Michael Sticka - President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

Michael Sticka - President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

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President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

Jack Horner - Renowned Dinosaur Paleontologist - Technical Advisor, Jurassic Park/World Films

Jack Horner - Renowned Dinosaur Paleontologist - Technical Advisor, Jurassic Park/World Films

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Renowned Dinosaur Paleontologist
Technical Advisor on all Jurassic Park / Jurassic World Films

I found my first fossil when I was six years old. And I found my first dinosaur bone when I was eight, my first dinosaur skeleton when I was 13. When I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a paleontologist, and I didn't think there was much hope for it, though. I was doing very poorly in school. I think I was always a pretty positive kid. And so even though I wasn't doing well in school, I was really happy about the fact that I was finding all these cool fossils, and I was making collections. I don't know when it came to me that I would do this, but I think I just was born this way.

Ken Cheng - Writer/Producer of “Easter Sunday” starring Jo Koy - Co-Founder - Crab Club, Inc.

Ken Cheng - Writer/Producer of “Easter Sunday” starring Jo Koy - Co-Founder - Crab Club, Inc.

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Writer & Executive Producer of Easter Sunday starring Jo Koy, Jimmy O’Yang, Tia Carrere, Tiffany Haddish
Co-Founder of Crab Club, Inc.

I think there's this belief that creativity requires our ability to think outward and extrapolate beyond our own experiences and think of the world in imaginative new ways - which is true in a lot of cases - but I also believe in creativity as the ability to access inward and look introspectively at our own personal experiences and mine those experiences in ways that aren't necessarily one to one copies of our lives, but that we can extrapolate themes and lessons, comedy, drama, humor...into new works.

Bruce Mau - Award-winning Designer, Author of “Mau MC24…24 Principles for Designing Massive Change”

Bruce Mau - Award-winning Designer, Author of “Mau MC24…24 Principles for Designing Massive Change”

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Award-winning Designer, Artist & Educator
Co-founder & CEO of Massive Change Network
Author/Co-author of Mau MC24 · The Nexus · S, M, L, XL

I would like them to know just how powerful they are, that they have the power to shape the world. At some point, I realized that the world is produced. The world is designed and produced, and since we designed and produced it, we can redesign it. And you can play a part in designing it. You can play a part in that production. It doesn't have to happen to you. And I think, for too many people, too much power and too much control is concentrated in too few hands. People need to have the power to control and design their own life.

David Farrier - Author of “Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils” - Prof. U of Edinburgh

David Farrier - Author of “Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils” - Prof. U of Edinburgh

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Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils · Anthropocene Poetics
Professor of Literature & the Environment · University of Edinburgh.

Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.

John Beaton - Founder, Director & Co-Visionary of Fairhaven Farm

John Beaton - Founder, Director & Co-Visionary of Fairhaven Farm

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Founder, Director & Co-Visionary of Fairhaven Farm

What's trending now with beginning farmers is that it is creating this kind of community connection. It's bringing people to the farm. It's connecting them to their food source. That creates community. It helps cultivate culture and connectivity, and so I think overall, it's like the landscape and agriculture as a whole is shifting towards a different direction.

William Irvine - Author of “The Stoic Challenge”, “A Guide to the Good Life”

William Irvine - Author of “The Stoic Challenge”, “A Guide to the Good Life”

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Author of The Stoic Challenge & A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

Happiness is another interesting thing. I've been thinking about this lately. You know, people take aim at happiness. I don't know if you can actually do that, if you can have a recipe for attaining happiness. Happiness is something that just happens as a byproduct of something else going on in your life, and that is having a day where you're experiencing equanimity. You don't have this abundance of negative emotions, where you value the things you've already got, where you value the relationships you've got, where you feel good inside your own body. You like being who you are. And I think, if all that happens, then suddenly, you know, it'll dawn on me. 'Gosh, I guess I'm happy...'

