From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Social platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena. That shift takes audiences that were once local and turns them global. It also puts the anointment dynamic on steroids, because now your potential reach is basically unlimited.
Those who are suffering the consequences of these price increases are rarely (if at all) responsible for their creation- leading to an exacerbated (and right) sense of injustice.
You don't need to be a celebrity to suffer from what social media does to you; it's happening to everyone. For me, I have to find a routine and discipline with how I use my public image.
Our mate choices are the ultimate form of consumer choice. I can pretty much fit most of our purposeful behaviours under the umbrella of consumption.
It is essential that the public knows how deeply science and technology affect their lives. A lot of the decisions that will impact our future are underpinned by science, and whilst sometimes these decisions are made by governments – who are elected and hopefully transparent – many are made by corporations who are not generally accountable to the public.
As comedians, our main charity engagement for such a long time had been the tradition of the Secret Policeman's Ball, a way of saying comedians care… they'll be as funny as they can…. they'll make money for a cause… but the event had close to no connection with the cause at all! When I did Comic Relief, the aim was to be as funny as possible, to get as much of an audience as possible, and leverage the fact that comedians are often seen as people's friends, and normal people, not as intellectuals.
Everyone experiences some form of trauma. Many people are unaware that being bullied, constantly criticised, or neglected can also be forms of trauma. There's a growing recognition of these repeated relational injuries—being ignored or growing up in a dysfunctional family where excessive drinking or overworking occurs, neglecting one's emotional needs.
If you get just a little bit of a head start, you can end up racing far ahead. So you end up with very small differences in quality or merit that get amplified over careers or competitions, eventually becoming very large differences over time.
Child labour is one of the worst violations of human rights, it's an affirmation that we don't respect the freedom and dignity of children in our society.
We are facing a global catastrophe, one which should be a bigger motivator for us to come-together around a common cause than even World War II. Climate scientists tell us we're facing an existential crisis, and unless we get emissions under control in the next decade, that climate change will be irreversible.
Search started as a free product meaning it cannot get any less expensive for the user. You pay nothing, but the benefits of reaching larger and larger portions of humanity accrue to the provider, not to you.
What really characterises the experience of poverty is emotional stress. Stress is a natural human response to emotional strain, and whilst it can be useful in short doses as a catalyst, a motivator, a wake-up call, in the long term it can impact development, damage relationships and lead to self-defeating compulsive, addictive behaviours.