From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
This isn't about shareholders becoming like Greenpeace but realising that return on investment requires you to understand your risks and that requires you to understand, and act on, your relationship with society.
Fashion is one of the most influential phenomena in Western civilisation since the renaissance. It has conquered an increasing number of modern man's fields of activity and has become almost 'second nature'.
There's this sense that our institutions have failed us. The very rich generally pay lower effective tax rates than middle-class and lower-income individuals. There's a sense that the system is broken, the rules of the game are rigged.
The average American worker was subject to danger every bit as great as soldiers in war.
The defining feature of our era is that the next generation are bona fide digital natives. They've been raised in a digital world, so concepts like artificial intelligence or quantum computing don't faze them. They're backed by technology, making them tech-empowered. This is the first aspect. They're equipped both to decide how capital is utilized and to research if it aligns with their values.
My life's mission is to dismantle the notion of mental illness altogether. I detest it. It only serves to shame and stigmatise those with brain health challenges, which is utterly wrong.
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.
Loneliness very much defines what this century has become. It's a feeling of being disconnected from our government, our fellow citizens and our employer. That feeling of being invisible, unseen and unheard occurs not just from those we are closest to but also from our workplace and state.
It's not even about achieving something – it's about changing mindset. At that age, kids can go strongly in one direction or another in life, and being able to give them a steer is a huge accomplishment.
One of the psychological effects of that is it can blur the boundaries between self and group and create this feeling that you are the group, and the group is you. And this obviously has the capacity to promote quite strong forms of pro-group action.
The neo-liberal capitalist mindset has been a huge contributor to loneliness. Since the 1980s, a new form of economics came to the fore which enshrined the pursuit of self-interest over the pursuit of collective good. That generated the mindset we see today- me first, dog-eat-dog, greed is good.
Around the world you've got somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people who are living in abject poverty. Economic growth offers the opportunity to reduce that 1 or 2 billion to 100,000–200,000 in the next phase.