The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Education, Environment, Theatre, Dance, LGBTQ, Climate Change, Social Justice, Spirituality, Feminism, Tech, Sustainability

Today we explore the collapse of the journalism business model, the rise of spin dictators and how disinformation has become the new censorship. As empires struggle and media consolidates, the pursuit of truth remains an act of hope. We hear from foreign correspondents and journalists Nicholas Kristof, Abrahm Lustgarten, Michael Maren, Richard Black and Jacob Ward. They're joined by scholars and economists Jeffrey Rosen, Sergei Guriev, James Fishkin, Richard Wolff and Daniel Susskind. Writers Viet Thanh Nguyen, T.C. Boyle and Lee McIntyre, TV showrunners George Pelecanos and Debora Cahn and activists Dean Spade and Mike Davis explore language, authoritarianism and human conflict.
(0:00) Nicholas Kristof (Journalist, NYTimes) (3:03) Abrahm Lustgarten (ProPublica) (4:45) Lee McIntyre (Philosopher) (8:40) Richard Black (Fmr. BBC, Dir. of Policy, Ember) (7:40) Jacob Ward (Journalist) (10:50) Jeffrey Rosen (Journalist, Legal Scholar) (11:19) Sergei Guriev (Economist, Dean, LBS) James Fishkin (Dir., Stanford's Deliberative Democracy Lab) (14:14) Viet Thanh Nguyen (Author, The Sympathizer) (15:37) T.C. Boyle (Novelist, Blue Skies) (16:16) George Pelecanos (Writer/Co-creator, We Own This City, The Wire) (17:48) Dean Spade (Activist) (18:15) Debora Cahn (Creator, Netflix's The Diplomat) (18:51) Richard Wolff (Economist, Co-founder, Democracy at Work) (22:23) Daniel Susskind (Economist) (30:19) Mike Davis (CEO, Global Witness) (33:50) Michael Maren (Filmmaker, Fmr. Foreign Correspondent)
https://www.creativeprocess.info/interviews-featured/anth-journalism https://www.creativeprocess.info/pod

“I've discovered in my studies of creativity in general that creativity is not about starting with a brilliant idea and then following a linear path to an execution of your idea. What I see in art and design is a much more iterative, wandering, exploratory process where the ideas emerge from the act of engaging in the work.”
Dr. Keith Sawyer’s work focuses on creativity and human ingenuity. With over 20 books and a career that spans computer science, psychology, and the study of innovation, he has explored what it means to lead a creative life. Following his foundational research with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, his books include Explaining Creativity and Group Genius. In his latest book, Learning to See: Inside the World's Leading Art and Design Schools, he pulls back the curtain on how elite institutions cultivate the creative mind. He has been a jazz pianist for over 40 years. We will explore the evolution of his research, and what music and improvisation have taught him about life.
(0:00) The Non-Linear Process of Creativity
(3:12) Teaching Students to Find Their Own Aesthetic
(7:13) The Pressure to Replicate Success
(13:31) Guided Improvisation in Education
(16:46) Unlearning Rigid Perceptions
(22:52) Embodiment and the Material World
(25:27) Deep Listening and Jazz Improvisation
(27:09) Domain General vs. Domain Specific Creativity
(30:07) Architecture as an Exchange
(37:47) Learning from Nature: The Velcro Lesson
(42:54) Gen AI and Human Ingenuity
(44:42) The System of Improv
(1:01:08) The Value of Problem Finding
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

