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Our guest today is Sam Harris. Sam is the host of the Making Sense Podcast and an the author of five New York Times best sellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

Sam’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, Nature, among others. The Making Sense Podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category.

Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. He has created the Waking Up app for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context.

We talk about:

• How failing at meditation is the best approach
• Dissolving concepts that are made up by our mind
• How to loose your head
• His book the Moral Landscape
• Moral absolutes versus moral relativism
• Is adversity is the only path to growth
• The illusory distinction between rationality and emotions
• His book Free Will
• Whether we really know why we change our minds
• How losing a foot might lead to better podcasts
• And a lot more

Let’s meditate!

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Our guest today is Suzanne O'Sullivan, the author of the book The Age of Diagnosis: Sickness, Health and Why Medicine Has Gone Too Far. Suzanne is a neurologist, clinical neurophysiologist, and writer. She has been a consultant since 2004 and has been at The National Hospital for Neurology and The Epilepsy Society since 2011. Her specialist interests are in epilepsy and in improving services for people who suffer with functional neurological disorders.

Suzanne qualified in medicine in 1991 from Trinity College Dublin. In addition to academic publications in her field, she is an author of award-winning non-fiction books, each focusing on her medical casework.

Her 2016 book, It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness, won the Wellcome Book Prize, and the Royal Society of Biology's General Book Prize, for "for an accessible, engaging and informative life sciences book written for a non-specialist audience". Her book, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness, was shortlisted for the 2021 Royal Society Science Book Prize.

We talk about:

• Is there an epidemic of overdiagnosis
• Extending the definitions of disorders
• The rise of ADHD and Autism diagnosis
• The impact of this on either end of the spectrum
• Has this had a positive or negative effect on mental health
• Medicalising natural mood swings and differences
• Illness as identity
• Cancer screening and proactive surgery

Let’s analyse

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
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Our guest today is Nick Lane, who offers fresh insights on the theories of the origins of life. He is a Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London.

Nick’s research is on the way that energy flow has shaped evolution over 4 billion years, using a mixture of theoretical and experimental work to address the origin of life, the evolution of complex cells and downright peculiar behaviour such as sex.

He has received many awards for his work. Among them the 2015 Biochemical Society Award for his outstanding contribution to molecular life sciences and 2016 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science.

Nick is the author of five acclaimed books on evolutionary biochemistry, which have sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide, and been translated into 25 languages.

We talk about:

• How it all began deep in the ocean
• The similarity between a cell and the planet
• Is the earth only a giant battery
• How there are no clear definitions of what life is
• How cloning is boring and sex creates difference
• The innovation of multi- over single cell life
• How Genes shouldn’t be in the limelight, while chemistry is doing all the work
• The three domains of life

Let’s go back to the beginning!

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Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet