JEFFREY ROSEN

JEFFREY ROSEN

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President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

That idea of planting seeds for future generations came from the Tusculan Disputations. There’s something especially empowering about Cicero. And it's very striking that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and so many in the Founding Era viewed this manual about overcoming grief as the definition for achieving happiness. And I think it's because it's a philosophy of self-mastery, self-improvement, and self-empowerment.

BERTRAND PICCARD

BERTRAND PICCARD

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Explorer & Aviator of the First Round-the-World Solar-powered Flight
Founder of Solar Impulse Foundation & Climate Impulse

The goal with Climate Impulse is to revolutionize aviation and show that we can decarbonize aviation. Of course, it's not yet a jumbo jet with hydrogen. It's a two-seater airplane. If we go around the world nonstop with two people on board, this project can become like a flagship of climate action.

ED ZWICK

ED ZWICK

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Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer
Glory · The Last Samurai · Shakespeare in Love · Thirtysomething
Author of NYTimes Bestseller Hits, Flops & Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood

My intention was to write about my experiences, obviously, but also I felt that there was a little bit of a counterintuitive approach, which is to talk about some of the inner experiences of the creative process and being a director, being a writer, and I felt that that would open the window a little bit wider. I liked that it wasn't just a behind-the-scenes look. It is that, and I think it's full of fun anecdotes and little reveals, but it is to be a real book. It presumes to be a memoir, like many of the memoirs that I have loved of creative people in the past.

ALAN POUL

ALAN POUL

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Emmy & Golden Globe-winning Executive Producer · Director
Tokyo Vice · Six Feet Under · Tales of the City · My So-Called Life

I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from. 

JONATHAN YEO

JONATHAN YEO

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Artist

What are you trying to do with a portrait? On a basic level, you're trying to communicate something about the essence of who someone is. You're trying to figure out who they are, not necessarily who they present themselves as. The two things can quite often be different. You're trying to find ways of showing that through their face, their posture, or any other context. My instinct is always to try to reduce down to the essential elements. We read faces. It's obviously very, very deep in our DNA, really our survival instinct. We are programmed to read faces in a very fine-tuned way.

DR. RUPERT SHELDRAKE

DR. RUPERT SHELDRAKE

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Biologist · Author
The Science Delusion · The Presence of the Past · Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work

The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws. I mean, after all, dogs and cats don't obey laws. And in tribes, they don't even have laws. They have customs. So it's only in civilized societies that you have laws. And then if we think through that metaphor, then actually the laws do change. All artists are influenced by other artists and by things in the collective culture, and I think that morphic resonance as collective memory would say that all of us draw unconsciously as well as consciously on a collective memory and all animals draw on a collective memory of their kind as well. We don't know where it comes from, but there's true creativity involved in evolution, both human and natural.

TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE

TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE

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Founder · Host · Exec. Director of First Voices Radio
Founder of Akantu Intelligence · Master Musician of the Ancient Lakota Flute

We have not adapted to Earth. She needs us to do that. Instead, we've tried to adapt Earth to our needs. Which is always an extraction, take away. Earth doesn't exist because of technology. Earth will always be here. So when it comes to animacy, I think it's a Western term also, and so we get away from the Western terms. We start seeing that, oh, we are becoming Earth as we're born into this physical dimension. We are becoming Earth. And then as we are living during this time, we're alive. We are becoming Earth. And when we are finished with this body, we are becoming Earth. 

DAVID BYRNE'S THEATER OF THE MIND

DAVID BYRNE'S THEATER OF THE MIND

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Stories of Impact · People’s TV

Q: Who is David Byrne?
David Byrne: …I have no idea.

Most people know me through music, but when I was in high school I saw science and the arts as being equally creative fields. More recently, I just started taking an interest in how the brain works, and there's been this explosion of literature. As much as I love reading about neuroscience, I realize that experiencing some of the phenomena is just on a different level. I wanted to create an experience that shows us we're not who we think we are. Theater of the Mind is an immersive Science Theater project. With this show, I've tried to marry a narrative to the experience of different scientific phenomena that reveal how malleable our perception memory and identity really are.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

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ATHLETE · ACTOR · AMERICAN · ACTIVIST
DIAN HANSON discusses photographic homage to ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.
– ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

It's not just that he grew up in a rural environment too. He was born on July 30th, 1947. And most of us today don't have any understanding or relationship to what Europe was like right after World War II. The winter of 1946/1947 in Austria was the most brutal in decades. The people already had too little food. They were in an occupied country. The summer potato crops failed. As Arnold has said, his mother had to go from farm to farm to farm, begging for food to be able to feed her children. His father, like all the men in the village, was defeated by the war. And he saw them all physically, emotionally, intellectually defeated and taking it out on their wives and children, that he was beaten and his mother was beaten. All the neighbor kids were beaten, and they were beaten into a kind of placid defeat. And he alone would not accept that. He could not see that life for himself. And so he wanted out of that. And as a poor boy, he had nothing but his body to work with. That was it. There was not going to be any college. There was not going to be any of that. There was going to be some kind of menial job, or he could use what he had - his body - to get him out of there.

