Thought Economics: Conversations with the Remarkable People Shaping Our Century

By Lemn Sissay and Vikas Shah

Since 2007, entrepreneur and philanthropist Vikas Shah MBE has been on a mission to interview the people shaping our century. Including conversations with world leaders, Nobel prizewinners, business leaders, artists and Olympians, he quizzes the minds that matter on the big questions that concern us all. We often talk of war and conflict, the economy, culture, technology and revolutions as if they are something other than us. But all these things are a product of us – people like you, who have ideas that matter. We live in fast-moving and extraordinary times, and the changes we're experiencing now, in these first decades of the twenty-first century, feel particularly poignant as decisions are made that will inform our existence for decades to come. Vikas Shah is not a journalist. But he is curious and persistent – two things that have driven his business success, but have also been instrumental in getting him access to some of the most extraordinary people on the planet. In Thought Economics, Vikas presents some of his most emotive and insightful interviews to date.

Interviewees include:
Marina Abramovic, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor Justin Barrett, Professor Sean Carroll, Professor Deepak Chopra, Professor George Church, Dame Jane Morris Goodall DBE, Sir Antony Gormley, Bear Grylls OBE, Professor Yuval Noah Harari, Sir Anish Kapoor CBE, Rose McGowan, Sam Neill, Professor Steven Pinker, Dr Jordan B. Peterson, Sir Ken Robinson, Professor Carlo Rovelli, Sadhguru, Dr Carl Safina, Dr Elif Shafak, Philippe Starck, Professor Jack Szostak, Dr Maya Angelou (1928-2014), David Bailey CBE, Black Thought, Heston Blumenthal OBE, Ed Catmull, Alain Ducasse, Tracey Emin CBE, George the Poet, Paul Greengrass , Siddharth Roy Kapur, Lang Lang, Ken Loach, Yann Martel, Moby, Sir Andrew Motion, Rankin, Ritesh Sidhwani, Lemn Sissay MBE,.Saul Williams, Hans Zimmer, Carlo Anceltti OSI, Mark Cuban, Professor Stew Friedman, Professor Green, Commander Chris Hadfield, Gary Hamel, Tony Hsieh, Arianna Huffington, Professor John Kotter, General Stanley McChrystal, General Richard Myers, Jacqueline Novogratz, Robert Bernard Reich, Nico Rosberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Stephen Schwarzman, General Sir Richard Shirreff, Hamdi Ulukaya, Jocko Willink, Sophia Amoruso, Steve Ballmer, Sir Richard Branson, Tory Burch, Stewart Butterfield, Steve Case, Dennis Crowley, Weili Dai, Sir James Dyson, Jamal Edwards MBE, Tony O. Elumelu, Scott Farquhar, Naveen Jain, Donna Karan, Kevin O'Leary , Robin Li, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, JosÉ Neves , Michael Otto, John Sculley, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jack Welch (1935-2020), will.i.am, Chip Wilson, Jerry Yang , Professor Muhammad Yunus, David Baddiel, Laura Bates, Lord John Bird MBE, Sir Philip Craven MBE, Dexter Dias QC , Melinda Ann Gates, Leymah Gbowee, Matt Haig, Afua Hirsch, Ruth Hunt, Jameela Jamil, L. A. Kauffman, Frederik Willem (F.W.) de Klerk, Iby Knill, Harry Leslie Smith (1923-2018), George Takei , Peter Tatchell, Ai WeiWei, Bertie Ahern, President Martti Ahtisaari, Professor Alexander Betts, Marina Cantacuzino, FranÇois CrÉpeau, Dr Shirin Ebadi, Ben Ferencz, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, Gulwali Passarlay, Professor George Rupp, Lech Walesa, Jody Williams, Catherine Woolard, Alastair Campbell, Noam Chomsky, Vicente Fox, Professor A. C. Grayling, Toomas Hendrik Ilve, Susan Herman, Garry Kasparov, Michael Lewis, Ted Lieu, MoisÉs NaÍm, Admiral James Stavridis, Ece Temelkuran, Yanis Varoufakik, Guy Verhofstadt, Lord Woolf, Bassem Youssef

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael O'Mara
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789292671

Book preview

world.

Ihave no business writing this book. I’m neither a journalist, nor a professional writer. What I am, however, is curious. I was the kid who kept asking questions in class, the one who tracked teachers down while they were on their well-earned breaks to ask nice simple questions like, ‘So, how does the universe work?’

My day job is in the world of business, and I guess you could call me an entrepreneur. But I don’t want to unnecessarily glamorize it by making you think of shiny people getting out of shiny private planes into shiny cars, checking the time on their house-priced shiny watches, before passing the big shiny gate of their gigantic architect-designed home. That’s not me. My companies are all firmly part of the small-business world.

The reason for my profile is more to do with the journey than the numbers. I started my first business when I was fourteen, which probably seems quite old by today’s tech-entrepreneur standards, but back then it was considered quite a fresh-faced age to be in the cut-and-thrust world of enterprise. That business, Ultima Group, was in web design and software development, but we also had a little side-hustle called Independent Software Reviews. This was one of the first online magazines, and my colleagues and I reviewed computer games, software and music. We didn’t realize how early we were to the table as an online publication, and before long this side-hustle gained momentum and we were receiving over half a million unique users per month. Back in the early days of the internet this was a huge number. We built one of the world’s first content management systems (which we called the ‘flatpack web’) and syndicated content around the world. I suspect one of the only reasons we didn’t capitalize more on the success of this publication was that we were all kids. This business (and the publication) came to an abrupt halt as the first dotcom bubble burst in 2001, but the writing bug never quite left me.

My generation was perhaps the last to be habituated with long-form content; we grew up with newspapers, journals and books, rather than the omnichannel video, podcast and social formats that became the norm by the start of this century. We also saw the world shift rapidly as technology gained prominence in our economic, cultural and social transactions and ideas became visibly the new engine of power. We have always talked about markets, the economy, culture, society and politics as phenomena that exist outside ourselves, when, in fact, they are the product of ideas, of people. They are not apart from us; they are us. That was my ‘aha’ moment, though it took some time to brew.

Fast-forward to the year 2007. Combining a need to fix my frustration at the lack of long-form content and my desire to write, I created a blog. It didn’t even have a domain – it was simply thoughteconomics.blogspot.com, a very simple blog without any design templates on Google’s free blogging platform. The name Thought Economics was born of the fact that it was thinking, ideas, concepts – the products of thought – that create our world, and so perhaps my blog could explore that. My plan was simply to publish the occasional long-form article myself on a topic of interest and include interviews with interesting people I’d met or got to know over the years. There was no strategy here – it was simply a way of indulging a hobby alongside my day job(s). I didn’t want to editorialize or turn the interviews into opinion pieces, but rather I transcribed the conversations and posted them as they were.

The more interviews I posted, the more the traffic grew, and it quickly became apparent that there was an audience out there who really enjoyed long-form interview content in a way that was raw, unedited and (quite importantly) not behind a paywall. By 2008, I’d started to regularly get emails from readers all over the world suggesting topics and individuals they would like me to approach – and that’s really where I returned to that aha moment. I made a pivot (to steal the start-up parlance) – I bought the domain thoughteconomics.com, built a proper website (albeit in WordPress) and began my mission to capture interviews with the individuals who I felt had made a meaningful impact in our time.

One of my first big-name interviews was with Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), and this experience taught me an important lesson: be more prepared. Jimmy was the first household name to grant my humble little blog their time. I sent him the questions I wanted to ask, and his response was quite simple: ‘I’ve answered those all before, try again.’ From that point on, I committed not only to research every interviewee in more detail, but to work with them to prepare questions around the areas they were most passionate about, and most interested in.

Rather miraculously, and only a few months later, I had a call booked with one of my personal heroes, former astronaut Buzz Aldrin. I’d done some pretty nerve-wracking things in my career thus far, but here I was, early evening UK time, waiting by the phone in my office for Buzz Aldrin to call me. The interview went well, but towards the end a particularly memorable moment reminded me that I was doing something quite unusual. My dad was in the office, as we had planned to get dinner together that evening and, mid-interview, he came over to me:

Dad: Do you want a cup of tea?

Me: (Hits mute on the phone.) No thanks, Dad, I’m a bit busy here …

Dad: Who are you on the phone to?

