The Creative Process in 10 minutes or less · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Educ The Creative Process

“There is magic everywhere. There's wonder everywhere. There's wondrous complexity that is so complex, so difficult to conceptualize, to grasp, to articulate that it might as well be magic for all intents and purposes, but we can gradually start to unpick how the tricks are done, how nature learned to do these wonderful tricks. And that's the wonder of science, gradually learning what's happening behind the scenes and how these marvelous effects are produced.
I'm probably best known for my work on consciousness. My view about this is often caricatured, I think, as a kind of heartless, materialist one, because I'm resistant to all forms of dualism about the mind. I think that's a very unhelpful way of thinking.
Some people think that I do that because I have a sort of crass materialist attitude to the world, that there's only things you can measure and weigh and bump into and everything else is just nonsense and fancy and different. 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… Another one of my heroes is Daniel Dennett's great friend, Nicholas Humphrey, who has a wonderfully rich range of experience. He's been described as a scientific humanist. What he does is he knows his science, including cognitive neuroscience and psychology, but he's also steeped in literature, art, music, and painting, and he brings all this together in his wonderful book on consciousness Soul Dust, published in 2011, suggests the idea that the soul is actually made of dust, which is a fantastic concept.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One of the things I think about a lot is this. I vividly remember the desire throughout pretty much most of my twenties and certainly my teen years to be a famous artist and win big awards. And when you dig down into what you actually want from that, it's connection. The teen brain, in particular, is extremely geared toward connection and gets different brain chemical payouts for different things than adults. So certainly, when I think of like teenagers, I think of that drive for connection and fitting in and being accepted is so strong. And that was a part of my artistic output or desire as well was like, okay, if I write, you know, something world-changing, like then it could be like a really well-regarded composer and get that respect. Or if I go more of the songwriting and film route, I can be beloved or have people love my music and have this emotional experience with my music. There were all these dreams that I had that I think largely boiled down to just wanting to be accepted. And you can get that outside of your career and outside of the arts.”

“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. 
At this point, it is impossible to predict if such a shock will come from ecological disaster, war, pandemic, or another unforeseen risk. What is certain, though, is that without such a shock that motivates an AnthroShift large enough to reorient all the sectors of society to respond meaningfully to the climate crisis, it is hard to envision the world achieving the levels of climate action needed. Instead, the best we can hope for is incremental change that does not disrupt the dominant nodes of political and economic power; such incremental change has the potential to reduce the gravity of the crisis, but it will not stop the coming climate crisis.”
– Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action

“There’s a lot of greenwashing that's going on these days. It is great marketing. And that was really the reason why I wrote this book. I had started to see the patterns. You can start to tell them the companies that are genuinely doing it versus the companies that are just talking about it. So that was one indicator, you know, a company that would send out a press release about their goals and what they anticipated to do in the next 5 to 10 years was very different from companies who had said, you know what, this is what we've achieved. Regenerative started coming into the lexicon, the term 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.”