Cover of TEDxNorthernQuarter: TEDx and Talks

TEDxNorthernQuarter: TEDx and Talks

TEDxNorthernQuarter: TEDx and Talks

By: Andy Coley & Simran Whitham
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TEDxNorthernQuarter: TEDx and Talks goes beyond the red dot to explore the people, ideas and stories that inspire meaningful change. Hosted by Andy Coley and Simran Whitham, each episode features candid conversations with TEDx speakers, organisers, creatives and changemakers. Together, they unpack not only the polished talks you see on stage, but the personal experiences, difficult questions and hard-won lessons behind them. From leadership, identity and creativity to technology, community and the future of how we live and work, TEDx and Talks makes big ideas human, practical and relevant. For curious minds, thoughtful leaders and anyone who believes that one idea - or one conversation - can make a difference. TEDxNorthernQuarter is an independently organised TEDx event. This podcast is independently produced and is not operated by TED.

© 2026 TEDxNorthernQuarter Economics Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Find Your Way Back to Yourself | Aimie Skillen

    Find Your Way Back to Yourself | Aimie Skillen
    29 Oct 2026
    What happens when your life looks good from the outside… but something inside still feels wrong?Aimie Skillen built a brand around helping other people feel good.Then she reached a point where she didn’t.Aimie is the founder of Feel Good Club, the Manchester-born community and lifestyle brand built around a beautifully simple mission: make one person feel good.What began with Instagram posts and T-shirts grew into events, podcasts, books, billboards, brand activations and a much-loved Manchester coffee shop.But behind the community, Aimie was going through one of the hardest periods of her own life.In this episode of Northern Quarter Talks, Aimie joins Andy Coley and Simran Whitham for an open conversation about identity, community, loneliness and finding your way back to yourself.Aimie talks about navigating divorce, closing the Feel Good Club coffee shop and trying to lead a team while simultaneously realising she had lost sight of who she was.Eventually, she stepped away.For around eight months, Aimie paused the events and the parts of Feel Good Club that required her to physically show up.She needed to fill her own cup before she could keep pouring into everybody else's.And then, during a particularly difficult period, she realised something was still missing.Community.Aimie posted online that she was going for a walk in Monton and asked if anybody wanted to join her.Two people came.Initially, she wondered whether it had failed.Instead, those two people reminded her what Feel Good Club had always really been about.Connection.Months later, when Aimie brought Feel Good Club events back, the first event sold out within 24 hours.For her, it demonstrated the difference between building an audience and building a community.An audience can watch, like and disappear.A community shows up for you too.The conversation explores the loneliness Aimie sees repeatedly through her work and why, despite being more connected digitally than ever before, many people are struggling to find genuine friendship and places where they can simply turn up as themselves.Aimie's answer isn't relentless positivity.Quite the opposite.Feel Good Club is also permission not to feel good.Some days you have 100% to give.Some days you have 10%.Give the 10%.Aimie also reflects on the pressure of becoming "Miss Feelgood" while her own life was changing, why social media rarely shows the whole story and the freedom she found in realising that most people aren't scrutinising us nearly as closely as we imagine.Her message is simple:Turn up as you are.Because when you do, the right people have the chance to connect with the real you.Aimie also talks about confronting a lifelong fear of public speaking and the belief that her Salford accent might hold her back.Instead of trying to become somebody else, she learned that the most powerful thing she could do was simply turn up as herself.Her central message is one that reaches far beyond the stage:Follow what makes you feel good through your people, your places and your things.It's okay to lose yourself.Just remember that you can always find your way back.Aimie also takes us behind the scenes of preparing for her recent TEDxNorthernQuarter 2026 talk, confronting a lifelong fear of public speaking and the belief that her Salford accent might hold her back.Instead, that very voice became one of the reasons why she ended up on the red dot.And as the final speaker of TEDxNorthernQuarter 2026, Aimie's talk brought her journey full circle.Its title: Find your way back to you through people, places & thingsIts message: Follow what makes you feel good through your people, your places and your things. Watch it now on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45KzeOYKYKoIt's okay to lose yourself.Just remember that you can always find your way back.And of course her Feel Good Club journey and life continues to evolve, this episode was recorded at the end of August 2026 and things have continued to move on since then in life, her relationships and the challenges that living in the era of social media bring.Northern Quarter Talks is a podcast about people, stories, ideas and the conversations that stay with us long after the microphones are switched off.This episode is hosted by Andy Coley and Simran Whitham.Recorded by THE CLUB MCR in Manchester.TEDxNorthernQuarter 2026 took place at Stoller Hall, Manchester on 11 September 2026, bringing together 16 speakers to share ideas worth spreading.Find out more about TEDxNorthernQuarter:Website: https://www.tedxnorthernquarter.com/Podcast: https://podcast.tedxnorthernquarter.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tedxnorthernquarter/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tedxnorthernquarter/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tedxnorthernquarterFollow Aimie:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/feelgoodaimie/TEDx Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45KzeOYKYKoContent note: This episode includes discussion of divorce, loneliness and periods of poor mental ...
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    29 min
  • Food Makes Us Human Again | Daniel Bui

    Food Makes Us Human Again | Daniel Bui
    20 Oct 2026
    What if one of the simplest answers to loneliness was already sitting in our kitchens?A table. A meal. And an invitation.Daniel Bui is a chef, food creator and storyteller known online as Dumpedlingss. But underneath the recipes, food science and beautifully produced videos is something much more important to him.People.In this episode of TEDx and Talks, Daniel joins Andy Coley and Simran Whitham to explore why food has an extraordinary ability to bring us together.Daniel grew up around his family's Vietnamese restaurant before following a very different career path into mathematics and becoming an actuary.Food, however, never went away.While studying, he worked in restaurants and behind bars, learning to cook, serve and host. Eventually he realised that what fascinated him wasn't simply making good food.It was feeding people.Daniel describes the dinner table as a place where the pressure of everyday life begins to disappear.Job titles matter less.People soften.Conversations become more vulnerable.And, in Daniel's words, people can "become human again."That idea sits at the centre of his TEDxNorthernQuarter talk.In a society where loneliness and disconnection are increasingly familiar experiences, Daniel believes connection often has to begin with us.Reach out.Send the message.Invite somebody over.Cook something.What starts with a message can end with a meal.The conversation also explores why family recipes matter so much.Daniel talks about his mother's cooking and why sharing a treasured family recipe means more than simply passing on instructions. You're preserving a memory, a culture and part of the person who taught it to you.Andy shares the handwritten recipe cards he still has from his grandmother, while Simran talks about recipes passed through generations of his own family.For Daniel, food is a language.Travelling through countries including Syria, Lebanon, Ethiopia and Indonesia has allowed him to experience cultures through what people cook, how they season it and - perhaps most importantly — the extraordinary generosity of strangers prepared to invite somebody into their home and feed them.They also explore the science behind Daniel's cooking.Rather than simply following instructions, Daniel wants to know why a recipe works: what temperature is doing to an ingredient, how gluten behaves, why a technique produces a particular texture and what chemical reactions are happening along the way.Faith is another important part of Daniel's life and creative work.He talks openly about Christianity, why Scripture has become a source of inspiration for his cooking and how food has always played an important role in faith, hospitality and bringing people together.For Daniel, food can represent every love language.Cooking can be an act of service.Giving someone food can be a gift.Eating together creates quality time.And sometimes the meal itself communicates something that words cannot.Daniel also reveals what he would choose for his final meal — although even then, his answer becomes less about what he would eat and more about who would be sitting beside him.Outside the kitchen, Daniel's appetite for challenge continues.A former powerlifter and bodybuilder, he has thrown himself into running, completing seven marathons in a year and setting himself deliberately ambitious goals.Finally, Daniel takes us behind the scenes of preparing to become the opening speaker at TEDxNorthernQuarter 2026 — moving outside his comfort zone, learning a completely new style of public speaking and refining one big idea into 15 minutes on the red dot.Because ultimately, Daniel says, it isn't really about the food.It's about the people you get to have around the table.TEDx and Talks is the official podcast of TEDxNorthernQuarter, taking you beyond the red dot to discover more about the people, stories and ideas behind the talks.This episode is hosted by Andy Coley and Simran Whitham.Recorded by THE CLUB MCR in Manchester.TEDxNorthernQuarter 2026 took place at Stoller Hall, Manchester on 11 September 2026, bringing together 16 speakers to share ideas worth spreading.Watch Daniel's talk: https://youtu.be/NRkHdspgnI8Find out more about TEDxNorthernQuarterWebsite: https://www.tedxnorthernquarter.com/Podcast: https://podcast.tedxnorthernquarter.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tedxnorthernquarter/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tedxnorthernquarter/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tedxnorthernquarterFollow Daniel BuiInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dumpedlingss/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dumpedlingDaniel's writing and recipes: https://dumpedlingss.substack.com/TEDxNorthernQuarter is an independently organised event under license granted by TED.Send us Fan Mail
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    44 min
  • Leave People Better Than You Found Them | Jessica Southworth - Hotel Football

