Philosophy, Ideas, Critical Thinking, Ethics & Morality: The Creative Process: Philosophers, Writers, Educators, Creative Thinkers, Spiritual Leaders, Environmentalists & Bioethicists

What does learning another language and living in another culture do for your humanity and creative process? 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...

"I went to film school, But at the end of two years, I think you've only begun the learning. I think it's very hard in school, and particularly in graduate school, to take in all that's coming at you because you're being barraged with information, and you're trying to listen, and you're trying to internalize. At the same time, you're very anxious, and you're very fervent, but you're also furtive a...

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...

“I would go back to that very simple thing of treating animals the way that you would like to be treated. And I know that humane education is becoming a more welcome subject or way of teaching in schools. And I definitely think we need more of that where it's not just you go to school and learn about maths and science and history and so on, but you learn about those subjects within the realm of re...

How can we improve animal-human relationships? How can we increase our sensitivity to the other animals who share this planet with us? 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. “I would go back to that ver...

"I'm optimistic about education. There will likely be more traffic between technology and the arts. The tech world needs more creative-minded people and less literal people who have some understanding of how things work. With Jony Ive, you've got someone who designed the iPhone and was very interested in photography himself. We were talking about doing a portrait. He mentioned that he'd been fasci...

How can the arts help cultivate our intuitive intelligence? What does visual art teach us about consciousness and the human condition?    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 w...

"It seems that a lot of education is a little bit obsessed with training students to remember facts and figures. In the modern world, when every one of us has got the total of human knowledge in our pockets, it's much less important what you can hold in your head and what you can remember because you can just look it up whenever it becomes important, and it's now how you interpret or analyze or sy...

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 a...

“I think it's kind of important to think about the fact that originally, neural networks were inspired by neurons, really by our brains, but fundamentally, brains are really different than AI models, currently. Brains are quite efficient. For example, we won't be using all of our neurons all the time. If we're recognizing a face, or if we're speaking, or if we're drawing, or if we're watching a mo...

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, co...

"Re-living the Memories of an Indian Forester was really a neat way of trying to tell you, the current generation, especially the youngsters, how managing forests is not just black-and-white. It's not that the governments and the state are this kind of 'evil', and then you have NGOs and communities, who are this kind of 'goody two shoes'. And how it's in the gray areas that you can actually m...

How do urbanization and rural development impact communities differently? How can we make public policy and enlightened self-interest advance climate action? 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 Sust...

Scientists, artists, psychologists, conservationists, and spiritual leaders share their stories and insights on the importance of connecting with nature, preserving the environment, embracing diversity, and finding harmony in the world. Music courtesy of composer Max Richter . All voices in this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast. 00:05 Adapting...

“The first guitar I built, I took it to a friend who has a guitar business. And he looked at it and he said this instrument has the approximate shape of a guitar, but it's not a guitar. It's a piece of junk. And he was right. So, what I found is that it's thrilling, as an artist or as a scientist, to pursue something, even if you don't achieve the thing that you're pursuing but it's the attempt th...

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&...

“I had a very tangible interaction with a teacher that shaped everything in my life. I'm dyslexic, but I managed to get into a good university in the UK, and I was messing around in a class with 300 students, and the teacher sent me out of the class. But he met me after that class, and he essentially said, ‘What are you doing? Why are you here?’ And I was like, ‘I like ecology, but I just can't ke...

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, chai...

As we reach the tipping points of climate change, how will our world change? Greenland has already lost 4,700 billion metric tons of ice, an amount that is enough to flood the entire United States in 1.5 feet of water. Peter D. Ditlevsen is an Associate Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University. The institute was founded in 1921 as the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Ditlev...

"Clifford Geertz said that human beings uniquely are unfinished animals. And what he meant by that is that we come into the world with some structure, some constraints, some essential knowledge, but very incomplete. And society completes us. And that is not true of most of the other species in the world. They come into the world a lot closer to being complete than we do." Does having too many choi...

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...

Can we stop talking about growth and mediate an environmental crisis through the structures of capitalism? In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with Japanese scholar Kohei Saito, whose book, Marx in the Anthropocene sold over half a million copies. In it, Saito shows how late in life Marx came to a richer sense of production when he released that...

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with noted researcher and scholar Ben Franta about two new articles he has written that add to his growing archive of seminal work on climate change.  Ben tells us now the fossil fuel industry paid economists to join scientists in denying the true nature of the fossil fuel industry’s destruction of the en...

"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 r...

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...