CHRIS BLACKWELL - Founder of Island Records featuring Bob Marley, U2, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Amy Winehouse…

Interviewed by Mia Funk

Chris Blackwell, an inductee of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, is widely considered responsible for turning the world on to reggae music. As the founder of Island Records, he helped forge the careers of Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, U2, Roxy Music, among many other high-profile acts, and produced records including Marley’s Catch a Fire and Uprising. Blackwell currently runs Island Outpost, a group of elite resorts in Jamaica, which includes GoldenEye—the former home of author Ian Fleming. He received the A&R Icon Award in recognition of his lasting influence on the music business. He is author, with Paul Morley, of The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond.

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THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You’ve got great instincts. How did you hone them?

CHRIS BLACKWELL

I think you need to be aware and see people be open to what can happen and get a feel, get an instinct. I think I've been blessed with instinct. I mean, I did not do well at school. I passed zero exams. I'm unemployable, but I've been blessed with having instincts. The instinct of U2 was seeing their determination, the fact that the music itself initially wasn't close to what most of my music was because most of my music was bass and drum. And most of their music was vocal, so it wasn't a certain kind of music that I like all the time. I like music from all different kinds of levels. And I think that's one of the things which was lucky that the fact that I heard all this classical music at deafening volume in the early days, so I sort of learned to listen and how to make your own little judgment that you end up liking most?

I absolutely felt for Bob Marley to really make it worldwide as it were, he needed to change something a little bit. I didn't want him to change what he was doing, not his lyrics and everything else like that. It was more the instrumentation of it. I felt for Bob to be able to reach a wider audience that he needed to move away a little bit from that and focus more and more on his lyrics.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And I think that relaxed atmosphere that you had in Jamaica from a young age. People kind drifting in and out of your life and this ability to make quick friendships, but deep ones, it's something that you brought into your dealings in the music business, which was just really developing when you came into it. Looking at the artists you’ve worked with–Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Steve Winwood, Amy Winehouse, and so many others. When I talk to people about you, they said there's “just something about Chris Blackwell.” It's like a mystery or something, but you tapped into something in them that allowed them to flourish. I mean, how did you do that?

BLACKWELL

I think from meeting them and getting a feel from them, and just what their personality, what their character was, what the energy that was coming from them, that I would feel. Do you know what I mean? I think that was really it. For example, I was not initially interested in signing Cat Stevens, but that was mainly only because I'd seen him before on television. And the song he was singing was "I'm Gonna Get Me A Gun." And I thought I don't get that, so when somebody said that he was interested to meet with me, I wasn't really interested because I felt already that he was going in a different direction which didn't sort of make sense to me, but when I finally met him and we just sort of sat down and he played a song. And then he played another song, and then when he played the song "Father and Son," then suddenly the lyrics of the song and what it meant and everything, I suddenly felt this guy is fantastic. You know, the I person I'd seen on television had nothing to do with this person sitting in front of me. And so that's really when I said to him, I opened up to him and I said, "Honestly, I wasn't really interested to meet, but this song that you've just sung for me is such an incredible song." And then we started to talk, and he started to open up and say, "Well, he had a difficult time with the label that he was working with before because they weren't giving him much support to do what he wanted to do. And so that was music to my ears because I felt that I could definitely connect with him. "Where Do the Children Play", that was the one that, just the fact that he was somebody who was thinking like that.

You know, in Rock 'n' Roll, it's a lot of rough and tumble. Whereas, when he sang that song, the fact that's what he had created and that's the direction he was going. I thought, well, that's really something. And that's why I immediately sort of just jumped on it and then said, “Listen I'd love to do something with you.”

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So, you're in London in the 60s, driving around in your Mini Cooper distributing albums. It's a little bit like guerrilla music producing. Very grassroots. Tell us what London was like back then.

BLACKWELL

Well, London was happening. Very much happening in the film business in England. Great movies were being made out of England and also The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, all that really started to explode. And what was really great, the music that they were loving was the music which was coming from the black music from America, the blues, New Orleans, of course, St. Louis, those different parts that music was coming to England, and that was what was really happening. Jamaican music was creeping up, basically through the Jamaican communities who lived around London and Birmingham and Bristol, etc.

There was one time when Mick Jagger asked me to come and meet with him because I think he'd heard the records that were coming up from me, mainly Jamaican records and things, and that's why he wanted me to come and meet with him. He was leaving Decca, and wanted to go to another level. And I said, ‘It makes absolutely no sense for you to come to my label because you already are huge.’

