“Another hugely common mistake is optimising your business for investors, and not customers and employees. If you don't believe me, look at the fact that consulting businesses have a 5 year survival rate of 60% and venture backed businesses, less than 10%.”
— Rand Fishkin
Founder of Moz, SEO software company and industry thought leader

The quote archive

Technology

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

You cannot genuinely connect with another human being through technology. You can only connect with other human beings through the mind, and through love, but technology can serve the process.

— Marianne Williamson

Author of "A Return to Love" & Spiritual Activist

Ageing is malleable, we can control it. 20% of our health in old-age is due to genetic factors, and the rest is due to our lifestyle. We can measure this clock. It's literally measuring chemicals in our own DNA.

— David Sinclair

Longevity researcher & Harvard Medical School professor studying aging and lifespan extension

In a world where everything is connected, there's bits and bytes moving, and leaders need to understand what happens when functions inside a company interact. What happens when your company is interacting with others inside of its ecosystem? There's a flow to business and leaders need to be able to see that flow.

— Robert E. Siegel

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

The physical world isn't going away. We are a physical species. While digitisation is enabling incredible things – the best companies seem to be combining the physical and digital; they seem to understand what it means when products and services are connected.

— Robert E. Siegel

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

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

We live downstream of a very high-quality tool for manipulating each other in a collaborative way, which has been augmented by the perverse incentives surrounding manipulating each other in a hostile way. The explosion in the number of people who are interacting with each other has- today- made the problem effectively unsolvable.

— Bret Weinstein

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

We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles… we sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year… we're travelling to space.

— Steven Pinker

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

Fear just finds a new thing to be scared of. People are worried about having mean things said about them on twitter… they're worried about losing their jobs… and yes, all those things suck, and could happen, but it's not the same as being tied-up and roasted at the stake!

— Ryan Holiday

Author & Stoicism Expert; Marketer & Media Strategist

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.

— Owase Jeelani

We all have the opportunity to be on the level of Da Vinci or Franklin because we all have access to so many different forms of knowledge. Those who study philosophy, the arts and sciences together can make connections at that very high level.

— Robert Greene

Author of "The 48 Laws of Power" & Strategist

While people have been worried about AI being embedded in humanoid robots from the science fiction world, our lives have been shaped and influenced by AI which makes tens of billions of decisions each day about what we see, and how we communicate.

— Dan Huttenlocher

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

There's a delicate balance between making sure our values are encoded in these technologies as they come out- and not constraining them so much that we lose the technological race to other nations who don't hold our values.

— Dan Huttenlocher

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

We haven't really had a technology like AI in the history of technological development – the closest analogy would be the movable type printing press, which came to the fore at the beginning of the enlightenment, some five hundred years ago.

— Dan Huttenlocher

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

AI has been an area of technology for many decades, but the advances of the past five-years show us why this is one of the major technology events of the last several centuries.

— Dan Huttenlocher

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

If you're sourcing trainers from sweatshops, those sweatshops can be filmed on a mobile phone and that can go viral in hours, destroying shareholder value. There are no dark-corners in which supply chains can hide anymore.

— Andy Last

Digital media has allowed a complete bypass of those structures – there's less control around power – and people can amass huge followings for totally irrational reasons.

— Brian Klaas

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy