From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. 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.
The phrase 'I don't know' serves as both an invitation and a challenge, a beckoning call to delve into the unknown and piece together the enigmatic puzzle of knowledge. Science, at its core, thrives not on regurgitating established facts but on the exhilaration of unearthing new discoveries.
The fact that you and I are alive is against stupendous odds. One day we will die, and that's sad, but there are people who will never die because they were never born. We're the lucky ones, we get to die. You can only die if you were alive.
Today's business book says: business exists to maximize profit for the shareholders. I think that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life.
The reality is we live in a very dynamic world that's full of risks and all we should really care about are risk drivers – both financial and non-financial. Alternatives may provide us with ways of hedging out or managing future risks better.
They have maternal instincts and look after each other as we do… it's not an intellectual thing when a mother protects her child; it's an instinctive behaviour. We value all those things in the human being because we are human beings! But that's pretty short sighted and narrow minded.
The standard model of reason is the lone thinker — Rodin’s statue, head on fist. That is exactly the wrong model of reasoning. Reasoning evolved to be done in groups; it is a contested process. We think better in opposition with somebody we disagree with.
I grew up in the age of space exploration, reading Asimov, Le Guin and Clarke, getting lost in the worlds they had created which were littered with aliens, robots and AI. For me, I think it was a combination of Star Trek, far too much Asimov and the niggling question of understanding ourselves better through computing technologies.
We're breathing, defecating pieces of meat that are no more significant or enduring than lizards or potatoes.
If you know something, and if the reason you're confident is that I told you that thing? That means I wasn't a good educator at that moment because you decided that based on some authority figure, something is real, or true. Instead, an educator should teach you how to think about a problem – how to come to some form of understanding.
When I look at my own life- the things that I'm most embarrassed about are the moments where I acted, or didn't act, because of fear. The moments I'm most proud of are those where I acted with some semblance of courage.
The real mystery is not why organisms as complicated as us age and die, but why there is a kind of immortality through the germ line! There clearly is some way that all the damaging aspects of life that feed into ageing are overcome in the germ line.