Well, Led Zeppelin…I was in a recording in England and going to be doing a record with a group called Traffic, which was led by Steve Winwood. And in those days, it took some time tuning your guitar up, different instruments and everything. Nowadays, all that's done in a second, but in those days, there would be a lot of time spent. And I couldn't contribute to that. And it used to drive me nuts waiting until it got all ready to start the songs. So I drifted into another room in the studio. And I went in, and I heard a record coming out, and I thought I've never heard anything like this before in my life. It was just unbelievable. And I said, "Who are these kids?" They said it's a new band, really. I said, "Well, what do they call it?" They said, “I don't know what their name is. Something Zeppelin or something like that.” So I said, "Well, who's their manager?" And it turned out that the manager was somebody who was a sort of, not a great pal, but a pal because we shared an office. He was on the fifth floor, and I was on the second floor in an office. And I went to see him, and I said, "Listen, I heard your band. It was just unbelievable." So, we kind of agreed on a deal that I would sign them for England and Europe. And the manager wanted to sign with Atlantic Records in America. So I said, "Okay, I'll have England, Europe, and you have America, Canada, etc." And then we shook hands and that was it. And, of course, it never really turned out because when they went to America to make the deal with America, Atlantic said, "No, we want them for the world." And so he came back to me and said, "Oh, we didn't really want to be with Atlantic," and I made a deal with them. And I said, "Nevermind." And I didn't mind because it wasn't something that I would have been able to help a lot with. I certainly loved what I heard in terms of that music, but I didn't feel that it was something that I could be involved in managing them or doing their recordings.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So for these artistic collaborations, I believe it also takes a lot to get you to say yes. I believe Grace Jones was on your radar for a while? How did that come about?

BLACKWELL

Well, Grace Jones was also one of those things where I was having lunch with a couple of friends. And this guy said to me, "By the way, there's this model who is just stunning, and I think she's wanting to be a singer. You should find out about it." So I listened and then a couple of days afterward she was in a magazine. And, you know, she's a stunning-looking lady. She's amazing, and when I saw her in the magazine, I thought, "Well, I'm definitely going to follow up.” So I tracked her down. And what happened is that she had started doing a recording because she was more in the fashion business. She was a model. So she was doing a recording with these two people who were in the fashion business and just outside of New York. And, she'd been doing something with them. And so I tracked them down, and it turned out that they were desperate to see if they could get their money back from the money they'd put into her doing a record. They did not want to be in the record business. It had just happened like that. So I met with them, and I remember this very clearly. They came to my office, and they were very nervous, and they were really hoping that I'd be able to make a deal with them because the record they thought was going to be costing about 10 to $15,000, but it was closer to about $60,000. So they were in a state. So when I went and sat with them, and I said, “Well, can you play me a bit of the record that working on?” And they put the record on ,and it was a song, called La Vie en Rose, but recorded by a kind of drum machine. And so they put on the record. Grace wasn't there or anything. It was just this couple in the clothing business. They put on the record, and there was a drum machine. There was no vocal. There were no instruments, nothing. And the drum machine played for about two and a half to three minutes before I heard a voice. And by the time I was at two and a half to three minutes, I thought, Oh my gosh, this is a disaster. This is going to end in tears. And then suddenly I heard the voice, and the voice sounded great. And I said to them, "Okay, I'll buy the record off you.” And that's how it started from literally as simple as that.

I hadn't met Grace. I just heard her voice when the record started. And that was it. And then she met the guy who had been producing that record, which was called Portfolio. That was her first album. And it did quite well. Not very well, but quite well. And then the second record didn't do so well. The third record also didn't do so well. And when I say didn't do so well, I'm not sure we would even release them, but then that was a time when I thought I would love to work with her personally in the studio. And I had a studio in Nassau, the Bahamas. And so I put together a band to come and play for her. Four people from Jamaica, one person from France, one from England, and all of whom didn't know each other. The four from Jamaica knew each other, but they didn't know each other. They didn't know what was happening. Grace didn't really know what was happening. I'm not the best-organized person in the world, so nobody really had been told exactly what was happening. So right at the beginning, it felt like it could have been a disaster. But in fact, it turned around completely and was wonderful. And we had three or four albums by Grace Jones. And that was it.

Tom Waits is amazing. Absolutely incredible. A brilliant, brilliant, brilliant guy. I went and stayed with him a couple of days in his home in California, and I slept in one of the rooms. And I found out about him a little bit from that because he had all kinds of newspapers in this room, and I was thinking, “Oh boy, he gets these ideas from these different papers.” And he was somebody who - he's a brilliant guy - somebody who just knows the world really well. And a very well-read person. And very, very smart. An incredible sense of humor.

