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 to be 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 
the 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 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 
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 tried 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 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,
which I launched back in 2014.

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I haven't spoken about it for a while,
but it has been through 4 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
to measure what every country on earth

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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 said

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not another country index, surely 
there are 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 water,
that's our air and our water.

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If they go to war, 
drags other countries in

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and the refugees pour out.

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There is really nothing you can do any more

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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 simply measure
the positive and negative effects

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that the 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 of 
beautiful hate mails from trolls

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all over the world, demanding to know 
why the country they hate ranks so high.

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and the country they love ranks so low,
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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And we have conversations about
these things and we argue about it,

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

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I don't know if I am right. 
I don't know if you are 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,

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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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And 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 in this latest edition

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of the Good Country Index, 
and that was

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what you can see if you go to the 
slightly lower in the Index,

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the USA has 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) (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 that
the world hasn't changed very much

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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, it's pretty obvious

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you put that country's interest 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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And one of the nice things about
the job I have been doing

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for the last 20 years or so
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 to harmonise

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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 would be interesting
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 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. 10 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 when 
those numbers came out,

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I got very excited.

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But then on mature reflection,
I realised that actually

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the counterpart of that is that
90% of the people in the world

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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 because

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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,
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 that 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, of course it reminded me

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of this strange idea that emerged recently
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 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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I think 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 exist.

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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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While 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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the campaigning organisations
and charities,

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

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There was a sentence, which in
one form or another

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kept on cropping up.

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And 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 can take something huge

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like climate change, 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 gonna fix it 
before you check out?

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(Laughter)

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It's this kind of arrogance and impatience
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
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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