From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you're doing anything for legacy, you might as well forget about it – even your great grandchildren will have no idea who you were or what you did. Legacy lasts 50 years maximum.
Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners.
Unlike the divisive silos we've constructed, where one generation accuses the other — the older labeling the younger as lazy and the younger dismissing the older as out-of-touch or rigid. This dynamic needs transformation. Moving forward, it's imperative that both boomers and zoomers work in tandem.
Look at Jeff Bezos telling his 1.5 million employees to 'wake up every morning terrified and stay terrified all day.' They're not getting rich; they're barely scraping by. Yet he wants them living in terror so he can get even richer. That's crazy. That's a crazy society and a crazy life.
Ultimately, we want to make it unnecessary to be a B Corp – we want it to be just the norm of how all businesses are run, but that means we have to change the rules of the game and the role of business in society.
It's disappointing to see the amount of people who choose to profit from the pain and self-consciousness of teenage girls without even thinking about it. If you are motivated to constantly talk about your image, your weight and to guide people through ridiculously unhealthy juice fasts- then you are already poison; you've drunk the kool-aid.
San Francisco is the city of love and compassion, will always be, and will never change that. I know that's a very broad response, but I do think that's what motivates me the most in terms of the vision and feeling I have for the city.
There is a strong possibility that the relationship between humans and their environment would be so fundamentally changed that hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions, would have to move. History tells us that this carries serious risks of severe and extended conflict.
Human beings seem like their default recreation is sedation. For some reason, getting drunk at a bar is the default in what people do for fun, which I find bizarre.
Extremism is the desire to enforce illiberal views which are in a dichotomy to the liberal values that we all adhere to in a Liberal secular democracy; and you can have non-violent or violent extremism.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win…' the good news is that society is reaching a critical mass of influence meaning that today, people cannot ignore us, and cannot laugh at us, they have to fight- and if Gandhi was right, we are near the breakthrough towards winning.
We have been interested in celebrities since the dawn of time. Jesus was the first celebrity, then the royal families. Celebrity culture exists even at a micro-level... It's human nature to be interested in the captain of the football team, the head cheerleader or who is doing what with who.