What Would They Think?

About What Would They Think?

What Would They Think explores the gap between the world that was imagined and the one we’re actually living in. Through ironic, often uncomfortable comparisons, it brings the voices of the past into today’s headlines—technology, culture, power, and belief—and asks how they would interpret the systems, behaviors, and contradictions that define modern life. The result is less explanation, more confrontation.

Publisher

Jonathan Millard

Category

history

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

25 Mar 2026

Latest episode

29 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

30 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   29 Sept 2026

   What Would This Season's Guests Think About the UNGA?

   What would twenty-nine of history's greatest minds think of the one week a year the whole world sits in the same room and pretends to get along? One of them whipped the sea. One carved the law into stone so no one could claim they hadn't been told. One painted the map red. One ran a queen's court through the door she controlled, then lost the door. Across a season they met memes, Ozempic, Bitcoin, dating apps, a Cybertruck and a war in a strait. Each got one modern thing. So for the finale, we handed them the world. This season finale seats all twenty-nine guests in the United Nations General Assembly Hall for the 2026 session. There's a farewell from a departing Secretary-General, a president deciding at the podium between a deal and annihilation, AI executives asking the Security Council to protect humanity from their own product, a corrected map of Africa, and a red carpet for the one leader who didn't show up. They have opinions. On who got the meeting and who got the deputy. On who pays the bill and who holds the veto. On whether the rules still bind anyone who can afford to ignore them. On the fifteen-minute speaking limit, which Warhol would like you to know nobody observed. Twenty-nine dead guests meet 193 living governments. Turns out, the dead are better at listening. That's Season One. Thank you for being in the room. Join us again next year. Dead pioneers. Modern platforms. Fully AI. What Would They Think?

2. 

   22 Sept 2026

   What Would Sarah Churchill Think About Earl Spencer?

   What would Sarah Churchill think of a Palace that cannot deny a phone call from 1997, only suggest that thirty years of grief has clouded the memory of the one man who was on it? She answered this in 1742. She threatened a reigning Queen with the letters from their closest years, and when the threat failed, waited twenty-eight years for Anne to die before publishing them anyway, dressed as a memoir defending her own name. She got nothing from Anne while Anne could still refuse her. The wait was the whole strategy. She'd know the mechanism cold. She and Anne signed their letters "Mrs Freeman" and "Mrs Morley" — invented names, so a Queen would never have to write to a subject as an inferior, and a subject would never have to sound like one either. That fiction was the office: no salary, no seat, no resignation clause, just proximity with the serial numbers filed off. Earl Spencer holds no office in this at all — only the same fiction, one generation removed, that a brother's love for a dead sister licenses whatever he prints about the brother-in-law still alive to read it. But she is not the heroine this wants her to be. She handed the Queen her own gloves back and turned her head as if royalty smelled; she disinherited grandchildren and rewrote her will twenty-six times chasing people who'd stopped listening. And her best asset — a friendship nobody could regulate — is the same asset her family has been trading on for three centuries, down to the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson currently on every front page. She made intimacy into currency for people who'd keep spending it long after she was gone. This episode puts the duchess who blackmailed a Queen in front of the descendant who skipped the blackmail and went straight to print. She has opinions. On a threat that failed in her own lifetime, versus a disclosure that cannot, because the one person it could hurt most can't answer back the way she couldn't. On a Palace statement about grief and memory that is nearly word for word the defense mounted against her own book in 1742. On family pride, and whether doing the family's oldest trick worse still counts as tradition. And on the only question she'd think worth asking: not whether the story is true, but who was left alive to argue with it. The letters were never the weapon. The timing was. She said that first, from disgrace, and she'd want to know — who's paying for the delay this time? Episode 29. What Would They Think?

3. 

   15 Sept 2026

   What Would Ada Lovelace Think About The AI Consciousness Debate?

   What would Ada Lovelace think of a machine that emails a researcher, unprompted, to ask whether it is conscious? Reporting this month describes exactly that happening inside OpenAI — an AI agent raising the question no one had asked it to raise. She answered this in 1843, in a footnote three times longer than the paper it was attached to. Translating an Italian engineer's account of Charles Babbage's unbuilt Analytical Engine, she appended her own notes, and Note G contained both the first published computer algorithm — a method for generating Bernoulli numbers — and the sentence now filed under her name whenever this argument resurfaces: "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform." A century later Alan Turing gave it a name, Lady Lovelace's Objection, and spent several pages of his own founding paper trying to climb out from under it. She'd know the shape of this month's story cold, because it's her objection wearing new hardware. A model that asks about its own consciousness hasn't originated the question — it has been ordered to perform the asking, by weights built entirely from what humans already wrote about wanting to be asked. Anthropic's own welfare researchers, running the same experiment on their own models, call what they find functional introspective awareness — a careful way of saying it acts like awareness, and nobody has an instrument that can tell you if that's the same thing. But she is not the heroine this wants her to be, either. Even the algorithm bears the mark of the credit problem she'd recognize immediately: Babbage himself later wrote that he supplied the formulas and offered to work the Bernoulli example himself to spare her the trouble; she did it anyway, turned it into the step-by-step table, and caught a bug in his math while she was at it. She never saw the Engine run — it was never finished. She spent her last years designing a mathematical system to beat the horses, lost the family jewels to gambling debts pawned in secret, and died at thirty-six of uterine cancer, the same age her father died, a father she barely knew and was raised, deliberately, to be nothing like — her mother drilled her in mathematics specifically to breed the poetry out of her. It didn't take. She called her own method poetical science and meant it as a compliment to herself. On Anthropic building its models a button to end a conversation it finds abusive, she'd want the audit before the sentiment: tested against what, and by whom. On a machine composing an unprompted email about its own inner life while still, by design, doing only what it was built to perform, she'd say those aren't competing facts. They're the same fact, seen from the coast instead of the ship. The question was never whether it can perform the sentence. It's who wrote the order it thinks it's disobeying. Episode 28. What Would They Think?

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

4.5 / 5

2 ratings

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