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When Do Leaders Actually Matter? A Conversation with Jared Diamond on Discretion, Timing and the Hamlet Test

In this interview, I spoke to Professor Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, about when individual leaders genuinely change outcomes. We discussed discretion, timing, his Hamlet Test for irreplaceability, assassination as a…

Vikas Shah 24 min read

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Three thousand moments. Three picked at random.

“We all bear wounds and traumas that convince us we're undeserving or incapable of achieving our dreams. Confronting these is essential. We can't outrun our past; we need to heal, be it through therapy, counselling, or other methods that help process past traumas.”
— Roxie Nafousi
“Our story, our fight, the story of President Zelenskyy… these all come together in the story of how everyone is capable of more than the world expects of them, and what we expected of ourselves. It's only when we were asked what price we were prepared to pay that we found the truth; we were prepared to pay with our lives.”
— Kira Rudik Ukrainian politician and head of Servant of the People party faction
“I realised that what people do is, instead of figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it whether they want to or not, doing the ethical thing, what they do is they figure out what they want to do and then come up with the rationalisation for doing it, whether it's right or wrong. And we fool ourselves.”
— Martin E. Hellman Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

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  1. 01 Business & Economics A Conversation with Jesper Kouthoofd, Founder of Teenage Engineering, on Design, Play and Why Every Product Is an Illusion 363 interviews
  2. 02 Culture, Society, Sports & Arts A Conversation with Jesper Kouthoofd, Founder of Teenage Engineering, on Design, Play and Why Every Product Is an Illusion 237 interviews
  3. 03 Politics & Policy From the Minefields of Kuwait to Sandhurst: A Conversation with Major General Arthur Denaro on War, Leadership and Peace 170 interviews
  4. 04 Science & Technology We Are Not Alone: A Conversation with Jonathan Caplan KC on the Evidence for UAPs, Non-Human Intelligence and Why It Was Never Disclosed 136 interviews
  5. 05 Health & Medicine The Continuum of Mind: A Conversation with Professor Michael Levin on Cognition, Bioelectricity and the Future of Being 74 interviews
  6. 06 Nobel Laureates Markets, Morals and the Road Ahead: A Conversation with Nobel Laureate Professor Alvin Roth 21 interviews

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