WEBVTT 00:00:03.958 --> 00:00:09.467 (Applause) 00:00:11.737 --> 00:00:13.920 Give me 30 seconds, 00:00:15.875 --> 00:00:20.030 And I can give you a list of 30 terrifying challenges 00:00:20.030 --> 00:00:24.255 facing humanity and the planet at this point in history. 00:00:25.091 --> 00:00:27.416 And we wouldn't sleep tonight. 00:00:29.243 --> 00:00:31.924 There are so many of them, and they seem so frightening 00:00:31.924 --> 00:00:34.122 It's not really surprising 00:00:34.122 --> 00:00:37.074 that many of us are feeling a little bit disheartened, 00:00:37.585 --> 00:00:39.674 and a little bit anxious at the moment. 00:00:39.674 --> 00:00:41.567 But the way I see it - 00:00:41.567 --> 00:00:43.570 There are really only two things 00:00:43.570 --> 00:00:46.161 stopping the world working at the moment 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:51.788 The first one is the fact that the countries don't collaborate enough. 00:00:52.582 --> 00:00:55.755 We know the solutions to most of those challenges. 00:00:56.151 --> 00:00:59.263 But we don't implement them because we don't work together. 00:00:59.898 --> 00:01:03.013 And the second thing that's stopping the world working properly 00:01:03.013 --> 00:01:06.058 is the fact that every single one of those challenges 00:01:06.058 --> 00:01:09.549 has been caused by the behaviour of human beings. 00:01:10.089 --> 00:01:13.769 And if we can change that we can change everything. 00:01:14.394 --> 00:01:18.403 Now, those sound like very big tasks and they are. 00:01:18.813 --> 00:01:20.184 But I'm optimistic. 00:01:21.212 --> 00:01:27.061 For the last 10 years, I've been working on projects and plans and policies. 00:01:27.491 --> 00:01:31.755 to try and attack those two barriers to making the world work better. 00:01:32.396 --> 00:01:35.936 Some of them I tried to encourage countries to implement. 00:01:36.560 --> 00:01:41.624 But the coolest ones, I keep and I try to do them myself. 00:01:42.992 --> 00:01:48.115 So I'd like to tell you about two of those in the few minutes that I've got today. 00:01:49.511 --> 00:01:51.314 The first one is more of an update. 00:01:51.618 --> 00:01:56.305 It's a project called the Good Country Index which I launched back in 2014. 00:01:56.714 --> 00:02:01.752 I haven't spoken about it for a while, but it's been through 4 different editions. 00:02:01.892 --> 00:02:04.411 And I thought it would be good to give an update. 00:02:04.961 --> 00:02:09.312 So the Good Country Index is an attempt to measure what every country on earth 00:02:09.725 --> 00:02:11.495 gives to the rest of the world 00:02:11.495 --> 00:02:13.535 outside of its own borders, 00:02:13.535 --> 00:02:16.064 a kind of balance sheet for the world if you like. 00:02:16.288 --> 00:02:18.455 A lot of people when I originally launched it 00:02:18.455 --> 00:02:22.208 said not another country index. Surely there're enough of those around already. 00:02:22.208 --> 00:02:26.603 But the interesting thing is that almost all of the others look inwards. 00:02:26.603 --> 00:02:29.513 They treat countries as if they were little islands 00:02:29.513 --> 00:02:32.095 inhabiting their own private oceans. 00:02:32.095 --> 00:02:34.855 But surely that doesn't really make sense. 00:02:34.855 --> 00:02:39.647 Because everything everybody does has an impact on all of us, always. 00:02:39.927 --> 00:02:44.666 If one country pollutes the air or water, that's our air and our water. 00:02:44.866 --> 00:02:48.810 If they go to war, drags other countries in 00:02:48.810 --> 00:02:50.920 and the refugees pour out. 00:02:51.926 --> 00:02:53.938 There's really nothing you can do any more 00:02:53.938 --> 00:02:56.718 that only impacts the domestic population. 00:02:56.718 --> 00:02:59.351 So what the Good Country Index attempts to do 00:02:59.351 --> 00:03:02.836 is to make a start towards helping people to understand 00:03:02.836 --> 00:03:05.464 that this is an interconnected system, 00:03:05.464 --> 00:03:09.240 by measuring what each country contributes to the rest of the world. 00:03:10.410 --> 00:03:14.927 Now, it's not my opinion which countries rank higher and which ones rank lower. 00:03:15.330 --> 00:03:19.293 It's formed from a set of 35 large databases, 00:03:19.293 --> 00:03:21.940 which mostly come from the UN system. 