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Our guest today is Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness Oxford University Press.

Anil is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2019-2024), which recognizes the top 0.1% of scientists in the world, by the impact of their publications.

N - In 2023, he was awarded the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday Prize, which is ‘awarded annually to the scientist or engineer whose expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms is exemplary’.

His 2021 book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness was a Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller, and was Economist, Guardian and FT Science Book of the Year. Anil edited and co-authored the best-selling 30 Second Brain, and also writes the blog NeuroBanter.

We talk about:

• How to define consciousness
• What it feels like to be a bat
• Are we at the mercy of our brain chemistry
• The concept of interoception
• The white and gold OR the blue and black dress
• We predict ourselves into existence
• Does consciousness need a body

Let’s get our neurons firing!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Our guest today is Laura Clarke. She is the CEO of ClientEarth. She was recognised as one of the most influential climate business leaders globally in Time magazines top 100 climate list. Her background is in diplomacy and environmental advocacy. Laura was British High Commissioner to New Zealand, Governor of the Pitcairn Islands, High Commissioner to Samoa and has an OBE. Laura holds an MA in German and Russian from Cambridge University and a MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

ClientEarth uses the law to hold polluting companies and negligent governments to account for the climate and nature crisis. It is one of the most ambitious environmental organisations that works across boarders, systems and sectors using the law to protect life on Earth. ClientEarth works in over 60 countries with around 140 active cases tackling the most pressing environmental challenges. The impact of this charity’s work goes far beyond the cases that they fight in court but sets standards and creates precedents that lead to wider climate compliance.

We talk about:

• Holding governments to climate laws
• 2 million abandoned oil wells
• Using shareholder interests to companies accountable
• Holding directors personally liable for climate action not taken
• China’s proactive stance on climate
• How we can use the law as citizens
• Suing multinational organisations into climate compliance
• How 36 companies are responsible for half the world’s total emissions

Let’s go to court

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Our guest today is Sam Harris. Sam is the host of the Making Sense Podcast and an the author of five New York Times best sellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

Sam’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, Nature, among others. The Making Sense Podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category.

Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. He has created the Waking Up app for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context.

We talk about:

• How failing at meditation is the best approach
• Dissolving concepts that are made up by our mind
• How to loose your head
• His book the Moral Landscape
• Moral absolutes versus moral relativism
• Is adversity is the only path to growth
• The illusory distinction between rationality and emotions
• His book Free Will
• Whether we really know why we change our minds
• How losing a foot might lead to better podcasts
• And a lot more

Let’s meditate!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Our guest today is Suzanne O'Sullivan, the author of the book The Age of Diagnosis: Sickness, Health and Why Medicine Has Gone Too Far. Suzanne is a neurologist, clinical neurophysiologist, and writer. She has been a consultant since 2004 and has been at The National Hospital for Neurology and The Epilepsy Society since 2011. Her specialist interests are in epilepsy and in improving services for people who suffer with functional neurological disorders.

Suzanne qualified in medicine in 1991 from Trinity College Dublin. In addition to academic publications in her field, she is an author of award-winning non-fiction books, each focusing on her medical casework.

Her 2016 book, It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness, won the Wellcome Book Prize, and the Royal Society of Biology's General Book Prize, for "for an accessible, engaging and informative life sciences book written for a non-specialist audience". Her book, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness, was shortlisted for the 2021 Royal Society Science Book Prize.

We talk about:

• Is there an epidemic of overdiagnosis
• Extending the definitions of disorders
• The rise of ADHD and Autism diagnosis
• The impact of this on either end of the spectrum
• Has this had a positive or negative effect on mental health
• Medicalising natural mood swings and differences
• Illness as identity
• Cancer screening and proactive surgery

Let’s analyse

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Our guest today is Nick Lane, who offers fresh insights on the theories of the origins of life. He is a Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London.

Nick’s research is on the way that energy flow has shaped evolution over 4 billion years, using a mixture of theoretical and experimental work to address the origin of life, the evolution of complex cells and downright peculiar behaviour such as sex.

He has received many awards for his work. Among them the 2015 Biochemical Society Award for his outstanding contribution to molecular life sciences and 2016 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science.

Nick is the author of five acclaimed books on evolutionary biochemistry, which have sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide, and been translated into 25 languages.

We talk about:

• How it all began deep in the ocean
• The similarity between a cell and the planet
• Is the earth only a giant battery
• How there are no clear definitions of what life is
• How cloning is boring and sex creates difference
• The innovation of multi- over single cell life
• How Genes shouldn’t be in the limelight, while chemistry is doing all the work
• The three domains of life

Let’s go back to the beginning!

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Our guest this week is Guy Standing, who is a British labour economist. He is professor of Development Studies at SOAS and co-founder of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth Network.

He is best known as a long-standing and prominent advocate of Basic Income, but he is also responsible for redefining and revitalizing the term ‘precariat’.

Guy has written extensively about capitalism and labour market policy. Among his many books are Basic income: and how we can make it happen, A plunder of the commons, a manifesto for sharing public wealth, The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay, The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea.

We talk about:

• A brief history of capitalism
• Rentier capitalism
• The emergence of a precariat
• Plutocracy and Trump
• Will AI liberate us after all
• The dignity of a basic income for everyone
• Realisation and execution of basic income pilots

Let’s debate!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Our guest this week is David Whyte. David is a philosopher poet who, is the author of eight volumes of poetry and four books of prose, as well as a collection of audio recordings. He travels and lectures throughout the world, bringing his own and others' poetry to large audiences. He also works with corporations to teach them about conversational techniques.

He holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has worked as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands. David also holds honorary degrees from Neumann University in Pennsylvania and Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia, and is an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School at the University of Oxford.

In our conversation we will focus on his recent books Consolations 1 and 2, which are about the nourishment and underlying meaning of everyday words.

We talk about:

• Words as the magnifying glass of the human condition
• A reading of Alone
• Not avoiding the difficult questions
• A reading of Injury
• The interplay between the poet and the listener
• A reading of Horizon
• The Hawk of the Galapagos
• Conversations we should stop having
• The difference between Oven and Love
• Death only happens to other people

Let’s listen.

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
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Our guest this week is William Sargent. He co-founded Framestore in 1986 and led its rise from an award winning commercials production house to world renowned film and digital studio. During three decades the company has worked on all the Harry Potter films (and the JK Rowling 'Fantastic Beasts') , Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Paul King’s Paddington, Dr Strange, Christopher Robin, Blade Runner 2049 and Marvel’s Avengers Series.

William and his team have won all the major creative awards including 3 Oscars, British Academy, Primetime Emmys, D&AD, Royal Television Society and most recently over 100 global awards for the newest format Virtual Reality.

Equally at home in Hollywood and government, he was Permanent Secretary, Regulatory Reform, at the Cabinet Office, and Board Director of HM Treasury. He is currently a governor at Europe's largest arts complex Southbank Center, the U.K. governments innovation agency, Trinity College Dublin's Provost Council and the London Mayor's Business Council. William is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, member of BAFTA and the Academy. He received a CBE in 2004 and was knighted by the Queen in 2008.

We talk about:

• Rear Projection
• Stop motion animation
• Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity
• How music videos started the UK film industry
• George Lucas’ vision of multi-platform story telling
• How car manufacturing robots help in filmmaking
• Tennis balls and florescent tape
• How to create dinosaurs
• The next decade of filmmaking

Let’s roll.

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet