focus and I we have a very uneasy
relationship I mean sometimes I love
focus and sometimes I I hate it but
recently I’ve come to rediscover a
profound truth about the nature of focus
which is that if I take a finger and
raise it in front of me and close one
eye oh no way okay you all have to
embarrass yourselves with me everyone
take a finger raised in front of you
close one eye and then flip to the other
and the other and back again you see how
your finger moves isn’t that crazy
and I do this to remind us of a simple
truth that we learned when we were
children which is that if we want to
focus on any one point it takes two
points of view I mean we can try with
one but then our vision has no depth and
I think that there’s something basic and
urgent about our current predicament in
that insight because recently you know a
lot of events have been coming at us and
we just cannot judge you know when
they’re gonna hit and we’ve been hit in
the face
brexit never gonna happen all right
Donald Trump unelectable globalization
irreversible democratization inevitable
science incontrovertible we thought we
saw the moment that we live in so so
clearly it turns out that we’ve had one
eye closed the whole time so let’s open
the other eye all right how do we do
that how do we gain some depth on the
time that we’re living in what we
already know you know how to get depth
in space now it takes two points of view
we need to here and we need to there so
it just stands to reason that if we want
to see depth in our time we need two
moments we need a present and we need a
past
in the past that I’d like to stand at is
the Renaissance and before we get
started
know by Renaissance I don’t just mean
you know a rebirth of classical art in
Italy and I don’t just mean an
exclusively European moment either I
mean there have been Renaissance a”s
throughout history but the one I’m
standing at right now is about from 1450
to 1550 when Europe shifted from the
medieval to the early modern world with
the help of and with consequences for
the whole world
and why do I stand here at this
Renaissance to see some depth in the
present let’s go back here and think
about it now when the history of our
time is written what is the first
sentence of our history going to be the
most important thing I think it’s going
to be the advent of the digital medium
this new medium that connected computers
together and eliminated all barriers to
information exchange and back here in
the Renaissance of course the first
sentence of their history is the new
print medium which emerged just 600
kilometers down the road inmates in the
1450s and within 50 years had spread all
across Europe imagine what that most of
what that must have been like now to
live in a world before print where every
single piece of information you
possessed had to be hand written by
somebody else and then in your own
lifetime that limitation just falls away
for most people in history that that
would be really hard to do that thought
experiment but for us standing here it’s
easy right we know exactly what it’s
like to live through the advent of a new
information medium right and now we know
more and more about the consequences of
that how it accelerates the spread of
new ideas like Copernicus’s insight that
the Sun not the earth is the center of
the universe how it empowers sudden
revolutions
like Martin Luther’s Protestant
Reformation revolutions that that break
institutions whose permanence we took
for granted how it empowers false
prophets like Savonarola who kicked the
Medici out of Florence in the 1490s with
a fiery campaign to to drain the swamp
and make Florence great again who
ignited a bonfire of vanity to burn away
liberal values interesting historical
side note
Savonarola was crucified by his
political enemies four years later what
are you drawing some allusion to the
present that I’m not thinking of so new
map new media new mediums the giant
thing that we share with the Renaissance
but there’s more new maps which i think
of in the present context as
globalization this is global trade flows
by the way but the fall of the Berlin
Wall the opening of China right
democratization across Latin America and
South Africa took flows of trade of
capital of people of technologies and it
exploded them globally tangle this all
together and completely redrew our
political maps of the world and in the
Renaissance the new maps were made by
the voyages of discovery this was the
best map of the world that Europe had
access to pre-renaissance you know to
the left the Indian Ocean landlocked to
the right Africa barely understood and
the Americas didn’t even exist but
within just a few decades Columbus
Magellan de Gama they gave us this map
and put the world’s precious resources
as they were then understood into global
motion for the very first time local
flows became intercontinental and it
made tremendous winners for people on
these new ocean trade routes and big
losers along the old Silk Roads and it
wasn’t just goods that started the flow
more freely Bad’s to Europe carrying
diseases to the
America’s decimating native populations
financial shocks that spread through
this new international Republic of money
this is a German banker Jakob Fugger who
drew huge sums of wealth from this new
money market in Europe and lent it to
the spanish king charles v to finances
wars and here is shown burning that bet
in his fireplace because the sovereign
had defaulted on his debts and i could
