From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Freedom of expression isn't just about protecting popular speech - it's about creating the conditions where unpopular ideas can challenge power and where dissent can flourish without fear.
Our world is inherently chaotic, and we constantly strive to impose some structure on this chaos. Watching a play, a movie, or a TV show allows us to experience humanity through others, taking a break from our own responsibilities. In its best form, acting mirrors our lives, allowing us to see ourselves in the stories being told.
Freedom without struggle is an illusion. I love problems. How we deal with problems defines who we are and what values we stand for.
I owned a US$500 million hedge fund when I decided to retire from Wall Street. On paper, I was on top of the world. Inside, though, something was missing. All of the money and material things in the world could never fill that void. It was painful to admit, but I had climbed up to the top of the wrong mountain.
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.
Only one second in time you can find peace – now. There's only one second you can be happy – now. There's only one place you can find peace and happiness. Where you are. This is it, it's not out there somewhere, it's in you.
Art, for him, is a crucial means for turning thinking into doing in the world.
The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.
Ancient philosophy almost hasn't been bettered as a kind of therapeutic toolbox in 2400 years, and have a certain aesthetic to them which makes you feel part of a long tradition... You're part of a three millennia old tradition of wisdom that thousands and thousands of people have read the same book that you're reading, and found it therapeutic in very dark times.
I think that if you care about something, then you have a mission. Knowing that, and that your specific set of skills and experience brings something special to that mission, are key.
The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, or as a place of things. It is this distinction between the physical (a place of things) and metaphysical (a forum for action) that typifies the difference, as far as we are aware, between us and other species.
We are meaning driven – it's not enough for us to what there is, we need to know why.