MAX RICHTER

MAX RICHTER

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Award-winning Composer & Pianist
His album Sleep is the most streamed classical album of all time
Film & TV scores for Ad Astra · Black Mirror · Shutter Island · The Leftovers · Arrival · Taboo

For me, the creative process is a sort of a continuous thing in the sense that I'm writing kind of all the time, at some level. And that doesn't mean I'm sitting at my desk all the time, but it does mean that I've got a continuous thought process, a continuous engagement with the material I'm trying to shape. And it's many different kinds of processes. First of all, obviously an intention. You need to have an intention. What is it I'm trying to do? But then you get a process of making things, and then you get into a process of dialogue with the things you've made where they start to take on properties and it feels like the material has intentions of its own. So then you are trying to - it's like herding cats, you know? - sort of corralling this material into some kind of structure, some kind of formed object. Then it becomes like a sculptural process on the large scale.

JEFFREY SACHS

JEFFREY SACHS

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President of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University

The US signed several statements in 2021 confirming that NATO would enlarge. Russia massed troops on its border and put on the table a draft US-Russia security agreement on December 17th, 2021 based on no NATO enlargement. The Biden administration formally replied that it was not willing to negotiate over that issue in a response in January. Then Russia invaded on February 24th, 2022. Four weeks later, Zelenskyy declared that Ukraine was accepting of neutrality. In other words, the initial Russian invasion brought Ukraine to the negotiating table, and during the second half of March, with the Turkish government being the mediators, Russia and Ukraine hammered out a peace agreement. Incredibly, the United States blocked it because the United States told the Ukrainian government: you fight on.

ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON

ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON

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Icelandic Writer & Documentary Filmmaker
On Time and Water · The Casket of Time · LoveStar · Not Ok · The Story of the Blue Planet

A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.

If you look at the Himalayas, the frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water. The real tragedy is if the Himalayan glaciers go the same way as Iceland. In many places in the world, glaciers are very important for agriculture and the basic water supply of people.

MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO

MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO

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Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Fmr. Executive Director of Venice Biennale (Dept. of Visual Arts & Architecture)

When I started and I had to decide what to do in life - because I was working with museums, in exhibition design, and on the restoration of buildings - and then at some point, I had the chance to arrive at the Venice Biennale and my whole perspective changed. And it changed because I was working with living artists and architects. Until that moment, I was working around Old Masters, works in museums, and things that were there with the aura of history. And all of a sudden I was dealing with living architects and artists, and this was, for me, the most incredible experience. So I decided to leave all the rest, because I was doing quite a lot at the same time, and to concentrate on the Biennale.

ADA LIMÓN

ADA LIMÓN

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24th U.S. Poet Laureate · National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Poet

This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful.

CHRIS BLACKWELL

CHRIS BLACKWELL

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Founder of Island Records, which launched the careers of Bob Marley, U2, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Amy Winehouse…
Author of The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond
Winner of the Polar Music Prize · A&R Icon Award

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…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. When I finally met Cat Stevens, and we just sort of sat down 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.

CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG

CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG

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Award-winning Climate Activist
Author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future

There's that old saying, “blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.” For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe…

FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER

FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER

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Academy Award-nominated Cinematographer
HBO’s True Detective: Night Country starring Jodie Foster · Kali Reis · Fiona Shaw

I drove for like a half an hour into absolute nothingness, and I left the car. It was three o'clock in the morning. It was minus 17 degrees and it was absolutely still. I've never experienced stillness such as that. I mean, it's like you feel like you can feel your atoms move or not move because it's so cold. And the sky is full of the Northern Lights. So you are already in a remote place, but you want to go further. And I think maybe those themes of going out into the wilderness are motivated by the urge to connect. And I think Issa López has really incorporated it beautifully into the script. And the show tells of this great disconnect between people. So not only are we disconnected from our environment, but we are disconnected from each other.

DON McKELLAR

DON McKELLAR

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Co-writer · Executive Producer · Co-showrunner of HBO’s The Sympathizer
with Hoa Xuande · Robert Downey Jr.

I think it's central to the message of the show and of the book. This idea that there's another side to every question. That's the central quandary. There's this problem with the whole Vietnam War. It's saying, to Americans at least, put yourself on the other side, the Vietnamese side, and then recognize that that side also has two sides and then within that, there are further divisions. And if you do that, I think what it's proposing is that you have to step back. It forces a sort of objectivity and humility, and it asks you to step back and allow the bigger human questions to resonate.

DAVID FENTON

DAVID FENTON

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Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator
Founder of Fenton Communications: The Social Change Agency
JStreet · Climate Nexus · The Death Penalty Information Center

It sounds like a cliche, but it really is true that history moves in pendulums and waves. And whatever is happening today is not going to last. It will change. So you have periods of concentrations of wealth and power, and then you have periods of rebellion. And I'm quite sure we're headed for another period of rebellion. You can see it a little bit now in the labor strife in the United States and the strikes. You can certainly see it in the massive demonstrations in France and Israel. Excessive concentrations of power breeds rebellion, and that's just inevitable. And the climate crisis is going to cause a lot of rebellion as people figure this out. And I think it's coming very soon, actually, because as you've noticed, the weather is getting very bad. It's become a non-linear accelerating phenomenon. And people will wake up to that. I just hope they wake up in time.

DAN FUTTERMAN & ADAM RAPP

DAN FUTTERMAN & ADAM RAPP

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Award-winning Screenwriters · Exec. Producers · Directors
American Rust · The Looming Tower
Capote · The Outsiders musical

We're all culpable in some way of being both good and bad, being virtuous and also questionable at times in our own lives. And I think when you start answering questions on either side of that too firmly, I think it allows the audience to disconnect from it. And then you just have this sort of a good and bad guy narrative that is oversimplified all too often in our culture. I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance.