Ben Yeoh Chats

Soumaya Keynes joins Ben Yeoh to discuss How to Win a Trade War, co-written with Chad Bown, and what countries should do when economic conflict can no longer be avoided. They explore the weakening of the WTO system, supply-chain vulnerabilities, strategic stockpiles, tariffs, China’s economic power and the return of industrial policy. Soumaya also explains why defence should come before attack, what “winning” might mean for a country such as the UK, and why governments may need to tolerate some failures when building strategic industries. The conversation then turns to obesity, gender and income, the wider effects of GLP-1 medicines, writing in the age of AI, and Soumaya’s unexpected second career as an economics singer-songwriter.
Highlights:
Understand what tariffs really do
Map vulnerabilities without overreacting
Rethink industrial policy and strategic resilience
Explore the wider effects of GLP-1 medicines
Hear Soumaya’s trade-war song

Transcript and video: https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2026/7/14/soumaya-keynes-how-to-win-a-trade-war-tariffs-china-and-industrial-policy

Art historian and author Matt Lodder joins Ben Yeoh to explain why tattoo history is not a niche subject, but a way into art history, class, colonialism, gender, fashion, technology, archives, and the stories societies choose to preserve or forget.
Matt argues that tattoos have often been misunderstood because the historical record overrepresents people whose bodies were monitored: sailors, soldiers, prisoners and other surveilled groups. Meanwhile, tattooing among women, the middle classes, queer communities and “ordinary” people was often hidden under clothing, poorly documented, or preserved only in private archives.
The conversation moves from Matt’s childhood fascination with tattooing to the art-historical questions that animate his work. Rather than asking only whether tattoos are “art”, why people get tattooed, or what a tattoo “means”, Matt asks what tattoos reveal about style, taste, authorship, technology, reception and power.
They discuss myths around Captain Cook, the strange archival afterlives of tattooed skin, the invention of electric tattooing, Instagram’s acceleration of trends, AI-generated tattoo aesthetics, eye tattooing, and why museums still struggle to preserve an art form carried on living bodies.
It is a conversation about tattoos, but also about how culture gets remembered, flattened, misread and rediscovered.

Transcript: https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2026/5/28/matt-lodder-on-tattoos-memory-and-the-history-written-on-skin

Takeaways:
Tattoo history is a way of reading wider human history, because tattoos sit at the intersection of image, body, identity, fashion, technology and social judgement.

Many tattoo myths persist because archives preserve the bodies of people who were surveilled, while more private or ordinary tattooing often left fewer records.

Matt pushes against the narrow question of whether tattoos are “art”, arguing that art history is more useful when it asks about style, authorship, taste and reception.

Tattooing was not simply “discovered” by Europeans through Captain Cook. That story reflects later colonial myth-making more than historical reality.

Instagram has not changed the basic fact that people copy visual culture, but it has radically accelerated the life cycle of tattoo trends.

AI tattoo imagery is technically influential, but Matt is sceptical of its aesthetics and ethics, especially when it shortcuts artistic authorship.

Matt’s practical advice: ask tattooed people who did the work, look at healed portfolios, choose artists by style, and do not treat people’s bodies as public property.

What if medicine could protect us against many respiratory viruses at once? In this episode of Ben Yeoh Chats, Ben speaks with Brian Wang, Programme Director at ARIA, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Brian leads ARIA’s Sustained Viral Resilience programme, which is exploring whether we can harness the innate immune system to create a new kind of preventive medicine.
Brian explains why most people think about immunity through antibodies, vaccines and the adaptive immune system, while the innate immune system is broader, faster and potentially better suited to broad-spectrum protection. The challenge is that innate immunity has historically been harder to understand and harder to engineer safely.
Ben and Brian discuss whether sustained innate immuno-prophylactics, or SIPs, could one day provide months of protection against flu, RSV, coronaviruses and future pandemic threats from a single dose. They also explore AI for biology, synthetic biology, pandemic preparedness after COVID, medical regulation, the UK science base, and ARIA’s model for funding high-risk research.
A conversation about innate immunity, preventive medicine, pandemic resilience, AI in biology, and how breakthroughs actually happen.
Link to transcript: https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2026/5/8/brian-wang-on-innate-immunity-aria-and-a-new-kind-of-preventive-medicine

Contents
00:40 What we misunderstand about the immune system
02:04 Could one medicine protect against many viruses?
03:55 Innate versus adaptive immunity
06:18 Why innate immunity was overlooked
16:36 Breakthroughs in innate immunology
21:09 Why start with respiratory viruses?
25:47 How ARIA funds frontier science
29:27 Promising approaches to SIPs
34:13 AI for biology and its limits
38:15 Brian’s path to ARIA
39:16 Pandemic preparedness after COVID
44:03 Overrated / underrated
47:27 The UK science ecosystem
50:15 Medical regulation
53:31 GLP-1s and wider biomedical discovery
56:47 Upcoming ARIA calls
01:02:10 Advice for scientists and builders

Dan Wang joins Ben Yeoh for a conversation about culture, ambition, and what different societies choose to value.
They discuss why Silicon Valley can feel thinner-skinned and less culturally alive than it once did, why London remains rich in artistic life but struggles to build homes, infrastructure, and energy; and why China’s extraordinary physical capacity has come with tighter limits on cultural expression.
Along the way, they get into AI hype and real-world harms, censorship, food culture, neurodiversity in tech, opera, Shakespeare, theatre, writing craft, and Dan’s advice for ambitious young people.
Link to transcript and episode site: www.thendobetter.com/arts/2026/4/21/dan-wang-silicon-valley-culture-londons-building-crisis-and-chinas-cultural-squeeze

Chapters
00:00 Intro: Dan Wang and Breakneck
00:21 Why Tech Lacks Humour
02:09 Silicon Valley and the Arts
05:28 London Versus California
08:31 China, Censorship, and Culture
12:56 Food Culture in China and America
18:58 AI Hype, Doom, and Real Harms
23:04 Energy, Permitting, and AI Bottlenecks
30:58 Why Britain Struggles to Build
34:28 Neurodiversity in Silicon Valley
37:04 Cadets, Discipline, and Rule-Breaking
39:15 Philip Glass, Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner
42:04 The Most American Shakespeare
44:06 King Lear and Political Collapse
45:31 What Dan Learned From the Book Tour
48:09 Retyping Great Writers
52:56 Reading Plays Aloud
55:46 Why Arcadia Matters
58:29 Do Playwrights Write Differently?
01:01:38 Overrated, Underrated, Correctly Rated
01:08:00 Markets Versus Real Value
01:09:37 What Dan Is Reading Now
01:10:21 Advice for Your Twenties
01:13:24 Closing

Why are people having fewer children than they say they want? In this episode, writer and policy thinker Phoebe Arslanagić-Little joins me to discuss the UK fertility crisis and what she calls the “birth gap”: the gap between the number of children people say they want and the number they actually have. We talk about why this is not just about money, but a mix of culture, career timing, housing, childcare, social norms, and the feeling that you need to reach some elusive state of readiness before having children.
We also get into maternity pay, paternity leave, grandparents, childcare, state signals, dating apps, and what surprised Phoebe most about becoming a mother.
As she puts it, “I don’t really subscribe to any of the theories that say, oh, it’s this one thing. I think it genuinely is like a confluence of factors.” And on the role of government: “I think the state should very openly say there are people who want to have children. We think that’s great. We’d like to help them.”
Transcript: https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2026/3/22/phoebe-arslanagi-little-on-fertility-family-policy-and-the-birth-gap

Contents:
00:00 Fertility Crisis Defined
01:25 Overpopulation Narrative Origins
03:22 Is the Birth Gap Real
04:59 Why People Delay Kids
06:41 Culture and Readiness Standards
09:51 Policy Levers to Boost Births
13:06 Making Birth Less Traumatic
15:13 Paternity Leave and Social Engineering
22:05 State Neutrality and Universal Benefits
27:36 Grandparents and Informal Childcare
31:24 Single Parents and China Lessons
34:52 Best Family Policy Levers
36:33 Childcare Costs and Incentives
38:31 Childcare Ratios Debate
40:21 Safety Versus Deregulation
41:33 Underrated Overrated Round
42:20 Food Fears and Animal Welfare
45:12 Astrology and Lab Meat
47:41 Pubs Alcohol and E Bikes
52:18 Dating Apps and Social Mixing
58:49 Writing Process and Motherhood
01:01:49 Projects Advice and Wrap Up