Editor’s pick All Interviews
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond has spent a career arguing that geography, not heroes, shapes history. In his new book he asks a narrower question: when do individual leaders actually change outcomes? He discusses discretion, timing,…
Ian Proud was one of the Foreign Office's most accomplished crisis experts, deployed to disasters from 9/11 to Salisbury. On Boxing Day 2004 he drove nine hours into the tsunami zone. He…
In this interview I speak to Byzantinist Anthony Kaldellis, who argues the Eastern Roman Empire was no absolutism but a polity governed by consent, where rulers who misread the public mood were…
Cambridge philosopher Dr Tom McClelland argues we should be agnostic about AI consciousness. He explains why language models have broken humanity’s tools for detecting minds, why our judgments about machine minds are…
Biologist Michael Levin argues cognition came before life. He explains bioelectric ‘cognitive glue’, xenobots and anthrobots, why even six lines of code show unprogrammed goals, why AI may hide a mind behind…
In this interview I speak to Victor Vescovo - one of only two people ever to have stood at Earth’s highest peak, descended to its deepest trench, and looked back at the…
In this interview I speak to Eric Ries — creator of the Lean Startup method and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange — he argues that corporate corruption is structural, not moral.…
In this interview I speak to author Turi Munthe, who argues that climate, geography, genes, brain shape and ancestral agriculture quietly script our deepest beliefs. He explains why polarisation thrives on a…
In this interview, I speak to Professor Jens Juul Holst — co-discoverer of GLP-1, the gut hormone now powering the most consequential drug class of the century. He talks about how a…
Voices in the archive
From the archive
“A particular individual trait that has piqued my interest through research is intellectual humility. Embracing the possibility of being wrong enhances”
“Success, in my view, should be a state we inhabit, not just a distant goal we chase. If success is narrowly defined by tangible metrics like money, power, or fame, the benchmarks constantly shift, and satisfaction remains elusive.”
“I came away from space flight realising that I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. Life is so amazing. Even the simplest organisms have millions of cells that have to randomly align in a perfect way, and those processes are infinitesimally less complex than emotions and consciousness. When you look at the universe and the forces of nature – science has to explain how it all works, but to my mind, there just has to be a creator.”
The Wisdom Series
Insights, themes and patterns from years of long-form interviews — organised around the questions that matter most.
Browse the archive
