From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Our system has never defined what it means to be 'good' – what is the ideal human being in capitalism? Is it Jeff Bezos? Is it Steve Jobs? They thrived, they profited, are they 'moral'? Even though they exploit the labour of millions of people?
For the creator economy, NFTs represent a way for creators and producers of content to directly engage with the people who support them. It's a completely different model… a way for artists and creators to monetise much more effectively than incumbent platforms.
Digital currency shows that anything can be money. We have become accustomed to see money as paper or pieces of gold, but in truth it could also be stones, grain, wood, cigarettes or complex computer codes.
I typically think impact investing, on the whole, can generate better risk-adjusted yields than the alternatives.
We're working at the nexus of two pretty powerful forces which, when combined, can have a profound impact on reducing global poverty. First, agriculture.... You've got around 2.6 billion people in the world who survive on less than $2 per day, 75% of them are rural and agriculture is their primary economic activity.
We are, in the early days of the 21st century, talking about the death of the living world as an environmental externality. That alone should be an alarm-bell that our framework doesn't serve our time.
It's really complicated to work-out how much of our wealth came from empire, it's like trying to take the egg out of a baked cake.
We've entered the age of Peak Water - where the easy sources are already being used and future supplies will be harder to find, more expensive to develop, and come with greater environmental and social costs.
Without understanding the rules of the game, you might assume that your outcomes are determined mostly by luck. People who end up unhappy about what they get conclude that they were unlucky or that the system was rigged against them. After enough of these experiences, they believe that's just how the world works.
We waste 75% of the energy we produce, half the food we produce and half of our natural resources. So much of our waste is waste because people don't understand that it's a resource that can be used!
For the societies themselves, this activity drains hard currency reserves, heightens inflation, reduces tax collection, curtails government service and undermines investment. There is no good accomplished by this massive outflow of resources.
We must act now, before we reach economic checkmate.