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Our guest today is Janine Benyus, who is the Co-founder of Biomimicry 3.8. She is a biologist, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Since the book’s 1997 release, Janine’s work as a global thought leader has evolved the practice of biomimicry from a meme to a movement, inspiring clients and innovators around the world to learn from the genius of nature.

She has personally introduced millions to biomimicry through two TED talks, hundreds of conference keynote presentations, and a dozen documentaries such as Biomimicry, produced by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Tree Media, 11th Hour, Harmony, and The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, which aired in 71 countries.

In 1998, Janine co-founded the Biomimicry Guild with Dr. Dayna Baumeister. That consultancy morphed into Biomimicry 3.8, a B-Corp social enterprise providing biomimicry consulting services to clients like Nike, General Electric, Herman Miller, Procter and Gamble, and Levi’s.

In 2006, Janine co-founded The Biomimicry Institute, a non-profit institute to embed biomimicry in formal education and informal spaces such as museums and nature centers. Over 11,000 members are now part of the Biomimicry Global Network, working to practice, teach, and spread biomimicry in their region. In 2008, the institute launched AskNature.org, an award-winning bio-inspiration site for inventors.

Janine believes that the more people learn from nature’s mentors, the more they’ll want to protect them. This is why she writes, speaks, and communicates so prolifically about biomimicry.

We talk about:

• Learning from biological systems
• Waging war against nature rather than allying
• How profitable emulating nature can be
• Fitting form to function
• How ant colonies inspire mobile phone networks
• The dependence of the agricultural system on oil
• Photosynthetic Reaction Centre
• Nature is the best chemist
• AI helping the detective work of biologists

Let's get inspired by nature!

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We are talking about Ancestry today. Our guest is Maya Jasanoff who is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University’s History Department.

Maya’s teaching and research extend from the history of the British Empire to global history. She is the author of three prize-winning books. The Dawn Watch examines the dynamics of modern globalization through the life and times of the novelist Joseph Conrad. Her other books are Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World and her first book,  Edge of Empire explores British expansion in India and Egypt through the lives of art collectors. She is currently working on a book about the human preoccupation with ancestry.

In addition to classes on imperial history, she teaches a multidisciplinary Gen Ed course on the topic of "Ancestry: Where Do We Come From and Why Do We Care?". In 2015 Jasanoff was named a Harvard College Professor for excellence in undergraduate teaching. From 2019 to 2022, she is a part-time Visiting Professor at Ahmedabad University in India, where she has been helping launch new curricula in the liberal arts.

Jasanoff has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2013), a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, a Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. She has participated in several BBC documentaries, and her essays and reviews regularly appear in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

We will be talking about:

• The history of ancestry
• Caste systems in India
• Herder and the Idea of a Nation
• Immigrant nations
• Bards as knowledge keepers
• Race as a factor for resource allocation
• Affirmative Action university admission
• Generational privilege and dispossession
• Transatlantic slave trade

Let’s go back to our roots!

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Today we managed to catch Tim Minchin on his book tour between Brighton and Piccadilly London. He is an Australian actor, writer, musician, poet, composer, and songwriter. Tim is also a piano playing comedian extraordinaire. His recent book “You Don't Have To Have A Dream: Advice for the Incrementally Ambitious” became an instant Sunday Times bestseller.

He has released several albums, comedy specials, and live comedy shows that he has performed internationally. He is the composer and lyricist of the Olivier Award-winning, Tony Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated show Matilda the Musical and the Olivier Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated show Groundhog Day The Musical. In 2013, he played rock star Atticus Fetch on Californication and in 2019 he co-wrote and starred as Lucky Flynn in the TV series Upright.

Tim has been awarded several honorary Doctorates for his contribution to the arts. His “9 life lessons” acceptance speech went viral and has been viewed 10s of millions of times. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2020 Australia Day Honours "for significant service to the performing arts, and to the community".

We will talk about:

• Self-censoring and policing opinion
• Free speech absolutism
• Life without social media
• Assertion of tribal identity
• People just wanting a hug
• Decontextualising of text messages
• The sloganisation of the worlds information
• Ginger haired people
• Being consumers versus creators
• Bothsidesism
• Male Homo Sapiens are dangerous things

Let's get into it!

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Our guest today is Tessa Clarke. She the is Co-Founder & CEO of Olio, the anti-waste app tackling the climate crisis by solving the problem of waste in our homes & local communities. Olio does this by connecting people with their neighbours so they can give away rather than throw away their spare food and other household items. It is powered by volunteers who collect unsold food from local businesses such as Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda and Holland & Barrett, and redistribute it to the community via the Olio app. Its impact has been widely recognised, most notably by the United Nations who highlighted Olio as a "beacon” for the world, and by Vivatech who awarded Olio "Next European Unicorn". Olio is also a proud B Corp, and Tessa is an Ambassador of the Better Business Act.

Prior to Olio, Tessa had a 15 year corporate career as a digital Managing Director in the media, retail and financial services sectors, and she met her co-founder Saasha whilst they were studying for their MBAs at Stanford University. Tessa is passionate about the sharing economy as a solution for a sustainable world, and about ‘profit with purpose’ as the next business paradigm. Tessa’s TED talk about the power of sharing has been watched over 1 million times, and in 2023 she was awarded the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award, the longest running award for female business leaders.

We will talk about:

• That we throw away 30% of our food
• And that the majority of this is in our homes
• The truth about plastic bottles
• Reframing charity as sharing
• Ugly apples
• Earth Overshoot Day
• Connecting with your neighbours
• The truth about use by and sell by dates
• The Circular Economy

Let’s get wasted.

