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
“So much of silence is about perpetuating the status quo, reinforcing what someone or dominant groups within an entity or organization have deemed appropriate, good, polite. Being different inherently exposes you to vulnerability; you're pushing against everything that the forces of mimicry urge you to do, which is to conform.”
“Until James DeGale won a World Title, no-one who'd won a gold medal for Britain in the Olympic Games had ever won a professional World Title, which is quite amazing. Sometimes the greatest boxers get overlooked.”
“I once got a troll who read something about me and tweeted, 'The only thing I want to read about you is your obituary...' my comeback, 'well, at least I'll get one mate!' – that accepts his position (that he only wants to read my obituary) and turns it back at him without aggression. That's how you have to do it, that's the basic rule.”
The Wisdom Series
Insights, themes and patterns from years of long-form interviews — organised around the questions that matter most.
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