WEBVTT

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Give me 30 seconds,

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and I can give you a list
of 30 terrifying challenges

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facing humanity and the planet 
at this point in history.

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And we wouldn't sleep tonight.

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There are so many of them, 
and they seem so frightening;

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it's not really surprising

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that many of us are feeling 
a little bit disheartened

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and a little bit anxious at the moment.

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But the way I see it,

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there are really only two things

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stopping the world working at the moment.

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The first one is the fact
that countries don't collaborate enough.

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We know the solutions 
to most of those challenges,

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but we don't implement them
because we don't work together.

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And the second thing that's stopping
the world working properly

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is the fact that every single 
one of those challenges

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has been caused by the behaviour
of human beings.

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And if we can change that,
we can change everything.

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Now, those sound like 
very big tasks, and they are,

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but I'm optimistic.

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For the last 10 years, I've been working
on projects and plans and policies

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to try and attack those two barriers
to making the world work better.

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Some of them, I try to encourage
countries to implement,

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but the coolest ones,
I keep, and I try to do them myself.

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So I'd like to tell you about two of those
in the few minutes that I've got today.

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The first one is more of an update.

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It's a project called
the Good Country Index,

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which I launched back in 2014.

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I haven't spoken about it for a while,

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but it's been through
four different editions,

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and I thought it would be good
to give an update.

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So the Good Country Index is an attempt

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to measure what every country on earth
gives to the rest of the world

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outside of its own borders -

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a kind of balance sheet
for the world, if you like.

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A lot of people
when I originally launched it

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said, "Not another country index.
There're enough of those around already."

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But the interesting thing is that
almost all of the others look inwards.

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They treat countries 
as if they were little islands

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inhabiting their own private oceans.

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But surely that doesn't really make sense.

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Because everything everybody does
has an impact on all of us, always.

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If one country pollutes
the air or the water,

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that's our air and our water.

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If they go to war,

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it drags other countries in
and the refugees pour out.

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There's really nothing you can do anymore

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that only impacts the domestic population.

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So what the Good Country Index
attempts to do

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is to make a start towards
helping people to understand

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that this is an interconnected system,

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by measuring what each country
contributes to the rest of the world.

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Now, it's not my opinion which countries
rank higher and which ones rank lower;

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it's formed from a set
of 35 large databases

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which mostly come from the UN system,

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and what they do is they measure

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the positive and negative effects
that countries have.

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It's always been a tiny bit controversial.

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But that's kind of good

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because it helps to start
a new kind of argument.

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In fact, it works really well.

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Within hours of me releasing the first
edition of the Good Country Index,

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I started receiving thousands
and thousands of beautiful hate mails

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from trolls all over the world,

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demanding to know why
the country they hate ranks so high,

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and the country they love ranks so low,

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and how I cooked up the entire thing

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just to produce that specific result
and annoy them personally.

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(Laughter)

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So we have conversations about
these things and we'd argue about it,

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and at the end I'd always say 
the same thing, "Look, it's working."

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I don't know if I'm right
or if you're right,

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but in the end, we are 
discussing the right thing:

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we are talking about
not how well is your country doing,

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but how much is your country doing.

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And that's what it
was supposed to achieve.

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So by pushing the direction
of the argument, the conversation,

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towards a new way of looking at countries,

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then I think that it's pushing
the agenda forward.

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So, my colleague Robert Govers and I

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just released the latest edition
of the Good Country Index.

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I'll just give you a very quick glimpse
of what's going on there.

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Finland came first.

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One of these days, somebody
is going to invent a country ranking

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that does not have 
a Nordic country in the top ten.

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(Laughter)

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An index of modesty perhaps?

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Anyway well done Finland, seriously!
It's absolutely great.

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And another rather
interesting thing happened

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in this latest edition
of the Good Country Index,

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and that was what you can see
if you go slightly lower in the Index,

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that the United States of America

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has for various reasons sunk
quite a long way since the last edition,

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and Russia for various reasons has risen.

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And we now have this peculiar situation
where the USA and Russia,

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relative to the size of their economies,

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are neck and neck, 
quite a long way down the Index.

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It's like two mean kids holding hands
at the edge of the playground

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and refusing to join the others.

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(Laughter)

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(Cheering) (Applause)

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But hey, it's an interesting result,

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but in the end, I'm afraid to say

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that the world hasn't changed very much
since the first one came out in 2014.

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It's still: America first, Britain first,
Russia first, Germany first.

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And in a way, I understand that. 
I don't have a problem with it.

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I mean after all, if you are
elected to run a country,

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it's pretty obvious that you put
that country's interests first.

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But what I find rather demoralising 
about those kinds of sentiments

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is the implication that
everybody else has to come last.

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And this is what I dispute.

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I think we can all come first.

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A nice thing about the job I've been doing
for the last 20 years or so,

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advising governments around the world

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and trying out real policies
in the real world,

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is that it's perfectly possible

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to harmonise your domestic
and your international responsibilities.

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You can do the right thing
for your own people,

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and you can do the right thing
for humanity at the same time

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without sacrificing yourself.

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And the funny thing is
it makes better policies.

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This is something that most
governments have simply never tried.

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So, on to the second thing
that's stopping the world working:

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the slightly more complicated issue
of the behaviour of us humans.

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Well, to get started on this,

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I thought it'd be interesting

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to try to find out
how many people in the world

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already agree with some
of these basic principles,

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the ones outlined
behind the Good Country Index.

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So Robert and I did some research,

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and we discovered that no less than
10% of the world's population

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appears to fully share
the principles of the Good Country,

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the idea that countries should collaborate
and cooperate a great deal more

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and compete a tiny bit less.

