Episodes
"Climate change gives us a chance to re-imagine the world in a way that every single human being can participate in. And so whether you're in a remote part of the United States or some other country, when you learn about climate change, it shouldn't just be the science. It should be the opportunity." –Kathleen Rogers Excerpts of interviews from One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process.
Published 02/26/24
“The natural world has its own sonic language. Its own fingerprints. And that's one of the beautiful things about being out here. There is another acoustic environment, another sort of sonic fingerprint, and it is always changing. Every day is a sort of a different sound picture. I walk out the door and you do hear it changing over time. The leaves are coming in now, different kinds of bird song. The wind sounds different. It's a wonderful thing to be around and experience.” —Max...
Published 02/25/24
"I wanted to both look at the kind of vast, rich tapestry of spiritually adjacent practices among millennials and younger people, particularly in the unaffiliated world, but more broadly, what is the underlying ideology underpinning it all? This idea that religion is something for us because the goal of religion is to make us live our best lives, and it doesn't matter, which is the sort of shadow side of this, if it's true or not. If it's real or not. What matters is if it 'works for you.'"
Published 02/23/24
Microplastics and nanoplastic pollution are currently blanketing the planet. They are in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink, infiltrating our bodies and even brains and human embryos. Coca-Cola alone sells 100 billion+ single-use plastic bottles each year, ending up in landfills and the ocean. Earth’s population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2050. Two-thirds of humans will become city dwellers. Our waste will drive a mounting worldwide crisis.
Published 02/16/24
"I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from."
Published 02/15/24
"My intention was to write about my experiences, obviously, but also I felt that there was a little bit of a counterintuitive approach, which is to talk about some of the inner experiences of the creative process and being a director, being a writer, and I felt that that would open the window a little bit wider. I liked that it wasn't just a behind-the-scenes look. It is that, and I think it's full of fun anecdotes and little reveals, but it is to be a real book. It presumes to be a memoir,...
Published 02/09/24
"I wrote Survival at Stake because I've been working in animal rights for nearly the past 25 years. Throughout that time, one common question has been asked: Well, shouldn't we deal with human issues first. But animal rights are human rights. Animal rights is environmentalism. These things are not distinct. And that's the point I was really trying to make in my book. I was inspired to write it because of the COVID-19 crisis. It just brings us back to the point of why it is so important to...
Published 02/07/24
"What are you trying to do with the portrait? On a basic level, you're trying to communicate something about the essence of who someone is. You're trying to figure out who they are, not necessarily who they present themselves as. The two things can quite often be different. And then, you're trying to find ways of showing that through their face, their posture, or any other context. My instinct is always to try to reduce down to the essential elements. We read faces. It's obviously very, very...
Published 02/05/24
"The challenges facing our society at the moment effectively are the unintended consequence of a solution we found in the late 1700s when society was running out of energy, we had no more timber, and we realized we could dig underground for ancient fossilized woodland, which is basically what coal is from about 300 million years ago. The consequence of burning all that coal and then oil was a release of carbon dioxide, changing our atmosphere and warming the planet. So, it's a problem born...
Published 02/03/24
"The way I got into this field was working on the environmentally beneficial applications of AI, and I do believe that that's an impactful way of using AI techniques because there's so much data about the climate, satellite data, and sensor data, and the way to go about this is to work with domain experts. AI is never going to solve the problem on its own, but it can be a tool. So I think that there's a lot of promise there."
Published 01/31/24
"I'm kind of concerned when people put the promise on silver bullets of regenerative agriculture or growing a trillion trees or sucking carbon through CCS technologies. Because what happens then is people take comfort that there is a practice or a technology around the corner. Hydrogen is another one. Fusion energy is yet another. And I think we need to be going kind of full throttle on all of those, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that we give up on mitigation or we give up on...
Published 01/30/24
"Global restoration really means finding and empowering the millions of local communities, indigenous populations, and farmers who are promoting biodiversity. Restor is a digital platform, sort of like Google Maps, but for restoration. So rather than seeing coffee shops and supermarkets, you will see conservation projects and Indigenous-led restoration initiatives. And that means you can find a currently on Restor - I think we have around 140, 000 - so you can go on there for free right now...
