Impact in the 21st Century

Professor Mukesh Kapila CBE is a medical doctor, humanitarian, author, and Professor Emeritus of Global Health and Humanitarian Affairs at the University of Manchester. He has spent his life on the front lines of humanity’s worst moments, from Rwanda in 1994 to Srebrenica, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sierra Leone. In 2003 and 2004, he was the United Nations’ most senior official in Sudan when the killing in Darfur began. When the institution he served chose silence, Mukesh went on the BBC and told the world. He was fired, and he was right. In this rare and deeply honest conversation, Mukesh takes us inside the mechanics of global conscience and institutional failure, exploring: Why the world’s attention is so unevenly distributed across conflicts, from Palestine to Sudan, Tigray, Yemen, the DRC, and Afghanistan, and what cultural proximity, agency, and the existence of a “positive agenda” have to do with who gets heard The case for a one-state ideal over partition, drawn from his own family’s survival of the 1947 Partition of India and the Red Cross man who stood between a mob and a train carrying his pregnant grandmother How his aerial reconnaissance over Darfur revealed the pattern of racialised targeting, and the moment a woman named Ayesha walked into his office in Khartoum and flipped the switch that sent him to the BBC Why “genocide” is a legal threshold, not a rhetorical one, and the dangerous unintended consequences of using the word too loosely in the current moment The anatomy of institutional indifference inside the UN, why institutions reward loyalty over courage, and why the only honest unit of analysis is the individual The second half of his life’s work, captured in No Stranger to Kindness, and why true kindness is not the easy kind but the kind that costs the giver something real The story of a four-year-old Tutsi girl who picked up an abandoned baby on the road to the DRC border, and the young man she raised, whom Mukesh met years later This is a conversation about moral courage, the loneliness of being right, and the quieter counterweight to cruelty that keeps showing up when it matters most. It is also one of the most important conversations we have had on the show. Pick up his memoir Against the Tide of Evil and its companion No Stranger to Kindness wherever you get your books. Learn more about his ongoing work at mukeshkapila.org, and listen to his Fading Causes Podcast. 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals behind it. 👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of the Simbi Foundation. 🦻 Who makes it sound good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life.  

Jasper Eales calls himself "a living upcycled human." Diagnosed with Crohn's disease and Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis as a teenager, he underwent a liver transplant in his twenties after a ten-month wait for a donor match. That experience reshaped everything: his relationship with time, with risk, and with the idea that something broken or discarded can be rebuilt into something better. A consulting project put a pile of retired yacht sails in front of him, and in 2015 he and fellow surfer Mike Schlebach co-founded Sealand Gear,handcrafting bags and apparel from upcycled sails, Bedouin stretch tents, and advertising banners. They launched at The Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock. A decade later, Sealand has upcycled over 105 tonnes of material from landfill, holds B Corp certification, and is a member of 1% For The Planet. The brand has been featured in MR PORTER, Design Indaba, and Men's Health South Africa, and won awards including the 2019 Twyg Sustainable Fashion Award and the 2024 V&A Waterfront Our Better Nature Sustainability Award. Behind the product sits the Protect Our Paths Foundation, co-founded by Sealand and Skybound Capital, which employs previously unemployed custodians to clean shared natural spaces across Cape Town, inspired by a man named Keith Kleans who was already keeping Saunders Beach clean on his own. In this episode, Jasper and Aaron explore: The transplant and what came after: what it means to receive an organ from another life, to call yourself "upcycled," and how that experience became the foundation for a design philosophy built around the beauty of things that have been repaired rather than replaced The consulting project, the sails, and the Old Biscuit Mill: how a freelance job revealed an opportunity in discarded yacht sails, what those early days looked like selling furniture from a market stall, and the leap from noticing waste to building a company around it "Perfectly imperfect" and the stamp inside the bag: why every Sealand product carries the name of the machinist who made it, what Sealand means when they use the word "responsibility" rather than "sustainability," and how the founding WHY shapes decisions a profit-first framework would make differently Protect Our Paths and the custodians: the story of Keith Kleans and Saunders Beach, how one man cleaning a beach on his own became a registered foundation with seven custodians across four Cape Town sites Scaling impact when your raw material is waste: whether access to discarded sails and banners is the real constraint on growth, and what it looks like to commercialise upcycling at scale while keeping each product handmade Freedom over funding: why Jasper is not chasing the next raise, and what the breathing room lets him focus on The upside-down reader: how learning to read differently made him a better designer, and what it taught him about education systems that reward conformity over curiosity Family, the ocean, and the next twenty years: how having kids changed his urgency about the planet, what flexibility means to someone whose body nearly failed him, and what he hopes the next generation does differently This is a conversation about the gap between what we discard and what still has life in it, about a man who knows that gap in his own body and in the materials he works with every day. Learn more about Jasper's work at sealandgear.com, and follow @sealandgear and @jaspereales on Instagram. 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals behind it.  👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of the Simbi Foundation.  🦻 Who makes it sound good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Graduate at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project.  This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life. Proudly recorded at Waterfall Farm

