Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your career to the greatest challenges of our time. To be one of the best, but measured by a new standard of success.’ – Rutger Bregman The brightest minds of our generation may dream of changing the world. But in reality most high achievers will settle for making a lot of money for themselves and their family. World renowned historian and bestselling author Rutger Bregman is on a mission to change that. In April, Breg...
May 08, 2025•40 min•Season 1Ep. 3211
Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your career to the greatest challenges of our time. To be one of the best, but measured by a new standard of success.’ – Rutger Bregman The brightest minds of our generation may dream of changing the world. But in reality most high achievers will settle for making a lot of money for themselves and their family. World renowned historian and bestselling author Rutger Bregman is on a mission to change that. In April, Breg...
May 06, 2025•40 min•Season 1Ep. 3210
Acclaimed author and journalist Oliver Burkeman has captivated readers with his refreshing insights on how to embrace the finiteness of existence and find meaning in the everyday. Author of the bestselling book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and formerly a columnist for the Guardian, Burkeman challenges conventional productivity advice, offering a more realistic perspective on how to live well. In April 2025 Burkeman came to the Intelligence Squared stage, where he was in conve...
May 04, 2025•40 min•Season 1Ep. 3209
Acclaimed author and journalist Oliver Burkeman has captivated readers with his refreshing insights on how to embrace the finiteness of existence and find meaning in the everyday. Author of the bestselling book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and formerly a columnist for the Guardian, Burkeman challenges conventional productivity advice, offering a more realistic perspective on how to live well. In April 2025 Burkeman came to the Intelligence Squared stage, where he was in conve...
May 03, 2025•39 min•Season 1Ep. 3208
“This great rewiring of childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.” — Jonathan Haidt The mental health of young people has become one of the most pressing issues of our time. In recent months, debates have raged about the impact of smartphones on adolescent wellbeing: Should they be banned in schools? Should children under 14 or 16 even have access to them? These questions have fuelled a growing movement to addr...
May 01, 2025•40 min•Season 1Ep. 3207
“This great rewiring of childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.” — Jonathan Haidt The mental health of young people has become one of the most pressing issues of our time. In recent months, debates have raged about the impact of smartphones on adolescent wellbeing: Should they be banned in schools? Should children under 14 or 16 even have access to them? These questions have fuelled a growing movement to addr...
Apr 30, 2025•44 min•Season 1Ep. 3206
What does it mean to have a private life? Our guest today is Tiffany Jenkins, a writer, cultural historian and broadcaster. She is the author of the acclaimed Keeping Their Marbles: How Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums and Why They Should Stay There, and a former honorary fellow in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. She wrote and presented the BBC Radio 4 series ‘A History of Secrecy’ and ‘Contracts of Silence', about the rise of non-disclosure agreements. Today we’ll be...
Apr 28, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 3205
For this week's Sunday Debate, we're dipping back into the archive to 2014, when we gathered a panel of expert historians to debate whether Britain was right to fight in the First World War, a tragedy that laid the foundations for decades of destructive upheaval and violence across Europe. To debate the issue, we invited leading historians Margaret MacMillan, Max Hastings, John Charmley and Dominic Sandbrook to an event hosted by journalist, columnist and national security expert, Edward Lucas. ...
Apr 27, 2025•1 hr 38 min•Season 1Ep. 3204
Understanding how the diversity of life on earth came to be is one of the greatest puzzles in biology. In his new book, The Tree of Life: Solving Science's Greatest Puzzle, Professor Max Telford charts a four-billion-year journey through the evolution of our planet, from humans, fish and butterflies to oak trees, mushrooms and bacteria. On today’s episode, Professor Telford sheds light on an epic history of the family tree that records the relationships between every living thing - from Darwin’s...
Apr 24, 2025•38 min•Season 1Ep. 3203
What do we owe to the dead? What responsibilities do we inherit from the past, and how do they intersect with the crises of the present? In an era of ecological collapse and cultural dislocation, how can we meaningfully honour ancestral memory when the material sites of remembrance - tombs, villages, traditions - are themselves vanishing? In this episode, sociologist and author Alice Mah joins us to discuss her new book, Red Pockets, a deeply personal yet globally resonant exploration of ancestr...
