The Thought Exchange

This episode is a conversation with Matt Shirley, a conservation scientist with a particular passion for and interest in crocodiles.

I met Matt on a shoot, where he was the animal expert and I was brought in to deal with some pretty challenging technical problems, in order to capture crocodile behaviour which had not only never been filmed but had never even been observed in the wild before. Unfortunately, I can’t say any more as we are signed up to an NDA….

So I got to know Matt on a long journey into the jungle of Gabon, it took us 11 days to go from Libreville (the capital) to the point where we could record on camera. Matt’s expertise and knowledge of the local conditions and people were formidable.

A child-hood passion for reptiles led him to work with crocodiles, but Matt also works on pangolins and forest-dwelling tortoises, primarily in the forests of West Africa. His research has led to the recognition of 3 new crocodile species.

However, it is his work as a conservation scientist which I found most fascinating. The work he has done and the conclusions he has drawn, might be uncomfortable for Western observers who passionately want to protect and save all individuals from under-pressure species.

Yet, for anyone who has spent time and worked in those challenged eco-systems and been confronted by the poverty of the people trying to survive within or alongside them, it is hard not to see the sense in positions that advocate meaningful management rather than preservation at all costs.

In particular, Matt discusses the example of the American Alligator, which was almost extinct by the 1950s, but recovered so well there are now millions of them across the Southern States. It was a story I had never heard and one which upsets many preconceptions about how to save species.

This episode is a conversation with Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and writer, who originally started at Oxford as a literary scholar.

Dissatisfied with literary criticism, having published Against Criticism in 1982, McGilchrist sought greater philosophical understanding of human experience by retraining in medicine and he went on to become a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in London.

I heard McGilchrist talk on the Sam Harris podcast and was immediately fascinated by his ideas on the way the different brain hemispheres work both separately and in collaboration. In his book, The Master and the Emissary, McGilchrist explores the huge library of science in this field, much of which is in German and French and much of which has been ignored by English-language scientists.

In fact, McGilchrist was initially warned off studying the ways in which the different hemispheres process information, given that the topic was considered pop or junk science. But, thankfully, he stuck at it and has given us a fascinating exploration of how to think more deeply about the brain, consciousness and how they affect the real world.

Since our conversation, McGilchrist has published a further book on the topic titled The Matter with Things. There was no way we could do the body of his work justice in the short conversation we had, but I hope we were able to open the door on this incredible topic and that listeners will be inspired to seek out his books to learn more.

Hardback internationally https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Things-Brains-Delusions-Unmaking/dp/1914568060/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8andqid=1638197964andsr=8-1 (Amazon.com) and https://www.bookdepository.com/Matter-With-Things-Iain-McGilchrist/9781914568060 (The Book Depository )

Hardback UK only https://channelmcgilchrist.com/order-book/ (Channel McGilchrist ), https://www.amazon.co.uk/Matter-Things-Brains-Delusions-Unmaking/dp/1914568060/ref=sr_1_1?crid=MVUEC3JBP1XJandkeywords=the+matter+with+things+iain+mcgilchristandqid=1638197871andsprefix=The+Matter+with%2Caps%2C158andsr=8-1 (Amazon UK) and other booksellers nationwide

Kindle on https://www.amazon.co.uk/Matter-Things-Brains-Delusions-Unmaking-ebook/dp/B09KY5B3QL/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8andqid=1638197871andsr=8-1 (www.amazon.co.uk) and https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Things-Brains-Delusions-Unmaking-ebook/dp/B09KY5B3QL/ref=sr_1_1?crid=33DP5CE4A2U1Wandkeywords=the+matter+with+things+iain+mcgilchristandqid=1638197964andsprefix=The+Matter+with+Things+Iain%2Caps%2C218andsr=8-1 (www.amazon.com)

This episode of the Podcast is a conversation with Tristan Guttridge a biologist with a passion for sharks, in fact he describes himself as a shark fanatic. With a PhD in Behavioural Ecology, based on research he undertook at the Shark Lab in Bimini, Bahamas, Tristan has many strings to his bow as he advocates for greater understanding and protection of sharks.

