45 Degrees

The guest is an Argentinian journalist who has lived in Portugal for 40 years. Carlos Quevedo is the author of the E Deus Criou o Mundo programme on Antena 1, which promotes interfaith dialogue and recently gave rise to a book, which was precisely the motto for our conversation. In the book, the journalist discusses the differences and similarities between the three so-called "Abrahamic religions" - Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The guest is CEO of WYgroup, the largest national capital group dedicated to digital marketing, and, among various other occupations, a lecturer in executive training at Católica-Lisbon. During the conversation, which was very lively, we talked about these topics - technology, innovation, marketing and business internationalisation - and various other subjects that came up.

During this hour and a half conversation, we talked about topics as diverse as homeopathy, scientific culture, the history of science, science in Portugal, artificial intelligence and even space exploration - in short, just listening!

This episode turned out to be perhaps the most conversational of the conversations I recorded, as we talked about many topics that came up during the conversation. For example: the role of the philosophy of science and its relationship with the sciences, Artificial Intelligence, consciousness, Darwinism, the role of the economy today, technological progress, among others.

During the conversation, as well as personality traits, we also talked about the history of personality psychology, to contextualise the conversation, and McAdams' three levels of personality (of which this 'trait' model is only the first level).

As this is the first episode in which I talk specifically about Economic Science - it's the second on economics, but the episode with Pedro Braz Teixeira focused on specific issues - I thought it would be more interesting to take advantage of the presence of someone who thinks about Economic Science to talk about the foundations of the discipline.

My aim in this conversation with José Bancaleiro was to get away from those two attitudes, and to talk frankly and in depth about what HR management is, the challenges associated with it and what remains to be understood and done in this field. I think it was a great conversation.

The guest is a historian and novelist, and one of the world's leading experts on the history of slavery. The motto for the conversation was his latest book, 'Slavery - Questions and Answers', a great little book, incredibly rich in information, and well worth reading, as it leads us to know what we didn't know and to review preconceived positions.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Ana Carvalhas about Nutrition (nutrition, mind you, not diets!). The guest is a nutritionist who specialises in the dietary treatment of obesity, diabetes and dyslipidaemia. In my conversation with Ana Carvalhas I therefore tried to focus on the science of nutrition and the relatively well-established conclusions that nevertheless exist in this area.

This is the first of two episodes with Ludwig Krippahl as our guest - two parts of a long conversation (around 3 hours) in which we talked about... a whole range of topics. In this first part, we open the hostilities by talking about Critical Thinking, a teaching area of the guest, and move on to pseudoscience, faith and belief in God, and Democracy.

Welcome to Forty-Five Degrees is the second instalment of our conversation with Ludwig Krippahl. In this second part of the conversation, we talk about two topics: God and religion, which we already touched on in the previous episode, and gender equality.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Ana Rodrigues Oliveira about private, social and political life in the Middle Ages.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Rui Tavares, in a mix of history and political science. We talked about the history of the Left-Right dichotomy and the new Cosmopolitanism vs Nationalism distinction, among other topics.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Frederico Lourenço about the Bible and Christianity. We talked about the history of Christianity, especially its beginnings: its relationship with the Roman Empire and even classical Greek culture. We focussed more on the New Testament (the only one whose translation is now complete); of this, we spoke about the Acts of the Apostles and the Four Gospels, as well as the apocryphal gospels, the role of Paul and the vision transmitted in relation to slavery and homosexuality.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Pedro Pita Barros about health economics, health policies and the National Health System, among other topics. We talked about various health issues, such as: user charges, the doctor-patient relationship, spending on medicines, the surplus of doctors, technological innovation, among others, in the context of health economics.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Rui Nascimento Alves about Human Resources Management. In this conversation with Rui Nascimento Alves, I tried to cover different topics. We talked, for example, about teamwork and performance evaluation, talent, leadership, evaluation metrics, cultural differences, compensation policies, hiring, among other topics.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Marina Costa Lobo about political science. We talked about topics such as voter satisfaction with democracy, the Portuguese electoral system, public funding of parties, the role of the President of the Republic, among others.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Filipe Duarte Santos about climate change.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Carlos Coelho, one of the great Portuguese references in the field of brand building and management.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Paulo Finuras about evolutionary psychology. We talked about two of his most recent books - Cultural Primates (2015) and Bioleadership (2018) - although, in reality, the conversation ended up wandering off at the stroke of a pen, as usual.

In this episode, I'm chatting to Glenn Geher about evolutionary psychology. We talked about the evolutionary origin of humour, the origin of cultural differences between peoples and personality differences between people, and also the differences in behaviour between the sexes. We also talked about the most common criticisms of this area of evolutionary psychology.

We talked about various topics, drawing on the guest's academic career and his most recent works, from art and aesthetics - which I don't usually talk about on the podcast - to teaching and, in particular, the guest's provocative vision of the role a university should play.

