Dr. Vikas Shah MBE DL Interviews the world's leading thinkers, and the people shaping the century.

The philosophy of science has sought to introduce order into the chaos of existence by replacing supernatural and mystical with reason, logic and frameworks. Like most of our progress as a species- this isn’t a smooth curve, but unpredictable leaps forward in our knowledge that create platforms from which humanity…

 

Steven Pinker (Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard) is a remarkable thinker. He is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate,…

 

For over 40 years Penn & Teller have defied labels—and at times physics and good taste– by redefining the genre of magic and inventing their own very distinct niche in comedy. Penn Jillette is the magician, actor, musician, inventor, television personality, and author who forms half of this incredible and…

 

Formula One (F1) racing is an incredible sport.  Some of the brightest minds in the world of engineering and human performance, equipped with multi-billion-dollar budgets, create staggeringly high-performance cars, run by similarly high-performance teams and drivers.  Nico Rosberg raced in Formula One for eleven years, claiming the title of World…

 

Hamdi Ulukaya is the founder and CEO of Chobani, one of the fastest growing food companies of the last decade.  The company has annual sales of US$2billion and has become the gold standard for corporate social responsibility.  30% of Chobani’s 2,000 employees were born outside the United States, and several…

 

Chip Wilson is the entrepreneur & philanthropist who is widely credited with the creation of ‘athleisure’ as a retail category (now worth over $400-billion globally).  He is perhaps best known for being the founder of luluemon, the yoga-inspired technical athletic apparel company he started in 1998 which- today- has over…

 

Dr. Mario Capecchi has had a remarkable life. At four-and-a-half years old, during World War II, his mother was sent to Dachau concentration camp leading-eventually- to Mario living as a street child for nearly four years, coming in and out of orphanages and almost dying of malnutrition. From this hugely…

 

Explore an archive of more than 3,000 quotes.

Consider a car with malfunctioning brakes; it's unsafe to let it on the street, as it could cause harm. You'd need to confine it, but you wouldn't punish it or moralize its malfunction. Instead, you'd seek to understand why its brakes failed. This approach mirrors how we should handle human criminality.

— Robert Sapolsky
Neuroscientist & primatologist known for stress research and public engagement

Silence is, by definition, an absence—an absence of voice, opinion, and life. It begins so subtly that it often goes unnoticed. We start by withdrawing or withholding our genuine thoughts from conversations, replacing them with what we presume others want to hear. As it continues, silence essentially means we cannot fully be ourselves. We find ourselves editing parts of who we are, censoring our thoughts and feelings—and we do this to each other, often without realizing it.

There's no question that Facebook could have done much, much more in the last few years to address the problem. I don't think we can inoculate people against crazy ideas, they will always have takers- but we can certainly improve the way that platforms like Facebook operate because they don't have any incentive at the moment to restrict the spread of harmful content.

— Niall Ferguson
British historian and author specializing in financial and military history

If you had to make everything up in your life, from the start, with no input whatsoever – that wouldn't be freedom – you'd be less free; you'd have to think constantly about what you should or should not do. There would be no structure for your life choices.

— Kwame Anthony Appiah
Philosopher, Cosmopolitanism Advocate & Princeton University Professor

Being an entrepreneur, an inventor, is about having ideas and having the doggedness to see them through. As an inventor your ideas should be based on creating a solution to a problem – a solution which focuses on function over form.

— Sir James Dyson
Inventor & Founder of Dyson Ltd, Bagless Vacuum Pioneer

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Long-form Interviews with the World's Leading Thinkers — Thought Economics


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