Where Shall We Meet

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]

On Constructing Reality with Joscha Bach

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

On Planets with Natalie Batalha

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2372295/fan_mail/new] Our guest this week is Natalie Batalha. Natalie is professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Santa_Cruz] where received her PhD. Previously, she was a research astronomer in the Space Sciences Division of NASA Ames Research Center [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Ames_Research_Center]. She held the position of Science Team Lead on the Kepler Mission [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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! Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz [https://www.whereshallwemeet.xyz/] Twitter: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.twitter.com/whrshallwemeet] Instagram: @whrshallwemeet [https://www.instagram.com/whrshallwemeet]