Apr 23, 2025•43 min•Season 1Ep. 3202
What if a single ancient language lay at the root of nearly half of the world’s spoken tongues? In today’s episode, acclaimed science writer and journalist Laura Spinney joins us to discuss her new book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. In Proto, Spinney takes us deep into the mystery of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) - a prehistoric language that no one alive has heard, yet whose echoes can still be found in words spoken from Ireland to India. From the English word star, to Icelandic stja...
Apr 21, 2025•46 min•Season 1Ep. 3201
Jane Austen created the definitive picture of Georgian England. No writer matches Austen’s sensitive ear for the hypocrisy and irony lurking beneath the genteel conversation. That’s the argument of the Janeites, but to the aficionados of Emily Brontë they are the misguided worshippers of a circumscribed mind. In Wuthering Heights, Brontë dispensed with Austen’s niceties and the upper-middle class drawing rooms of Bath and the home counties. Her backdrop is the savage Yorkshire moors, her subject...
Apr 20, 2025•1 hr 39 min•Season 1Ep. 3200
Elif Shafak’s award-winning novels are celebrated globally. Her work has been translated into 58 languages, and her latest, There Are Rivers in the Sky, is a testament to the power of storytelling across borders and cultures. This is an epic story of interconnection. Spanning ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary London, Shafak charts the lifespan of a raindrop, as it is consumed, subsumed and transformed across continents and centuries. This sweeping narrative is anchored by the lives of three ch...
Apr 18, 2025•56 min•Season 1Ep. 3199
What if the biggest threat to liberal democracy isn’t authoritarianism - but our failure to build? On today’s episode we’re joined by journalist Derek Thompson to unpack Abundance, a new vision of progressive politics co-authored by Thompson and Ezra Klein. In it, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, host of the Plain English podcast, and the author ...
Apr 16, 2025•51 min•Season 1Ep. 3198
On today’s episode: the untold history of Russia’s deep cover spy programme. Shaun Walker is an international correspondent for The Guardian. He reported from Moscow for more than a decade, and his coverage of Russia's war in Ukraine was shortlisted for the Foreign Reporter of the Year category at the British 2023 Press Awards. In his new book, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West, Walker explores the untold history of Russia’s deep cover spy programme,...
Apr 13, 2025•53 min•Season 1Ep. 3197
These days, so much of our lives takes place online - but what about our afterlives? A recent study by the Oxford Internet Institute predicts that the number of deceased Facebook users could outnumber the living by 2070. As AI advances, a debate is growing over digital remains and what should be done with the vast amounts of data we leave behind. In this episode, Carl Öhman, author of The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care, explores the ethic...
Apr 12, 2025•50 min•Season 1Ep. 3196
On today’s episode, Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid sheds light on the history of Ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, gave rise to writing, literature, astronomy, and law - shaping human history in ways that still resonate today. Drawing on her new book Between Two Rivers, Al-Rashid brings to life the stories of ordinary people from thousands of years ago: working mothers, enslaved individuals seeking freedom, and even a princess who may have founded the first...
Apr 10, 2025•43 min•Season 1Ep. 3195
We are entering a new era of global instability. The world is facing an era of war, climate change, great power rivalry and unprecedented technological advancement. In April 2025, geopolitical expert and bestselling author Robert Kaplan came to Intelligence Squared to analyse where the world is heading in 2025 and beyond. Drawing from the themes of his new book Waste Land, he argued that history can help guide us through a world that is changing at an unprecedented pace. Kaplan drew comparisons ...
Apr 08, 2025•40 min•Season 1Ep. 3194
We are entering a new era of global instability. The world is facing an era of war, climate change, great power rivalry and unprecedented technological advancement. In April 2025, geopolitical expert and bestselling author Robert Kaplan came to Intelligence Squared to analyse where the world is heading in 2025 and beyond. Drawing from the themes of his new book Waste Land, he argued that history can help guide us through a world that is changing at an unprecedented pace. Kaplan drew comparisons ...
Apr 06, 2025•39 min•Season 1Ep. 3193
They are the titans of the spy novel, who have elevated thrillers to the level of literary fiction. Much imitated, much adapted by the big and small screens, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré have painted our picture of post-war espionage: Fleming through the dashing figure of James Bond, with his lush locations and Martinis as icy as his heart; Le Carré through his damning portrait of the British secret service drawn from his own time in MI5 and MI6. But which of the two novelists is the greater? I...
