0:02
Exploring Doubt, Knowledge, and Interconnectedness
We’ve never had more access to information, answers, and capability, but that doesn’t always mean we’re seeing more clearly.
Tie on Earth is a space for conversations with people whose experiences, ideas and perspectives might help us notice something we hadn’t before, question and assumption, or see what’s possible from another angle.
I’m Philippa White, founder of Thai Leadership and author of Return on Humanity.
For over 20 years, my work has taken me across industries, cultures and very different worlds, exploring how perspective shapes the way people think, behave and work together.
This is Thai Unearthed.
What does a lifetime spent studying the universe and crossing oceans teach you about certainty?
What happens when you become more comfortable saying, I don’t know?
And what if the real problem isn’t a lack of knowledge, but what happens after the knowledge is there?
Welcome to episode 124 of Thai Unearthed.
My guest today is Tiehi Kvosia, an astrophysicist, author and sailor who has spent his career exploring some of the biggest questions in science while also working at the intersection of science, society, and political decision making.
Tia.
He helped develop high energy astrophysics at the University of Geneva, created and LED the Science Data Center responsible for ES as integral gamma ray satellite, and has held senior roles across European science, including President of the European Astronomical Society and the European Academy’s Science Advisory Council.
And alongside all of that, he and his wife Barbara have spent years sailing extraordinary distances around the world.
Another perspective on uncertainty, judgement and our place within much bigger systems.
In this conversation, we explore doubt as a strength, Why expertise should make us more, not less, willing to listen, what happens when knowledge collides with politics and vested interests, Why our biggest challenges demand much more joined up thinking And what Tia He has learned about judgement after a lifetime spent in science.
This is such a thoughtful conversation and I can’t wait for you to hear it.
2:37
Letting Go of Ocean Crossings, Embracing New Chapters
Tia He welcome to Thai Unearthed.
Yeah, he it is so great that we are doing this conversation.
I have been really looking forward to this and I am so honoured to have you with us.
So thank you for taking the time.
Nothing to be honoured of.
Very honored, which our listeners are going to find out why shortly, just so that people can put you and our friendship in perspective.
It was fantastic to meet you when you were on one of your voyages around the world.
Very honored that we got to meet you here, got to sit on your boat and then got to show you around Olinda.
You got to see my house.
And that was how long ago was that now?
That was in 2020, three and we were in Salvador de Baya for the carnival.
Yes, that’s right.
And actually we liked Brazil very much.
I, I thoroughly enjoy this mix of African and European culture.
It’s something which is very peculiar, very special.
We went to the festival of Yemenia when we arrived in Salvador.
So we did sacrifice with flowers and with perfume, which for an old Calvinist, it was quite something.
It was great actually.
It’s so great that Google put you in touch with Georgie and maybe as well, because obviously they are very much into the Salvadoran Bayan culture and that would have just been fantastic as well.
And that’s what I love about this sailing culture and traveling world where you meet some people and then they thought you need to meet such and such, and then you go and then you meet those people.
And then it’s just this wonderful voyage of just different experiences that just come together as a result.
Obviously, you are a sailor and you have sailed, but there’s also a whole other part to you.
So you’re an astrophysicist, you’ve worked in public institutions.
Tell me, where are you joining us from right now?
Actually, that would be really interesting.
And then what are you?
Just what are you thinking about at the moment?
Well, I’m I’m in the hall and all is a small city on the shore of Lake Geneva.
We had been owning Vineyard for many, many years, family estate, but we decided to give that to our children some years ago before they were too old to do something with it, you know.
And we are now in a flat in this little city, which is very close to where we used to be.
That’s where we have a social life, close to Geneva, where I still have an office.
OK, what I’ve been doing recently is to write an essay on beauty in science.
I’ve been fascinating since since my studies really by the fact that many pages in science are really beautiful, like art.
And that’s something which I wanted to put forward once because everybody talks about science as a utilitarian tool for society and and I think it’s wrong.
Actually it comes second way after the fact of being beautiful.
So that’s what I’ve been trying to do in the last months.
And what?
What are you?
