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In this interview, I spoke to Michael and Liam Bates of the Principality of Sealand, a wartime fort in the North Sea that Britain tried to cut off, mercenaries seized and a…
In this interview, I spoke to Sherry Turkle, the MIT psychologist who has spent forty years studying our relationships with machines, about her new book Artificial Intimacy: why a chatbot cannot be…
In this interview, I spoke to David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37signals, about why he stopped writing code by hand, why AI is ending programmers' monopoly…
In this interview, I spoke to Carlos Gutierrez, former US Secretary of Commerce and the youngest chief executive in Kellogg's history, about fleeing Cuba as a child, selling cereal from a van…
In this interview, I spoke to Jesper Kouthoofd, founder of Teenage Engineering, about why he still refuses the title of designer, why he thinks every product is an illusion and the honest…
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 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…
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…
In this interview, I spoke to Nobel laureate Alvin Roth about his book Moral Economics and the repugnant transactions at its centre: exchanges willing parties want but others would ban. We discussed…
In this interview, I speak to Professor Andrés Velasco — Dean of LSE’s School of Public Policy, Chile’s former Finance Minister, and co-editor of The London Consensus. He argues that ideas, not…
In this interview I speak to Dr Leanne ten Brinke - an award-winning psychologist and associate professor at the University of British Columbia, where she directs the Truth and Trust Lab. Drawing…
In this interview I speak to Dr. Richard Socher — pioneer of neural NLP, inventor of widely used word vectors, and founder of You.com. He discusses his journey from contrarian Stanford researcher…
You know what to do. So why aren’t you doing it? In this interview, I speak to NYT bestselling author Nir Eyal — the man who wrote the book on habits, then…
What 89 conversations with the world's leading thinkers reveal about health and human longevity
What 160 conversations with the world's leading thinkers reveal about war, peace, and geopolitics
From the archive
I think it is outgrowing our family as we speak.
— Liam BatesPlaces like the US and the UK seem to be getting pulled in so many directions by so many different factions within the country that there's no cohesive view of where we want to go, what we stand for and who we want to be.
— Liam BatesI think a lot of people love the idea, and it's romantic, but after a year they've gone, oof, that was a lot of trouble and some real hard work.
— Liam BatesThey tried every nasty trick to stop us. And it was only the power of the press that rescued us.
— Michael BatesBut you don't have a lot of choice about it. With Sealand, you can choose.
— Liam BatesThey would open every tin of beans or whatever was going out there, just in case there was something inside that shouldn't be.
— Michael BatesEven the whole recognition thing is just the old boys looking after the old boys' club.
— Michael BatesYou can form an online community, you can be a Discord server, but unless you actually have some sovereign territory, it remains an idea in people's minds.
— Liam BatesIt only survives if people believe it should be there.
— Liam BatesNormally what countries like the UK do is try and ignore things and hope they go away. Well, we've been there for 60 years, and we want to go further with it.
— Michael BatesIf I could capture in my work the difference between talking to a chatbot and what it felt like to open the door and have this woman come in with Mexican food, I would have won my argument.
— Sherry TurkleThis is a product. It's being made by companies. It's being sold to me. And it's trying to get me to do certain things, most of all to sit with it and talk to it so they can make more money.
— Sherry TurkleWe are so seduced by that pretend empathy that sometimes we start to think that it's empathy enough.
— Sherry TurkleThe first rule of social media was: make people angry and silo them with their own kind. There couldn't be a worse training for relationships, or for citizenship, or for democracy.
— Sherry TurkleLearning to deal with friction is a requirement for being a citizen.
— Sherry TurkleThere's no intimacy without vulnerability, and there's no relationship without friction, because the whole point of a relationship is that you're not the same as the other person, and you don't have to be.
— Sherry TurkleTherapy is not words being told, people saying words at you that sound like the right words. Therapy is a relationship with someone who cares about you.
— Sherry TurkleSocial media came after their attention. This is coming after their attachment.
— Sherry TurkleWe are in this spot not just because the chatbots are so attractive, but because we have abandoned each other.
— Sherry TurkleThe original sin of artificial intimacy is the use of the first person, because that's the hook. It makes you feel that there's a there there when there's no there there, and there's no one who cares about you.
— Sherry TurkleWe're going to have to tackle the problem of existence. That's going to be the main challenge. What do you do when you don't have to do anything?
— David Heinemeier HanssonThe more we come to rely on this intelligence, the more important it is that there's a tiny class of people who really understand what the hell is going on.
— David Heinemeier HanssonI always was a software maker before I was a software writer. I love the writing part, but I like the making part more.
— David Heinemeier HanssonWe've never had end users able to create or rewrite their operating system at this level, and be at the same level as the operating system designer.
— David Heinemeier Hansson
