Caroline Goyder is a leading voice and gravitas coach based in the UK and the bestselling author who has trained news anchors, CEOs, actors, and even royalty to speak with confidence. She studied English Literature at Oxford and fell in love with voice and movement at drama school, then spent over a decade as a voice coach at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama before launching her own practice. An introvert by nature, she built her career on a simple conviction that everyone has a confident speaker within, and that the secret is not performance but regulation, breath, and genuine focus on the other person. Her TEDx talk, The Surprising Secret to Speaking with Confidence, has been viewed more than 10 million times, and in this conversation she revisits it eleven years on after a year training as a breath work facilitator. She is the author of Gravitas and Find Your Voice, and the creator of The Gravitas Method.

Expect to learn why speaking is a physical act rather than an intellectual one, what the human voice offers in an age of AI generated content, why focusing on the other person is the real secret to confidence, what separates a good communicator from a bad one, how fight or flight shows up in your voice when you get nervous, why simplicity is a speaking superpower and so hard to achieve, how the gravitas equation of knowledge plus passion plus purpose minus anxiety works, why too much expertise can work against you, how to bring playfulness to heavy or boring topics, how to stop using filler words and pause with confidence, why a daily breathing practice can change how you show up, what men and women each tend to struggle with, and why introverts can make the most compelling speakers of all.

Wade Allison is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College, where he taught physics and medical physics for over 40 years. He was inspired at the age of 13 in 1954 after stumbling upon the Atoms for Peace exhibition in Geneva, and went on to study at Cambridge and earn his doctorate in particle physics at Oxford and CERN. His research spanned experimental and theoretical physics, but a final-year course he created on the applications of nuclear physics drew him toward radiation safety, where he became convinced that public fear of radiation is wildly out of proportion to the actual risk. He argues that the blast, fire, fear, and panic surrounding nuclear accidents have caused far more harm than the radiation itself, pointing to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cleanup of Chernobyl, and the panic evacuation at Fukushima as evidence. He is the author of Radiation and Reason and Nuclear is for Life, and the Honorary Secretary of Supporters of Nuclear Energy.

Expect to learn what nuclear energy actually is and how it works, what the three things are that happen when radiation hits living tissue, why the linear no threshold model used to set safety rules is wrong, what really happened to the radium girls who painted glowing watch dials, how a lifetime radiation experiment on dogs revealed a safe threshold, why the fear of radiation was deliberately exaggerated after the war, what the precautionary principle gets wrong, whether a serious nuclear accident could still happen today, why fear and panic do more damage than radiation, how the placebo and nocebo effects can make people genuinely ill, what the Goiania accident in Brazil teaches us, what radiation did and did not do to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why nuclear fuel holds a million times more energy than fossil fuels, and whether nuclear power is really as expensive as people believe.

Wade Allison online:

Website: http://www.nuclear4life.com

Email: [email protected]

Supporters of Nuclear Energy: www.sone.org.uk

Books: Radiation and Reason (2009) and Nuclear is for Life (2015), available on Amazon and all good booksellers

0:00 Introduction

4:41 What is nuclear energy

6:57 Three things radiation does

15:23 The linear no threshold myth

20:59 Chernobyl death data

23:05 Marie Curie

24:54 The radium girls

33:20 Lifetime radiation dog study

41:38 Why the fear was exaggerated

43:19 The precautionary principle

48:06 Could an accident still happen

53:02 The real danger fear and panic

55:56 Placebo and nocebo effects

1:01:34 The Goiania accident

1:07:40 Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors

1:11:47 Energy density of nuclear

1:14:21 A million times more powerful

1:21:30 Churchill on nuclear energy

1:23:38 Where the energy comes from

1:33:34 The cost of nuclear

1:36:41 China and the future

1:38:56 Closing thoughts

Erik Persson is a Swedish philosopher, an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Lund University and co-director of its Space Humanities Lab, where his work focuses on the ethics of space exploration. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in environmental ethics and has also studied astrobiology and astronomy, which led him to ask whether the principles we apply to the environment here on Earth can be extended beyond it. His research deals with the moral questions raised by asteroid and lunar mining, planetary protection, terraforming, and the long-term settlement of Mars, and he has published widely on the conflicts between commercial use of space, science, and the possible value of extraterrestrial life. In this conversation he traces how space mining moved from science fiction into a serious geopolitical contest, now that the Artemis programme and a renewed race to the Moon have brought celestial resources within reach. He helps organize a biennial space ethics conference, the most recent edition of which took place at Carnegie Mellon University, with the next planned for Padua, Italy.

