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I was born in Brazil and grew up in the '70s under a climate of political distress, and I was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way - in a sort of a semiotic black market. You couldn't really say what you wanted to say; you had to invent ways of doing it. You didn't trust information very much.

I'm a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.

Even in developing markets, we're seeing the growth of digital communication is proceeding at a very rapid pace.

Look at me and tell me if I don't have Brazil in every curve of my body.

And once you get instantaneous communication with everybody, you have economic activity that's far more advanced, far more liquid, far more distributed than ever before.

They have a joy for life in Brazil unlike any country I've ever seen.

Brazil is not what you see but what you feel. Once you spend time here - a week, two weeks - you get in the vibe. It's really intoxicating.

The way we do music in Brazil is very different because we are so moved by music; we grow up with that.

There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today's politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing.

What most surprises me about Brazil is the extent of the difficulties that we create for ourselves. We create a lot of legislation to control the Brazilian state itself, that this ends up meaning that things don't go with the speed any head of government would like.