You’re turning it into a book.
It’ll be a short book and I’m looking for an editor now I I hope to have found somebody who will be ready to to edit that.
OK, interesting.
And does it have to do with astrophysics?
No, it’s more to do with physics.
You know, I I don’t want to show nice images of the sky.
It’s not.
The sky is beautiful indeed, but it’s not the point I want to make.
What I want to make is the fact that the science to uncover some of these things is beautiful, like the equations of Maxwell or Holtzmann.
Some of these pages which for themselves are really like a page of Mozart.
That’s amazing.
Yes, fantastic.
Well, I look forward to hearing how that evolves.
Before we get into some of your other thinking, let’s start with the C Actually, it was a health emergency that happened when you were in the Gambier Islands of you and your wife Barbara.
You’ve created a life around the world doing huge crossings regularly.
And unfortunately, because of this health emergency, you decided to stop these ocean crossings, which I’m sure was a difficult decision to make, but at the same time necessary because it must have been quite scary what you experienced.
What was it like to make a decision that was necessary but also meant letting go of such a big part of your shared life?
Well, we, we knew it would come to an end.
You know, we, we will not live infinitely long.
We old obviously.
So we, we knew that health would bring us to an end of sailing at at some point.
So it came a bit faster than expected, maybe in a slightly more abrupt manner, but we knew it would come.
And when it did, we really had sailed.
And we have sailed from from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from from Russia to Polynesia.
So we’ve sailed, we’ve sailed a lot.
And the fact of, of having done something without 2 boats meant that it’s not so dramatic.
Probably like death, you know, if you’ve lived well, death is not much of a problem.
In a way, it has something similar to that sort of reflection.
Kind of.
No regrets.
Not at all.
We did what we could while we could do it and fine.
So the chapter is now at an end and and that’s it.
It’s interesting actually and I know this is not the same, but I think maybe the feeling is similar.
I mean, I had two children.
I love my children dearly.
I have 0 desire to be pregnant again.
I have 0 desire to deal with the toddler again.
I have done that chapter.
It was lovely.
I love seeing them growing up.
I’m loving each kind of phase and I feel like I’m growing with them at each phase.
But that chapter is so closed for me.
And I just think it’s really interesting how some people sort of feel.
Oh no, really miss it.
And I just and I just, I think no done it was nice moving on.
I think you’re perfectly right.
Back to death, just because we’re going to touch on the happy subjects of the on this podcast, But when we spoke earlier, I brought up certainty in the conversation and just reflecting on what are the certainties in life?
9:06
Why Expertise Makes You Less Certain, More Open
And we both agreed that, you know, well, actually you said, well, death, taxes and tides.
And then I think I’ve said, well, and the sky, come on, ask for physics.
Oh yes, and the sky.
But as you know, these are the certainties in life.
But you also said that the more we know, the more clearly we are aware that there’s things that we don’t know.
And I just am curious, can you remember when you first understood this concept of doubt being a strength and not a weakness?
Doubt, I think I’ve lived with doubt since my childhood.
I think that that belongs to, to to my culture from very, very, very early on, Certainly from reading more than and about Pascal, who both put doubt much on the four of the scene.
I mean, you have to be a bit careful with that because it’s it’s essential.
It’s necessary.
You you don’t have a critical mind if you don’t doubt.
And a critical mind is something that we need and we need a lot of.
But you shouldn’t doubt about everything all the time, because then you don’t have a stone on which you can step.
To move forward.
You have to have the doubt.
You have to have the right quantity of doubt.
Only certainties is also completely unhelpful.
To have the answers but not the questions doesn’t help you move forward either, which depends on the subject, on where in life you are, et cetera.
But you need to assess that all the time.
You need that in in science.
That certainly is true.
When somebody says something, you have to say, Are you sure?
But you need that everywhere in life too.
It’s not something which is limited to the realm of science.
It’s something that goes absolutely everywhere in life and in discussions and in interactions with people.
Again, with the right sort of of level, there are people who give you certainties and you will say you let it go knowing that it’s nonsense.
But if you want to construct, then you question.
