From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Digital currency shows that anything can be money. We have become accustomed to see money as paper or pieces of gold, but in truth it could also be stones, grain, wood, cigarettes or complex computer codes.
Even though Brent has been successful in terms of becoming a larger and more liquid benchmark, it is the 'least worst' option.
We waste 75% of the energy we produce, half the food we produce and half of our natural resources. So much of our waste is waste because people don't understand that it's a resource that can be used!
Travel is a market that will always do well, in the absence of one of two factors. Firstly… if the global economy goes soft- since travel is a discretionary spend- it will go soft faster than the rest of the economy. Secondly… if there is ever an event that cause travel to be inhibited it has a ripple-out effect.
For four decades, real wages for Americans haven't experienced any significant growth. Prior to the pandemic, it was reported by the Brookings Institute that 53 million Americans were trapped in low wage jobs, where their earnings failed to adequately cover their needs. This cyclical deprivation extends beyond monetary constraints, manifesting in heightened levels of stress, health concerns, and impaired cognitive functioning.
The potential of wearable health monitoring is enormous, and under appreciated by a lot of society, because version-1 of wearables were – to put it politely – underwhelming. The health care industry spends a lot on curative costs… and if you shift the curative to the preventative, you can save a tonne of money and have better outcomes.
You only get to really redesign markets root and branch when they are failing so dramatically that everyone acknowledges it. Markets are a little like language. It's hard to change the spelling of certain words in the English language, even though those spellings are dysfunctional. Markets that are getting-along but not doing as well as they could are very hard to change.
You may have gone to the best business school in the world and learned that the three most important things in real estate are location, location, location- but it's just not true! It's relationship, relationship, relationship.
There are a handful of families that own a very substantial degree of the economy including several companies on the stock exchange... The positive effect is through stabilising- it's very difficult for speculators to short stock here or to play tricks on the exchanges... there are simply not enough shares in free-float to do that.
most of the half-trillion dollars received by Africa since the 1960s has funded military coups and civil wars, not economic development. Between 1982 and 1985, Zimbabwe spent $1.3 out of $1.5 billion of foreign assistance on arms and ammunition.
Corporations find themselves in a bind, torn between clinging to the notion of solely enhancing shareholder value and making vague promises to cater to all stakeholders, which can be perilously misleading.
Time wealth is all about having the freedom to decide how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, and what you trade it for. It boils down to one simple truth: recognizing time as your most precious asset—the only thing you can never get back.