Editor’s pick Business & Economics
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…
In this interview, I spoke to Jonathan Caplan KC, one of Britain's most senior barristers, who has spent 50 years applying the evidentiary standards of the criminal Bar to unidentified anomalous phenomena.…
In this interview, I spoke to Michelle Gielan, positive psychology researcher, former CBS Morning News anchor and author of Resilient Optimism, about why optimism is a set of behaviours rather than a…
In this interview, I spoke to Major General Arthur Denaro, who led his regiment through sixteen kilometres of minefield to liberate Kuwait and was Chief of Staff of UN forces in Bosnia.…
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…
Voices in the archive
From the archive
“From cell to civilisation took about 4 billion years, which is a long time—a third of the age of the universe. If it takes billions of years to produce complex living things at our level, maybe there aren't many places that could sustain an unbroken chain of life for that long.”
“We were able to trash the currency, inject hyperinflation and cause interest rates to skyrocket… all at the same time… through the use of a currency weapon. This is a real world, real time example of a currency weapon being used…. Not to gain trade advantage, but to destabilise a regime.”
“Fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.”
Browse the archive