00:03:21.940 --> 00:03:25.063 And what they do is they measure the positive and negative effects 00:03:25.073 --> 00:03:27.205 that the countries have. 00:03:27.205 --> 00:03:30.291 It's always been a tiny bit controversial. 00:03:30.291 --> 00:03:31.714 But that's kind of good, 00:03:31.714 --> 00:03:34.864 because it helps to start a new kind of argument. 00:03:35.709 --> 00:03:38.191 In fact, it works really well. 00:03:38.191 --> 00:03:42.374 Within hours of me releasing the first edition of the Good Country Index 00:03:42.374 --> 00:03:47.186 I started receiving thousands of beautiful hate mails from trolls 00:03:47.186 --> 00:03:52.547 all over the world, demanding to know why the country they hate ranks so high. 00:03:52.547 --> 00:03:57.512 and the country they love ranks so low, and how I cooked up the entire thing 00:03:57.512 --> 00:04:01.342 just to produce that specific result and annoy them personally. 00:04:01.342 --> 00:04:02.842 (Laughter) 00:04:02.938 --> 00:04:06.093 And we have conversations about these things and we argue about it, 00:04:06.093 --> 00:04:10.413 and at the end I'd always say the same thing, "Look, it's working." 00:04:10.685 --> 00:04:11.693 I don't know if I'm right 00:04:11.693 --> 00:04:12.693 or you're right. 00:04:12.693 --> 00:04:15.343 But in the end, we are discussing the right thing. 00:04:15.343 --> 00:04:18.795 We are talking about not how well is your country doing, 00:04:18.795 --> 00:04:21.136 but how much is your country doing. 00:04:21.506 --> 00:04:23.870 And that's what it was supposed to achieve. 00:04:24.043 --> 00:04:28.695 So by pushing the direction of the argument, the conversation, 00:04:28.695 --> 00:04:31.039 towards a new way of looking at countries, 00:04:31.039 --> 00:04:33.390 then I think that it's pushing the agenda forward. 00:04:33.827 --> 00:04:35.928 So, my colleague Robert Govers and I 00:04:35.928 --> 00:04:39.061 just released the latest edition of the Good Country Index. 00:04:39.242 --> 00:04:43.068 I'll just give you a very quick glimpse of what's going on there. 00:04:44.258 --> 00:04:46.172 Finland came first. 00:04:47.705 --> 00:04:51.142 One of these days, somebody is going to invent a country ranking 00:04:51.142 --> 00:04:53.760 that does not have a nordic country in the top ten. 00:04:53.760 --> 00:04:56.330 (Laughter) 00:04:56.584 --> 00:04:59.014 An index of modesty perhaps. 00:04:59.907 --> 00:05:03.177 Anyway well done Finland, seriously! It's absolutely great. 00:05:03.379 --> 00:05:06.839 And another rather interesting thing happened in this latest edition 00:05:06.839 --> 00:05:08.951 of the Good Country Index, and that was 00:05:08.951 --> 00:05:12.932 what you can see if you go to the slightly lower in the Index, 00:05:12.932 --> 00:05:20.332 that the USA has various reasons sunk quite a long way since the last edition, 00:05:20.332 --> 00:05:23.315 and Russia for various reasons has risen. 00:05:23.315 --> 00:05:27.535 And we now have this peculiar situation where the USA and Russia 00:05:27.535 --> 00:05:29.579 relative to the size of their economies, 00:05:29.579 --> 00:05:33.675 are neck and neck, quite a long way down the Index. 00:05:33.675 --> 00:05:37.474 It's like two mean kids holding hands at the edge of the playground 00:05:37.474 --> 00:05:39.433 and refusing to join the others. 00:05:39.433 --> 00:05:44.283 (Laughter) (Cheering) (Applause) 00:05:47.993 --> 00:05:50.566 But hey, it's an interesting result, 00:05:50.566 --> 00:05:54.299 but in the end, I'm afraid to say that the world hasn't changed very much 00:05:54.299 --> 00:05:57.452 since the first one came out in 2014. 00:05:57.452 --> 00:06:01.612 It's still America first, Britain first, Russia first, Germany first. 00:06:03.137 --> 00:06:06.176 And in a way I understand that. I don't have a problem with it. 00:06:06.184 --> 00:06:09.978 I mean after all, if you are elected to run a country, it's pretty obvious 00:06:09.978 --> 00:06:12.856 that you put that country's interest first. 00:06:12.856 --> 00:06:16.706 But what I find rather demoralising about those kinds of sentiments 00:06:16.706 --> 00:06:20.418 is the implication that everybody else has to come last. 00:06:20.418 --> 00:06:22.136 And this is what I dispute. 