"What we need to do is learn from nature. If you think about how nature progresses through trial and error. I'm really a fan of how we can do open designs that citizens can respond to, and use the feedback in order to create similar systems to what happens in nature."
Our guest today is Carlo Ratti, an architect, engineer, and academic who is deeply engaged with the critical questions facing our planet and its urban spaces. He's known for his innovative work at MIT's Senseable City Lab, where he explores how digital technologies are transforming our cities and for his groundbreaking design projectsaround the world. Carlo Ratti's work has been called everything from sensory city philosophy to a driving force behind the world of design. And having recently tackled one of the biggest challenges of our time as a curator of the 19th International Architectural Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, the exhibition Intelligence, Natural, Artificial, Collective seeks to fundamentally rethink architecture's role in an altered world and rapidly changing climate.
(0:00) Learning From Nature's Trial and Error
(1:20) The Senseable City
(6:05) The Future Of Concrete and Circular Building
(9:02) Peak Population And The Century Of The City
(10:55) Transforming Architecture With Japanese Joinery and AI
(14:36) Curating the Venice Biennale As An Open Lab
(16:22) Blending The Natural And Artificial Through Data
(20:32) Breaking Down Silos and Staying Curious
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Look closely at the screen in front of you. It is no longer just a passive device; it is actively shaping your perception. Today, we investigate the cognitive and ethical costs of offloading our reason to algorithms and ask what happens when our tools begin to train us? We explore the rise of surveillance capitalism with those documenting the shift—technologists Jaron Lanier, Henry Ajder, and Antonella Wilby. We hear from those fighting to preserve our essence and agency—philosophers Iain McGilchrist and C. Thi Nguyen, economist Jeffrey Sachs and ecologist Carl Safina. Grounding us in the power of expression, are artists and writers Trevor Paglen, April Gornik, Etgar Keret, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. In these original interviews for The Creative Process, our guests remind us that we must never surrender our messy, human reality to artificial perfection.
(0:00) Trevor Paglen (Artist) The cognitive cost of offloading our reasoning to AI (3:26)
(2:28) Jaron Lanier (Computer Scientist, VR Pioneer) The Turing Test and the degradation of humanity (14:30)
(5:42) Henry Ajder (AI & Deepfakes Expert) The unprecedented speed of generative AI
(8:48) Hans Ulrich Obrist (Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries) The fight for net neutrality
(10:14) Antonella Wilby (Roboticist, NatGeo Explorer) Encoded biases, the danger of neutral tech
(11:50) C. Thi Nguyen (Philosopher, Author) Thin metrics and the truth about screen time
(13:09) Carl Safina (Ecologist, Author) Mechanization and human dignity
(15:17) Jeffrey Sachs (Economist, Center for Sustainable Development) Citizen responsibility (23:06)
(16:54) Etgar Keret (Writer, Filmmaker) Enslavement to the machine, outsourcing imagination
(19:07) April Gornik (Artist) The historical parallel between AI and nuclear weapons
(20:46) Iain McGilchrist (Psychiatrist, Author) Wisdom vs. utility in artificial intelligence
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews here or http://www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Episode Website IG@creativeprocesspodcast

“ Musk interestingly has this way of excluding the majority of the population from consideration, what he variously calls non-playing characters or NPCs, which is a category from video games, or sometimes bots, vampires. And this is a much more stark version of insider and outsider group creation than even hierarchies of race because it takes this one step further by taking very seriously the idea that other people are not only not human, but they in some way don't even exist, which is the literal reading of Musk's adoption of Nick Bostrom's simulation theory, which is that most people are simply programmable parts of a simulation and only a small number of people are actual players.”
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff about their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. This is much more than a biography or popular account of Elon Musk, it is a radical analysis of a deeply disturbing, computational way of seeing the world. We see a mind that is profoundly troubled by any contagion spreading into seemingly closed systems—it can take the form of racial others, transpeople, “woke” populations, or most generally and dismissively, “Non-Player-Characters.” We talk about the dangers this mindset has on democracy and the public sphere, and argue that what we should do is to “embrace the woke-mind virus as a counter-revolutionary act.”
Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy and Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Slobodian is a Guggenheim Fellow. has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.
Ben Tarnoff's books include Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do-and How They Do It, and Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future. He's a contributor to the New York Review of Books, NYTimes and The New Yorker.
(4:50) How childhood in apartheid South Africa shaped Musk’s worldview
(11:05) Humans as NPCs
(17:26) Memes & far-right discourse
(21:40) Engineering ideology through Grok & probabilistic language models
(33:03) Automating consent & isolating the public sphere
(38:08) DOGE, the limits of cyborg optimization
(47:46) Unwinding tech monopolies, Embracing the woke mind virus
(53::20) Possible Futures of Carbon Musk & Contractor Musk
https://www.creativeprocess.info/speaking-out-of-place-6/elon-musk-slobodian-tarnoff
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