Your mother was the original Bond girl before the films were made. She was a model for Ian Fleming’s great characters. You say it was an uneventful life, but to us who didn’t grow up that way, it seems like a kind of a magical childhood. The kind of childhood that's very hard for young people to have that kind of experience now.

BLACKWELL

Because I was not going to school and everything, I can remember clearly when Errol Flynn first came into the house because my father had gone down to the port to meet him. And he brought him up, and I remember very well him arriving. And he was such an amazing-looking guy, and he was a charmer, and we became friends. He was very nice. He took me down to his yacht which was in the harbor, and he allowed me to go and be wherever I wanted to be on the boat. In fact, he even allow me, because he was somebody who did whatever he wanted to do rather than what he was supposed to do, and he let me go where I wanted to be, which was under the bow of a sailboat. It has a net underneath it and that area there you are absolutely not supposed to go to for obvious reasons because if you drop, the boat runs right over you, but I used to ask him, "Well, can I just go down there?" Because I felt it was safe. And so he let me do that, and we'd come back to the house and spend some time and have lunch or dinner and there was a lot of laughter. And he was an amazing character, and he was so handsome. And I didn't know at that time what movie stars were all about. I didn't really know because, again, there weren't many films happening in Jamaica when I was 7, 8... So it was just really meeting this guy who was amazing, and he and my dad were friends very quickly. And then my mom, too. So that's really the time I spent with him. But he was very mischievous.

It wasn't about money. It was just a really different life, I guess, in a way. It was a really great opportunity because one would meet different people, and they'd be there for a bit, and they'd be gone, and then you may see them in a year or something later when they came back to Jamaica or something like that, but it was never something which was sort of organized. Different things would just sort of happen out of the blue, and they would happen also out of the fact that I spent a lot of time hanging out with the staff, and it was an extraordinary, thinking back about it, it was an extraordinary life. It was very, very, very different. And I guess it was just different opportunities of seeing different things happening in different ways all the time.

Miles Davis was the best teacher, always amused when I asked him questions. I was pretty cocky at the time, and I once asked him why he played so many bad notes, unlike Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong, who always played clean. He didn’t blink. He didn’t bite my head off. “Because I try and play what I hear in my head,” he said, “not what I know I can already play.” That, to me, was the essence of jazz, trying to get somewhere new and not worrying if you made mistakes as long as you got there in the end. On a tightrope, and wobbling a little, but eventually gliding across that tightrope.

Well, it's really great if you can be involved in doing something which brings something to people and lifts things. You know, if you can find a way to…when I say find a way, you just get an instinct of something, Oh, this is going to be fun. That can be great. I'm always looking…I don't know that I'm deliberately looking at things. I think things have happened, and I've seen something or got a feel for something or feel for the person or… I think I've been given a lot of luck.

Photos: Island Outpost Images / Island Trading Archive

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

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BEN SHOFTY

Functional Neurosurgeon · Professor · University of Utah

When you think about the evolution of the human brain–just like other animals that have specialized in speed or keeping warm or gathering food–I feel our brain sort of specialized being creative and flexible and being able to generate different solutions to a given problem. To me, this is probably the most fascinating thought process that happens in the human brain. And what I do in neurosurgery–and my subspecialty is called functional neurosurgery–we don't deal with disorders in which there's an anatomical abnormality inside the brain. We deal with disorders in which there is an abnormal connection or abnormal circuitry inside the brain when there's an issue with the way the brain functions. There's no tumor. There are no abnormal blood vessels or anything like that. And that gives us an amazing opportunity to really investigate how different circuits and different areas inside the brain work.

SCOTT DOORLEY · CARISSA CARTER

Creative & Academic Director · Stanford d.school
Co-authors of Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future

Today, someone is putting the finishing touches on a machine- learning algorithm that will change the way you relate to your family. Someone is trying to design a way to communicate with animals in their own language. Someone is cleaning up the mess someone else left behind seventy years ago yesterday. Today, someone just had an idea that will end up saving one thing while it harms another.

To be a maker in this moment— to be a human today— is to collaborate with the world. It is to create and be created, to work and be worked on, to make and be made. To be human is to tinker, create, fix, care, and bring new things into the world. It is to design. You— yes, you!— might design products or policy, services or sermons, production lines or preschool programs. You might run a business, make art, or participate in passing out meals to the poor. You may write code or pour concrete, lobby for endangered species legislation or craft cocktails. Wherever you fit in, you are part of shaping the world. This is design work.

– Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future

STEPHEN REILY

Founding Director · Remuseum
Fmr. Director · Speed Museum · Attorney · Co-Founder & CEO · IMC Licensing
The opportunity is that we have never had a public that is more passionate and obsessed with visual imagery. If the owners of the best original imagery in the world can't figure out how to take advantage of the fact that the world has now become obsessed with these treasures that we have to offer as museums, then shame on us. This is the opportunity to say, if you're spending all day scrolling on Instagram looking for amazing imagery, come and see the original source. Come and see the real work. Let us figure out how to make that connection.

Was Stanford Firing 23 Lecturers in Creative Writing Really Necessary?

A Conversation with Lecturers & Students

Recently, twenty-three lecturers in the highly successful Creative Writing program at Stanford were summoned to a Zoom meeting where they were first praised, and then summarily fired. One of the most surprising aspects of this purge is the fact that it was carried out not by top-tier university administrators, but by tenure-track faculty in the program. It was they who decided to brutally terminate their colleagues. On this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with two of the lecturers who have been told they will leave Stanford in nine months, and one of their students, a published novelist. They explain the devastating nature of this act and share statistics and histories that show this was not at all necessary. Expediency for senior faculty trumped the survival of a carefully developed and nurtured community of creative writers.

JACQUELINE GOTTLIEB

Professor of Neuroscience & Principal Investigator at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute

I came to neuroscience from a humanistic perspective. I was very interested to find out who we are. What do we know? What do we think we know? Why do we think we know certain things? How do we see things? How do we perceive them? Ultimately, the question behind curiosity is what things we find interesting in our environment. The way I think about eye movements is that they really are trained in some largely subconscious process.

MEAGHAN OPPENHEIMER

Screenwriter · Exec. Producer · Showrunner
Creator of Hulu's Tell Me Lies · Queen America

Often when people write or make movies about romances with young adults, I think they are very flippant about it and don't take it seriously. But I think that those friendships and romantic relationships are some of the most important ones because they really set the stage for the rest of our lives. If your first relationship is incredibly toxic and damaging, it can take you years to figure out that that's not normal, and that that's not actually how relationships are meant to be.

EUAN NISBET

Earth Systems Scientist · Royal Holloway University of London

I am a Christian and I have strong Muslim and Jewish friends as well as great respect for Hindu beliefs. I grew up in Southern Africa and I am well aware of the depth of some Indigenous beliefs. I think that having belief systems does give you a very different perspective sometimes. Now, in Christianity, the concept of the shepherd, human beings are here and this is our garden, our garden of Eden, but we have a responsibility. And if we choose to kick ourselves out of the garden, there are consequences. And that's precisely what we are doing. The garden is there, it's lovely, and we can manage it, and it's our job to manage it. We can manage it properly. We can respect it. It's for all creation, and it's very explicit that it involves all Creation. And that's a very fundamental biblical law that you have to respect all Creation. And if you don't do that, then the consequences—you’re basically throwing yourself out of the garden of Eden.

RENÉE BERGLAND

Literary Critic · Historian of Science · Educator
Author of Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science

There is a stronger connection between Dickinson and Darwin than the proximity of history. Or the universality of literature. They both understood natural science and the natural world in ways that seem strange and somewhat surprising in the 21st century. Their 19th century attitudes to nature and the study of it are so different from ours that when we trace their stories, a vanished world begins to emerge. The more I consider these figures together, the more I feel their world and my world. come alive. Darwin and Dickinson illuminate each other. By reading them together, we can start to understand the interconnected relationships that animated 19th century poetry and science.

FRANK TRENTMANN

Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London · Author of Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942 to 2022

The environmental crisis, Gaza, the war in Ukraine—all of those don't make sense if you don't have a sense of history. History and the humanities have come under huge pressure. We've seen falling student numbers, and that's a real shame because history continues to be a source of intellectual inspiration and curiosity that not only makes us wiser and more reflective but also creates the dynamism and creativity we need to confront our present and future challenges. I hope that among the young generations, there will be people inspired by history, people that have the ambition to research and write about the past.

LISA EDELSTEIN

Actress · Artist · Director · Producer · Writer
House M.D. · Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce · Little Bird · The West Wing · The Kominsky Method

I have always thrown myself into everything, and that includes terrible things, because I want to have the whole experience. Even if I know it's going to hurt for better or for worse, that has been how I've lived my life. And so it's given me a lot of information and allowed me to play a lot of different roles and understand a lot of different points of view. I think part of the beauty of being in a long-running television show is that, in season one, you're playing the role they wrote. By season two, they're writing the person you're playing. You start to build your voice, and they start to merge, and so by the time you get to season three, you're much more like full human beings having this dialogue.

