born in France, he was educated at the University of Chicago and University of Illinois. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, past Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Panofsky Prize of the American Physical Society.
· faculty.utah.edu/u0029107-PIERRE_SOKOLSKY/hm/index.hml
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I’ve always considered myself a believing historian and, in fact, most historians of religion are actually believing historians. Very frequently they emerge from the congregations that they’re writing about, whether new religious movements or traditional religions, this is true of Kabbalistic scholar Gershom Scholem, it’s true of people who have written probably the most important biographies of more recent religious figures like Mary Baker Eddy or Joseph Smith, a Mormon prophet. Although, historians don’t frequently acknowledge being believing historians because they feel that it might seem to compromise their capacity for critical judgement, but my impression is different. My impression is that being in very direct proximity to the nature of the philosophical, religious, ethical, therapeutic movements that you’re writing about can heighten your critical acumen.”
Mitch Horowitz is a historian of alternative spirituality and one of today’s most literate voices of esoterica, mysticism, and the occult. Mitch illuminates outsider history, explains its relevance to contemporary life, and reveals the longstanding quest to bring empowerment and agency to the human condition. Mitch is a Writer & Lecturer in Residence at the New York Public Library and the PEN Award-winning author of books, including Occult America, One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life, and The Miracle Habits.
· www.mitchhorowitz.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“It’s about leaving the planet in a better condition than it is currently. What you’re witnessing is years of neglect. It’s the humans who have screwed it all up, and the warming of the earth is no different. The oceans are changing. The topography is changing. Mussels are being fried when the tides recede. This is all unnatural. Or maybe it’s natural. I think it’s Mother Nature just being pissed off and saying, “This is what you get.” And so it’s up to everyone to change their ways. Their shopping habits, their eating habits, how much gas they use. All that stuff which people think “that can’t affect anything.” Well, you’re seeing the result of it now.”
Ian Seabrook is an Underwater Director of Photography in the Motion Picture and Television Industry, working on a number of feature productions, such as Batman v Superman, Deadpool 2 and Jungle Cruise, along with documentary films such as The Rescue. Seabrook is also the winner of Double Gold & Silver Medals for Cinematography at the 2019 Telly Awards. A full member of the Society of Camera Operators, and the CSC, Seabrook holds both commercial and recreational dive certifications.
· www.ianseabrook.net
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“We planted over 10 million trees in 2020 alone. And it’s one tree planted for every dollar donated, so we make it as simple as possible, but when you add it all up together the impact is just tremendous and growing every day.”
Diana Chaplin is the Canopy Director of One Tree Planted, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit on a mission to make it simple for anyone to help the environment by planting trees. Her role is focused on managing communications, marketing, and storytelling around the many reforestation projects that the organization conducts. She's a holistic thinker who applies the wisdom of nature's systems towards creating connectivity through content that ultimately helps scale the impact of One Tree Planted's work.
· onetreeplanted.org
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“Now I think we’re in another culture war. I think we’re in, as we see the realm of cancel culture in social media and this very polarising war between the liberal left and the conservative right. I think that we’re in another culture and a lot of it is centering around gender and race. If you look at what’s happened to black women athletes in the last couples of months, the censuring of their bodies either because of hormones in the case of Caster Semenya or Naomi Osaka, there’s a lot of ways that our society has found to police black bodies for being too exceptional in a lot of ways. For performing in exceptional ways, and the white patriarchy doesn’t like to see that because it starts to diminish their power.”
Professor Micol Hebron is a video and performance artist who works out of Los Angeles. Professor Hebron has studied at UCSD, Academia di Belle Arti at Università di Venezia, and UCLA. She founded Gallery B12, a cooperative artists-run exhibition and lecture space in Hollywood. Hebron co-produced the Full Nelson Festival a showcase of international performance art and, in 2004, founded the LA Art Girls. Hebron has held teaching positions in new genres and contemporary art history and theory at Chapman University, Art Center College of Design, UCLA Extension and Chaffey College.
· micolhebron.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.”
Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
· halaalyan.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…”
Marge Piercy’s 17 novels include NYTimes Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It, and her critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. She’s written 20 volumes of poetry. The most recent is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. Born in Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.
· margepiercy.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“We’re not waiting for the disasters to happen. They have happened. They are happening, and the disasters aren’t natural. They involve climate, but the disasters are very much made by the conditions of capitalist accumulation. We are not going to be able to grapple with the challenges of planetary crisis with the thinking that created planetary crisis.”
Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian, historical geographer, and professor of sociology at Binghamton University. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized. He also coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.
· jasonwmoore.com
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org· www.creativeprocess.info
“There’s this children’s book called Miss Rumphius, and I’ve carried it around with me my entire life. It’s about a woman who grandfather tells her three things, and the last one in the most difficult thing of all and that’s to fill the world with beauty. And I give this book to every one of my friends who are having babies, I have a copy with me almost at all times, and I’m reminded of that feeling that Jonathan Larson had in Tick, Tick…Boom! Of how much time do we have to do something great.”
Alice Brooks is a cinematographer who has worked on award-winning features, television and commercials. She is a graduate of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where her creative partnership with director Jon Chu first began. Since, they have worked on several projects together, most recently on the film In The Heights based on the musical by Lin Manuel Miranda. Brooks is known for her use of dramatic lighting and compassionate camerawork. Her latest film is Tick, Tick…Boom! which is set to release on Netflix this fall.
· www.alicebrooks.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
Neil Patrick Harris is a Tony and Emmy award-winning stage and screen performer, famous for his roles as Barney Stinson in the popular CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and as the iconic and beloved Doogie Howser, M.D., and Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events. He’s hosted the Oscars, Tony, and Emmy Awards, and performed in several Broadway shows, including Rent, Cabaret, Proof, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. His film credits include Starship Troopers , the Harold and Kumar series, and Gone Girl.
“The ancient Greeks had technology in their DNA. And you can understand this in their religion because, they had a god for technology, Hephaistos. I remembered it while we are discussing this shield and thorax. They were made with fire and a hammer. And this was doing the work of the god Hephaistos. His characteristic tool was a fire and a hammer.”
