https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4Nx6u34vGEE
Do you feel like there’s, I would say there’s widespread demoralization among young people in the West. And I think that’s particularly true of young men. And I think the reasons are basically threefold. The first is that we do a very bad job of managing the play preference and the activity preference of boys in our early education system. So our elementary schools are not well designed for what boys need. And then on the ideological front, we insist at every possible turn that any manifestation of masculine ambition is part of the system of patriarchal oppression that’s, what would you call, wreaked havoc in a demonic way since the beginning of time. And so the boys learn to identify their ambition with pathological power. And then if they manage to escape those two things, then the next thing they’re told is that all human activity is nothing but destructive, that we’re taking the planet into an environmental apocalypse and that everything’s going to collapse in any case. And it’s the fault of human action. And the combination of those three things is, you could add pornography into the mix just to mop up any boys that might have escaped from those three things. And we’ve done a pretty spectacular job of demoralizing young people in the West, and it’s not pretty. And so would you say that in the UAE that the young people that are part of your culture are looking to the future with hope? I mean, I know you’re putting forward an optimistic vision and it’s a credible vision and it’s credible because there are markers of its success, right? It’s not just talk, but you know, at least to some degree, what’s happening in the West on the ideological front and the demoralization front. Do you think that you guys have been successful at providing a positive vision and motivating while young men in particular, we talked about young women already, you’ve got the women’s rights approach fully active. You said women are well integrated into your culture at every level. Are your young people looking forward to the future with a certain degree of hope? So Jordan, I have studied with young people, worked with young people and also been offering public service to young people. Part of my mandate was to actually interact with young people on a daily basis. And what I saw is not just hope. I actually saw a drive, a drive to build something big, to build the next big thing for this nation, to actually turn another impossible into possible. And we have many examples on stuff that happens in schools and universities. Ten years ago, if you ask a young man, would you ever dream to go to the space or would you, what would be your dream? I don’t think the answer about going or exploring the space would exist back then in the airport. It was something almost impossible. It was something that’s far away. You don’t see young Arabs actually exploring space for decades, for 30, 40 years. Now if you go to the schools in the United Arab Emirates and meet many young kids and young men, many of them would say, we want to be the next astronaut who goes and explore space, because they have someone and they have a role model that exists today. We tick that box. We made it possible. We turned something impossible into possible. We turned the whole dream into an actual visual story. And we have many of these stories in the UAE where actually men could see others do it and they feel that, oh, I can also do it. I can also design my own startup. I can also be part of this mission. I can also be part of this program. Actually, if you look at the cabinet, many members of the cabinet are young ministers. They are under the age of 35. They are under the age of 30. They are ministers of economy, ministers of artificial intelligence, minister of youth affairs, minister of community development, and in a way showcase again hope in many different formats. And that goes back to the whole region. There was a survey called the Arab Youth Survey. Now they did it almost 10 times. Every time they questioned almost 3,000 young Arabs. Every time the UAE became the ideal location for them to actually follow their dreams. And every time they saw the UAE model as a model of hope and a model of optimistic future. And not only when it comes to views or how we see the future, but actually how we design it and how we build it. You go and walk in the United Arab Emirates, you would find incubators everywhere for young entrepreneurs. You would find youth hubs where actually either if you were an artist, a musician, a scholar, a writer, a researcher, where you can have a whole path. One thing that we did very well, Jordan, is basically we taught people how to find their point B and then how to go and walk that way toward point B. Because not knowing the destination is scary and it creates that gap. And hopeless. Yes, exactly. If you look at most of the challenges Arab youth face, a big part of it, because many of them are hopeless or many of them didn’t find hope in a way. Almost 70% of PhD holders in the Arab world are living outside the Arab world. And there where we have an initiative called the Great Arab Minds, an initiative that was launched last year. The ultimate idea and purpose and objective of this initiative is actually to build role models in medicine, in physics, in chemistry, in economy, in technology and engineering and in design. It’s an award that not only contributes with the financial rewards, but actually it’s recognized different contributions. It’s recognized the gems we have in the Arab world. For so long, many of our scientists and scholars were hidden gems in our society. And sadly, in our communities in the Arab world, if you look at the numbers, many are leaving the Arab world. And that’s something I don’t mind people chasing their future anywhere. But then we should also understand that the Arab world needs them the most. It needs more role models for the 108 million young Arabs in science and economy and design. The thing is, the reason why the UAE came up with this initiative, which I’m currently busy with, is actually not to explore who are our hidden gems and turn them into visible gems, but also to recognize them, to empower them, to reward them. Sometimes all what they need is a pat on the back. They want someone to tell them, well done, you have done it. You are a role model for our kids. And sometimes we do that late. You have many names in the Arab world. Like look at Zaha Hadid. She was a designer. She built and designed buildings in many different places in the whole world. I think today we value her and we notice her value. But then who is our current Zaha Hadid? Who is our current Ibn Khaldun of psychology? Who is our current Al-Khawarizmi in the whole Arab world? And that’s what we are trying to find. And I think this is the ultimate message of hope and confidence. Because part of what we do is we build confidence in people. If the UAE made it, if someone made it to the space station, if someone built a city in 50 years, the most ideal and one of the world’s best cities, you can also do it. We are facing the threat of government shutdown later this month. And yet again, the administration will ultimately deal with it the same way they always do, with more spending. More spending equals a lower value of the dollar. Protect your savings by diversifying into gold with the help of the Birch Gold Group. And here’s the best part. When you open a gold IRA with Birch Gold, for every $10,000 you spend by December 22nd, Birch Gold will send you a free gold bar. Birch Gold can even help you convert an existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold for no money out of pocket, and you still get the free gold bars. 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One thing is the impact of social media and the impact of bringing everything closer. Well, that had a very positive impact on doing business, on work, on studying, on education, but also showed some threats that I see in many different areas worldwide. People are losing their identity. They are losing their hope. Sometimes I don’t know how can I define what we see in many different parts of the whole world. So my ultimate goal always, that’s I see it for myself and my family, how to ensure that we have that immunity and we have that guarding values to ensure that not only my generation can take the right decision, but my daughter’s generation could take again the right decision and her next generation could also take the right generation. Well, the problem with that information influx, as you said, is very, very rich, but it’s also sufficiently overwhelming to be a dissolvent and an agent of chaos. I mean, when you have access to everything, it’s hard to be something. And we don’t know what this extension of our nervous system, because that’s definitely what the social media platforms are, we don’t know what that extension exactly is going to do for us. And you made reference back to some of the earlier points you made in the discussion, is that you guys are trying to identify your core values and to leave them in bedrock position in your culture. And you’re hoping that that will enable your young people to turn to the benefits of our interconnectedness without falling prey to the possibility of chaos being induced. You know, it’s very hard to set up a complex information system that’s optimally interconnected. So the brain is set up so that it has areas that only communicate locally, and then those areas communicate distally. Like every neuron isn’t connected to every other neuron. You get nothing but chaos in that situation. And so there has to be a balance between order and stability and connectivity. And we are all wrestling with that around the world, right? I mean, these new technologies are absolutely amazing, but they definitely do have the possibility of spreading chaos at the same rate they distribute benevolent information. I think that again goes to the way we want this generation to raise and grow. Part of it we take full responsibility on. I think we should take full accountability and responsibility on what are the values we want to embed in the community’s DNA and our family’s DNA. And how do we do that often in different doses? We do it in school, we do it at home, we do it in university, we do it in workplaces. I’ll give you an example. I had a program called the National Values Program here at the United Arab Emirates. And one of the main products of that program was to actually measure values in the society and in the community. So we used to do social experiments. And then one of the social experiments, I said, okay, let’s take a permission where we have a car by the side of the street where someone who needs help with his mechanics of his car, his car is not working. It’s at 2 p.m. Afternoon in the summer, it’s a time where maybe most people would be busy having lunch with their families. And we said, let’s record that and see how many actually young Emiratis would come and provide help or provide support. Jordan, in one hour, the number of people who actually stopped and paused their journey to wherever they were heading and paused by and parked beside that car to actually offer help, it was more than 15 young people. They decided to actually, voluntarily, something in them felt that, oh, I should offer help. And that’s something I see on a daily basis. I don’t think you will see a single incident where we think twice before providing support or before providing help to people around. And that’s that value. Great. That’s part of that tradition of hospitality. Yes, that was part of our generation’s hospitality and the way we have been raised. But then my ultimate concern is always, I have to be as good as my father and my grandfather and building that in my daughter and building that in the next generation to ensure that I embed the same values that grows in her the way I saw it happening in me and in many other people.