Where Shall We Meet

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Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Anne Applebaum, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She is a historian of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. She also hosts The Atlantic's podcast Autocracy in America with Peter Pomerantsev. For the past decade she has written about the dismantling of liberal democracy, and about the people inside democracies who help them.

Anne started her career in 1988 as The Economist's correspondent in Warsaw and covered the collapse of communism. She went on to be deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist at The Washington Post. Her book Gulag: A History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, and Iron Curtain, Red Famine and Twilight of Democracy followed. In 2024 she won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She is now a Polish citizen and is married to Poland's foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski.

Her latest book is Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It argues that today's autocracies don't share an ideology. Communist China, theocratic Iran, nationalist Russia and a handful of others instead cooperate like the separate companies of one big corporation. They trade drones, weapons, markets and propaganda, and they hide stolen money in an offshore system that Western bankers, lawyers and accountants built.

We talk about:

• Is having no constraints the only thing autocrats share?
• Swapping Putin for Trump: where the comparison breaks down
• The offshore economy we built, and could take apart
• Crypto, Nigel Farage and who is paying whom
• Evan Mawarire, a flag, and how a smear campaign works
• "Am I sure this is true?" Fact-checkers and knowing who to trust
• Ceuta, and why the images win even after the facts change
• Democracy is not water from a tap

Let’s begin!

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Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Carissa Véliz, who is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford University. She works on privacy, digital ethics and the ethics of AI, and her new book argues that AI has become the new Oracle of Delphi.

That book is Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future. It is a history of prediction as much as a book about AI — tracing the line from ancient oracles to credit scores, bail algorithms and tech CEOs, and arguing that a prediction is never a neutral forecast but an instrument of power. As she points out in the conversation, for all the thousands of books on how to forecast, nobody had yet written one on the ethics of it.

Carissa is also the author of Privacy Is Power, an Economist book of the year translated into seven languages, and The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance. She is also the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. She has advised the UK and Spanish governments, sits on the board of the Proton Foundation alongside Tim Berners-Lee, and is a member of UNESCO's Women4Ethical AI expert group.

We talk about:

• Is AI the new Oracle of Delphi?
• When a CEO predicts, is it a forecast or an order?
• Obeying in advance
• A prediction can never be a fact
• The turkey’s disappointment at Thanksgiving
• Does polling corrupt democracy?
• Why a self-fulfilling prophecy is the perfect crime
• A blow dryer, a sensor, and what's wrong with prediction markets
• Is AI doing the creative work while we do the boring jobs?

Let's not prophesise!

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

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Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is James Manyika, who is Senior Vice President of Research, Labs, Technology and Society at Google and Alphabet. He joined Google in 2022 in a newly created role reporting to Sundar Pichai, and has spent the years since arguing that AI's largest contribution may turn out to be to science itself.

His latest essay in the new volume of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is devoted to AI and scientific discovery which features Demis Hassabis, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Eric Topol and others. He also co-chaired the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Body on AI, served as vice chair of the US National AI Advisory Committee, and co-wrote No Ordinary Disruption.

James was born and raised in Zimbabwe and read electrical engineering at the University of Zimbabwe before going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he took a doctorate in AI and robotics and became a fellow of Balliol College. He was a visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then spent twenty-five years at McKinsey, thirteen of them as chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute.

We talk about:

• AlphaFold and a fifty-year grand challenge
• Did it understand how proteins fold, or just learn the grammar?
• Is hallucination a bug or a feature?
• Move 37 and the bitter lesson
• Turing on why an infallible machine is a boring one
• Is this the first time we have had a cognitive competitor?
• The impossible problem of alignment
• AI as an invention for making inventions
• Missed use, and who actually benefits from a breakthrough

Let's discover!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Welcome to the where shall we meet podcast. Our guest this week is Xavier Collins who is the CEO and Co-founder of Wonder Studios, an AI-native creative studio redefining how film, advertising, and music video content is made. Based in London, Xavier founded Wonder alongside CCO Justin Hackney with a clear thesis: that the most valuable creative work in the AI era lives at the intersection of human taste and intelligent production — what the studio calls “crafting jewelry from AI gold.”

Wonder has raised $15M from investors including LocalGlobe and Blackbird, with angels from ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind — and is building toward becoming the A24 of the AI generation.

Before Wonder, Xavier held senior roles scaling some of the world’s fastest-growing consumer platforms, including Uber and Deliveroo.

We talk about:

• Who is the maker when we use AI?
• Does what we value change when things don’t require effort?
• Is the box office truly reflective of what care about?
• Will AI tools empower the unskilled?
• How will we adjust to fakery?
• Is Inga Rose a watershed moment?
• Will artisanal always resonate more AI?
• Can AI create novelty?

Let’s wonder!

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

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Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. This is the first time we have a returning guest. We talk about Maria Popova’s new book Traversal, which to be honest defies summary.

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Nick Potter, who is a consultant Osteopath at King Edward the VII hospital, in London. He researches “Bendy Bodies, Bendy Brains”: studying the relationship between hypermobility, ADHD, anxiety, and nervous-system regulation

He is the author of The Meaning of Pain: A Radical New Approach to Overcoming Chronic Pain, which has been translated into several languages. His book explores how modern stress, biology, behaviour and breathing can interact with pain.

In the early 2000’s, Nick worked in Paris with Alain Prost’s team doctor for The Institut Biomedical Sports et Vie. There he conducted intensive assessments of Formula 1 drivers and their environments, going on to be a Human Performance Advisor to Jaguar F1. From the findings they made, particularly in sleep and stress medicine, the concept of the ‘Corporate Athlete’ was formulated, which Nick presented at INSEAD Business School.