00:06:22.136 --> 00:06:24.223 I think we can all come first. 00:06:25.153 --> 00:06:27.137 A nice thing about the job I've been doing 00:06:27.137 --> 00:06:30.392 for the last 20 years or so advising governments around the world 00:06:30.392 --> 00:06:33.322 and trying out real policies in the real world, 00:06:33.322 --> 00:06:36.141 is that it's perfectly possible to harmonise 00:06:36.141 --> 00:06:39.103 your domestic and your international responsibilities. 00:06:39.103 --> 00:06:41.301 You can do the right thing for your own people, 00:06:41.301 --> 00:06:44.560 and you can do the right thing for humanity at the same time 00:06:44.560 --> 00:06:46.472 without sacrificing yourself. 00:06:46.472 --> 00:06:49.341 And the funny thing is, it makes better policies. 00:06:49.341 --> 00:06:52.348 This is something that most governments have simply never tried. 00:06:53.463 --> 00:06:57.155 So on to the second thing that's stopping the world working 00:06:57.155 --> 00:07:01.576 the slightly more complicated issue of the behaviour of us humans. 00:07:01.975 --> 00:07:03.890 Well, to get started on this. 00:07:03.890 --> 00:07:07.673 I thought it'd be interesting to try to find out how many people in the world 00:07:07.673 --> 00:07:10.654 already agree with some of these basic principles, 00:07:10.654 --> 00:07:14.361 the ones outlined behind the Good Country Index. 00:07:14.361 --> 00:07:16.225 So Robert and I did some research 00:07:16.225 --> 00:07:20.153 and we discovered that no less than 10% of the world's population 00:07:20.153 --> 00:07:23.716 appears to fully share the principles of the Good Country, 00:07:23.716 --> 00:07:28.436 the idea that countries should collaborate and cooperate a great deal more, 00:07:28.436 --> 00:07:30.930 and compete a tiny bit less. 00:07:30.930 --> 00:07:35.925 This is great news. 10 percent, that's 760 million people. 00:07:36.295 --> 00:07:39.832 If that were a nation, that would be the third largest nation on the planet 00:07:39.832 --> 00:07:41.564 after China and India. 00:07:42.149 --> 00:07:45.086 And I have to admit when those numbers came out, 00:07:45.086 --> 00:07:46.786 I got very excited. 00:07:47.234 --> 00:07:50.411 But then on mature reflection, I realised that actually 00:07:50.411 --> 00:07:54.285 the counterpart of that is that 90% of the people in the world 00:07:54.285 --> 00:07:56.179 don't agree with that proposition. 00:07:56.371 --> 00:07:59.102 I think if one was going to take this challenge seriously, 00:07:59.102 --> 00:08:01.624 one has to focus on the 90%. 00:08:01.894 --> 00:08:06.274 It's not enough just to sell messages to the people who already agree with you, 00:08:06.274 --> 00:08:09.688 and try to make them make tiny tweaks in their behaviour 00:08:09.688 --> 00:08:12.493 because frankly, it's too late for that. 00:08:12.493 --> 00:08:14.214 We are in too much of a hurry. 00:08:14.227 --> 00:08:16.919 We need big change, we need it very soon. 00:08:16.919 --> 00:08:18.984 In fact, we need it right now. 00:08:19.571 --> 00:08:24.311 So how can we deeply educate the majority of the world's population 00:08:24.311 --> 00:08:27.515 to behave in a way which is more friendly to the world we live in 00:08:27.515 --> 00:08:29.474 and more friendly to each other? 00:08:29.707 --> 00:08:33.980 Because by the way, when I was speaking of trolls, of course it reminded me 00:08:33.980 --> 00:08:38.652 of this strange idea that emerged recently and I don't know where it came from 00:08:38.918 --> 00:08:41.857 that the people who care more about local things 00:08:41.857 --> 00:08:44.592 and people like me who care more about global things 00:08:44.592 --> 00:08:46.174 should be enemies. 00:08:46.186 --> 00:08:48.217 Who thought of this idea? 00:08:48.217 --> 00:08:51.314 This is the most dangerous idea in the world at the moment, 00:08:51.314 --> 00:08:55.024 and I think we should all look out for it and challenge it whenever we hear it. 00:08:55.035 --> 00:08:57.194 The people who care more about local things 00:08:57.194 --> 00:09:00.584 and the people who care more about global things shouldn't be enemies. 00:09:00.584 --> 00:09:02.392 They should be working together. 00:09:02.392 --> 00:09:04.941 We should be glad that each other exists. 