From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I'm a firm believer in the inherent goodness of the world. The notion that refugees aim to usurp others' opportunities is a misconception. Excellence and dedication secure positions, not nationality. If a refugee excels, it's a call for self-improvement, not resentment. My goal is to demonstrate through our actions that coexistence is not only possible but enriching.
My greatest fear is that we have learnt nothing. Individually, we have learnt that the longer your population lives healthy, the better off your economy will be.
We are the first generation that through its neglect could destroy the relationship between humans and the planet, and perhaps the last generation that can prevent dangerous climate change.
Most people we have worked with who have accomplished great things have an other-centred purpose, and that's never just 'make a lot of money…' – it could be to make women's lives easier, to close the inequality gap, to change the world, it's something which isn't strictly personal and selfish.
We live in a deeply connected world, and if we want stability and prosperity in our connected world, we have to look after the weakest links as well as the strongest parts.
We have layer upon layer of novelty, and today we are in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change of the novelty we face is so fast that it has outstripped our evolutionary capacity to keep up.
Your only duty is to take the rope and try to make a better one. Your only duty is to make the best rope you can for your children, for the next generation.
We also don't really have cultural mechanisms that emphasize what truly matters—not so much the hustle, but the rest. The social connection. The deeper forms of connection we get from meeting people face-to-face.
We often talk about misinformation and disinformation, but the deeper issue is the speed and flow of trust, because we're responding to feeling rather than expertise and credibility.
The scale of our damage on the animal world is unimaginable. We inflict pain and suffering on wild and domestic animals. We take away their wild lands and habitats, we use them to test our medicines and they're affected by climate change, pollution and many other aspects of our world. We are the master race. We are the creatures who impose our will on virtually everything that lives and breathes. It's deeply shocking when you start to think about the scale of it.
Rape is one of the oldest weapons of war and it remains so to this day. For so long, it has been viewed as an 'unfortunate' side effect of war. But really, it is a tactic.
I don't think there is anything about putting your country first that requires you to turn your back on the rest of the world. If anything, the opposite is true.