And as soon as you start questioning, then it means that doubt or lack of knowledge is there.
And that’s fine.
And it’s true what we mentioned once that when you are senior in your in your field, when you’ve proven yourself, then you always say, I don’t know, you’re free to do that.
The more senior you are, the freer you are to show your weakness and your doubts and your uncertainties and your unknowledge.
And it’s the best way also to make the others progress, you know, questioning and not knowing.
Then they discover what they know and what they don’t know.
And it helps everybody grow from there.
At your job too, I guess.
You question people and they ask you.
You put the questions to me and I said well, and then I started.
Writing it down.
And something came out of it, so.
And it’s interesting, I was working with a team not long ago, and this might have been a cultural nuance, but I found it fascinating because along this line of thinking around doubt and that saying, I don’t know, that’s an area of vulnerability, it’s allowing yourself to be vulnerable.
But if you are senior, it’s a minor vulnerability because it comes on an asset and actually with time it even ceases to be a vulnerability but becomes a strength.
Exactly.
And it is a strength.
And therefore, you could say to allow yourself to show vulnerability is a strength.
And it’s interesting because this team, one of the leaders of the team was saying, but this is not being vulnerable.
But for me, that’s not vulnerability.
And I found that interesting actually, because, well, maybe that’s what we’re saying is actually it isn’t vulnerability to say that I don’t know something is simply just stating a fact.
It’s impossible to know everything if you don’t know.
Well done for you for saying that you don’t know and that you’re not sure the way forward because you’re probably at a, at a part of this project or of this analysis or of this strategy where you need to start bringing in other voices to help construct whatever it is that you’re creating.
And that’s just understanding Co creation or understanding the importance of interdependence.
It’s not a negative.
And I think what’s interesting is my language.
I have talked a lot about vulnerability being a, a positive thing and I still believe that.
But actually it’s interesting, I think that word vulnerability has turned people off and they, they sort of feel almost, well, no, I’m, I’m not a vulnerable person, but I love how you talk about it is doubt and how you say, well, it is doubt.
It’s obviously questioning and it’s, but the more senior you get, the more doubt you should have in certain parts of it.
And as you say, you don’t want to constantly have doubts otherwise you don’t move forward.
But having that critical mind is key.
Without that, you, you, you don’t move.
Actually, you have to question politely or more or less.
So.
I mean, nowadays everybody is so infinitely polite.
No, no, you, you don’t say to somebody else saying a nonsense.
You might think it, but then you put it in flowers all over the place.
That may not be that helpful either.
And I think you’ve said it already, but I do think I just want to ask it specifically, did you feel the more senior you got, it became easier to say?
I don’t know.
Absolutely.
Because you, you’ve proven yourself in many ways and the people with whom you talk, they, they know what you’ve done, they, they know your asses.
So when you go from that point, then it’s easier.
The more solid you are in a way, the, the freer you are to admit that.
And with your vis A vis it is then seen to be constructive rather than something else.
And again, so it’s a sort of positive spiral.
And I really loved what you said about it allows the progression of other people as well.
I talk about that in my book and I, I feel I live it all the time actually with my kids.
You know, it’s unbelievable with people that I work with or even my children, when you give people you are less experienced than you are space to fill, it’s unbelievable how they will fill that space.
I find it really interesting how even just saying I don’t know when you truly don’t know, it doesn’t make sense to talk over somebody who is more junior than you because they will without question have a different opinion about whatever it is that you’re working on.
They will come at it from a completely different point of view.
Their schooling has been different because they’re another generation and it opens up 1 like you say, that opportunity for them to grow and and feel like they can contribute, which just is so powerful.
But you really do get something as a result.
And it’s so amazing when you bring in these voices.
And it just seems so strange to me how really senior people seem to feel this need to prove something to those other people around them and don’t see that the power of doubt.
16:23
Why Knowledge Alone Doesn’t Solve Global Problems
So you wrote a book called Stars to States and you made the argument that for some of our biggest challenges, the problem is low no longer that we lack knowledge because we already know a great deal about what needs to be done about various things in this world.
