From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It's about the pursuit of a vision. It's about being brutally honest each day. It's about truly understanding the role of housekeeping versus the relationship with your customer.
The real strength of our culture lies in what happens once our basic needs are met. As social capital develops, humans become increasingly able to perform feats way beyond the biological and cognitive limitations of the individual.
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.
Social media has been a wonderful thing; it allows celebrities to bypass the middle-man. Many celebrities have also been able to monetise their social-media and make extra money, often very serious amounts. Crucially, social media gives celebrities the opportunities to speak for themselves and set the record straight.
The role of a chef today is not just to feed people, but to be a storyteller, an educator, a guardian of traditions while pushing boundaries.
Human beings seem like their default recreation is sedation. For some reason, getting drunk at a bar is the default in what people do for fun, which I find bizarre.
I have way too often felt like 'the other.' Even in my motherland, I did not quite fit in. I never did. This is partly because I was born in France, Strasbourg. After my parents separated, my father stayed in France and remarried.
Women were never in the driver's seat with dating. It always came down to the man to take the lead, to ask the girl... There was this playbook where the guy has the power, the girl is weak and fragile waiting to be saved by Prince Charming... and this is disempowering for both sides.
Cinema and drama are also changing perceptions in India. This certainly happened with Made in Heaven which was commercially entertaining, but had a main character who was Gay. It blew everyone away and started an important conversation which was really encouraging.
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.
All the market research we have done shows that consumers use diamonds to mark special moments in their lives because they are timeless, have been in the ground 3 billion years and are unique.
We've had an explosion of platforms that have atomized the delivery and consumption of music, and I'm really for that- it's democratized music. Previously, there were a lot of gatekeepers that controlled how you were supposed to listen to music… that's all gone now.