From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Power is the ability to affect others and get the outcomes you want – and that's true whether on the individual, national or international level. You can exert power in three ways. You can do it with coercion (sticks), you can do it with payments (carrots) and you can do it with soft power – through attraction.
It's hard for people to defend democracy when it cannot defend them against social injustice.
By creating public scapegoats of an entire industry- politicians are doing more to harm the future growth of our nation than any other economic policy.
When you're trying to understand the motivations of people, quite often understanding the emotional drivers is at least as important as understanding the facts that took them there. In the case of Putin and the people around him, it's resentment and it's anger and it's determination to recover something they believe they lost.
History is not linear, like the chapters of a book… History moves through seasons, and so winters are inevitable.
There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.
[the impact of the internet on liberty and free speech has been] very positive indeed – not so much two steps forward and one step back, as ten steps forward for every step back. By breaking the oligopoly of the established press and letting everyone be a publisher, it has made information much harder for the powerful to control.
Some foreign dictatorial regimes are bypassing traditional lobbying shops altogether and directly recruiting sitting members of Congress to act as foreign agents.
The concept of 'crimes against humanity,' as initially defined for the Nuremberg trial, emerged to address atrocities committed in Germany, particularly against Jewish and other minority groups, including political factions and the disabled. These acts demanded accountability, which the existing legal frameworks, recognizing state sovereignty, couldn't provide.
Fear has had a huge impact on human societies throughout history, and as science and archaeology are increasingly suggesting through prehistory, too. But my main interest is in how fear has been used as an instrument of power, wielded by rulers to consolidate their authority, and to manage their populations.
the overall picture that's emerging is that the controls which still work operate more along corporate boundaries than along national boundaries.
Deep fakes in terms of a true deep fake, you do not even know if this is Barack Obama speaking or if this is a synthetic Barack Obama. There are ways to detect that today, and we think that we can discern otherwise. That's quickly going to fall, but already the minute changes that can manipulate perception are terrifying.