“ I'm fascinated by the extremes of the human experience, partly because it is so far removed from our own experience of life. In another way, when you look at people who have neurological disorders or diseases, these are really nature's experiments. They are ways of trying to understand how the brain works for all of us. By extrapolation from looking at these extremes, we can learn about the workings of our own brains. That's very much the case across all the areas of my work, whether it be sleep disorders, neurology, or epilepsy—how we regulate our emotions, how we move, how we experience the world.

I never intended to be a storyteller; I intended to be a story listener, which is what we do daily in our clinics. Telling these stories generates empathy, creates understanding, and hopefully inspires the next generation to pursue careers as doctors, psychologists, and healthcare professionals, fostering a fascination with the brain similar to what Oliver Sacks did for me.”

Dr. Guy Leschziner is the author of The Nocturnal Brain, The Man Who Tasted Words, and other books. He is a consultant neurologist and a Professor of Neurology and Sleep Medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. He sees patients with a range of neurological and sleep disorders, and is actively involved in research and teaching. He has presented series on sleep and neurology for BBC World Service and Radio 4. His latest book is Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human.

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“When I was working at the Times and the Times Magazine, on one Tuesday morning, the towers fell. September 11, 2001. The magazine had a 10-day lead time, so it was a weekly that was essentially 10 days old by the time it came out. We came to work and realized the world had changed, and the entire process, the magazine had been made for over a hundred years, had to be thrown out the window. We had to create a new magazine in 36 hours that would in some way speak to this very different, scary, and interesting world we were now in. In those 36 hours, we usually would take months to produce a magazine. If you take all of its aspects, it’s a long journey. However, we made a magazine in 36 hours that, in some ways, was the best magazine I ever made because of the urgency of the moment.”

Adam Moss was the editor of New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and 7 Days. As editor of New York, he also oversaw the creation of five digital magazines: Vulture, The Cut, Daily Intelligencer, Grub Street, and The Strategist. During his tenure, New York won forty-one National Magazine Awards, including Magazine of the Year. He was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times with oversight of the Magazine, the Book Review, and the Culture, and Style sections, as well as managing editor of Esquire. He was elected to the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2019. He is the Author of The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing.

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“So, post-activism is not ‘post-activism’ in the sense of being after activism. It is not supposed to be a through line to results or resolutions or solutions.”

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a philosopher, psychologist, writer, public intellectual, and the founder of the Emergence Network. His work, which he names post-activism, marks an earth-wide effort to sensitize bodies towards new response-abilities and other places of power – a project framed within a material feminist/post-humanist/post-activist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home.

“Post-activism is instead a noticing that the ways we care for ourselves and our causes and our worlds could actually be incarcerated. Another way to put that is to notice that care can often become carceral. I often suggest that we like to embrace things, but sometimes in the squeeze of embrace, it could quickly become asphyxiation, where we choke the air out of each other in trying to care for each other.”

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“I learn more than anything else from my children. My son, he's seven, he's autistic, and I call him my prophet for a reason. He teaches me to meet myself in ways that are usually very stunning. I can get information from other people; I can read a book here and there, but it's very rare to come across such an embodiment of grace, possibility, and futurity, all wrapped up in a tiny seven-year-old boy's body. My son has given me lots of gifts.”

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a philosopher, psychologist, writer, public intellectual, and the founder of the Emergence Network. His work, which he names post-activism, marks an earth-wide effort to sensitize bodies towards new response-abilities and other places of power – a project framed within a material feminist/post-humanist/post-activist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home.

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“This novel is the third in what I see as a little set of books that all feature unnamed female protagonists who have experienced varying degrees of passivity and agency in their lives. They're all women who speak the words of other people.”

Katie Kitamura is the author five novels, most recently Audition and Intimacies, which was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, fellowships from the Cullman Center and the Lannan Foundation, and many other honors. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

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“I'm really interested in the formal aspect of characters who are channeling language, who are speaking the words of other people, and in characters who are aware of how little agency they actually have, who have passivity forced upon them, who perhaps even embrace their passivity to a certain extent but eventually seek out where they can enact their agency.”

