Intelligence Squared

By Intelligence SquaredSociety & Culture News Arts News Commentary

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Intelligence Squared episodes

October 04, 2021 Business Weekly: Dame Vivian Hunt on Stakeholder Capitalism and the Value of a Diverse Workforce
Today's episode comes from the How To Lead a Sustainable Business podcast, brought to you by Selfridges Group and Intelligence Squared. In the podcast, Alannah Weston, Chairman of Selfridges Group, speaks to inspiring leaders at the forefront of sustainability and business to find out what it takes to lead change and how businesses can put sustainability at their core.
In this episode Alannah is joined by Dame Vivian Hunt, a senior partner at the global management consultancy firm McKinsey & Company. She served as managing partner of McKinsey’s UK and Ireland offices from 2013-2020 and is a thought leader on productivity, leadership and diversity. She was previously named as one of the top ten “most influential black people in Britain” by the Powerlist Foundation, and The Financial Times identified her “one of the 30 most influential people in the City of London”. She speaks to Alannah about the importance of businesses being open to innovation, stakeholder capitalism and the value of a diverse workforce.
How To Lead a Sustainable Business is brought to you by Selfridges Group and Intelligence Squared. If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever your podcasts: https://bit.ly/howtoleadpod

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33 min
October 03, 2021 The Sunday Debate: Let Them Eat Meat
This event took place on the 31st of October at the Royal Institution in London.
CHAIR: Afua Hirsch - Writer and broadcaster
SPEAKERS FOR THE MOTION: AA Gill - The Sunday Times’s star restaurant and TV critic
AGAINST THE MOTION: George Monbiot - Guardian columnist, environmental campaigner and author of Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet

Fancy a nice juicy steak? Most of us do from time to time, and we don’t trouble our consciences too much with the rights and wrongs of eating meat. Others, while vaguely aware that we ought to go vegan, just can’t face the rest of our lives denying ourselves bacon, beef, butter etc. But once we start looking into the arguments for veganism, it becomes difficult to justify the omnivore diet.
Take the environment for starters. Livestock farming has a massive impact on the planet, producing around 14% of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions according to the UN. That’s roughly the same as the total amount of global transport emissions. Animals are extremely inefficient processors of the maize and soya that farmers grow to feed them. If we ate those crops ourselves instead of feeding them to livestock, we could free up hundreds of millions of hectares of rainforests, savannahs and wetlands where wild animals could flourish instead.
And then there are the arguments about animal welfare. Recent scientific research indicates what many of us feel we already know – that animals have complex emotional lives not dissimilar to our own. Intensive farming – the kind that confines hens, pigs and cattle to squalid indoor pens – thwarts their instincts to move around freely and build social bonds with their group. Tens of billions of animals exist in this way, and that’s before their short lives are ended in the horror house of the abattoir. As for those who say a vegan diet isn’t healthy, elite athletes who have made the switch, including world tennis No 1 Novak Djokovic, prove you don’t need animal protein to excel at the highest levels in sport.
On the other side of the argument we developed as omnivores and every human culture has its culinary traditions, based on the taste and aesthetics of meat and dairy. Do we really want to live in a world where there is no beef Wellington or cheese soufflé? As for the environmentalist arguments, omnivores now have some serious eco-credentials behind them. A study at Cornell University shows that a diet that includes a few small portions of grass-fed meat a week may actually be greener than eating no animal products at all.
And when it comes to animal welfare, rather than abandoning animal products altogether, couldn’t we do more good by pressing for genuinely transparent labelling of our meat and dairy? If consumers really know what they are getting, fewer people might be willing to buy the £3 chicken produced in the barbaric conditions of the agricultural industry. As for a vegan diet being healthier, we should stop giving airtime to self-appointed health experts and lifestyle bloggers. Some dieticians argue that there are nutrients we need that we just can’t get from plants alone. Yes, we can get calcium from kale and iron from beans, but the quantity, quality and bio-availability of such elements are far better when we get them from animal rather than plant sources.
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1 hr 4 min
October 01, 2021 How I Built This, with Guy Raz
Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy's Pita Chips).
In this week's episode award-winning journalist and NPR host Guy Raz speaks to Carl Miller about uncovering the stories of highly successful entrepreneurs.
To find out more about Guy's book click here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Built-This-Unexpected-Entrepreneurs/dp/0358216761

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45 min
September 28, 2021 How I Disrupted an Industry, with CEO of Starling Bank Anne Boden
In this week's episode Anne Boden CEO of Starling Bank speaks to Linda Yueh about setting up her own bank.
In her remarkable story Boden reveals how she broke through bureaucracy and successfully countered widespread suspicion to realise her vision for the future of consumer banking. She fulfilled that dream by founding Starling, the winner of Best British Bank at the British Bank Awards in 2018, 2019 and 2020, and in doing so has triggered a new movement that is revolutionising the entire banking industry.
To find out more about the book click here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/BANKING-How-I-Disrupted-Industry/dp/0241453585