Anil Seth has spent more than twenty-five years asking one of the most disorienting questions a scientist can ask: what is it that makes you conscious, and are you as real as you feel? A Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, Seth has published more than 200 research papers and is recognized by Web of Science as being in the top 0.1% of researchers worldwide in his field. His 2017 TED talk, "Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality," has been viewed more than 14 million times, one of the most-watched science talks in TED history. His 2021 book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, became an instant Sunday Times bestseller and a Book of the Year for The Economist, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New Statesman, and Bloomberg. In 2023, he was awarded the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for his extraordinary contribution to public engagement with science. In 2025, he won the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition for "The Mythology of Conscious AI." And in 2026, he delivered a new main-stage TED talk: "Why AI is unlikely to become conscious." His central argument is as simple as it is radical: we do not perceive the world as it actually is. Instead, the brain is a prediction machine, constantly generating its best guess about what's out there, using sensory signals only to correct its errors. What we experience as reality is a "controlled hallucination." And crucially, the self, the very sense of being a "you" behind your eyes, is part of that hallucination too. In this wide-ranging and mind-bending episode, Anil unpacks the ideas at the frontier of consciousness science, exploring: The controlled hallucination: why every perception you have, color, pain, the weight of your own body, is a construction of your brain, not a window onto objective reality, and what that means for how you move through the world The predictive brain: how your mind is not passively receiving information but constantly generating predictions, and why the experience of surprise is actually your brain updating its model of the world The "beast machine" theory of selfhood: why Anil believes that consciousness is not just about computation but is deeply grounded in the biological drive to stay alive, and why that matters for debates about AI The hard problem and the real problem: why philosophers have spent decades asking why there is subjective experience at all, and why Anil thinks we've been asking the wrong question Animal consciousness and the octopus: what creatures with radically different nervous systems reveal about the many possible ways of being conscious, and why this should expand our moral circle Can AI be conscious? Why Anil argues, against the dominant view in Silicon Valley, that large language models are almost certainly not conscious, what we'd actually need to look for, and why anthropomorphizing AI carries real societal risk The Dreamachine: how Anil led a groundbreaking science-art project that used stroboscopic light to induce visual hallucinations in more than 35,000 people, and what the largest ever citizen science study into perceptual diversity revealed about how differently each of us experiences the world What the neuroscience of consciousness means for medicine: from anaesthesia and disorders of consciousness to psychedelics and mental health, how understanding the brain's generative nature opens new clinical possibilities Free will, the self, and what's left: if the self is a controlled hallucination, does that mean we aren't really in control? And is that terrifying, or strangely liberating? This is a deeply searching and surprisingly personal conversation about the most intimate fact of human existence: the experience of being you. Learn more about Anil's work at anilseth.com, and find his book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, wherever books are sold. His TED talks are available HERE, and his 2025 Berggruen Prize essay, "The Mythology of Conscious AI," can be read at Noema Magazine. 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals behind it. 👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of the Simbi Foundation. 🦻 Who makes it sound good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life. Proudly recorded at Waterfall Farm  