The Museum Herakleidon was founded in 2004 by Mr. and Mrs. Firos and extends to two buildings in the historic district of Thissio, next to the Acropolis, the Ancient Agora and the Temple of Hephaestus. The first building is located at 16 Herakleidon str. and the second one 150 meters further, at 37 Ap. Pavlou str., one of the busiest pedestrian streets of Athens.During the first decade of its operation, the museum focused on artistic activities and organized exhibitions with artworks of great artists such as M.C. Escher, Victor Vasarely, Carol Wax, Constantine Xenakis, Adolf Luther, Francesco Scavullo, Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Sol LeWitt and others. At the same time, a plethora of cultural activities allowed visitors to explore the essence of each artist's perspective.
· www.herakleidon-gr.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I started Women in Media in 2010 as a sort of community group. We talked about women above and below the line because there weren’t any organizations or conversations really happening about women in the below the line positions, meaning women in the crew who are in the camera, art, grip and electronics departments. There were only conversations happening about more women directors and, being a scenic artist and production designer, I knew that there are so many women in the crew and there’s only one director. So if we only aimed for one, we would never get to parity and there would never be room like myself who wanted to advance from these crew positions.”
Tema Staig is the Executive Director of Women in Media, a non-profit organization that promotes gender equality in the film and TV industry. Tema is also a production designer, an art director known for her work on feature films such as Kissing Jessica Stein and American Splendor.
Allison Vanore is the secretary and treasurer of Women in Media. Allison is also the Emmy Award-winning producer of the digital series After Forever starring Kevin Spirtas.
· www.womennmedia.com
· www.temastaig.com
· www.imdb.com/name/nm1704951
· www.creativeprocess.info
“At first when I began writing these books, people told me that they didn’t think there was an audience for them. They thought it was a kind of niche subject, nobody was really that interested in it. And then gradually it became clear that there’s a surprisingly big audience of people that really have a craving for Classical wisdom and are interested in history, in the relationship between history and self-improvement and philosophy and psychotherapy.”
Donald Robertson is a writer, cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist, and a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH). He is known as an expert on the relationship between modern psychotherapy (CBT) and classical Greek and Roman philosophy, specifically Stoicism. He has been doing public speaking for over two decades and has spoken on over a hundred podcasts, webinars, and conferences. He has also published six books on philosophy and psychotherapy that have been translated into several languages. Titles include Stoicism and the Art of Happiness and the bestselling How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. His graphic novel, Verissimus: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, is due for publication around Autumn 2021.
· donaldrobertson.name
Plato’s Academy: donaldrobertson.name/2021/02/10/rebuilding-platos-academy/
· www.creativeprocess.info
“Think of yourself as a tree. You’ve got neighbours that you live beside for hundreds if not thousands of years, and none of you can move around, so you just have to communicate in other ways. And so trees have evolved to have these ways of communicating with each other, and they’re sophisticated, they’re nuanced. They include things like transmitting information through these root networks that link them together. They transmit information to each other through the air, so they perceive each other, they communicate and then they respond to each other. And that language is complex.”
Dr. Suzanne Simard is a professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. In 2016, she gave a TED talk about her groundbreaking discovery of how trees communicate with each other. Most recently, Dr. Simard has published a book called Finding the Mother Tree. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls in James Cameron’s Avatar) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.
· suzannesimard.com
· mothertreeproject.org
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“This generation really does hold the future of the planet in its hands.”
Peter Singeris often described as the world's most influential philosopher. The author of important books such as Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, Rethinking Life and Death, and The Life You Can Save, he helped launch the animal rights and effective altruism movements and contributed to the development of bioethics. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words.
· petersinger.info
· www.thelifeyoucansave.org
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I think direct contact with the material should be important to every sculptor because I think once you lose that it becomes a second-hand process. It’s one of the reasons the casting process isn’t so interesting to me just because the final product, the final piece has not been touched by the artist. There’s no relationship with the mind that conceived the piece or designed it. I think something is lost when that happens. And it becomes something else.”
Born in Cedar Falls Iowa and raised in New York City Mark Mennin graduated with a degree in History from Princeton University, where he also taught ceramics under Toshiko Takaezu. He began to carve stone in Italy in 1984, and worked there for three years, executing commissions and preparing for solo shows in New York. From 1989-1993, he worked in Paris, The scale of his sculpture has evolved to giant landscape and architectural works, often involving hundreds of tons of granite, prompting a move from New York to a large indoor-outdoor atelier in Bethlehem, Connecticut. where he lives with his wife, writer Marcia DeSanctis and two children.
· www.markmennin.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
Photo by Charles Lindsay
“I have three missions, topics of conversation, ideas for exhibitions and really discussions that we want to bring to life at the House, and those are stories of African-Americans, racial conflict, and social justice, as well as women and women’s stories, suffrage, and finally Wilson’s international legacy and how he was seen after the Great War. I think those three topics are topics that resonate today. So, even though they’re 100 years old and issues that he faced in his Presidency, these are topics that are still relevant. We’re still talking about social and racial justice. We’re still about women being enfranchised and women, not just in the vote, but having positions in Board of Directors, museums, companies, and corporations across the United States.”
Elizabeth Karcher is the Executive Director of the President Wilson House in Washington, D.C., a site owned and managed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Elizabeth manages the strategy and operations of this historic house and museum. The site’s current focus is on the themes of African American history, women’s history, and Wilson’s international impact. In addition to telling the many stories derived from the over 9,000 pieces in the collection of this National Historic Landmark and model historic and presidential site, Elizabeth’s goal for the house is to explore the social movements of the early 20th Century and their relevance today, discuss Wilson’s complicated and consequential presidency and to share deeper stories that tie the past to today.
Prior to joining the National Trust and the Wilson House, Elizabeth worked at Discovery, Inc. a leading global media company. Elizabeth holds a Master of Arts in International Relations from Rutgers University. She received her Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs from the American University of Paris, France.
· www.woodrowwilsonhouse.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“We have a motto that says that ‘we want to change the gaze on immigration or to open the eyes on immigration’. We’re not here to make action in society, but we want people who come here to have elements of reflection, perception about the question of immigration. To change a mind, because immigration is about the stories of people who come from another country–they are someone else, basically–by assisting them we want to show how someone else can be great for us and not a stranger, foreigner, nor an enemy, but a friend. Someone who will bring us many things about culture, about work, about a way of meaning, of thinking. We have a historical point of view. We want to show that from the French Revolution until now, so two centuries of stories.”
