The Ruffian

For this episode I’m delighted to welcome Benedict Evans to discuss AI and jobs and much else besides. Benedict is an independent technology analyst who has spent 25 years thinking about tech-based industries. He’s worked in Britain, Silicon Valley, and New York, where he’s now based. He’s is one of the most respected voices in tech, which is why his newsletter has nearly 200,000 subscribers. In a...

I'm delighted to say that my guest for this episode is Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of America's pre-eminent legal scholars. Cass has been an adviser to President Obama and President Biden. He's also the author or co-author of numerous excellent books on a staggering variety of topics, from behavioural economics to conspiracy theories to fame to climate justice and more...

Ever since I wrote a book about the trait of curiosity I’ve taken an interest in the science of learning and education. In the book, I criticised the popular idea that teaching children facts and knowledge somehow gets in the way of their curiosity and creativity. All evidence points in the opposite direction. And yet a thousand Ted Talks have been launched on the idea that we should dispense with...

I know what you’ve been thinking: it’s been too long since the last Ruffian pod! Well, it’s back. Earlier this week I sat down with returning guest James Marriott, of The Times, to talk about our year in reading. I published my Top Ten reads of 2025 a few weeks back. You can read James’s list on his excellent Substack, Cultural Capital .James is currently hard at work on a book about the decline o...

“It is a sunny Sunday in June and I am sitting in a Porsche with a man I recently matched with on Bumble, two Spanish sighthounds, an intersex DJ and Curtis Yarvin. “Let’s go Team Fascist!” shouts my match as he pulls away from the grand Georgian terrace in Pimlico where Yarvin has spent the morning chatting about Austrian economics with 86-year-old crossbench peer and Keynes biographer Lord Skide...

In this episode of The Ruffian’s podcast we ask whether the price of using increasingly smart machines is increasingly stupid humans. My guest is Daisy Christodoulou , director of education at No More Marking, and my favourite thinker on learning and education. Daisy recently wrote a Substack post asking whether we live in a ‘stupidogenic society’ - just as it’s said that we live in an ‘obesogenic...

Britain is in a depression. Not an economic one - we're still growing, albeit slowly - but a cultural and political one. We are running low on optimism, self-esteem and, most dangerously, on hope - on the sense that we can fix things. Voters have become deeply cynical about the political class; support for both main parties has collapsed. They’re turning to Reform, not necessarily because they bel...

A few weeks ago I posted an extract from a brilliant book called A Brief History Of Intelligence , by Max Bennett. It proved really popular with Ruffian readers, so I’m delighted to have Max on the podcast to discuss some of the questions his book raises. In Part One, which is free for everyone, and on all the usual podcast platforms, I ask Max about the concept of 'reinforcement learning' and wha...

There is a growing sense that Britain's fiscal position is unsustainable. We’re spending more than we’re raising in tax, our debt is growing faster than the economy, and bond market scepticism about the government’s ability to fix any of this is driving up our interest payments. We may be heading for a crisis that will make Liz Truss’s mini-budget debacle look like a minor wobble. It would cause a...

Are our new AI overlords tools intelligent in the same way humans are? Is an AI agent truly, well agentic? Does it have a mind of its own, so to speak? Might it just decide to destroy us? Or is this completely the wrong way to think about it? In this episode I get into these questions with Professor Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, where...

I recently talked to James Marriott about the future of writing and journalism in the age of AI. James was quite worried about how good the chatbots have got at writing and wondered if it spells doom for human writers, especially journalists. So I thought it would be good to follow up with a conversation with Jasmine Sun, a very talented young tech journalist and thinker from San Francisco. Jasmin...

ChatGPT and Claude have got really quite good at writing. As they improve, will they make human writers, even highly skilled ones, as obsolete as typists? In the first part of this two-part episode, I discuss that question with returning guest James Marriott. James has been posting some of his experiments with ChatGPT his Substack and on Twitter - like this one: This stirred up quite a storm. It’s...

In this episode of The Ruffian’s podcast we discuss what is possibly the single most important event in human history: the Industrial Revolution. If you look at all the economic data before (very roughly) 1780-1840, you see flat lines. Afterwards, everything starts going up, and continually. It's not just GDP - human welfare is transformed. Human became much more numerous and at the same time much...

I’m delighted to share with you a new conversation with returning guest, The Times columnist James Marriott. Those of you read James’ recent column about the mediocrities who rise to the top of our institutions will know that he has strong views on our elites. This conversation was recorded a while back, so we don’t discuss that column, but we do talk about a new book called Born To Rule: The Maki...

Note: if you’re in the UK, pick up a copy of today’s Sunday Times. The magazine is running an extract from the first chapter of John & Paul. You can also read it online FOR FREE if you click today (Sunday) . (The Times website has taken its entire paywall down for the weekend, not just in my honour I hasten to add.) And don’t forget to pre-order! I’m delighted to share with you this conversation w...

Jemima Kelly is a columnist and reporter for the Financial Times and one of the most original and interesting voices in the British press. She writes about culture and economics and politics and always comes at them from unexpected angles, usually with a dose of humour. As a reporter she likes to dive into worlds very different from her own, and in late 2022 she took a trip to a very strange world...

James Kanagasooriam on 'culturenomics' https://www.thetimes.com/article/culturenomics-will-define-new-political-era-fqvx0nvb3 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ian-leslie.com/subscribe

The Ruffian newsletter now has a podcast! In this inaugural episode, Ian Leslie and James Marriott discuss the phenomenon of Jordan Peterson, the most influential thinker of the last ten years. This episode was produced by Jack Aldane. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ian-leslie.com/subscribe