Dex Hunter-Torricke

I mean, how likely is it that I speak Chinese or Japanese?

But that was annoying enough for me that from this very early age, I was interested in why we even assign these ridiculous labels to people.

And we make these assumptions and they constrain our whole lives.

if I had spoken Chinese or Japanese, so what?

And so I really wanted to spend my life trying to figure out how do you improve these systems that shape your whole life from before you're even born?

Why is it some kids get these amazing lives from the beginning?

Why is it that others really are struggling the whole time against the tide of history?

And the logical place to start there was at the UN.

So I moved to New York

in 2008, and I got a job at the UN.

I'd done research on the UN for my master's.

I got a scholarship to go to university, and I was the first in my family to get a degree, so I got two of them for good measure.

I thought I will just absolutely work really hard now to try and rise through this system.

And at the UN, I realized really quickly that it's not the sort of place that actually you can change the world most days.

You're just trying to get through the day.

I think people don't really understand how...

poorly resourced and how weak the UN is structurally.

The New York City Police Department has a budget orders of magnitude larger than the entire UN globally.

And that's shocking to a lot of people.

The UN has hundreds of thousands of peacekeeping troops in the field worldwide.