Amol Rajan
speaker
3,997 appearances
23 recordings
6 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Amol Rajan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.
Appearances
I think they've all been brilliant.
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And you can go back and listen to all of them, and please do, because there is an entire catalogue on BBC Sounds.
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But I wanted to end with an extract from my conversation with James Marriott.
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He is the Times columnist, creator of a newsletter called Cultural Capital, author of a new book called The New Dark Ages.
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And he came in...
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with an unsettling argument.
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He argued that there is a kind of supreme irony about this age in which we live, which is that on the one hand, we have loosed upon the world the most astonishing powers of cognitive brilliance, of intelligence, and it's called artificial intelligence, which by the way, is roughly doubling in speed every six or seven months as I sit behind this microphone right now.
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But at the same time, as this incredible intelligence is loosed upon the world,
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We humans are getting stupider and the facts bear it out.
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For most of the 20th century, global IQ levels were rising.
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For most of this century, they have been falling.
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And technology may well be the reason smartphones in particular.
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Now, you can argue a lot about whether this is causation or correlation, but there is in this country today a crisis of reading.
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We actually had the remarkable Catherine Rundle, brilliant scientist,
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author including of children's books in an early episode talking about why we should champion reading and James Marriott came in and he made it really really clear that a century ago in this country mass literacy was a kind of revolutionary technology which has been replaced these days by short form video but whereas literacy and mass literacy encouraged cogitation short form video encourages agitation and he thinks
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that that has profound implications for democracy.
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He thinks that reading is not just a sort of quaint hobby or a nice way to pass an afternoon.
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It's a foundation of a literate and therefore democratic culture.
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I really want you to hear this episode from James Marriott again, because the argument is incredibly timely and it goes to the absolute heart of what we tried to do
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on this podcast, which is identify the deep forces and trends changing our world and offer some radical ideas like this from James Marriott for the future.
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Showing 261–280 of 3,997 · page 14 of 200
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