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631 interviews · 4,952 quotes
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In this interview, I spoke to Carlos Gutierrez, former US Secretary of Commerce and the youngest chief executive in Kellogg's history, about fleeing Cuba as a child, selling cereal from a van…
In this interview, I spoke to Jesper Kouthoofd, founder of Teenage Engineering, about why he still refuses the title of designer, why he thinks every product is an illusion and the honest…
In this interview, I spoke to Jonathan Caplan KC, one of Britain's most senior barristers, who has spent 50 years applying the evidentiary standards of the criminal Bar to unidentified anomalous phenomena.…
In this interview, I spoke to Michelle Gielan, positive psychology researcher, former CBS Morning News anchor and author of Resilient Optimism, about why optimism is a set of behaviours rather than a…
In this interview, I spoke to Major General Arthur Denaro, who led his regiment through sixteen kilometres of minefield to liberate Kuwait and was Chief of Staff of UN forces in Bosnia.…
In this interview, I spoke to Professor Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, about when individual leaders genuinely change outcomes. We discussed discretion, timing, his Hamlet Test for…
In this interview, I spoke to Ian Proud, a former British diplomat and Foreign Office crisis expert, who drove nine hours into the 2004 tsunami zone on Boxing Day. We discussed what…
In this interview, I spoke to Professor Anthony Kaldellis, who argues the eastern Roman Empire was no absolutism but a polity governed by consent, where rulers who misread the public mood were…
In this interview, I spoke to Dr Tom McClelland, the Cambridge philosopher who argues we should be agnostic about AI consciousness. We discussed why language models have broken humanity's tools for detecting…
In this interview, I spoke to Professor Michael Levin, who argues that cognition came before life rather than after it. We discussed bioelectric "cognitive glue", xenobots and anthrobots, why six lines of…
In this interview, I spoke to Victor Vescovo, one of only two people to have stood at Earth's highest peak, descended to its deepest trench and looked back at the planet from…
In this interview, I spoke to Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup method and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who argues that corporate corruption is structural rather than moral. We…
In this interview I speak to author Turi Munthe, who argues that climate, geography, genes, brain shape and ancestral agriculture quietly script our deepest beliefs. He explains why polarisation thrives on a…
In this interview, I speak to Professor Jens Juul Holst — co-discoverer of GLP-1, the gut hormone now powering the most consequential drug class of the century. He talks about how a…
In this interview, I spoke to Nobel laureate Alvin Roth about his book Moral Economics and the repugnant transactions at its centre: exchanges willing parties want but others would ban. We discussed…
In this interview, I speak to Professor Andrés Velasco — Dean of LSE’s School of Public Policy, Chile’s former Finance Minister, and co-editor of The London Consensus. He argues that ideas, not…
In this interview I speak to Dr Leanne ten Brinke - an award-winning psychologist and associate professor at the University of British Columbia, where she directs the Truth and Trust Lab. Drawing…
In this interview I speak to Dr. Richard Socher — pioneer of neural NLP, inventor of widely used word vectors, and founder of You.com. He discusses his journey from contrarian Stanford researcher…
You know what to do. So why aren’t you doing it? In this interview, I speak to NYT bestselling author Nir Eyal — the man who wrote the book on habits, then…
What 89 conversations with the world's leading thinkers reveal about health and human longevity
What 160 conversations with the world's leading thinkers reveal about war, peace, and geopolitics
What 190 conversations with the world's leading thinkers reveal about the nature of reality
What 207 conversations with the world's leading thinkers reveal about the fight for justice
What 161 conversations with the world's leading thinkers reveal about resilience and mental strength
From the archive
It's not just about things that I did and how powerful I ended up being. It's more about how unlikely the journey was.
— Carlos GutierrezIt was classic Washington: lawmakers passed a bill so they'd have a positive talking point, and then put no effort into its execution.
— Carlos GutierrezHyperfocus, for me, is so strong and so intense that the odds of being successful in that specific task go up substantially, because you're thinking about it twenty-four hours a day. Most people don't do that.
— Carlos GutierrezThere's a sense I picked up from the Cuba experience that if you're not struggling, you're not really working. Life is a struggle. Don't be surprised. It's never going to be easy.
— Carlos GutierrezLeadership, ironically, in an era where everything is technology, is more important than ever.
— Carlos GutierrezHow can I be against immigration when I came to this country as a refugee?
— Carlos GutierrezWhen politicians say, we are going to keep your factory open, knowing that there's no way that factory can compete in a globalised world, that also works against trust. What they should say is: you're going to lose your job because of what is happening around the world, and we have to retrain you. Nobody says that.
— Carlos GutierrezDo people trust that you will make the right decision for the company when the moment comes? Not the right decision for you, but the right decision for the company. And once you get it, it's an amazing thing to have. But you can lose it very easily.
— Carlos GutierrezI did sacrifice everything else. In my mind, it's part of the price you pay. They say some people find their self-esteem in different places. I found my self-esteem in work.
— Carlos GutierrezThe thing about luck is that you have to have the skill to recognise it. Because we all have fortunate circumstances in front of us, but sometimes we don't see them.
— Carlos GutierrezI communicate through design rather than long interviews like this. I hope the story is told through the objects.
— Jesper KouthoofdWhat happens if your legacy was that you created a new era, like the Renaissance? That would be cool. Very, very ambitious, but super fun to explore.
— Jesper KouthoofdThis is a safe zone for us, so let us move to an unsafe zone and do something new.
— Jesper KouthoofdA lot of people, when they create an object, do an analysis of what will sell, rather than what they believe in themselves.
— Jesper KouthoofdOne of our methods in our studio is that we do not have presentations.
— Jesper KouthoofdIf you like it, you like it. If you do not like it, you will probably hate it. So we have a lot of haters as well, because we break that illusion.
— Jesper KouthoofdYou live in an illusion that a product solves a problem. But it creates some kind of presence instead.
— Jesper KouthoofdWhen people laugh and say, no, we can't do it, then I know we have to do it.
— Jesper KouthoofdWe do not need a lot of money. We just need enough money to do the next project.
— Jesper KouthoofdFirst of all, I think that is the greatest illusion in technology history. It is sold as something that it isn't. And what I miss with that technology is that it does not have any soul.
— Jesper KouthoofdThey would have to come clean about the catalogue of deception they have practised over the last 80 years.
— Jonathan Caplan KCYou can't lose sight of the fact that this may not be our planet. We may actually just be one species of inhabitants here, and this may belong to others.
— Jonathan Caplan KCThe majority of this phenomenon is not visiting. The numbers show that these are not passing visitors.
— Jonathan Caplan KCThere is a very strong case that we have had this kind of non-human intelligence, which has been worshipped or depicted as gods, for thousands of years.
— Jonathan Caplan KC
