Editor’s pick All Interviews
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 removed. He examines how…
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…
I speak to Nobel Prize Winner, Professor Alvin Roth on 'Moral Economics', exploring repugnant transactions — exchanges willing parties want but others would ban. Drawing on kidney exchange, vaccine challenge trials, surrogacy,…
In this interview, I speak to Professor Andrés Velasco — Dean of LSE’s School of Public Policy, Chile’s former Finance Minister, and co-editor of The London Consensus. He argues that ideas, not…
Voices in the archive
From the archive
“I was working in Russia from 1998-2002... You also had this extraordinary episode where Putin is on record being asked a question, 'President Putin, do you think Russia could ever join NATO?' to which he replied, 'Why not?!' – what he actually said was 'why not…' provided that Russia could be a fully-fledged partner in NATO.”
“One of the undoubted triumphs of racism is how difficult it is to have an honest conversation about it.”
“If you ask an American where the DJIA or Facebook is trading today, everybody knows. Ask the same person how many kids dropped out of high-school last year and nobody knows. That to me is very short sighted, after all what is the better barometer of the future of America?”
The Wisdom Series
Insights, themes and patterns from years of long-form interviews — organised around the questions that matter most.
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