APRIL GORNIK

Artist · Environmentalist
Co-founder of The Church · Arts & Creativity Center
Co-director of Sag Harbor Cinema Board

I've chosen my work because I've loved the outside world. I love the things outside of myself. I love what isn't immediate to me. And I love projecting onto that as a way of kind of trying to reach the distance between my inner self and the vastness. To try to do that in a way that makes other people feel inspired by it, not be chided for not taking care of it. It's not something that I intend to be a message per se. I'd rather people look at the natural world and see the heartbreaking beauty of it and sense its fragility and its impermanence and their own impermanence and fragility and then have a response to that rather than say, you know, you have to act, you have to do something. I would hope that would inspire action rather than to cudgel them with a directive.

JULIAN LENNON

Singer-songwriter · Photographer · Documentary Filmmaker
Founder of The White Feather Foundation
Executive Producer of Common Ground

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 end. How well rounded it was, the flow of the film, the storytelling, and really feeding me information that I didn't even know previously. And so also watching that become a platform around the world was jaw-dropping. I mean, the fact that the belief and the understanding and the wisdom that came out of that project has touched so many hearts, minds, and souls around the world, that people are really single-handedly almost making change for the better around the world. Now, when Common Ground was presented, I did love that concept because Kiss the Ground had been very much a broad approach and about America, for the majority, really, and Common Ground was a much more...I mean, we're still dealing with the same subject matter obviously, but I think it felt great to come from a more personal aspect."

Featured

The Architecture of Oppression

Jake Ferguson · Anthony Joseph · Jermain Jackman

I think as humans, we forget. We are often limited by our own stereotypes, and we don't see that in everyone there's the potential for beauty and love and all these things. And I think The Architecture of Oppression, both parts one and two, are really a reflection of all the community and civil rights work that I've been doing for the same amount of time, really - 25 years. And I wanted to try and mix my day job and my music side, so bringing those two sides of my life together. I wanted to create a platform for black artists, black singers, and poets who I really admire. And it was a no-brainer to give Anthony a call for this second album because I know of his pedigree, and he's much more able to put ideas and thoughts on paper than I would be able to.

PRIYAMVADA GOPAL · FRANÇOISE VERGÈS

on the Recent Elections in Britain and France

I would say what we can celebrate is the incredible mobilization of the young people. They went everywhere, they knocked on the door, they mobilized. This was an incredible, incredible mobilization. So that was extraordinary because it showed real mobilization and an understanding that the National Rally was a real threat. We knew that if they came to power, the first people who would be targeted would be people of color, and that was absolutely clear.

S. D. CHROSTOWSKA

Author · Historian · Curator
Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics · The Eyelid · Marvellous Utopia

I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.

RICHARD BLACK

Author of The Future of Energy · Fmr. BBC Environment Correspondent · Director of Policy & Strategy · Global Clean Energy Thinktank · Ember

The fact is you've got a lot of industrial and political muscle now coming behind clean energy, especially from China, which is the leading country deploying wind energy, solar, and the leading manufacturer and user of electric vehicles. "We have petrostates in the world. China is the first electrostate." And China is on its way to becoming the world's most powerful country. So, where China leads, the rest of the world is almost certain to follow. Yes, there are massive air pollution problems in China, of course, but I think it's more than that. It's also about seeing that this is the future that the world is going to have. And if these goods are going to be made anywhere, well, the Chinese government clearly would like them to be made in China. And they've set out, you know, industrial policies and all kinds of other policies for, well, at least a decade now, in pursuit of that aim. It's interesting now to see other countries, India, for example, and the United States now sort of deploying muscle to try and carve out a slice of the pie themselves as well.

CHRIS CARLSSON

Writer · Organizer · Activist
When Shells Crumble · Shaping San Francisco · Critical Mass

The novel When Shells Crumble begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale—it focuses on how to resist political cynicism and defeatism, and rebuild on planetary wreckage. It is a world-building project filled with wisdom, sadness, and joy. We specifically put this fictional text in conservation with his brilliant non-fiction work, Nowtopia, which offers a radical redefinition of “work” that restores dignity and value to their proper places.

On the War & Famine in Sudan

with Dr. Osman Hamdan & Umniya Najaer

The ongoing conflict in Sudan has pushed millions to the brink of famine, threatening to devastate an entire generation. Despite the severe humanitarian crisis, global awareness remains limited. Today learn about the long history behind these events, the people and groups involved, and the roles that foreign governments and international organizations like the IMF have played. Importantly, we learn how civil society groups are bringing a form of mutual aid and support to the people of Sudan where the national government, warring factions, and international humanitarian organizations have utterly failed.

