From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I'm extremely proud of the fact that we have driven social and cultural change. I have always wanted women to be empowered, and we've given them that opportunity.
I've known many individual monkeys and apes, and I'm struck by how much diversity and gender diversity there is which I have been ignoring. We always look for typical behaviours… a typical male does X… a typical female does Y. We overemphasise the typicality of men and women. If we start looking in primates, we'll almost certainly find the same sort of gender diversity we find in humans.
When you're a child, you define your team as those wearing the same jerseys and your team's goal is to defeat anyone wearing different jerseys. But as you get older, your notion of what constitutes a team evolves.
You come back and go to a job where your boss is trying to make an extra buck and your co-workers are trying to trample each other to get ahead- even though you just came back from a place where people were willing to die for you.
Distrust in government is very dangerous – what follows is the ability for authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government to take control, and that doesn't do anybody, any good.
Hip-hop gives a ground-level view of what it might mean to live under what are nearly warlike conditions in communities that face a myriad of daunting circumstances.
If history has taught us anything, it's that women rarely win anything without a fight!
People ask me all the time what do you want to be known for? My answer is simple. I want people to say 'Shaquille O'Neal was a nice guy...' forget how much money I made, forget how many championships I won, or what type of businessman I am.
When you look at the numbers, over half the sub-Saharan African population is under 18 years old, versus Latin America, where over half the population is under 25 years old and Asia, where it is under 35 years old. In short, these EM populations are young, expansive and dynamic, not like the stable, more risk-averse populations of the world's developed economies.
I'd argue it's easier now than ever, given the world's increasing openness to varied perspectives. Society's acceptance of homosexuality was a significant milestone, and now we're witnessing similar progress concerning gender issues. I perceive these shifts as testament to the world's growing receptivity to new ideas.
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'? The ideal human profile of capitalism does not fit with our basic human dignity.
The developed world actually has worse demographics when looking at competitiveness and systemic issues, and has a lot of work to do in order to shore up financial systems.