From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I believe success and fame, especially fame, can instigate fundamental shifts within us at a cellular level. The very nature of fame is peculiar; it's akin to an insatiable flame that ceaselessly yearns for more, compelling you to endlessly seek something, despite its ultimate emptiness. To set fame as an objective can be likened to voluntarily stepping into a fire, with the inevitable outcome of being consumed.
Our psychology is open-ended: we can plug in variables, and are not just tied to constants. We can expand our circle of sympathy – we can employ the logic of impartiality, and the emotional prompts of human contact and vicarious experience, and expand our fellow-feeling from our family to our clan, our nation, tribe, and from there to all of humanity and even other sentient beings.
In higher states of consciousness, we also lose our fear of death. The transcendent you is not in time. Only thought exists in time… only perception exists in time…
There's a beauty in the truth which is undeniable. It's a tragedy in a way- sometimes we just need to understand what the hell we've truly lost.
Art is a vocation for me, not a career, not a job… you wouldn't say to a nun. 'so, how did you get into God?'
Algorithms will soon surpass our innate ability to cater to our health, wellness, and overall well-being. As this unfolds, uncharted realms of purpose and significance will surface, ones we can't currently fathom. The act of humans making choices will become a mere memory. We'll be spectators in a novel arena.
Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. And the reason this is so important is that trust isn't, at its essence, an asset or an attribute or a currency. It's a belief. It's what we believe about someone or something. That definition is slightly counterintuitive because, often, when people think about trust, they talk about knowing what to expect from someone or knowing what the outcomes will be. So, they're actually thinking about trust through the language of risk, thinking about it in terms of certainty. And that's not what trust is.
Risk is actually an asset. Fear isn't meant to be dismissed; it's intended to be embraced. Fear sharpens your focus, enhances your performance, and boosts your resilience. This is something many haven't realised—fear is a superpower meant to be embraced, not avoided.
If you view the world from a moral perspective, you have no option but to address climate change in a timely fashion. The good news is that the moral imperative is backed-up by economics, technological advance and capital shifts.
One of the most precious aspects of Glastonbury is specifically that we can't put our finger on it. It's evolved slowly over 50 years to become what it is today – we've tried things that have worked, some have not, and allowed it to evolve.
I cannot argue that my own interests are special simply because I'm me and you're not and expect that you will take me seriously. The nature of logic forces us to cede our own pre-eminence, because there is nothing in the pronoun 'you' or 'he' or 'she' which confers some special status.
Poverty is a result of history first of all. Mankind was always 'poor' according to our development standards. Growth has been very high in the last two centuries, but only in the west for a while, and now