Victor Lopez-Carmen - Dakota - Yaqui Writer, Health Advocate - Co-Chair, UN Global Indigenous Youth Caucus

Victor Lopez-Carmen - Dakota - Yaqui Writer, Health Advocate - Co-Chair, UN Global Indigenous Youth Caucus

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Dakota & Yaqui Writer, Health Advocate · Co-Chair, UN Global Indigenous Youth Caucus
Founder of Translations for our Nations · Co-founder Ohiyesa Premedical Program

My mom and my dad would often go to protests. They would organize movements. They'd be part of multilateral indigenous people's movements, not only nationally, but internationally, that were operating at the grassroots level. Activism, it’s a tradition in my family for indigenous rights. I have aunts and uncles that were very involved as well. So as a kid, I was often at those protests. I was running around as a little Native kid with all the other little Native kids, when our parents would be in meetings discussing how to move forward discussing indigenous rights.

Donald Hoffman - Prof. of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine - Author of “The case against reality”

Donald Hoffman - Prof. of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine - Author of “The case against reality”

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Professor of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine
Author of The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes

This is really what life, I think, is about - learning to not believe your thoughts. Watch your thoughts, see their patterns and learn that you are not at the whim and beck and call of your thoughts. You can watch your thoughts, and you can choose to let go of thoughts and just be present and let go of the complaints. And that then opens up a level of creativity that's surprising. It could be in dance, science, it could be in music, or art. Wherever you have creative expression, letting go of thought and having this balance between thinking and no thinking, going into complete silence and then pulling ideas back for your art, your science, your dance, whatever it might be, is really the dance of life.

Kevin Trenberth - Nobel Prize-winning Climate Scientist - Author of “The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System”

Kevin Trenberth - Nobel Prize-winning Climate Scientist - Author of “The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System”

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Nobel Prize-winning Climate Scientist · Lead Author of IPCC Assessment Reports
Author of The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System

This is an intergenerational problem. The response to climate change relates very much to value systems. And one of the questions people ask, or should ask is: How much do you value the future generations? How much do you value the world that you're leaving your children and your grandchildren? And what kind of a climate you're leaving them with? And some people don't care, and some people don't have children. And they say, "Eh, it's not an issue for me. It's not one of my values." And so this is part of the problem, but if you're thinking about peoples as a whole, all of the community that you're leaving behind, this is a collective problem.

Bertrand Piccard - Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions

Bertrand Piccard - Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions

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Psychiatrist, Explorer, Aviator of the First Round-the-World Solar-powered Flight
Founder and Chairman of Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions
United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment

So this is why I prefer to speak with a really down to earth language. So maybe the people who love nature are going to say, “Oh, Bertrand Piccard, now he is too down to earth. He's speaking about profitable solutions. He's speaking to the industries that are polluting,” but we have to speak to the industries that are polluting and bring them profitable solutions, otherwise the world will never change, or humankind will never change. And don't forget one thing, what we are damaging is not the beauty of nature. What is being damaged is the quality of life of human beings on Earth because we can still have beautiful things to see, but if we have climate change, if we have tropical disease in Europe, if we have heat waves, floods, droughts, millions of climate refugees, life will be miserable, even if nature is still beautiful.

Dr. Charles D. Koven - Lead Author on the IPCC Report - Earth System Scientist

Dr. Charles D. Koven - Lead Author on the IPCC Report - Earth System Scientist

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Earth System Scientist, Climate Sciences Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lead Author on the IPCC Report

Looking into the future, as a scientist, what I've learned how to do is hold multiple futures in my head at the same time because we just don't know. We don't know what the future holds. We need to fight for the futures that we want, and against the futures that we don't want. All I can really say is that it's up to us. It's up to us to fight and advocate for the future we want, and what does that look like, and how do we get there?

Claire Potter - Designer, Author of “Welcome to the Circular Economy”

Claire Potter - Designer, Author of “Welcome to the Circular Economy”

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Circular Economy Designer, Lecturer & Researcher, University of Sussex
Author of Welcome to the Circular Economy

That's something that I would want all of the next generations to have in some way or another, to have the ability to access and be amazed by how staggeringly beautiful, complicated - awful in some ways and just brutal - the natural world is, but then really sit and think about how the natural world just gets on and does it. And every species is benefited from everybody else. And you could remove humans from that equation, and nature would just carry on doing its thing. So that's what I would love for people to see and to realize is that nature is so incredibly beautiful and diverse. And so are we. So how can we take the beauty and diversity of the natural world and actually learn a lot more and stop thinking we're separate from nature because we are pretty much, we are all part of that same biosphere on the planet.