In addition to continued shark research, Tristan has become a well-known presenter on Discovery Channels, and I worked with him in March 2021 for a programme for Discovery Shark Week 2021. With his wife, Annie, Tristan has also founded a non-profit called Save the Blue, which enables volunteers to learn more about shark research aswell as providing education programmes for schoolchildren in the Bahamas.

Much of his work is based in the waters around Andros Island in the Bahamas, a uniquely pristine barrier reef environment with a trench of very deep water, the Tongue of the Ocean, directly alongside and a huge area of protected marine reserve.

We had a very intense shoot schedule, including multiple night shoots and dives, but we were able to have a conversation on the final day while we were packing to leave. It was a really fantastic experience to do an interview live and face-to-face for the first time. I learnt a lot about sharks and Tristan’s enthusiasm is infectious.

This episode of the Podcast is actually a Bonus episode with Jack Goldstone. During our conversation, I asked Jack to talk me through 3 specific examples of social change which help illustrate his model: the British Revolution, the American Civil War and the Chinese Revolutions which ended with Mao and the Communist Party entering Beijing in 1949.

When listening back and editing the main Podcast, I felt that these three examples needed to be lifted and put in a separate Podcast with space to breathe. Doing so has allowed the main Podcast to have a better flow, but this extra episode will allow anyone interested in these ideas to go a little deeper with a lot more detail.

This episode of The Thought Exchange is a conversation American sociologist, historian and political scientist Jack A Goldstone. Goldstone is author of 13 books and many, many research articles, with a focus on revolutions and social change. In particular, he made a key contributions in looking at the relationship between population cycles and political revolutions. Indeed, there are those who have credited Goldstone with predicting Trump and the turbulent Twenties almost 30 years ago, when he developed and published his Demographic-Structural Theory.

Jack A. Goldstone is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel Professor of Public Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Goldstone has worked all over the world, including Russia and Hong Kong, and has worked for a number of US government agencies, consulting on USAID Democracy Assistance Programs, as_well as the UN and various European governments.

He has also worked at the Brookings Institute think tank and is a current fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre. Goldstone has worked extensively on the conditions required for building democracy and stability in developing nations.

Goldstone has studied revolution and social change around the world and across time, with fascinating analyses of world-changing political events throughout modern history. In particular, his 20143 book Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction is clear and accessible, with a number of compelling but counter-intuitive conclusions.

The conversation is a deep-dive into Goldstone’s thinking about the causes of revolution, what current social conditions might tell us about where we are headed and also how to ensure scientifically rigorous methodology in the social sciences.

This episode of The Thought Exchange is a conversation with guerrilla geographer and creative explorer Dan Raven-Ellison. I first met Dan 11 years ago when our sons became friends and I have followed his work with great interest ever since, as he has developed a series of fascinating projects and achieved major success in his field.

Dan is a National Geographic explorer and an Ordnance Survey Get Outside Champion. He is passionate about walking through all landscapes, whether rural or urban. He has walked across London, Mumbai, Mexico City and Guatemala City, aswell as through all of the UK’s National Parks and many other places across the UK and internationally.

Dan credits his freedom to roam in childhood as the foundation of his passion for being and exploring outdoors, preferring the slower experience of walking to the speed of cars, trains and bikes which is how the majority of people interact with the geography of our developed world. Dan focuses on projects which disrupt the ways in which we relate to the landscapes we encounter.

Walking through all 15 of the UK’s national parks inspired Dan to campaign for a declaration of London as the world’s first National Park City, which he achieved in July 2019 with the support of thousands, including Mayor Sadiq Khan. He has recorded the use of land in the UK and Netherlands with a series of 100 second long films where each second relates to 1% of the land use.

