From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Community brings out the good… the encourager in people. You could be on a treadmill next to someone who's having a hard time, and it just brings it out of you.
So many of the things our culture pushes us to pursue for happiness don't actually work the way we think they will. Material possessions, more money—if you're on social media, you get this strong sense that you should go after more of everything and then you'll feel better.
Identities are useful – if you had to make everything up in your life, from the start, with no input whatsoever – that wouldn't be freedom – you'd be less free; you'd have to think constantly about what you should or should not do. There would be no structure for your life choices.
Everything we do in one sense or another is consummatory. We consume religious narratives, we consume literature, we consume friendships. Our mate choices are the ultimate form of consumer choice.
We can expand our circle of sympathy – we can employ the logic of impartiality, and the emotional prompts of human contact and vicarious experience, and expand our fellow-feeling from our family to our clan, our nation, tribe, and from there to all of humanity and even other sentient beings.
I often envision the modern world as a battleground, with a continuous tug-of-war between the forces of salvation and our own potentially destructive instincts. AI emerges as a beacon of hope with a promise to significantly elevate the quality of life, especially for those in the lower echelons of society.
When considering the prevalence of this disease, we're speaking of 7 million diagnosed patients in the US. But how many Americans currently have the initial stages of Alzheimer's already festering in their brains? I concur with the higher estimates, suggesting around 40 million people.
Where decent jobs are scarce, women can achieve financial independence by becoming job creators rather than job seekers – providing, of course, that they have the right support and opportunities to do so.
On our Sahara Desert crossing, there was a man, who was dying of thirst, who urinated in his hand and shared some with me when he needed it to survive. The world is about sharing and giving to others.
We don't change the world through opinions, we change it with examples. So I've been putting myself out there, reaching out and connecting.
Photography has become the universal language. It doesn't matter what country you're from, what language you speak, we all understand images. That's what makes it so powerful and so dangerous.
All three of these causal forces manifest to such a degree of intensity as they do today. They have always been present but have not had this degree of intensity and not all at once. That's what makes this a particularly dangerous moment.