From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We must fundamentally change how we see children - not as objects of charity, but as individuals with rights, with potential, with the power to transform our world.
There's an interesting over-representation of physicists within the existentialist community. Physicists, especially astronomers and cosmologists have had a glimpse of how vast the universe is, and the potential value of it, versus our planet.
Water is like energy - it can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. But unlike energy, water is essential for every single biological process. We're not just managing a resource, we're managing life itself.
I have always thought that if you are abducted for a week, 2 weeks, even a month- you don't know what abduction is. It's only after a certain time that you understand the weight of abduction.
Music can reveal the nature that lies within us, the part of us we cannot hide. When you hear a single note, a C, it's not a single sound, it's the result of many harmonies. It's like God hiding in plain sight.
If a company doesn't have a purpose, I think they are wasting their life. Making money should be the result of helping people to build businesses.
What are you responsible for and what are you not responsible for? That's a fundamental question in life. If we start feeling bad about things over which we have no control, that is the inevitable source of a downward spiral.
I have a deep fascination with the natural world, the problems that living creatures need to solve and how natural selection evolution by natural selection has solved those problems. When it comes to flight... It's all about physics... how you solve the problems raised by physics.
Connection is not a nice to have. When we lose the right kinds of connections with others, we start to feel we don't exist.
If the role of government is, as Thomas Hobbes put it, to stop life being nasty brutish and short because humans unregulated are at each other's throats, then government has to step up to that plate now and start rethinking what it can do to ensure cohesion in societies where you will always have disagreement.
There are significant distinctions between what we perceive to be reality and the cold, hard, molecular world we inhabit. Our brains are constantly taking shortcuts to inform us about the world and this introduces an intrinsic error which our brains are filling in.
I am a father of two small children. When you have children, you have to ask yourself what the world will look like in the next 80-100 years, because people get that old these days if everything goes well. Last but not least, as a father I see it as my responsibility to think about my actions and my motives.