From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There's a compelling mission—both because of the enormous economic opportunity it represents, if it succeeds, and because of the broader impact it can have on the world. The mission is defined by a stubborn technical challenge. It has to be hard. No one wants to work on something that isn't difficult, and in a sense, choosing the hardest problems becomes a moat.
In the realm of experts, intuition, anchored in a substantial reservoir of experience and knowledge, becomes an invaluable asset. It's essentially a dialogue with your unconscious. However, for it to be constructive, your unconscious necessitates a good measure of education. An uneducated unconscious is a perilous entity.
We try to make decisions through a kind of committee-based approach around what species we're going to bring back, where we're going to invest our dollars, and what fits our core ethos. If it's not going to be beneficial to humans, if we can't do it at arm's length from humans, and if we can't do it in a way that's good for animals, then we just don't touch it.
A resilient position means that you are not always on the brink of war. The cost of war is so great that being on the brink is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. We have to make leaders and societies pay more attention to the costs of conflict.
We cannot focus only on the material aspects of poverty- we must address the poverty of spirit that's present in every one of our broken institutions: health systems, economic systems, criminal justice systems, and food systems. If we are going to solve the toughest problems we face as a world right now, we're going to need new operating principles that are compatible with a deeply interconnected world.
Open-source evidence is essentially public information available to anyone and can be traced back to its original source. We've always maintained transparency in our methodologies and the step-by-step processes we employ to validate an image or investigate. Thus, our work can be reverse engineered. If there are any flaws in our methodology, they're readily apparent.
It's about creating legal accountability around the creation of value for stakeholders, not just shareholders. That's what changes the conversation in the boardroom.
What really matters is how well you know yourself — because every aspect of your leadership is expressed through your personality. I think that single trait — self-awareness — or rather, that skillset, outweighs all the others put together.
When these people are under stress, they make bad decisions. They get reactive. One of the key findings in our conclusions is that the unsuccessful founders were more reactive. They weren't measured. They weren't deliberate. They didn't make decisions based on facts — their emotions carried them away.
When a coach gains the player's confidence and establishes a strong partnership, they can effectively motivate the player, boost their confidence, and help them break through barriers. This can elevate a player's career to new heights.
I started from a position of giving, without expectation of return. I also decided that I only wanted to work with people who I loved to work with.
To me it was an adventure. I'm a hardened explorer and adventurer, and I remember the whole mission as an adventure with some awesome experiences and beautiful sights.