Where Shall We Meet

Omid Ashtari & Natascha McElhone
  • 5.0 (19)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Weekly

Explorations of topics about society, culture, arts, technology and science with your hosts Natascha McElhone and Omid Ashtari. The spirit of this podcast is to interview people from all walks of life on different subjects. Our hope is to talk about ideas, divorced from our identities - listening, learning and maybe meeting somewhere in the middle. The perfect audio diet for shallow polymaths! Natascha McElhone is an actor and producer. Omid Ashtari is a tech entrepreneur and angel investor.

  1. 5d ago

    On Censorship with Marc Levy

    Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Last year, according to PEN America, nearly 12,000 book bans took place in US public schools. Our guest this week is Marc Levy, who wrote The Bookshop of Forbidden Books. He is the author of twenty-seven other novels published in fifty languages. With more than fifty million copies sold, he is the most-read French author alive. A nationwide poll by Le Figaro ranked him alongside Victor Hugo as France’s favourite writer. He currently lives in New York. At eighteen years old he joined the Red Cross, where he worked for six years. He then founded a computer graphics company operating in France and the United States, and later started an architecture firm with two friends that became one of the leading firms in France. He wrote his first novel, If Only It Were True, when he was 37. Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks bought the film rights before the book was even published, and the film, Just Like Heaven, starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, went to number one at the US box office in 2005. Several of his novels have been adapted for the screen, including All Those Things We Never Said, which Canal+ broadcast in 2022. His latest novel, The Rebel Sisters, comes out in France this autumn in two volumes. We talk about: How a Florida law can pull thousands of books off library shelves in a dayWhy authoritarians need citizens to be ignorant and scaredAnd why books are the antidote to bothDid the woke movement pave the way for censorship overreach?Why 380 words have been struck from official US vocabularyTyrants don’t need monsters, they need a systemWhy the dictionary is the most dangerous bookLet’s begin! Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz Twitter: @whrshallwemeet Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

  2. Oct 7

    On Autocracy with Anne Applebaum

    Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Anne Applebaum, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She is a historian of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. She also hosts The Atlantic's podcast Autocracy in America with Peter Pomerantsev. For the past decade she has written about the dismantling of liberal democracy, and about the people inside democracies who help them. Anne started her career in 1988 as The Economist's correspondent in Warsaw and covered the collapse of communism. She went on to be deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist at The Washington Post. Her book Gulag: A History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, and Iron Curtain, Red Famine and Twilight of Democracy followed. In 2024 she won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She is now a Polish citizen and is married to Poland's foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski. Her latest book is Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It argues that today's autocracies don't share an ideology. Communist China, theocratic Iran, nationalist Russia and a handful of others instead cooperate like the separate companies of one big corporation. They trade drones, weapons, markets and propaganda, and they hide stolen money in an offshore system that Western bankers, lawyers and accountants built. We talk about: Is having no constraints the only thing autocrats share?Swapping Putin for Trump: where the comparison breaks downThe offshore economy we built, and could take apartCrypto, Nigel Farage and who is paying whomEvan Mawarire, a flag, and how a smear campaign works"Am I sure this is true?" Fact-checkers and knowing who to trustCeuta, and why the images win even after the facts changeDemocracy is not water from a tapLet’s begin! Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz Twitter: @whrshallwemeet Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

  3. Sep 23

    On Prophecy with Carissa Veliz

    Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Carissa Véliz, who is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford University. She works on privacy, digital ethics and the ethics of AI, and her new book argues that AI has become the new Oracle of Delphi. That book is Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future. It is a history of prediction as much as a book about AI — tracing the line from ancient oracles to credit scores, bail algorithms and tech CEOs, and arguing that a prediction is never a neutral forecast but an instrument of power. As she points out in the conversation, for all the thousands of books on how to forecast, nobody had yet written one on the ethics of it. Carissa is also the author of Privacy Is Power, an Economist book of the year translated into seven languages, and The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance. She is also the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. She has advised the UK and Spanish governments, sits on the board of the Proton Foundation alongside Tim Berners-Lee, and is a member of UNESCO's Women4Ethical AI expert group. We talk about: Is AI the new Oracle of Delphi?When a CEO predicts, is it a forecast or an order?Obeying in advanceA prediction can never be a factThe turkey’s disappointment at ThanksgivingDoes polling corrupt democracy?Why a self-fulfilling prophecy is the perfect crimeA blow dryer, a sensor, and what's wrong with prediction marketsIs AI doing the creative work while we do the boring jobs?Let's not prophesise! Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz Twitter: @whrshallwemeet Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

