Welcome to a new season dedicated to exploring and the great explorers of the world!

Explorers and exploration will be the overarching theme, but what about archives you might think?

Well they will still be around because they are the big sources of knowledge and inspiration in this podcast. We will continue to visit museums, archives, libraries and other places where interesting people reside so that our insatible curiosity can be pleased for at least a moment.

So I have changed a few things and if you’ve listened to season one you’ve immediatelly identify one big thing I guess – the change of language from Swedish to English. The hope is to reach more listeners by doing so.

But back to the new theme of season two – Explorers – and why I have choosen to focus on that.

The reason is that the explorers are the ones who go on their own paths to discover new places, things, ideas and ways of living and being that the rest of us don’t know of yet. And they all have great stories to tell and who doesn’t love that?

True exploring is about stepping out into the unknown and by doing so the explorer take a big risk because who knows what she or he will find, or if there is anything to find at all. Not everyone is prepared to do so. Most of us prefer to stay in the our safe zone and to live our lives just like everone around us.

The explorer needs to be able to stand the discomfort of leaving it’s tribe and what is well-known.

But the revard is potentially huge. With this new knowledge they can help expand our world, our knowledge and understanding. Where would we be without them?

I’ve identified seven different archetypes of the explorers and in this season we will find out more about them. They are The Voyager, The Adventurer, The Wanderer, The Scientist, The Connesseur, The Visionary and The Artist.

Artists, connesseurs and scientist you might think? Yes, because exploring is not merely about new continents or mountain tops because then exploring wouldn’t be a thing any longer.

No, exploring is about the unknown and pushing limits or crossing them. It’s about asking new questions and it is actually the true meaning of the cliché expression – thinking outside the box.

The greatest artists explores how far they can take the human expression whether its in a painting or on a stage as a musician or actor. For the visionary the exploration is about seeing new possibilities whether its about inventing a new product or developing new ideas that transforms a religion. The true scientist is therefore also an explorer when she systematically investigates what we know about the world and develops new theories of how it functions.

We will go more into this and all the archetypes in this season and we will start off by looking at the Scientist.

I went to Stockholm to visit the Nobel Center, next to Humlegården and the Royal library, a month before the 2017 Nobel laurates will receive their prizes.

I met with Gustav Källstrand who is an historian of ideas and works at the Nobel center and their museum to talk about the greatest scientists of our time. I was curious to know whether or not these scientists see themselves as explorers, what motivates them and what skills are needed to develop groundbreaking ideas and findings and if that is something that we can learn from.

The episode will be released on the 10th of december, the same day the Nobel prize is awarded.

Make sure you don’t miss it by subscribing to the podcast in iTunes or elsewhere you listen. Another way of staying in the loop of new episodes is to sign up for the Archives Podcast’s newletter at archivespodcast.com.

I hope you are excited for this new season, I sure am! I will visit Oslo in Norway and the KonTiki museum and a trip to Copenhagen is also in the planning, so there are a lot of interesting episodes to come.

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