Expect to learn what space mining actually means and how mining an asteroid differs from mining the Moon or Mars, why bringing resources back to Earth is rarely worth the energy, how the Artemis programme and China's lunar ambitions have reignited the space race, what the Outer Space Treaty and the Artemis Accords do and do not allow, whether a first come first served approach to space resources is fair, how mining in space could either narrow or widen the gap between rich and poor, what planetary protection is and why we sterilize spacecraft, whether it could ever be ethical to terraform a planet, what we owe to extraterrestrial life if we find it, whether it is right to raise children who never chose to be born on Mars, and why some argue for human settlement of space even when it benefits no one alive today.

Erik Persson Online

Lund University profile: http://fil.lu.se

Popular texts from the Inhospitable Space conference: https://pghrev.com/tag/inhospitable-space-conference-2/

Conference recordings (YouTube playlist): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLob6JXdYejvvQA-UERE1qKM1mVZv-LN1

Book recommendation: Mars and the Earthlings: A Realistic View on Mars Exploration and Settlement

Also worth a look: astrobiologist Charles Cockell, who has written on space and liberty.

0:00 Why space mining matters now

0:45 From environmental ethics to space

1:28 Defining space mining

5:41 Who actually benefits

8:55 Mining as substitution not addition

12:21 China and the new space race

15:12 The Outer Space Treaty

15:36 The Artemis Accords

16:11 First come, first served

25:17 The problem with claiming resources

28:59 Settling Mars ethically

32:04 Surviving radiation and environment

40:46 The value of extraterrestrial life

46:44 Why caring about life is hard

48:47 Planetary protection and sterilization

53:22 The ethics of terraforming

55:56 Could Mars become a second Earth

62:57 Raising children on Mars

67:08 Two human species in the system

70:19 The risk to the first settlers

76:03 What is in it for us

79:07 Where to follow Erik's work

Justin Brierley is a British writer, broadcaster and public speaker who has spent over two decades hosting dialogue between Christians, atheists and sceptics. After university he joined Premier Christian Radio in London, where he spent more than twenty years and became known for Unbelievable, a weekly faith debate show that brought believers and non-believers together to argue the big questions. Going freelance in 2023, he now hosts the Re-enchanting podcast and the dialogue show Uncommon Ground, alongside his documentary series The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. His central argument is that, after the heyday of New Atheism, secular thinkers across the West are taking Christianity seriously again, a cultural turn he traces through declining birth rates, the search for meaning, and a fresh openness among public intellectuals. His book of the same name, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, lays out the case in full.

Expect to learn how Justin moved from Christian radio into hosting debates between believers and atheists, what New Atheism was and why its momentum faded, how figures like Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland shifted the public conversation, why the decline of religion may be linked to falling birth rates and a loss of community, what Christianity offers people searching for meaning and purpose, how the idea of grace differs from a culture of constant striving, whether the so-called revival is real or just an online algorithm, what the controversy over the withdrawn Bible Society survey actually shows, how cultural Christianity differs from genuine belief, what Blaise Pascal meant by making people wish Christianity were true, why Justin thinks you cannot understand faith from the outside, and how to begin exploring Christianity if you are open but not yet convinced.

Justin Brierley online:

Website: justinbrierley.com

Podcasts: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Re-enchanting, and Uncommon Ground

Book: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, available at justinbrierley.com

0:00 Decades in faith media

0:35 Premier Christian Radio and Unbelievable

3:07 Raised in a Christian family

4:01 Doubts and questions at university

9:02 The rise of New Atheism

14:41 Jordan Peterson and the shift

16:12 What losing religion costs society

19:19 Religion, community and birth rates

24:31 How Christianity provides meaning

28:11 Which story do you prefer

32:01 Where human rights came from

38:31 Grace versus constant striving

40:39 Is the revival real

42:23 The withdrawn survey controversy

45:59 Bible sales and other data

51:57 The danger of cultural Christianity

57:55 Pascal and wishing it were true

63:34 Why you have to step inside

64:58 Faith and How to Stop Smoking

66:31 Anything before we close

69:02 The problem with chasing goals

69:53 Building a life that survives storms

72:18 Where to find Justin

Kate Burridge is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. She earned her PhD from the University of London in 1983 with a dissertation on syntactic change in medieval Dutch. Burridge has authored or co-authored more than 25 books on language, including Blooming English, Weeds in the Garden of Words, and Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. She is a regular presenter of language segments on ABC Radio and co-hosts the Breaking Taboos podcast, which explores how older people talk about mental health. In this conversation, she explains how slang is born and dies, why swearing provides genuine physical relief, and what makes some words taboo in one era but perfectly acceptable in another.

