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
“Emotions are the brain's way of making us pay attention immediately to what is most important so that we can react as quickly as possible. In evolution, that meant 'survival' – the rustle in the bushes may be our next meal or may make us its next meal – something that we have to chase, or run away from – and in either case, we don't want to have to stop and think.”
“In 2013, the International Rescue Committee were looking for a new CEO, and at the interview panel I said that I was applying for the job firstly because I thought some of the questions at the intersection of foreign policy and humanitarian aid were some of the most difficult questions in global public policy. How do you get aid into Syria? How do you educate kids in Afghanistan? How do you tackle sexual violence in the Congo? Those are difficult questions, and I like difficult questions.”
“World poverty has been reduced significantly- and whilst everyone seems to think the world is getting more impoverished, this simply is not the case. Scientific cooperation has improved too, and this has allowed significant advances in global health.”
The Wisdom Series
Insights, themes and patterns from years of long-form interviews — organised around the questions that matter most.
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