go on all day i could talk about how
powers that had been on the margins
suddenly become global leaders right
which back in the renaissance that new
kid on the block was europe right here
is how ming dynasty china saw the world
here’s where they put europe literally
on the margins right and that all
changed in just a few decades right or
you know what about how these new
advances in AI in human genetic
modification are putting into our human
hands powers that have always been above
us you know could ask Copernicus about
that
who said that math not the Bible reveals
the nature of the universe could ask him
about how that’s going to play out so
you know here we’ve been stumbling
through this time and we call it
shocking and rapid change and disruption
with one eye open when really all we
needed to do is open both eyes you know
see the past and the presence and say to
ourselves this isn’t so hard to
understand this is a second Renaissance
now I know we all want answers right and
we want relief from the anxiety and the
fear of what comes next
now what is this historic depth mean for
my business for my politics for me you
know for what’s gonna happen next and
and I have I think some answers but
today I think in the context of this
event the most important question that I
want us to talk about is what is this
historic depth on the present mean for
us
for all of us as authors co-authors of
our own time in history and I think it
relates to the steam of a focus and
where do we focus on why because if if
this is a second Renaissance right then
the chief task of our age is to usher in
the next one and now I’m out of the
lights DaVinci help usher in the early
modern era with his vitruvian man and we
all know it what does it mean the square
for circles for seasons that’s Earth the
perfect circle that’s heaven by putting
us in the center of both da Vinci is
challenging this limiting medieval view
that our place in creation is fixed no
it’s not fixed he said we can rise we
can expand our knowledge of creation
beyond the Bible beyond the ancients
with present-day efforts and
observations and that new radical
philosophy of progress ultimately helped
usher in the Scientific Revolution and
the Enlightenment I stand here today and
I think that we too are reaching the
limits of some of our philosophies and
that it’s time to start breaking those
limits and to give you just one example
here’s a graph only graph I promise of
global GDP growth over the past thousand
years and here’s the Renaissance totally
uninteresting this moment in history one
of the most important transitions in
history and through a modern economic
lens nothing happened right
which immediately begs the question this
paradigm and this is the dominant
paradigm through which we measure
progress today does it help us to grow
or does it limit our very conception of
growth and history suggest the latter
history suggests we need to break this
paradigm how do we do that
well I think we need to learn from some
of the mistakes of
now we should learn for example from
this guy Christopher Columbus right
because like him we’re setting out on
all these voyages like him were making
all of these amazing discoveries but
like him we are trying to ram these
discoveries into outdated maps mental
maps of the world Columbus sailed in
search of Asia
he found America but he was certain it
was Asia because Noah had three sons and
after the flood they founded that this
is all very biblical they founded the
three races Africa Asia and Europe and
that was it that was humanity and he was
so fixed in that lens that he couldn’t
even appreciate the significance of his
own discovery it’s why America today
isn’t named after Columbus
it’s named after this guy Amerigo
Vespucci an Italian explorer who a
decade later said okay these discoveries
they don’t fit on any map right this is
a moon dis Novus a new world people and
by shifting our thinking by shifting our
maps he unleashed our capacity to
navigate this new world for good and for
ill and that’s the kind of challenge
that’s in front of us right now not just
to try to keep up with all the change
and Ram it into our heads but to
challenge the maps onto which we are
trying to place it so that our thinking
keeps up with our reality and we can’t
understand Donald Trump by mapping him
on a political spectrum of left versus
right and we got to add new dimensions
open and closed or globalist the
Nationalists we can’t understand
progress through simply you know
economic capital we got to add new
dimensions like social capital and
natural capital and Civic capital I’m a
China specialist I’ll tell you we cannot
understand modern China through this you
know worn-out cliche of the color red
there is a Red China now there is also a
blue China and a yellow China and a
green China and if we ever want to make
sense of it we’ve got to break away from
that old map and start to draw new ones
in a Renaissance moment this map making
this is our core work this is what our
focus needs to be and I mean I don’t
have the maps in in my head I’m I’m just
here to start the conversation a
conversation which I’m really excited
about today because I know that together
we’re gonna take this conversation
forward and I also know from history
that if we challenge enough of our
current maps then maybe just just maybe
out of all this confusion this
disruption this anxiety that we will in
our own Renaissance moment begin a new
age thanks
[Applause]