Expect to learn how medieval Dutch surgery manuals reveal patterns of language change, why 800 separate languages exist in Papua New Guinea, what linguistic accommodation is and why we do it instinctively, how swearing in your first language provides greater emotional release, why the ice water experiment proved that swearing increases pain tolerance, how slang got its start as underworld criminal jargon, why 30% of English words for stupidity begin with the letter D, how social media accelerates the birth and death of slang, what makes OK the most successful slang term of all time, how disease-based swearing works in Dutch, and why euphemisms around mental health can delay treatment for older people.

Kate Burridge online: Monash University: research.monash.edu/en/persons/kathryn-burridge Podcast: Breaking Taboos (available on all podcast platforms) Books: Forbidden Words, Blooming English, Weeds in the Garden of Words (Cambridge University Press)

Randal Koene is a Dutch neuroscientist, neuroengineer, and co-founder of the Carboncopies Foundation, a nonprofit advancing research into substrate-independent minds. He holds a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from McGill University and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Delft University of Technology. Koene coined the term "whole brain emulation" in 2000 and has spent decades building the scientific roadmap for recreating brain function in non-biological substrates. He previously served as a professor at Boston University's Center for Memory and Brain, as Director of Neuroengineering at Tecnalia in Spain, and as Science Director of the 2045 Initiative. In this conversation, he explains how structural brain scanning has advanced dramatically, why the viral fruit fly brain demo was more limited than headlines suggested, and what it would actually take to build and validate an emulation of a human brain.

Expect to learn how Randal's father at CERN shaped his thinking about substrate independence, what inspired him to coin the term whole brain emulation, how lesion studies and evolutionary biology support the idea that minds can run on different hardware, what the difference is between neuronal networks and artificial neural networks, how electron microscopy is transforming brain data collection, why the viral fruit fly brain demo was misleading, what the two biggest bottlenecks are in scaling brain emulation to humans, how AI is being used as a tool in computational neuroscience, what consciousness is according to the Metzinger framework, whether a brain emulation would have human rights, how the Carboncopies Foundation's brain emulation challenge works, and why whole brain emulation and mind uploading are not the same thing.

Randal Koene online: Website: randalkoene.com Carboncopies Foundation: carboncopies.org LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/randalkoene Contact: [email protected]

Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist, director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, and director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he led the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition for over two decades. He is the author of numerous books including Risk Savvy, Gut Feelings, and The Intelligence of Intuition, and has spent his career studying how people actually make decisions under uncertainty, as opposed to how theorists think they should. Before becoming an academic, he spent roughly a dozen years as a professional musician, an experience that directly shaped his thinking about heuristics and real-world choice. His long-running intellectual debate with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman over the nature of human rationality is one of the defining controversies in modern behavioral science.

Expect to learn how Gigerenzer chose an academic career over life as a professional musician using heuristic rather than calculated reasoning, how the gap between what is taught about rationality in universities and how people actually decide prompted his life's research agenda, what the crucial distinction between risk and uncertainty means and why standard probability tools fail in an uncertain world, how intuition works as a form of unconscious intelligence built on experience rather than arbitrary feeling, why corporate executives routinely hide gut decisions behind consulting reports and what Gigerenzer calls defensive decision making, how predictive AI systems used in US courts fail to outperform simple strategies despite being marketed as superior, what ecological rationality means and how it differs from the logical rationality assumed by most economists and behavioral scientists, why Gigerenzer disagreed with Daniel Kahneman about heuristics and what their decades-long debate was actually about, when ignoring information leads to better decisions than processing all of it, how the framing of medical statistics as relative rather than absolute risk caused thousands of unnecessary procedures in the UK, and what risk literacy means and why Gigerenzer believes it is a necessary condition for a functioning democracy.

Gerd Gigerenzer online: Website: www.gerd-gigerenzer.com Books: Risk Savvy, Gut Feelings, The Intelligence of Intuition, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World (available wherever books are sold).

Carel le Roux is a Professor of Experimental Pathology at University College Dublin, Director of the Metabolic Medicine Group, and one of the world's leading researchers on how the gut communicates with the brain. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London, where he conducted foundational research on gut hormones and appetite, and later co-founded My Best Weight, Ireland's leading obesity care clinic accredited by the European Association for the Study of Obesity. His clinical work and trials span GLP-1 receptor agonists, bariatric surgery outcomes, and the emerging class of multi-receptor drugs now transforming obesity medicine. He is currently leading the trial of survodutide, one of the most promising next-generation treatments in the field.

