“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, w...
Apr 11, 2025•42 min•Season 14Ep. 1113
“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...
Apr 08, 2025•10 min•Season 14Ep. 1112
“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 ...
Apr 08, 2025•33 min•Season 14Ep. 1111
“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 so...
Apr 05, 2025•13 min•Season 14Ep. 1110
“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...
Apr 04, 2025•49 min•Season 14Ep. 1109
“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 ...
Mar 29, 2025•12 min•Season 14Ep. 1108
“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...
Mar 29, 2025•14 min•Season 14Ep. 1107
Why is there so much conflict over people, land, and resources? How can we rethink capitalism and land ownership to create a fairer, more equitable society? 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 F...
Mar 28, 2025•50 min•Season 14Ep. 1106
“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.” 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 Amer...
Mar 20, 2025•49 min•Season 14Ep. 1105
How has feminism changed in light of the way we live now? DEAN SPADE (Author of Love in a F*cked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up & Raise Hell Together ) on recognizing political conditions in personal relationships. MARILYN MINTER (Artist, Feminist) on sexual agency, beauty & her creative process. TEY MEADOW (Author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century ) on the necessity of creating an inclusive environment & argues that diverse storytelling is cruc...
Mar 13, 2025•17 min•Season 14Ep. 1103
In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Sarah T. Roberts about the hidden humans behind Artificial Intelligence, which is reliant on executives and business managers to direct AI to promote their brand and low-level, out-sourced, and poorly paid content managers to slog through masses of images, words, and data before they get fed into the machine. They talk about the cultural, sociological, financial, and political aspects of AI. They end by takin...
Mar 12, 2025•59 min•Season 14Ep. 1102
“We've lost over 70 percent, 73 percent, I think the latest data indicates, of wildlife and mammals in the last 50 years. That’s just shocking when you get that data, but then you ask, what can I do? What can I do? I wanted to move away from any guilt or compulsion because it doesn't work to talk to people that way. After 50 years of climate being in the news, in science, and in our schools, less than a fraction of 1 percent of people in the world do anything about it on a daily basis. How could...
Mar 05, 2025•15 min•Season 14Ep. 1100
“ We have 1.2 trillion carbon molecules in every cell. We have around 30 trillion cells, and that’s us. So carbon is really a flow that animates everything we love, enjoy, eat, and all plant life, all sea life—everything that's alive on this planet—is animated by the flow of carbon. “ Paul Hawken is a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist committed to sustainability and transforming the business-environment relationship. He starts ecological businesses, writes about natur...
Mar 05, 2025•57 min•Season 14Ep. 1099
In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu t talks with Professor Adrian Daub about the recent elections in Germany, where we saw a surge in votes for the Far Right AfD party, which is now the second most powerful party in the country. They discuss the significance of this rise in popularity and the ways the elections reveal a number of shifts in German politics as the various parties stake out positions that align with not just a center-right orientation but, m...
Mar 02, 2025
Peter Weller is a renowned theater and Hollywood actor. His performances in films such as RoboCop and Naked Lunch garnered him much critical and commercial success over the years. His television acting and directing credits include Sons of Anarchy, Dexter, and 24 . Unbeknownst to most, Weller has spent decades honing his appreciation for the visual and musical arts through his studies of the Renaissance era. Earning a Master's in Roman architecture from Syracuse University before moving on to a ...
Feb 27, 2025•14 min•Season 14Ep. 1098
“I met Miles backstage at the Hollywood Bowl—the last gig he ever played. Miles asked, “Who’s that white boy?” I introduced him to Bob Thiele Jr., whose father produced Coltrane. When Miles discovered this, he said, “Well, you can hang,” following this friendly gesture with me walking Miles to his car. I did not know he was dying. I kissed him on both cheeks. And 18 days later, he was gone.” Peter Weller is a renowned theater and Hollywood actor. His performances in films such as RoboCop and Nak...
Feb 27, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Season 14Ep. 1097
How can we overcome our fears? How can we challenge ourselves, pushing our physical boundaries to achieve the impossible? Alain Robert is a renowned rock climber and urban climber. Known as "the French Spider-Man” or "the Human Spider," Robert is famous for his free solo climbing, scaling skyscrapers using no climbing equipment except for a small bag of chalk and a pair of climbing shoes. Some of his most notable ascents include the Burj Khalifa, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sydney Opera House, and...
Feb 24, 2025•10 min•Season 9Ep. 1096
“You are fighting to stay alive. You are fully in the present moment. You don't have time to think about being afraid. You are focused on what you are doing. You struggle to pass another window. You don't have time to think about your problems. The only thing you are concerned about deep down in the back of your mind is that you need to stay alive, and for that, you need to remain calm and focused.” How can we overcome our fears? How can we challenge ourselves, pushing our physical boundaries to...
