Tech, Innovation & Society - The Creative Process: Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics Interviews

"The research that I've done with these NASA satellites - they’re called the Grace Mission, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Mission, and they're really unusual in that they're able to weigh, using small variations in the pull of gravity that water exerts on the satellites. Satellites are like a scale. They move up and down in the sky depending on how much water there is on the ground. So we can map out these places that are gaining or losing water on a monthly basis. And you know, now the satellites have been flying for 20 years, so we can see these trends.""So there's lots of interesting stuff that's happening out there. Technology that helps industry. There's going to be a big push and a lot of pressure on industry to do more reporting. The technology to do optimal water and nutrient delivery at the plant scale, like just using the optimal amount of water and fertilizer at the plant scale, so down to the plant scale within huge farms is being rapidly developed. So these things are all game changers. And that's without talking about financial innovations. So financial innovations are also not necessarily technology, but when we think about what innovations we need, some of those are financial, whether it's incentive packages or the need to work with investors. So just like we did with carbon that has been so successful working with investors who invest in the big agricultural companies, the big food and beverage companies, we've gotten great traction on the carbon side driving these companies, huge multinational companies to net zero carbon. We need to be doing the same thing on the water side. And so that investor push is a financial innovation."Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist, a professor and the Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where he holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley tech startup, Waterplan. Before moving to Saskatchewan, he served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.  From 2013 through 2018, he was appointed  by Governor Jerry Brown to the California State Water Boards. He has appeared on CBS News 60 Minutes, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, as a featured expert in water documentaries including Day Zero and Last Call at the Oasis, and across a host of international news media. He is the host of the podcast What About Water?https://jayfamiglietti.comWhat About Water? podcast with Jay FamigliettiTwitter @WhatAboutWaterGIWS https://water.usask.cawww.waterplan.comwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist, a professor and the Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where he holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley tech startup, Waterplan. Before moving to Saskatchewan, he served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.  From 2013 through 2018, he was appointed  by Governor Jerry Brown to the California State Water Boards. He has appeared on CBS News 60 Minutes, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, as a featured expert in water documentaries including Day Zero and Last Call at the Oasis, and across a host of international news media. He is the host of the podcast What About Water?"The research that I've done with these NASA satellites - they’re called the Grace Mission, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Mission, and they're really unusual in that they're able to weigh, using small variations in the pull of gravity that water exerts on the satellites. Satellites are like a scale. They move up and down in the sky depending on how much water there is on the ground. So we can map out these places that are gaining or losing water on a monthly basis. And you know, now the satellites have been flying for 20 years, so we can see these trends.""So there's lots of interesting stuff that's happening out there. Technology that helps industry. There's going to be a big push and a lot of pressure on industry to do more reporting. The technology to do optimal water and nutrient delivery at the plant scale, like just using the optimal amount of water and fertilizer at the plant scale, so down to the plant scale within huge farms is being rapidly developed. So these things are all game changers. And that's without talking about financial innovations. So financial innovations are also not necessarily technology, but when we think about what innovations we need, some of those are financial, whether it's incentive packages or the need to work with investors. So just like we did with carbon that has been so successful working with investors who invest in the big agricultural companies, the big food and beverage companies, we've gotten great traction on the carbon side driving these companies, huge multinational companies to net zero carbon. We need to be doing the same thing on the water side. And so that investor push is a financial innovation."https://jayfamiglietti.comWhat About Water? podcast with Jay FamigliettiTwitter @WhatAboutWaterGIWS https://water.usask.cawww.waterplan.comwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

"And you can make extremely intelligent computations and very complex computations, but you don't get a mind out of it. You don't get consciousness out of it. You get a computer, and that's what's driving my hands waving around, driving my lips and my tongue, and all that kind of stuff, it's a computer; it's our non-conscious mind. But on top of that, we have the stuff we're aware of, and that's where our creativity lies. That's where our emotions lie. We can't think of being creative without using our conscious mind. And that's where stuff comes together because the difference between what happens in our conscious mind and in our non-conscious mind – in our non-conscious mind, everything is dissected."Johnjoe McFadden is the author of Life is Simple, How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. He obtained his PhD at Imperial College London and went on to work on human genetic diseases and then infectious diseases, at the University of Surrey. Professor McFadden has specialised in examining the genetics of microbes such as the agents of tuberculosis and meningitis. His other books are Quantum Evolution: Life in the Multiverse, and Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (co-authored with Jim Al-Khalili). He has published more than 100 articles in scientific journals on a wide range of subjects and lectures around the world. His present post is Associate Dean (International) and Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey.www.surrey.ac.uk/people/johnjoe-mcfaddenhttps://johnjoemcfadden.co.ukwww.basicbooks.com/titles/johnjoe-mcfadden/life-is-simple/9781549112119www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

