“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 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 over 200 of the world's tallest skyscrapers. He is also a motivational speaker and the author of The Spider-man: Free and Unattached, and With Bare Hands: The True Story of Alain Robert, the Real-life Spiderman.

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In this episode on the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liutalks 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 benign via the work of the west’s “dark laboratory.” Writing back through accounts of indigenous bird watching and Black provisional grounds, we talk about things as seemingly different as the massive guano industry built on Chinese and Indian labor in the 19th century to Malcolm X’s boyhood vegetable garden in Michigan. We talk in particular about one of the key passages of Dark Laboratory, where Tao writes:

“Still, we manage to create a poetics out of that which wishes to destroy us and the planet. How else will we be able to live in ‘the after’? We must reassess what a problem is. Living is not a problem, as Audrey Lorde reminds us. I would add that dying is not a problem either. Decomposing is essential to the natural order and cycle of life. Living at the expense of others is a problem.”

Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York City. For the past fifteen years she has specialized in colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. Dr. Goffe lives and works in Manhattan where she is an Associate Professor at CUNY in Black Studies. She teaches classes on literary theory and cultural history. Dr. Goffe’s book on how the climate crisis is a racial crisis is called DARK LABORATORY (Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK, 2025). Her second book BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT, under contract with Duke University Press, presents a long history of racialization, modern finance, and indebtedness. It brings together subjects of the Atlantic and Pacific markets from 1806 to the present under European colonialism. Dr. Goffe is a fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School in racial justice. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before earning her PhD at Yale University.

Dr. Goffe’s research and curatorial work is rooted in literatures and theories of labor that center Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Committed to building intellectual communities beyond institutions, she is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, an engine for the study of race, technology, and ecology through digital storytelling. Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity, and radical coalition towards sovereignty.

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“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't know what it's going to be. I'd like to do many, many things. It's all my life's work. I don't want to just write the same book over and over again as some other authors do. I don't want to become formulaic.”

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 earned numerous awards, including winning the PEN/Faulkner Award for Best Novel of the Year for World's End.

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