Paul Hawken has spent more than fifty years asking the same question in different registers: what does it look like when human commerce rejoins the community of life rather than consuming it? He was a 19-year-old press coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr.'s march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. He cured his own lifelong asthma through food at 19, and went on to found Erewhon, one of the first natural food companies in America. He co-founded Smith & Hawken, wrote nine books translated into 30 languages across 50 countries, and co-founded Project Drawdown, which modeled the 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming. His most recent book, Carbon: The Book of Life, reframes carbon not as the villain of the climate story, but as the invisible thread connecting every living thing on Earth. In this rich and wide-ranging episode, Paul unpacks the ideas behind Carbon, exploring: The first breath: how a ten-day rice and tea fast at 19 cured an asthma that three doctors and a lifetime of medication never could, and what that taught him about the difference between fixing a symptom and restoring a relationship Why he now says Project Drawdown failed by his own measure, what's wrong with "Net Zero" as a target, and the difference between stabilizing the overflow and draining the tub Carbon as "the currency of abundance, the central bank of evolutionary growth, and the most socially adept entrepreneur in the pantheon of life," and what it means that this is not the language of a pollutant The naming problem: how the Enlightenment turned forests into cellulose, soil into dirt, and animals into objects, and why our climate response keeps failing because it uses the same framework that created the crisis What it means that humans are 0.01% of living biomass, and what the other 99.99% knows about running stable carbon cycles for hundreds of millions of years without summits, frameworks, or pledges The economics of a whale, valued at over two million dollars alive versus forty thousand dead, and whether pricing nature protects it or just folds it into the logic that nearly destroyed it The hidden world beneath our feet: mycorrhizal networks connecting 90% of land plants, 2,500 gigatons of carbon stored in soil, and why losing just 8% of it would dwarf current fossil fuel emissions Why cooperation, not competition, is the actual operating principle of the living world, and what that says about the economic system we've built on top of it Awe versus optimism: why Paul says he isn't optimistic, but is in awe of the people making a true difference, and what that distinction means in practice This is a deeply personal and quietly radical conversation about commerce, the body, and what it might mean to stop fighting carbon and start rejoining the community of life that has been regulating it all along. Learn more about Paul's work at paulhawken.com, and find his latest book, Carbon: The Book of Life, wherever books are sold. 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals behind it. 👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of the Simbi Foundation. 🦻 Who makes it sound good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life.

David Abram is an ecologist, philosopher, and sleight-of-hand magician whose work sits at the intersection of phenomenology, linguistics, and our embodied relationship with the more-than-human world. Author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, David is one of the most original and necessary voices asking what we lose when language severs us from the living land and what it takes to find our way back. In this rich and unhurried conversation, David and Aaron explore: Why tracking, reading wind, footprint, and silence, is humanity's original literacy, and what alphabetic writing cost us when it displaced that older way of knowing How oral, place-based cultures encode intelligence in the landscape itself, and why that wisdom cannot survive transplantation into a book The phenomenology of perception: how breath, texture, and animal encounter invite a kind of participation with the world that abstract thinking actively forecloses The animism underlying Indigenous cosmologies, not as superstition, but as a precise description of how attention actually works What it means to be a body among bodies, and why the ecological crisis is, at its root, a crisis of the senses How the alphabet quietly re-routed human attention away from the living world and toward a self-enclosed human conversation The rise of AI and what it means when the dominant intelligence shaping our language, perception, and knowledge is no longer rooted in a body, a place, or the breathing earth Practical, grounded ways to reawaken sensory presence, and why this is not a romantic retreat from modernity, but its most urgent frontier This is a conversation about the oldest question: what does it mean to be fully alive and fully here? And it arrives at exactly the right moment. Learn more about David's work at davidabram.org 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals behind it. 👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of the Simbi Foundation. 🦻 Who makes it sound good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life.

Valdemar Danry is a PhD researcher in the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab, a 2025 Google PhD Fellow in Human-Computer Interaction, and one of the most important voices at the intersection of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. His landmark study, Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for an Essay-Writing Task, sparked a global conversation about what happens to human cognition when we delegate our thinking to machines. In this rich and urgent episode, Valdemar unpacks the science behind AI's effect on the brain, exploring: The difference between cognitive offloading and cognitive debt, and the moment one quietly becomes the other What EEG brain data revealed when people wrote essays with versus without ChatGPT, and why the sequence of tool use matters enormously Why AI systems that hand us answers rather than ask us questions may be slowly eroding our capacity for independent thought "Desirable difficulties," the intentional friction that makes learning stick, and two simple habits that keep AI as a thinking aid rather than a thinking replacement Whether the reasoning traces and thinking steps now visible in tools like Claude, Grok, and Gemini genuinely help people reason, or simply create a more sophisticated illusion of understanding A plain-English glossary of key terms: cognitive offloading, cognitive debt, transactive memory, extended cognition, epistemic hygiene, and more Three possible futures, Assistive Renaissance, Dependency Drift, and Captured Cognition, and what determines which path we take What Orwell and Huxley each got right about the world we're now living in This is an honest, grounded, and deeply important conversation about one of the defining questions of our time: as AI gets smarter, do we get sharper, or do we quietly outsource the very faculty that makes us human? Learn more about Valdemar's research at valdemardanry.com. 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals behind it. 👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of the Simbi Foundation. 🦻 Who makes it sound good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life.

