The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Education, Environment, Theatre, Dance, LGBTQ, Climate Change, Social Justice, Spirituality, Feminism, Tech, Sustainability

"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

We live in a world obsessed with tracking. From our sleep scores to our social media engagement, invisible systems constantly quantify our worth. But when we replace our deepest values with these thin, easily measurable numbers, we lose a part of our humanity. It is time to step outside the magic circle of optimization and reclaim the unstructured joy of being alive.
C. Thi Nguyen is a philosopher whose work gets to the heart of the invisible structures that define modern life. He first established himself as a food writer, exploring the sensory world, before turning his intellectual gaze toward the philosophy of games and agency. He’s the author of Games: Agency As Art.His new book is The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game.He argues that when we simplify our values for the sake of a leaderboard, something inside the human spirit begins to die. In it, he explores a concept called "value capture"—the moment we stop caring about the experience and start obsessing over the metric. He joins me now to discuss how we can lead a playful, spontaneous life without getting lost in the scoring systems of the 21st century.
(0:00) THE MEANING OF LIFE IS THE CREATIVE PROCESS Why the most valuable parts of life are impossible to measure
(6:46) VALUE CAPTURE DEFINED How external metrics and institutional scoring systems take over our personal values
(11:38) THE METRICS WE LIVE BY The invisible toll of screen time, credit scores, and daily optimization
(19:44) THE LOGIC OF QUANTIFICATION Why simple numbers travel well but strip away vital human context
(24:13) THE MAGIC CIRCLE OF PLAY Understanding the difference between a gamified life and the true beauty of struggle
(31:56) ART AS A GAME How taking the hard way and avoiding efficiency leads to genuine creative expression
(38:48) THE POLITICS OF TECHNOLOGY Why tools and systems like factories and databases are never truly value-neutral
(44:23) AI AND HUMAN CREATIVITY Navigating the tension between automated efficiency and expressive human art
(50:44) THE POLITICS OF IQ Questioning the assumption that complex human traits can be measured on a single scale
(1:01:12) NARRATIVE SCAFFOLDING How structured constraints in role-playing games can actually boost collaborative storytelling
(1:10:00) THE SPIRIT OF PLAY Stepping lightly between different rule worlds and reclaiming our agency
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
@creativeprocesspodcast

Are the walls of our most celebrated museums actually monuments to wealth extraction and labor suppression? How did the violent union-busting tactics of the 19th-century robber barons pave the way for modern philanthropy? And what happens when we expose the hidden racial capitalism behind the "genius" of modern art?
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Eunsong Kim about her stunning book, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property. It is remarkable in its theoretical conceptualization, argument, and archival work. Kim argues that the beginnings of elite art collection in the United States coincided with the rise of the robber barons and the suppression of the labor movement. She connects this to Taylorism and the idea of scientific management, that further extenuated the rift between the mind and the body, between intellectual activity and labor. Not coincidentally, this distribution of kinds of work created a new distribution of value. In each case, Kim argues, race played a fundamental role. Ranging from the “found” art of Duchamp to the pseudo-Marxist conceptual art of Sierra, Kim eviscerates both pretention and cruelty, and restores the laboring body and what it produces to prominence, along with a truly reinvigorated and capacious sense of the Imagination outside of the constraints of neoliberal aesthetics.
(0:00) The Politics of Collecting
(2:16) The Rise of the Museum Form How art spaces are fundamentally tied to racial capitalism and settler colonialism
(5:18) Carnegie, Frick, and the Homestead Strike, Violent de-unionization of steelworkers that preceded modern philanthropic projects
(10:04) Taylorism and Scientific Management How Frederick Taylor's experiments sought to separate "mind work" from "hand work"
(13:00) The De-skilling of Labor
(16:11) The PR of Robber Barons
(19:42) Duchamp and the Illusion of Meritocracy
(26:17) Racial Violence and the "Ready-Made" Reading Duchamp's Fountain through the lens of segregation and white freedom
(32:26) Santiago Sierra and Neoliberal Aesthetics Critiquing art that replicates capitalism by enacting humiliation on marginalized and precarious workers
(43:12) Artists vs. Workers at the Whitney, 1969 anti-Vietnam War protest
(47:58) Professors as Managers On private university labor laws, unionization, and the weaponization of the "manager" title
(51:24) AI and the Alienation of Thought
Episode Website
www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
@speaking_out_of_place

