Jewellery tends to have a much longer life – it can become part of your heritage and have a sentimental value that runs extremely deep, across generations.

Entrepreneurs are people who by nature are optimists, who can tolerate risk and who have huge curiosity.

This problem originated in the most sophisticated and advanced financial markets because those are the markets where leverage was the greatest and people took the most advantage of it.

We are in the midst of a pandemic of eating too much (the overweight and obesity pandemic) and a pandemic of not having enough to eat (the under nutrition and hunger pandemic). Roughly 1.6 billion people in the world are affected by the first pandemic and roughly 1 billion people in the world today are affected by the second pandemic.

Disruption is treated as an event, and it is a constant and that is the interesting sort of fallacy. As humans we want this state of consistency but if we are taking it as a hypothesis, we are constantly being disrupted, constantly changing and the groundwork we are standing on is shifting all the time.

We're a multicultural society because we had a multicultural empire. The reason you and I are here talking is because some English people went to India and invaded it in the 17th century.

Social platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works—soon to be topped by AI, which I think will be even more fundamentally, and even more bizarrely, distortive. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena.

I do not talk about life and death – I talk about birth and death, they are opposites, and life is simply a continuum of both, and you cannot have one without the other.

The guards hung me by my wrists from the ceiling for eight days…. After a few days of hanging, being denied sleep, it felt like my brain stopped working. I was imagining things. My feet got swollen on the third day. I felt pain that I have never felt in my entire life.

Public health is mostly a field for research and inquiry, but it's also an arena for action. The best way to think of public health as to see it tackling the health needs of an entire population rather than individuals (that is mostly what medicine does). I am a physician, but when I went into public health I said that my position was now that society would be my patient.

Think about a rabbit sitting in a field. If that rabbit saw a hawk circling above and decided to wait for the back-propagation step before responding, it would be dead. It has been eliminated from the gene pool. The better you model the world, and the faster you can act on that model, the more likely your genes are to survive.

Central banks all around the world have essentially abused the power of printing money, and they have abused it by using quantitative easing, meaning creating new federal money to kit over fundamental problems, structural problems in the economy. So much of that acceleration in the wealth inequality has come from this quantitative easing.