“A regional war in say, South Asia, which involved as few as one hundred nuclear bombs would result in firestorms in their urban centres that would put so much smoke and particulate into the atmosphere that the earth would be covered in a cloud that would reflect sunlight back into space and reduce global temperatures but two to three degrees for several years. This would kill most food crops on the planet, resulting in massive famines and starvation.”

— Joseph Cirincione

Nuclear weapons expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund.

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Wisdom in fragments

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When you take a step back and view this from a 30,000-foot perspective, I try to highlight the role of civilians in conflict. Officials, especially those in power controlling militaries or governments, often want to shape the narrative, to spin you to their story. But when you speak to civilians in the midst of war, they share more about the personal impact on their lives, and I think my audience and readers can connect more deeply with those voices.

— Trey Yingst

Fox News Correspondent and International Reporter

I've learned that people exist on a spectrum, and that's something many observers don't like to acknowledge. But it's a reality across all the wars we cover, on all sides of every conflict. No one thinks exactly the same; some people hold very hawkish views on certain issues while being less so on others.

— Trey Yingst

Fox News Correspondent and International Reporter

I want to set an example for this generation of war reporters, and for my generation as a whole, that you don't have to rely on drugs or alcohol to cope with traumatic experiences. Cold exposure, like an ice bath or cold shower, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, getting outside for a walk in the sun—ideally, a combination of all these things—can make a huge difference. You'd be surprised how your brain starts to adjust after just a few days, making you feel lighter, healthier, and more capable of handling whatever life throws at you.

— Trey Yingst

Fox News Correspondent and International Reporter

I've always been interested in foreign coverage. When I first got into journalism as a student at American University, my goal was to change people's minds about others by helping them understand different perspectives. I didn't necessarily aim to make them feel one way or another, but rather to foster a sense of connection with people they might not know or might even disagree with.

— Trey Yingst

Fox News Correspondent and International Reporter

Part of the reason I'm arguing the time is right is because unlike back in the 60s when these ideas about complexity economics were first floated by people like Herbert Simon, we now have all the tools to do it. Computers are a billion times more powerful, the data is vastly better, our understanding of psychology is vastly better, we know a lot more about how to program models like this.

— J. Doyne Farmer

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

Well credit, as you say, makes the world go around, but we want the right amount of credit. Too little credit and the economy can't grow, too much credit and the economy becomes unstable and we have the great financial crisis. So we need to find that proper Goldilocks point in the middle.

— J. Doyne Farmer

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

My observation is if we make a parallel between biology and economics, the role of the economy is like the role of metabolism in an organism. Because what does the metabolism do? It takes in food, resources from the environment, and breaks them down and rearranges them to make other things that we need. Similarly, the economy takes in natural resources from the environment, combines them with labour to make goods and services that we use.

— J. Doyne Farmer

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

The standard models were formulated through a process that started well before computers were in place, and I would say it's undergone a certain lock-in. Once you start going down that path, it's hard to break out of it to another path. As a result, economics is stuck. It's not even that the existing models are wrong, they're just very limited in what they can do, and mainstream economists have gotten very locked in to using those models – and only those models.

— J. Doyne Farmer

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. The human brain is a great example. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain. You have to hook them together just right, of course, but the result is completely fundamentally different than what you started with.

— J. Doyne Farmer

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

If you make everything you do data driven, it's an inherent limitation on experimentation. Most PLCs are so driven by the finance department that they've lost the capacity to get lucky.

— Rory Sutherland