Apr 05, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 3192
In 1957 John Lennon and Paul McCartney were two ordinary teenagers who met in suburban Liverpool and decided to play rock and roll together. Twenty-three years later that friendship came to a tragic end when Lennon was murdered. But those 23 years changed the world. Lennon and McCartney became global stars, created a body of work that has never been matched in popular music, and arguably had more influence on our culture than any other figures in the past century. InMarch 2025 writer Ian Leslie ...
Apr 03, 2025•39 min•Season 1Ep. 3191
In 1957 John Lennon and Paul McCartney were two ordinary teenagers who met in suburban Liverpool and decided to play rock and roll together. Twenty-three years later that friendship came to a tragic end when Lennon was murdered. But those 23 years changed the world. Lennon and McCartney became global stars, created a body of work that has never been matched in popular music, and arguably had more influence on our culture than any other figures in the past century. InMarch 2025 writer Ian Leslie ...
Apr 01, 2025•38 min•Season 1Ep. 3190
Unpaid domestic labor has long been the invisible backbone of economies worldwide - but what if it were compensated? In this episode, historian Emily Callaci takes us inside the Wages for Housework movement, a bold and controversial campaign that emerged in the 1970s. Drawing on her new book, Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise, Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators, tracing their wildly creative political visio...
Mar 30, 2025•43 min•Season 1Ep. 3189
Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political blood-letting - including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords - as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in English history. In today’s episode, historians Caroline Burt and Richard Partington discuss the six Plantagenet kings who ruled during these two centuries, and th...
Mar 30, 2025•55 min•Season 1Ep. 3188
Reid Hoffman is one of the world’s most influential and successful entrepreneurs. The co-founder of LinkedIn, Manas AI, Inflection AI and part of the original team at PayPal, he has built companies that have shaped the internet and AI revolutions of the twenty-first century. As part of Reid’s staunch commitment to Democracy, he was a supporter of Kamala Harris in the 2024 US election. In March 2025, Hoffman returned to the Intelligence Squared stage to discuss how AI is rapidly changing our worl...
Mar 28, 2025•39 min•Season 1Ep. 3187
Reid Hoffman is one of the world’s most influential and successful entrepreneurs. The co-founder of LinkedIn, Manas AI, Inflection AI and part of the original team at PayPal, he has built companies that have shaped the internet and AI revolutions of the twenty-first century. As part of Reid’s staunch commitment to Democracy, he was a supporter of Kamala Harris in the 2024 US election. In March 2025, Hoffman returned to the Intelligence Squared stage to discuss how AI is rapidly changing our worl...
Mar 26, 2025•38 min•Season 1Ep. 3186
Music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed. But how did we get here, and what does it mean for artists, listeners, and the music industry as a whole? In today’s episode, journalist Liz Pelly unpacks the origins of Spotify, its meteoric rise, and its transformative impact on the way we create and experience music. Whilst researching for her new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Pelly conducted over one hundred interviews wit...
Mar 24, 2025•46 min•Season 1Ep. 3185
The Bengal Famine is the forgotten story of the Second World War. Between 1943 and 1944, at least three million Indians, all of whom were British subjects, died from starvation or diseases linked to malnutrition. It is one of the darkest chapters in colonial history, yet the memory of those millions who perished is not broadly nurtured in Britain, India or Bangladesh. There is no memorial, museum, or archive dedicated to them anywhere in the world – not even a plaque. Who better to shed light on...
Mar 23, 2025•45 min•Season 1Ep. 3184
The Bengal Famine is the forgotten story of the Second World War. Between 1943 and 1944, at least three million Indians, all of whom were British subjects, died from starvation or diseases linked to malnutrition. It is one of the darkest chapters in colonial history, yet the memory of those millions who perished is not broadly nurtured in Britain, India or Bangladesh. There is no memorial, museum, or archive dedicated to them anywhere in the world – not even a plaque. Who better to shed light on...
Mar 21, 2025•41 min•Season 1Ep. 3183
Ed Winters, known to his millions of online followers as Earthling Ed, has perfected the art of persuasion. During his extensive career as an activist and educator, he has made the case for veganism everywhere from university campuses to live on GB News. His compelling and informative content has garnered millions of views, and earned him a dedicated following across online platforms. Earthling Ed joined us live at the Kiln Theatre to share his insights on how we can all become better conversati...
Mar 19, 2025•34 min•Season 1Ep. 3182