Sébastien Gokalp is the director of France’s National Museum of Immigration. He has managed projects at Centre Pompidou and musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris and curated exhibitions of Andy Warhol, Lucio Fontana, Robert Crumb, and others. He curates at the Louis Vuitton Foundation and teaches at the Ecole du Louvre. Recognizing that immigration is one of today’s most important issues, he sees his work as an opportunity to educate and combine his background in history and art.
· www.histoire-immigration.fr
· www.creativeprocess.info
“We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.”
Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
· halaalyan.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“‘Architecture is frozen music.’…There is something about when you’re exploring not knowing exactly where it’s going to go or how it’s going to turn out which creates an element of surprise and an element of intrigue.”
Michael Daugherty is one of the ten most performed living American composers. Recordings of his pieces Metropolis, Deus ex Machina and Tales of Hemmingway have earned him a total of 6 GRAMMY Awards, including Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2011 and 2017. Daugherty has written music for orchestra, band, and chamber ensemble. He is currently a Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan.
· michaeldaugherty.net
· www.creativeprocess.info
“What interested me about this particular experience is that I didn’t have the language to attach to it in the way I had the language to attach to a later experience that I would have no trouble calling rape, but happened to me and I call Mark in the book. I didn’t know what to call that for the longest time, so I didn’t know what to feel about it, and so as a writer that interests me. When I don’t have the words for something, when I sense that inevitably I’m going to fail.”
Jeannie Vanasco is the author of two memoirs. Her latest, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a TIME magazine Must-Read Book of the Year, and the 2020 winner of the Ohioana Book Award in nonfiction. Her debut, The Glass Eye, was honored as Indie Next and Indies Introduce selections by the American Booksellers Association. She lives in Baltimore and teaches at Towson University.
· www.jeannievanasco.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“People talk about the work life, the line between your work and your life and keeping them separate and keeping the balance. For me, it’s always been that my work defines who I am and who I am in my personal life also defines who I am at my workplace. I don’t know how you separate those identities because I take all my belief systems and who I am to my workplace.”
Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, book critic, and the host of the Desi Books podcast. Her debut collection, Each of Us Killers, was out in 2020 and won a Foreword INDIES award in the short stories category and was a finalist in the multicultural category. Her debut literary translation, Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu, was also out in 2020 and has been longlisted for the PFC-Valley of Words award in the English Translation category. She teaches at Writing Workshops Dallas.
· jennybhattwriter.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
Peter Weller · Actor, Art Historian & Director Peter Weller is a renowned theater and Hollywood actor. His performance in films such as Robocop and Naked Lunch garnering him much critical and commercial success over the years. Unbeknownst to most, Weller has spent much of his time over the decades, honing his appreciation for the visual and musical arts through his studies of the Renaissance era. Earning a Masters in Roman architecture from Syracuse University before moving onto a PHD in Renaissance art from UCLA, Weller has even penned numerous academic papers covering the era’s influence on modern art. Recently, Weller has even returned to the setting of RoboCop in Detroit, Michigan to deliver a lecture on “The Crisis in Beauty”. Peter has also contributed an essay to a music anthology The Creative Process has co-curated for Routledge Press. Weller’s essay details his memories of the late Miles Davis, who was both a friend and an inspiration. www.creativeprocess.info
“I try to preserve the Chinese music flavor. So, you imagine in Chinese band, the country music that people usually reserve for weddings or for big moments or for funerals. That kind of a feeling. Drums and music playing. I try to preserve it from my memory because what we have now is just a tune. You can probably recognize the tune, but the execution of translating that for a Western orchestra and make it sound like it’s a Chinese band playing Chinese instruments.”
Bright Sheng is a composer, conductor, and pianist. His work has been commissioned and performed by many prestigious institutions throughout the world, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and special commissions from the White House and for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Sheng has collaborated with many distinguished artists, including Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma, David Henry Hwang, Christoph Eschenbach, and many others.
· www.brightsheng.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
Photo: Santa Fe performance of Madame Mao
“This particular exhibition definitely had to do with my close relationship to dance. I have collaborated a lot with choreographers for contemporary dance theater, and I was often advising collaborators, so we would create the tasks and the content of the choreography together. We would exchange the tasks. We would create the score and narrative together. Also, because I’m a pianist, which is a very physically demanding instrument, you have this geography of the piano. I think this exhibitions links to my own experience as a performer and composer for dance and the relationship that music has with the body.”
Kiriakos Spirou is an editor, writer, content creator, pianist and composer based in Athens, Greece. After studying music in his hometown of Limassol, and then musicology in Athens, he moved to The Netherlands to complete a master's course in Music Design at the Utrecht School for the Arts. He is currently the deputy editor of Yatzer.com, and works for various publications as a freelancer. He is also the founding editor of Und. Athens, a new, alternative art guide for Athens.
· kiriakosspirou.wordpress.com/about/
· yatzer.com/yatzerpedia/kiriakos-spirou
· www.creativeprocess.info
“There’s a lot of controversy about that idea at the moment, about whether fiction is truly empathic and how much freedom the imagination should have because, as one of my friends says, the imagination is not free. It comes from all of the places that we come from. So it’s a controversial notion, but I am firmly on the side of literature is empathic. In fact, I think that all the arts are empathic because all the arts basically say, ‘Wait a minute. Look at it this way.’ And they allow us to see from some other vantage point than our extremely self-interested selves.”
Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, esssays, children’s books, and nine novels including The Buzzards; Raw Silk, Opening Nights, Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of The New York Times Book Review), Bridge of Sand and Simone in Transit.Plays include Parts of Speech, Sweepstakes, Boomerang, and Medea With Child,whichhave received readings and productions in Chicago, New York, London, San Francisco, Hollywood, and various regional theatres; Her Writing Fiction, now in its tenth edition, is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and Imaginative Writing is in its fourth edition. She is author of a collection of essays, Embalming Mom and the memoir Losing Tim. Winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council, she is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University.
· janetburroway.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I think the most critical thing is education for critical thinking. The ability to listen to a political argument or an argument of any sort, on COVID, for example, or climate change, and not necessarily understand the science behind that, but to understand how to evaluate the credibility of the speaker, how to evaluate the logic of the arguments and to see whether a conspiracy theory is behind this that has no grounding… And so I think what’s especially important in would be an educational in critical thinking.”
