Tech, Innovation & Society - The Creative Process: Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics Interviews (Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics Interviews - Creative Process Original Series)
Explorez tous les épisodes de Tech, Innovation & Society - The Creative Process: Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics Interviews
| Date | Titre | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 Feb 2022 | (Highlights) JEFFREY D. SACHS | ||
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. | |||
| 01 Mar 2022 | DOUGLAS WOLK | ||
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. | |||
| 01 Mar 2022 | (Highlights) DOUGLAS WOLK | ||
“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. | |||
| 10 Mar 2022 | (Highlights) PAULA PINHO | ||
“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. | |||
| 08 Mar 2022 | MERLIN DONALD | ||
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 | |||
| 10 Mar 2022 | PAULA PINHO | ||
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. | |||
| 09 Mar 2022 | EARL K. MILLER, Ph.D. | ||
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. | |||
| 09 Mar 2022 | (Highlights) EARL K. MILLER, Ph.D. | ||
“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. | |||
| 11 Mar 2022 | YOLANDA KAKABADSE | ||
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. | |||
| 11 Mar 2022 | (Highlights) YOLANDA KAKABADSE | ||
“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. 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 · Sistema B: sistemab.org · B Team: bteam.org | |||
| 08 Mar 2022 | (Highlights) MERLIN DONALD | ||
“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. 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 | |||
| 12 Mar 2022 | AZBY BROWN | ||
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 | |||
| 12 Mar 2022 | (Highlights) AZBY BROWN | ||
“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 | |||
| 15 Mar 2022 | ROLAND GEYER | ||
Roland Geyer is a Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the author of The Business of Less. Since 2000 he has worked with a wide range of governmental organizations, trade associations, and companies on environmental sustainability issues. His overarching goal is to help develop the knowledge, tools, and methods necessary to reduce the environmental impact from industrial production and consumption. · www.rolandgeyer.com | |||
| 15 Mar 2022 | (Highlights) ROLAND GEYER | ||
“So, if we study transportation, then we need to study urban development and infrastructure. Suddenly, we need to think about housing. We need to think about the co-location of jobs and shops, and you realize it's all connected. That might be one of the challenges of urban sustainability. It's all connected. So the way we move around is connected to the way we built the city. And I think the intrinsic sustainability or non-sustainability in urban areas seems to be designed in. Especially in the United States where there are just so many places where, if you don't have a car, you're basically stranded. You can't go anywhere. The European model is to have co-located things, and I miss that. I think it has some intrinsic sustainability built-in.” Roland Geyer is a Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the author of The Business of Less. Since 2000, he has worked with a wide range of governmental organizations, trade associations, and companies on environmental sustainability issues. His overarching goal is to help develop the knowledge, tools, and methods necessary to reduce the environmental impact from industrial production and consumption. · www.rolandgeyer.com | |||
| 22 Mar 2022 | BILL HARE | ||
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 | |||
| 22 Mar 2022 | (Highlights) BILL HARE | ||
“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 | |||
| 24 Mar 2022 | ALI SCHOUTEN | ||
Ali Schouten is a showrunner, executive producer, and writer who is quickly establishing herself as a creative on the rise as her formidable talent and artistic versatility continue to make waves. Schouten currently serves as the showrunner and executive producer of the wildly successful iCarly revival for Paramount+, which set 10 years later, features Miranda Cosgrove reprising her iconic role. The series was renewed for a second season and will return on April 8th after swiftly becoming one of the streaming service’s top acquisition drivers, ranking among their most streamed titles since the series’ debut. The series, which holds an impressive rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, continues to receive praise for its modernized and inclusive approach from audiences and critics alike, with Variety applauding its ability to “straddl[e] the line between childhood nostalgia and newfound maturity”. This follows her role as co-executive producer on the Latinx-led family series from Disney+, Diary of a Future President, created by Ilana Peña and executive produced by Gina Rodriguez. Schouten also served as a supervising producer on the Netflix holiday miniseries, MERRY HAPPY WHATEVER, starring Dennis Quaid, Bridgit Mendler, Brent Morin, and Ashley Tisdale. Additional credits include serving as consulting producer and writer on the CBS All Access series NO ACTIVITY, supervising producer and writer on the Hulu series ALL NIGHT, and co-producer and writer on the NBC series CHAMPIONS from Mindy Kaling and Charlie Grandy. Schouten also served as an executive story editor and writer on the hit ABC Family series, YOUNG AND HUNGRY, in addition to the Verizon go90's series, RELATIONSHIP STATUS, for which she received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for ‘Outstanding Writing in a Digital Drama Series’. | |||
| 24 Mar 2022 | (Highlights) ALI SCHOUTEN | ||
“What we deal with more in the second season is 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.” Schouten currently serves as the showrunner and executive producer of the wildly successful iCarly revival for Paramount+, which set 10 years later, features Miranda Cosgrove reprising her iconic role. The series was renewed for a second season and will return on April 8th after swiftly becoming one of the streaming service’s top acquisition drivers, ranking among their most streamed titles since the series’ debut. The series, which holds an impressive rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, continues to receive praise for its modernized and inclusive approach from audiences and critics alike, with Variety applauding its ability to “straddl[e] the line between childhood nostalgia and newfound maturity”. This follows her role as co-executive producer on the Latinx-led family series from Disney+, Diary of a Future President, created by Ilana Peña and executive produced by Gina Rodriguez. Schouten also served as a supervising producer on the Netflix holiday miniseries, MERRY HAPPY WHATEVER, starring Dennis Quaid, Bridgit Mendler, Brent Morin, and Ashley Tisdale. Additional credits include serving as consulting producer and writer on the CBS All Access series NO ACTIVITY, supervising producer and writer on the Hulu series ALL NIGHT, and co-producer and writer on the NBC series CHAMPIONS from Mindy Kaling and Charlie Grandy. Schouten also served as an executive story editor and writer on the hit ABC Family series, YOUNG AND HUNGRY, in addition to the Verizon go90's series, RELATIONSHIP STATUS, for which she received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for ‘Outstanding Writing in a Digital Drama Series’. | |||
| 01 Apr 2022 | ALICE SCHMIDT | ||
Alice Schmidt is 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”. | |||
| 01 Apr 2022 | (Highlights) ALICE SCHMIDT | ||
“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 Schmidt is 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”. | |||
| 08 Apr 2022 | DAVID SIMON | ||
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 | |||
| 08 Apr 2022 | (Highlights) DAVID SIMON | ||
“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 | |||
| 12 Apr 2022 | WILLIAM McDONOUGH | ||
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. 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 · https://mcdonoughpartners.com/projects ©DuHun Photography | |||
| 12 Apr 2022 | (Highlights) WILLIAM McDONOUGH | ||
“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. 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. 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 · https://mcdonoughpartners.com/projects | |||
| 15 Apr 2022 | IAIN McGILCHRIST | ||
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 | |||
| 15 Apr 2022 | (Highlights) IAIN McGILCHRIST | ||
"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.” 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 | |||
| 06 May 2022 | Ann Hiatt · Leadership Strategist & Author of “Bet on Yourself” | ||
Ann Hiatt is a best selling author, executive consultant, speaker, and investor. She is a Silicon Valley veteran with 15 years experience reporting directly to CEOs Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Eric Schmidt (Google/Alphabet). Ann consults with CEOs and their leadership teams across the globe on c-suite optimization. Ann has published articles in publications such as Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and CNBC. She has also contributed to articles in The New York Times, Economic Times, The Financial Times and Forbes. Her bestselling book, Bet On Yourself, was published by HarperCollins in 2021. · https://annhiatt.co
| |||
| 06 May 2022 | (Highlights) Ann Hiatt · Leadership Strategist & Author of “Bet on Yourself” | ||
"I am very concerned that the future seems to be consolidated among the 10 wealthiest, most powerful people in the world who are all white guys. And they're great. I know most of them personally. I have mad respect for them, but it's really concerning when a private individual can buy Twitter. It's very concerning when a billionaire can own one of the most important news organizations in the United States. When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, at first I was very excited about it because we all know that journalism and journalistic integrity are an essential part of modern democracy. And that was very much threatened and dismantled by technology because their revenue structure was destroyed with the internet. So they had to reinvent themselves. So at first, when he bought it, I thought, Oh good, he's going to give them new lifeblood. And now I'm like, Oh, no. When we have major billionaires controlling the dialogue, the discussions, the flow of information–whether that's Facebook or Twitter or news organizations, that's really concerning. So my major deliverable and really the motivation behind writing Bet on Yourself was to democratize success, democratize entrepreneurism, and to wake up inside all of us, realizing that whether you're an intrepreneur working in another company, or if you're a more traditional quote, unquote entrepreneur - it doesn't have to be in a garage or getting funding from traditional VC companies. I wanted to wake that up in as many minds as possible that we can make a huge difference. No matter your expertise, your industry, your risk tolerance, there are ways that we can all participate in this, and what we need most, especially now when core algorithms of artificial intelligence are being written, is more participation from more perspectives. Whether that's cultural...every possible definition of diversity. I want more people participating because what concerns me most about globalization is it's being controlled by about 10 people." Ann Hiatt is a best selling author, executive consultant, speaker, and investor. She is a Silicon Valley veteran with 15 years experience reporting directly to CEOs Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Eric Schmidt (Google/Alphabet). Ann consults with CEOs and their leadership teams across the globe on c-suite optimization. Ann has published articles in publications such as Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and CNBC. She has also contributed to articles in The New York Times, Economic Times, The Financial Times and Forbes. Her bestselling book, Bet On Yourself, was published by HarperCollins in 2021. · https://annhiatt.co · www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 20 May 2022 | Noah Wilson-Rich · Co-founder/CEO, The Best Bees Co, Urban Beekeeping Driven by Science & Tech | ||
