From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
When you're behind a camera, you have this incredible power to freeze a moment in time. But with that power comes responsibility. You're not just taking a picture, you're creating a narrative, you're telling a story.
Our thought was simple; why don't' we send ill-informed comedians to look at these social issues? And that turned out to be the magical idea – because people were used to experts and journalists, talking in terms of agricultural yields and geopolitics… we sent out normal people, who were very well known, to talk about human issues and human problems.
Be a curious explorer of other people's emotions. Don't approach people as if you know how they're feeling. We often make mistakes when reading other people's emotions because we bring in our own cultural values and belief systems.
If you can rank oboists and there's one who's clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?
When China started its open-door policy, 40 years ago, it was a much different environment. There was nothing to work with! It was a communist system before that, a planned economy, no free market. People started building things from scratch.
The role of a chef today is not just to feed people, but to be a storyteller, an educator, a guardian of traditions while pushing boundaries.
African music more broadly is about rhythm, it's so addictive when you listen to it. People dance from 10 pm to 10 am without really stopping much – it's not complicated harmonies, it's about rhythm and connection. It's like a trance – you get hooked.
I start by asking: How will our customers benefit from this acquisition? I tend to shy away from companies that don't share a similar cultural ethos. Even if an acquisition seems financially sound, if there's a stark cultural mismatch, I'd usually reconsider.
You can have many great actors but you have very few who really become movie stars. It is that indefinable quality of someone who becomes iconic that people want to come and watch regardless of the type of film they're in.
People come to Glastonbury and can try out ways of living that can be rolled out across the country. It's a place where people come to be a part of something… something greater than the sum of its parts.
There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me... And there are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.
After the Holocaust, such thinking became widely discredited. In the post-war era, other developments also influenced attitudes towards antisemitism, leading to a significant shift in political antisemitism. However, what persisted were the cultural stereotypes – the entrenched narratives and stereotypes about Jews within the culture, ready to be drawn upon whenever they seemed relevant or useful.