From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Birds are not born with an innate genetically determined knowledge of constellations. What they do has been brilliantly shown in an experiment by Stephen Emlen.
People underestimate their personal probability of encountering negative …it is not so much that individuals believe that negative events will not happen, but rather that these events are relatively unlikely to happen to them.
I saw something in the world that was done poorly and thought it could be done better. The difference between a miserable, crank grump and an entrepreneur? Both are unhappy- but the entrepreneur says they can make it better… that they can fix it… and they follow the spark.
A true pet's value lies entirely in its relationship with us, and vice versa. The first fossil evidence of that bond goes back around 30,000 to 40,000 years: dogs buried with humans, including one remarkable case of a dog that had survived two bouts of canine distemper, presumably because its human companion cared for it.
This tool is truly the best thing that the science has come up with for getting two people to like each other. A little bit of optimisation can be effective—you should be eating healthy and exercising and doing the basics. But I tend to think in terms of relational optimisation: how can I put two people in the best position to share things about themselves that allow them to find conversational pathways that happen to go well?
The silence I employ has agency behind it. I choose to use it strategically as the pause between stimulus and response, differentiating a considered response from a mere reaction. We need more of this kind of silence.
Purpose and meaning are inextricably tied to suffering and difficulty. If you tell me a pursuit that you view as meaningful and important, I can guarantee it won't be easy. If it was easy, it wouldn't be meaningful or important. We reserve the notion of meaning for things that have difficulty.
He was a powerful figure who amassed considerable wealth for a select few—if they were fortunate and early enough in his scheme. Despite the exorbitant returns that should have raised eyebrows, those benefitting often turned a blind eye, choosing not to question the source of their profits. Yes, there were individuals who asked probing questions, but Madoff had crafted such an aura of invulnerability around himself that any questioning was met with swift exclusion from his investment circle. He was effectively untouchable.
Habituation is a very basic mechanism. It's something we find in every neuron and every system of our brain, including our fundamental abilities like perception. Essentially, we stop responding to and perceiving things that are not changing or are changing very gradually.
The brain, if nothing else, is a giant pattern detector. It looks for order in chaos. And those patterns matter: they can mean the difference between life and death. Music taps into that same machinery because it's so highly structured. When your brain says, I thought this path would lead here, but it actually took me somewhere new — you experience pleasure.
I often describe a Grand Slam as a marathon, not a sprint. It involves enduring extremely long matches, seven times over two weeks. In tennis, those who sprint don't make it to the finish line.
What crises actually do is expose the underlying fragility and structural flaws within an economy and society. Some of this is endemic – financial markets are fragile because they are giant pools of sentiment and leverage at their heart.