Editor’s pick All Interviews
Major General Arthur Denaro led his regiment through the minefields to liberate Kuwait and was Chief of Staff of UN forces in Bosnia. He reflects on the night before battle, what politicians misunderstand about war, why…
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…
In this interview, I spoke to Ian Proud, a former British diplomat and Foreign Office crisis expert, who drove nine hours into the 2004 tsunami zone on Boxing Day. We discussed what…
In this interview, I spoke to Professor 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…
In this interview, I spoke to Dr Tom McClelland, the Cambridge philosopher who argues we should be agnostic about AI consciousness. We discussed why language models have broken humanity's tools for detecting…
In this interview, I spoke to Professor Michael Levin, who argues that cognition came before life rather than after it. We discussed bioelectric "cognitive glue", xenobots and anthrobots, why six lines of…
In this interview, I spoke to Victor Vescovo, one of only two people to have stood at Earth's highest peak, descended to its deepest trench and looked back at the planet from…
In this interview, I spoke to Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup method and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who argues that corporate corruption is structural rather than moral. We…
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…
Voices in the archive
From the archive
“We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.”
“Applying classic negative Jewish stereotypes to Israel is antisemitic. For instance, portraying Israel as orchestrating global conspiracies is essentially repurposing an antisemitic trope. Another broadly agreed point is that holding Jews outside of Israel accountable for the actions of the Israeli state is also antisemitic.”
“It's difficult to describe to people who aren't curious, just what curiosity is. Imagine explaining to a robot or a computer what curiosity is! For those of us who experience it however, it's almost a primal-pull.”
The Wisdom Series
Insights, themes and patterns from years of long-form interviews — organised around the questions that matter most.
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