From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We are living through a profound era where speculative failure is simply not an option, and is fought tooth and nail by the government. This is a trap. Here I am the fool looking to fail frequently.
There's a tension amongst the countries who belong to, and who have led, international organisations. Are they there to solve problems which no country can alone solve? Or – are they there to impose one particular view of the world on the rest of the world?
Comedy chips at people in power, particularly those who use tyrannical power. It strips their fake respect, and destroys the fake fear they create; and these are people who rely on being respected, and being feared.
The Olympics elevate this understanding; there, athletes' origins become secondary. You don't dwell on their life stories; their athletic prowess and the spirit of competition captivate you. The focus is on their dedication and the culmination of years, sometimes lifetimes, of preparation, free from the constraints of politics and geographical divides.
Even though we still have approximately twenty thousand hydrogen bombs in the arsenals of the United States and Russia (many of them ready to use at a moment's notice) the two risks that most experts think are the greatest and most likely are the risks of a single bomb being used by a terrorist group or the risk of a regional war involving dozens of weapons.
Politicians, by and large, don't understand technology at all, and technologists don't understand politicians—and both tend to denigrate each other. The technologists in Silicon Valley see politicians as venal, short-term, and ignorant, while politicians view technologists as rapacious capitalists who will stop at nothing to beat their rivals and lack any ethical compass.
The neo-liberal capitalist mindset has been a huge contributor to loneliness. Since the 1980s, a new form of economics came to the fore which enshrined the pursuit of self-interest over the pursuit of collective good. That generated the mindset we see today- me first, dog-eat-dog, greed is good.
By keeping people feeling they are on the wrong side of history morally, or on the wrong side of the argument intellectually, and by doing so using rhetorical tricks, they are very effective at keeping people on the defensive.
Those who know the locations of the remaining graves remain silent, not wanting to tarnish the 'heroic' image of their generals. This silence and glorification prevent crucial information about mass graves from emerging, demonstrating the profound and tragic impact of this hero worship.
The Trump phenomenon isn't just a blip—there's a genuine rupture across the Atlantic. So, what does that mean in practice? It means we need to protect some of our own sovereign infrastructure—our own sovereign cloud—especially for utilities, security, and intelligence.
Central banks all around the world have essentially abused the power of printing money, and they have abused it by using quantitative easing, meaning creating new federal money to kit over fundamental problems, structural problems in the economy. So much of that acceleration in the wealth inequality has come from this quantitative easing.
Consider for instance that the bulk of the world's foreign exchange reserves – trillions of dollars – are held by developing economies, and that the US runs a current account and budget deficit of astronomical proportions.