“In the book I spend a bunch of time basically teaching skills and teaching frameworks of thinking. Not to indoctrinate, it's not a framework like an ideology where you need to believe exactly these things. This is a lot more about how does one use their minds effectively to solve problems that have been solved before. Of course, I work on things that have to do with investment and climate and the future of the economy and automation. The main things I'm trying to teach in the book are skills around creativity, critical thinking, community compassion and frameworks around how to go and use that on problems that should be relatively portable to a bunch of problems that are meaningful to you. The way that education needs to change is that people need to actively be working on things that truly matter to them so that over time they end up being able to go make that difference.”

Tom Chi is a physicist, designer, inventor, and investor whose work has shaped everything from Google Glass and rapid prototyping at Google X to some of the most ambitious climate technologies being built today. He’s now the founding partner of At One Ventures, where he invests in deep-tech companies focused on a bold goal: a world where humanity is a net positive to nature.

Tom’s new book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future, reframes economics itself—not as a fixed law, but as a design discipline that can be reimagined to align with the physical realities of our planet. Drawing on science, systems thinking, and lessons from nature, the book offers a grounded, practical framework for moving beyond both climate doom and empty optimism—and toward real, regenerative solutions. Today’s conversation is about what Tom calls the 4Cs: Capital, Compassion, Climate, and Community—but also about agency, responsibility, and what becomes possible when we stop treating the future as something that happens to us and start designing it deliberately.

(0:00) Overcoming Powerlessness through Creativity, Critical Thinking, Community Compassion

Why broad hopelessness about the future is a purposeful tactic to maintain the status quo.

(7:16) How average temperature metrics fail to communicate the true danger of extreme climate volatility.

(11:54) Economics as Design

(17:11) Multi-disciplinary Learning Centered on Real-World Impact

(26:12) Local Resilience

(31:15) Tax & Capital Misallocation

(36:52) Build Integrity

(45:32) AI and Robotics in Agriculture

(51:08) The First Honeybee Vaccine

(56:11) The Entropy Curve of Pollution

(1:15:31) Human-Centric AI

Flipping the priority of automation to serve the collective good rather than enriching a select few

(1:20:59) Thinking in Pictures

How learning to communicate and problem-solve without language fueled a career in deep tech invention

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Step into the deep time of the forest floor, where a single fallen leaf contains the history of the world, and invisible fungal networks hum with ancient conversations. Biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell reveals a staggering truth: we are completely dependent on the botanical world, and our belief in strict human individuality is a biological illusion.

Haskell has spent much of his life training himself to see the universal within the infinitesimally small. He's famously sat for a year in a single square meter of Tennessee's forest, a mandala experience that revealed the deep history of the world through a single fallen leaf. He's a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his books The Forest Unseen and Sounds Wild and Broken, and he received the John Burroughs Medal for The Songs of Trees.

His work often focuses on what he calls the unwaged labor of the natural world, the complex biological communities that sustain our planet without a monetary ledger. And his latest book is How Flowers Made Our World. In it, he argues that we are essentially grass apes dependent on the ancient innovations of flowering plants for two-thirds of our daily calories.

(0:00) How Flowers Made Our World

(1:33) Networked Connection is the Foundation of Life

(2:00) Contemplating the Small

(4:07) Consciousness, Intelligence & Memory in the More-Than-Human-World

(4:18) We Are Grass Apes

(5:41) Memories of His Childhood in Paris & Wild Orchids

(6:34) The Networked Intelligence of Forests

(7:45) The Earth in Full Song

(8:46) The Practice of Listening

(10:11) Escaping the Screen: Real Connections in the Classroom

(11:35) The True Cost of AI

(12:11) Transforming Ourselves

(14:23) Silence Without Expectation

(15:32) A Sensory Legacy for the Future

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

"To be in the process of making things, to be in the process of talking to people about what things mean. The creative process is actually, I think, the most meaningful part of life, but it's very hard to measure. When we get shoved towards a world that demands easy measurables, it's very hard to optimize away from the creative process and optimize towards things that are more static."

On this episode of The Creative Process, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen joins us to discuss his new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. He unpacks the profound concept of "value capture"—the moment we stop caring about the rich, subtle experiences of life and start obsessing over simplified, external metrics like grades, likes, and screen time.

Beyond the trap of quantification, C. Thi Nguyen explores the liberating power of games and art. We discuss how true play requires us to step lightly between different rule sets, the difference between art and craft, and how reclaiming our creative process might just be the ultimate meaning of life.

(0:00) THE TRAP OF VALUE CAPTURE How external metrics and scoring systems hijack our personal values and creativity

(7:09) THE LOGIC OF QUANTIFICATION Why simple numbers travel well but strip away vital human context, from screen time to grades

(11:58) THE MAGIC CIRCLE OF PLAY Understanding the difference between a gamified life and the true, disattached beauty of struggle

(14:57) ART, CRAFT, AND METRICS Why taking the hard way leads to genuine creative expression, and how to spot value-laden systems

(19:34) THE POLITICS OF MEASUREMENT Questioning the assumption that complex human traits, like IQ or consciousness, can be quantified on a single scale

(21:31) THE SPIRIT OF PLAY Using constraints to boost collaborative storytelling and learning to step lightly between different rule worlds

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast