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From Refugee to the US Cabinet: A Conversation with Carlos Gutierrez on Ambition, Trust and the American Dream

In this interview, I spoke to Carlos Gutierrez, former US Secretary of Commerce and the youngest chief executive in Kellogg's history, about fleeing Cuba as a child, selling cereal from a van in Mexico City, the…

Vikas Shah 19 min read

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Three thousand moments. Three picked at random.

“Without what Becker called 'cultural world views' we would be overwhelmed by existential terror. Beliefs about reality that we share foster psychological equanimity by giving us a sense of meaning and value.”
— Sheldon Solomon Terror Management Theory researcher & social psychologist
“Guantánamo has created more terrorists than have ever passed through. It is the major recruiting tool used… it inhibits the United States' ability to talk about human rights on a global scale… when you have the UN calling-up the United States on their human rights abuses at Guantánamo it makes it very difficult for the United States to then go to other places in the world and demand that they apply human rights.”
— Carlos Warner
“Navigating complexity and uncertainty requires long-term thinking, not long-term planning. Long-term thinking requires accepting, even enjoying, the challenges of unpredictability, builds the flexibility required to navigate it, and rejects simplified narratives that lose the nuance of this reality.”
— Perry Chen Founder of Kickstarter, crowdfunding platform pioneer

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  1. 01 Business & Economics From Refugee to the US Cabinet: A Conversation with Carlos Gutierrez on Ambition, Trust and the American Dream 364 interviews
  2. 02 Culture, Society, Sports & Arts A Conversation with Jesper Kouthoofd, Founder of Teenage Engineering, on Design, Play and Why Every Product Is an Illusion 237 interviews
  3. 03 Politics & Policy From Refugee to the US Cabinet: A Conversation with Carlos Gutierrez on Ambition, Trust and the American Dream 171 interviews
  4. 04 Science & Technology We Are Not Alone: A Conversation with Jonathan Caplan KC on the Evidence for UAPs, Non-Human Intelligence and Why It Was Never Disclosed 136 interviews
  5. 05 Health & Medicine The Continuum of Mind: A Conversation with Professor Michael Levin on Cognition, Bioelectricity and the Future of Being 74 interviews
  6. 06 Nobel Laureates Markets, Morals and the Road Ahead: A Conversation with Nobel Laureate Professor Alvin Roth 21 interviews

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