Robert Axelrod, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan where he has taught for over 4 decades. Receiving a PH.D. at Yale in Political Science, he is best known for his work and research concerning the evolution of cooperation and political behavior into the modern age, including topics like international and cyber security. He is an award-winning and extensively published scholar who has taught across the country, consulting for organizations like The UN, the World Bank, and the US Department of Defense. In 2012 he was awarded with the National Medal of Science by former US president Barack Obama concerning his extensive work in the behavioral social sciences. In this interview, Axelrod sits down with Mia to talk about his work, the current political climate, and his hopes for future political thinking and action.
·fordschool.umich.edu/faculty/robert-axelrod
· www.creativeprocess.info
Tom Perrotta is the bestselling author of nine works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed, Peabody Award-winning HBO series. His other books include Bad Haircut, The Wishbones, Joe College, The Abstinence Teacher, Nine Inches, and his newest, Mrs. Fletcher. His work has been translated into a multitude of languages. Perrotta grew up in New Jersey and lives outside of Boston. http://tomperrotta.com · www.creativeprocess.info
“For autistic individuals, there’s really sort of two paths. There are those today, about 35% percent of 18 year olds with an autism diagnosis who do go on to college or some form of post-secondary education, and then those who don’t. Of those who don’t and want to work, there’s about a 55% unemployment rate. And those who go to college and then look for employment afterwards, there’s about a 75 to 85% underemployment rate. So you can see the unemployment rates whether you go to college or not are astronomical, but they’re even higher if you go to college, which is sort of counterintuitive.”
President and Founder of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors ("Integrate"), co-author of The Neurodivergent Job Candidate: Recruiting Autistic Professionalsand An Employer’s Guide to Managing Professionals on the Autism Spectrum (2017) and frequent speaker on autism employment. Prior to founding Integrate in 2010, Ms. Scheiner held senior management positions in the financial services industry. Ms. Scheiner is a graduate of Wellesley College and has an MBA from Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. She is the parent of an adult son with autism.
· www.integrateadvisors.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
“In origami design, historically people have always used their intuition. They probably started by folding traditional shapes or folding designs by others, developed an intuitive understanding of how the paper behaves and then from there they can explore that intuition to create new shapes. That was the way design worked for years and years, that was the way it worked for me, but I eventually hit a limit to what I could do with my intuition and so part of my motivation for exploring mathematical methods was to externalise some of the design process. If I could get some of the design process on paper in a meaningful way, then I could handle more complicated goals than I could just fit in my brain.”
Robert J. Lang has been working with origami for over fifty years and is now recognized as one of the world’s leading masters of the art and one of the pioneers of the marriage of origami with mathematics and technology. He has consulted on applications of origami to medical devices, airbag design, and space telescopes, is the author or co-author of twenty-one books and numerous technical articles, and lectures and consults on the connections between origami, science, and technology.
· langorigami.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
David Tomas Martinez - Poet and author of “The Only Mexican” (Highlights)
“When I was younger, I never really thought of living past twenty-five…I felt like I was in a movie. I thought that I was living this movie idea of things and there’d be gunshots around you. You hear it hitting the concrete, and you’re like ‘Oh, shit’. Seriously, I didn’t think of it as real life. When you’re young, the idea that I’d known people that were killed early, you go to prison. These just felt like matter of fact. They seemed to be this part of life and you just accepted them.”
David Tomas Martinez is the author of two collections of poetry, Hustle and Post Traumatic Hood Disorder, both from Sarabande Books. Martinez is a Pushcart winner, CantoMundo fellow, a Breadloaf Stanley P. Young Fellow, NEA poetry fellow, and NEA Big Read author. Martinez lives in Brooklyn.
· davidtomasmartinez.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
“To not honor that we are all creative, beautiful, interesting deep, rich individuals. We’re not zeros and ones on a spreadsheet. We’re not scientifically explained. We are not mathematically judged. We are imperfect blobs of emotion and bone and spirit and life and when we come together there is nothing greater than the chemistry and the alchemy of musical theater… There’s a joy, there’s a bounce, there’s an effervescence that’s part of that music. I had a great teacher in college, the head of our program Brent Wagner said, 'With lyrics, I can tell you to open the door, but with music I can tell you how.’ Lyrics are information and music is emotion.”
Most highly noted for his stunning work in musical theater, Gavin James Creel is a Tony & Olivier Award-winning actor, singer and songwriter. On Broadway, he’s performed in shows including Throughly Modern Millie, Hair, The Book of Mormon, Waitress and Hello, Dolly!, his performance in which won him his first Tony Award. Creel is also a LGBTQ+ activist, having done much to raise awareness and fight for marriage equality.
· www.imdb.com/name/nm1342128
· www.creativeprocess.info
“I always find it an ironic thing to think about the fact that Fred Rogers was colour-blind. He could barely tell a blue from a grey. I was young and to him I was a child and I certainly played the role of a child and he played the role of parent… He was profoundly patient.”
Dr. François Clemmons is perhaps best known as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s Officer Clemmons. He made history as the first African American actor to have a recurring role on a children’s television program. He received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin College, a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and an honorary degree from Middlebury College. In 1973, he won a Grammy Award for a recording of Porgy and Bess; in 1986, he founded and directed the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble; and from 1997 until his retirement in 2013, Clemmons was the Alexander Twilight Artist in Residence and director of the Martin Luther King Spiritual Choir at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he currently resides.
· https://francoisclemmons.net
· www.creativeprocess.info
Avi Loeb is a Professor of Science at Harvard University and a bestselling author with lists of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly and more. Loeb wrote 8 books and over 800 papers on a wide range of topics, including black holes, the first stars, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the future of the universe. He had been the longest serving Chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy (2011-2020), and Founding Director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative. In 2012, TIME magazine selected Loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space.