00:09:04.941 --> 00:09:08.397 There isn't time for this kind of childish tribalism. 00:09:08.397 --> 00:09:10.913 We need to get on and fix things. 00:09:11.488 --> 00:09:13.395 While anyway as I was saying 00:09:14.008 --> 00:09:18.128 the 90% need to be fundamentally educated in a different way. 00:09:19.092 --> 00:09:21.883 And I started looking at some of the websites of the NGOs, 00:09:21.883 --> 00:09:24.637 and the campaigning organisations and the charities, 00:09:24.637 --> 00:09:27.721 and I began to notice there was a common theme emerging. 00:09:27.891 --> 00:09:30.960 There was a sentence, which in one form or another 00:09:30.960 --> 00:09:32.346 kept on cropping up. 00:09:32.346 --> 00:09:34.494 And the sentence was something like this, 00:09:35.073 --> 00:09:39.333 "And we should leave the world in a better state for our children." 00:09:40.679 --> 00:09:44.622 And I've tried to read this sentence about 93 times in different places. 00:09:44.622 --> 00:09:46.587 I began thinking to myself, 00:09:47.550 --> 00:09:49.969 "you know that's pretty arrogant really." 00:09:49.969 --> 00:09:51.835 The idea you could take something huge 00:09:51.835 --> 00:09:56.172 like climate change, huge systemic problem or conflict or migration 00:09:56.172 --> 00:10:00.212 that's taken billions of people centuries to perpetrate, 00:10:00.212 --> 00:10:02.352 you are gonna fix it before you check out? 00:10:02.352 --> 00:10:03.488 (Laughter) 00:10:03.488 --> 00:10:07.971 It's this kind of arrogance and impatience that causes more problems than it solves. 00:10:08.621 --> 00:10:12.193 If we only have the nerve, if we only have the courage 00:10:12.193 --> 00:10:13.850 to give it one generation, 00:10:13.850 --> 00:10:17.360 we can fix everything and we can fix it for good. 00:10:17.976 --> 00:10:22.996 Because every single day that passes humanity has opportunity to start again. 00:10:23.938 --> 00:10:27.695 Because every single day that passes new children are born, 00:10:27.695 --> 00:10:30.105 and they can learn in new ways. 00:10:30.105 --> 00:10:33.272 So there is a solution to every single challenge facing humanity. 00:10:33.272 --> 00:10:34.745 It's called education. 00:10:34.745 --> 00:10:37.365 But we need to do it in a new way and a different way 00:10:37.366 --> 00:10:40.836 and a much more ambitious way than we've done it before. 00:10:40.836 --> 00:10:43.769 Imagine if you wield a test tube rack 00:10:43.769 --> 00:10:46.957 of the sort you probably had when you studied science at school. 00:10:47.422 --> 00:10:51.834 And in this test tube rack made of wood there are 7, 8, 10 I don't know 00:10:51.834 --> 00:10:55.861 little glass test tubes, and each one contains a different coloured liquid. 00:10:55.861 --> 00:11:00.646 And each one of those liquids is a vaccine, an educational vaccine 00:11:00.646 --> 00:11:04.083 against the behaviours that cause climate change, conflicts, 00:11:04.083 --> 00:11:08.498 human right abuses, terrorism, migration pandemic and all the rest of it. 00:11:08.498 --> 00:11:12.390 And if we administer these educational vaccines to all of our children, 00:11:12.390 --> 00:11:16.696 in the next generation, they will be incapable of continuing the behaviours 00:11:16.696 --> 00:11:19.081 that we have indulged in for so long. 00:11:19.802 --> 00:11:23.149 If we teach our children cultural anthropology at the age of 6, 00:11:23.149 --> 00:11:25.935 it's a wonderful subject for 6 year olds. 00:11:25.935 --> 00:11:30.385 They grow up taking a scientific pride in understanding cultural differences. 00:11:30.817 --> 00:11:32.894 They are immunised against the ignorance 00:11:32.894 --> 00:11:35.096 leads to prejudice and intolerance. 00:11:35.096 --> 00:11:37.899 I know that one works because I experimented on my children 00:11:37.899 --> 00:11:39.403 and it works a charm. 00:11:39.403 --> 00:11:40.894 (Laughter) 00:11:41.571 --> 00:11:44.687 If we want to lessen the speed of climate change, 00:11:44.687 --> 00:11:47.692 we need to teach our children oceanography and meteorology, 00:11:47.692 --> 00:11:49.722 maybe one day they'll switch off the light 00:11:49.722 --> 00:11:50.844 when they leave bedroom 00:11:50.844 --> 00:11:52.344 (Laugher) 00:11:52.344 --> 00:11:56.202 We need to teach our children hygiene so that there is less disease. 