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This is great news. Ten percent,
that's 760 million people.

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If that were a nation, that would be
the third largest nation on the planet

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after China and India.

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And I have to admit
that when those numbers came out,

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I got very excited.

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But then on mature reflection,

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I realised that, actually,
the counterpart of that

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is that 90% of the people in the world
don't agree with that proposition,

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and I think if one was going
to take this challenge seriously,

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one has to focus on the 90%.

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It's not enough just to sell messages
to the people who already agree with you

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and try to make them make
tiny tweaks in their behaviour

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because frankly, it's too late for that.

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We are in too much of a hurry.

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We need big change,
and we need it very soon.

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In fact, we need it right now.

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So how can we deeply educate
the majority of the world's population

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to behave in a way which is more 
friendly to the world we live in

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and more friendly to each other?

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Because, by the way,
when I was speaking of trolls,

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of course it reminded me of
this strange idea that emerged recently,

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and I don't know where it came from,

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that the people who care more
about local things

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and the people like me
who care more about global things

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should be enemies.

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Who thought of this idea?

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This is the most dangerous idea
in the world at the moment,

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and I think we should all look out for it
and challenge it whenever we hear it.

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The people who care more 
about local things

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and the people who care more
about global things shouldn't be enemies.

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They should be working together.

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We should be glad that each other exists.

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There isn't time for this kind
of childish tribalism.

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We need to get on and fix things.

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Well anyway, as I was saying,

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the 90% need to be fundamentally 
educated in a different way.

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And I started looking
at some of the websites of the NGOs

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and the campaigning 
organisations and the charities,

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and I began to notice
there was a common theme emerging.

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There was a sentence,

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which in one form or another
kept on cropping up.

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The sentence was something like this:

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"And we should leave the world
in a better state for our children."

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And I've tried to read this sentence
about 93 times in different places.

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I began thinking to myself,

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"You know, that's pretty arrogant really."

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The idea you could take
something huge like climate change,

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a huge systemic problem
or conflict or migration

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that's taken billions of people 
centuries to perpetrate,

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and you are going to fix it 
before you check out?

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(Laughter)

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It's this kind of arrogance and impatience

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that causes more problems than it solves.

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If we only have the nerve,
if we only have the courage

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to give it one generation,

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we can fix everything
and we can fix it for good.

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Because every single day that passes,

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humanity has an opportunity
to start again.

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Because every single day that passes,
new children are born,

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and they can learn in new ways.

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So there is a solution to every
single challenge facing humanity;

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it's called education.

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But we need to do it in a new way
and a different way

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and a much more ambitious way
than we've done it before.

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Imagine if you will, a test tube rack

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of the sort you probably had
when you studied science at school.

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And in this test tube rack made of wood,

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there are 7, 8, 10, I don't know,
little glass test tubes,

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and each one contains
a different coloured liquid.

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And each one of those liquids
is a vaccine, an educational vaccine

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against the behaviours
that cause climate change, conflicts,

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human right abuses, terrorism, migration,
pandemics and all the rest of it.

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And if we administer these educational
vaccines to all of our children,

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in the next generation, they will be
incapable of continuing the behaviours

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that we have indulged in for so long.

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If we teach our children 
cultural anthropology at the age of six -

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it's a wonderful subject
for six-year-olds -

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they'd grow up taking a scientific pride
in understanding cultural differences.

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They are immunised

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against the kind of ignorance
that leads to prejudice and intolerance.

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I know that one works

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because I experimented it
on my children, and it works a charm.

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(Laughter)

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If we want to lessen 
the speed of climate change,

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we need to teach our children 
oceanography and meteorology,

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and then maybe one day


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they'll switch off the damn light
when they leave bedroom.

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(Laugher)

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We need to teach our children hygiene
so that there is less disease.

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We need to teach them to meditate 
so there is less mental illness

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and they learn to have more empathy
and understanding and kindness

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towards everybody else.

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There are so many subjects.

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I can't decide which ones they should be.

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What I think we need to do

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is to have a big global
discussion on the internet,

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where everybody puts in their own idea

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about what should be 
the next set of values

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that we're going to teach
the next generation of children

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so they can run towards
the global challenges

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instead of running away 
from them as we've done.

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And we can do this.

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Next year, it will be my aim, my ambition,

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to have one hundred
ministers of education signing up

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to this new global compact
of educational values.

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UNESCO has already signed a letter

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saying they would like to support this
if we can get it going.

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And if you have any doubts
about whether it's possible

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for humanity to engage
in such a big common project

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despite all of our cultural differences,

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well, just have a think
about the United Nations' charter

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or the human rights documentation.

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Have a read if you
haven't read it for a while.

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These are the most beautiful documents
ever produced by humanity,

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and they really give you faith

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because they remind you as you read them

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that we are capable

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of behaving like a single species
inhabiting a single planet.

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We can do it if we really want to
and if we do it at scale.

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The good news is

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it's more about joining up the dots
than starting from scratch.

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Because there're hundreds and hundreds

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if not thousands of projects
around the world at the moment,

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finding and experimenting
different ways of educating children

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so they behave better in the future.

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The trouble is they're mostly
single topics and in single countries.

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There's no time for doing it slowly now.

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We need to do it big,
and we need to do it in one go.

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Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old 
Swedish climate activist,

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is beginning to discover
and beginning to show us

00:13:54.625 --> 00:13:59.481
how very difficult it is to persuade
grown-ups to change their behaviour.

00:14:00.183 --> 00:14:02.150
But the simple fact of 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 --> 00:14:11.688
Some adults have the solutions,

00:14:11.688 --> 00:14:14.638
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 --> 00:14:34.155
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 --> 00:14:47.978
(Applause) (Cheering)