HENRY AJDER

AI/Deepfakes/Synthetic Media Advisor · BBC Presenter
Adobe · Meta · European Commission · Partnership on AI · House of Lords

I would like to preserve a real sense of empathy and humility, which comes with understanding that the world is messy, that people are messy, that defects and imperfections exist, that things don't always necessarily kind of go the way you want, even as much as you wish they could. Imperfection is part of life and I guess my concern is that AI-generated content, which smooths and perfects a version of reality to precisely what you want and forces you or makes you feel pressured to represent yourself in this absolutely perfect way, fundamentally gives you no room for error and kind of detaches you from the reality of growth and life and and how people work. Empathize with other people. Everyone has their challenges. Things don't always have to be exactly perfect to how you want them to be or how other people want them to be. And that involves having some humility about yourself as a messy creature, as we all are. I hope that's retained, but I do see this kind of move towards this sort of smoothed and shaped reality that AI is enabling, potentially creating more of a disconnect between that imperfect, messy, but also quite beautiful world. This sort of polished but ultimately plastic version of reality increasingly is becoming the default for some people over the kind of fleshy, messy human side of things.

PAUL AUSTER

Writer · Filmmaker 1947-2024

What happens is a space is created. And maybe it’s the only space of its kind in the world in which two absolute strangers can meet each other on terms of absolute intimacy. I think this is what is at the heart of the experience and why once you become a reader that you want to repeat that experience, that very deep total communication with that invisible stranger who has written the book that you’re holding in your hands. And that’s why I think, in spite of everything, novels are not going to stop being written, no matter what the circumstances. We need stories. We’re all human beings, and it’s stories from the moment we’re able to talk.

JEFF OLSON

Co-founder of the Largest Bike Share System in North America · NYC’s CitiBike
Co-founder of re:Charge-e: Wireless Bike & Scooter Docking Stations
Author of The 3rd Mode: Towards a Green Society

The key number for people to remember is one to 150 for the cost and energy that it takes to charge a single electric car, our system could charge 150 bikes or scooters in public space that then people have access to. So the question from an equity standpoint, from really achieving our climate goals standpoint is, do you invest in getting one person mobile and maintaining maybe the current lifestyle that goes along with those cars? Or do we make some changes and invest in 150 to 200 people being mobile with the same energy? Clearly, we think the answer is more people moving more often, more sustainably. And we have to make that shift or we're never going to hit the 2030 goals. They are probably not even in reach, you heard the Secretary-General say just last week. And even 2050 seems a long way to go if we're still investing in technologies that only essentially help the 1 percent that already have the resources. It's the larger population that we really need to reach.

LEE McINTYRE

Philosopher · Author of On Disinformation: How To Fight For Truth and Protect Democracy · How to Talk to a Science Denier

One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.

STEPHEN WOLFRAM

Computer Scientist · Mathematician · Theoretical Physicist
Founder/CEO of Wolfram Research · Creator of Mathematica · Wolfram|Alpha

I think as there is more automation, there is more kind of emphasis on this question of our choice. The story of the development of things tends to be what do humans decide that they care about? In what direction do they want to go? What kind of art do they want to make? What kinds of things do they want to think about? There is in the computational universe of all possibilities, there is sort of infinite creativity.

KEITH FRANKISH

Editor of Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness · Cambridge University Press’ Elements in Philosophy of Mind
Author of Mind and Supermind · Consciousness

What I like about the sort of view I have is that it represents us as fully part of the world, fully part of the same world. We're not sealed off into little private mental bubbles, Cartesian theaters, where all the real action is happening in here, not out there. No, I think we're much more engaged with the world. It's not all happening in some private mental world. It's happening in our engagement with the shared world, and that seems to me a vision that I find much more uplifting, comforting, and rewarding.

PAUL HAWKEN

Founder of Project Regeneration & Project Drawdown
Author of Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation

We and all living beings thrive by being actors in the planet’s regeneration, a civilizational goal that should commence and never cease. We practiced degeneration as a species and it brought us to the threshold of an unimaginable crisis. To reverse global warming, we need to reverse global degeneration.

ROBIN PHILLIPS

Retired US Army Officer with a Career in Current and Crisis Intelligence and Strategic Plans and Policy at the Pentagon

We need to work together to handle the migrations that will inevitably come because of climate change and loss of human habitat and loss of agricultural lands. The wisest nation going forward will be the one that can maintain its population through allowing immigration and thinking about where you can draw folks that are coming from stressed environments and they need a place to land and you're losing population. Why should you not accept those people and encourage them to fill the roles that you need them to fill and settle in the areas where you are being depopulated because of falling fertility by choice?

ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

Senior Reporter at ProPublica · Filmmaker · Author
On The Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America

Living in California, I've just come to accept the unsettledness of this era we're moving into. And I think that's really how I see the future. You know, we're living in an era of disruption, and there are others I talk to and write about in the book who also muse about the possibility of a more nomadic future. That maybe home isn't a permanent place with deep roots but is a transient place with shallow roots or two places that you alternate between. In addition to a lot of other dramatic changes that the book is about, a change in our sense of home and our sense of place is a part of this story.

MATTIA MAURÉE

Interdisciplinary Composer · AuDHD Coach
Host of the AuDHD Flourishing Podcast

So for me, just removing a lot of the shame and then a lot of the energy that I was wasting trying to fit myself into a neurotypical process or framework or way of thinking or being. So, you know, some people call that unmasking, just kind of removing. I was wasting a lot of energy, basically trying to be someone else and function in a different way. And then just beating myself up internally for not being able to do that. And throughout my healing journey, as I really realized, Oh, that's actually what's happening. Like there's not actually anything wrong with me being able to...That's why it's called Love Your Brain. It's not just, you know, tolerate your brain. Or, fine, you can work with this brain that you have. It's like, no, I genuinely love the weird experiences that my brain can give me and the incredibly rich, deep experience I have of the world. Like I experience nature so deeply and so intensely. I have really strong connections with animals. I have really great intuition, which I think is just from picking up all this sensory data and putting it together. All these experiences that I get to have, but I don't get to have those experiences if I'm just trying to make myself be something else, which I think is most people who are late diagnosed, I feel like that's their experience. It's just like I've been trying to be someone else for so long. It's exhausting. And then you don't have the energy then to be creative, the carving out the time, making the time to actually create.

DANA FISHER

Director · Center for Environment, Community, & Equity
Author of Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action

I call myself an apocalyptic optimist. In other words, I do believe there is hope to save ourselves from the climate crisis that we have caused. However, I also believe that saving ourselves will only be possible with a mass mobilization that is driven by the pain and suffering of climate shocks around the world. A generalized sense of extreme risk can lead to peaceful and less-peaceful mass mobilizations at the levels needed to stimulate an AnthroShift. Only a global risk event (or numerous smaller events that are seen as threatening social and economic centers of power) will motivate the kind of massive social change that is needed. In other words, without a risk pivot—be it driven by social or environmental change—an AnthroShift that is large enough to respond adequately to the climate crisis and open a large enough window of opportunity postshock is improbable.

ESHA CHHABRA

Author of Working to Restore: Harnessing the Power of Business to Heal the Earth

The term regenerative business started coming into the lexicon in 2017, 2018. And regenerative means to regenerate, means to bring life into something. To sustain means to keep the status quo. And regenerative looks at things from a very holistic lens. You know, it's like if you're going to run a regenerative farm, it's all the different components of the farm and the ecosystem ideally come within the ecosystem.

RAPHAËL MILLIÈRE

Asst. Professor in Philosophy of AI · Macquarie University
I'd like to focus more on the immediate harms that the kinds of AI technologies we have today might pose. With language models, the kind of technology that powers ChatGPT and other chatbots, there are harms that might result from regular use of these systems, and then there are harms that might result from malicious use. Regular use would be how you and I might use ChatGPT and other chatbots to do ordinary things. There is a concern that these systems might reproduce and amplify, for example, racist or sexist biases, or spread misinformation. These systems are known to, as researchers put it, “hallucinate” in some cases, making up facts or false citations. And then there are the harms from malicious use, which might result from some bad actors using the systems for nefarious purposes. That would include disinformation on a mass scale. You could imagine a bad actor using language models to automate the creation of fake news and propaganda to try to manipulate voters, for example. And this takes us into the medium term future, because we're not quite there, but another concern would be language models providing dangerous, potentially illegal information that is not readily available on the internet for anyone to access. As they get better over time, there is a concern that in the wrong hands, these systems might become quite powerful weapons, at least indirectly, and so people have been trying to mitigate these potential harm

DANNY CAINE

Bookseller · Poet · Author of How to Protect Bookstores and Why · How to Resist Amazon and Why · Picture Window

The thing that unites my poetry and the nonfiction writing is my main obsession as a writer. It's the question of, how do you live meaningfully in late capitalism? As corporations and global capitalist forces take over the world, what does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life? Bookselling captured my imagination and my heart as soon as I started working at the bookstore because I could see the potential for this great, amazing community-oriented work.