Katie Kitamura is the author five novels, most recently Audition and Intimacies, which was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, fellowships from the Cullman Center and the Lannan Foundation, and many other honors. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

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“What I meant when I said there is no AI is that I don't think we serve ourselves well when we put our own technology up as if it were a new God that we created. I think we confuse ourselves too easily. This goes back to Alan Turing, the main founder of computer science, who had this idea of the Turing test. In the test, you can't tell whether the computer has gotten more human-like or the human has gotten more computer-like. People are very prone to becoming more computer-like. When we're on social media, we let ourselves be guided by the algorithms, so we start to become dumb in the way the algorithms want us to. You see that all the time. It's really degraded our psychologies and our society.”

Jaron Lanier is a pioneering technologist, writer, and musician, best known for coining the term “Virtual Reality” and founding VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. He led early breakthroughs in virtual worlds, avatars, and VR applications in fields like surgery and media. Lanier writes on the philosophy and economics of technology in his bestselling book Who Owns the Future? and You Are Not a Gadget. His book Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality is an inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, and philosophy. Lanier has been named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people and serves as Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft’s Office of the CTO—aka “Octopus.” As a musician, he’s performed with Sara Bareilles, Philip Glass, T Bone Burnett, Laurie Anderson, Jon Batiste, and others.

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Episode Website

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“AI is obviously the dominant topic in tech lately, and I think occasionally there's AI that's nonsense, and occasionally there's AI that's great. I love finding new proteins for medicine and so on. I don't think we serve ourselves well when we put our own technology up as if it were a new God that we created. I think we're really getting a little too full of ourselves to think that. This goes back to Alan Turing, the main founder of computer science, who had this idea of the Turing test. In the test, you can't tell whether the computer has gotten more human-like or the human has gotten more computer-like. People are very prone to becoming more computer-like. When we're on social media, we let ourselves be guided by the algorithms, so we start to become dumb in the way the algorithms want us to. You see that all the time. It's really degraded our psychologies and our society.”

Jaron Lanier is a pioneering technologist, writer, and musician, best known for coining the term “Virtual Reality” and founding VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. He led early breakthroughs in virtual worlds, avatars, and VR applications in fields like surgery and media. Lanier writes on the philosophy and economics of technology in his bestselling book Who Owns the Future? and You Are Not a Gadget. His book Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality is an inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, and philosophy. Lanier has been named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people and serves as Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft’s Office of the CTO—aka “Octopus.” As a musician, he’s performed with Sara Bareilles, Philip Glass, T Bone Burnett, Laurie Anderson, Jon Batiste, and others.

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Photo credit: Michael Springer

“When I first started writing this book, it really foregrounded the problems within our land ownership system, which treats land as a commodity. The way we talk about land and issues like racial and food justice reflects this. We tend to focus on the problems, attaching big concepts to them, such as racial justice or environmental justice. I realized that my job primarily consists of going around and talking to activists and community groups about their work. I’m interested not just in the very big problems we face as a society, economy, and political system, but also in how people are trying to think through solutions or approaches to those problems.

Audrea Lim is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist whose work focuses on land, energy, and the environment. Her writing has appeared in TheNew Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Republic, and The Nation. Lim is the editor of The World We Need and the author of Free The Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos. She is a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University and was a 2022 Macdowell fellow.

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The music on this episode is “Snowball” from the album Sunken Cities, performed by Audrea Lim and her band Odd Rumblings.

“The three ills of democracy that I propose to address with this method, which we've perfected over the last several decades. Democracy is supposed to make some connection with the "will of the people." But how can we estimate the will of the people when everyone is trying to manipulate it?”

James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His work focuses on Deliberative Polling, a process of deliberative public consultation that has been conducted more than 150 times around the world. He is the author of Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?, Democracy When the People Are Thinking (OUP) and other books.

“Deliberative democracy is itself, when properly done, a kind of democracy that can speak to the interests of a community. And we need that all over the world.”

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