Featured Quote

Too little credit and the economy can't grow, too much credit and the economy becomes unstable and we have the great financial crisis. So we need to find that proper Goldilocks point in the middle.

— J. Doyne Farmer Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

The current Trump–Silicon Valley consensus—that all forms of regulation somehow constrain the muscular freedom of companies to innovate—is ludicrous.

If history has taught us anything, it's that women rarely win anything without a fight!

The greatest film-makers have an ability to work beyond the genre. Kubrick, Scorsese and even the great Ford who made Westerns, but transcended them. There's something about the vision of these film-makers that can use the supporting framework of a genre but create something which appeals to a wider story and audience. That's why they are the great masters.

Our brains actively construct a model of the world, which is our actual experience. Incoming sensory data serves mainly to verify and correct this internal model. A familiar example is predictive texting on smartphones. You start typing, and the phone anticipates the rest of the word. This process mirrors how our brains handle sensory input, triggering various internal models.

I personally want to throw up every time I hear some completely senseless and baseless statement like 'we need more of Europe, not less'. It means nothing, and those slogans simply drive people crazy – It goes to show the intellectual vacuousness of the people who say them.

I saw something in the world that was done poorly and thought it could be done better. The difference between a miserable, crank grump and an entrepreneur? Both are unhappy- but the entrepreneur says they can make it better… that they can fix it… and they follow the spark.

If Leonardo Da Vinci could somehow be transported to the present, he would be blown away by the level of knowledge that's available to all of us by a simple press of a key. It follows that 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.

If the role of government is, as Thomas Hobbes put it, to stop life being nasty brutish and short because humans unregulated are at each other's throats, then government has to step up to that plate now and start rethinking what it can do to ensure cohesion in societies where you will always have disagreement.

It's the ultimate invention—the last one we'll ever need to make—because once we have AI that is generally intelligent and then superintelligent, it will do the inventing far better than we can. In that sense, it's a handing over of the baton.

A resilient position means that you are not always on the brink of war. The cost of war is so great that being on the brink is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. We have to make leaders and societies pay more attention to the costs of conflict.

The stress response is designed for '3 minutes of screaming terror across the Savannah.' If you're not experiencing such an intense moment, it's likely that your stress response isn't calibrated right. At its core, stress is a primal reaction meant for life-threatening situations where our options are to freeze, flee, or fight.

You are as good as your highest level of preparation in any negotiation. In any negotiation, you develop trust by putting in time where you don't have any skin in the game; that means you need to watch negotiations happen- and get a feel for how it's done.

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