Where Shall We Meet

On Traversal with Maria Popova

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2372295/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://www.whereshallwemeet.xyz/] Twitter: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.twitter.com/whrshallwemeet] Instagram: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.instagram.com/whrshallwemeet]

On Embodied Brains with Nick Potter

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2372295/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://www.whereshallwemeet.xyz/] Twitter: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.twitter.com/whrshallwemeet] Instagram: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.instagram.com/whrshallwemeet]

On Fashion Science with Amanda Parkes

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2372295/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://www.whereshallwemeet.xyz/] Twitter: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.twitter.com/whrshallwemeet] Instagram: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.instagram.com/whrshallwemeet]

On Trust with Jimmy Wales

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2372295/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://www.whereshallwemeet.xyz/] Twitter: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.twitter.com/whrshallwemeet] Instagram: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.instagram.com/whrshallwemeet]

On Reading with Samantha Harvey

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2372295/fan_mail/new] 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 [https://www.whereshallwemeet.xyz/] Twitter: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.twitter.com/whrshallwemeet] Instagram: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.instagram.com/whrshallwemeet]