00:11:56.202 --> 00:11:59.568 We need to teach them to meditate so there is less mental illness, 00:11:59.568 --> 00:12:02.680 they learn to have more empathy more understanding and kindness 00:12:02.680 --> 00:12:04.647 towards everybody else. 00:12:04.647 --> 00:12:06.121 There are so many subjects. 00:12:06.121 --> 00:12:08.166 I can't decide which ones they should be. 00:12:08.166 --> 00:12:11.238 What I think we need to do is to have a big global discussion 00:12:11.238 --> 00:12:12.325 on the internet 00:12:12.325 --> 00:12:14.556 where everybody puts in their own idea 00:12:14.556 --> 00:12:17.184 about what should be the next set of values 00:12:17.184 --> 00:12:19.784 we are going to teach the next generation of children 00:12:19.784 --> 00:12:22.261 so they can run towards the global challenges 00:12:22.261 --> 00:12:24.769 instead of running away from them as we've done. 00:12:26.862 --> 00:12:28.658 And we can do this. 00:12:29.253 --> 00:12:34.895 Next year, it will be my aim, my ambition to have one hundred ministers of education 00:12:34.895 --> 00:12:38.632 signing up to this new global compact of educational values. 00:12:38.932 --> 00:12:42.268 UNESCO has already signed a letter that they would like to support this 00:12:42.268 --> 00:12:44.181 if we can get it going. 00:12:44.688 --> 00:12:48.077 And if you have any doubts about whether it's possible 00:12:48.078 --> 00:12:52.072 for humanity to engage in such a big common project 00:12:52.072 --> 00:12:54.496 despite all of that cultural differences, 00:12:54.496 --> 00:12:58.540 we'll just have a think about the United National's charter 00:12:59.613 --> 00:13:03.285 or the human rights documentation. 00:13:03.285 --> 00:13:06.045 Have a read if you haven't read it for a while. 00:13:06.045 --> 00:13:09.427 These are the most beautiful documents ever produced by humanity, 00:13:09.429 --> 00:13:13.429 and they really give you faith, because they remind you as you read them 00:13:13.429 --> 00:13:16.948 that we are capable of behaving like a single species 00:13:16.948 --> 00:13:19.033 inhabiting a single planet. 00:13:19.428 --> 00:13:22.682 We can do it if we really want to and if we do it at scale. 00:13:22.682 --> 00:13:25.427 The good news is it's more about joining up the dots than 00:13:25.427 --> 00:13:26.638 starting from scratch. 00:13:26.638 --> 00:13:30.054 Because there're hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of projects 00:13:30.054 --> 00:13:34.209 around the world at the moment, finding and experimenting different ways 00:13:34.209 --> 00:13:36.994 of educating children so they behave better in the future. 00:13:36.994 --> 00:13:41.390 The trouble is they are mostly single topics and in single countries. 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:43.981 There's no time for doing it slowly now. 00:13:43.981 --> 00:13:47.381 We need to do it big, and we need to do it in one go. 00:13:48.850 --> 00:13:52.177 Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old Swedish climate activist 00:13:52.177 --> 00:13:56.220 is beginning to discover and beginning to show us how very difficult it is 00:13:56.744 --> 00:13:59.481 to persuade grown-ups to change their behaviour. 00:14:00.183 --> 00:14:01.947 But the simple fact to the matter is 00:14:02.420 --> 00:14:07.453 that we can see that a lot of children have got the right attitude, 00:14:07.453 --> 00:14:09.614 but they don't have the solutions. 00:14:09.839 --> 00:14:14.638 Some adults have the solutions but they definitely don't have the right attitude. 00:14:15.163 --> 00:14:19.601 And so guess what, it's another necessity for collaboration, 00:14:19.601 --> 00:14:22.472 the children and the grown-ups working together. 00:14:23.873 --> 00:14:28.233 We all have to think very hard now about being better human beings. 00:14:29.033 --> 00:14:33.863 And that's about being better citizens, both locally and globally. 00:14:34.771 --> 00:14:38.971 But it's also perhaps mainly about being better ancestors. 00:14:39.379 --> 00:14:42.940 If we can do that, we can make the world work. 00:14:44.027 --> 00:14:45.024 Thank you. 00:14:45.024 --> 00:14:49.284 (Applause) (Cheering)