Cynthia Daniels - Grammy - Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

Cynthia Daniels - Grammy - Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

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Grammy & Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

We all are looking for a little magic in our lives, and I think that's what art and the creative process allow for, above all. In a world that can be either way too predictable and mundane and create tedium, the creative mind, for me, is the curious mind and the mind that's always learning and allowing yourself to make mistakes. To generate from your core, from your soul, and from your experience something new and experimental and something that is unique to yourself.

Neil Grimmer - Artist - Brand Pres. - SOURCE Global - Drinking Water Made from Sunlight and Air

Neil Grimmer - Artist - Brand Pres. - SOURCE Global - Drinking Water Made from Sunlight and Air

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Brand President of SOURCE Global · Innovator of the SOURCE Hydropanel
Drinking Water Made from Sunlight and Air

Water insecurity and water scarcity is affecting all people in almost every part of the world. At this point, by 2025, we expect 1.8 billion people to suffer from water scarcity, which means they have no access to clean, safe drinking water within a 30-minute walk of their home. You fast forward to 2050, we expect 6 billion people will have water scarcity. So the rate at which this problem is increasing is far greater than the current infrastructure that has supported water for humans. And that's where innovation and rapid deployment of technology at scale is really essential. And that's what we're in the business to do.

Claudia Forestieri - Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz - “Gordita Chronicles”on HBO Max

Claudia Forestieri - Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz - “Gordita Chronicles”on HBO Max

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Claudia Forestieri (Creator) & Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz (Showrunner)
Gordita Chronicles

When you immigrate, it's kind of like you're going through adolescence because you're in a new place. You feel weird in your own skin. You're learning new things. Everything is changing. You feel awkward. So that also helped us connect the adult stories to the children's stories.

Florian Hoffmeister - Award-winning DP “Pachinko”, “Great Expectations”

Florian Hoffmeister - Award-winning DP “Pachinko”, “Great Expectations”

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Florian Hoffmeister · Emmy & BAFTA Award-winning Director of Photography
Pachinko · Great Expectations · Official Secrets

Every time I ask, ‘What do you need? What do I want? What does the director want? How do we collaborate? What is generated during the collaboration? What ideas, questions come across? And then I can start constructing something like a look.

Jonathan Newman - VP, Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

Jonathan Newman - VP, Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

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Lead Author of Climate Change Biology, and Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics
Vice President of Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

Climate change is certainly going to affect biodiversity. Some species will benefit from climate change, but others will not, and we'll have different ecosystems, different biotic communities as a result of this. I think the impacts that are likely are pretty clear, and I think that's a pretty good reason to do all those things we can do without completely destroying our economies and our communities because those things have moral value as well. It's not just the environment that we think is important. We also think humans are important, then doing the things we can do now, do the less painful things first. We should have done them already, and we should be now thinking about how to do the harder things.

Roy Scranton - Author of “We're Doomed. Now What?” - "Learning to Die in the Anthropocene"

Roy Scranton - Author of “We're Doomed. Now What?” - "Learning to Die in the Anthropocene"

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Author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene & We’re Doomed, Now What?
Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative

It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life.

David A. Banks - Dir. of Globalization Studies - SUNY Albany

David A. Banks - Dir. of Globalization Studies - SUNY Albany

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Director of Globalization Studies University of Albany at SUNY
Author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (forthcoming)

I think that is often what tourism is starting to move towards. Is this existential authentic? And what that means is that you're not even really looking to meet expectations or validate that the thing in front of you is what it says it is. You are trying to recreate who you think you should be in a time that is disconnected from your usual life. Because we're a pretty jaded and suspicious society now. “Is it a deep fake?”We live in this world of make-believe and fakeness, and you want to get to something that's real. And what's more real than yourself and the story that you tell to yourself about yourself. And if you can really connect to that, you'll feel really good.