Editor’s pick All Interviews
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 reflects on institutional failure,…
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…
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,…
Voices in the archive
From the archive
“Sometimes it doesn't matter if the other side doesn't care about fairness; provided you do, you explain what's going on. Now it's arbitrary versus arbitrary versus principle versus arbitrary.”
“You should never place your value as a human being on results. You don't control the results of the game – people get lucky or go bankrupt. Also, what happens when you achieve your result? What long-term satisfaction does that bring you?”
“For a civilisation to succeed, it must learn from failures. Dubai is a land of innovation and failure here is perceived as an opportunity to learn and not the end of an endeavour.”
The Wisdom Series
Insights, themes and patterns from years of long-form interviews — organised around the questions that matter most.
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