The Ledger, every show

“You have to be fairly settled in yourself to allow a child to have a better life than you had. I know the cliches that every parent wants that. No. I don't, I mean, I, experience does not bear that out.”

“Because if you really believe in a world in which everyone who gets to the top deserves to get to the top, you have to believe in a world in which those who get to the bottom deserve to be at the bottom.”

“I don't think you should bring your full self anywhere, because if we really think about what your full self is, it includes, you know, infantile bits of you when you were two, bits of you that are full of rage, bits of you that are full of envy and bitterness…”

“Envy is one of the key motivators, and people are envious of their children.”

“The human animal doesn't change. Our constitution is the same now as it was, you know, thousands of years ago, and that Puts a cap, really, on the amount of novelty that we're able to build. We build a lot of new tools. We are tool builders. We always have bee…”

“I think it should really be banned for adults more, you know.”

“A marker of good parenting is that your child doesn't have any wish to be famous.”

“When companies start talking about loving their employees and being a family, etc., they've tied themselves in a knot. They've borrowed the language of private life. In order to foster a short-term sense of togetherness.”

“One of the ills of the modern age is this belief that we are always in unparalleled, uncharted waters, and that's an exhausting, and I think untrue you know perspective on things.”

“Looking at it through an evolutionary biological lens, that's maybe the function of adolescence is to act as a sieve between sort of generational knowledge.”

“We hold people much more tightly responsible for their fates, and therefore if people mess up, The psychological consequences are harder than ever.”

“Religious ideology is terribly prone to engaging a side of human nature which is really unfortunate which is around authoritarianism, dogmatism black and white thinking you know, friend or foe thinking.”

“So it's not so much that we want more meaning, it's that quite naturally, without anyone meaning to, modern industrial processes have drained many jobs Of their meaning.”

“It's not going to come ready made like a sort of, as an external voice. You have to assemble from fragments, a whole working identity and mission.”

“Sometimes people have spent a concentrated period with their friends and family, normally family of Christmas or whatever they may be aching to get back to work because the true self of themselves and of those around them is just slightly unbearable and they'r…”

“From purely economic perspective, it doesn't matter if people are buying psychotherapy lessons or buying handguns. Same thing for the economy. You know, the economy will grow. It doesn't matter what the product or service is.”

“Every time encounter any kind of unhappiness, you're encountering, ah, something that's a business idea that might not have come to fruition.”

“I think that entrepreneurial opportunity, and to be able to see entrepreneurial opportunity, is, is a faculty that exists in a latent form inside everybody.”

“And what happens in modern society is these companies hack into our biology in order to exploit our lack of self-control.”

“If you don't have a plan, you're full prey to the plans of others. And what goes wrong often in people's lives is they don't really have a plan.”

“People often say we're very materialistic nowadays. We're not particularly materialistic. What we are is we're hungry for status, for love, respect, dignity, and we live in a world in which that status is available via the acquisition of material goods.”

“And, you know, and on the whole, psychologists would argue, you know, I think it's almost common sense, that the amount of independence that you're capable of in adulthood is directly related to the amount of love and esteem you were given as a child from peop…”

“It's the paradox of modernity. We are richer than ever before, but more restless and anxious than ever before.”

“People who are leaders in their field often have about them a courage in asking the so-called obvious question, which isn't obvious at all. They're able to put themselves in the shoes and they're able to inhabit without shame the position of someone who doesn'…”

“Fame generally doesn't deliver on its promises because, you know, what the fame seeking person wants is, is love, respect, dignity, and what they find instead is envy, insecurity backlash, etc.”

“The most legitimate ambition is in some ways to bite off some area of the eudaimonic project and make that the thing that you pursue according to your talents.”

“An insight that a person reaches themselves is worth, you know, much, much more than an insight which has been given to them pre-prepared by somebody else.”

“Most societies for most periods of history have believed that any achievement is, is a combination of individual effort and divine intervention.”

“But there's lots of indirect ways in which one person can influence another by suggesting what would make them happy, what they believe in. You don't have to, you know, you can talk about one thing and actually be talking about another. And when children grow …”

“Snobbery is an interesting thing, because a snob is really anyone who uses a particular system of judgment that's rigid and fairly one-dimensional to assess human beings.”

“It's the constant striving to matter, and to feel that you are immortal, that is at the origin of unhappiness”

“Meaningful work is really work where you can feel that in some way, through your labour, you are either reducing the suffering or increasing the pleasure of another human being.”

“If you divide labor, you're also dividing meaning. So there is meaning in the organization, but there's not meaning in the individual soul of everyone in, in, on the production line, as it were.”

“I would say it's as hard to figure out what you're good at as it is almost as it is to know what you love.”

“What we know is, I guess, brand extension or brand definition has got a, an analogy in, in individual life as well.”

“Start very, very young, because the younger you are, the fewer risks there are. It gets much, much harder to risk things when you get in, especially when you have a family. So try and get the early, try and try and get the risk done, you know, pretty early. Yo…”

“There are many people who are actually quite, you know, well motivated. They can see the goal. They don't need a reminder of their colleague. They got the colleagues in their heads. They don't need to see the building. They don't need to see the logo. They don…”

“There's a working identity crisis that can be spurred by remote working, which is, you know, I trained as an accountant, I took the exams, I'm now part of a gigantic accounting firm, et cetera, but now it's 12 o'clock, and I've been in my room, and I'm very fa…”

“And that's what advertising does brilliantly. It shows us one thing that we really need, and it ties it up with something that we might desire, but probably don't need at all. And therefore sets us on the wrong track”

“I think a great leader is someone who has got a sense of what they're trying to do, because everything flows from that and why they're trying to do it. So all the other things that we associate with good leadership, management, etc, flows ultimately from a kno…”

“Many of the moves we need to make around children are also moves we need to make around adults. And it's not being patronizing to think that. It's actually honoring what human beings like, which is a fascinating conglomerate of the child and the adult. And I t…”

“All of us are fated to run out of time before we've done more than scratch the surface, which is, you know, real existential agony.”

“We need this in, in our own lives, often a reminder of who we are, where we're going, what the trajectory is, and an evocation of it through imaginative means. So you might want to, you know, investment that you made seven years ago, you might want to show som…”

“Well, I love the paintings of a German, nineties-century artist called Caspar David Friedrich, who does large canvases of He does mountains, he does cliffs, he does waterfalls, he does oceans, and people are looking out at, tiny little human figures are lookin…”