And even now with AII mean knowledge, we it’s not something we are short on.
Now we have access to pretty much anything we want to understand.
So why do we collectively neglect the knowledge that we already have?
I think there are several aspects in that, indeed.
I don’t think we have a water problem.
I don’t think we have an energy problem.
I don’t have.
We know what to do.
There’s plenty of water.
Just look out of your window and we may have an entropy problem because you need to take the salt out of the water, but that you do with energy and energy we have plenty of you also look outside and plenty of sunshine and we know how to tame these things.
We we know how to deal with all of that.
We also know that until now, and more so until not so long ago, it’s not infinitely expensive to do all of that.
It’s a few percent of world gross national product or whatever you want to name it.
What it really means.
I think when that’s a subject where I know a bit less, but it, what it means is that it’s it’s a small part of human activity which is needed in order to solve these big issues that we have and we know what to do.
That’s absolutely true.
We’ve had schools, universities, academies write, report and tell, analyse what should be done, how for the buildings, for the transportation, for this and for that.
So we do know it’s not perfect.
There are some contradictions on which the industry plays an awful lot to say.
Oh, no, no, no, no, they don’t know what they’re saying.
So that’s enfimage, as we say in in French.
And why we don’t do that is because our decision making process is is crude.
We have a decision making process which since the French Revolution also very collectively has been working at least for parts of the world, not not for everywhere, but but for the Western type of world has been working reasonably well.
But for some exceptions.
I mean the the beginning of World War One is certainly a place where the collective decision making process just went completely bananas.
And I think we are now in the same sort of position and for a number of reasons.
We have put our money and our effort in a number of directions and we need to get out of these directions and a bit somewhere else.
I don’t think it’s infinitely difficult.
You know, we we fund looking for oil and instead of funding that we could use that money to do something which is more fruitful for the future.
It’s doable.
We don’t do it because there are lots of interests in all of that and it’s short term interests rather than longer term interests.
And we don’t have the capacity to bring those people which would be harmed by a change into the picture.
You know, people who build cars now in Europe and they’re going to be laid out.
And so it’s a drama.
But it’s a pity that it’s a drama because we should organize our society so that we do something reasonable for that.
But for that you need.
Look from above and you you need to design processes a bit differently than what we’ve been doing in the political world.
You probably need to look a bit beyond the next election because that’s insufficient and, and, and bringing these people’s votes into the game.
If they lose their job and just end on the street, they’re not going to vote for you.
So somehow there we are getting it wrong.
Somehow, And that’s possibly interesting too, the Chinese seem to be getting it less wrong than we.
And I was actually about to say, there are some countries that seem to be getting parts of this right.
Part of it only probably so we but it’s true.
I mean this, this green evolution in China is going the much better pace than it is here in new part of the world.
Things are also changing at least during some periods and deforestration is is decreasing now and should be decreasing more, but it is decreasing.
So some moves are are right in different places, but all together we probably lack the synthesis.
We have elected the wrong leaders in many places of the world and we’ve taken national interest vests together with other types of vested interest, be the economical or those of a caste or those of whatever.
Much too much in in in the front.
And I think we would need a sort of global governance one way or another, which is not the putting together of nations because they’re each tries to defend its own interests, but to have a group of people who have up their aim, the good of the of the whole place.
Maybe it’s just naive to no end.
But short of that, the sort of space vessel Earth is left without captain.
And it’s just if we don’t start to come together and again, actually that brings us back to what we were even talking about before, you know, 1 country, one group of people.
I mean, the challenges are so interconnected now, this interdependent thinking and bringing in different solutions that people are finding to try and find something for the common good.
So for example, what’s working in Scandinavia, What’s working in China?
What is not working in other places?
And how can we learn?
Where is that dialogue?
You could say that, you know, World Economic Forum, you could say conversations at the UN.
The challenge is that it’s the lobbying and it’s the political power that seems to get in the way of what actually really does make sense.
And I, you know, we worked on a project once with a an organization in Malawi and you know, they were working with fuel efficient stoves.
It’s one of the most powerful ways to decrease the greenhouse gases globally, actually, because the poorest people of the world are using open fires and that causes that’s one of the greatest contributors to greenhouse gases.
And in order to decrease that, just giving plate stoves that decrease significantly that black smoke really does make a huge difference.
And they needed to go to this world.
I think it was the World Economic Forum conversations and be a voice there to just say, let’s invest in these stoves.
But it’s, you know, who has a bigger voice and who has the massive groups of people at those events.
It’s oil and it’s electricity.
And the poorest people of this planet can’t afford gas for a fire.
And so it just feels like they just don’t have a voice.
And so, yeah, it’s the political power.
It’s the economic power.
23:58
When Scientific Advice Collides with Vested Interests
You’ve said knowledge itself carries no value, which is actually what we’re just talking about now, right?
We know all of this.
There’s no value in that if we’re not going to do something with it.
But responsibility sits with the people who decide how it’s used.
You experienced that tension directly at EASES A/C, where scientific knowledge met political power.
What did that experience teach you about where responsibility actually sits?
I think there I I got probably more about the decision making process itself.
You know, EASAC is the European Academies Science Advisory Council.
So you put together all the science academies in Europe with the specifically of bringing knowledge into the European Commission and trying to get an action out of that.
I think there are two things which I saw there.
The 1st is that with this ESAC, all the European academies, blah, blah, blah.
We had to fight for years to get 1/2 person into an office in the backroom of a building of the Academy over there and that’s it.
So a few 10s of thousands of EUR per year.
And we, we had to fight for that.
The building next to the building of the European Commission, huge building which you see sometimes on television.
So that belongs to Volkswagen.
Then you ask yourself will be listened to the half person we have in the back office or all those sitting over there.
So that’s certainly is one thing where you you see where the power is and what what is being done with knowledge.
And the other thing is that the the European Commission then built a sort of science advice mechanism.
It put together ESAC plus the European Medical Academy, the Technological Academy, all of that together.
Fine.
But then it said, ah, you’re not going to give us advice, you’re going to find facts.
And we’ll have a small group of people whom we nominate who will then take what you say and give the advice out of that.
And I fought against that as much as I could, unsuccessfully actually, because what it means is that these people in the Commission, they did not want to hear the straight voice of the scientist this, but they wanted to put a filter, which they mastered in between because they put people themselves in there who had no legitimacy from the science community to, to do that.
And I found that that was interesting and, and very depressing, actually.
So ESAC per SE has a voice outside this system and makes recommendation.
And I think it’s essential that the scientists go all the way to making recommendations where they can.
They don’t take the decisions that that’s fair enough and that’s right.
But they should say, well, look, I know that.
And I think that that ought to be done for this and this and this reason.
Then other people can say, well, I’m not going to listen to you.
But then at least it was said, whereas in the in the system which was established, then you, you put that voice on a low key and then you make the recommendations be said by yourself.
So to say.
I was very critical of of that and I and I still am in many ways.
But again, these academies, they need money from somewhere, even if it’s not very much.
And you should give money to have people tell you things you don’t want to hear.
And modern management is very much against that.
I mean, you want to control the the people who give the money.
They control what you do.
And oh, at 4:00, you were talking with Philippe.
I’m not sure that I want to pay for that.
But that, again, is not quite what it what it ought to be because there are things that the political and the economic world don’t want to hear.
That must be said.
And so we have to find means of having that heard and that’s a very difficult issue and modern management speaks against us for that.
I mean, maybe this is me just being overly optimistic.
I’m not sure.
I am a bit of a cup half full person and maybe I just will keep kind of banging this drum until who knows.
But the old way around the time of the industrial revolution and and the way that business ran was very regional.
It was very easy to to do whatever the manager wants or the owner of the factory wants because you know, you had a group of people who really didn’t have access to information or really know what their rights were.
They would sort of clock in, clock out, they would show up for work and whatever kind of happened in that factory or however things were kind of done, no one outside of that particular region really knew about it.
So it was a lot easier to just do whatever they wanted.
Obviously we can all see that the world has evolved significantly since then.
So we’re now living in a very interconnected world world.