  4. Sep 9

    On Discovery with James Manyika

    Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is James Manyika, who is Senior Vice President of Research, Labs, Technology and Society at Google and Alphabet. He joined Google in 2022 in a newly created role reporting to Sundar Pichai, and has spent the years since arguing that AI's largest contribution may turn out to be to science itself. His latest essay in the new volume of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is devoted to AI and scientific discovery which features Demis Hassabis, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Eric Topol and others. He also co-chaired the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Body on AI, served as vice chair of the US National AI Advisory Committee, and co-wrote No Ordinary Disruption. James was born and raised in Zimbabwe and read electrical engineering at the University of Zimbabwe before going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he took a doctorate in AI and robotics and became a fellow of Balliol College. He was a visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then spent twenty-five years at McKinsey, thirteen of them as chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute. We talk about: AlphaFold and a fifty-year grand challengeDid it understand how proteins fold, or just learn the grammar?Is hallucination a bug or a feature?Move 37 and the bitter lessonTuring on why an infallible machine is a boring oneIs this the first time we have had a cognitive competitor?The impossible problem of alignmentAI as an invention for making inventionsMissed use, and who actually benefits from a breakthroughLet's discover! Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz Twitter: @whrshallwemeet Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

  5. Jun 24

    On AI Filmmaking with Xavier Collins

    Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! Welcome to the where shall we meet podcast. Our guest this week is Xavier Collins who is the CEO and Co-founder of Wonder Studios, an AI-native creative studio redefining how film, advertising, and music video content is made. Based in London, Xavier founded Wonder alongside CCO Justin Hackney with a clear thesis: that the most valuable creative work in the AI era lives at the intersection of human taste and intelligent production — what the studio calls “crafting jewelry from AI gold.” Wonder has raised $15M from investors including LocalGlobe and Blackbird, with angels from ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind — and is building toward becoming the A24 of the AI generation. Before Wonder, Xavier held senior roles scaling some of the world’s fastest-growing consumer platforms, including Uber and Deliveroo. We talk about: Who is the maker when we use AI?Does what we value change when things don’t require effort?Is the box office truly reflective of what care about?Will AI tools empower the unskilled?How will we adjust to fakery?Is Inga Rose a watershed moment?Will artisanal always resonate more AI?Can AI create novelty?Let’s wonder! Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz Twitter: @whrshallwemeet Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

  6. Jun 10

    On Traversal with Maria Popova

    Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! 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 Twitter: @whrshallwemeet Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

  7. May 27

    On Embodied Brains with Nick Potter

    Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! 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 bodyCaptain Tom and how motion is lotionDo we really move less now than beforeThe importance of dancingIs Asthma a stress responseHow keeping healthy can cost nothingKeeping traders zenThe practice of interoceptionIs anger unaddressed fearLet’s move! Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz Twitter: @whrshallwemeet Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

  8. May 13

    On Fashion Science with Amanda Parkes

    Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message! 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 scienceDesigning clothing as part of a biological cycleHigh-tech NaturalismHow algae can transform into clothing dyeBio fabricationHumans are good at building not at breaking downUsing carbon air pollution to make inkHow banana skin can become a dressLet’s get dressed! Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz Twitter: @whrshallwemeet Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

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5
out of 5
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About

Explorations of topics about society, culture, arts, technology and science with your hosts Natascha McElhone and Omid Ashtari. The spirit of this podcast is to interview people from all walks of life on different subjects. Our hope is to talk about ideas, divorced from our identities - listening, learning and maybe meeting somewhere in the middle. The perfect audio diet for shallow polymaths! Natascha McElhone is an actor and producer. Omid Ashtari is a tech entrepreneur and angel investor.

Information

  • Creator
    Omid Ashtari & Natascha McElhone
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    41
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Where Shall We Meet
  • Show Website
    Where Shall We Meet

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