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
“Research shows that empowering women to gain financial independence generates lasting impact, with women typically investing 90% of their income back into their families. In addition to this, McKinsey estimates that if women and men were to play an identical role in labour markets across the world, an extra $28 trillion would be added to the global economy by 2025.”
“It's absolutely true that a lot of the time the market is indistinguishable from a coin toss. However, when the system is under some stress, when the market is undergoing changes, the coin toss model just doesn't work. The 'black swan' doesn't appear very often in coin-toss land but in agent based complex systems land, it appears quite a lot.”
“This is a race to the future, a future powered by renewable energy sources and underpinned by efficient energy use. The winning nations, corporation and citizens will reap enormous benefits in terms of jobs, sustainable economic development, energy security and vastly improved local environments.”
The Wisdom Series
Insights, themes and patterns from years of long-form interviews — organised around the questions that matter most.
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