Through his links with Brevan Howard he has worked with John Coats and Dr. Danny Kahneman to study stress responses universal to us all and which are independent of personality type. Nick knows, through personal experience of a spinal injury, what pain is all about. Through applying his principles he is now pain-free.

We talk about: 

• How Descartes was wrong - it should be a synergy of mind and body
• Captain Tom and how motion is lotion
• Do we really move less now than before
• The importance of dancing
• Is Asthma a stress response
• How keeping healthy can cost nothing
• Keeping traders zen
• The practice of interoception
• Is anger unaddressed fear

Let’s move!

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

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message!

Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest today is Dr Amanda Parkes. Amanda calls herself a fashion scientist - she has a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, where her research bridged computer science and material science, and dual Stanford degrees in mechanical engineering and art history. She has spent fifteen years trying to answer a deceptively simple question: what if we rebuilt the material world around nature's logic instead of against it?

That question has taken her from algae biofuels to 3D printed couture, from developing science exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Science Museum here in London to running R&D at Pangaia, the company she describes as a material science company masquerading as a fashion brand. There she turned wildflowers into jacket insulation, Himalayan nettle into denim, and carbon dioxide pulled from the air to make sunglasses.

She is now CTO at Mothership Materials, where she has gone even deeper - extracting the building blocks of biology from food waste to feed the next generation of bio-manufacturers.

We talk about:

• Fashion as a material science
• Designing clothing as part of a biological cycle
• High-tech Naturalism
• How algae can transform into clothing dye
• Bio fabrication
• Humans are good at building not at breaking down
• Using carbon air pollution to make ink
• How banana skin can become a dress

Let’s get dressed!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Jimmy Wales. He is an internet entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that launched in 2001, creating a radically collaborative model that allows anyone to contribute to and edit what has become the world’s largest free encyclopedia. Born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1966, Wales studied finance before working in Chicago as a trader.

Beyond Wikipedia itself, Wales also founded the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects, and later co-founded Wikia, now known as Fandom, a commercial wiki platform built around fan communities.

Over the years, he has become both an advocate and a symbol of the broader idea that knowledge can be created collaboratively and made freely accessible at global scale. His role has often been less that of a traditional executive and more that of a public steward for a radically open model of information.

Wikipedia is not just a website; it is a living experiment in whether strangers can cooperate, disagree, revise one another, and still produce something of enormous public value. That question of trust is central to his 2025 book The Seven Rules of Trust, in which he reflects on how trust can be built, and sustained in institutions and communities.

We talk about:

• His seven rules of trust
• Trusting people to contribute wisely
• The mechanics of Wikipedia
• How a crisis lead to an innovation
• News shouldn’t be entertainment
• How collective knowledge negotiates truth
• Can we find consensus as a society
• Crisis of trust in politics

Let’s search!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message!

Welcome to the third season of the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Quick housekeeping, in the show notes you will find a link to send us a voice note, should you feel the urge.

Our guest today is Samantha Harvey who is a British novelist and a senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her Phd centred on writing philosophical fiction. She has published five novels and one work of non-fiction, and her work has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize, the James Tait Black Award and the Walter Scott Prize.

Her debut, The Wilderness, was narrated from inside the mind of a man with Alzheimer's and won the Betty Trask Prize. Her non-fiction book The Shapeless Unease is an account of a year of severe insomnia, exploring how prolonged sleeplessness changes the way you think, write, and experience time.

Her most recent novel, Orbital, was published in 2023 and won the 2024 Booker Prize - one of the shortest novels ever to do so. Harvey wrote much of it during COVID lockdowns, watching live footage from the ISS.

Her work consistently returns to questions of consciousness, perception, and attention - how we experience time, place, and the limits of what the human mind can hold.

We talk about:

• What is reading
• Can we still pay attention?
• A love letter to planet Earth
• The value of new media
• How she got 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets into one day
• It’s the reader who finishes the novel
• The humbling impact of the Overview effect
• How to be an intrepid explorer from your desk

Let’s go into orbit!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Our guest this week is Joscha Bach. He is a German cognitive scientist, artificial-intelligence researcher and philosopher of mind who consistently bridges the gap between what human intelligence is and what machines could become. He has an MA in computer science and a PhD in cognitive science. Over the course of his career he has held research positions at institutions such as the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

Bach is best known for his work on computational models of human-like cognition: he developed the cognitive architecture called “MicroPsi”, exploring how perception, motivation, emotion and decision-making interact in autonomous agents. He is the author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence. In addition to his academic output, he has taken roles in applied AI research and strategy, bringing theoretical insight into real-world settings.

What sets his approach apart is his deeply integrative mindset: he treats intelligence not just as surface behaviour or pattern-recognition, but as the emergent result of rich internal models of the world and self. His philosophical lens brings questions of consciousness, free will and meaning into the technical domain, framing AI and cognition as part of a broader inquiry into what it means to think, feel and act.

We talk about:

• We live in a story not in the physical world
• Consciousness does not depend on the substrate
• Can you learn reality by just watching YT
• Alternative approaches to building AI
• Intuition is the part of your mind you cannot yet reflect
• The constraint to becoming superhuman only applies to humans
• There is no obligation to unite your many selves

This episode will require your full focus. We recommend you put on headphones and turn off all your other devices.

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