We have information at our fingertips.
We have access to knowledge of how companies are working.
We know that there are certain companies out there that we really prop properly, do not agree with their values.
You know, Meta has just been in the papers recently because of how society is just really questioning their processes, their strategy, their mission, their vision.
And I feel, I would like to think that the more we know and the more information we have access to about certain ways of performing and treating the world or treating people’s human rights or the environment or whatever it might be, people are then going to be less likely, less inclined to want to work for those companies or less inclined to connect with those managers.
I don’t believe it happens from one day to the next.
But I do feel that even just what’s happening in the US, there are groups of people who are definitely very much against what is happening.
There are some that are just blinded and they, you know, they’re supporting it.
But you do feel that I would like to think that there’s a movement in that direction.
And I just wonder if I mean, do you feel that it’s just getting worse or do you feel that there light?
I’m just curious, do you feel that?
Is there a way?
I mean I have 0 inside more than you in that field.
I’m afraid of this information swarm that we have, which in the end mixes everything rather than simplifying.
So it you get lots of stuff instead of a coherent knowledge.
But we’ll see.
I mean, I have.
I have no more idea or insight or whatever than than anybody else.
We’ve talked a lot about knowledge and systems, but decisions are ultimately made by people.
Can you think of a time when another person or an experience outside of your own world changed the way that you saw a problem and therefore a decision that you made?
31:21
Challenging Perspectives for Better Decisions and Empathy
My reaction is to say, well it’s it’s all the time.
With my work, we talk a lot about the power of challenging perspectives and I think it’s very easy for people to kind of get stuck in a certain frame of mind.
You’ve travelled all over the place.
So you know, the power of suddenly seeing the way that something’s done in a different way.
Challenging those perspectives is so important and I’m it’s so interesting to hear all the time, so.
31:43
Certainly once that happened in the way when I started building up a data Center for for satellite to the big data problem at the time.
Now it’s a problem you solve on your telephone or just about, but at the time it was a big problem and it was a big problem making it work in real time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I hired an engineer and the engineer said, oh, we need to invent this new methodology and etcetera.
Then I decided to go on a tour of the different places in the world where the same thing had been attempted or done in some sense.
That was in Spain, that was in the UK, that was in the US And the guy in the US, he’s told me, yeah, you should just never invent a technology when you want to, to try to solve a problem like that.
It’s much too difficult and you’re going to fail on the on the technology.
So I came back and I think I thought it was, it was right, actually.
And so I told that to the engineer and I said, doesn’t look like quite the right way to to go forward.
We should use existing stuff and put them together.
The guy left because it was no fun for him anymore, but I think it was one of the keys to the success of that endeavor.
But in general, really deciding that means listening to as many voices as possible in all corners where you hear things.
And when you’ve listened as much as you can, then you decide, you know, an intelligent person is a system which is very simple.
It’s got a microphone, a filter and a loudspeaker.
The microphone to pick up everything, the filter to weed out the crap and the loudspeaker to put in evidence the rest.
That’s all what we do all the time like that.
Each time that you that you take a decision, you, you, you should have listened to as much as you can.
Sometimes you can’t listen to very much, you know, in the middle of the night when somebody comes and tells you on your boat, what should we we do then there’s nobody to listen to because if the guy comes to you, it means that they don’t have the solution or anything.
So then you have to wake up halfway and say, OK, we do this and that’s it.
But you’ve at least listened to as much as you can.
And I think you should do that all the time.
And there’s no mystery to that.
And it’s fascinating, isn’t it?
And you know, I even, you know, we’re in an election here in Brazil and it’s a big one because there’s, you know, you’ve got the CIA here trying to sway the elections and it’s all very ridiculous and it’s quite polemic.
And then you sort of get into the sort of them and us and you and me very polarized.
I find it fascinating because, you know, I might have my leanings and I might have in the context of now, it feels there are certain decisions politically that need to be made to avoid the worst situation.
But I think it’s also so important to truly listen and understand how even in this context, are people supporting another opinion and where does that come from and bridging those divides as much as you do not agree necessarily with what those people stand for, if we don’t listen and if we don’t understand, then it just becomes even more polarized.
