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Michelle LaFountaine, sports broadcaster and anchor on ESPN English News, talks with Dr. Michael Laitman about unfair competition in sports.

Here’s an extract from the conversation:

Michele LaFountaine: [There is] a sense of anger [among my colleagues], I think, at athletes [who use steroids and all other kinds of drugs] because competition should be fair and to have an unfair advantage is cheating, basically. And so, yes, I think all of us would love it that this stops.

Michael Laitman: I think that there is a problem in general. Say, you are stronger than me, another person is taller than me, and another person is quicker than me, we are naturally different. So what are those achievements? Of course, if you were born strong and I was born weak, from the very beginning, you will be more successful in sports and I will not. There is no competition between people here. We have to understand that we cannot compete physically because we are not born the same.

The competition between us has to be in what makes us human, that in each of us there is an ability to be equal to each other, and only there can we compete. And this is only the way we bond above our egos. There is where we can be equal because this is not given to us naturally. Naturally, we are completely selfish and if we rise above our nature, then we can say, “Okay, show us how much of a hero you are. Yes, how much you can be more than others.” But physically, of course, it is natural, I didn’t choose it. “I want to be Schwarzenegger, I want to be this and that.” It’s unfair to begin with. There are 50,000 kids looking at one hero who was born big and strong.

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Hank Sheinkopf, political public affairs & governmental affairs consultant for over 30 years, talks with Dr. Michael Laitman about the financial crisis, its causes and possible solutions.

Here’s an extract from the conversation:

Michael Laitman: Over the years it’s as if we’ve taken ourselves out of nature. It’s as if we control the plants, minerals, and animals, and we’re not controlled by them. We’re forgetting that we are inside nature; we are under these laws. We don’t know what these laws are, but we’re affected by them. And now we’re in a situation that we are in a bubble inside nature, not outside of it, and that bubble runs by a law, which is a law of reciprocity, of mutual consideration. Everything has to be in harmony, and by doing whatever we want, we’re creating disharmony.

Hank Sheinkopf: There is disharmony. Disharmony by definition is not just spiritual disharmony, but human beings make up the universe, and when they behave in inappropriate fashions that do not meet what they’re supposed to be doing, in fact, they create the disharmony. So you could say, of course, that there’s relevance to it. The question is how you take that and put it into practical terms: How you get the average person to understand?

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Steve Rubel, Senior Vice-President in Edelman Communications, the world’s largest PR firm, talks with Dr. Michael Laitman about technology, business and profit in an interconnected world.

Here’s an extract from the conversation:

Steve Rubel: There’s always going to be something new that comes around that’s different than what it was. I mean the stuff I’m talking about now is very different than I was talking about six months ago or a year ago. So I also think that people now growing up don’t know what the world was like before the Internet. I mean I do, you do, but they’re different now, and I think that we have to take…. And I think also the impact of mobile devices is just beginning.

Host: We’re going to talk about mobile devices. Dr. Laitman, where is all this taking us?

Michael Laitman: To throwing away all the phones, very simple. Because in the end, say after we have so many cars, where are we driving with our cars? – Into traffic jams. Where are we going to get with our phones or with computers? Into jams, too. It’s all going to jam because something more internal is missing. Technology is evolving only to bring us to a certain goal, a goal that exists in nature, and the goal is for us to rise above corporeality, to be connected in thoughts and desires to one mechanism, to one system. And if you get to that, then there’s no need for communicating through these devices.

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Caroline Adams Miller, life coach, speaker, and practitioner of positive psychology talks with Dr. Michael Laitman about goal-setting and fixing the connections among people.

Here’s an extract from the conversation:

Caroline Adams Miller: What has increasingly been found is that the happiest people have vibrant social networks; they work hard at cultivating relationships with other people. So it’s the togetherness, the bringing people together that brings people the most joy.

Michael Laitman: Do you teach them that if they want to be happy, they have to start connecting well to each other, or if you’re happy, then you will connect well to each other? Which comes first?

Caroline Adams Miller: It’s bidirectional; it’s bidirectional. People who have the goal of connecting with other people are happier, and happier people connect with other people. So it’s a circle; it’s on a continuum. And if you start somewhere in that process, you will gain all the benefits.

Michael Laitman: Do I need to connect to people? And what if I have a hard time doing that because of my nature?

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Dr. Gary Marcus, director of the NYU Infant Center, Professor of Psychology at NYU, editor of the Norton Psychology Reader, and author of 3 books on the development of the mind, talks with Dr. Michael Laitman about evolution, free choice, selfishness and education.

Here’s an extract from the conversation:

Michael Laitman: School should not only turn children into engineers, or physicians, or economists, or maybe lawyers. First of all, they have to come out with values toward their environment, and here is where we run up against a problem that is not really up to the teachers.

Gary Marcus: I totally agree with that. I think part of teaching children about the broader picture is really to understand the limits of their own minds. We don’t really teach them about what it is to be a human being, or the limits of the human mind, the ways in which we can be selfish…

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