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42 min
September 27, 2021 Business Weekly: Exponential, with Azeem Azhar
We are entering the Exponential Age. Between faster computers, better software and bigger data, ours is the first era in human history in which technology is constantly accelerating.
Azeem Azhar - writer, technologist, and creator of the acclaimed Exponential View newsletter - understands this shift better than anyone. Technology, he argues, is developing at an increasing, exponential rate. But human society - from our businesses to our political institutions - can only ever adapt at a slower, incremental pace. The result is an 'exponential gap', between the power of new technology and our ability to keep up. In this week's episode he speaks to Ros Urwin about this new era and what we we should do about it.
To buy the book click here: https://amzn.to/3i8YieM

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43 min
September 25, 2021 The Sunday Debate: Identity Politics is Tearing Society Apart
Is identity politics tearing society apart or is it a call for social justice for everyone? That's the theme of this week's Sunday Debate.
For the motion were journalist and author of 'We Need To Talk About Kevin', Lionel Shriver and Founding chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor Phillips.
Against the motion were Labour politician David Lammy and Guardian journalist, the late Dawn Foster.
The chair was Kamal Ahmed former editorial director of the BBC.

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1 hr
September 24, 2021 AI 2041: Why the Future is Already Here, with Kai-Fu Lee
Kai-Fu Lee is one of the world’s leading AI experts and a bestselling author. He founded Microsoft Asia’s research lab that has trained CTOs and AI heads at Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei. As President of Google China he helped establish the company in the Chinese market. And now, as CEO of Sinovation Ventures, he is investing in China’s high-tech sector, giving him a unique perspective on how AI is set to change our world over the next 20 years. On September 22 Lee came to Intelligence Squared to explain how AI is at an inflection point and urged us to wake up to its radiant possibilities as well as to the existential threats it poses to life as we know it. In conversation with Kamal Ahmed, former Editorial Director of the BBC, he discussed his new work of ‘scientific fiction’, AI 2041, co-authored with the celebrated novelist Chen Qiufan. The book offers up eye-opening scenarios of our techno-future – from a teenage girl’s rebellion when AI gets in the way of romance to a rogue quantum computer scientist’s revenge plot that imperils the world. To buy his new book AI 2041 with the Intelligence Squared discount click here: https://www.primrosehillbooks.com/product/ai-2041-ten-visions-for-our-future-kai-fu-lee-chen-qiufan/

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1 hr 2 min
September 21, 2021 Should Black Americans Move to the South?
In this week's episode Charles Blow speaks to journalist Dele Olojede about the arguments in his new book The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto. He argued that if enough African-Americans move south, the demographic balance in the Southern States will be tipped in favour of Black voters and politicians. His new home state of Georgia – he practises what he preaches and left Brooklyn for Atlanta – recently voted for a Democrat presidential candidate and two Democratic Senate candidates, one of whom became the first Black senator in the state’s history. The growing African-American population in Georgia was pivotal in these votes, Blow believes.
To find out more and buy the book click here: https://www.primrosehillbooks.com/product/the-devil-you-know-a-black-power-manifesto-charles-m-blow-subscribers/

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57 min
September 20, 2021 Business Weekly: What is Economic Growth?
In this week's episode we're featuring a podcast produced by Intelligence Squared called 'It’s The Economy' in which host Nicola Walton breaks down the complex economic ideas we have all heard of but may not fully understand in under 15 minutes. In this episode Lord O’Donnell, a former Cabinet Secretary who headed the British Civil Service between 2005-2011 under Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron looks at economic growth, what counts as GDP and productivity, and whether national happiness and wellbeing are taken into account. Subscribe to It's The Economy at: https://pod.link/1577180549

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20 min
September 19, 2021 The Sunday Debate: Break Up The Tech Giants
With so much data and power centralised in the hands of a few West Coast companies, the tech giants have become a serious threat to our basic freedoms and must be broken up. That’s the argument that was made at this major Intelligence Squared debate by the FT’s global business columnist Rana Foroohar and by businessman and former chairman of Channel 4 Luke Johnson.
But others would argue that it’s all too easy to make the tech giants a scapegoat for the inevitable upheavals caused by the digital revolution. The real winners of this revolution are not the tech companies but us, the users. Who could now imagine living without the services of Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft? That’s the case that was made in our debate by former head of Facebook’s European politics and government division Elizabeth Linder and competition law expert Pinar Akman. Who's right and who's wrong?

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1 hr 4 min