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Our guest this week is Natalie Batalha. Natalie is professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz where received her PhD. Previously, she was a research astronomer in the Space Sciences Division of NASA Ames Research Center. She held the position of Science Team Lead on the Kepler Mission, the first mission capable of finding Earth-size planets around other stars. This mission revolutionised our understanding of planetary systems.

The Kepler Mission discovered thousands of exoplanets revealing that planets are common in the galaxy, not rare and many even lie in the habitable zone.

Natalie is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was listed as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2017.

We talk about:

• Where is everyone AKA the Fermi Paradox
• What is an exoplanet
• The Drake equation in simple terms
• The revelation that planets like ours are more common than ever imagined
• What was the Kepler mission and what did it achieve?
• Who owns space?
• Will our alien friends be receptive?
• Can we be trusted to become multi-planetary?

Unfortunately, we had a couple of technical issues on this recording but have done our very best to iron them out.

Let’s look through the telescope!

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Our guest this week is Jacinda Ardern. She became the world's youngest female head of government at age 37. Ardern served as Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, earning global admiration for her empathetic and decisive leadership through crises like the Christchurch attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic. Her trademark “be kind” approach redefined what modern political leadership could look like.

In 2025, she released her memoir A Different Kind of Power, reflecting on how empathy can drive real progress. It’s more than a political memoir, it’s a profound insight into how it feels to lead.

Since leaving office, Ardern has turned her focus to global initiatives on climate action, online safety, and compassionate leadership. She’s a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a Distinguished Fellow of Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government and a Trustee of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize, continuing her work to inspire change on the world stage.

She was recently made a Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit — a fitting recognition for a leader whose grace and humanity have left a lasting mark far beyond her time in office.

We talk about:

• A kinder definition of leadership
• Media’s new incentives
• Changing the culture of engagement
• Taking the money out of politics
• The dangerous loss of nuance
• Caring is more important than caring about politics
• Allowing politicians to change their mind
• Buying back guns from civilians

Let’s do this!

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Our guest this week is Kim Stanley Robinson, also know as Stan. He is an American science fiction writer best known for his Mars trilogy of novels. Over his career he has published over 20 books. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, and political themes, featuring scientists as heroes.

Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novel, as well as the World Fantasy Award.

The Atlantic magazine has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to an article in The New Yorker magazine, Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers." Time magazine named him “the hero of the environment” for his optimistic focus on future possibilities.

His most recent novel “The Ministry for the Future” presents a vision for how humanity might unite together to overcome the climate crisis.

We talk about:

• What is science fiction 
• The difference between Utopia and Optopia 
• Being optimistic whilst remaining vigilant 
• Predicting the future 
• What the hell is terraforming 
• Finance as a tool for changing civilisation 
• The current state of American politics 
• Championing scientists 
• If anything is possible, is nothing interesting?

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Let’s talk about the future!

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Our guest this week is Alain de Botton. Alain is a London based writer and psychotherapist. His first book, Essays in Love was published when he was 23 years old and went on to sell two million copies. His books emphasise philosophy's relevance to everyday life. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Status Anxiety (2004), and The Architecture of Happiness (2006).

He’s written 15 books under his name and many more under The School of Life imprint, which have become bestsellers in 30 countries. He is not just a writer, but also an organizer of ideas and institutions.

He founded The School Of Life in 2008, which is dedicated to help people lead more emotionally intelligent lives – through classes, books, games, therapy, films, articles, their app, and their podcast. Their website says, everything they do supports self-knowledge, better relationships, and brings calm to modern life.

His public profile emphasises his desire to bridge intellectual ideas into a lived experience.

We talk about:

• 2 and a half friends is plenty 
• A more rigorous approach to friendship
• Different types of friends - from the teasing to the mirco 
• Platonic sleepovers
• One way friends 
• Enemies of friendship 
• The bravery of being weird 
• Good substitutes for friends

Let’s make friends!