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. “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.” Their blog offers many resources: National Pollinator Week June 20 - 26 www.pollinator.org Green roof company · Noah-Wilson Rich’s website: | |||
| 20 May 2022 | (Highlights) Noah Wilson-Rich · Co-founder/CEO, The Best Bees Co, Urban Beekeeping Driven by Science & Tech | ||
“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.” · Book: The Bee: A Natural History · Their blog offers many resources: · National Pollinator Week June 20 - 26 · Green roof company · Noah-Wilson Rich’s website: | |||
| 23 May 2022 | Bill Novelli · Founder, Business for Impact Program, Georgetown · Co-founder Porter Novelli | ||
Bill Novelli co-founded Porter Novelli one of the first social marketing companies and now a global PR agency, he started the Business for Impact program at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. He is formerly the CEO of AARP, the president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and the COO of CARE USA. He’s the author of Good Business, The Talk, Fight, Win Way to Change the World and coauthor of Fifty Plus: Give Meaning and Purpose to the Best Time of Your Life. He served in and helped reposition and market the Peace Corps and began his career in marketing management at Unilever. “This is one of the biggest problems that we have in this country. So, on the one hand, we know that we have to take personal responsibility for ourselves, our own health, our families – it's up to us. As some people like to say, you're on your own. And we have to balance that against the concept that we're all in this together. You know, the idea that it takes a village and both sides essentially disrespect the other side. They criticize the other side. No, we're not in this together. It's your own responsibility, and vice versa. If we're going to be good citizens, and we're going to make progress, we have to see both sides of that equation. That's not easy to do.” · businessforimpact.georgetown.edu/ Business & Society is a 10-episode limited series co-hosted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk. | |||
| 24 May 2022 | Petra Cortright · Digital Artist | ||
Petra Cortright is 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. "I really didn't see the NFT thing coming. For sure, crypto. I remember when internet artists were getting into that years ago and that always seemed like it was going to develop into something substantial, but in terms of the NFTs, I've just been very surprised and charmed by people all of a sudden caring about digital images because I spent so many years literally trying to figure out a way to print them out. It just wasn't seen as serious as an oil painting or something like that. I think I tried every single platform that there is to try. I released hundreds of them, which was fun because my practice can allow that. The gallery system is very – I have to hold back so much – and also when you're making physical things, the physical paintings they're quite expensive to produce. We can't make endless. It's labor-intensive, and it's expensive to make physical things, but with the NFTs, it just was kind of a way to show the range and the scale that is possible with my practice." · www.petracortright.com · Show at Societé in Berlin: BALEAF GYS AKADEMIKS MAAMGIC BROKIG: · Show at Foxy production at the beginning of this year: https://www.foxyproduction.com/exhibitions/1756 Photo by Stefan Simchowitz | |||
| 24 May 2022 | (Highlights) Petra Cortright · Digital Artist | ||
"I really didn't see the NFT thing coming. For sure, crypto. I remember when internet artists were getting into that years ago and that always seemed like it was going to develop into something substantial, but in terms of the NFTs, I've just been very surprised and charmed by people all of a sudden caring about digital images because I spent so many years literally trying to figure out a way to print them out. It just wasn't seen as serious as an oil painting or something like that. I think I tried every single platform that there is to try. I released hundreds of them, which was fun because my practice can allow that. The gallery system is very – I have to hold back so much – and also when you're making physical things, the physical paintings they're quite expensive to produce. We can't make endless. It's labor-intensive, and it's expensive to make physical things, but with the NFTs, it just was kind of a way to show the range and the scale that is possible with my practice." Petra Cortright is 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: · 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 | |||
| 27 May 2022 | Derrick Emsley · Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel | ||
From a young age, Saskatchewan born Derrick Emsley has been actively connecting people with environmental stewardship. At 16, he and his brother Kalen founded a tree planting company that sold carbon offsets to businesses, a venture that saw over $1 million dollars in contracts and 150,000 trees planted. Derrick founded tentree, the apparel company that plants trees for purchases, soon after graduating from Richard Ivey School of Business in 2012. In just under a decade, tentree has set new standards for apparel brands with environmentally progressive values. Based on its success creating a model for engagement between the brand and its consumers, Derrick co-founded veritree last year, as a platform for regeneration that other brands can use to create similar impact. Named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2020, Derrick has become a voice for a modern generation—one who recognizes the necessity of a brand that's earth-first, transparent, and community-focused. "I think what's powerful about a tree is it's tangible and it's symbolic in a lot of ways. We as humans naturally have this emotional connection, I think, to trees, and so particularly when you think of our ability to take action within the climate crisis conversation, a tree is this really powerful symbol and vehicle because it's a lot easier to understand a tree than it is to understand a pound or two of CO2 that's floating in the air. So for us, tree planting is just the start of the communication, just the start of the impact. Really if all it was was to get a stick in the ground that wouldn't have the long-term impact, whether that be carbon, whether that be socioeconomic impact, and things like that. So really for us, veritree helps us collect all that data and create the operating system to pull in the data on everything from planting forms and field updates that are coming in, survivability analysis, and different updates on things like biodiversity. We're partnering with some groups to test underwater sensors in some of these planting sites. We're collecting socioeconomic surveys and things like that to try to attach the impact to the community and back to the planting that's happening." · veritree Launches Community of 30 Brand Partners to Plant 10 Million Verified Trees veritree Partners with Samsung to Plant Millions of Trees in 2022 | |||
| 26 May 2022 | (Highlights) Derrick Emsley · Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel Co. | ||
"I think what's powerful about a tree is it's tangible and it's symbolic in a lot of ways. We as humans naturally have this emotional connection, I think, to trees, and so particularly when you think of our ability to take action within the climate crisis conversation, a tree is this really powerful symbol and vehicle because it's a lot easier to understand a tree than it is to understand a pound or two of CO2 that's floating in the air. So for us, tree planting is just the start of the communication, just the start of the impact. Really if all it was was to get a stick in the ground that wouldn't have the long-term impact, whether that be carbon, whether that be socioeconomic impact, and things like that. So really for us, veritree helps us collect all that data and create the operating system to pull in the data on everything from planting forms and field updates that are coming in, survivability analysis, and different updates on things like biodiversity. We're partnering with some groups to test underwater sensors in some of these planting sites. We're collecting socioeconomic surveys and things like that to try to attach the impact to the community and back to the planting that's happening.” From a young age, Saskatchewan born Derrick Emsley has been actively connecting people with environmental stewardship. At 16, he and his brother Kalen founded a tree planting company that sold carbon offsets to businesses, a venture that saw over $1 million dollars in contracts and 150,000 trees planted. Derrick founded tentree, the apparel company that plants trees for purchases, soon after graduating from Richard Ivey School of Business in 2012. In just under a decade, tentree has set new standards for apparel brands with environmentally progressive values. Based on its success creating a model for engagement between the brand and its consumers, Derrick co-founded veritree last year, as a platform for regeneration that other brands can use to create similar impact. Named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2020, Derrick has become a voice for a modern generation—one who recognizes the necessity of a brand that's earth-first, transparent, and community-focused. · veritree Launches Community of 30 Brand Partners to Plant 10 Million Verified Trees veritree Partners with Samsung to Plant Millions of Trees in 2022 | |||
| 31 May 2022 | Nicholas A. Christakis - Author of “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society" - Dir. - Human Nature Lab, Yale | 00:56:00 | |
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. “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? Nicholas Christakis humannaturelab.net/people/nicholas-christakis Human Nature Lab: humannaturelab.net Yale Institute for Network Science yins.yale.edu sociology.yale.edu/people/nicholas-christakis Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society 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.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/robots-human-relationships/583204/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 31 May 2022 | Highlights - Nicholas Christakis - Author of “Blueprint” - Dir. - Human Nature Lab, Yale | 00:09:55 | |
“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: humannaturelab.net/people/nicholas-christakis Human Nature Lab: humannaturelab.net Yale Institute for Network Science: yins.yale.edu sociology.yale.edu/people/nicholas-christakis Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live 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 | |||
| 05 Jun 2022 | Sir Geoff Mulgan, Author of “Another World is Possible” | ||
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. "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.” geoffmulgan.com hurstpublishers.com/book/another-world-is-possible www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org | |||
| 05 Jun 2022 | Highlights-Sir Geoff Mulgan, Author of “Another World is Possible” | ||
"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 | |||
| 10 Jun 2022 | Yee Lee - Chief of Growth at Terraformation - Silicon Valley Entrepreneur | 00:39:47 | |
Yee Lee was the first employee at Terraformation, dedicated to restoring the planet’s forests to solve climate change. He is a serial technology entrepreneur and angel investor from Silicon Valley, having invested in over 100 technology startups. Prior to Terraformation, Yee was an early team member at PayPal and Slide. He founded four venture-backed ecommerce and financial technology startups with M&A exits to Google and TaskRabbit (now part of IKEA). In his capacity as Chief of Growth at Terraformation, Yee supports Business Development, Sales, Capital Markets, and Terraformation Foundation teams. 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 www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 10 Jun 2022 | Highlights - Yee Lee - Chief of Growth at Terraformation | ||
