There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanIn the tech sphere, when you acquire a company, you're seldom buying the present product. Instead, you're investing in their future innovations. This means retaining talent is paramount.
I once advised my daughter, as I handed her some money, to consult our family's wealth manager. But she corrected me, saying, 'Dad, it's not just about avoiding the negative; I want my investments to contribute positively.' That was an eye-opener for me. The rise of impact investing is undeniable.
Governments are keen to levy brutal taxes on the very engines that create the market for goods and services; lowering their propensity to spend and invest by removing the surpluses they would normally use to do so.
From cell to civilisation took about 4 billion years, which is a long time—a third of the age of the universe. If it takes billions of years to produce complex living things at our level, maybe there aren't many places that could sustain an unbroken chain of life for that long.
There are individuals within organizations who seem untouchable, be they extraordinarily successful salespeople or powerhouse CEOs. These individuals often appear to be above the rules, even above the law. They're given latitude due to the exceptional value they bring to the organization.
Everyone has important skills and likely unique skills, but they may not always be as confident in those skills as they should be. We need to challenge the notion that if you don't feel like a superhero, then you must not be the right person for the job. Being underestimated in that way often brings out the best in me. For me, it's not just about overcoming insecurity but leveraging it as a catalyst to ensure that I bring everything I have to the mission.
Upon experiencing my first miscarriage, I was incredulously told I'd need to endure three consecutive miscarriages before further action would be taken. The idea itself was staggering to me. You wouldn't ask someone to undergo multiple heart attacks or even endure recurrent minor injuries like broken fingers before intervening. Yet, the system requires women to face the trauma of three successive miscarriages.
The issue you're worried about, the one you're likely spending most of your time discussing, isn't the only problem in the world. We tend to lose sight of this because we often perceive our immediate tasks as the most crucial. Given the multitude of issues we need to address, the goal shouldn't be to resolve a single problem in an exhaustive and expensive way. Instead, we should aim to find an effective, low-cost strategy that addresses most of the problem, ensuring we preserve resources for other tasks.
We have a lot of phobias around algorithms. Sometimes this is justified, but in the main, it's like being afraid of cockroaches or spiders. Algorithms aren't spiders or cockroaches, they're an instrument and sometimes will outperform human judgement terrifically well – and sometimes won't. If lives are on the line and it turns out an algorithm reduces the noise of the human decision maker and the bias, then the moral case for using the algorithm starts to look really strong.
I see myself as the pioneering 'zero'—the inaugural integration of a human with technology, aiming for an autonomous growth trajectory. The introduction of zero transformed mathematics, art, physics, and more. Now, it's humanity's turn.
I love Mick and Bianca, but Jade's more my speed. I taught her how to colour and she showed me how to play Monopoly. She was four and I was forty-four.
We can't solve problems if we don't understand them.