Me: Buzz Aldrin.

Dad: Bollocks. (Laughs as he walks back to the kitchen.)

I’d almost lost sight of how incredible these opportunities were in the excitement of growing my new website, but the disbelief my friends and family had about who I was speaking to made me realize what an absolute privilege it is to be able to get one-to-one time on the phone with some of the most influential and interesting people on the planet.

After I’d published my interview with Buzz, a journalist from a major newspaper emailed me and asked, ‘So, how did you get hold of him? We’ve been trying for a long time.’ I get asked this a lot, and my honest reply is that I just don’t know. I just asked! Of course, for every interview I publish, what you don’t see is the slew of rejections. I would estimate that every interview I get is the product of at least twenty approaches, and hence nineteen rejections. Sometimes it can feel personal – in the process of writing this book, I reached out to one leadership expert in the USA, and his office replied, ‘Aren’t most of the interviews on your site fake? I’m sorry, this doesn’t pass muster.’ A pretty god-awful reply, which can trigger a whole host of emotions, until I remind myself that I’m approaching people who get asked for interviews constantly, individuals who have a natural guard up and also who will have layers of people around them, primarily to protect and defend their time. In many ways, Thought Economics has been an exercise in determination for me, to prove to people that it is possible to do absurdly ambitious things if you have the tenacity and resilience.

When I was approached by my publishers about turning some of my conversations into a book, I worked through some of my favourite interviews and was struck by the common themes that ran through a lot of my questions and their revealing answers. The first was identity and the eternal question of who we are, what our purpose is, and what our place is in the world. This also led to many questions about culture, the paste that binds us together – our art, our music, our literature, everything that’s really important and feeds into our ideas on identity and belonging. That notion of belonging extends to those fundamental biases we carry in our own society. Discrimination in all its forms has resulted in pain, suffering and inequalities through the choices we have made about who is in or out of our tribes and groups – and has often been the cause of the conflicts we have seen as a backdrop to most of human history. Alongside these obvious challenges, society has made huge progress in peacebuilding and the greatest governance experiment of our times, democracy, which has created the political, legal and economic framework on which entrepreneurs have created the innovations, ideas and businesses that have pushed our world forward, creating a backbone for our economy, providing employment, opportunity and solving many of our most pressing challenges. All of this, however, would be impossible without leadership, and in every single interview I have done, it is those leadership qualities – the ability to inspire, to pull people together, and achieve the impossible – that have shone through.

Without a doubt, there are gaps within these chapters. There will be major topics or individuals you feel are missing; there may be perspectives that have not been addressed, or truths that need to be told. Thought Economics is constantly evolving, and interviews are being added regularly. I’m passionate about diversity of thought and perspectives, and will always do my best to make sure that it is represented across the site.

The best and worst of humanity has come as a result of our ideas, and at a time when so much of our world is feeling culturally, socially, economically and politically unstable, it’s on all of us not only to talk openly and honestly about these issues, but to take in as much diverse knowledge and as many opinions as we can, in a bid to understand them more deeply, rather than simply skim-reading enough to troll each other on Twitter.

It is in the spirit of creating that depth of understanding that I am committing a minimum of £10,000 of the royalties from this book to two organizations: In Place of War, an international charity I chair, which works across thirty countries in communities impacted by conflict, using the arts, research and entrepreneurship to build sustainable peace and opportunity; and the University of Manchester, England’s first civic university, closely linked to Manchester’s development as the world’s first industrial city, and a place that is carrying out world-changing research in many important areas. Both of these are charitable organizations, and both are fighting for knowledge, the power of thought, to be the light that shows us ways to change the world.

It is an honour to share these conversations with you, and if you want to share your feedback, or have suggestions for any new interviews or topics, you are always welcome to email me: [e-mail], or tweet @MrVikas.

Vikas Shah MBE

July 2020, London

www.thoughteconomics.com

Who are you? Well, physically, you’re mainly a bag of water. That sounds unremarkable enough, until you realize that the amount of water on our planet has remained reasonably constant since the earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Thus you, me and everyone around us are big bags of ancient water, which has cycled through oceans, rivers, forests and between each other. You could also be described as a bag of stuff, of matter, of atoms. Again, that sounds unremarkable enough until you realize that the stuff that forms us was made deep in the heart of stars, billions of years ago and, through processes that we still don’t fully understand, came to form you and me – strange super-monkeys that are intelligent enough to contemplate their origin and place in the universe.