“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 | |||
| 17 Jun 2022 | Chris Funk - Director, Climate Hazards Center - Author of “Drought, Flood, Fire…” | 00:37:41 | |
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. “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.” www.chc.ucsb.edu www.chc.ucsb.edu/people/chris-funk Drought, Flood, Fire: www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 17 Jun 2022 | Highlights - Chris Funk - Dir., Climate Hazards Center - Author of “Drought, Flood, Fire…” | 00:12:19 | |
“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: www.cambridge.org/core/books/drought-flood-fire/96E0EB1519F5175B68079D294D0B0E93 www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 22 Jun 2022 | KC Legacion on Degrowth, Technology and Social Media | 00:42:41 | |
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. "There's actually an entire subfield of degrowth scholarship that's called degrowth and technology, which looks at technology's role in these sociological transformations pursued by degrowthers. My master's research focuses on looking at social media through a degrowth lens. Specifically, I'm using concepts in the literature called "conviviality", which was first formulated by Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born priest, critic, and philosopher who wrote a number of texts in the 1970s that sharply analyzed industrial ways of life...I collected data on six social media, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Decidim, Mastodon, and iNaturalist, and I'm using this lens of conviviality to analyze the different components of social media.” www.degrowth.info www.kclegacion.com www.decidim.org www.joinmastodon.org www.iNaturalist.org www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 22 Jun 2022 | Highlights - KC Legacion on Degrowth, Technology and Social Media | 00:18:24 | |
"There's actually an entire subfield of degrowth scholarship that's called degrowth and technology, which looks at technology's role in these sociological transformations pursued by degrowthers. My master's research focuses on looking at social media through a degrowth lens. Specifically, I'm using concepts in the literature called "conviviality", which was first formulated by Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born priest, critic, and philosopher who wrote a number of texts in the 1970s that sharply analyzed industrial ways of life...I collected data on six social media, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Decidim, Mastodon, and iNaturalist, and I'm using this lens of conviviality to analyze the different components of social media.” 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 | |||
| 24 Jun 2022 | Highlights - David A. Banks - Dir. of Globalization Studies - SUNY Albany | 00:13:04 | |
"All of the technologies necessary to solve a great deal of problems have already been done. The issue is having the political will to make them actually happen. Capital won't do that because it's more advantageous financially to have the problem continually move and then just kind of fix it here and then move it over there and then fix it over there and then move it back over here.” 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 | |||
| 24 Jun 2022 | David A. Banks - Dir. of Globalization Studies - SUNY Albany - Author of “The City Authentic” | 00:52:12 | |
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. "All of the technologies necessary to solve a great deal of problems have already been done. The issue is having the political will to make them actually happen. Capital won't do that because it's more advantageous financially to have the problem continually move and then just kind of fix it here and then move it over there and then fix it over there and then move it back over here.” 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 | |||
| 28 Jun 2022 | Roy Scranton - Author of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” - “We’re Doomed, Now What?” | 00:44:31 | |
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. "Capitalism and technological innovation have brought a higher standard of living and greater health to the people of the world. That's inarguable. That's absolutely true. It's a combination of capitalism, imperialism, and technological innovation that have raised all boats in their way and increased standards of living and so on. People like Stephen Pinker make this argument. There are various kinds of Just So Stories about how we're all better off now because of capitalism and technological development than humans were in 1784. The thing that all these stories ignore, however, is two things. One is that this trendline parallels various other trend lines that measure our devastation and exploitation of the earth. This trendline is real, right? In terms of human wealth and general quality of life as measured in numerical terms. The costs for that are also manifest and have largely been externalized." http://royscranton.net Photo by Ola Kjelbye | |||
| 28 Jun 2022 | Highlights - Roy Scranton - Author of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” | 00:09:54 | |
"Capitalism and technological innovation have brought a higher standard of living and greater health to the people of the world. That's inarguable. That's absolutely true. It's a combination of capitalism, imperialism, and technological innovation that have raised all boats in their way and increased standards of living and so on. People like Stephen Pinker make this argument. There are various kinds of Just So Stories about how we're all better off now because of capitalism and technological development than humans were in 1784. The thing that all these stories ignore, however, is two things. One is that this trendline parallels various other trend lines that measure our devastation and exploitation of the earth. This trendline is real, right? In terms of human wealth and general quality of life as measured in numerical terms. The costs for that are also manifest and have largely been externalized." 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 | |||
| 13 Jul 2022 | Neil Grimmer - Brand President - SOURCE Global - Innovator of the SOURCE Hydropanel | 00:40:53 | |
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. “So at SOURCE, we have one core technology, which is called a SOURCE Hydropanel. If you look at it, it looks like a solar panel, but what it really does is it pulls the water vapor out of the air, and then condenses it into liquid water, which we then mineralize for health and taste, and then bring to the end customer - whether that's a village in a remote part of the world or an office building or a hospital that needs water - we plumb it directly in so that people can have access to clean, safe drinking water, and it's done completely off the grid.” www.source.co www.source.co/team/neil-grimmer www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 13 Jul 2022 | Highlights - Neil Grimmer - Brand Pres. - SOURCE Global - Drinking Water Made from Sunlight and Air | 00:08:20 | |
“So at SOURCE, we have one core technology, which is called a SOURCE Hydropanel. If you look at it, it looks like a solar panel, but what it really does is it pulls the water vapor out of the air, and then condenses it into liquid water, which we then mineralize for health and taste, and then bring to the end customer - whether that's a village in a remote part of the world or an office building or a hospital that needs water - we plumb it directly in so that people can have access to clean, safe drinking water, and it's done completely off the grid.” 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 www.source.co/team/neil-grimmer www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 15 Jul 2022 | Cynthia Daniels - Grammy and Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer | 01:14:03 | |
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. “One thing I do know is that over-compressed music is distorted music and distortion has an introduction of harmonic frequencies that absolutely create an inurement and inability to discern certain sounds and basically make people deaf. Bottom line, new music is over-compressed, ultra-distorted, and even at low levels, will create deafness. And it's a scientifically proven, and that means we've got this entire generation…Somehow I feel like with all the internet and the attention disorder that we discussed, we’re synthesizing into new human beings. ‘Something is happening here but, you don't know what it is.’ That's to quote an old Bob Dylan song. ‘...do you, Mr. Jones?’ And there's always something happening, and you don't know what it is.” www.cynthiadaniels.net www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org | |||
| 15 Jul 2022 | Highlights - Cynthia Daniels - Grammy - Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer | 00:14:45 | |
“One thing I do know is that over-compressed music is distorted music and distortion has an introduction of harmonic frequencies that absolutely create an inurement and inability to discern certain sounds and basically make people deaf. Bottom line, new music is over-compressed, ultra-distorted, and even at low levels, will create deafness. And it's a scientifically proven, and that means we've got this entire generation…Somehow I feel like with all the internet and the attention disorder that we discussed, we’re synthesizing into new human beings. ‘Something is happening here but, you don't know what it is.’ That's to quote an old Bob Dylan song. ‘...do you, Mr. Jones?’ And there's always something happening, and you don't know what it is.” 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 www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org | |||
| 19 Jul 2022 | Dr. Charles D. Koven - Earth System Scientist - Lead Author on the IPCC Report | 00:48:54 | |
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. "How do we actually get deployment of clean technologies everywhere around the world with the urgency that's needed, at the scale that's needed is an incredibly daunting challenge. We do have a lot of the technologies. We haven't deployed them as fast as we would hope, but that seems to be changing. Solar is the fastest growing energy source in the world right now. We are starting to see movement in terms of the replacement of our light duty passenger vehicle transport system away from gasoline-powered cars and towards electric cars. So we're starting to see important movements happening.” www.ipcc.ch www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 19 Jul 2022 | Highlights - Dr. Charles D. Koven - Lead Author - IPCC Report - Earth System Scientist | 00:10:19 | |
"How do we actually get deployment of clean technologies everywhere around the world with the urgency that's needed, at the scale that's needed is an incredibly daunting challenge. We do have a lot of the technologies. We haven't deployed them as fast as we would hope, but that seems to be changing. Solar is the fastest growing energy source in the world right now. We are starting to see movement in terms of the replacement of our light duty passenger vehicle transport system away from gasoline-powered cars and towards electric cars. So we're starting to see important movements happening.” 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. www.ipcc.ch www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 21 Jul 2022 | Bertrand Piccard - Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions | 00:57:59 | |
