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

"We need to learn from the animals how to live more gently, consume less and look out for each other in this great circle of life.": Our shared moment in time reminds us that we are one part of a vast ecosystem. Today, we explore how humanity can live in harmony with the Earth by paying attention to the land and lives of animals around us. We listen to those who translate the voices of the living...

“ 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.” Today, we’re looking at how the landscapes of our childhood shape the way we see the world. We explore memory, nature, and attunement to the present moment with composer Max Richter and writer and biologist David George Haskell . We’re joined by authors Kristin Ohls...

“It’s always very interesting that we have to make a case for art because we don’t have to make a case for fast food. Like, we don’t have to make a case for all of these sort of things in our lives that we do not need, and yet we have to make a case for beauty? We have to make a case for the soul? We have to make a case for humanity? We have to make a case for singing back the wounded world? That...

“As a psychotherapist, I've worked with thousands of people over my 53 years of practice, and I have had to learn to love each and every one of them. There is something about opening your heart and stopping judging and arguing, and listening again, inquiring until you find what is most lovable about another person, and that is a very difficult thing to do. We're all inclined to reject one another,...

My guest today is Ada Limón . She served two historic terms as the 24th poet laureate in the United States. She has brought poetry to public parks across the US, and her words have traveled through deep space, engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft. In over 20 years of writing in celebrated collections like Bright Dead Things and The Carrying and her new book, Startlement: New and Selected P...

Emmy van Deurzen is a philosopher, a therapist and a pioneer who has spent five decades mapping the architecture of human existence. Born in the Netherlands and trained in the radical psychiatric wards of France, she came to London in 1977 to work alongside R.D. Laing, only to realize the anti-psychiatry movement had kind of lost its way. She decided to build something new. Today, she's the founde...

Chiara Barzini has spent her life navigating the literal and cultural fault lines between Italy and California. Today we will discuss her book, Aqua: A Story of Water and Lost Dreams , and her life as an artist living between two countries. In her acclaimed 2017 novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake , she wrote about arriving in the San Fernando Valley just weeks after a catastrophic n...

“I think first of all that in order to have disillusion, you need to have illusion and I really want to sort of take a stand in the name of being a delusional person, you know? I do think illusions are necessary to our sense of creativity, and we need to fall in love with extreme projects, and we need to have ideas that are sometimes unsustainable. We need to dream big in order to be creative and...

“Lincoln Center is multiple stages. I think probably over three dozen stages across 16 acres. It is a vast canvas in and of itself. And then we have this beautiful plaza that leads to this beautiful campus, and that’s the visual I think that most people have when they think of Lincoln Center is this beautiful fountain in the center and these three gorgeous buildings. It’s New York’s biggest plaza,...

“We are in the middle of a labyrinth which suggests to us many fake corridors. What's the superpower of literature? Literature is like an antidote against propaganda. Propaganda explains the world easily in a two-dimensional way.  Literature gives you a more complex explanation. Literature tells personal stories.” Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of h...

Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinov is 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 Easter...

"I really do believe that the arts are critical to how we move forward together, and live performance in particular, I think, is a way of us practicing how to move across our ideological boundaries and find one another and imagine these new worlds together and create together." Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts —the nation's largest performing art...

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 h...

“ 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 sayin...

"So synanthropes are animals that have adapted to human-modified environments, and the Greek translation essentially is together with humans, so synanthrope. And they're a fascinating subset of wild animals that they're all around us, but we don't really notice them. And so in this new book, I was excited about writing something that had to do with the natural world. I was excited about writing so...

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...

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...

“Architecture should bring a true sensation of wellbeing. We were really lucky to experience that as children, and now as architects, we try to bring all that we learned into our practice.” 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 environ...

Why do we write? Is it to capture a memory before it vanishes or to build a bridge between the person we are and the stories we've been told? In this episode of The Creative Process , we explore the practice of writing as an awakening and tool for discovery with a group of celebrated poets, novelists, musicians and thinkers. We hear from neuroscientist, dancer and author Julia Christensen on how l...

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, inven...

“In the book I spend a bunch of time basically teaching skills and teaching frameworks of thinking. Not to indoctrinate, it's not a framework like an ideology where you need to believe exactly these things. This is a lot more about how does one use their minds effectively to solve problems that have been solved before. Of course, I work on things that have to do with investment and climate and the...

What if the defining revolution of Earth's history wasn't led by animals or humans, but by flowers? Are we truly individuals, or are our bodies and minds just walking ecosystems? Our guest today is  David George Haskell , a biologist who has spent much of his life training himself to see the universal within the infinitesimally small. He's famously sat for a year in a single square meter of T...

Step into the deep time of the forest floor, where a single fallen leaf contains the history of the world, and invisible fungal networks hum with ancient conversations. Biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell reveals a staggering truth: we are completely dependent on the botanical world, and our belief in strict human individuality is a biological illusion. Haskell has spent much of hi...

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...

“These oppressive structures are built to strip us of our humanity. One of the ways they do that is by filling us with anger and hatred. If we allow ourselves to stay there, we're doing the job of the oppressor for them by slowly killing ourselves. I wanted to make a movie that would remind people that we can't allow them to win by giving up our humanity . We have to hold onto our humanity and try...