Website: lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Essays in Scientific American: lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Opinion.html
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Photo: Lotem Loeb
“A lot of people in my family and among my friends when they heard that I study Yiddish and that later made it my livelihood, they are very surprised. Yiddish? How come Yiddish? Why Yiddish? They even laugh sometimes, they are very surprised. And what I answer to them is that there is nothing surprising about the fact that I study or speak Yiddish. The real surprise, the real question that has to be asked is how come my parents, this last generation, didn’t speak Yiddish? Because, if you consider my family, for hundreds of years on all sides they spoke Yiddish.”
Tal Hever-Chybowski is the Director of the Paris Yiddish Center (Maison de la Culture Yiddish) & Medem Library. He is the Founder and Editor of the diasporic-Hebrew journal Mikan Ve’eylakh in Berlin, and Ph.D. candidate at the History Department of Humboldt University, Berlin. He holds a B.A. in History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an M.A. in History from the Humboldt University. He translated into Hebrew Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1993), Mikhal Dekel’s The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Moment (2014), and is currently translating a forthcoming book on diaspora by Daniel Boyarin.
· www.yiddishweb.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process is proud to partner with UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development. Hear our first interview with Founding Director of UNESCO MGIEP Anantha Duraiappah, a part of our ongoing series of conversations around education, sustainability, and world peace. Stay tuned for more!
UNESCO MGIEP’s Events and initiatives around World Environment Day https://trello.com/b/NgNkbcm9/world-environment-day-nature-emotion
Course webpage: https://mgiep.unesco.org/course-climate-change
Sign up Form: https://climatechange.paperform.co/
Brochure: https://bit.ly/3ihjr7q
“The whole of hierarchy is just wrong. It’s about passion and it’s about letting the person explore themselves. That’s how I think education should be. It should not be a mechanised…it should be a place to explore. It’s a place to have dialogues."
Anantha Duraiappah took the position as inaugural Director of the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) based in New Delhi, India, in 2014. A science-policy pacesetter, with over 35 years’ experience, he now plays a key role in positioning UNESCO MGIEP as a leading science and evidence-based research institute on education for peace, sustainable development and global citizenship. Additionally, Anantha is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences (WAAS), a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and Co-Chair of The International Science and Evidence based Education (ISEE) Assessment that contributes to re- envisioning the future of education for human flourishing.
UNESCO MGIEP’s website: https://mgiep.unesco.org/ Vision page: https://mgiep.unesco.org/vision
Anantha’s profile: https://bit.ly/3q4ti1i
Anantha’s page + writings: https://mgiep.unesco.org/office-of-the-director
Youth Initiatives:
TAGe: https://mgiep.unesco.org/tage (Talking Across Generations on Education)
Kindness Campaign: https://mgiep.unesco.org/kindness
Compassionate Integrity Training: https://mgiep.unesco.org/cit
The Blue DOT publication: https://mgiep.unesco.org/the-bluedot - you can receive your free copy by signing up here: https://thebluedot.paperform.co/ https://mgiep.unesco.org/the-blue-dot-issue-10 http://mgiep.unesco.org/the-blue-dot-issue-6
Rethinking learning and the importance of Social and Emotional Learning released on Nelson Mandela Day last year: https://mgiep.unesco.org/rethinking-learning
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“When I compare novelists to short story writers or very short story writers, I can’t compare them, but one thing for sure, the purpose is different. I think that someone who writes tries to create or document a world. And when you write very short fiction you try to document a motion, some kind of movement.”
Etgar Keret was born in Ramat Gan and lives in Tel Aviv. He is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of five short story collections and, most recently, Fly Already and The Seven Good Years: A Memoir. In addition to his stories, he has written graphic novels, TV shows, movie scripts and a children’s book. Jellyfish, a film he directed with his wife Shira Geffen, won the 2007 Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. His work has been translated in thirty-seven languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among many other publications, and on the NPR radio program This American Life, where he is a regular contributor. He is the recipient of the 2016 Charles Bronfman Prize for "conveying Jewish values across cultures and imparting a humanitarian vision throughout the world."
· www.etgarkeret.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
Photo: Yanai Yechiel
“When we moved back to Hawaii and lived on Molokai. I was teaching at the Kalaupapa Leprosy Colony, we had no money. And I was spearfishing, not for sport, but to get food for my family. And it was a beautiful time of our lives. We were so poor, but we were not poor. Poor is a state of mind. We were without money, but we were having so much fun… You find out that art is really good for…whatever is inside comes out. And if you don’t have a way out, that’s not good. You need to have the air go from the inside to the outside, otherwise it becomes dead air.”
After leaving his home in Hawaii to journey through Asia in 1974, Paton Miller arrived on the East End of Long Island with a collection of travel inspired artworks that won him an art scholarship from Southampton College. Graduating with honors, Paton launched his career in over twenty solo and numerous group exhibitions in New York City and throughout the United States. Today, his works are exhibited internationally, in cities such as Florence and Shanghai. Paton’s paintings are now among the most widely collected works between the East End of Long Island and New York City.
· www.patonmiller.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
Boy and Painted Horse
Oil on canvas, 60 x 86 inches
“Cybernetics is the Greek word for governor, that’s where it came from. It was introduced into the contemporary discussion with a book by Norbert Wiener in 1948 called Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. These were the very early days of computers and they were looking for a theory to guide the creation of computers.”
Stuart Umpleby is Professor Emeritus of Management at George Washington University School of Business. He has served as President of the American Society of Cybernetics and is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Cybernetics and Systems. His studies in cybernetics, systems and management has led him to consult with the World Bank, US and Canadian government agencies as well as numerous corporate institutions throughout America, Europe, and Asia.
· https://blogs.gwu.edu/umpleby
· www.creativeprocess.info
David Rubin began his career in New York on the production staff of Saturday Night Live, before working on the casting of Ragtime, Silkwood, and Amadeus. His career as a casting director includes more than 80 motion pictures, including The English Patient, Men in Black, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Lars and the Real Girl. He has also assembled the casts of TV productions such as Big Little Lies, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Little Fires Everywhere. In 2002, he received the Casting Society of America’s Hoyt Bowers Award for outstanding contribution to the casting profession. David Rubin is currently the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
This episode originally aired in 2020.