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, Special Advisor to the European Commission, and is author of Réaliste, Changer d’Altitude, and other books. “All the holders of solutions, all the innovators could be a startup or a big company, can submit their solution to us, and the solution will be analyzed by our group of experts. We have external and independent experts, about 370 of them, and they will observe three criteria: Is it a solution that exists today and is credible today? Because we don't want to have vague ideas for the future. We want to have solutions for today. Then it needs to be economically profitable for the company who produces it and for the consumer. The people buying the solution must save money, otherwise it's not profitable. And it needs to protect the environment, either because it's much better than anything else existing today, or because it's clearly a new business opportunity to protect the environment. If you have these criteria that are all three positive, then the experts will give a recommendation that we give the label, and then they will receive the label. The Solar Impulse Efficient Solution Label is currently the first and only label in the world that certifies the profitability of an environmentally friendly product.” Solar Impulse Solutions Explorer (1400+) www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info Photo credit: Philipp Böhlen | |||
| 21 Jul 2022 | Highlights - Bertrand Piccard - Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions | 00:12:06 | |
“All the holders of solutions, all the innovators could be a startup or a big company, can submit their solution to us, and the solution will be analyzed by our group of experts. We have external and independent experts, about 370 of them, and they will observe three criteria: Is it a solution that exists today and is credible today? Because we don't want to have vague ideas for the future. We want to have solutions for today. Then it needs to be economically profitable for the company who produces it and for the consumer. The people buying the solution must save money, otherwise it's not profitable. And it needs to protect the environment, either because it's much better than anything else existing today, or because it's clearly a new business opportunity to protect the environment. If you have these criteria that are all three positive, then the experts will give a recommendation that we give the label, and then they will receive the label. The Solar Impulse Efficient Solution Label is currently the first and only label in the world that certifies the profitability of an environmentally friendly product.” 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 Solutions Explorer (1400+) Photo credit: Solar Impulse/ Stefatou www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 25 Jul 2022 | Kevin Trenberth - Nobel Prize-winning Climate Scientist - Author of “The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System” | 00:57:56 | |
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". "I think certainly we're going to go through 1.5 degrees Celsius. I think the best estimate is probably somewhere around 2032 or thereabouts, the early 2030s. And at the current rate we're going, we'll go through 2 degrees Celsius in the mid to late 2050s. Now there's certainly time to slow that rate of increase down, and we could easily push the 2 degrees Celsius threshold out to 2070 or 2080. And with really strong efforts, we might be able to hold the overall global mean surface temperature increase to something maybe close to that. Although, whether it goes past it and then comes back a little bit to it, remains to be seen. So this relates to current policies and what nations are committed to doing. Certainly, if everyone's current policies and what they're committed to doing were in place, we would be in a much better situation than we actually are because a lot of those policies have been mentioned, but there are no implementation plans in many countries. There was a recent report I saw, which said that maybe two countries in the world, out of 190 something countries, are maybe on track to meeting their obligations on the COP26 meeting in Glasgow last year.” 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 | |||
| 25 Jul 2022 | Highlights - Kevin Trenberth - Nobel Prize Winner - Author of “The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System” | 00:12:40 | |
"I think certainly we're going to go through 1.5 degrees Celsius. I think the best estimate is probably somewhere around 2032 or thereabouts, the early 2030s. And at the current rate we're going, we'll go through 2 degrees Celsius in the mid to late 2050s. Now there's certainly time to slow that rate of increase down, and we could easily push the 2 degrees Celsius threshold out to 2070 or 2080. And with really strong efforts, we might be able to hold the overall global mean surface temperature increase to something maybe close to that. Although, whether it goes past it and then comes back a little bit to it, remains to be seen. So this relates to current policies and what nations are committed to doing. Certainly, if everyone's current policies and what they're committed to doing were in place, we would be in a much better situation than we actually are because a lot of those policies have been mentioned, but there are no implementation plans in many countries. There was a recent report I saw, which said that maybe two countries in the world, out of 190 something countries, are maybe on track to meeting their obligations on the COP26 meeting in Glasgow last year.” 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 Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System www.ipcc.ch https://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 26 Jul 2022 | Donald Hoffman - Prof. of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine - Author of “The case against reality” | 00:43:54 | |
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?” "So the idea of the multiverse, as you all know, is a pretty big idea in physics right now. Many physicists are thinking about interpreting quantum theory in terms of the multiverse or many-worlds interpretation. Max Tegmark, for example, has the idea that there's what he calls a Level IV multiverse. He thinks that mathematics is fundamental. So the fundamental reality is just mathematics, and in some sense, Gödel's incompleteness theorem says that there's endless mathematics. There's no end to mathematical exploration. And so that's Tegmark's multiverse: whatever is mathematically possible is actual." http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 26 Jul 2022 | Highlights - Donald Hoffman - Author of “The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes” | 00:09:42 | |
"So the idea of the multiverse, as you all know, is a pretty big idea in physics right now. Many physicists are thinking about interpreting quantum theory in terms of the multiverse or many-worlds interpretation. Max Tegmark, for example, has the idea that there's what he calls a Level IV multiverse. He thinks that mathematics is fundamental. So the fundamental reality is just mathematics, and in some sense, Gödel's incompleteness theorem says that there's endless mathematics. There's no end to mathematical exploration. And so that's Tegmark's multiverse: whatever is mathematically possible is actual." 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/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 15 Aug 2022 | Bruce Mau - Author of "Mau MC24…24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work” | 01:04:17 | |
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. "Cities are certainly a great place to start because the way that we do them - you can see it if you go up in an airplane and look down - you can see that they're built against nature. You can see it in the color of the city. It's interesting. We reflect it in our maps. Cities are gray, and the rest of the world is green. We build them against the natural world, and the way that we do it - concrete - is one of the worst environmental materials we could use, and we have no intention, at the moment, of changing that. And we're going to add roughly two more billion people, almost all of whom will live in cities. The scale of that problem is absolutely staggering, and we intend to put them in buildings. No one I've found is willing to say, No, actually you've got to stay outside. No, we're going to put them in buildings. And we're going to build about half the world again to accommodate it. So all of that has to change, and the good news is that there's huge effort being made, huge innovation projects all over the world." Image Courtesy of Massive Change Network www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org | |||
| 15 Aug 2022 | Highlights - Bruce Mau - Award-winning Designer, Author of “Mau MC24…24 Principles for Designing Massive Change” | 00:18:11 | |
"Cities are certainly a great place to start because the way that we do them - you can see it if you go up in an airplane and look down - you can see that they're built against nature. You can see it in the color of the city. It's interesting. We reflect it in our maps. Cities are gray, and the rest of the world is green. We build them against the natural world, and the way that we do it - concrete - is one of the worst environmental materials we could use, and we have no intention, at the moment, of changing that. And we're going to add roughly two more billion people, almost all of whom will live in cities. The scale of that problem is absolutely staggering, and we intend to put them in buildings. No one I've found is willing to say, No, actually you've got to stay outside. No, we're going to put them in buildings. And we're going to build about half the world again to accommodate it. So all of that has to change, and the good news is that there's huge effort being made, huge innovation projects all over the world." 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. Image Courtesy of Massive Change Network www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org | |||
| 19 Aug 2022 | Michael Sticka - President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum | 00:25:40 | |
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. "It's one of our more popular experiences at the GRAMMY Museum. We have something called Mono to Immersive, which actually takes a Bruno Mars and Cardi B performance at the GRAMMY Awards, and we put guests/listeners into a room, and they watch this performance. And we had Grammy-winning engineers mix these performances. What would that Bruno Mars and Cardi B performance sound like if it were mono sound - so records, wax cylinder? Think about that. And then what about on cassette? And then what about on MP3? And then now on streaming? And then what we call immersive, which is surround sound? So we really try to walk visitors through the history of recorded sound and how much technology has changed, not just the recording process, but the listening experience as well." IG, FB, TW: @grammymuseum | |||
| 19 Aug 2022 | Highlights - Michael Sticka - President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum | ||
"It's one of our more popular experiences at the GRAMMY Museum. We have something called Mono to Immersive, which actually takes a Bruno Mars and Cardi B performance at the GRAMMY Awards, and we put guests/listeners into a room, and they watch this performance. And we had Grammy-winning engineers mix these performances. What would that Bruno Mars and Cardi B performance sound like if it were mono sound - so records, wax cylinder? Think about that. And then what about on cassette? And then what about on MP3? And then now on streaming? And then what we call immersive, which is surround sound? So we really try to walk visitors through the history of recorded sound and how much technology has changed, not just the recording process, but the listening experience as well." 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. IG, FB, TW: @grammymuseum | |||
| 19 Aug 2022 | Jack Horner - Renowned Dinosaur Paleontologist - Technical Advisor, Jurassic Park/World Films | 00:49:57 | |