We talked about user-driven innovation, especially, but not only, in the area of health.

The guest is scientist Zita Martins, in the words of Expresso, "the Portuguese star of astrobiology". Zita Martins is an Associate Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico and, until recently, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society at Imperial College London (UK).

Tiago Cavaco is the pastor of the Lapa Baptist Church in Lisbon and, for many, the face of non-Catholic Christianity in Portugal. His sermons have won him admirers, even among non-Baptists and non-believers. He recently released the book Milagres no Coração (Quetzal), a collection of sermons on the Gospel of Mark, prefaced by Ricardo Araújo Pereira.

Eugénia Cunha is Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of Coimbra. In recent years, she has become known above all for her work in the field of forensic anthropology. But that's not what we talked about! Her other area of specialisation is, in my opinion, even more interesting: Human Evolution. That's why I invited her to talk about it, on the back of the book she published a few years ago called "How We Became Human".

Get ready for a chat with a guest who is as relaxed as he is erudite. António Castro Caeiro is several people in one: in the same body, inside the same head, lives someone who was a member of the legendary punk-rock band Mata-Ratos - who released songs such as 'My Mother-in-Law is an Ox' -, someone who practises muay thai - because "he likes punching" and after having done 36 years of karate -, ...and, at the same time, someone who is one of Portugal's greatest specialists in Ancient and Contemporary Philosophy, who quotes directly from classical Greek and German.

The ideal guest to kill two birds with one stone: On the one hand, I was able to talk about entrepreneurship with someone who ensures a realistic perspective, without the fatuities or simplistic explanations that we commonly hear in this area. On the other hand, we also discussed the world of Fintechs, which are one of the most interesting areas of innovation today, a good novelty for consumers but one of the biggest threats to incumbent institutions in the financial sector.

As I said at the beginning of the conversation, we spoke on the pretext of a book organised by our guest and published by the Lisbon Academy of Sciences on the teaching of macroeconomics in Portugal after the 25th of April. The book was then a pretext for us to talk about the enormous challenge of managing the Portuguese economy during that period, about the evolution of macroeconomic thinking at a global level, which inevitably influenced the discussion. By comparison, we also talked about the 2008 crisis (it was 10 years since Lehman Brothers went bankrupt on the day we recorded) and, inevitably, the parallel with the Crisis of '29.

Mark van Vugt is one of the world's leading figures in the field of evolutionary psychology. He is a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam and collaborates with the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

The guest is Miguel Real, the pseudonym of this writer, essayist and philosophy professor - and one of Portugal's most prolific writers (I counted at least 45 books on the website of an online bookshop) We talked about the book he published last year: "Traços Fundamentais da Cultura Portuguesa" (Fundamental Traits of Portuguese Culture). It was a relaxed conversation, in which we by no means covered every aspect of this subject, which is never-ending, but very worthwhile, because Miguel is a wealth of knowledge.

The guest is Raquel Vaz Pinto, one of Portugal's leading experts on China's foreign policy and strategy. The motto for this episode was Chinese foreign policy, but we ended up talking about much more than that. Chinese foreign policy, which was very discreet during the first decades of its development, has become increasingly conspicuous, so much so that the rivalry between China and the US is probably the big issue in international relations for the next few decades.

Luís was recommended to me by more than one person as the ideal person to talk to about Political Philosophy and Law - an area not only of his teaching but also of his research - and he didn't disappoint, as you'll realise. In fact, the Philosophy of Law, and more specifically the subject of Justice, was just the starting point for the conversation, which quickly took us to other areas, fuelled by the guest's extraordinary erudition (and erudition - not culture or knowledge - is really the right word, as you'll soon realise).

This episode introduces the series of conversations on Political Orientations that I'm currently recording, which will contain several episodes with different guests.

This episode's guest is Adolfo Mesquita Nunes. He is a lawyer, was a member of parliament and Secretary of State for Tourism in the PSD-CDS government, and is currently vice-president of the CDS and a councillor in Covilhã. This is the first in a series of episodes about political ideologies, in which I'll be talking to a heterogeneous group of guests with different political orientations. The aim is for them to complement each other, in order to give a comprehensive view of the different political philosophies of today (excluding the more extreme ones).

The guest in this second episode is Daniel Oliveira, a journalist, former leader of the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) and a recognised activist and political commentator linked to the Left, who considers himself a "social democrat" in the original sense of the term.

Luís Oliveira e Silva is a professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico and one of Portugal's leading researchers in the field of physics, specifically lasers and plasmas. In this episode, we talked about various topics: from the latest advances in physics, to the guest's area of research - lasers and plasmas - and ending with a topic as fascinating as it is relevant: the possibility of obtaining energy through nuclear fusion.