    Leave People Better Than You Found Them | Jessica Southworth - Hotel Football
    13 Oct 2026
    What if one of the best measures of success was simply this:Did you leave people better than you found them?That idea runs through the way Jessica Southworth approaches work, relationships, community and the city she calls home.Jess is a hospitality leader with more than two decades in the industry and is Cluster Sales and Marketing Director across Hotel Football and Stock Exchange Hotel Manchester.In this special episode of TEDx and Talks, Jess joins Simran Whitham for a conversation about Manchester, community, collaboration and why creating a great experience has far more to do with people than products.Hotel Football joined TEDxNorthernQuarter 2026 as an Event Partner, but this isn't really a conversation about a hotel.It's about the person behind the partnership.Jess talks about what happened when Hotel Football stopped trying to make its social media polished and corporate and simply started behaving more like the people who actually worked there.She explains why she believes in collaboration over competition, why the strongest organisations become part of their communities and why some of the most important things a business does may never appear in its sales material.That includes a decision by the Hotel Football team to mark the hotel's tenth birthday not by spending a £10,000 celebration budget on themselves, but by giving it to a local charity.The conversation becomes much more personal when Jess talks about supporting NACOA, the National Association for Children of Alcoholics.After losing their father, who had lived with alcohol dependency, Jess and her sister became ambassadors for the charity and created a fundraising gala with support from Hotel Football.At one of those events, an anonymous guest donated £125,000.Jess reflects on the extraordinary chain reaction behind moments like that: an idea becomes an event, an event gets people into a room, a conversation happens — and something changes that nobody involved could have predicted.It's why she believes so strongly in putting people together and creating opportunities for connection.There is also a lot of Manchester in this episode.Jess and Simran explore what makes the city feel different, from its friendliness and resilience to the willingness of people and businesses to help one another even when they technically compete.Jess shares why she has never wanted to leave, why Manchester's people are its biggest strength and why confidence in the city doesn't have to become arrogance.There are some brilliant hospitality stories too - including the night rapper Dave appeared on Hotel Football's rooftop, casually posted where he was, and within an hour around a thousand people had turned up outside.But underneath the stories is a consistent philosophy.Create experiences people remember.Open doors for other people.Say someone's name in a room when an opportunity might help them.Tell people when you can see something in them that they haven't yet seen in themselves.And whenever you can, leave people a little better than you found them.TEDx and Talks is the official podcast of TEDxNorthernQuarter, taking you beyond the red dot to discover more about the people, stories and ideas behind the talks.This episode is hosted by Simran Whitham.Hotel Football supported TEDxNorthernQuarter 2026 as an Event Partner, helping us create the wider speaker experience around the event. This conversation was recorded as part of that partnership.Recorded by THE CLUB MCR in Manchester.TEDxNorthernQuarter 2026 took place at Stoller Hall, Manchester on 11 September 2026, bringing together 16 speakers to share ideas worth spreading.Find out more about TEDxNorthernQuarter:Website: https://www.tedxnorthernquarter.com/Podcast: https://podcast.tedxnorthernquarter.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tedxnorthernquarter/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tedxnorthernquarter/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tedxnorthernquarterConnect with Jessica Southworth on LinkedIn or @jess_southworth on IG and find Hotel Football at @hotelfootballuk.Content note: This episode includes discussion of bereavement and parental alcohol dependency.TEDxNorthernQuarter is an independently organised event under license granted by TED.Send us Fan Mail
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    39 min
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