Published 01/17/24
“I think like a scientist and my interest in stunted trees probably goes back to my upbringing. I had a difficult childhood with a father who insisted that he was right about everything all the time. And in my early years as a scientist, I was trying to find some system that would not argue back to me. I loved working with organisms that were themselves repressed by nature. It's a wonderful thing to stand like Gulliver on top of an entire ecosystem that's only three inches tall. And ask...
Published 01/16/24
"The original edition of The Paradox of Choice came out in 2004, and the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's...
Published 01/12/24
"The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws....
Published 01/05/24
“I drove for like a half an hour into absolute nothingness, and I left the car. It was three o'clock in the morning. It was minus 17 degrees and it was absolutely still. I've never experienced stillness such as that. I mean, it's like you feel like you can feel your atoms move or not move because it's so cold. And the sky is full of the Northern Lights. So you are already in a remote place, but you want to go further. And I think maybe those themes of going out into the wilderness are...
Published 01/04/24
“If we say Mitakuye Oyasin, we don't really mean all my relations. It's like, no, we're talking about what you can formulate into E = mc2 and beyond. It's beyond what you see. And that energy you don't see with these eyes, which only see a certain range of color and light refraction is what we are also understanding. Our body is, people would say the brain is...there is no disconnection. And so are we fully understanding or do we have a full spectrum perspective of what tools of the Earth...
Published 12/29/23
"These ideas go as far back as Ancient Greece, which basically gave birth to two lines of thinking, two ideologies, materialism and idealism. And the idealist thinkers like Plato regarded reality as a projection of our minds, as something that is not real. And the only thing that is real is our consciousness and our minds and everything else around us is just constructs of our proception and projections. And that was a philosophy that was opposed to materialism, which regards the world as in...
Published 12/27/23
"It's a study of adult lifespan development and when it was started in 1938, it was actually radical to study normal development for two reasons. One is that most of what had been studied was about what goes wrong in development, which we still do because we want to try to help people who are having developmental problems. So that makes a lot of sense, but to study what goes right in development, that was unheard of. The other thing is that for a long time, we certainly thought about children...
Published 12/22/23
“I play the double bass as a professional musician. I don't consider myself a piano player, but I play a little bit of piano, of course. Every musician should play a little bit of piano to understand harmony. And if you want to compose or to arrange music, you need to know basic piano. So I play a little bit of piano. Actually, I started to play guitar before the double bass, because it was not so easy to get a double bass 40 years ago. My father was a bass player, but he never had a bass at...
Published 12/21/23
"One of the things that we need to remember is that we are data stakeholders and not data subjects. We're often called data subjects if you look at the way legislation is written and tech companies talk about the users of their technology as data subjects. Being a subject casts this sort of 'you can't help but have this happen to you' effect. But we're actually data stakeholders for the reason that data cannot be created without us. If companies were incentivized to follow data minimization...
Published 12/15/23
"I thought, wow, how are they going to bring this across in a way that isn't shoving things down people's throats? It's presenting information in a way that is creative, but also in a way that drives your curiosity into understanding, number one, why are we in the position that we're in? And number two, how can we fix this? What can we do to change all of this? And so, I initially got involved as an executive producer on Kiss the Ground, and I was blown away by how that film came out at the...
Published 12/08/23
What gave Taxi Driver its edge? What was Mary Poppins secret life? If filmmaking is all about “creating lies”, when does the lie become more real than the truth? Featured film discussions from screenings at Sag Harbor Cinema, following on our interview with April Gornik, community activist/organizer and artist. She is a director of Sag Harbor Cinema and was Campaign Chair for the restoration of the Cinema after a fire nearly destroyed it in 2016. Today the SHG screens a variety of...
Published 12/05/23
How we think, feel, and experience the world is a mystery. What distinguishes our consciousness from AI and machine learning? Liad Mudrik studies high level cognition and its neural substrates, focusing on conscious experience. She teaches at the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel Aviv University. At her research lab, her team is currently investigating the functionality of consciousness, trying to unravel the depth and limits of unconscious processing, and also researching the ways...
Published 12/01/23
“Coral reefs are the most biodiverse habitat on the planet, despite covering less than 1 percent of the ocean area, over a quarter of all marine life exists in these rainforests of the sea. And if you think of a coral reef as a rainforest, the trees are the coral themselves. Which are incredible organisms, so, magic is really the right word to describe them. They're these animals that are one of the original forms of animal life, the second branch of the animal kingdom is actually Cnidaria,...
Published 11/30/23