Featured Quote

We've had an explosion of platforms that have atomized the delivery and consumption of music, and I'm really for that- it's democratized music. Previously, there were a lot of gatekeepers that controlled how you were supposed to listen to music… that's all gone now.

— Max Richter Renowned composer known for film scores and electronic classical music

This is nothing to do with the 0.000001% who go on to be professional fighters – it's about the 99.9% of people who train because they enjoy it, and connect with it – and who apply the lessons they've learned to deal with the setbacks, failures, victories, challenges and tests they're going to get in work and life.

Children are bought and sold like animals, sometimes at a lower price than animals. 168 million children work as child labourers, more than 200 million children who should be in education are not at school. We see two different constituencies of children. One group who enjoys their childhood, and others who are deprived of their fundamental right to be children.

The Internet is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies, it's becoming our typewriter and our printing press, our map and our clock, our calculator and our telephone, our post office and our library, our radio and our TV.

Germany for example, has decided to close-down its nuclear industry. That creates a huge electricity deficit, and there is the potential to produce a large amount of renewable energy in Greece and export it to countries like that.

We are first generation entrepreneurs, with middle class values, coming from middle class backgrounds, we never expected to be so wealthy! Our first reaction therefore is to share.

Politics and celebrity culture have always been deeply entwined. What happens in any society, country by country, is that we go through waves of celebrity focused and political focus. There's always been a blurring of the lines when it comes to the worlds of entertainment and politics.

In the 18th century, they're kind of taking stock of how, in just about 100 years, all this classical learning had been overturned. Looking back on everything that's happened, they construct this narrative of how human reason has progressed.

I remember one day though, conversing with a primatologist and saying, 'oh, animals are just like us… we're not that special…' and he said, 'well, when did chimps build their own large hadron collider?' – I was gob smacked. That one comment made me realise how absurd it is to claim we aren't that different from other animals because, clearly, we're amazingly different.

Growing up in Pakistan, I saw so many people with heart disease and having heart attacks – it felt almost biblical – it was catastrophic. Unlike a lot of diseases, there wasn't much a cultural footprint for heart disease – it's not something you hear about on news or TV shows.

I nearly died several times. I shared everything openly with everyone. I shared how my whole thought process and character had completely changed in that expedition, but also how my own purpose had completely changed.

Our ethics are not static, they evolve over time and that gives me tremendous hope. If we had remained static, the progress we have made would have been impossible. The evolution of ethics is essential to our survival.

Our brains are adept at concealing our motives from ourselves, convincing us that we are not as interested in status as we might actually be. This self-deception, paradoxically, enhances our ability to argue our lack of interest in status, which, in turn, can ironically increase our standing within the social group.

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