From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You cannot trust Russia, that Putin is rebuilding the Russian Empire and they are fighting not to win, but to rebuild their empire as an ideological way to resolve domestic issues, and further feed evil.
We have a very strange relationship with empire, a combination of selective amnesia and nostalgia. The amnesia comes from the fact we mostly identify as the nation that won World War 2 not as the nation which had the greatest empire in human history.
You can't force people to change- you have to find their passion and implement based on that. The economist, Dambisa Moyo, showed that even though $2.5trillion has been invested in aid, Africa is now net-poorer than 50 years ago.
The ice is neither left nor right, it is neither Republican nor Democrat, it is simply melting. The consequences of the sea ice melting are enormous and will be felt everywhere from Texas to China.
We estimate with the World Bank that US$20-40 billion each year is lost in developing countries through corruption. If you add to that $5 billion each year in stolen assets, it clearly shows that corruption is a serious obstacle to the achievement of the millennium development goals. It is also a threat to human security and human rights.
One of the great ironies of a company like Meta, where I worked, is that well over 90% of its users are outside the US, yet well over 90% of the bandwidth among decision-makers is focused on what's happening in America. In the end, that just doesn't make sense.
The important thing which central government can do is to promise, without reservation, that there will be no new taxation and 'emergency' taxation- and that they will focus on collecting existing taxes by expanding the tax-base to those who are evading taxes.
Today's Coronavirus crisis is not a force-majeure, it is a biological phenomenon, the spread of which is an indictment, and commentary on the mediocrity global leadership. It should never have escaped Wuhan, and the fact it has shows a failure of leadership and now the very same people who are responsible for neglecting these issues are being invited to comment on it, and lead our way out.
The moment that really stuck with me was during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Before Mubarak steps down, he turned the internet off for five days. And that was kind of a moment where it was like, wow—actually, in this hyper-technological world we live in, states can control it in ways they couldn't control printing presses or other forms of written technology as easily.
What we're seeing is a broad constellation of nominally independent subsets, even entire industries, that have now come under the umbrella of the foreign lobbying industry. All of these entities have been transformed into go-to vehicles and mouthpieces for foreign regimes.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win…' the good news is that society is reaching a critical mass of influence meaning that today, people cannot ignore us, and cannot laugh at us, they have to fight- and if Gandhi was right, we are near the breakthrough towards winning.
I am in favour of quotas and targets. I think affirmative action works, and we've had affirmative action in the opposite direction for centuries. So sometimes we have to shock the system. We have to do it to normalise things, to get to a tipping point and then let the system just takes care of itself.