Impact in the 21st Century

About Impact in the 21st Century

Welcome to Impact in the 21st Century. This is a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, founders, and authors, and the positive impact they create. Each episode, Host Aaron Friedland sits down with these inspiring guests to unpack how they found their purpose, the work they're doing to make a positive difference, and what it takes to lead a more impactful life in the 21st century. Impact in the 21st Century is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life. Each episode is recorded from https://waterfall.farm/ (https://waterfall.farm/) Learn more at www.simbifoundation.org/podcast (http://www.simbifoundation.org/podcast)

Publisher

Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life

Category

business · education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Sept 2020

Latest episode

10 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

38 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   10 Aug 2026

   EP #37: Jasper Eales - The Upcycled Human | Perfect Imperfection | Why Waste Is a Design Problem

   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

2. 

   29 Jun 2026

   EP #36: Anil Seth - Your Brain Is Lying to You | Consciousness & Controlled Hallucination | What It Means to Be You

   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 HER

3. 

   11 Jun 2026

   EP #35: Paul Hawken - Carbon, the Book of Life | Why We Declared War on the Wrong Thing

   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.

Who has been a guest on Impact in the 21st Century

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Alberto Manguel
• Hylton Kallner
• Dr Charles Owubah
• Danny Glenwright
• Alyssa Carson

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

603,084

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 41 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

34

Social presence

0

YouTube

86

Engagement

32

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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