Etgar Keret - Author - Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director - Transdisciplinary Artist

Interviewed by Mia Funk

Author, Screenwriter, and Director Etgar Keret is a recipient of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the Charles Bronfman Prize, and the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Jellyfish, which he directed with his wife Shira Geffen. Most recently, they created the TV mini series The Middleman (L’Agent Immobilier) starring Mathieu Amalric. His books include the short story collections Fly Already, Suddenly a Knock on the Door, and his memoir The Seven Good Years. Etgar’s work has been translated into forty-five languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and This American Life.
A frequent collaborator with visual and performing artists, an exhibition inspired by his mother called Inside Out is currently showing at the Jewish Museum in Berlin until February 5th, 2023.
Find Etgar on Substack

ETGAR KERET

For me, there is something about art, it's not a monologue, it's a dialogue. Some people, it doesn't matter who they speak to, they will speak in the same way they would speak to a five-year-old or to an intellectual or to somebody who doesn't speak the language very well. They would speak the same way and they don't care because this is what they have to say, but I think that the natural thing in the dialogue is really to look into the eyes of the person you speak to and see when he understands or when she doesn't understand or when she's moved or when he's angry. And basically out of that, kind of create your own language. And I think the same way that people are excited about learning and speaking different languages - because I think each language has different merits and different aspects.

So I basically speak Hebrew and English. Many things in the world are easier for me to understand through English and not through Hebrew, so this idea, this kind of learning this new language allows me some kind of versatility and understanding the world better. So I think that having a dialogue with specific and different kinds of audiences does the same. When I started publishing and my books, started becoming successful, the first thing I did was I wrote a children's book because I thought, In life, I like speaking to adults, but I also like speaking to children.

Because my mom grew up in a period where they were excited about Nazi ideology and my mom knew this wasn't a good thing. So this idea of making up your own story instead of taking other people's stories was something that was very important. When I was a child, my mother didn't allow children's books in our home because she insisted on making up the stories for us. For her, basically, it was like the idea of reading us classics from a book was like ordering a pizza instead of cooking dinner. It meant that she didn't care about us. And she felt that because her parents told her bedtime stories in the ghetto where they had no access to books. And she saw how those people who were broken and angry and hurting could still find in their imaginations a brand new story that they made for somebody that they loved. So for her, it was this kind of generosity and something that could not be compared to, for example, buying Alice in Wonderland and reading it to somebody. You had to give more than that.

You don't hire somebody who will make love to your lover for you, and then you say, “I love you so much, I hired this really good guy or good girl that will make love to you instead of me.” So this idea of being there and being authentic and giving yourself was really, really important to her.

And I think that from a young age I've kind of learned that there are good stories, great stories, but none of them is your story. And that you have to kind of make up your own story, not feel just good enough kind of picking up one. And it doesn't matter if it's about Flat Earths or some conspiracy or wanting to clear the world of plastic or going vegan - which I am, vegan. So just this idea of joining some kind of boy scouts or wearing some kind of uniform or supporting some sports club and saying, Okay, now I don't have to think, I'm the New York Knicks fan! So if they win, I'm happy. If they lose, then I'm sad. I think that there is something, both with my mother and my father, being Holocaust survivors, being orphaned, basically, they had to seek the narrative. They didn't inherit one.

It's not like my parents always said, You do like this, you know, and then you can either do what your parents said or rebel against them. It's this idea of What the hell do I do? And I'm looking outside and inside to find my narrative, to find my ethics, to find my values.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I think in your work, as you said, obviously that's a collaboration when you have a translation, so the translator is putting it in the idiom and the tone. Also, in your other work in film, dance, or your television show The Middlemann (L’Agent Immobilier), this had a very French sensibility. You seem to orientate your work around the local culture. You adapt, and it just felt completely of a piece, with of course wonderful acting by Mathieu Amalric, Eddy Mitchell, and others. So it was very beautifully done, and it got right into, I feel, our sensibility.

KERET

When I do a video dance for a Japanese audience or a sci-fi comedy for a French audience then I do try to think about if I want to shock the audience at a certain moment. I think that the same things that would shock a French person would not necessarily shock an Israeli or a Japanese person, you know? I think that what's funny is that for a lot of people, the fact that The Middleman (L'Agent Immobilier) is very extreme, but in Israel when they watched it, they never thought it was extreme. They said it was very funny, but because the Israeli reality is much more extreme, so the idea of people shouting at each other or breaking a wall or punching each other or doing weird stuff, the French said, “Oh, it's over the top.” In Israel, they felt that it was just like the way things are. So it's very, very interesting.

Some people, it doesn't matter who they speak to, they will speak in the same way they would speak to a five-year-old or to an intellectual or to somebody who doesn't speak the language very well. They would speak the same way and they don't care because this is what they have to say, but I think that the natural thing in the dialogue is really to look into the eyes of the person you speak to and see when he understands or when she doesn't understand or when she's moved or when he's angry. And basically out of that, kind of create your own language. And I think the same way that people are excited about learning and speaking different languages - because I think each language has different merits and different aspects.

If I try to think about my mother's story it's really this idea that you don't have a complete picture, but it's broken to pieces. And you can look at each of them and try to imagine the pieces or collect them, but there is something that is fragmented by nature.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

In fact, insisting on a whole picture is probably the larger illusion or a larger lie because, in reality, there is no complete picture. I think to have that you would have to be God, right?

KERET

I think that there are many complete pictures, but in a sense, they are all kind of redacted. And the truth is that it's strange, but I feel that, let's say, if there's a collective narrative that you totally identify with, then one should go with it. It doesn't matter if it's the Catholic Church or Antifa or the Klu Klux Klan. If people say something, they say, Oh my God, yes! They got it! They cracked it. Yay! Give me a torch. Now I got it. It's good enough.

But I think that, at least the experience that I've had, many times it's that I'm too passive. And there are all kinds of narratives passing by, and I hitchhike, kind of sitting on a narrative without really judging and thinking, to say, Oh, it's nice. Oh, people say it's good. You know? And from my mother, I learned to be very, very critical of all those narratives. Because the fact that many people say something and are excited about it, doesn't mean anything.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I think this nurturing, comforting thing that you provide in your art…you’ve mentioned opening doorways to other lands, from your very first story “Pipes” or later stories like “Lieland” or “Unzipping”. You create these other worlds where your fictions, your lies in “Lieland” come to life, and they're magical. That’s something that recurs in your fiction?

KERET

I really feel that if there is something about art that I seek - I think people use art for many things - it's really some kind of a belief that we can transcend. I mean, if I try to kind of see it as some kind of a substitute for a religion. You know, religion tells us that there's something out there. There's somebody watching us, somebody doing something. And I think that for me, many times good art says there is something beyond our understanding that exists, and there is a way to get a step closer to it. Maybe not to unveil it, but we can get there.

And I'm saying that in The Middleman (L'Agent Immobilier), it has this aspect that the guy in it is not nice in any way. There is nothing nice about him, but you see in the series that whatever the starting point, he can get better. So if he's obnoxious, he can become less obnoxious. If he's unloyal, he can become a little bit more loyal. This idea that we can move, it's really, really important.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell me, what was the last conversation you had with your mother?

KERET

Well, the last time we talked, she was already in dementia. So I think that the last time we talked, I held her hand. She said I love you. And I said, “You know who I am?” And she said, “Yes, of course, don't be silly. You're my father.” I think this was the last conversation we had, or something like that.

There is something about both my parents, but I think especially my mother, it's as if the horrible circumstances that they lived through being Jews in the Holocaust, my mother losing her entire family - it was horrible and traumatic, but it was almost like a very extreme human experiment. And it created something. It's like many times when you put somebody in extreme situations, and most of the time he will crush or she will crush, but sometimes, a superhero will be born. And there is something about my parents, when I came to work on the exhibition about my mother Inside Out, I realized there is something about her that was so unique that it could not have been achieved in normal times. Because the thing that happened with my mother was that, when the war started, she was five years old. When the war ended, she was 11 years old. By the time she was about 10, all the people that she had known before the war had died. Her parents, her brother, her grandfather, her friends.

