Dr. Vikas Shah MBE DL Interviews the world's leading thinkers, and the people shaping the century.

Forming a board or similarly high-level leadership team is an inevitable part of your entrepreneurship journey. Often it can happen organically, as part of the normal growth of your business- or sometimes, particularly in the case of businesses attracting external investment, it can be something which is done early- before…

 

How Creativity, Animation and Stories define us. In these exclusive interviews we speak to Ed Catmull (Co-Founder of Pixar Animation, and President of Walt Disney Animation Studios), Nick Park (Oscar Winning Writer, Director and Animator with Aardman Animation) and Jonathan Gottschall (A world expert in storytelling and Distinguished Research Fellow…

 

Scientists, scholars and academics have yet to define genius, yet the concept is rightly applied to those exceptional individuals who, through their art, their science or their enterprise, create unique changes in our thinking, or our broader-world. Genius carries a certain mystical quality, distancing it from even that which we…

 

By: Vikas Shah, Originally Published at AllAboutAlpha.com Factory farming is a brutal endeavour.  In this environment, chickens (and other animals) are given a variety of feeds and chemicals (stimuli) designed to make them grow as big as possible as fast as possible and hence maximise output.  In truth, factory farms…

 

In these exclusive interviews, we speak to Moisés Naím (Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Minister of Trade and Industry for Venezuela and Executive Director of the World Bank) and Admiral James Stavridis (Dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University and former Supreme Allied Commander…

 

By Vikas Shah (Originally for AllAboutAlpha.com) Modern markets are hugely complex environments.  CME Group for example, trades over 3 billion contracts (with a notional value of over U$1 quadrillion) each and every year.  Alongside this, many of the world’s largest companies such as Google, Alibaba and Amazon (with market capitalisations…

 

In entrepreneurship, delegation is often seen as perhaps something akin to a four-letter-word. I have met countless founders over the years who have been nothing short of insistent that they should know every last detail about every part of the business. We’ve all met the sort before, the archetypal ‘micro…

 

“Macroeconomics has not done well in recent years…” writes Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The standard models didn’t predict the Great Recession; and even said it couldn’t happen. After the bubble burst, the models did not predict the full consequences.”  In a hugely relevant recent paper titled “Reconstructing Macroeconomic Theory…

 

Each and every year, I have the pleasure of judging at the Rice Business Plan Competition. Tens of thousands of enterprising students from around the world compete, with a handful making it to the finals in Houston, Texas. At this incredible event, student entrepreneurs pitch to the crème-de-la-crème of global…

 

In this exclusive series of interviews, we speak to Javed Abidi (Chair, Disabled People's International DPI), Sir Philip Craven MBE (President, International Paralympic Committee IPC) and Professor Hugh Herr (Head of the Biomechatronics research group at MIT Media Lab and Founder of BiOM Inc). We discuss the human rights and…

 

Explore an archive of more than 3,000 quotes.

I think it's down to what Jeremy Bentham said which is, '…the question is not can they reason? Or can they talk? …But can they suffer?'

— Ingrid Newkirk
Founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

I personally think that it's only the ignorant and populism pandering politicians who treat the hedge fund industry as a scapegoat for the financial crisis. It was the extremely heavily regulated investment banks who, risking their shareholders' money, levered their firms up to 40:1!

Hedge funds don't have that asymmetric risk profile problem because, in general, the interests of the hedge fund managers are aligned with their investors. I think only people who are pandering to perceived public passions are blaming hedge funds for the financial crisis.

We are in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change of the novelty we face is so fast that it has outstripped our evolutionary capacity to keep up.

— Bret Weinstein
Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

People who haven't benefitted from decades of neo-liberal prosperity are right in their assessment that democracy does work for certain people, but not for them.

— Darren McGarvey
Scottish Writer, Broadcaster & Anti-Poverty Activist & Poet

Browse all quotes →

Long-form Interviews with the World's Leading Thinkers — Thought Economics


The Wisdom Series

Ten in-depth articles distilling insights from over 550 interviews with the world's leading thinkers, creators, and changemakers.

The Wisdom of Leadership The Wisdom of Entrepreneurship The Wisdom of Creativity The Wisdom of Technology The Wisdom of Meaning The Wisdom of the Mind The Wisdom of Justice The Wisdom of Science The Wisdom of Geopolitics The Wisdom of Health
Explore the Wisdom Series →