Even the fundamental question of what we are when we refer to ‘I’ is fraught with doubt. Every day our body is changing and regenerating physically and developing mentally. It’s unlikely, for example, that you have many cells in your body now that were present at your birth, and the connections in your brain will be vastly different today than even a decade ago. When we refer to the self, we are really talking of the experiential continuity that has brought us to this present moment. You are in effect the result of your own idiosyncratic path through the gamut of reality, and the fact that those experiences are unique to you creates the self as an individual that exists as a phenomenon in time, irrespective and apart from any other individual. Understanding the self in this way is important. You are a unique and beautiful living experiment that is conscious enough to observe itself. The experiment of you is informed by a constant process of learning, given context by our education. To put it another way: we live, we learn. And that last point – learning – is critical. For most of history, deep thinking and self-discovery were tasks largely left to the intelligentsia and those who ruled their domain, whether it be religion, politics or nobility. The rest of us had to be passive and obedient enough to be useful, and relatively predictable.

As our species has progressed technologically, however, it has also become ever more protean. A citizen is no longer defined by ‘what’ they do, but rather exists as an individual who is able to learn, to question and to grow. Our new diffuse culture has also created the opportunity for humanity to innovate; we can explore who we are and what we are capable of in more dramatic ways than could ever be imagined. In the 1950s, for example, it would have been impossible to conceive the total sum of human knowledge being contained within a human-made computer network, or that we would have the technology to decode our very DNA, or that billions could be educated digitally in communities that still lack basic access to food and water. But less than half a century later, those things are taken for granted. The pace of change socially, culturally and technologically in our world is increasing rapidly, meaning that the shape of humanity even a decade from now will be significantly different to today, and invariably will require a different set of cognitive, emotional and spiritual apparatus to that which we currently wield.

Identity and who we are is so key to how we view everything else in our world that I wanted to start this book here. In this chapter are some of the conversations I had with artists, whose work naturally seeks to explain our place in the world. It also contains parts of some of the interviews I conducted with spiritual leaders for whom faith is a shared narrative of our experience of humanity, and with academics whose research and study are helping us to understand the beginnings of life itself. I have also included some of my interviews with leading physicists, who spoke to me about our place in the universe. Understanding identity, however, would feel incomplete without delving into the stories of our time, and so I’d also like to share conversations I had with some inspirational writers, who gave deeply beautiful accounts of who we are.

Why do identities matter?

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Identities essentially involve a few key elements. We have a label with ideas about how to apply it – to others, and by others. The label gives us a way to think, feel and do things and also consequences for identifying and thinking under that label. We also have the reality that in a society, the label affects how other people treat you and shapes how you treat and see them. For those of us who have an identity, it offers a conception of who we are, and helps us to think about how we ought to behave, who we belong with, with whom we should have solidarity, with whom we have conflict and who is on the inside and outside. Some of this, of course, can lead to negative outcomes, but there is a positive role of identity in shaping who we are. Modern life has allowed more identities, with more packages of expectations and behaviours for people who have those identities. In modern society, too, we can reject labels altogether and say, ‘I’m not a man! I’m a woman!’ or ‘I am a man, but being a man doesn’t have to be like that, it can be like this …’

How can we find our identity in this world?

Elif Shafak: I have always been very critical of identity politics. It saddens me to see how within my side of the political spectrum – the liberal left in general – many people, especially young people, want to defend identity politics as a progressive force. It is not. Identity politics can be a good starting point to raise awareness, but it cannot be our destination, it cannot be where we end up. The answer to a tribal instinct is not to retreat into another tribe. The way forward is to challenge the very mentality of tribalism. When I examine myself, I can see clearly that I do not have an identity. Instead I have multiple belongings. I am an Istanbulite, and I will carry Istanbul with me wherever I go. I am attached to the Aegean, the other side of the water, so Greek culture is also close to my heart. I am attached to Anatolia, with all its traditions and cultures: Armenian, Sephardic, Alevi, Kurdish, Turkish, Yazidi. I’ll embrace them all. I am attached to the Balkans – Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian, Slavic. I am attached to the Middle East: put me next to someone from Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Iraq – I have so much to share with them. At the same time, I am a European by birth, by choice, in the core values that I uphold. I am a Londoner, a British citizen and a citizen of the world, and a global soul. I am a mother, a writer, a storyteller, a woman, a nomad, a mystic, but also an agnostic, a bisexual, a feminist. Just like Walt Whitman said, ‘I contain multitudes.’ We all contain multitudes.