Johnjoe McFadden is the author of Life is Simple, How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. He obtained his PhD at Imperial College London and went on to work on human genetic diseases and then infectious diseases, at the University of Surrey. Professor McFadden has specialised in examining the genetics of microbes such as the agents of tuberculosis and meningitis. His other books are Quantum Evolution: Life in the Multiverse, and Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (co-authored with Jim Al-Khalili). He has published more than 100 articles in scientific journals on a wide range of subjects and lectures around the world. His present post is Associate Dean (International) and Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey."And you can make extremely intelligent computations and very complex computations, but you don't get a mind out of it. You don't get consciousness out of it. You get a computer, and that's what's driving my hands waving around, driving my lips and my tongue, and all that kind of stuff, it's a computer; it's our non-conscious mind. But on top of that, we have the stuff we're aware of, and that's where our creativity lies. That's where our emotions lie. We can't think of being creative without using our conscious mind. And that's where stuff comes together because the difference between what happens in our conscious mind and in our non-conscious mind – in our non-conscious mind, everything is dissected."www.surrey.ac.uk/people/johnjoe-mcfaddenhttps://johnjoemcfadden.co.ukwww.basicbooks.com/titles/johnjoe-mcfadden/life-is-simple/9781549112119www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

"Scott [aka Kid Cudi] sees music in color, so what the visuals of music meant to him. So he wanted to create a new experience and that alongside Kenya Barris and ideating what it could be led to Entergalactic, which essentially Scott wrote an original album, which is his 10th Studio album, and pieced those songs in before the creation of this love story, which runs 90 minutes from start to finish, and essentially the two parts exist simultaneously. So you've got the album on its own, and then you've got the event, which allows you to hear beats of each piece of music in all of these key beats of Jabari (Scott's character) and Meadow’s (Jessica Williams' character) love story. Scott had tweeted out that Entergalactic was the greatest piece he's ever created. This is the thing he's most proud of. Scott feels that this was an opportunity to create that new moment for his audience where they're going to get to experience something that they'd never had the opportunity to before because it feels so new.""Scott lives in between the notes. So the things that you would expect, he lives right in the center, which is why his music is so interesting. The nuance and creativity of his choices is so indicative of the way that he hears sound."Karina Manashil is the President of Mad Solar Productions. She began her career in the mailroom at WME (William Morris Endeavor) where she became a talent agent. She represented notable clients including Scott Mescudi, known by his stage name, Kid Cudi, and built her career taking talent into new arenas. In 2020, she partnered with Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to launch Mad Solar, which is backed by BRON Studios. Manashil then went on to Executive Produce SXSW fan-favorite X and its sequel, Pearl, directed by Ti West. Manashil is an Executive Producer on the Netflix animated series Entergalactic directed by Fletcher Moules. Entergalactic was created by Kid Cudi and features voiceover from Jessica Williams and Timothée Chalamet. It was released alongside its album of the same name from Kid Cudi on September 30th. Manashil is a native of Los Angeles and graduated from Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production.Manashil www.imdb.com/name/nm3556462/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0 www.kidcudi.comMad Solar https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?companies=co0831164 Entergalactic www.netflix.com/title/81053303Pearl www.imdb.com/title/tt18925334/X www.imdb.com/title/tt13560574/?ref_=tt_trv_trvwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

