From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I'll hope I have helped be more generative and less extractive, through my own actions, and through my support of others. We live in a world where we're constantly battling these forces and we need to ensure we're more generative than extractive — of each other, of our planet — I believe we can do it.
I think the answer, really, in my view, is that we cannot control them because they are smarter. As simple as that, we only know that the smartest hacker in the room will always find a way through our defences. So maybe we should stop our arrogance for a minute.
At one site, a mature man carrying a white flag was shot dead by an Israeli soldier. To those less experienced or with a 'soft' generally compassionate outlook, this might immediately seem a clear case of unlawful killing – a 'war crime'. However, the general offered a different perspective. He considered the terrain and highlighted the dilemma faced by the soldier in high-risk situations: might the soldier be genuinely uncertain over whether the white flag genuinely signified surrender?
The court is primarily interested in the effort made, in the attempt. That is what truly counts.
For the first time since life began, a single animal is utterly dominant: the ape species Homo sapiens. Evolution has equipped us with huge brains, stunning adaptability and brilliantly successful technical prowess.
Freedom without struggle is an illusion. I love problems. How we deal with problems defines who we are and what values we stand for.
Life is not a race against other people. Life is a competition with yourself. One of the greatest achievements in life is to outperform yourself and live your greatest life possible. Greatness lives in all of us, but we must all find what it is that ignites our souls.
I study history and genealogy – I buy old maps from the 1500s and 1600s, and one thing that's absolutely clear to me is that legacy lasts 50 years maximum. Thinking about legacy in timeframes beyond that is meaningless.
A particular individual trait that has piqued my interest through research is intellectual humility. Embracing the possibility of being wrong enhances the likelihood of being right—a somewhat magical paradox. This notion dovetails with the scientific ethos, where the quest isn't about proving oneself right.
The question I always ask them is '…what has our foreign policy got to do with Muslims travelling thousands of miles to go and kill other Muslims in Iraq and Syria?'
If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.
If I say to you 41, it's data. If I tell you 41 is the temperature in centigrade, that's information. If I tell you 41 is the temperature, in centigrade, of a human patient, that really is information – in fact, it's in danger of becoming knowledge because of the contextualisation it gives you.