From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
If someone can take our findings and draw out additional insights, we consider it a triumph. Our aim is to constantly enhance our understanding of the world, and contributions from others are invaluable in this pursuit.
We are the only species who have taken control of their evolution. We are animals who – one day – had an idea to become better. Billions of us have worked to make ourselves better – that's why we created the concept of God, an entity that is everywhere, that is powerful, that is the master of everything, that gives us a unique model for our society. Now we know God doesn't exist, and so we know we are better than that notion of God.
There have been well-known people who actually have advocated rights for great apes – chimps and orangs and gorillas. They're our closest genetic relatives; but why should we exclude any creature that can suffer? If you hold the paw of a little rabbit or a mouse or whatever so hard that it squeaks or screams, isn't that cruel? isn't that hurting it? What right have we got to hurt animals like that? We don't have any right at all.
War teaches you that there are many different types of people, good and bad, and you have to understand that good and evil co-exist, and it's up to you to calculate your way through the world, understanding where people are rooted.
It's only when you look back that you can connect the dots to where we are right now. All of us go through things that make us think, 'this makes no sense, why is this happening to me!…' but when you look back you realise that had it not been for 'that,' you wouldn't have had that opportunity… that meeting… that chance… that love.
In postmodernism, there are no absolute truths; everything is relative, of course other than the one absolute truth that there are no absolute truths. This is a form of intellectual terrorism, nihilism.
The most corrupting idea about power is that it gives you a set of techniques to enable you to get more of what you want, no questions asked. If we think about power in that way, our soul will get eroded.
There is no such thing as true-altruism (even philanthropists get something out of giving!). What is this individuals' payoff from working with you?
Postmodernists are intellectual terrorists who fly their planes of bullshit into the edifices of reason.
Aging is a side-effect of being a machine with moving parts. All such machines, whether living or not, inherently create entropy in their structure. Living organisms have immensely sophisticated systems for exporting that entropy, but those systems are generally not 100% comprehensive, so aging still happens.
The rate of change has become exponential and us as human beings physiologically have not been able to adapt. We just cannot physiologically adapt that quickly – what does it mean for us? This is in some ways Darwinian because he said it wasn't about the strongest that survives, it's those that are most able to adapt.