Tom Kortbeek and Roos Meerman are the founders of Fillip Studios, a Netherlands-based interdisciplinary design studio whose work sits at the intersection of art, science, technology, and human experience. Together, Tom and Roos have spent more than a decade exploring what happens when artists, designers, engineers and scientists are invited into the same conversation. Their projects explore everything from human connection to healthcare to public ethics, environmental responsibility, and the future role of design in society. There’s Tactile Orchestra, an interactive installation that turns touch into collaborative music; there’s Kozie, a sensory object that’s being used in dementia and Alzheimer's care; Holland's Next Embryo invites the public to grapple with the ethical questions surrounding reproductive technology and genetic selection; Commissioned by Earth explores what changes when the planet itself is treated as the client; Arabidopsis Symphony transforms plant biology into an immersive musical experience. And other projects that challenge audiences to reconsider the relationship between people, nature, materials, technology, and the systems that shape our lives.

But beneath all of those projects is a simpler question: How do people come together? Not through argument or instruction, but through touch, play, curiosity, wonder, and shared experience. It's a question that sits at the center of much of Fillip Studios' work and is reflected in its guiding philosophy: Impact Through Wonder. In the studio, this starts with creating an atmosphere where creators are comfortable to explore and discover. Here, Tom and Roos’ role involves helping people work through a creative process, uncovering new questions and perspectives along the way. The result is a body of work that invites people to come together, and that some of our most meaningful insights aren't always something we think our way into, they can also be something we feel our way toward.

Anchorage Historian David Reamer has spent years digging through archives, newspapers, and forgotten corners, recovering stories that might otherwise disappear. From his early days of sharing historical stories on social media to his long-running Histories of Alaska column in the Anchorage Daily News, he’s documented everything from vanished neighborhoods and local legends to racial covenants, labor struggles, oddball characters, and the everyday moments that shaped Alaska's largest city. His work reminds us that history doesn’t just live in textbooks or monuments. It survives in fragments — rumors, newspaper clippings, photographs, old advertisements, property records, fading memories, and oral histories. Through those fragments, he explores what Anchorage's past reveals about its present and what it means to preserve the memory of a city that has spent much of its life reinventing itself.

Anchorage is difficult to define because it never stops changing. It was founded in 1915 as a railroad tent city—a place of laborers, opportunists, and people eager to get in on the ground floor. More than a century later, that spirit of reinvention remains. The challenge in seeing the full picture, David says, is that we rarely see the present clearly while we're living through it. Only with distance do the patterns emerge. So, he’s skeptical of the neat narratives that often follow official histories because, for him, history is messy. And he embraces that messiness, challenging conventional wisdom and uncovering histories that are both profound and absurd. Like Anchorage's brief obsession with raising chinchillas.

In this one, I talk to Ashley Saupe. She’s the host of the Sharp End Podcast, a show built around firsthand accounts of accidents, near misses, survival, and the complicated psychology of risk in the outdoors. But before she started the podcast, she was studying the mistakes of others, reading Accidents in North American Climbing, an annual publication by the American Alpine Club that documents climbing incidents, what went wrong, and the lessons people take away from them. She became fascinated not by triumphs or summit photos, but by the thin line between routine and disaster—the small decisions, overlooked details, and human tendencies that can shift a situation toward danger. Eventually, she began to think: someone should turn these stories into a podcast. That idea became The Sharp End.

For more than eleven years, she’s been listening to people recount moments when things fell apart, and in the process her own relationship to climbing, risk, and the outdoors has changed. In her twenties and early thirties, she was more concerned with reaching the summit, but now, as she nears 40, she’s learned to enjoy the journey. These days, success means facilitating wilderness experiences for other people and getting down safely. She’s less interested in collecting accomplishments than she is in what the outdoors reveal about fear, ego, vulnerability, and identity. Now, she often spends time alone in the backcountry, where the silence and isolation force her to confront these things directly. She says time slows down in the mountains, that survival depends on paying attention: listening to your body, the weather, your partner, the rock in front of you. That way of moving through the outdoors has also shaped the way she thinks about Alaska, how it’s scale and mythology often distorts people’s judgment and can lead to a dangerous kind of confidence. Many people refer to this as “The Alaska Factor.”