There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanIt's really complicated to work-out how much of our wealth came from empire, it's like trying to take the egg out of a baked cake. It's better to look at individual wealth and businesses.
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.
I genuinely believe that you can train yourself to see trouble as opportunity and realise that the best time to make money is when other people are most fearful.
Empowering women to be decision-makers in their families and communities makes everyone safer, more successful, healthier, and more educated.
With technology, we're creating a lot more hammers – and with more hammers, we're able to find more nails. The question is whether those hammers are being made for the right purposes, and whether they will serve the right purpose.
I came to the conclusion that clubs would be better of promoting strategies that induce home-advantage rather than fighting for higher ticket price because the incremental value of each point lost is higher than the value of those more expensive tickets. If you drive your home advantage, your revenues go up!
Chosen suffering is part and parcel of a meaningful life. If you don't have any chosen suffering in your life, you're probably not living the best life you could. To put it primitively, we're the mammal that likes Tabasco sauce! We're the only creature that seeks out suffering and pain willingly.
The purpose of intelligence is to improve the quality of decision making by reducing ignorance. The more you know the more likely it is that a sound decision will be taken. That applies to all of us in our day-to-day decisions.
The best analogy I can give for an IPO is that it's like a wedding. There's a whole lot of attention directed toward the wedding, and less toward the 20 years of marriage after the wedding. IPO has the word initial in it, it's the starting line for being a public company.
We see two different constituencies of children. One group who enjoys their childhood, and others who are deprived of their fundamental right to be children.
Seeing the earth from space was just breathtaking – I cannot imagine anywhere being more beautiful, we're living on an absolute paradise. Seeing our planet from that vantage point also changed my perspective on the concept of home. I used to think of myself as a New Yorker, as an America, but now? I'm a citizen of earth first and still all those things. Now, when I think of home, I think of the earth.
We see math as code and code as math. The real magic, and the key transition, comes from combining AI, programming languages, and mathematics—bringing all three pillars together.