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 BlattmanUncertainty creates a strategic incentive for a rational man to go to war. That's not necessarily a mistake as, at the moment, people may wish they had better information, but they may also realise they've made the optimal choice.
I made a principled decision that none of my wealth will be passed on as inheritance, that my capital will work for philanthropic causes. In other words, philanthropy is the reason I make money.
The heart is dramatic. Many of your other crucial organs – your liver, your kidneys- do their work in bureaucratic silence. Your heart is dramatic and reacts to how you feel. Your heart moves with your emotions, it quiets down when you're about to sleep, or when you're relaxed.
The industrial age economy was characterised by the scarcity of physical capital like machines, buildings, and roads. Capital is no longer the binding constraint on humanity. We have an excess of physical capital. The real scarcity today is attention to the importance of the question, to what end are we deploying this capital.
Many of these, I think, would have moral status, meaning it would matter how they are treated for their own sake—not just because an owner might be upset if you destroyed a data center, but because they would be moral patients in the same sense that humans, pigs, dogs, or other sentient creatures are.
There's a huge gap between the inspiration side of travel and the execution into the purchase path. That latter part of the process is so universally horrid that everyone hates it- and nobody is doing anything about it.
Generally speaking, I advocate for entrepreneurship as being originating something entirely new – taking it from zero to one, so to speak. This endeavour doesn't strictly have to be a technical startup or a monumental success. The main focus is on initiating something on your own, which essentially leads you into the journey of entrepreneurship. It's a voyage that can be challenging and intricate, marked by a series of failures. Moreover, it's a path that you'll often tread alone.
From day one, we said that we wanted to create value, create impact, and create inspiration. We're not going to build a business that just creates impact—we're not a nonprofit. We're not going to just create a company that inspires the next generation. We have to create value.
Only when I spent a year and a half writing a book, did I realise how long it takes you to do something to get a tangible result. It makes you respect money more when it comes from something you create, rather than just trading back and forth with someone else's cash.
Loneliness is thought to be as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. If you're lonely, you have a 32% higher chance of getting a stroke, a 29% higher chance of having heart disease and 30% higher chance of dying prematurely.
We've never met anybody that has changed the world without moving people. We've never met anyone that changed their own world without moving people. Moving people is not a 'yucky' thing. Martin Luther King Jr. moved people.
Most people run around like biological robots, as if we are an algorithm not a being. We become the predictable outcomes of the conditioned reflexes of our nerves, constantly triggered by people in reaction to circumstances.