From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If someone can take our findings and draw out additional insights, we consider it a triumph. Our aim is to constantly enhance our understanding of the world, and contributions from others are invaluable in this pursuit.
Consciousness is the most troubling because it's so hard to deny its existence. With all these other tricky, troubling phenomena, it's at least an option to say maybe it doesn't exist, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. But with consciousness, it seems hard to make sense of the idea that nobody's ever felt pain. Nobody's ever seen colour.
Anti-goals are all about what you refuse to give up while chasing those goals. The trap a lot of people fall into is getting so laser-focused on the target that everything else just fades away. You put on blinders.
What people fail to recognise is that fear is different for everyone. Your emotions are unique to you and you've really, really got to take time to concentrate on yourself.
Today, a fear-based politics has largely replaced the promotion of ideals. Obama's call for 'the audacity of hope' in 2006 now feels quaint. To me, this concession to fear poses a big challenge: how do we recover an aspirational politics?
People often talk about life hacks, but for me, the real 'hack' is simply to remain curious and willing. It's about living in a space between willingness and curiosity—willing to embrace discomfort as you pursue questions, without a clear idea of the answers.
Be ashamed to die unless you have won some victory for humanity. Nobody should make the world worse off for their having lived in it. Everyone has the obligation to add their brick to the edifice of civilisation, and whether that brick is big or small, it means you have contributed to building- not destroying.
Power is the ability to affect others and get the outcomes you want – and that's true whether on the individual, national or international level. You can exert power in three ways. You can do it with coercion (sticks), you can do it with payments (carrots) and you can do it with soft power – through attraction.
We've lost our relationship with ourselves; and that is all-encompassing because without a relationship with ourselves, we can't then have a relationship with nature, with each other and the planet. Our rituals and practices often bring us home – they bring us back to what we knew as babies but couldn't clearly articulate.
The scale of our damage on the animal world is unimaginable. We inflict pain and suffering on wild and domestic animals. We take away their wild lands and habitats, we use them to test our medicines and they're affected by climate change, pollution and many other aspects of our world. We are the master race. We are the creatures who impose our will on virtually everything that lives and breathes. It's deeply shocking when you start to think about the scale of it.
The discovery of new cosmic truths doesn't negate our prior understanding. For instance, despite Einstein's theory of relativity extending beyond the scope of Newton's laws, the latter will remain as valid a million years from now as they are today.
Our relationship with the ocean is beautiful – you frequently see people at the shoreline, just in prayer or meditating… connecting with the ocean, letting the waves wash over them… Being around the ocean is our connection to something bigger- you can just lay in the ocean and let your worries wash away.