So I think that there was something about my mother that she was a true rebel and an anarchist, not by choice, but by education. Because the fact that she grew up in a place in which you could not trust anyone or you could not trust the narratives in which basically the grownups that she met were not like my parents - who would help me navigate life - but they were like a kind of evil orphanage managers who would steal her food or who would try to molest her or do all those horrible things. So in that sense, she kind of relied on herself for a narrative...So it doesn't really matter so much what's out there, but what matters is how you experience it.

I asked my father as a child, “What was the point in imagining this world? And he said, “Everything that you can imagine can potentially exist. So whenever I was hiding in a hole in the ground, and whenever I could imagine something new, I would make the space in which I live bigger and bigger and wider, and make it to this kind of infinite plane by kind of unfolding my imagination.” And I think that it's always kind of good to remind ourselves that we have an option. We're active. We can act.

I think that there is something about this age that we live in, that it's an age, I think, that everybody feels trapped. Everybody feels wronged. Everybody feels that there is no responsible adult up there. But the idea is what do you do with it? And I feel that it's all about maybe creating some kind of individual sphere, and from this individual sphere trying to connect with others instead of kind of ganging into these posts, which you like or dislike, saying that you hate this guy or like this guy. Kind of avoiding this kind of binaric reduction of yourself, just so you feel you belong to a big group, you know? And I think just like the moment I talked about my mother seeing her history as a pearl necklace, I think that the moment that we see humanity as a pearl necklace and not some kind of equation in which everybody has to give you the same results, then there will be some kind of a breathing option to any person who tries to feel better.

And again, I'm not saying that all my life I felt this way. When I was younger, I think I wanted to change the world. Now I admit, I mostly want to survive it. And I think that there is something looming from above. Let's say when I started writing in the late eighties, early nineties when I was a teenager. You know, everything, the world kind of gave you this promise that things are going to get better, that things are going to get solved. Fukuyama wrote this book about The End of History. No more wars! We're going to solve all our problems! And I think that in these kinds of times, this idea of saying I want to put my things center stage because everybody would listen to it - kind of feels like not only a young man's inspiration but also something that had to do with the zeitgeist.

But right now, I really, really feel it's time for each of us to our boroughs, and not necessarily seek the default town square, CNN, Fox News, you are feeding Facebook - all those kind of things that make you feel less alone but for the price of kind of reducing yourself to something that is very, very binaric in nature.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You were saying that answering questions is a kind of therapy. Is therapy actually good for your writing process?

KERET

Actually, I have friends who have psychologists, so it's not as if I'm against this vocation. It's just maybe because of my biography, I had to go for Plan B. And I wrote my first story Pipes about two or three weeks after my friend died. So, I guess that this idea that I passed the trauma, and I can't go to a psychologist or psychotherapist kind of made me look for Plan B, and it kind of made me a writer.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yes, that goes into that idea of happiness or wanting the absence of pain. But I think that if we didn't have any, then you wonder if you were really alive. That's how we get to know ourselves and each other.

KERET

I think that one of the most powerful sentences I've read was in Faulker's The Wild Palms where the protagonist says that “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” And again, there is some kind of hubris about it because nobody said that life is a buffet and you can choose what you want, you know? But I think there is something in this statement that between void and suffering, I'd rather be suffering. So I feel human. I feel my emotion, and I feel my life than not feel anything. This is something that I can totally identify with.

Main photo credit: Lielle Sand

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Jamie Lammers. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth.

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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President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
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Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer
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Emmy & Golden Globe-winning Executive Producer · Director
Tokyo Vice · Six Feet Under · Tales of the City · My So-Called Life

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Doubt starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
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What an academy was meant to be, going back to their founding, really is a group of people with a certain degree of passion and expertise and knowledge that want to get together and share. That's what I think academies are all about. So the fact that I've been helpful in spurring the Academy onto becoming a more international and global enterprise is a source of great satisfaction to me

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Famous Rock & Urban Climber
"The French Spider-Man”
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BEN SHOFTY

Functional Neurosurgeon · Professor · University of Utah

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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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