Jack Ma encouraged the entire company to practice and learn Tai Chi in their free time, it is a practice that allows one to embrace the seeming contradictions in the world, and in business. Let me give you some examples – how do you become a profitable business while also doing good for society?

Power is the capacity to get others to do or stop doing something now, or in the future. Power is also a source of order, and a source of comfort for some people. Remember that the extreme situation where nobody has power, is anarchy… and anarchy leads to inferior social outcomes [versus] societies where structures and entities that impose power, limits and rules to create stability and prosperity.

Managing in the age of outrage is not the same as managing outrage. Managing outrage is crisis management—you can turn it over to a part of the organization that's pro at it and then get on with your day. It's firefighting.

Today, policies are sold to us largely on the basis of fear, or fear mitigation: from immigration to climate change, from health services to defence. It's less about promoting a progressive vision of the future and more about playing to our fears of what might happen if we don't toe a particular line.

There is a certain conventional wisdom about the way that humanity evolved over time. The puzzling element is that much of the gain that we made in the technological realm were converted into more people, rather than into richer people up until very, very recently. World income per capita has increased 14-fold in the past 200 years, whereas over 300,000 years of human existence, it hardly changed.

When I ask people to note down their desired earnings for the next week or year, about 95% choose figures they deem 'realistic'. They won't even dare to jot down their dream figures, held back by their internal reservations.

Song writing is about finding a vision that sets the mood and state for the work and process. Then you need to put in the time and the good vibes to achieve that vision.

These models depend entirely on government statistics. They automatically leave out many forms of illicit money such as drug trading, human trafficking, some forms of trade mispricing and so forth. That is why we feel our estimates are very conservative.

We naturally will tend to read media or engage with dialogue that affirms our hypotheses, rather than looking at the truth.

We are at a stage of development where we have 'god like' physical powers. In the bible, only God could create new life forms- yet with the genetics technologies we have, we can do that. In the Bible, only God was supposed to be able to throw down thunderbolts that could incinerate whole cities; we call them nuclear weapons.

If you only listen to the voices around you, you'll amalgamate them into something that already exists… My view was that consensus isn't going to build something that will change the game.

Self-awareness, to me, is about discerning the elements of life we can control from those we should release. This recognition doesn't hinder growth or improvement but provides a necessary clarity that aids in managing stress.