Karina Manashil is the President of Mad Solar Productions. She began her career in the mailroom at WME (William Morris Endeavor) where she became a talent agent. She represented notable clients including Scott Mescudi, known by his stage name, Kid Cudi, and built her career taking talent into new arenas.In 2020, she partnered with Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to launch Mad Solar, which is backed by BRON Studios. Manashil then went on to Executive Produce SXSW fan-favorite X and its sequel, Pearl, directed by Ti West. Manashil is an Executive Producer on the Netflix animated series Entergalactic directed by Fletcher Moules. Entergalactic was created by Kid Cudi and features voiceover from Jessica Williams and Timothée Chalamet. It was released alongside its album of the same name from Kid Cudi on September 30th.Manashil is a native of Los Angeles and graduated from Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production."Scott [aka Kid Cudi] sees music in color, so what the visuals of music meant to him. So he wanted to create a new experience and that alongside Kenya Barris and ideating what it could be led to Entergalactic, which essentially Scott wrote an original album, which is his 10th Studio album, and pieced those songs in before the creation of this love story, which runs 90 minutes from start to finish, and essentially the two parts exist simultaneously. So you've got the album on its own, and then you've got the event, which allows you to hear beats of each piece of music in all of these key beats of Jabari (Scott's character) and Meadow’s (Jessica Williams' character) love story. Scott had tweeted out that Entergalactic was the greatest piece he's ever created. This is the thing he's most proud of. Scott feels that this was an opportunity to create that new moment for his audience where they're going to get to experience something that they'd never had the opportunity to before because it feels so new.""Scott lives in between the notes. So the things that you would expect, he lives right in the center, which is why his music is so interesting. The nuance and creativity of his choices is so indicative of the way that he hears sound."Manashil www.imdb.com/name/nm3556462/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0 www.kidcudi.comMad Solar https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?companies=co0831164 Entergalactic www.netflix.com/title/81053303Pearl www.imdb.com/title/tt18925334/X www.imdb.com/title/tt13560574/?ref_=tt_trv_trvwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

"I remember in the early 2000s, we had so much hope for the internet that it was going to democratize the distribution of music, especially when file sharing started. We said, Oh, wow. This is great. At that time, there were five major record companies, and then they conspired with MTV to give MTV all this free, big production content, and you couldn't really sell a lot of records unless you were on MTV. And unless you had this big budget for this video. And it started, artists were exploited from the beginning of radio. So I thought, Oh wow, now we're going to have file sharing, and we have the internet, and there's going to be all this information. This is going to transform the world. We're going to have this incredible end of poverty. And instead, we get Fascism. We get Bolsonaro, and it's really scary. On the other hand, listening to some of your podcasts - which I've been doing a lot recently - it's really pushed me to try to be optimistic because the pessimism is very oppressive. It makes me not want to work. So I'm really pushing myself to be consciously optimistic."Lee Jaffe, a cross-disciplinary visual artist, musician, and poet, took photos of his friend, Jean-Michel Basquiat, when they traveled abroad in 1983. As a photographer, Jaffe had a connection to Basquiat, and their time spent together resulted in an archive of imagery that captured one of the art world’s true legends through an unfiltered and authentic lens. “For me, watching him [Jean-Michel] paint reminded me of the times I would sit and play harmonica while Bob Marley, with his acoustic guitar, would be writing songs that were eventually to become classics,” Jaffe says. “With Jean and Bob, it seemed like they were channeling inspiration coming from an otherworldly place.”Basquiat and Jaffe connected over reggae music. It was the early 1980s in New York. Jaffe had been a member of Bob Marley’s band, producer on Peter Tosh’s first solo album.  and collaborated with art world figures Helio Oiticica, Gordon Matta Clark, and Vito Acconci. Jaffe is the author of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads.www.leejaffe.comwww.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847871841/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

Lee Jaffe, a cross-disciplinary visual artist, musician, and poet, took photos of his friend, Jean-Michel Basquiat, when they traveled abroad in 1983. As a photographer, Jaffe had a connection to Basquiat, and their time spent together resulted in an archive of imagery that captured one of the art world’s true legends through an unfiltered and authentic lens. “For me, watching him [Jean-Michel] paint reminded me of the times I would sit and play harmonica while Bob Marley, with his acoustic guitar, would be writing songs that were eventually to become classics,” Jaffe says. “With Jean and Bob, it seemed like they were channeling inspiration coming from an otherworldly place.”Basquiat and Jaffe connected over reggae music. It was the early 1980s in New York. Jaffe had been a member of Bob Marley’s band, producer on Peter Tosh’s first solo album.  and collaborated with art world figures Helio Oiticica, Gordon Matta Clark, and Vito Acconci. Jaffe is the author of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads."I remember in the early 2000s, we had so much hope for the internet that it was going to democratize the distribution of music, especially when file sharing started. We said, Oh, wow. This is great. At that time, there were five major record companies, and then they conspired with MTV to give MTV all this free, big production content, and you couldn't really sell a lot of records unless you were on MTV. And unless you had this big budget for this video. And it started, artists were exploited from the beginning of radio. So I thought, Oh wow, now we're going to have file sharing, and we have the internet, and there's going to be all this information. This is going to transform the world. We're going to have this incredible end of poverty. And instead, we get Fascism. We get Bolsonaro, and it's really scary. On the other hand, listening to some of your podcasts - which I've been doing a lot recently - it's really pushed me to try to be optimistic because the pessimism is very oppressive. It makes me not want to work. So I'm really pushing myself to be consciously optimistic."www.leejaffe.comwww.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847871841/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgPhoto credit: Paige Powell, Lee Jaffe and Jean-Michel Basquiat recording the installation of “Inverted Oak” : Carmel, New York

