From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Salman Abedi, Khalid Masood, Khuram Butt, all of these people and the people in ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab… We tend to think sometimes that they are extremism. But the reality is they didn't breed extremism. Islamist extremism bred them.
The 'compare and despair' generation is constantly bombarded with unrealistic portrayals of success, leading everyone to feel inadequate, regardless of their achievements. We all have flaws and recognize our weaknesses, and there will always be someone who seems better in some way.
Technology, scale and globalisation has helped people involved in business- and led to increased incomes for many groups. The conundrum we have in society is that many of the 'less-skilled' members of the population have not done so well from these trends and that's part of the reason for backlash.
I am a nomad—intellectually, physically, spiritually. A commuter, in the words of James Baldwin. This state of continuous exile is one that I find difficult to explain to other people but it's who I am.
In the 21st century, there are cameras everywhere except for where our food and energy come from, and where our waste goes. We are the most powerful species in the world, but we remain blind to the fundamentals that allow us to survive. How are we blind to our life support system?
Soup kitchens are good, but they don't prevent homelessness. You can go to volunteer at a soup kitchen every day of the year, and you'll still have homeless people. We wanted to tackle root causes and tackle them globally.
In the case of Brazil, one of the most important things is the huge ethnic and cultural mixture which makes us a country with dynamism, vibrancy, and the ability to understand the psychology of other nations.
While people have been worried about AI being embedded in humanoid robots from the science fiction world, our lives have been shaped and influenced by AI which makes tens of billions of decisions each day about what we see, and how we communicate.
Instead of militaries fighting militaries, we now have militaries or military motivated agents that are able to activate civilians in each other's countries. Social media is global national security threat, and one that we're not even spending billions of dollars to protect against.
While epidemics can shape communities through their demographic impact, fear of disease invariably has a stigmatising effect. Groups, often minorities, are targeted as carriers of disease. Fear involves an 'othering' and leads to discrimination.
Look at Jeff Bezos telling his 1.5 million employees to 'wake up every morning terrified and stay terrified all day.' They're not getting rich; they're barely scraping by. Yet he wants them living in terror so he can get even richer. That's crazy. That's a crazy society and a crazy life.
We have to constantly evolve how we make an impact, and make sure that we're doing what the communities we work in want us to support rather than enforcing some kind of model. Our work has to be led by the leaders of communities telling us what will work.