From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Human cooperation is the greatest force in history- it enabled us to put people on the moon, build microprocessors and advance medicine. Human cooperation with intelligent machines will define the next era of history.
You know what else is immoral? 700 million people who have no electricity. We need to have actual conversations about how to solve problems – and hold the uneasy tension of who pays for it, and how.
Grief is perhaps the most universal human experience—live long enough, and you will grieve. When I see grief in another, whether a friend or a perceived adversary, what do I choose to do? In moments of shared grief, we find ourselves reflecting each other; your grief mirrors mine.
Social media has changed everything for companies. Within 24 hours, people on the other side of the world were cancelling flights because they were outraged. You can't segment your message, you have to take ownership.
Despite these needs, the reality is that more than half of the estimated 2.7 billion working age adults globally are excluded from formal financial services. Poor families, as far as access to financial services is concerned, are doubly penalised. They need financial access more than we do, but they only have access to inferior informal services.
Power requires oppression. In order to be powerful, you have to stand upon something. Strength comes from within. We are seeing the emergence of new political organisms with strength not power at the core. From Moscow to Hong Kong and India to the United States, powerless organisations are creating strong governance without power.
As children we experience a domestication process where rather than having our authenticity unlocked for us, instead we have put upon us layers and layers of rules about how we ought to behave and how we ought not to behave.
Fictions grant us a semblance of understanding, a hint of control, and a sense of community during times of solitude. This makes misinformation appealing, as it fulfils these basic human desires: comprehension, control, and community.
Critical theories give proposed solutions to legitimate problems that could not possibly be more open to manipulation and grift. The manipulators and grifters have filled the vacuum to the point where they're only ones who can benefit.
Today's civilisation is more fragile as a result of its complexity. We've created an astonishingly networked world in which we communicate and travel in ways which were unimaginable for most of human history... but at the same time, we have made ourselves more vulnerable to certain kinds of disaster, and even invented new forms of disaster that didn't' exist before.
The evidence suggests, unfortunately, that once you roughly earn a lower middle-class standard of living, additional money you earn beyond that has almost no effect on your quality of life.
Philanthropy is very much like business, there's not such a huge difference. In business you have a mission statement, in philanthropy you have a vision. I believe in philanthropy we want to do things that give back as much as we give, otherwise it doesn't have permanence.