From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
America has a class system, and it's becoming more rigid all the time. As inequality widens the ladder becomes so long that you have little hope of getting too far up it in your lifetime.
Engineering life is often less demanding than creating a nuclear weapon, making monitoring more challenging. This complexity underscores the need for the scientific community to actively engage in establishing robust safeguards and developing strategies to prevent bioterrorism.
One of the unique aspects of a prize is that when you put a dollar up in a prize purse, you're incentivising teams around the world to spend many times that dollar in pursuit of the competition. You are leveraging dollars in a completely different way- in a philanthropic pursuit.
Cities are the future of humanity. How we design them will determine whether we create sustainable, equitable communities or contribute to further environmental and social decay.
We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles, sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year. At the same time, we have pizzagate, QAnon, chemtrails and 9/11 truthers.
The fascinating part is how we've witnessed an industry sprout from virtually nothing, and now, the upcoming generation is impressively adept at understanding the true potential of being an influencer. For many Gen Z individuals, it's seen as a springboard for launching their own businesses.
Connection is why we're here. It gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The ability to feel connected is neurobiologically wired into us.
I didn't have a childhood- I didn't play- every day was about survival. I was always moving to a different-place on a weekly/monthly basis. Since the only food I had was stolen, your presence was soon known by the local shopkeeper and they would make things miserable for you often calling the local police.
Influencers wield enormous influence, and sometimes, this can manifest negatively. One area I often highlight is the spread of misinformation, particularly regarding health and wellness. The spread of anti-vaccination rhetoric, the reluctance to use sunscreen, and the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon can be profoundly damaging.
The internet has had a tremendous positive impact because it's the most democratised and decentralised medium ever known. Along comes the internet, and it changes all that, it puts the power of communication in everyone's hand, at least everyone who can afford access.
Imagine Martin Luther King walked into your foundation. Would he pass muster? He would not get a dime out of most contemporary foundations because he would say, 'honestly? This work will take years, people are going to die, I'm not sure how it will turn out.'
We must always remember, in the West as democracies, that we have to do this within the character of a free society. That will hopefully always be what separates us from them: that we defend ourselves, but we do so within the character of a free society.