Dan is a radical and progressive thinker, with core values which include trying to encourage others, especially children and young people, to share his love of being outside and exploring. A brilliant speaker and an engaging teacher, he is a true pioneer who changes the way people think about the world around them

This episode features French physicist and science communicator Christophe Galfard. His background is in theoretical physics and Christophe worked with Professor Stephen Hawking as his PhD student at Cambridge University.

I worked with Christophe in 2016, where he co-presented Search for a New Earth with Danielle George. He was also the solo presenter of a French-language version of the programme.

While working on his PhD with Hawking, Christophe focused on black holes as an area which challenges the theories around the very big and the very small, touching as they do on both gravity and quantum physics.

Since finishing his PhD Christophe has been focused on the importance of communicating science to a broader audience. With Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy Hawking, he co-authored a children’s book and went on to publish a science fiction trilogy for 9-13 year olds. He has gone on to write books for adults including the international bestseller The Universe in Your Hand and he is a very busy public speaker with various TED talks under his belt aswell as numerous speaking events around the globe.

I hugely enjoyed getting to know Christophe on the road while filming, I really enjoyed this opportunity to dig into some of the questions I didn’t get to ask when filming together. I learnt a lot about black holes, gravitational theory, quantum physics and the current understanding of our amazing universe.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

­This episode is a conversation with Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) and Associate Vice President at the University of Manchester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Manchester (University of Manchester). She is a highly-respected scientist and was made Professor in 2014 at the age of 38.

Danielle gave the 2014 Royal Institution lecture, at the time only the sixth woman to do so, she was given an MBE in 2016 and was awarded the Faraday Prize in 2018. She is currently the President of The Institution of Engineering and Technology, overseeing an international programme to celebrate the Institution’s 150th anniversary.

If her work and plaudits sound daunting, they shouldn’t because Danielle also happens to be one of the nicest and most down-to-earth people I’ve had the pleasure of working with. With French physicist Christophe Galforth, Danielle co-presented a programme I filmed, which featured Stephen Hawking and his central idea that human beings need to become multi-planetary species in order to survive long-term.

I was fortunate to get to know Danielle well during filming, which included camping on Norwegian snow fields and venturing to South American observatories, among other places. Aswell as being super intelligent, she is great fun with a fantastic sense of humour.

In many ways, Danielle’s approach to science communication is perfectly captured by the Robot Orchestra project, which we touch on in our conversation. Unexpected, brilliant, fun and easy to engage with, the robot orchestra is very much like Danielle herself.

This episode is a conversation with Dr Kirk Johnson, the Sant Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. This is the largest natural history museum in the world, by visitor numbers of over 5 million a year.

Kirk has a long history in museums, having been the VICE PRESIDENT of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science BEFORE MOVING TO Washington DC in 2012, but his passion and his scientific background are in plant palaeontology. With his first published paper appearing at the tender age of just 23, Kirk is a passionate scientist and science communicator, with major television series to his name.

I first met Kirk working together in 2014 on Making of North America for NOVA in the US and, in 2018 and 2019, we subsequently worked on a climate change special called Polar Extremes for the same channel.

I am honoured to count Kirk among my friends as well as my colleagues and I can honestly say that spending time in the field with him has changed the way I see the natural world. He is always generous with his time and considered in his thinking, so I’m sure you’ll enjoy his company and conversation.

Kirk’s sister Kirsten Johnson is a Oscar-nominated film-maker who has made an incredible film for Netflix about their father’s dementia and which seems to be heading for more awards. And it is with the film, Dick Johnson is Dead, that we start the conversation as we spoke a day or so after its release.

The conversation was recorded in October 2020, the week that Trump contracted Covid, so all the references are in the context of that time rather than all the craziness which has happened since.

When I heard the story of the gorillas in San Diego Zoo which had contracted Covid, my thoughts turned immediately to Gladys and the mountain gorillas of Bwindi. I haven't felt the need to do an update before, but I couldn't stop thinking about Gladys, the mountain gorillas or Bwindi and the people around the park for whom gorilla tourism was so important. I last spoke to Gladys in October and I needed to know how she was and how Uganda was coping with the crisis.