Feb 21, 2025•52 min•Season 14Ep. 1095
In this episode on the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Tao Leigh Goffe about her new, magisterial Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis . Spanning many fields and disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities, and the arts, Professor Goffe weaves together a historically rich and geographically complex picture of how capitalism and racism undergird the climate crisis in ways made invisible or...
Feb 17, 2025•38 min
“What I have done in my career is just try to assess who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how come we, as animals, are able to walk around and wear pants and dresses and talk on the internet, while the other animals are not. It's been my obsession since I was young. I think if I hadn't become a novelist, I might have been happy to be a naturalist or a field biologist. There is some kind of magic in the creative process. I am reaching for things in my unconscious that surprise me. I don'...
Feb 13, 2025•12 min•Season 14Ep. 1093
Why are we filled with so many contradictions? How does writing help us make sense of the absurdity and of the absurdity and chaos of the world? T.C. Boyle is a novelist and short story writer based out of Santa Barbara, California. He has published 19 novels, such as The Road to Wellville and more than 150 short stories for publications like The New Yorker, as well as his many short story collections. His latest novel Blue Skies is a companion piece to A Friend of the Earth. His writing has ear...
Feb 13, 2025•53 min•Season 14Ep. 1092
“You have all the different languages interplaying with each other. Little scraps of Irish languages and idioms have stories that have been told, but how Ireland actually comes about as an idea, as to where the Irish come from. A lot of these kinds of debates are just placed, you know, in day-to-day conversation, and then they trail off. People start something; they trail off and might come back to it later. That phenomenon of speaking over each other, tales that are known and not known, I alway...
Feb 10, 2025•18 min•Season 14Ep. 1091
Patrick Healy’s novel Beyond the Pale explores memory, time, childhood, and how language shapes our world. Set in rural Ireland, starting in the 1950s, the book follows a young boy’s early memories through a series of expressionistic soundscapes. The expression from which the book takes its name has come to mean beyond what is considered acceptable behavior, but the origins of the phrase referred to land within Ireland that was “beyond the control of the English government.” Healy’s book examine...
Feb 08, 2025•56 min•Season 14Ep. 1090
“The fact that technologies are being used and combined to capture our attention is concerning. This is currently being done with no limitations and no regulations. That's the main problem. Attention is a very private resource. No one should be allowed to extract it from us by exploiting what we know about the human mind and how it functions, including its weaknesses. We wrote this paper as a call to regulate the attention market and prevent algorithmic emotional governance.” Computer scientist ...
Feb 03, 2025•12 min•Season 14Ep. 1089
AI competes for our attention because our attention has been commodified. As our entire lives revolve more and more around the attention economy, what can we do to restore our autonomy, reclaim our privacy, and reconnect with the real world. Computer scientist Fabien Gandon and research engineer Franck Michel are experts in AI, the Web, and knowledge systems. Fabien is a senior researcher at Inria (Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique), specializing in the Sema...
Feb 03, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 14Ep. 1088
In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition . They talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars, and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on ...
Feb 03, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 14Ep. 1106
"Hegel taught me that things can be true and false at the same time. In fact, to expect that, and therefore to understand something, you have to know the boundaries that separate it from what it isn’t. What it isn’t is part of understanding what it is. When you have that in your mind, then when you want to understand capitalism, you have to understand what separates it from everything else. The minute you have that, you have an 'else.' Now you can compare. That is what human beings do. When you ...
Jan 27, 2025•12 min•Season 14Ep. 1083
When capitalism stops serving the needs of the people, what can we do to create a fairer more equitable society? What can we learn from China's success and economic growth? Are we witnessing the decline of the American Empire and what comes next? Richard D. Wolff is the co-founder of Democracy at Work and host of their nationally syndicated show Economic Update. He was formerly professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Yale University, the City College of the City Univer...
Jan 27, 2025•48 min•Season 14Ep. 1082
How do our personal lives influence the art we make? JIM SHEPARD (Author of The Book of Aron, Project X, & The World to Come starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, Katherine Waterston · Winner of the PEN New England Award, The Story Prize) explores historical human dilemmas, the emotional imagination and literature's role in extending empathetic understanding. He discusses the importance of self-education and curiosity. LAURA EASON (Emmy-nominated Producer, Screenwriter, Playwright · Three W...
Jan 23, 2025•12 min•Season 14Ep. 1081
“My mandate focuses on the protection of those trying to protect the planet. Protection of defenders is my main topic. When I'm speaking to states or companies, it's always related to cases of defenders facing threats, attacks, or penalization by companies or governments, like the recent case of Paul Watson (founder of Sea Shepherd) in Denmark… When I travel to places like Peru, Colombia, or Honduras and meet Indigenous people, I realize they have a relationship with nature that we don't have an...
Jan 19, 2025•13 min•Season 14Ep. 1080
