From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The military have always done a great job of creating this band of brothers – groups who are so close-knit they very literally behave like family, and from an evolutionary perspective- we're wired to do anything to protect our family.
Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners.
Iceland, a country of just 332,000 people, managed to qualify among the 32 teams for FIFA. In contrast, India, with its billion-plus population, was nowhere in the picture. It made me realize that someone has to initiate change. While it's not a single person's job, someone needs to make a start. I firmly believe that beyond a certain point, money should serve society.
The essence of public health as a field of action is that it tries to stop problems from happening where possible, and prepares societies for problems that are unavoidable. That's why it requires us to understand the entire population.
Right now, it's a bit like the early stages of the universe. Lots of hot plasma gas everywhere, but structure takes time to emerge… We have the opportunity to re-imagine this, it's not a deal that's been done, and it's not too late to imagine a different way of organising, regulating, collecting, contributing and benefiting.
A resilient position means that you are not always on the brink of war. The cost of war is so great that being on the brink is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. We have to make leaders and societies pay more attention to the costs of conflict.
I was a semi-chubby white kid from Montana who couldn't swim. I became a Navy SEAL who ended-up in Osama bin Laden's bedroom on a Tier 1 Mission to take down the #1 terrorist in the world. My life is proof that if you put your mind to it, you can do anything you want.
The police never talk to us, they ignore us, they don't think we're human in this area.
Most of the venture backed businesses, and venture capital firms, are a mirror-tocracy not a meritocracy! Senior executives are disproportionately drawn from a narrow stratum of society – in the US, this means Ivy-League Schools such as Stanford. They tend to be overwhelmingly white (and increasingly now Asian) but certainly overwhelmingly male.
We recently set ourselves the goal of educating 10 million children in the next decade; it's ambitious, but we're attracting incredible people and partners to help us on this journey, and I genuinely believe we'll achieve it.
Before we came to market, everything in retail was about how cheaply you could pay your employees- and unfortunately, particularly women. There was an attitude in retail that said, '... well, your female employees are just going to get married, have children at 23 and leave, so why invest in them?' The reality of the world was that 60% of university graduates were women- and most women were having children later, entering professional careers.
We didn't just make technology, it made us. In the modern context, this phenomenon terrifies some people and excites others- but it's going to happen. We have to understand how humans and their tools and technologies blend at scale – it's going to be an absolutely fascinating journey.