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8th December 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

James Thornton is a remarkable individual who has dedicated his life to fighting for climate and environmental justice. As a Wall Street lawyer, he won over 80 cases to force the Reagan Administration to clean up polluted water. It was in 2007, when he moved to Europe that ClientEarth was formed with a mission to change the way environmental protections are made and enforced. Now operating globally, ClientEarth uses advocacy, litigation and research to address the greatest challenges of our time – including nature loss, public health and climate change. In the last decade alone, ClientEarth has led an EU-wide law banning illegally harvested rainforest timber, setup the Sustainable Seafood Coalition, won numerous cases against governments for failing to tackle air pollution, and forced many nations and corporations to create sustainable change in their policy and strategy for the benefit of the climate and environment. James and his team use the most effective tool in the arsenal for change, the law. In this exclusive interview, I spoke to James Thornton about how we can tackle one of the greatest challenges our species has ever faced, climate change.

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03-12-2021 8:34:41
Thought Economics

2nd December 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Kalki Koechlin is an extraordinary talent. She is an actress, writer, producer and activist who has received numerous accolades including a National Film Award, a Filmfare Award, MetroPlus Playwright Award and two Screen Awards. Born in Pondicherry, India, to French parents, Kalki studied her craft at Goldsmiths, University of London before returning to India, making her screen debut as Chanda in the drama Dev.D (winning her the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress). Her diverse career has led her to star in two of the highest grossing films in Bollywood history Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani and iconic movies such as Margarita with a Straw, Shanghai and Gully Boy (with Ranveer Singh & Alia Bhatt). Kalki has also been a pioneer in web and streaming formats. She drew critical acclaim for her characters in Made in Heaven and Sacred Games and Zee 5’s original titled, Bhram. She is also an engaged and respected activist, promoting causes ranging from health & education, to the empowerment of women and gender equity. In this exclusive interview, I spoke to Kalki Koechlin about her life, her art and her advocacy. 

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03-12-2021 8:35:07
Thought Economics

21st November 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Robert O’Neill is one of the most highly-decorated combat veterans of our time and the author of The New York Times best-selling memoir, The Operator: Firing the Shots That Killed Osama bin Laden and My Years as a SEAL Team Warrior. A former SEAL Team Six leader with the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, he deployed more than a dozen times and held combat leadership roles in more than 400 combat missions in four different theatres of war. A highly trained Navy SEAL, he led the military’s most elite and was involved in our nation’s most important campaigns. In this exclusive interview, I spoke to Robert O’Neill about the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, what it takes to be a Navy SEAL and what we can all learn from the SEAL mindset.

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03-12-2021 8:35:21
Thought Economics

18th November 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Christiana Figueres is a Costa Rican citizen and an internationally recognized leader on climate change. She was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010 to 2016. During her tenure at the UNFCCC, Ms. Figueres brought together national and sub-national governments, corporations and activists, financial institutions and NGOs to jointly deliver the historic Paris Agreement on climate change, in which 195 sovereign nations agreed on a collaborative path forward to limit future global warming to well below 2°C, and strive for 1.5°C, in order to protect the most vulnerable. In this exclusive interview, I spoke with Christiana Figueres about her lifelong commitment to building a sustainable future for our planet.

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18-11-2020 20:50:03
Thought Economics

18th November 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Jacqueline Gold CBE is Chief Executive of Ann Summers and Knickerbox and is renowned for managing a business run by women, for women. Jacqueline is an activist for women in business, championing female entrepreneurs and, through sharing her own experiences, aims to better the working environment for women. Her attitude towards female empowerment and gender equality inspires countless generations of women to pursue their dreams and celebrate their successes, not least her 11-year-old daughter Scarlett. In this exclusive interview, I spoke to Jacqueline Gold CBE about her incredible entrepreneurship journey with Ann Summers and her work empowering women in the workplace.

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19-11-2020 17:56:38
Thought Economics

15th November 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

In this exclusive interview, I speak to Professor Sir David Omand, one of Britain’s most senior ex-intelligence officers. He was the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter-terrorism strategy and “homeland security”. He served for seven years on the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was Permanent Secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that Director of GCHQ.  We talk through the incredible tools In his new book How Spies Think: 10 Lessons in Intelligence and how the big decisions in our lives can be easier when using the frameworks used by British intelligence.

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03-12-2021 8:35:45
Thought Economics

29th October 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” by The Atlantic magazine, Tristan Harris spent three years as a Google Design Ethicist developing a framework for how technology should “ethically” steer the thoughts and actions of billions of people from screens. He is now co-founder & president of the Center for Humane Technology, whose mission is to reverse ‘human downgrading’ and re-align technology with humanity. Additionally, he is co-host of the Center for Humane Technology’s Your Undivided Attention podcast with co-founder Aza Raskin. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce notes that, “Tristan Harris is probably the strongest voice in technology pointing where the industry needs to go. This is a call to arms and everyone needs to hear him now.” In this exclusive interview I spoke to Tristan Harris about how the technologies of social media and the smartphone are destroying our society, and what we can do to pull it back from the brink.

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03-12-2021 8:35:58
Thought Economics

28th October 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Jaron Lanier is a renaissance man, and one of the most profoundly important thinkers of our age on the relationship of technology to humanity. He is a computer scientist, composer, artist, and author who writes on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technology, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics, and the future of humanism. He has been on the cusp of technological innovation from its infancy to the present. A pioneer in virtual reality (a term he coined), Lanier founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products, and led teams originating VR applications for medicine, design, and numerous other fields. Officially, Jaron is Microsoft’s “Octopus”, which stands for Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist.. He was a founder or principal of startups that were acquired by Google, Adobe, Oracle, and Pfizer. In this exclusive interview, I spoke to Jaron Lanier about the very essence of the relationship between technology and humanity, and why we need to evaluate the ethics of our platforms and our relationship to social media.

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03-12-2021 8:36:11
Thought Economics

27th October 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is one of the world’s foremost computer scientists. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He is a leading researcher in artificial intelligence and was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of web science. He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a visiting Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton. In this exclusive interview, I spoke to Sir Nigel about open data and artificial intelligence are transforming humanity.

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27-10-2020 14:24:34
Thought Economics

13th October 2020 · Articles & Interviews by: Vikas Shah MBE

Ally Brooke is an astonishing talent. Following her time in Fifth Harmony (described by Billboard as the biggest girl group of the 2010s’), the multiplatinum singer-songwriter kicked off her solo career with back-to-back Top 40 charting singles and an impressive resume of collaborations including “All Night” with Afrojack which marked her first #1 as a solo artist on US Dance Radio. A life-long entertainer, Ally competed on ABC’s Dancing With The Stars before embarking on her debut headline Time To Shine Tour in early 2020 with scheduled stops including a sold out show at New York’s Gramercy Theatre. She also appears in numerous Nickelodeon shows including Blue’s Clues & You and The Casagrandes, for which she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title for an Animated Program and plays the role of “Alissa.” With total career streams already in the billions, Ally is only just getting started. In this exclusive interview, I spoke to Ally Brooke about her incredible career in music, following her dreams, what we can all learn from her journey, and why she decided to chronicle her life in her fantastic new book Finding Your Harmony: Dream Big, Have Faith, & Achieve More than You Can Imagine.

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03-12-2021 8:36:31
Thought Economics

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