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. "I'm an educator, and I'm interested in educating people about what dinosaurs were really like. One of the ways to do that is through working on exhibits for museums, working with some of these other companies that make things like exhibits, working with them to try to update their ideas of what dinosaurs were like. Modern exhibits oftentimes have a lot of VR in them and a lot of computer graphics and things like that. So we have to work together with companies that are interested or are doing that sort of thing. We started working early on with Microsoft to make these virtual dinosaurs that you could put on a VR mask and see these dinosaurs. We also made a little VR game that kids could play and dig up dinosaurs. We're just trying to figure out ways to go beyond what we can do at universities and see if we can figure out ways of just sharing all this new information." | |||
| 19 Aug 2022 | Highlights - Jack Horner - Renowned Paleontologist - Technical Advisor, Jurassic Park/World Films | 00:10:35 | |
"I'm an educator, and I'm interested in educating people about what dinosaurs were really like. One of the ways to do that is through working on exhibits for museums, working with some of these other companies that make things like exhibits, working with them to try to update their ideas of what dinosaurs were like. Modern exhibits oftentimes have a lot of VR in them and a lot of computer graphics and things like that. So we have to work together with companies that are interested or are doing that sort of thing. We started working early on with Microsoft to make these virtual dinosaurs that you could put on a VR mask and see these dinosaurs. We also made a little VR game that kids could play and dig up dinosaurs. We're just trying to figure out ways to go beyond what we can do at universities and see if we can figure out ways of just sharing all this new information." 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. | |||
| 30 Aug 2022 | Dr. Mona Sarfaty - Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health | Dr. Ed Maibach - Communication Scientist | 00:52:28 | |
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. “Humanity needs to do three things if it wants to continue to flourish, and it will. The three things that humanity needs to do are decarbonize the global economy, drawdown, capture, harvest much of that heat-trapping pollution that we've already pumped into the atmosphere over the past hundred years because as long as it's up in our atmosphere, we're going to have continued warming. And the third thing that humanity needs to do is become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, which unfortunately will continue for the next several generations at least, even as we succeed in decarbonizing the global economy and harvesting that heat-trapping pollution from the atmosphere. So these are the three things that have to happen. These three things will happen. The open question is how rapidly will they happen? Any business that can play a vital role in making any one or two or all three of those things happen, those are businesses that are going to flourish going forward. And any business that's sitting on the side and not contributing to one of those three areas, I really think they will become increasingly irrelevant, if not completely antiquated and increasingly understood to be harmful.” 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/ | |||
| 30 Aug 2022 | Highlights - Mona Sarfaty - Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health | Ed Maibach - Communication Scientist | 00:14:50 | |
“Humanity needs to do three things if it wants to continue to flourish, and it will. The three things that humanity needs to do are decarbonize the global economy, drawdown, capture, harvest much of that heat-trapping pollution that we've already pumped into the atmosphere over the past hundred years because as long as it's up in our atmosphere, we're going to have continued warming. And the third thing that humanity needs to do is become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, which unfortunately will continue for the next several generations at least, even as we succeed in decarbonizing the global economy and harvesting that heat-trapping pollution from the atmosphere. So these are the three things that have to happen. These three things will happen. The open question is how rapidly will they happen? Any business that can play a vital role in making any one or two or all three of those things happen, those are businesses that are going to flourish going forward. And any business that's sitting on the side and not contributing to one of those three areas, I really think they will become increasingly irrelevant, if not completely antiquated and increasingly understood to be harmful.” 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/ | |||
| 06 Sep 2022 | Nick Bostrom - Philosopher, Founding Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford | 00:42:22 | |
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. "I think what we really face is an even more profound change into this condition where human nature becomes plastic in the sense of malleable, and we then have to think more from the ground up - What is it that ultimately brings value to the world? If you could be literally any kind of being you chose to be, what kind of being would you want to be? What constraints and limitations and flaws would you want to retain because it's part of what makes you, you. And what aspects would you want to improve? If you have like a bad knee, you probably would want to fix the knee. If you're nearsighted, and you could just snap your fingers and have perfect eyesight, that seems pretty attractive, but then if you keep going in that direction, eventually, it's not clear that you're human anymore. You become some sort of idealized ethereal being, and maybe that's a desirable ultimate destiny for humanity, but I'm not sure we would want to rush there immediately. Maybe we would want to take a kind of slower path to get to that destination." | |||
| 06 Sep 2022 | Highlights - Nick Bostrom - Founding Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford | 00:11:19 | |
"I think what we really face is an even more profound change into this condition where human nature becomes plastic in the sense of malleable, and we then have to think more from the ground up - What is it that ultimately brings value to the world? If you could be literally any kind of being you chose to be, what kind of being would you want to be? What constraints and limitations and flaws would you want to retain because it's part of what makes you, you. And what aspects would you want to improve? If you have like a bad knee, you probably would want to fix the knee. If you're nearsighted, and you could just snap your fingers and have perfect eyesight, that seems pretty attractive, but then if you keep going in that direction, eventually, it's not clear that you're human anymore. You become some sort of idealized ethereal being, and maybe that's a desirable ultimate destiny for humanity, but I'm not sure we would want to rush there immediately. Maybe we would want to take a kind of slower path to get to that destination." 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. | |||
| 16 Sep 2022 | Kent Redford - Co-author of "Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology” | 00:56:24 | |
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. "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." https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300230970/strange-natures/ | |||
| 16 Sep 2022 | Highlights - Kent Redford - Co-author, ”Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology” | 00:13:20 | |
"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/ | |||
| 15 Sep 2022 | Carl Safina - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author | 00:59:30 | |
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. "We are the extreme animal. We're certainly, technologically speaking, there's no comparison to what humans can do among all the animals that make some tools, even though we should keep in mind that for close to 200,000 years, humans who were essentially identical to us had no tools that were more complicated than a bow and arrow. I think the most crucial thing is that while we are such extraordinary tinkerers that we can keep creating unbelievable kinds of technologies, we are not very smart about what we do with those things or seeing them through to the implications of what happens when we do these things. If we were wiser about it, we would conduct ourselves much more differently than the all-out charge that we conduct, where often we just follow some technology along without worrying about the implications of what will happen ultimately, or caring about what will happen ultimately, or denying what is happening as a result of the overuse of those technologies or the overpopulation of the world by human beings. And those are causing many of the problems that we have." Photo: Carl Safina in Uganda | |||
| 15 Sep 2022 | Highlights - Carl Safina - Author of “Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace” | 00:11:10 | |
"We are the extreme animal. We're certainly, technologically speaking, there's no comparison to what humans can do among all the animals that make some tools, even though we should keep in mind that for close to 200,000 years, humans who were essentially identical to us had no tools that were more complicated than a bow and arrow. I think the most crucial thing is that while we are such extraordinary tinkerers that we can keep creating unbelievable kinds of technologies, we are not very smart about what we do with those things or seeing them through to the implications of what happens when we do these things. If we were wiser about it, we would conduct ourselves much more differently than the all-out charge that we conduct, where often we just follow some technology along without worrying about the implications of what will happen ultimately, or caring about what will happen ultimately, or denying what is happening as a result of the overuse of those technologies or the overpopulation of the world by human beings. And those are causing many of the problems that we have." 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. Photo: Carl Safina in Uganda | |||
| 20 Sep 2022 | Aniela Unguresan - Co-founder, Economic Dividends for Gender Equality - EDGE Cert. Foundation | 00:43:09 | |
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. "For a very long time, the tech industry was publishing their numbers year after year, and the numbers stayed very much the same. And they were throwing their hands in the air and saying, 'Well, okay, we are measuring. We are publishing the numbers, numbers look bad. There's nothing we can do about it.' So there was transparency, but there was not the accountability of yes, there is something we can do about those numbers. It might take longer, and the progress might not be as fast as we can do, but there is something we can do about it. And here is the place we would start. But when the stakeholders start to have a voice then that accountability is created for organizations to move from intention to action and from action to impact." | |||
| 20 Sep 2022 | Highlights - Aniela Unguresan - Champion of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion in the Workplace - EDGE Cert | 00:10:18 | |
"For a very long time, the tech industry was publishing their numbers year after year, and the numbers stayed very much the same. And they were throwing their hands in the air and saying, 'Well, okay, we are measuring. We are publishing the numbers, numbers look bad. There's nothing we can do about it.' So there was transparency, but there was not the accountability of yes, there is something we can do about those numbers. It might take longer, and the progress might not be as fast as we can do, but there is something we can do about it. And here is the place we would start. But when the stakeholders start to have a voice then that accountability is created for organizations to move from intention to action and from action to impact." 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. | |||
