Where Shall We Meet

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

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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
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message!
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!
Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message!
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!
Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message!
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!
Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet