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

Yee Lee was the first employee at Terraformation, dedicated to restoring the planet’s forests to solve climate change. He is a serial technology entrepreneur and angel investor from Silicon Valley, having invested in over 100 technology startups. Prior to Terraformation, Yee was an early team member at PayPal and Slide. He founded four venture-backed ecommerce and financial technology startups with M&A exits to Google and TaskRabbit (now part of IKEA). In his capacity as Chief of Growth at Terraformation, Yee supports Business Development, Sales, Capital Markets, and Terraformation Foundation teams.Terraformation builds and deploys tools to tackle the largest bottlenecks to mass-scale reforestation. Its technology includes off-grid seed banks that process and store millions of seeds, tracking and monitoring platforms to enable project transparency, solar-powered desalination and more. Its current partner network spans five continents, including in South America, East Africa and Central Asia, and includes public- and private-sector landowners and organizations. Terraformation’s goal in 2022 is to establish the world’s largest decentralized native seed banking network.www.terraformation.orgwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

“We're trying to help the world's forestry organizations collectively plant a trillion trees in the next decade and cover 3 billion acres of net new forest. That's a very, very large number. Some of the very largest tree-planting organizations in the world collectively plant something like half a billion to three-quarters of a billion trees per year. And even that number sounds large, too, but then you realize that's actually three full orders of magnitude smaller than the actual number we need to hit in the next decade. So we actually need to take all of the world's largest forestry organizations as a group and multiply by a thousand their efforts. So that's a very large undertaking, and I just can't underscore enough the scale at which we as a human species seeks to operate when we talk about tree-planting and forestry operations.”Terraformation builds and deploys tools to tackle the largest bottlenecks to mass-scale reforestation. Its technology includes off-grid seed banks that process and store millions of seeds, tracking and monitoring platforms to enable project transparency, solar-powered desalination and more. Its current partner network spans five continents, including in South America, East Africa and Central Asia, and includes public- and private-sector landowners and organizations. Terraformation’s goal in 2022 is to establish the world’s largest decentralized native seed banking network.www.terraformation.orgPhoto credit @pkworldwidewww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

"The great thing about a complex society is there is space for lots of different kinds of people. There's space for wildly visionary poets and accountants and actuaries and engineers. And they all have a slightly different outlook, but it's the combination of this huge diversity, which makes our societies work. But what we probably do need a bit more of are the bilingual people, the trilingual people who are as at ease spending a day, a week, a year designing how a criminal justice system could look in 50 years and then getting back to perhaps working in a real court or real lawyer's office.”Sir Geoff Mulgan is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London. Formerly he was chief executive of Nesta, and held government roles (1997–2004), including as the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit director and as Downing Street’s head of policy. He is the founder or co-founder of many organisations, from Demos to Action for Happiness, and the author of Another World is Possible, Social Innovation: how societies find the power to change, Big Mind: how collective intelligence can change our world, and other books.  geoffmulgan.comhurstpublishers.com/book/another-world-is-possiblewww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

Sir Geoff Mulgan is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London. Formerly he was chief executive of Nesta, and held government roles (1997–2004), including as the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit director and as Downing Street’s head of policy. He is the founder or co-founder of many organisations, from Demos to Action for Happiness, and the author of Another World is Possible, Social Innovation: how societies find the power to change, Big Mind: how collective intelligence can change our world, and other books.  "The great thing about a complex society is there is space for lots of different kinds of people. There's space for wildly visionary poets and accountants and actuaries and engineers. And they all have a slightly different outlook, but it's the combination of this huge diversity, which makes our societies work. But what we probably do need a bit more of are the bilingual people, the trilingual people who are as at ease spending a day, a week, a year designing how a criminal justice system could look in 50 years and then getting back to perhaps working in a real court or real lawyer's office.”geoffmulgan.comhurstpublishers.com/book/another-world-is-possiblewww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

“We're not attempting to invent super smart AI to replace human cognition. We are inventing dumb AI to supplement human interaction. Are there simple forms of artificial intelligence, simple programming of bots, such that when they are added to groups of humans – because those humans are smart or otherwise positively inclined - that help the humans to help themselves? Can we get groups of people to work better together, for instance, to confront climate change, or to reduce racism online, or to foster innovation within firms?Can we have simple forms of AI that are added into our midst that make us work better together? And the work we're doing in that part of my lab shows that abundantly that's the case. And we published a stream of papers showing that we can do that.” Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist and physician who conducts research in the areas of biosocial science, network science and behavioral genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University and is the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. Dr. Christakis has authored numerous books, including Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society published in 2019 and Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live published in 2020. In 2009, Christakis was named by TIME magazine to their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.Nicholas Christakis: humannaturelab.net/people/nicholas-christakisHuman Nature Lab: humannaturelab.net Yale Institute for Network Science: yins.yale.edusociology.yale.edu/people/nicholas-christakisBlueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We LiveTRELLIS - Suite of software tools for developing, administering, and collecting survey and social network data: trellis.yale.edu.The Atlantic: “How AI Will Rewire Us: For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for altruism, love, and friendship”www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist and physician who conducts research in the areas of biosocial science, network science and behavioral genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University and is the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. Dr. Christakis has authored numerous books, including Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society published in 2019 and Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live published in 2020. In 2009, Christakis was named by TIME magazine to their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.“We're not attempting to invent super smart AI to replace human cognition. We are inventing dumb AI to supplement human interaction. Are there simple forms of artificial intelligence, simple programming of bots, such that when they are added to groups of humans – because those humans are smart or otherwise positively inclined - that help the humans to help themselves? Can we get groups of people to work better together, for instance, to confront climate change, or to reduce racism online, or to foster innovation within firms? Can we have simple forms of AI that are added into our midst that make us work better together? And the work we're doing in that part of my lab shows that abundantly that's the case. And we published a stream of papers showing that we can do that.”Nicholas Christakis humannaturelab.net/people/nicholas-christakisHuman Nature Lab: humannaturelab.netYale Institute for Network Science yins.yale.edusociology.yale.edu/people/nicholas-christakisBlueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We LiveTRELLIS - Suite of software tools for developing, administering, and collecting survey and social network data: trellis.yale.edu.The Atlantic: “How AI Will Rewire Us: For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for altruism, love, and friendship”www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/robots-human-relationships/583204/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

From a young age, Saskatchewan born Derrick Emsley has been actively connecting people with environmental stewardship. At 16, he and his brother Kalen founded a tree planting company that sold carbon offsets to businesses, a venture that saw over $1 million dollars in contracts and 150,000 trees planted. Derrick founded tentree, the apparel company that plants trees for purchases, soon after graduating from Richard Ivey School of Business in 2012. In just under a decade, tentree has set new standards for apparel brands with environmentally progressive values. Based on its success creating a model for engagement between the brand and its consumers, Derrick co-founded veritree last year, as a platform for regeneration that other brands can use to create similar impact. Named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2020, Derrick has become a voice for a modern generation—one who recognizes the necessity of a brand that's earth-first, transparent, and community-focused."I think what's powerful about a tree is it's tangible and it's symbolic in a lot of ways. We as humans naturally have this emotional connection, I think, to trees, and so particularly when you think of our ability to take action within the climate crisis conversation, a tree is this really powerful symbol and vehicle because it's a lot easier to understand a tree than it is to understand a pound or two of CO2 that's floating in the air.So for us, tree planting is just the start of the communication, just the start of the impact. Really if all it was was to get a stick in the ground that wouldn't have the long-term impact, whether that be carbon, whether that be socioeconomic impact, and things like that. So really for us, veritree helps us collect all that data and create the operating system to pull in the data on everything from planting forms and field updates that are coming in, survivability analysis, and different updates on things like biodiversity. We're partnering with some groups to test underwater sensors in some of these planting sites. We're collecting socioeconomic surveys and things like that to try to attach the impact to the community and back to the planting that's happening."· www.veritree.com· veritree Launches Community of 30 Brand Partners to Plant 10 Million Verified Treesveritree Partners with Samsung to Plant Millions of Trees in 2022Mogo announces its partnership with veritreeveritree and Cardano Foundation Complete Global Impact Challenge as "Cardano Forest" Reaches Funding Target for Planting 1M Treeswww.oneplanetpodcast.org· www.creativeprocess.info

"I think what's powerful about a tree is it's tangible and it's symbolic in a lot of ways. We as humans naturally have this emotional connection, I think, to trees, and so particularly when you think of our ability to take action within the climate crisis conversation, a tree is this really powerful symbol and vehicle because it's a lot easier to understand a tree than it is to understand a pound or two of CO2 that's floating in the air.So for us, tree planting is just the start of the communication, just the start of the impact. Really if all it was was to get a stick in the ground that wouldn't have the long-term impact, whether that be carbon, whether that be socioeconomic impact, and things like that. So really for us, veritree helps us collect all that data and create the operating system to pull in the data on everything from planting forms and field updates that are coming in, survivability analysis, and different updates on things like biodiversity. We're partnering with some groups to test underwater sensors in some of these planting sites. We're collecting socioeconomic surveys and things like that to try to attach the impact to the community and back to the planting that's happening.”From a young age, Saskatchewan born Derrick Emsley has been actively connecting people with environmental stewardship. At 16, he and his brother Kalen founded a tree planting company that sold carbon offsets to businesses, a venture that saw over $1 million dollars in contracts and 150,000 trees planted. Derrick founded tentree, the apparel company that plants trees for purchases, soon after graduating from Richard Ivey School of Business in 2012. In just under a decade, tentree has set new standards for apparel brands with environmentally progressive values. Based on its success creating a model for engagement between the brand and its consumers, Derrick co-founded veritree last year, as a platform for regeneration that other brands can use to create similar impact. Named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2020, Derrick has become a voice for a modern generation—one who recognizes the necessity of a brand that's earth-first, transparent, and community-focused.· www.veritree.com· veritree Launches Community of 30 Brand Partners to Plant 10 Million Verified Treesveritree Partners with Samsung to Plant Millions of Trees in 2022Mogo announces its partnership with veritreeveritree and Cardano Foundation Complete Global Impact Challenge as "Cardano Forest" Reaches Funding Target for Planting 1M Treeswww.oneplanetpodcast.org· www.creativeprocess.info