| 22 Sep 2022 | Philip Fernbach - Co-author of “The Knowledge Illusion” - Cognitive Scientist - Co-Director of Ctr. for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making | 00:55:24 | |
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. "I admit to being just a dyed-in-the-wool kind of techno-optimist. I don't know why that is, but I'm just very hopeful and optimistic about the future. And I know people are scared of like superintelligence taking over and everything. I just don't think that we're close to anything like that yet. It's not impossible, and it's something that I think we should take very seriously, but I really see AI as being this incredibly powerful, wonderful thing that is going to unlock incredible huge amounts of economic value. Maybe an optimist bordering on idealistic, but I kind of believe in this idea of abundance. And the idea of abundance is we sort of have this zero-sum perspective about economic activity, where if some people have a lot of wealth, other people can't. But if you look at the size of the world economy – and you can actually go on Wikipedia and look at estimations of this going back to something like 2000 BC – the size of the economy in terms of economic activity is an exponential function, and it's like a perfect exponential function. What exponential function means, as opposed to a linear function, it grows in a percentage basis, not an absolute way over time, which means that to double from one to two is going to take a certain amount of time, but then the same amount of time, not to go from two to three, but to go much higher. The problem is not actually the generation of economic activity. It's allocation of that activity. And I really believe we're on the cusp of that. And AI is one big reason because if you can get rid of a lot of labor, of drudgery, and jobs that people don't want to do, and you can run a factory with a bunch of robots where people don't have to intervene that makes food or makes products or extracts resources...you can unlock a huge amount of economic activity. So, that has the potential, I think, to usher in an era of great abundance." | |||
| 22 Sep 2022 | Highlights - Philip Fernbach - Cognitive Scientist - Co-Director, Ctr. for Research, Consumer Financial Decision Making - Co-author, “The Knowledge Illusion” | 00:12:00 | |
"I admit to being just a dyed-in-the-wool kind of techno-optimist. I don't know why that is, but I'm just very hopeful and optimistic about the future. And I know people are scared of like superintelligence taking over and everything. I just don't think that we're close to anything like that yet. It's not impossible, and it's something that I think we should take very seriously, but I really see AI as being this incredibly powerful, wonderful thing that is going to unlock incredible huge amounts of economic value. Maybe an optimist bordering on idealistic, but I kind of believe in this idea of abundance. And the idea of abundance is we sort of have this zero-sum perspective about economic activity, where if some people have a lot of wealth, other people can't. But if you look at the size of the world economy – and you can actually go on Wikipedia and look at estimations of this going back to something like 2000 BC – the size of the economy in terms of economic activity is an exponential function, and it's like a perfect exponential function. What exponential function means, as opposed to a linear function, it grows in a percentage basis, not an absolute way over time, which means that to double from one to two is going to take a certain amount of time, but then the same amount of time, not to go from two to three, but to go much higher. The problem is not actually the generation of economic activity. It's allocation of that activity. And I really believe we're on the cusp of that. And AI is one big reason because if you can get rid of a lot of labor, of drudgery, and jobs that people don't want to do, and you can run a factory with a bunch of robots where people don't have to intervene that makes food or makes products or extracts resources...you can unlock a huge amount of economic activity. So, that has the potential, I think, to usher in an era of great abundance." 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. | |||
| 29 Sep 2022 | Lee Jaffe - Author of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads” - Artist, Musician, Poet | 00:46:57 | |
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. "I remember in the early 2000s, we had so much hope for the internet that it was going to democratize the distribution of music, especially when file sharing started. We said, Oh, wow. This is great. At that time, there were five major record companies, and then they conspired with MTV to give MTV all this free, big production content, and you couldn't really sell a lot of records unless you were on MTV. And unless you had this big budget for this video. And it started, artists were exploited from the beginning of radio. So I thought, Oh wow, now we're going to have file sharing, and we have the internet, and there's going to be all this information. This is going to transform the world. We're going to have this incredible end of poverty. And instead, we get Fascism. We get Bolsonaro, and it's really scary. On the other hand, listening to some of your podcasts - which I've been doing a lot recently - it's really pushed me to try to be optimistic because the pessimism is very oppressive. It makes me not want to work. So I'm really pushing myself to be consciously optimistic." www.leejaffe.com www.creativeprocess.info Photo credit: Paige Powell, Lee Jaffe and Jean-Michel Basquiat recording the installation of “Inverted Oak” : Carmel, New York | |||
| 29 Sep 2022 | Highlights - Lee Jaffe - Author of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads” - Artist, Musician, Poet | 00:10:29 | |
"I remember in the early 2000s, we had so much hope for the internet that it was going to democratize the distribution of music, especially when file sharing started. We said, Oh, wow. This is great. At that time, there were five major record companies, and then they conspired with MTV to give MTV all this free, big production content, and you couldn't really sell a lot of records unless you were on MTV. And unless you had this big budget for this video. And it started, artists were exploited from the beginning of radio. So I thought, Oh wow, now we're going to have file sharing, and we have the internet, and there's going to be all this information. This is going to transform the world. We're going to have this incredible end of poverty. And instead, we get Fascism. We get Bolsonaro, and it's really scary. On the other hand, listening to some of your podcasts - which I've been doing a lot recently - it's really pushed me to try to be optimistic because the pessimism is very oppressive. It makes me not want to work. So I'm really pushing myself to be consciously optimistic." 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. | |||
| 05 Oct 2022 | Karina Manashil - President of Mad Solar - Creative Confidante for Kid Cudi - Exec. Producer of “Entergalactic” | 00:47:18 | |
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. "Scott [aka Kid Cudi] sees music in color, so what the visuals of music meant to him. So he wanted to create a new experience and that alongside Kenya Barris and ideating what it could be led to Entergalactic, which essentially Scott wrote an original album, which is his 10th Studio album, and pieced those songs in before the creation of this love story, which runs 90 minutes from start to finish, and essentially the two parts exist simultaneously. So you've got the album on its own, and then you've got the event, which allows you to hear beats of each piece of music in all of these key beats of Jabari (Scott's character) and Meadow’s (Jessica Williams' character) love story. Scott had tweeted out that Entergalactic was the greatest piece he's ever created. This is the thing he's most proud of. Scott feels that this was an opportunity to create that new moment for his audience where they're going to get to experience something that they'd never had the opportunity to before because it feels so new." "Scott lives in between the notes. So the things that you would expect, he lives right in the center, which is why his music is so interesting. The nuance and creativity of his choices is so indicative of the way that he hears sound." Manashil www.imdb.com/name/nm3556462/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0 Mad Solar https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?companies=co0831164 Entergalactic www.netflix.com/title/81053303 Pearl www.imdb.com/title/tt18925334/ | |||
| 05 Oct 2022 | Highlights - Karina Manashil - Pres. of Mad Solar - Exec. Producer of “Entergalactic”, “Pearl”, “X” | 00:12:15 | |
"Scott [aka Kid Cudi] sees music in color, so what the visuals of music meant to him. So he wanted to create a new experience and that alongside Kenya Barris and ideating what it could be led to Entergalactic, which essentially Scott wrote an original album, which is his 10th Studio album, and pieced those songs in before the creation of this love story, which runs 90 minutes from start to finish, and essentially the two parts exist simultaneously. So you've got the album on its own, and then you've got the event, which allows you to hear beats of each piece of music in all of these key beats of Jabari (Scott's character) and Meadow’s (Jessica Williams' character) love story. Scott had tweeted out that Entergalactic was the greatest piece he's ever created. This is the thing he's most proud of. Scott feels that this was an opportunity to create that new moment for his audience where they're going to get to experience something that they'd never had the opportunity to before because it feels so new." "Scott lives in between the notes. So the things that you would expect, he lives right in the center, which is why his music is so interesting. The nuance and creativity of his choices is so indicative of the way that he hears sound." 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 Mad Solar https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?companies=co0831164 Entergalactic www.netflix.com/title/81053303 Pearl www.imdb.com/title/tt18925334/ | |||
| 07 Oct 2022 | Johnjoe McFadden - Author of “Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe” | 00:56:26 | |
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. "And you can make extremely intelligent computations and very complex computations, but you don't get a mind out of it. You don't get consciousness out of it. You get a computer, and that's what's driving my hands waving around, driving my lips and my tongue, and all that kind of stuff, it's a computer; it's our non-conscious mind. But on top of that, we have the stuff we're aware of, and that's where our creativity lies. That's where our emotions lie. We can't think of being creative without using our conscious mind. And that's where stuff comes together because the difference between what happens in our conscious mind and in our non-conscious mind – in our non-conscious mind, everything is dissected." www.surrey.ac.uk/people/johnjoe-mcfadden www.basicbooks.com/titles/johnjoe-mcfadden/life-is-simple/9781549112119 | |||
| 07 Oct 2022 | Highlights - Johnjoe McFadden - Author of “Life is Simple” - Prof. Molecular Genetics, Assoc. Dean - U of Surrey | 00:11:42 | |
"And you can make extremely intelligent computations and very complex computations, but you don't get a mind out of it. You don't get consciousness out of it. You get a computer, and that's what's driving my hands waving around, driving my lips and my tongue, and all that kind of stuff, it's a computer; it's our non-conscious mind. But on top of that, we have the stuff we're aware of, and that's where our creativity lies. That's where our emotions lie. We can't think of being creative without using our conscious mind. And that's where stuff comes together because the difference between what happens in our conscious mind and in our non-conscious mind – in our non-conscious mind, everything is dissected." 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 www.basicbooks.com/titles/johnjoe-mcfadden/life-is-simple/9781549112119 | |||
| 14 Oct 2022 | Jay Famiglietti - Hydrologist, Exec. Director - Global Institute for Water Security, Host of "What About Water?" Podcast | 00:53:23 | |
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? "The research that I've done with these NASA satellites - they’re called the Grace Mission, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Mission, and they're really unusual in that they're able to weigh, using small variations in the pull of gravity that water exerts on the satellites. Satellites are like a scale. They move up and down in the sky depending on how much water there is on the ground. So we can map out these places that are gaining or losing water on a monthly basis. And you know, now the satellites have been flying for 20 years, so we can see these trends." "So there's lots of interesting stuff that's happening out there. Technology that helps industry. There's going to be a big push and a lot of pressure on industry to do more reporting. The technology to do optimal water and nutrient delivery at the plant scale, like just using the optimal amount of water and fertilizer at the plant scale, so down to the plant scale within huge farms is being rapidly developed. So these things are all game changers. And that's without talking about financial innovations. So financial innovations are also not necessarily technology, but when we think about what innovations we need, some of those are financial, whether it's incentive packages or the need to work with investors. So just like we did with carbon that has been so successful working with investors who invest in the big agricultural companies, the big food and beverage companies, we've gotten great traction on the carbon side driving these companies, huge multinational companies to net zero carbon. We need to be doing the same thing on the water side. And so that investor push is a financial innovation." What About Water? podcast with Jay Famiglietti Twitter @WhatAboutWater | |||
| 14 Oct 2022 | Highlights - Jay Famiglietti - Exec. Director - Global Institute for Water Security, Host of “What About Water?” Podcast | 00:10:14 | |
"The research that I've done with these NASA satellites - they’re called the Grace Mission, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Mission, and they're really unusual in that they're able to weigh, using small variations in the pull of gravity that water exerts on the satellites. Satellites are like a scale. They move up and down in the sky depending on how much water there is on the ground. So we can map out these places that are gaining or losing water on a monthly basis. And you know, now the satellites have been flying for 20 years, so we can see these trends." "So there's lots of interesting stuff that's happening out there. Technology that helps industry. There's going to be a big push and a lot of pressure on industry to do more reporting. The technology to do optimal water and nutrient delivery at the plant scale, like just using the optimal amount of water and fertilizer at the plant scale, so down to the plant scale within huge farms is being rapidly developed. So these things are all game changers. And that's without talking about financial innovations. So financial innovations are also not necessarily technology, but when we think about what innovations we need, some of those are financial, whether it's incentive packages or the need to work with investors. So just like we did with carbon that has been so successful working with investors who invest in the big agricultural companies, the big food and beverage companies, we've gotten great traction on the carbon side driving these companies, huge multinational companies to net zero carbon. We need to be doing the same thing on the water side. And so that investor push is a financial innovation." 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? What About Water? podcast with Jay Famiglietti Twitter @WhatAboutWater | |||
| 26 Oct 2022 | Dr. Anna Lembke - Author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence | 00:49:18 | |
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. "There's a ton of work now looking at how we can re-engineer or patch the AI that's currently sort of driving these interfaces to make it easier for people to manage their consumption. But so far there's not a lot of evidence that it's working. So the time management things, unfortunately, people just tend to override those or not want to look at the amount of time that they're spending on their devices. So I'm not seeing a lot of encouraging stuff there. And basically what you have is you have a fundamental structural problem. These technologies are engineered literally to keep us clicking and swiping. You can't ask them...in a way, it's very difficult for them to have their product that's not engaging. Now there's a big push to do this, to see, Okay, well what if we get rid of the likes, or what if we eliminate the bottomless scrolls? Or what if we get rid of the alerts and the push notifications, or what if we go to grayscale and make the images...? And I think all those can work as nudges and be helpful, but I think we also need to start looking more proactively at having time where we literally are just not touching our device. Distance from the actual device itself. And so I think there's some movement in that direction as well." https://med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/patient_care/addiction.html www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624957/dopamine-nation-by-anna-lembke-md/ | |||
| 26 Oct 2022 | Highlights - Dr. Anna Lembke - Author of Dopamine Nation - Chief of Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic | 00:10:49 | |
"There's a ton of work now looking at how we can re-engineer or patch the AI that's currently sort of driving these interfaces to make it easier for people to manage their consumption. But so far there's not a lot of evidence that it's working. So the time management things, unfortunately, people just tend to override those or not want to look at the amount of time that they're spending on their devices. So I'm not seeing a lot of encouraging stuff there. And basically what you have is you have a fundamental structural problem. These technologies are engineered literally to keep us clicking and swiping. You can't ask them...in a way, it's very difficult for them to have their product that's not engaging. Now there's a big push to do this, to see, Okay, well what if we get rid of the likes, or what if we eliminate the bottomless scrolls? Or what if we get rid of the alerts and the push notifications, or what if we go to grayscale and make the images...? And I think all those can work as nudges and be helpful, but I think we also need to start looking more proactively at having time where we literally are just not touching our device. Distance from the actual device itself. And so I think there's some movement in that direction as well." 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. https://med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/patient_care/addiction.html www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624957/dopamine-nation-by-anna-lembke-md/ | |||
| 23 Nov 2022 | Highlights - Walter Stahel - Architect, Founding Father of Circular Economy - Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute | 00:18:05 | |
"We have to solve three problems. We have to create a low-waste society through incentives to change individual behavior from consumer to user through loss and waste prevention, and intelligent resource management. We also have to create a low-carbon society by preserving the water, electricity, and CO2 emissions embodied in physical assets or through innovation in green electricity and circular energy. And the third challenge, which is probably the biggest, we have to create a low anthropogenic mass society by preserving these existing stocks of infrastructure, buildings, equipment, vehicles, and objects. The only strategy I know that can fulfill these three challenges is a circular industrial economy. Now the last point, low anthropogenic mass society is simply because some years ago, the rapidly growing anthropogenic mass has become bigger than the world's biomass. And that of course means we are destroying the biomass because we have a limited planet, and we are destroying biodiversity and replacing it with synthetic manmade materials and objects. And this in the long term means we are killing ourselves, so we have to stop producing anthropogenic mass, except in countries that don't yet have sufficient infrastructures for education, health, living, and sufficient food to feed the population." 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.routledge.com/The-Circular-Economy-A-Users-Guide/Stahel/p/book/9780367200176 Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast | |||
| 15 Nov 2022 | Highlights - Todd Kashdan - APA Award-winning Author of The Art of Insubordination, and Curious? | 00:15:10 | |
"Better than mindfulness, curiosity and the willingness to be open to other perspectives and reveal diversion of perspectives, it's linked with more innovation, it leads to willingness for greater social support for your ideas. So you're talking about finding allies more work, family integration, less burnout, more engagement, and then a greater tendency to experience flow where you lose yourself in your work in the workplace. And there's these wide-ranging benefits that occur. And what you find is the two dimensions of curiosity that are the most beneficial in the workplace, one is called joyous exploration. And that's really just this pure pleasurable sense of wonder that there's a lot of interesting things in the world, and I just know less than I think I do, and I want to be exposed to that novelty. The second one gets less attention. It's what we call stress tolerance. It's that when you have the lure of the novel, the divergent, and you know, the mysterious and complex, there's always a level of anxiety. You are moving away from the knowns and the own unknowns, and you are going into the face of acknowledging there's uncertainty, and you don't know how things are going to turn out. The people that can better tolerate that without trying to close and reach an answer quickly, they're the ones that are more likely to be creative, more likely to be innovative." 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. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690674/the-art-of-insubordination-by-todd-b-kashdan-phd/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 15 Nov 2022 | Todd Kashdan - Award-winning Author of “The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively” | 00:57:31 | |
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. "Better than mindfulness, curiosity and the willingness to be open to other perspectives and reveal diversion of perspectives, it's linked with more innovation, it leads to willingness for greater social support for your ideas. So you're talking about finding allies more work, family integration, less burnout, more engagement, and then a greater tendency to experience flow where you lose yourself in your work in the workplace. And there's these wide-ranging benefits that occur. And what you find is the two dimensions of curiosity that are the most beneficial in the workplace, one is called joyous exploration. And that's really just this pure pleasurable sense of wonder that there's a lot of interesting things in the world, and I just know less than I think I do, and I want to be exposed to that novelty. The second one gets less attention. It's what we call stress tolerance. It's that when you have the lure of the novel, the divergent, and you know, the mysterious and complex, there's always a level of anxiety. You are moving away from the knowns and the own unknowns, and you are going into the face of acknowledging there's uncertainty, and you don't know how things are going to turn out. The people that can better tolerate that without trying to close and reach an answer quickly, they're the ones that are more likely to be creative, more likely to be innovative." www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690674/the-art-of-insubordination-by-todd-b-kashdan-phd/ www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 23 Nov 2022 | Walter Stahel - Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy - Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute | 00:51:39 | |
