From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I'm 65 years old, and one of the things that amazes me is the number of people who work to get to a certain level of success in showbusiness, and then quit to go play golf?! There is nothing else I would want to do in this world.
Magic is this incredibly weird bondage and discipline you make where you say to someone, 'do this thing to me that's morally wrong… you have my consent…' – once you give your consent, the morality changes.
Every acorn is already programmed to become an oak tree, every embryo is programmed to become a baby, and every bud is programmed to become a blossom. Human beings are programmed as well, but we have something an acorn does not; free will. Every moment we live- we either allow the natural intelligence of life to unfold through us- or not. That natural intelligence is love.
Arguably, though, it could be more comparable to the rise of Homo sapiens itself, or even to the origin of life on Earth.
When faced with the inevitable, get relative.
Consciousness is the most troubling because it's so hard to deny its existence. With all these other tricky, troubling phenomena, it's at least an option to say maybe it doesn't exist, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. But with consciousness, it seems hard to make sense of the idea that nobody's ever felt pain. Nobody's ever seen colour.
When I approach anything, especially high-risk activities, I always brace myself for the worst outcome – death. By accepting death, they rid themselves of the fear and could focus purely on survival. This mentality is my cornerstone.
Nothing in this world has deep enough roots to sustain us. We keep grasping for something in the world that we think will ease our existential pain, but the pain itself is a result of over-identifying with the world.
I want a world where people can be true to themselves and to live their lives according to who they truly are.
In science, one never shows causality. Causality is something philosophers are concerned with, not scientists. I cannot stress this in strong enough words- we have not shown a causal link between the public's mood state as we measured it from twitter data feeds, and the market.
Western civilisation has veered off course; we have de-sacralised the world in which we live. We are collectively insane, and we need to mount our own intervention.
I am a nomad—intellectually, physically, spiritually. A commuter, in the words of James Baldwin. This state of continuous exile is one that I find difficult to explain to other people but it's who I am.