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Our guest today is Maria Popova, who thinks and writes about our search for meaning — sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), an online publication, which she has fought to keep free and advertisement free. It features her writing on books, art, science, philosophy and poetry. It is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She’s also the author of Figuring, and maker of the live show “The Universe in Verse” — a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, which is now also a book.

In addition to her writing and related speaking engagements, she has served as an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow, as the editorial director at the higher education social network Lore, and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired UK, and other publications.

We will talk about:

• Dissatisfaction as propulsive force
• Productivity as a band aid
• Performative Identity versus Soul
• Instagram Wisdom
• Everyone is a living question - the question is what is the question
• Poetry as a side door to consciousness
• Writing as a clarifying force
• Resisting Dinner Parties
• The Price of consciousness is awareness of mortality
• ”The Republic of Letters”

Now let’s search for meaning.

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In this episode we talk to Ben Macintyre. He is a columnist and Associate Editor on The Times. He is also an award winning authour and one of the most acclaimed writers of espionage history. His books Agent Zigzag A Spy Among Friends, The Spy and the Traitor, Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy, Operation Mincemeat, Double Cross and SAS: Rogue Heroes have reached bestseller status and many have been adapted for the screen.

Ben’s latest book Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle tells the astonishing true story of history’s most infamous prison and became the biggest selling history book of 2022 and a No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller. His upcoming book The Siege is about the greatest SAS hostage drama held in the Iranian Embassy London.

We will talk about:

• The ultimate history curriculum
• How reality is always stranger than fiction
• Historical quantum leaps
• Agent versus structre theory
• Uncovering the hidden stories of spies
• How much of history is the story of the victors
• How much virality could change the way we tell history in the future

You can pre-order Ben's new book "The Siege" here.

Let’s travel through time!

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In this episode we speak to Dr. Roslind Watts. Dr Watts is a clinical psychologist, and a nature lover. Her work as the Clinical Lead for Imperial College London’s psilocybin trial has made her one of the most prominent voices and minds in the field of psychedelic research.

Dr Watts has been named as one of the 50 Most Influential People in Psychedelics. She builds tools and structures to foster connectedness after psychedelic experiences, finding inspiration for their design from nature. She co-founded the UK's first psychedelic integration group, and in 2022 launched ACER a global online integration community.

We will talk about:

• The difference between Macro and microdosing
• Categorising synthetic and natural compounds
• The Importance of post trip integration
• How psychedelics are changing approaches to therapy
• The condundrum of corporate interests and democratisation use
• Regulation
• ACER
• Appropriation of indegenous practices
• “Doing the work” and being a tenant of your own trauma
• The Default Mode Network

More about Dr. Rosalind Watt's ACER framework here.

Now let’s go on a trip!

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In this episode we talk to Ali Eslami, who is a Principal Research Scientist at Google DeepMind studying artificial intelligence. He's currently also Director of Research Strategy for Google Gemini. Prior to this, he led a team at DeepMind working on generative models, self-supervised learning, multi-modal large language models. He also led the Quantum Chemistry and Materials team in Science.

Prior to DeepMind, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He did his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where he was a Carnegie scholar. During that time he was also a visiting researcher at Oxford University in the visual geometry group.

We talk about:

• The emergence of the AI landscape
• Whether you need a body to understand the world
• Human perception slash Plato
• The difference between how humans and AI learn
• How AI models are built and trained
• Differences between Machine learning and Generative AI
• Marcus Aurelius and how amazing the human brain is
• Whether we are about to surrender our sovereignty to AI

Let’s log in!

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In this episode we talk to Erling Kagge who is an explorer, author, publisher, art collector, and the first person to have completed the Three Poles Challenge on foot—the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest. He has written eight books on exploration, philosophy, and art collecting. They have been published in 42 different languages. His next book is 'The North Pole - The History of an Obsession', which out later this year.

In this episode we talk about:

• Searching for infinity in the North Pole
• The hardship of exploration
• And how inconvenience is good for you
• Wearing the same clothes for 50 days
• Confronting Polar Bears
• Pooping at minus 50
• How a single raisin can make your day
• Living underground in sewers
• And whether silence can be measured

We recommend listening to this episode while walking!

Here a link to Erling's book 'Walking: One Step at a Time'

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In this episode we are speaking to Nitin Sawhney, who is a multifaceted artist whose career spans music, film, theatre and dance. Nitin is a world-renowned composer, producer, and musician, celebrated for his ability to blend a wide array of musical styles, including classical, jazz, electronica, and traditional Indian music. He also produces other artists work, offering stewardship to many talented young musicians. His work has earned him over 20 international awards, a CBE, a Mercury Prize nomination and an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award.

Beyond his albums, Nitin has composed scores for film, television, and stage productions, showcasing his versatility and depth as an artist. His collaborations read like a who’s who of the music and entertainment world, featuring artists such as Paul McCartney, Sting, Annie Lennox, Nora Jones, Anoushka Shankar, Joss Stone and Jeff Beck. His influence extends to activism as well, using his platform to address social and political issues.

We talk about:

• The neuroscience of music
• Nature and music
• How cultures create different musical frameworks
• The impact of technology on music production
• Why is it that music affects our mood?
• The fabulousness of Nitin’s musical career
• Will copyright survive AI?
• And the existential questions that arise form this

Press play and enjoy the music!

Here's a link to Nitin's newest Album Identity.

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