relationship I mean sometimes I love
focus and sometimes I I hate it but
recently I’ve come to rediscover a
profound truth about the nature of focus
which is that if I take a finger and
raise it in front of me and close one
eye oh no way okay you all have to
embarrass yourselves with me everyone
take a finger raised in front of you
close one eye and then flip to the other
and the other and back again you see how
your finger moves isn’t that crazy
and I do this to remind us of a simple
truth that we learned when we were
children which is that if we want to
focus on any one point it takes two
points of view I mean we can try with
one but then our vision has no depth and
I think that there’s something basic and
urgent about our current predicament in
that insight because recently you know a
lot of events have been coming at us and
we just cannot judge you know when
they’re gonna hit and we’ve been hit in
the face
brexit never gonna happen all right
Donald Trump unelectable globalization
irreversible democratization inevitable
science incontrovertible we thought we
saw the moment that we live in so so
clearly it turns out that we’ve had one
eye closed the whole time so let’s open
the other eye all right how do we do
that how do we gain some depth on the
time that we’re living in what we
already know you know how to get depth
in space now it takes two points of view
we need to here and we need to there so
it just stands to reason that if we want
to see depth in our time we need two
moments we need a present and we need a
past
in the past that I’d like to stand at is
the Renaissance and before we get
started
know by Renaissance I don’t just mean
you know a rebirth of classical art in
Italy and I don’t just mean an
exclusively European moment either I
mean there have been Renaissance a”s
throughout history but the one I’m
standing at right now is about from 1450
to 1550 when Europe shifted from the
medieval to the early modern world with
the help of and with consequences for
the whole world
and why do I stand here at this
Renaissance to see some depth in the
present let’s go back here and think
about it now when the history of our
time is written what is the first
sentence of our history going to be the
most important thing I think it’s going
to be the advent of the digital medium
this new medium that connected computers
together and eliminated all barriers to
information exchange and back here in
the Renaissance of course the first
sentence of their history is the new
print medium which emerged just 600
kilometers down the road inmates in the
1450s and within 50 years had spread all
across Europe imagine what that most of
what that must have been like now to
live in a world before print where every
single piece of information you
possessed had to be hand written by
somebody else and then in your own
lifetime that limitation just falls away
for most people in history that that
would be really hard to do that thought
experiment but for us standing here it’s
easy right we know exactly what it’s
like to live through the advent of a new
information medium right and now we know
more and more about the consequences of
that how it accelerates the spread of
new ideas like Copernicus’s insight that
the Sun not the earth is the center of
the universe how it empowers sudden
revolutions
like Martin Luther’s Protestant
Reformation revolutions that that break
institutions whose permanence we took
for granted how it empowers false
prophets like Savonarola who kicked the
Medici out of Florence in the 1490s with
a fiery campaign to to drain the swamp
and make Florence great again who
ignited a bonfire of vanity to burn away
liberal values interesting historical
side note
Savonarola was crucified by his
political enemies four years later what
are you drawing some allusion to the
present that I’m not thinking of so new
map new media new mediums the giant
thing that we share with the Renaissance
but there’s more new maps which i think
of in the present context as
globalization this is global trade flows
by the way but the fall of the Berlin
Wall the opening of China right
democratization across Latin America and
South Africa took flows of trade of
capital of people of technologies and it
exploded them globally tangle this all
together and completely redrew our
political maps of the world and in the
Renaissance the new maps were made by
the voyages of discovery this was the
best map of the world that Europe had
access to pre-renaissance you know to
the left the Indian Ocean landlocked to
the right Africa barely understood and
the Americas didn’t even exist but
within just a few decades Columbus
Magellan de Gama they gave us this map
and put the world’s precious resources
as they were then understood into global
motion for the very first time local
flows became intercontinental and it
made tremendous winners for people on
these new ocean trade routes and big
losers along the old Silk Roads and it
wasn’t just goods that started the flow
more freely Bad’s to Europe carrying
diseases to the
America’s decimating native populations
financial shocks that spread through
this new international Republic of money
this is a German banker Jakob Fugger who
drew huge sums of wealth from this new
money market in Europe and lent it to
the spanish king charles v to finances
wars and here is shown burning that bet
in his fireplace because the sovereign
had defaulted on his debts and i could
go on all day i could talk about how