Image courtesy of OSCARS.ORG · Artwork: Victoria Villasana
. www.oscars.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Gregory Jbara is a Tony award winning stage actor with a impressive career spanning over four decades . On Broadway, Gregory has stared in renditions of Chicago, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Billy Elliot, which earned him the 2009 Tony award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. Since departing from the stage, Gregory has spent ten seasons alongside Tom Selick in the CBS drama Blue Bloods. www.gregoryjbara.com www.creativeprocess.info
Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, the Donna Ford Attallah College of Educational Studies, Chapman University and Professor Emeritus, the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an award-winning author and editor of approximately 50 books. His writings have been translated into 25 languages. He is the recipient of numerous lifetime achievement awards and is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. One of the architects of critical pedagogy in North America, Professor McLaren is active politically in both North America and America Latina and is co-founder of Instituto McLaren de Pedagogia Critica in Ensenada, Mexico. His work is indebted to his mentor, Paulo Freire, and the Catholic social justice tradition of liberation theology. His latest book is He Walks Among Us: Christian Fascism Ushering in the End of Days. www.diopress.com/he-walks-among-us
Museum director, curator, and cultural producer at large, Chris Dercon is the President of the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais, an umbrella group of national museums in France. His career in major cultural institutions across Europe spans several decades. From 2011 to 2016, he was director of London's Tate Modern. He has been program director of MoMA PS1 in New York, and has served as director of the Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and Berlin's Volksbühne theater. He is also a presenter, writer and maker of cultural documentaries.
· www.grandpalais.fr
· www.creativeprocess.info
Debra Kerr is the Executive Director of Intuit - the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago. She was previously at the John G. Shedd Aquarium for 17 years - she is a past board member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, past chair and instructor for its Professional Development Committee and management courses, past chair of the zoo and aquarium committee for the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, and former board member of the National Veterans Art Museum.
She currently serves on the board for the Merit School of Music and the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Leaders Council.She frequently presents on issues related to museum relevance, teen empowerment and activating the public for social good.
· www.art.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
Director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C., Susan Fisher Sterling has built her career and the stature of the museum around the message of equity for women through excellence in the arts.
Unusual for the museum field, Sterling has dedicated her entire career to advancing NMWA’s mission.As an associate curator, curator of modern and contemporary art, and then chief curator/deputy director, she spent her first 20 years organizing exhibitions and publications of contemporary women artists.
Sterling assumed the directorship of the museum in 2008. During her ten-year tenure the museum has flourished, and has regularly received the highest Charity Navigator rating of 4 stars for sound fiscal and programmatic management. In 2017–18, NMWA celebrated its 30th anniversary with Washington Post “best pick” exhibitions like Women House and its annual gala honoring renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz.
A life-long champion of women through the arts, Sterling has received National Orders of Merit from Brazil and Norway and the President’s Award of the Women’s Caucus for Art. In 2017 she was named one of the Most Powerful Women in Washington by Washingtonian magazine. www.nmwa.org www.creativeprocess.info
Noelani Pantastico is from Oahu, Hawaii. She trained at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet and attended summer courses at Pacific Northwest Ballet School from 1994 to 1996. She joined Pacific Northwest Ballet as an apprentice in 1997. She was promoted to corps de ballet in 1998, soloist in 2001, and principal in 2004. In 2008, she left PNB to join Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo as a soloist and was promoted to first soloist in 2009. In 2015, Ms. Pantastico returned to PNB as a principal dancer.
In addition to her PNB repertory, Ms. Pantastico danced leading roles at Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo in Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Altro Canto, La Belle, Cendrillon, Choré, Faust, Men’s Dance for Women, Opus 40, Roméo et Juliette, Scheherazade, Le Songe, and Vers un Pays Sage; Marie Chouinard’s Body Remix; Alexander Eckman’s Rondo; Nicolo Fonte’s Quiet Bang; William Forsythe’s New Sleep; Emio Greco and Peter Scholten’s Le Corps du Ballet; Natalia Horeçna’s Tales Absurd, Fatalistic Visions Predominate; Johan Inger’s In Exact; Jiří Kylián’s Petite Mort; Pontus Lidberg’s Summer’s Winter Shadow; Matjash Mrozewski’s Pavillon d’Armide; and Jeroen Verbruggen’s Kill Bambi. She originated roles in Maillot’s Casse-Noisette Compagnie and Lac.
Ms. Pantastico was featured in the BBC’s 1999 film version of PNB’s production of Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London. In 2004, she performed the second movement of Balanchine’s Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet as a guest artist for New York City Ballet’s Balanchine Centennial.
In 2017, Ms. Pantastico choreographed Picnic for Sculptured Dance, a collaboration between Pacific Northwest Ballet and Seattle Art Museum presented at Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park. www.png.org · www.creativeprocess.info
Aaron Dworkin is a multifaceted artist and entrepreneur with passion for diversifying and amplifying the arts. Epitomizing how art, leadership, and diversity all play a vital role in advancing our society, Dwokin founded The Sphinx Organization, a non-profit organization that molds Black and Latinx classical musicians, and he serves on the advisory board for several prestigious arts organizations. Dworkin is an educator of both Arts Leadership and Entrepreneurial Leadership at his alma mater, the University of Michigan. Aaron Dworkin, decorated in awards and accolades, continues to be a force in his community, driving the need for diversity, arts education, and leadership. aarondworkin.com · www.creativeprocess.info
Reem Bassous received her Bachelor of Arts from The Lebanese American University in Beirut. Lebanon and her master of Fine Arts from The George Washington University in Washington DC. She started teaching drawing and painting in 2001 at The George Washington University, taught at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa for 9 years, and is currently an instructor at Leeward Community College at the University of Hawaiʻi. Bassous’ work is in permanent collections which include the Honolulu Museum of Art and Shangri La Museum for Islamic Art, Culture and Design. www.reembassous.studio · www.creativeprocess.info
Trish Sie is a multi-talented director whose work spans the realms of music videos, commercials, and short and feature films. After spending a decade as a professional dancer, championship ballroom competitor and choreographer, she built a successful and championed career in filmmaking. The first music video that she produced, “Here it Goes Again” for the band OK Go, won her a Grammy award. Her success expands to the world of films, where she has directed the likes of PItch Perfect 3 and Step Up: All In, using her dance and choreography experience to make magic happen on camera. Along with the Grammy, Trish has won a number of awards such as the Youtube award for most creative video, the smithsonian ingenuity award, and multiple accolades for best short film at various film festivals. www.bigbadtrish.com · www.creativeprocess.info
Jeffrey Rosen is a Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School. He is also the President and CEO of the National Constitution Center and a Contributing Editor of The Atlantic. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. His latest book, for the American Presidents Series, is William Howard Taft. His other books include: Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet; The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America, the best-selling companion book to the award-winning PBS series; The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America; The Naked Crowd: Freedom and Security in an Anxious Age; and The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. Professor Rosen is coeditor, with Benjamin Wittes, of Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change. His essays and commentaries have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, on National Public Radio, in The New Republic, where he was the legal affairs editor, and in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer. He hosts the weekly "We the People" podcast. The Chicago Tribune named him one of the ten best magazine journalists in America, and the Los Angeles Times called him the nation's most widely read and influential legal commentator. This interview was conducted before the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. constitutioncenter.org · www.creativeprocess.info
Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the second female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, Bader taught at Rutgers University Law School and then at Columbia University, where she became its first female tenured professor. She served as the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union during the 1970s, and was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1980. Named to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, she continued to argue for gender equality in such cases as United States v. Virginia. She died September 18, 2020 due to complications from metastatic pancreas cancer. www.creativeprocess.info
Tanner Woodford is founder and executive director of the Design Museum of Chicago. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and paints large scale typographic murals across public spaces. As a designer, educator, and entrepreneur, he has taught, lectured, and led workshops on design issues, social change, and design history in classrooms and at conferences. He is happy to be scrappy, irrepressibly optimistic, and believes design has the capacity to fundamentally improve the human condition. He lives and works in Chicago, Ill. designchicago.org · tannerwoodford.com www.creativeprocess.info
Vlad Sokhin is a Russia-born documentary photographer, videographer, and multimedia producer covering sociocultural, environmental, and human rights issues worldwide. His projects are supported by various UN agencies and international NGOs. Vlad’s work has been featured in over 40 publications, including National Geographic, NPR, Newsweek Japan, BBC, and The Guardian. In 2014, he was named Best Photographer in Russia, and in 2017, he was awarded the Visa d’or Franceinfo: Award for the Best Digital News Story for his “Warm Waters, Kamchatka” series.
Vlad is a citizen of the world. He is currently based in the Asia-Pacfic region and continues to work on photography and video projects there, in addition to Africa, Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. www.vladsokhin.com · www.creativeprocess.info
Jack Thorne is an internationally acclaimed playwright and BAFTA award-winning screenwriter. His adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is currently airing on HBO and the BBC, and his new series The Eddy was recently released for Netflix. Thorne’s screenwriting career began on the Channel 4 series Shameless and BBC series Skins. Later this year, his feature adaptation of The Secret Garden will be released and feature films Enola Holmes and Swimmers are on the way. Thorne’s films include The Aeronauts, starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, Wonder, starring Julia Roberts and A Long Way Down starring Toni Collette. As a playwright, Jack’s credits include the Tony and Olivier award-winning West End and Broadway hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. www.creativeprocess.info
Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories. Baxter lives in Minneapolis and has taught at the University of Minnesota and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. www.charlesbaxter.com · www.creativeprocess.info
Morgan Neville is an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. For over twenty years he has been making films about music and cultural subjects including Troubadours, Search and Destroy and three Grammy-nominated films: Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, Muddy Waters Can’t Be Satisfied, and Johnny Cash’s America. His non-music films include The Cool School, Steinbeck and Shotgun Freeway: Drives Thru Lost L.A.. Neville has also produced many documentaries, including Pearl Jam Twenty, Crossfire Hurricane and Beauty is Embarrassing. In 2014, 20 Feet From Stardom, won numerous awards including the Academy Award for Best Documentary. His next film, Best of Enemies, won an Emmy Award for Best Historical Documentary at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards in 2017. The film was also shortlisted for the 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Recent projects include Ugly Delicious, Abstract: The Art of Design, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, a documentary about Fred Rogers which was released by Focus Features in 2018 and has become one of the best reviewed and highest grossing documentaries of all time.
· tremoloproductions.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
Award-winning landscape artist April Gornik’s paintings and drawings of land, sky and sea are anchored in observed reality and a world synthesized, abstracted, remembered and imagined. Award-winning artist April Gornik has work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and other collections. Retrospectives of her art have traveled to museums in the U.S. and Canada. She has shown at the Whitney and Venice Biennales, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Weisman Museum, Guild Hall, Parrish Art Museum, and in Seeing Nature, a traveling exhibition of Paul Allen's collection featuring Monet, Klimt, Turner, Hockney, and others. She has contributed much to preserve the history and culture of Sag Harbor, leading many projects, including the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center and The Church. Mia recently completed a residency, as an inaugural artist participating in The Church’s new program, where she was able to witness first hand the depth of April’s engagement with the community and her dedication to art, not just as a means of self-expression but as a vehicle for bringing people together. She sat down with April in her studio in North Haven. www.aprilgornik.com · www.creativeprocess.info
Albert Serra has been called one of the most radical and singular filmmakers working today. Born in Banyoles, Spain, he studied literature and art history at Barcelona University. In 2006 he wrote, directed and produced his first feature film, Honor of the Knights, followed by Birdsong; both were selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. In 2010 he made Els noms de Crist before directing, a year later, El Senyor ha fet en mi meravelles for the exhibition Correspondencias at Barcelona. He is best known for his films Story of My Death and The Death of Louis XIV starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. His most recent feature film Liberté explores libertinism at the time of the French Revolution. www.albertserra.com · www.creativeprocess.info
James McDaniel is an actor and director best known for his award winning performances on NYPD Blue, Detroit 187, and Edge of America. When he’s not acting in front of the camera you can find James on and off-Broadway starring in works like Before it Hits Home, August Wilson’s Joe Turners Come and Gone, and most recently A Soldier’s Play. James also created the role Paul, in Six Degrees of Separation, setting the stage for future Black actors like Will Smith, who reprised the role in 1993. His television credits include Orange is the New Black, Madame Secretary, and most recently, Hysteria, streaming on Amazon Prime. Other film credits include The Battle for Bunker Hill, Steel City, and Malcolm X, amongst many others. www.creativeprocess.info
Hans-Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, and Senior Artistic Advisor of The Shed in New York. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Obrist has curated more than 300 exhibitions and lectured internationally at academic and art institutions. He is a contributing editor to Artforum, AnOther Magazine, 032C, a writes for Mousse, Kaleidoscope, Das Magazin and Weltkunst. He received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence and the International Folkwang Prize. His recent publications include Mondialité, Conversations in Mexico, Ways of Curating, The Age of Earthquakes with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar, and Lives of The Artists, Lives of The Architects. www.serpentinegalleries.org www.creativeprocess.info
Howard A. Rodman is a screenwriter, author and educator. His novels include The Great Eastern and Destiny Express. As a screenwriter, Rodman wrote Savage Grace, with Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne, nominated for Best Screenplay at the 2009 Spirit Awards, and AUGUST, starring Josh Hartnett and David Bowie. He also wrote Joe Gould’s Secret, the opening night film of the Sundance Film Festival, based on the memoir by iconic New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell. He is the past president of the Writers Guild of America West; professor of screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts; a member of the National Film Preservation Board; and an artistic director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs. howardrodman.com/ www.creativeprocess.info
Actor, producer, writer and director, Joe Mantegna began his career on the stage with the 1969 musical Hair. He later earned a Tony Award for portraying Richard Roma in the first American production of David Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross, the first of many collaborations with Mamet.