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Our guest this week is Rutger Bregman. Rutger is a Dutch historian and author. His books Humankind: A Hopeful History and Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There were both Sunday Times and New York Times Best Sellers and have been translated in 46 languages.

The Guardian described him as 'the Dutch wunderkind of new ideas', while TED named him 'one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers'. His TED Talk, 'Poverty Isn't a Lack of Character; It's a Lack of Cash', was selected by TED curator Chris Anderson as one of the top ten talks of 2017.

He studied History at Utrecht University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Initially considering a career as an academic historian, Rutger instead ventured into journalism. He began his career at the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant before moving to the independent journalism platform De Correspondent, for which he wrote for ten years.

In 2024, Rutger co-founded The School for Moral Ambition, a non-profit organization inspired by his latest book, Moral Ambition. The initiative helps people to take steps toward an impactful career.

‍We talk about:

• Not resting on ones laurels
• Individual versus societal responsibility
• How just being decent isn’t enough
• The value of harsh feedback
• When is the best time to make people morally ambitious
• Pragmatic Alliances
• Noble Loosers aka Social Media Activism
• Effective Altruism
• The School of Moral Ambition

‍Let’s get moral!

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Our guest this week is Howard Covington. Howard is a Cambridge graduate in physics and maths. He has been a banker, a co-founder and chief executive of New Star Asset Management, and a trustee of the Science Museum. He’s also been and chair of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, The Alan Turing Institute, ClientEarth, and the Scotia Group.

He is the incoming chair of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. Howard is a fellow of the Institute of Physics and an honorary fellow of the Isaac Newton Institute and The Alan Turing Institute.

We want to a talk Howard gave recently and were very amazed about how many of his predictions have come to pass and therefore left comforted by his positive predictions of the future.

We talk about:

• A quick history of 540 million years
• Living in the midst of the third Intelligence Explosion
• Printing meat to eat
• Dark factories
• Are robots part of evolution
• How capitalism drives the race to net zero
• The restoration of the planet

Let’s gaze into the future!

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Paul Bennett is a designer. For 23 years he worked at design and innovation powerhouse IDEO, where he was Chief Creative Officer and then co-CEO. There he was responsible for content excellence across the whole firm, and was active in developing and publishing new thinking in the field of human-centered and design-led innovation.

Today, Paul is a Senior Advisor at McKinsey, where he continues to provide creative leadership and cross-pollination of insights and ideas to clients and colleagues on an extended scale by traveling, learning, and working across the globe.

Paul has taught and coached students from the Royal College of Art (UK), Stanford University and Columbia Business School. Most recently he has taught on the Masters program at KHiO in Oslo and at Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík.

We talk about:

• Redesigning death
• Losing parents
• Digital remains of our lives
• Death is a universal market opportunity
• Using the full extent of the design space death provides
• The pursuit of immortality
• Euthanasia
• Who matters more the dying or the left behind

Let’s design!

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Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Dr Carine Minne is Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis at England’s High Security Hospital, Broadmoor. She was also based at The Portman Clinic, London for three decades - an out-patient psychotherapy clinic for people suffering from problems of violence and sexual paraphilia - both under the NHS public health service.

She chairs the International Psychoanalytic Association Violence Committee and is editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy. She has published widely and lectures nationally and internationally. Her main focus always remains the rehumanising of the dehumanised. She doesn’t believe in innate evil but in evil acts that are carried out, therefore intervention and treatment is always worthwhile. She is speaking personal experience whilst not representing any of the aforementioned organisations.

We talk about:

• Working as a psychotherapist in a high security prison
• What creates a violent criminal
• How childhood trauma causes disinhibition
• Interventions during the first 1000 days of life
• Comparing reoffending rates in different countries
• The prison industrial complex
• Asymmetry of empathy for perpetrators and victims
• Education’s impact on recidivisim

Let’s investigate!

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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!

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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

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Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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