powers that had been on the margins
suddenly become global leaders right
which back in the renaissance that new
kid on the block was europe right here
is how ming dynasty china saw the world
here’s where they put europe literally
on the margins right and that all
changed in just a few decades right or
you know what about how these new
advances in AI in human genetic
modification are putting into our human
hands powers that have always been above
us you know could ask Copernicus about
that
who said that math not the Bible reveals
the nature of the universe could ask him
about how that’s going to play out so
you know here we’ve been stumbling
through this time and we call it
shocking and rapid change and disruption
with one eye open when really all we
needed to do is open both eyes you know
see the past and the presence and say to
ourselves this isn’t so hard to
understand this is a second Renaissance
now I know we all want answers right and
we want relief from the anxiety and the
fear of what comes next
now what is this historic depth mean for
my business for my politics for me you
know for what’s gonna happen next and
and I have I think some answers but
today I think in the context of this
event the most important question that I
want us to talk about is what is this
historic depth on the present mean for
us
for all of us as authors co-authors of
our own time in history and I think it
relates to the steam of a focus and
where do we focus on why because if if
this is a second Renaissance right then
the chief task of our age is to usher in
the next one and now I’m out of the
lights DaVinci help usher in the early
modern era with his vitruvian man and we
all know it what does it mean the square
for circles for seasons that’s Earth the
perfect circle that’s heaven by putting
us in the center of both da Vinci is
challenging this limiting medieval view
that our place in creation is fixed no
it’s not fixed he said we can rise we
can expand our knowledge of creation
beyond the Bible beyond the ancients
with present-day efforts and
observations and that new radical
philosophy of progress ultimately helped
usher in the Scientific Revolution and
the Enlightenment I stand here today and
I think that we too are reaching the
limits of some of our philosophies and
that it’s time to start breaking those
limits and to give you just one example
here’s a graph only graph I promise of
global GDP growth over the past thousand
years and here’s the Renaissance totally
uninteresting this moment in history one
of the most important transitions in
history and through a modern economic
lens nothing happened right
which immediately begs the question this
paradigm and this is the dominant
paradigm through which we measure
progress today does it help us to grow
or does it limit our very conception of
growth and history suggest the latter
history suggests we need to break this
paradigm how do we do that
well I think we need to learn from some
of the mistakes of
now we should learn for example from
this guy Christopher Columbus right
because like him we’re setting out on
all these voyages like him were making
all of these amazing discoveries but
like him we are trying to ram these
discoveries into outdated maps mental
maps of the world Columbus sailed in
search of Asia
he found America but he was certain it
was Asia because Noah had three sons and
after the flood they founded that this
is all very biblical they founded the
three races Africa Asia and Europe and
that was it that was humanity and he was
so fixed in that lens that he couldn’t
even appreciate the significance of his
own discovery it’s why America today
isn’t named after Columbus
it’s named after this guy Amerigo
Vespucci an Italian explorer who a
decade later said okay these discoveries
they don’t fit on any map right this is
a moon dis Novus a new world people and
by shifting our thinking by shifting our
maps he unleashed our capacity to
navigate this new world for good and for
ill and that’s the kind of challenge
that’s in front of us right now not just
to try to keep up with all the change
and Ram it into our heads but to
challenge the maps onto which we are
trying to place it so that our thinking
keeps up with our reality and we can’t
understand Donald Trump by mapping him
on a political spectrum of left versus
right and we got to add new dimensions
open and closed or globalist the
Nationalists we can’t understand
progress through simply you know
economic capital we got to add new
dimensions like social capital and
natural capital and Civic capital I’m a
China specialist I’ll tell you we cannot
understand modern China through this you
know worn-out cliche of the color red
there is a Red China now there is also a
blue China and a yellow China and a
green China and if we ever want to make
sense of it we’ve got to break away from
that old map and start to draw new ones
in a Renaissance moment this map making
this is our core work this is what our
focus needs to be and I mean I don’t
have the maps in in my head I’m I’m just
here to start the conversation a
conversation which I’m really excited
about today because I know that together
we’re gonna take this conversation
forward and I also know from history
that if we challenge enough of our
current maps then maybe just just maybe
out of all this confusion this
disruption this anxiety that we will in
our own Renaissance moment begin a new
age thanks
[Applause]
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