How have identities shaped society?

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Class has the virtue of being a kind of social identity that’s tied to something objectively real, that being your socioeconomic options. In some ways, our societies are becoming increasingly economically polarized and one of the challenges for those doing well out of the system (the club classes) is to distract people from the power of identity because if people organized around class identity, they would presumably be deposed since those at the bottom of the hierarchy are larger in number, and presumably they would wish to take action to reduce inequality. It’s a puzzle to me why class doesn’t play a bigger role in our politics. We use identities to make ourselves, to define ourselves with and against people – and we have to make a conscious effort to see this, else we will over-assign significance to identity, as we do in the world of gender. Women and men are far more similar than our gender ideologies suggest to us and we’ve been trying very hard for a couple of generations to push against the bad consequences of gender discrimination and patriarchy (the gender parallel to white supremacy). We’ve been trying to drive it out of our system, but people keep falling back into it. You cannot get rid of identities, but you can reform them.

Why do so many people build identity just on what they do?

Rose McGowan: I remember coming to a point where I realized that just because someone has a business card with their occupation on, it doesn’t define who they are or actually what they do. Why don’t those activities, which you don’t get paid for, which are your interests and passions, also qualify as being what you do; and why aren’t they, in some ways, more valuable? The two can certainly dovetail, but for most people these ‘other’ activities are dismissed as hobbies – or ‘useless talents’ – because they don’t make money. Those talents are actually there to help you to define yourself. I want to push society to grow, and four years ago when the #MeToo movement began, that was the idea: to see if we could push at the overall thought structure, and break those conversations that were happening over and over again. It was a bit like a cultural reset.

When people gather, I always think it’s interesting to hear the topics of conversation that ensue most often. If someone says, ‘So, tell me about yourself,’ the natural response is often to start with your occupation – ‘I run a business’, ‘I am a lawyer’, ‘I am a doctor’ and so on. When my first business collapsed following the dotcom bubble bursting, I came to realize very abruptly that defining your identity by what you do is dangerous and also limiting. We are capable of so much more than our jobs, and worth more, too. For as long as we’ve asked questions, religion and spirituality have been sources of answers, providing comfort and explanation for billions. I was born into quite a religious Hindu household, and saw this first-hand as my parents and extended family turned to religion to provide answers to the challenges of everyday life. As for me, my school, while grounded in faith, as many British schools are, had roots in science and in secular enquiry, and so my entire world view has been framed with this nuanced lens of deep respect for scientific and spiritual answers.

What does it mean to be alive?

Sadhguru: Not everybody is alive to the same extent. Life is available to us in many different dimensions, at different levels of sensitivity and perception, and unfortunately, not everyone is alive to the same extent; and that is why I’ve dedicated my work to get people to their fullest possible ‘aliveness’. The fundamental purpose of life is to know life in its full depth and dimension. If you want to know life, the only way is for you to live your own life at its peak. You are incapable of experiencing anything outside of you. What you think of as light and darkness are within you, that which is pleasure and pain happens within you, agony and ecstasy happen within you. Everything that you ever experience happens within you, and it’s your own aliveness that gives you access to the more profound dimensions of life to be experienced.

What does it mean to have a life well lived?

Jordan B. Peterson: A life well lived means that you spend a substantial amount of time addressing the troubles of the world – trouble with yourself, your family, your community. Everyone has a sense that things are less than they could be, and everyone is affected by the suffering they see around them. It seems to me that lays a moral burden on us that can’t be avoided, and that the only way to rectify this burden is to confront it and try to do something about it. People inevitably find that