Mantegna has appeared in Three Amigos, The Godfather Part III, Forget Paris, and Up Close & Personal and other films. From 2007 to 2020 he starred in the CBS TV series Criminal Minds as FBI Supervisory Special Agent David Rossi. Since 1991, he’s had a recurring role on The Simpsons as mob boss Fat Tony. He earned Emmy Award nominations three miniseries: The Last Don, The Rat Pack, and The Starter Wife. He’s executive produced for various films and TV movies, including Corduroy, Hoods, and Lakeboat, which he also directed.
Robert Nathan is an award-winning television producer, screenwriter, journalist, and novelist. Best known for his work on the Law & Order television franchise and his novel The White Tiger. He has worked in politics, broadcast and print journalism, film, and television. Nathan joined the original writing staff of Law & Order, working on three series in the franchise. Nathan’s script for the episode “Manhood,” co-written with Walon Green, holds the franchise’s only Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. He was also on the original staff of the TV series ER and received a Peabody Award. Nathan has received four Emmy nominations, an Edgar Award nomination, the GLAAD Media Award, the Silver Gavel Award, the Shine Award, and a Humanitas Award nomination.
www.creativeprocess.info
Salvador Perez’s work is very diverse. He has designed for many TV series including Castle, Moonlight, Veronica Mars and 6 Seasons of The Mindy Project where he was nominated for an Emmy for costume design. Salvador has also worked on movies such as Pitch Perfect 1, 2 and 3, Think Like a Man 1 and 2, Men of Honor and Drumline. Born and raised in Central California, Perez moved to Los Angeles to attend The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising to pursue a career in fashion design. Once other Costume Designers discovered his costume manufacturing talents, he began running the costume workrooms and assisting on films like Titanic, The Flintstones, and Barb Wire. Outside of film and TV, Salvador designed and developed the “Movie Legends Line” for the J. Peterman Catalogue, he designed a line of Jewelry for Bauble Bar, and designed a signature line of colorful coats for GILT.COM. He is currently the elected president of the Costume Designers Guild.
· www.salvadorperezdesign.com
· www.creativeprocess.info
David Hollander’s career as a television creator, showrunner, screenwriter, producer and director has included Golden Globe winning drama Ray Donovan, The Guardian, Heartland and The Cleaner. As a writer, he began his career as a playwright in the early 1990’s with productions in New York and Los Angeles. In 1994, Hollander turned to screenwriting, working for Paramount Pictures and other major studios. Working in television since 2000, he has written over 100 credited episodes and directed over a dozen episodes. His film credits include directing the feature film Personal Effects, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Kathy Bates and Ashton Kutcher. A talented musician, he discussed with Mia the emotional core of his writing and how music informs his stories. He is currently continuing his work on Ray Donovan and adapting American Gigolo into a TV series for Showtime.
www.creativeprocess.info
Ian Wardropper is the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Director of The Frick Collection and has organized more than twenty exhibitions in his specialties of European sculpture, earlier decorative arts, and twentieth-century design and decorative arts. Exhibitions he co-organized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art include Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure for the Palaces of Europe in 2008 and Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture from Renaissance to Revolution in 2009. Recent publications include European Sculpture, 1400–1900, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bernini: Sculpting in Clay; Limoges Enamels at The Frick Collection; and The Frick Collection: Director's Choice.
· www.frick.org
· www.creativeprocess.info
It is difficult to make generalizations about Neil Gaiman’s books. His contributions to practically every literary genre have earned him a place in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers. His work has been honored with many awards internationally, including the Newbery and Carnegie Medals. His books and stories have also been honored with 4 Hugos, 2 Nebulas, 1 World Fantasy Award, 4 Bram Stoker Awards, 6 Locus Awards, 2 British SF Awards, 1 British Fantasy Award, 3 Geffens, 1 International Horror Guild Award and 2 Mythopoeic Awards.
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Siri Hustvedt is the internationally acclaimed author of a book of poems, six novels, four collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her books include What I Loved; Memories of the Future; Living, Thinking, Looking; and The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction. She has also published numerous papers in scholarly and scientific journals. She has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
· sirihustvedt.net
· www.creativeprocess.info
Photo by Marion Ettlinger
Novelist and short-story writer Yiyun Li discusses her two homelands – the China she left when she came to the University of Iowa to study immunology, and America, which has been her home for almost 20 years. In novels like Kinder than Solitude and The Vagrants, and short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, she has impressed critics and fellow writers with the grace and subtlety of her writing, even as she tells stories so truthful and critical that she won’t publish her books in China. Michel Faber, writing for The Guardian, said, “Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life’s insoluble mysteries...[she] is the real deal.”
Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She has served on the jury panel for Man Booker International Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and other. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.
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Dyer is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; two collections of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room; and six genre-defying titles: But Beautiful, The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, The Ongoing Moment and Zona, about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. A collection of essays from the last twenty years entitled Otherwise Known as the Human Condition was published in the US in April 2011 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His most recent book is White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World.
www.creativeprocess.info