We go to war not because we ignore the costs, but because we know there are costs, but we are willing to pay those costs because we get something from the war which we wouldn't get otherwise.
— Christopher BlattmanThe perspective of seeing the Earth from space has rewired our brain. We used to have a 2-dimensional view for hundreds of thousands of years. Now with space telescopes we have a 4-dimensional view of our universe.
There's a beauty in the truth which is undeniable. It's a tragedy in a way- sometimes we just need to understand what the hell we've truly lost.
I often joke that disproving quantum computing sceptics is the primary application of a quantum computer, with everything else being a bonus.
From about 2000, Africa has come into an economic renaissance: Between 2000 and 2008, we saw a marked improvement in macro-economic stability, with inflation falling and interest rates hitting single digits even in areas like Nigeria. We have seen robust GDP growth, 17% in Angola and 5.5% in Ghana and Nigeria in 2008 for example, combined with increases in FDI, which was up 25% year on year between 2000 and 2005.
The first human beings who will live to 1,000 years old have already been born.
The heart is a fascinating machine. It beats 3 billion times in a typical human lifetime, consumes so much energy, and does so much work that if you attached a heart to a typical swimming pool – the heart would empty the pool in about a week.
You're not going to be a warrior in battle unless you are a warrior in preparation. You have to be single-minded, you can't just show-up on the night.
It's amusing when you ask people, well name someone who became rich as a hedge fund client?
Some of my greatest rewards have been when I jumped off the cliff and figured out how to fly on the way down.
Working class life has been important to me; it's not a question of pity or disaster- but of enjoying the comedy, warmth and generosity of spirit that you find there – alongside the use of language, dialects, and the stories of childhood and old-age.
The idea that Google or Meta weren't American companies was a fiction they liked to tell themselves. It just simply wasn't true. And I'll tell you why: physically, their servers are in actual places.
To overcome extreme obstacles, to do the impossible, you have to create another human being inside yourself. I had to create an image of how I wanted to look, how I wanted to act, how I wanted to believe, how hard I wanted to push. I trained that image in my mind, and then I had to become an artist to create it.