The highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another. That's the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic. If a bunch of lawyers were to introduce a lot of process, the patients would all die. So never forget, when you're a lawyer, that you may be rewarded for selling this stuff, but you don't have to buy it. In your own life, what you want is a seamless web of deserved trust. And if your proposed marriage contract has forty-seven pages, my suggestion is you not enter.

The way I work is — I want to not have external stimulation. You can kind of see, on the walls are this light green. I'm told that at mental institutions they use that on the walls. It's like a calming color, it's not something that really stimulates you. What you can't see is the computer here, you only see the screen, but the main thing I worry about in my computer is — it doesn't have to be big and powerful, although I like that — it really has to be completely silent. I know people who work for Google and they have their own small data center at home, and I don't do that. My office is the most boring office you'll ever see. And I sit there alone in the quiet. If the cat comes up, it sits in my lap. And I want to hear the cat purring, not the sound of the fans in the computer.

But I am not looking to any accounts, and I’m not interested at all how many money I have in the bank, what is costing this or that. I’m only trying to realize my ideas.

I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

What we've done all of these years is very simple, is use the little tool, which is ask three whys in a row. Because the first why you always have a good answer for. The second why, it starts getting difficult. By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing.

You know, the one that you mentioned, the Seven-Day Weekend , as with many other books, is a good place to poke around also inside your own head and to look for some insights. When I wrote the book originally, Brazil was still a relatively closed, elite environment for businesspeople, etc. Obviously because the book has sold a good quantity, most people had read it and I kept giving autographs to taxi drivers and so on so it was a very small microcosm I was living in. I remember the second occasion this happened to me, which was being stopped on the street and somebody saying, “You know, I read your book and it changed my life.” And they would go off and quote somebody else’s book entirely. When this happened the second time, I said shit, this is not about me at all. So, let me stop right here. And of course at that point there were all kinds of campaigns for me to run for mayor, and for president, and become Brazil’s Trump. Because people get lost along the way and they start believing in their own bullshit. The interesting thing here, going back to the issue of the book, was it’s when you come across an insight which was already yours and you see it in writing, that’s when you say this book changed my life. But real insight is where you go there and you say geez, I never thought of that, and there is some of that; it has to add to something that you believe in or that jives with your moment. So, I think putting too much weight and too much importance on something that you got out of someone doesn’t remind us that this intuition and this insight was growing inside you already; you were just waiting for some clarification of it. But that kind of answers the second bit. I had talked for several years at the Sloane School at MIT and I had a group of MBAs. This was always a very fun group and I used to go there in the fall quarter. I’d tell them: look, this is what you have to read to understand business and organizations. I was obliged to make this available on the MIT site and the books that were there were Marco Polo’s Travel, one book, a Kafka parable, a Jung book on synchronicity and so forth. These kinds of books – and Kafka I think is extraordinary – give you an enormous insight into the people who are doing things and why they’re doing things, rather than the whole set of how-tos. When you run away from the how-tos into the issue of how do you get to real wisdom, we’ve been at this for a long time. We’ve been in this agricultural era, then we were in the industrial era, then we were in the information age and we were in the knowledge age. But we don’t get any closer to the age of wisdom, and something is terribly wrong for a population and the humanity that has been around for so long and doesn’t get closer to wisdom. When you think about organizations and I ask you to show me one democratic organization or business environment in the world, or to find one wise company as a company, these are all almost impossible to find. So, to answer your question, I would say the books that stop to think about why the heck do we do the things that we do which are in Kafka and Freud or in Jung or in Thoreau; I think those will answer the business world much closer than people think. When they say oh, great, that’s all good and well but that’s all philosophy and all airy-fairy and touchy-feely but I need to get down to answer this: how come, which people, how, and so forth. But this process I think is much, much stronger from a philosophical point of what makes you want to get up in the morning and how you let the other people around you do what they want to do how they want to do it, and get out of their way. That is a philosophical issue that I think would solve a lot more issues if people went from that filter onwards, you know?

My favorite documentary is one called Up. ... For your listeners, it’s a guy, Michael Apted who in 1964 decided to follow about a dozen or actually more kids from very different backgrounds and from the UK and some in orphanages, and some very well off to try and establish how much people are stuck to their context, to their social context. ... It’s quite an extraordinary way to look at humanity and see can people really escape their social constraints and their initial lay of life?