Let’s Talk About That is a podcast about the ideas, discoveries, and people shaping our world.
Hosted by neuroscientist and biotech leader Anirvan Ghosh, the show features thoughtful, wide-ranging conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and changemakers. Each episode goes beyond titles and headlines to explore the curiosity, setbacks, and convictions that drive meaningful work and discovery. Let’s Talk About That invites guests to step outside their comfort zones and engage in candid, curious dialogue.
Join us for engaging conversations about science, society, and purpose.
S2E15 Shamim Sarif: Telling Stories of Love, Identity, and Belonging through Film
In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Shamim Sarif, award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and director, about the power of storytelling to illuminate identity, love, and belonging.
Shamim grew up in London in an Indian Muslim family with deep roots in South Africa, and from an early age saw the world through stories. As she came to understand her own identity, she found herself drawn to writing the kinds of queer and cross-cultural stories she rarely saw represented on screen or in books.
The conversation traces her journey from novelist to filmmaker, including I Can’t Think Straight, The World Unseen, Despite the Falling Snow, and Polarized. Shamim reflects on navigating family and cultural expectations, building a life with her wife and creative partner Hanan Kattan, who is Palestinian, and discovering that stories she wrote because they were important to her could have profound meaning for people who had rarely seen themselves represented. Shamim tells deeply human stories that draw on her lived experience as an LGBTQ+ artist and is a voice we all need to hear.
Film, book, and television credits at https://www.shamimsarif.com/ (https://www.shamimsarif.com/)
21 Apr 2026
S2E14 Mariam Khayretdinova: Decoding Depression – From Trial-and-Error to Precision Treatments
In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Mariam Khayretdinova, - neuroscientist, data scientist, founder of Brainify.AI, and author of ‘Decoding Despair: How AI Is Reshaping Psychiatry’ - about rethinking how we understand and treat depression—one of the most widespread and complex illnesses of our time.
Mariam’s journey into mental health began with her own lived experience. Growing up with undiagnosed depression in a culture where mental illness was stigmatized and poorly understood, she spent years navigating symptoms without a framework for what she was experiencing or how to seek help.
That experience now informs her work at the intersection of neuroscience, data science, and artificial intelligence. In the conversation, Mariam explains why psychiatry still relies heavily on subjective, symptom-based diagnoses, and why current treatments often follow a trial-and-error approach that can take months—or years—to find something that works.
She outlines a new vision: using large-scale biological, behavioral, and digital data to uncover objective biomarkers of mental illness and move toward truly personalized care. From EEG-based models to AI-driven early detection tools, Mariam explores how advances in data and computation could transform psychiatry into a more precise and predictive discipline, leading to better outcomes for patients.
14 Apr 2026
S2E13 Aaron Roodman: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and Mapping the Cosmos
In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Stanford Professor Aaron Roodman, about some of the deepest mysteries in the universe: dark matter, dark energy, and the architecture of the cosmos.
The conversation begins with a deceptively simple question: what is matter? From there, Aaron walks through the fundamental particles that make up the visible universe before stepping into the far stranger territory of dark matter—an invisible form of mass that shapes galaxies and outweighs ordinary matter by roughly five to one—and dark energy, the mysterious property of space that appears to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.
A major focus of the episode is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, one of the most ambitious scientific instruments ever built. Aaron describes how the Rubin Observatory and its extraordinary LSST camera will map billions of galaxies over a decade, offering an unprecedented window into the visible and invisible structure and evolution of the cosmos (Aaron led the team that built the LSST, largest digital camera ever constructed for astronomy) .
Supporting links of interest:
https://rubinobservatory.org
https://rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-first-look
https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery
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