From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
At Hostage International, we tailor our approach to each individual's needs. We assign a liaison to support the hostage's family for as long as needed without a time limit. This personalised care underscores that no two cases are identical. Each must be treated as unique, with specific strategies developed to address its particular challenges.
I think there's a big misconception—sometimes called 'toxic positivity' or 'good vibes only'—that a happy life is one where we only experience positive emotions. But that's just patently false. Evolutionarily speaking, our negative emotions serve a really important purpose: they cue us to take action.
I couldn't believe you could spend so much time working for something, without knowing it would happen, and then it happened. I came off track and remember looking around thinking someone was about to tell me that I'd been disqualified or that it was an error- I just couldn't believe that everything had come together, and I'd won that medal.
Music is definitely a form of communication, and it gives me a good feeling. If I'm hungry and sit at the piano to play, I'm not hungry anymore. I'll forget everything when I make music. I think when we listen to music, it allows us to feel things.
If you go into a new situation where you don't know anybody and you want to be more influential, don't look around the room and say hmmm… who can most help me here?… instead, look around and say hmmm…. Who can I most help here? You will put that person in a position where they will be standing on the balls of their feet to help you!
For me, our sophisticated way of communicating- with words- is that crucial difference. It meant that for the first time, we could teach another about something that wasn't present… whereas young chimps just learn by observing. We can read books about the distant past, and plan the distant future.
Our world is inherently chaotic, and we constantly strive to impose some structure on this chaos. Watching a play, a movie, or a TV show allows us to experience humanity through others, taking a break from our own responsibilities. In its best form, acting mirrors our lives, allowing us to see ourselves in the stories being told.
I'm particularly interested in the human propensity to copy behaviours that lack any kind of knowable causal structure. This is how we learn arbitrary conventions—and I think it originates in a distinctively human way of building group identities. I describe ritual actions as causally opaque. We engage in this kind of behaviour even more enthusiastically when we're anxious about being excluded or left out.
Technology claims to be showing us a mirror of what was already present in society- racism, conspiracy theories- but in reality, technology is a funhouse mirror with a feedback loop that's engineered to show us the most egregious parts of society… those parts that are better at keeping our attention. The mirror gets more and more warped, but we mistake it for an honest and neutral view of who we are.
Initially, my goal wasn't to become an entrepreneur; I was simply aiming to earn some money. Given my dyslexia, the academic path was not an option for me; there were no A-Levels or university in my future. My choices were stark: acquire a skill or venture into entrepreneurship. Naturally, I gravitated towards entrepreneurship.
Currently, public services are extraordinarily hostile to those in poverty; a doctrine we've seen clearly in how the Home Office has handled the Windrush generation. This ideology believes people will respond positively to being treated with hostility; but that only works for emotionally regulated people who didn't grow-up in adversity. Our public services are emotionally illiterate.
When individuals express a desire for a stress-free life, I often remind them of two things: First, the only beings without stress are no longer living. Second, when you plot stress against performance, you observe an inverse U-shaped curve. At zero stress, performance is at its lowest.