The most straightforward way to create value is to solve a problem. When you provide a solution to someone's problem, by default, you're generating value for that person. Consequently, my perspective is that this journey must always begin with a problem.

When I decided to climb Everest, the reason was simply to draw attention to what was happening with the glaciers but also, when I talked about sustainability, it was hard to keep people's attention. You start talking and 5 minutes later, it's an abstract topic. The audience start checking their emails or yawning, and this really frustrated me.

What we're seeing is a global shift towards meaning and WeWork is helping achieve that on a global scale.

Digital technologies are now an unavoidable part of the infrastructure of life and society, and we have the capacity to design them in ways that promote, understand and respect people's goals and values in ways we simply couldn't in the pre-digital era. With many of these technologies, though, our deeper human goals get treated as secondary, or are ignored altogether, in favour of lower 'engagement' goals such as views or clicks.

Conditional on the emergence of the human brain, civilisation was inevitable for many reasons. We had a commendable population in Africa 300,000 years ago and given the fact that these individuals were equipped with the power of the modern brain, the emergence of civilisation was inevitable.