From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I can see from people I've lost in my life that the thing you leave behind is love, so I hope I've created a bit of that too… I know I've been lucky to receive a lot.
It's not even about achieving something – it's about changing mindset. At that age, kids can go strongly in one direction or another in life, and being able to give them a steer is a huge accomplishment.
Architecture is a direct reflection of society - its aspirations, its achievements, its failures. It's a mirror that shows us who we are and who we want to be.
I also want to dispel the hero-myth of entrepreneurs, that they're somehow super-gifted individuals who are better than me or the people I know. I don't know any like that – my friends sleep late, smell funny, do stupid stuff and have weird joint problems.
From around 2007 onwards, a new era dawned, marked by the widespread adoption of smartphones, essentially equipping every person with a sensor device. In tandem, social media platforms proliferated, facilitating incessant information sharing. Concurrently, Google services like Earth and Street View began to provide unprecedented access to geospatial data, granting us both the means and the method to verify a plethora of information.
The process of problem definition is a discipline that we rarely teach or learn. It is one of the most important things that we can invest our time in. What are the true underlying causes of a problem? How are people really affected?
Today? we're at the precipice of taking a fundamental vacation from survival where instead of worrying about tomorrow, we can decide how to spend our time. When food, energy, healthcare and education are literally free to everyone, everywhere, what will humanity do with time? What an extraordinary opportunity?
If you love yourself – and feel good about yourself, it will help you enhance your future, life, and relationships. Loving yourself makes you feel worthy and if you love yourself, you're far more likely to love others.
I've been teaching for most of the last 40 years, and I've not come across a generation as dedicated to public service and the common good as my current generation of students. They will inherit the future, and I have great confidence that they know what they must do.
At its core lies a universal crisis of legitimacy of the state, and that crisis means many countries will evolve Fourth Generation war on their soil. America, with a closed political system and a poisonous ideology of multiculturalism, is a prime candidate for the home-grown variety of Fourth Generation war.
Most of the venture backed businesses, and venture capital firms, are a mirror-tocracy not a meritocracy! Senior executives are disproportionately drawn from a narrow stratum of society – in the US, this means Ivy-League Schools such as Stanford. They tend to be overwhelmingly white (and increasingly now Asian) but certainly overwhelmingly male.
We have made money, capital, materialism and consumption into our God, it's a disease – you could call it affluenza. It is perhaps because of this context that humanity has lost its way, and the consideration of human rights has been subordinated to the interests of a handful of powerful people who sit at the top of the pyramid.