"I admit to being just a dyed-in-the-wool kind of techno-optimist. I don't know why that is, but I'm just very hopeful and optimistic about the future. And I know people are scared of like superintelligence taking over and everything. I just don't think that we're close to anything like that yet. It's not impossible, and it's something that I think we should take very seriously, but I really see AI as being this incredibly powerful, wonderful thing that is going to unlock incredible huge amounts of economic value. Maybe an optimist bordering on idealistic, but I kind of believe in this idea of abundance. And the idea of abundance is we sort of have this zero-sum perspective about economic activity, where if some people have a lot of wealth, other people can't.But if you look at the size of the world economy – and you can actually go on Wikipedia and look at estimations of this going back to something like 2000 BC – the size of the economy in terms of economic activity is an exponential function, and it's like a perfect exponential function.What exponential function means, as opposed to a linear function, it grows in a percentage basis, not an absolute way over time, which means that to double from one to two is going to take a certain amount of time, but then the same amount of time, not to go from two to three, but to go much higher.The problem is not actually the generation of economic activity. It's allocation of that activity. And I really believe we're on the cusp of that. And AI is one big reason because if you can get rid of a lot of labor, of drudgery, and jobs that people don't want to do, and you can run a factory with a bunch of robots where people don't have to intervene that makes food or makes products or extracts resources...you can unlock a huge amount of economic activity. So, that has the potential, I think, to usher in an era of great abundance."Philip Fernbach is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Leeds School of Business. He’s published widely in the top journals in cognitive science, consumer research and marketing, and received the ACR Early Career Award for Contributions to Consumer Research. He’s co-author with Steve Sloman of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, which was chosen as a New York Times Editor’s Pick. He’s also written for NYTimes, Harvard Business Review, and his research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Washinton Post, National Public Radio, and the BBC. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown and his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Williams College. He teaches data analytics and behavioral science to undergraduate and Masters students.www.colorado.edu/business/www.philipfernbach.comThe Knowledge Illusionwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

Philip Fernbach is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Leeds School of Business. He’s published widely in the top journals in cognitive science, consumer research and marketing, and received the ACR Early Career Award for Contributions to Consumer Research. He’s co-author with Steve Sloman of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, which was chosen as a New York Times Editor’s Pick. He’s also written for NYTimes, Harvard Business Review, and his research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Washinton Post, National Public Radio, and the BBC. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown and his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Williams College. He teaches data analytics and behavioral science to undergraduate and Masters students."I admit to being just a dyed-in-the-wool kind of techno-optimist. I don't know why that is, but I'm just very hopeful and optimistic about the future. And I know people are scared of like superintelligence taking over and everything. I just don't think that we're close to anything like that yet. It's not impossible, and it's something that I think we should take very seriously, but I really see AI as being this incredibly powerful, wonderful thing that is going to unlock incredible huge amounts of economic value. Maybe an optimist bordering on idealistic, but I kind of believe in this idea of abundance. And the idea of abundance is we sort of have this zero-sum perspective about economic activity, where if some people have a lot of wealth, other people can't.But if you look at the size of the world economy – and you can actually go on Wikipedia and look at estimations of this going back to something like 2000 BC – the size of the economy in terms of economic activity is an exponential function, and it's like a perfect exponential function.What exponential function means, as opposed to a linear function, it grows in a percentage basis, not an absolute way over time, which means that to double from one to two is going to take a certain amount of time, but then the same amount of time, not to go from two to three, but to go much higher.The problem is not actually the generation of economic activity. It's allocation of that activity. And I really believe we're on the cusp of that. And AI is one big reason because if you can get rid of a lot of labor, of drudgery, and jobs that people don't want to do, and you can run a factory with a bunch of robots where people don't have to intervene that makes food or makes products or extracts resources...you can unlock a huge amount of economic activity. So, that has the potential, I think, to usher in an era of great abundance."www.colorado.edu/business/www.philipfernbach.comThe Knowledge Illusionwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org