NEIL JOHNSON

Professor of Physics · GWU · Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab

It gets back to this core question: Why AI comes out with what it does. That's the burning question. It's like it's bigger than the origin of the universe to me as a scientist, and here's the reason why. The origin of the universe, it happened. That's why we're here. It's almost like a historical question asking why it happened. The AI future is not a historical question. It's a now and future question.

BEN GOLDFARB

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award-winning Author

The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. We're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads. Roads aren't just symbols of movement and mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.

ROBERT PIPPIN

Author of The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy
Modernism as a Philosophical Problem · Hegel’s Idealism

Philosophy is both an academic discipline and also something that everybody does. Everybody has to have reflective views about what's significant. They also have to justify to themselves why it's significant or important. The nature of justice itself, and the various opinions that have been written about in philosophy about justice, can get to a very high level. So there's this unusual connection between philosophy and human life. We've inherited from the middle ages, this incredible tradition that's now developed into a chance for young people to spend four or five years, in a way, released from the pressures of life. The idea to pursue your ideas a little further in these four years you have, exempt from the pressures of social life, allows philosophy to have a kind of position unique in the academy. In confronting what the best minds in the history of the world have had to say about these issues, the hope is that they provide for the people who are privileged enough to confront philosophy a better and more thoughtful approach to these fundamental questions that everybody has to confront.

BERTRAND PICCARD

Psychiatrist, Explorer, Aviator of First Round-the-World Solar-powered Flight
Founder & Chairman · Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions
UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment

So this is why I prefer to speak with a really down to earth language. So maybe the people who love nature are going to say, “Oh, Bertrand Piccard, now he is too down to earth. He's speaking about profitable solutions. He's speaking to the industries that are polluting,” but we have to speak to the industries that are polluting and bring them profitable solutions, otherwise the world will never change, or humankind will never change. And don't forget one thing, what we are damaging is not the beauty of nature. What is being damaged is the quality of life of human beings on Earth because we can still have beautiful things to see, but if we have climate change, if we have tropical disease in Europe, if we have heat waves, floods, droughts, millions of climate refugees, life will be miserable, even if nature is still beautiful.

NINA LUZZATTO GARDNER

Adjunct Lecturer in International Law, Johns Hopkins SAIS
Director of Strategy International, Corporate Sustainability Advisory Firm

My father made me think very much in terms of what kind of planet we are leaving to our children? And what should we be doing in terms of being custodians of this planet? And that we should not be using up all the resources, but actually trying to conserve them and make the world a better for the next generation.

JOSEPH LEDOUX

Neuroscientist · Musician · Author
The Emotional Brain · Anxious · The Deep History of Ourselves
The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human

We've got four billion years of biological accidents that created all of the intricate aspects of everything about life, including consciousness. And it's about what's going on in each of those cells at the time that allows it to be connected to everything else and for the information to be understood as it's being exchanged between those things with their multifaceted, deep, complex processing.

INTAN PARAMADITHA

Author of The Wandering · Apple and Knife
Editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets · Co-ed. The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas

The Wandering is a choose your own adventure novel, and the reader is situated in the shoes of this brown woman from the Global South. She's 27 and in a way, she is stuck with her life. She aspires to be middle class, but her job doesn't allow her to achieve this social mobility. In her condition, she makes a deal with a devil, a reference to the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, finally getting a pair of red shoes that will take her anywhere. But that means she will never be able to find home—that's the curse of the shoes. The title in Indonesian is Gentayanga, which is a word used to describe ghosts who exist in a liminal state.

MAX COOPER

Electronic Musician · Fmr. Computational Biologist

As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.

CLAYTON PAGE ALDERN

Neuroscientist turned Environmental Journalist
Author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains, and Bodies

I want to be wowed by the world. I want to gaze at it in awe and wonder. And I think when we take a step back and begin to appreciate the complexity of the interactions around us. We're taking note of a very porous between the self and the rest of the world. We are literally observing our enmeshment in our environment. And it's that kind of a reference frameshift that I think is going to help us move out of some of the darkness. My mother is an artist, and I think growing up surrounded by her practice exposed me to the creative process and is probably that which afforded me a certain sympathy for those tools and those modes of exploring the world later in life.

AYÇA ÇUBUKÇU & ADOM GETACHEW

On Imagining a New Left Internationalism Outside the Legacies of the Settler State

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji have a conversation with critical political theorists Adom Getachew and Ayça Çubukçu on the colonial construction of the international system and its organization around the institution of the nation state. The conversation covers and uncovers so many aspects of the hidden colonial history behind the constitution of this system, but also the resistance and creative appropriations by Black, Indigenous, and colonized peoples, allowing us to imagine possible liberatory futures beyond the forms and strictures of the colonial present.

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