Expect to learn how GLP-1 was discovered during PhD research into gut-brain communication and how it became one of the most consequential drug classes in medical history, what the Gila monster's saliva has to do with the development of Ozempic and drugs like it, why obesity is a disease of the brain rather than a failure of willpower or lifestyle, how these medications reset the brain's fat-mass setpoint so that weight loss happens without deliberate effort, what ultra-processed foods may be doing to brain inflammation and why reversing the obesity epidemic through diet advice alone has failed everywhere it has been tried, why the goal of treatment should be health gain rather than weight loss and what that distinction means in practice, how to manage and minimise side effects by titrating the dose slowly, what the long-term safety record of GLP-1 drugs actually shows and why not taking the medication is often the riskier choice, why muscle loss on these drugs is largely a misunderstood phenomenon and what protein intake and exercise do to address it, what the evidence says about non-obese people using GLP-1 drugs recreationally and why these treatments were designed as lifelong medications, how GLP-1-like drugs appear to reduce alcohol consumption and are now being studied for addiction and other conditions including heart and kidney disease, and what new triple-receptor drugs like retatrutide and survodutide offer over existing treatments.

Carel le Roux online: Website: mybestweight.ie University profile: University College Dublin, Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research

Gloria Simoncini is a neuropsychologist, psychotherapist, and PhD student at eCampus University, Department of Theoretical and Applied Sciences, researching the emotion of awe.

She trained clinically in cognitive rehabilitation with patients who had acquired brain injuries, an experience that drew her toward the scientific study of emotions and their role in human transformation. Her doctoral project sits at the intersection of affective neuroscience, virtual reality, and clinical neuropsychology, with a particular focus on using VR environments to screen for mild cognitive impairment in ecologically valid, real-life-like scenarios. She works within a research group on emotions and complex emotional experiences, including awe, positive psychology, and affect dynamics.

Expect to learn how awe is formally defined through its two core ingredients of vastness and the need for accommodation, what makes awe distinct from related emotions like wonder, elevation, and fear, why awe is unusually difficult to study in laboratory conditions and how virtual reality helps solve that problem, what happens in the brain during awe including changes in the default mode network and the small self effect, how positive and negative awe recruit different neural structures, what physical responses in the body accompany an awe experience, why the evolutionary negativity bias makes cultivating positive emotions like awe require conscious effort, how awe may function as a therapeutic tool for depression by reducing rumination and loosening rigid mental frameworks, what Gloria's own PhD research on VR-based cognitive screening looks like in practice, and how awe can be trained as a perspective rather than simply waited for as a fleeting moment.

Gloria Simoncini online:

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gloria-Simoncini

Research group (Prof. Alice Chirico): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alice-Chirico-2

Hanna Tuomisto is a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of Helsinki, based in Finland, and one of the world's leading researchers on the environmental impacts of cultivated meat. She earned her PhD in agroecology and sustainable agriculture from the University of Oxford and has been researching cell-culturing technologies for food production since 2008, when she carried out one of the first environmental life cycle assessments of what was then called in vitro meat. She leads the Future Sustainable Food Systems research group at Helsinki and has published extensively on life cycle assessment, carbon footprinting, and the sustainability of novel proteins. In this episode, she walks through the full picture of cultivated meat, from the biology of cell cultivation to the regulatory and economic barriers standing between lab prototypes and supermarket shelves.

Expect to learn how the global livestock sector contributes roughly 20% of all human-caused climate impact, what role land use and deforestation play in biodiversity loss driven by animal agriculture, why antibiotic use in livestock poses a growing public health risk, how cultivated meat is produced from a small cell sample to a finished product, what fetal bovine serum is and why replacing it is one of the central technical challenges, how the culture medium feeds cells in the same way feed nourishes a living animal, why the texture of cultivated meat is harder to replicate than its flavor, what the current state of regulatory approval looks like in Europe, Singapore, and the United States, how startup investment outpaced fundamental research and slowed the field's progress, why a supermarket-scale product is likely still 15 to 20 years away, and whether cultivated meat could one day serve as a protein source for long-duration space missions.

Hanna Tuomisto online:

University of Helsinki: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/future-sustainable-food-systems/people

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hanna-Tuomisto-2

Good Food Institute (cultivated meat research hub): https://gfi.org