Have we forgotten how to truly participate in the natural world? What can the ancient practice of shepherding teach us about ecological healing? How does physical labor connect us to the land, memory and belonging?
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with Helen Whybrow about her book, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life. Besides being a detailed account of the day to day, season by season life on her farm, where she and her family raise sheep, build a broad community, and maintain Knoll Farm, a center for activists, writers, artists and others to share ideas on how to promote healthier and more just ways of living together and in the environment, The Salt Stones is at base about the ways we are losing a sense of belonging, not only with others and with other forms of life on this planet, but also with the cycles of existence, of life and of death. Whybrow shows time and again that it is mostly a matter of developing ways of seeing and noticing what is all around us, and learning about and respecting the ways that generations of people and non-human animals have existed together in sustainable and mutually-dependent ways.
Helen Whybrow is a writer, editor and organic farmer whose book about shepherding, land and belonging, The Salt Stones, was longlisted for the National Book Award and chosen as a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Her other titles include Dead Reckoning (W. W. Norton, 2001) and A Man Apart (Chelsea Green, 2015). She has a master’s in journalism and has taught writing at Middlebury College and the Breadloaf Environmental Writer’s Conference. She and her family farm and steward a refuge for land justice at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont.
(0:00) The Salt Stones
(2:50) A Lifelong Love of Land and Language
(6:50) The Cord: A Story of Lambing and Life
(13:40) Literary Influences and Jean Giono
(18:15) The Erased Work of Nature
(20:30) Radical Intimacy and Participation
(23:45) Measuring Diminishment and Listening to Nature
(25:15) Lita the Ewe and Complex Ecosystems
(29:17) Kulning: The Lost Art of Herding Songs
(32:15) Embodied Memory and Physical Labor
(37:45) The True Meaning of Belonging
(43:30) Radical Hospitality at Noel Farm
(46:15) Kinship
Episode Website
www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

What happens when Mexico's future president lands in New Orleans, a city of operas, slave markets, and radical musical invention? A man who spoke a variant of Zapotec and read the French philosophers of the Enlightenment finds himself adrift in the hallucinatory swamps of New Orleans.
In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with novelist, essayist, and scholar Yuri Herrera about his new novel, Season of the Swamp, which is a deeply researched and dazzlingly imagined account of Benito Juarez’s time spent in exile in New Orleans. We learn about what that time and place offered to Juarez’s understanding of a world coming into being—one of créolité and carnival, of mixedness and multiplicity, and what these sometimes hallucinatory moments offered his political vision. They talk about what kinds of new visions of freedom are discovered in the midst of forms of slavery that horrify Juarez. We hear how all of this relates to the present day—to the genocide in Gaza, the violent ICE attacks in the United States, and the descent into unbridled, and unmasked fascism.
Yuri Herrera's first three novels have been translated into several languages: Kingdom Cons, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Transmigration of Bodies. In 2016 he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. That same year he received the Anna Seghers Prize at the Academy of Arts of Berlin, for the body of his work. His latest books are A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, Ten Planets, and Season of the Swamp. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Tulane University, in New Orleans.
(0:00) The Season of the Swamp
(3:55) Benito Juarez’s Life, his indigenous roots and his conflict with dictator Santana.
(7:00) Yuri Herrera's relationship with New Orleans and the theme of extreme migration.
(11:00) An Accidental Avant-Garde How the clash of European classical music and African drumming in Congo Square created a new space for imagination.
(15:30) Individual Freedom vs. Slavery
(19:30) Ocampo the Socialist Vampire Slayer Symbolic dreams in the novel and the rebellious resilience of New Orleans.
(24:10) The Art of Translation
(27:25) Reading from the novel
(33:30) Democratizing the Gaze Why the author chose not to use Juarez's name in order to strip away the monument and reveal the tender, perceptive migrant.
(39:30) Modern Fascism and Cruelty Connecting history to the ICE attacks and global resistance.
(45:00) The Last Gringo Reflecting on a short story about language, power and the changing face of America.
www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
@speaking_out_of_place