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. "We have to solve three problems. We have to create a low-waste society through incentives to change individual behavior from consumer to user through loss and waste prevention, and intelligent resource management. We also have to create a low-carbon society by preserving the water, electricity, and CO2 emissions embodied in physical assets or through innovation in green electricity and circular energy. And the third challenge, which is probably the biggest, we have to create a low anthropogenic mass society by preserving these existing stocks of infrastructure, buildings, equipment, vehicles, and objects. The only strategy I know that can fulfill these three challenges is a circular industrial economy. Now the last point, low anthropogenic mass society is simply because some years ago, the rapidly growing anthropogenic mass has become bigger than the world's biomass. And that of course means we are destroying the biomass because we have a limited planet, and we are destroying biodiversity and replacing it with synthetic manmade materials and objects. And this in the long term means we are killing ourselves, so we have to stop producing anthropogenic mass, except in countries that don't yet have sufficient infrastructures for education, health, living, and sufficient food to feed the population." www.routledge.com/The-Circular-Economy-A-Users-Guide/Stahel/p/book/9780367200176 Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast | |||
| 09 Dec 2022 | Mathis Wackernagel - Founder, President, Global Footprint Network - World Sustainability Award Winner | 00:44:45 | |
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. "So shooting for one planet just means you would be totally dominant, and leave no space for other species. Ecologists say to maintain 85% of preindustrial biodiversity, it would take about at least half the planet left on its own. That would mean getting to half-planet. And now we use at least 1.75. I say at least because our assessments with about 15,000 data points per country in a year are based on UN statistics, and their demand side is probably an underestimate because not all demands are included. And also on the supply side or the regeneration side, the UN is very production oriented, so it's the FAO numbers, for example, look at agricultural production, and the depletion side or the destruction side is not factored in adequately. So that's why it's an underestimate. And still, it shows we use about 1.75 Earths, and that's more than three times half an Earth. So that's kind of the difference. But we also know overshoot will end one way or another. The question is do we choose to end it? Do we choose it by design, or do we let nature take the lead and end overshoot by disaster? So it's really ending overshoot by design or disaster. That's the big choice we need to make.” www.footprintnetwork.org/tools www.overshootday.org/power-of-possibility/ www.creativeprocess.info Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast | |||
| 09 Dec 2022 | Highlights - Mathis Wackernagel - Founder, Pres., Global Footprint Network - World Sustainability Award Winner | 00:13:28 | |
"So shooting for one planet just means you would be totally dominant, and leave no space for other species. Ecologists say to maintain 85% of preindustrial biodiversity, it would take about at least half the planet left on its own. That would mean getting to half-planet. And now we use at least 1.75. I say at least because our assessments with about 15,000 data points per country in a year are based on UN statistics, and their demand side is probably an underestimate because not all demands are included. And also on the supply side or the regeneration side, the UN is very production oriented, so it's the FAO numbers, for example, look at agricultural production, and the depletion side or the destruction side is not factored in adequately. So that's why it's an underestimate. And still, it shows we use about 1.75 Earths, and that's more than three times half an Earth. So that's kind of the difference. But we also know overshoot will end one way or another. The question is do we choose to end it? Do we choose it by design, or do we let nature take the lead and end overshoot by disaster? So it's really ending overshoot by design or disaster. That's the big choice we need to make.” 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/tools www.overshootday.org/power-of-possibility/ www.creativeprocess.info Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast | |||
| 16 Dec 2022 | Alberto Savoia - Google’s 1st Engineering Director - Author of “The Right It” | 01:01:54 | |
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. “So, as much as I would love to take the credit, Google Ads was a big team, and I was fortunate to be brought in as a director that managed the team. And I would also like to say the idea of attaching ads to searches, anybody could have had it. In fact, it was the most obvious thing. Just like on television, if you watch a car race, then it makes sense to have ads about cars. So I think the reason it was so successful is because innovations and new ideas, they compound. They build one upon the other. So the reason why ads was so successful for Google is because search was so successful for Google. So when you have search and you have billions of people coming in every day, maybe every hour, and searching all kinds of things, you have this treasure trove of data. And more importantly, guess what? If you have billion searches per day, you know how many experiments can you run? Countless, right? And so Google is very famous for doing a lot of A/B experiments. That's how we collect the data. You think, if we make the ads, let's say short and long, they will be more effective than if we make them, tall and long. Well, how do we know which one will work better? You can do a lot of experiments. So what actually enabled Google to be so successful and to grow is this mental attitude, which by the way, is the same one that Amazon and some of these really successful technology companies have, of doing a lot of experiments on small samples and continually refining their data based on that. If you're dealing with a lot of people, you can do those experiments and that's why these companies are successful. The sad thing or what happens with companies that do not operate in that way, that do not try to operate on data and do all of those experiments, those are the ones that are left behind. Innovation is experimentation." www.albertosavoia.com www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 16 Dec 2022 | Highlights - Alberto Savoia - Google’s 1st Engineering Director - Author of “The Right It” | 00:10:47 | |
“So, as much as I would love to take the credit, Google Ads was a big team, and I was fortunate to be brought in as a director that managed the team. And I would also like to say the idea of attaching ads to searches, anybody could have had it. In fact, it was the most obvious thing. Just like on television, if you watch a car race, then it makes sense to have ads about cars. So I think the reason it was so successful is because innovations and new ideas, they compound. They build one upon the other. So the reason why ads was so successful for Google is because search was so successful for Google. So when you have search and you have billions of people coming in every day, maybe every hour, and searching all kinds of things, you have this treasure trove of data. And more importantly, guess what? If you have billion searches per day, you know how many experiments can you run? Countless, right? And so Google is very famous for doing a lot of A/B experiments. That's how we collect the data. You think, if we make the ads, let's say short and long, they will be more effective than if we make them, tall and long. Well, how do we know which one will work better? You can do a lot of experiments. So what actually enabled Google to be so successful and to grow is this mental attitude, which by the way, is the same one that Amazon and some of these really successful technology companies have, of doing a lot of experiments on small samples and continually refining their data based on that. If you're dealing with a lot of people, you can do those experiments and that's why these companies are successful. The sad thing or what happens with companies that do not operate in that way, that do not try to operate on data and do all of those experiments, those are the ones that are left behind. Innovation is experimentation." 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 www.creativeprocess.info | |||
| 17 Dec 2022 | Nina Hall - Author of “Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local” | 00:44:52 | |
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. “So one of the main arguments in the book is that digital technology is important to how organizations campaign, and it's not a matter of campaigning online or offline, right? Often people hear the title of my book and they go, ‘Oh, it's all just slacktivism.’ You know, whatever you do online is slacktivism. Luckily the academic debates move past that because most advocacy groups operate both online and offline. What I argue instead is that digital technology has enabled groups to be rapid response, like you said, extremely member-driven so they can listen to their members and do something called analytic activism (that's a term coined by David Karpf) and be multi-issue generalists. The ways that works is much more than meets the eye. So when you're rapid response, that means a news story can come on one hour and two hours later a campaign can be started by the organizations. So it could be related to refugee issues. In 2015, when there was increasing concern about what was happening on Europe's borders with refugees and asylum seekers, some of these groups that had no expertise in refugee rights switched very rapidly when they saw public opinion changing." https://ninahall.net | |||
| 17 Dec 2022 | Highlights - Nina Hall - Author of “Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era” | 00:13:20 | |
“So one of the main arguments in the book is that digital technology is important to how organizations campaign, and it's not a matter of campaigning online or offline, right? Often people hear the title of my book and they go, ‘Oh, it's all just slacktivism.’ You know, whatever you do online is slacktivism. Luckily the academic debates move past that because most advocacy groups operate both online and offline. What I argue instead is that digital technology has enabled groups to be rapid response, like you said, extremely member-driven so they can listen to their members and do something called analytic activism (that's a term coined by David Karpf) and be multi-issue generalists. The ways that works is much more than meets the eye. So when you're rapid response, that means a news story can come on one hour and two hours later a campaign can be started by the organizations. So it could be related to refugee issues. In 2015, when there was increasing concern about what was happening on Europe's borders with refugees and asylum seekers, some of these groups that had no expertise in refugee rights switched very rapidly when they saw public opinion changing." 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 | |||