And then the sort of the two sides just kind of grow and grow.
And then the more that one side doesn’t feel listened to, that just becomes what the far right actually just then hold on to.
And I just think everything is, as you say, it’s having that doubt, it’s asking those questions, and it’s truly trying to understand, to be able to develop that empathy and that understanding to then make whatever the decision might be.
You can feel it heating up here.
And so even sort of when it comes to politics.
I can I can imagine, yes, but it’s being also skewed indeed by outside interests.
But these are vested interests, national for for a large part and large companies I guess.
And and that’s what’s trying to get the Brazil in a given direction, which is certainly not the direction we would want that to be, because for the earth, we need the Brazilian forest.
And that’s actually, you know, when we talk about interconnectedness, and I think it’s an interesting, it’s one of the pillars of what I talk about in my book.
And any leadership needs to have that understanding of interconnectedness.
And there are many leaders in this, well, many leaders in companies and politics who really only just see their constituents or just their community or just their interests, but really not, you know, understanding how a decision made in one place can have that ripple effect and that domino effect of impacting many other places.
And you just think it might feel like the election in Brazil doesn’t matter to someone in Norway.
But interestingly, it does.
We are all connected.
36:49
Finding Inspiration and Purpose Beyond Growth and Utility
Before we finish, I always like to ask people, is there a line of a song or a poem that inspires you?
That perhaps summarizes what we’ve talked about or something that just inspires you in general.
Again, when I thought about that question, I, I the songs by Édith Piaf is something which I’ve had for a long time.
But then there’s a saying which is the the devis of Wilhelm of Orange, and that says in Nepan, this is a desperate entrepreneur need a race here for persevere.
It’s not necessary to hope to do something, nor is it necessary to succeed in order to continue and to push on.
And it’s again not absolutely true.
But again, if you think something is right, then do it without asking yourself too, too, too, too much whether it’s going to be successful or not.
And I think in a way, what I’ve tried to do over the last decades in terms of, of putting the science into the political world.
And, and so Barbara told me, well, all what you’ve done is, is useless.
And I think it’s, it’s right in, in many ways.
We, we haven’t been heard in many ways, but it’s not a reason for not doing it.
So 11 should push on with those things where one thing that that it is right.
And that certainly is a line that that that I’ve had with me also since a long, long time.
We talk a lot about it business resilience.
I was on a podcast yesterday and we were talking about resilience and you know, I see resilience in two ways. 1, the importance of the organization to support people in a way that they want to keep persevering and not creating the conditions where they’re just burning out.
But I also think that it’s also up to us and it’s that mindset piece.
And I think what’s interesting about people who have that individual mission that they’re sort of working towards something and it’s having a real purpose or whatever you want to call it.
But I just think what keeps us going isn’t necessarily what we are gaining specifically for.
It’s it’s having that mission and just being like, I’m just going to keep going.
But what it mean?
I mean it it requires a certain level of self certainty, which you have to salt with a pinch of doubt to to know whether what you’re doing is is indeed right.
But this being said, I think it’s, I think it’s, it’s, it’s important indeed to try to keep that in mind.
Totally.
I mean, I can relate.
Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to tell our listeners?
We started with beauty and maybe we should end with with beauty and maybe we should say that people should maybe stop thinking about growth, utility and and all of that and think a little bit more about about beauty and pleasure.
It’s been really, really lovely to connect with you.
I’m just imagining us sitting in front of my house drinking our Portuguese red wine and world walk past.
I mean, I hope you.
Could come back well.
You are welcome here anytime and I hope that I can meet with you and Barbara on that side of the world at some point.
Love to Barbara.
I’ll tell her and and really tell my best to Google I I often think of him.
We talk about the constellation that he has found and he talked through with you many times.
Yep.
Yep, Yep.
Yep.
Yep, Yep, Yep.
Well, until next time, thank you with.
Great pleasure Philippa, all the all the best and OK.
Thanks so much for listening to Tie on Earth.
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And until next time, I wonder what we might notice differently.
