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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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Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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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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Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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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!

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

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
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!

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!

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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

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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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Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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