Frank Solomon is a world-renowned big wave surfer, ocean adventurer, and the founder of Sentinel Ocean Alliance. Raised on the rugged coastline of South Africa, Frank has ridden some of the most dangerous waves on Earth, from Mavericks in California to the legendary Dungeons in Hout Bay. But beyond pushing the limits of human courage, he has dedicated his life to protecting the ocean and empowering coastal communities through education, safety, and conservation. In this powerful and grounded episode, Frank takes us deep into the world of big wave surfing and ocean stewardship, exploring: What it takes mentally, physically, and emotionally, to ride waves over 50 feet tall The unique danger and beauty of Dungeons, one of the world’s most feared big wave surf breaks How fear becomes a tool rather than an obstacle in extreme environments Why the ocean is not just a playground, but a living system under real threat How Sentinel Ocean Alliance is transforming coastal communities through ocean education, safety training, and conservation initiatives What everyday people can do to reconnect with, respect, and protect the sea, even if they never surf This is a raw, reflective, and inspiring conversation about courage, humility, and responsibility, where adventure meets advocacy, and where loving the ocean means standing up for it. 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals behind it. 👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of the Simbi Foundation. 🦻 Who makes it sound good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life.

Nelson Dellis is a six-time USA Memory Champion, Grandmaster of Memory, and one of the world’s foremost experts on training the mind. Driven by his grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, he turned an average memory into a world-class superpower using ancient techniques and now teaches others to do the same. As founder of Climb For Memory, he scales the planet’s highest peaks, including multiple Everest expeditions, to fund Alzheimer’s research and prove that mental and physical resilience go hand in hand. In this mind-expanding episode, Nelson reveals how anyone can transform their memory from forgetful to unforgettable, including: The ancient origins of the memory palace and why these techniques powered civilizations long before writing existed Step-by-step guidance on building your first memory palace and mastering the Major System for numbers Instant hacks for remembering names, speeches, grocery lists and a live demo that will blow your mind Why memory training builds focus, presence, and creativity in an age of endless digital distraction The future of human memory as AI takes over storage and how keeping this skill sharp could define our humanity This is a thrilling, practical conversation for anyone ready to reclaim their mind, boost daily performance, and discover that superhuman memory isn’t a gift. It’s a skill waiting to be unlocked. 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals who are behind it. 👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of Simbi Foundation. 🦻 Who Makes It Sound Good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life.

Dr. Raoul Goldberg is a renowned integrative medicine practitioner with decades of experience blending conventional medical expertise with holistic approaches to empower individuals toward optimal health. As a leader in integrative health practices, he has inspired countless people through his innovative methods, combining physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of healing. His work emphasizes patient empowerment, preventive care, and the transformative potential of addressing the root causes of illness. In this enlightening episode, Dr. Goldberg shares his insights on revolutionizing health and wellness, including: The principles of integrative medicine and how they bridge conventional and holistic approaches How the PATH method helps break free from addictive behaviors by addressing underlying emotional and psychological patterns The role of nutrition, lifestyle, and emotional well-being in preventing and healing chronic conditions Practical tools for fostering resilience and vitality in the modern world The future of healthcare in integrating holistic practices with cutting-edge medical advancements This is an inspiring conversation for anyone curious about the future of medicine, the power of holistic health, and the path to a vibrant, balanced life. 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals who are behind it. 👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of Simbi Foundation. 🦻 Who Makes It Sound Good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life.

Most world-changing startups don’t die from lack of money or market fit. They die because the founder never becomes the CEO the mission needs. Jonathan Lowenhar has spent 10 years helping hundreds of founders make that leap before it’s too late. In this episode he gives you the exact tools that decide whether your mission lives or dies: The critical difference between being a great founder and a great CEO Why 90 % of startups fail, and the day-one patterns that predict it Venture funding vs. philanthropic capital: how to choose the model that protects your mission The live 5-minute exercise Jonathan used to stress-test Aaron’s own clarity and blind spots Staying Curious Over Toxic Certainty: the mindset that turns conflict into alignment Aligning leadership, systems, and purpose from day one The daily ritual Jonathan has kept for twelve years that prevents burnout Real examples of founders who recovered after hitting hidden failure modes Want to make the leap yourself? Jonathan just opened CEO Bootcamps built exactly for this moment: → (December 2 & 3, 2025): https://enjoythework.com/a-new-kind-of-ceo-bootcamp/ Required pre-reading (5 minutes that will change everything): From Founder to Master Operator – the blog post that started it all https://enjoythework.com/blog/from-founder-to-master-operator If you’re building something that has to outlive you, this episode + bootcamp combo is the fastest way to guarantee it does. 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals who are behind it. 👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of Simbi Foundation. 🦻 Who Makes It Sound Good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life.