From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We live in a society where our pursuit of authenticity is more important to us than ever, but we've created a society which is also extraordinarily fake. I want to understand this and understand how we can fight back.
When the hydrogen bomb was first proposed in the early 1950's, the scientific panel in charge of US nuclear research recommended against it, unanimously. They called it a weapon of genocide whose only purpose would be to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Markets are human artefacts; however we often treat them as natural phenomenon in the same way we might treat a language. People are the ones who ultimately make language, but we feel have no control over it as it's such an emergent phenomenon. Markets are emergent phenomenon too, but individual market-places have proprietors and groups of users and therefore markets are more amenable to change. When something isn't working, we can change the rules!
The need to express abstract registers of time and deep space, and something of the life of the body, has never altered. Art is not a luxury, an object of exchange, a profession or a career; it is an intrinsic part of being human.
Seeing the earth from space was just breathtaking – I cannot imagine anywhere being more beautiful, we're living on an absolute paradise. Seeing our planet from that vantage point also changed my perspective on the concept of home. I used to think of myself as a New Yorker, as an America, but now? I'm a citizen of earth first and still all those things. Now, when I think of home, I think of the earth.
Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking, a way of acting, that enables you to realise your dreams. It allows ideas to thrive and become reality and success to be born from hard work, good intention, taking risks and believing in something that others may deem to be impossible.
My father taught me an important lesson; when you get something, when you receive something, it's important to give back. This lesson is something that has really stuck with me through my whole life, and I've always tried to do social good as much as I can.
Patience is really the act of letting things take the time that they take. It becomes more important as the world accelerates and as we have the opportunity technologically to do things faster and faster. There are many things that can't continuously be accelerated, or which can only be accelerated to a certain point.
What was impossible 20 years ago, is possible today. What is impossible today, will be possible x-years from now. We are always in change.
If we treat the mind and body as one unit, then wherever we put the mind, we necessarily put the body—and that opens up enormous possibilities for control.
If you want to see where human nature is most revealed, you have to look at human beings in their most stressful and painful scenarios. It is in those situations that you can learn how people behave and how you can behave.
Our ability to do philosophy is one of the things that distinguishes us from other animals- in some ways, it is that which makes us sapiens, 'wise monkeys'. Only humans seem to have developed this capacity for higher order questioning…. asking 'to what end are we doing this?' – 'why are we doing this at all?'