From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The future is baked into the population of today, and that makes it very convenient for looking at the next couple of decades as our future soldiers are today in nursery school, and our future retirees are entering college.
We are the master race. We are the creatures who impose our will on virtually everything that lives and breathes. It's deeply shocking when you start to think about the scale of it.
Population aging is evidence that we've been doing a lot of things right. We're confident that if we have children, they will live long lives as well and we've never had those trends before in all human history.
Our system has never defined what it means to be 'good' – what is the ideal human being in capitalism? Is it Jeff Bezos? Is it Steve Jobs? They thrived, they profited, are they 'moral'? The ideal human profile of capitalism does not fit with our basic human dignity.
Nature is not the backdrop to our lives — it is our lives. We are nature and nature is us. There is no separation. We invented the ideology that we're exempt from nature's rules, that we're masters over nature, and that ideology is incorrect.
The last century has witnessed a radical transformation in the entire human environment, largely as a result of the impact of the mathematical and physical sciences upon technology.
I made a principled decision that none of my wealth will be passed on as inheritance, that my capital will work for philanthropic causes. In other words, philanthropy is the reason I make money.
Social media has completely and seismically changed our industry in a way that is hard to express. Historically we would have largely been reliant on a few gatekeepers, but that has been completely flipped on its head with social media, in that anybody with a unique voice that is able to connect with an audience can be talent.
We like to think of data as being objective, but the answers we get are often shaped by the questions we ask. When those questions are biased, the data is, too.
Truth is an aspiration which none of us can ever know that we have attained. Nobody has a pipeline to the truth; nobody is imbued with divine revelation. We seek truth through institutions like science, journalism, governance, justice systems and record keeping.
Humans are now more numerous than any large land animal ever to walk the Earth, and the combined weight of our fleshy biomass outstrips that of most other larger animals put together, with the single exception of our own livestock.
Consciousness is at the root of human identity. Fundamentally, we relate to each other as beings with feelings and experiences. Consciousness is at the root of everything that really matters in life from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, these are the things that make life worth living.