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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!

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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!

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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
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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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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Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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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!

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