From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
the most important thing is to commit your resources, whether it's money or time, to a cause that you're passionate about, whether that is a local school, supporting an environmental project, or helping poor kids in Africa
There is no healthy society without a healthy internet.
Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated.
Digital technology and instant news cycles, together with the aggressive marketing of fear-mitigating products and services, are certainly driving fear in contemporary society. Today, fear is closely related to the problem of misinformation and disinformation, and to the erosion of trust in political institutions.
Without understanding the rules of the game, you might assume that your outcomes are determined mostly by luck. People who end up unhappy about what they get conclude that they were unlucky or that the system was rigged against them. After enough of these experiences, they believe that's just how the world works.
When you meet somebody who seems unfamiliar, who appears to be different, and for whatever reason you feel uncomfortable with that, a wall goes up, and you behave differently towards them; it impacts your actions.
The power of routinization is that it allows you to spread a shared set of identity markers to a large population—and to do so very quickly. All you need is a handful of proselytizing leaders willing to travel from village to village, spreading the same ideas and behaviours, and you can soon create a vast tradition encompassing hundreds of communities.
The conversation I want us to have is, 'This could be any one of us.' Frequently, when we point out 'them', we're referring to the corporate, narcissistic, aggressive, high-achievers, often the deliberate culprits. Their stories pervade our movies and crime podcasts, enabling us to distance ourselves because we can't necessarily identify with their actions.
The displacement that people face is now over generations not just years. The old model was to keep people alive until they go home. That model is broken, less than 3% of the world's refugees went home last year.
The complexity of the topic combined with significant political and social blindness towards it, has led to disability becoming one of the most significant un-addressed issues of modern time.
The key lesson I have learned from looking at 600 years of technological controversies is that human history is a footnote on the tensions between innovation and incumbency.
Much of the mistreatment of animals is due to economics; it's cheaper to raise animals for food when they're kept in a confined 'economical' way rather than letting them graze in fields. In my view, we should actually only have the free-range farms – meat would then be more expensive and more people would become vegetarian, vegan, and find alternative protein foods so that we don't cause this terrible animal suffering.