I would not have believed anyone if they had told me that within eighteen months I would have lost 99 per cent of my $4 billion fortune and would be pursued almost to the brink of bankruptcy by seven major banks… I would have found it impossible to contemplate that I would be treated like a pariah in my home country, saddled with $1 billion in debts and hated as a man who had supposedly almost single-handedly brought down an economy. But that is exactly what happened…

I don't see things as impossible; I got right to the equations to figure out how this could be achieved; I didn't put a barrier on my mind or body. A practitioner is the person who goes out and breaks the limits of the mind, the soul, the body.

On a personal level, the best defense against materialism and greed is to give money away. You need to be charitable, engage in philanthropy.

a compelling call to action that will stay with you long after you've turned the last page.

I'm advocating for a right to cognitive liberty, a new international human right that would be the right to self-determination of our brains and mental experiences.

I made the analogy of earthquake faults- when they get aligned, they either all move, or they don't move- we also have this diversity of micro fault-lines that fail, and I think that's a huge problem.

The essence of public health as a field of action is that it tries to stop problems from happening where possible, and prepares societies for problems that are unavoidable. That's why it requires us to understand the entire population.

I think intelligence is best understood as an entity that has the ability to improve a metric through repeated exposure over time. By that definition, machine learning algorithms are learning systems — they get better with more data and more exposures. A dog is a learning system. A cat is a learning system — you teach it a trick, reward it a few times, and it just does it from there on. And humans, of course, are the ultimate example of a learning system.

Everything we do in one sense or another is consummatory. We consume religious narratives, we consume literature, we consume friendships. Our mate choices are the ultimate form of consumer choice.

When you go out to run 100 miles – the lessons of a lifetime get compressed into 24 hours of non-stop running.

Over 70% of the labour force in sub-Saharan Africa is involved in agriculture. This means the sector forms a lynch-pin of society.

People don't know what it is that they're negotiating over… If you don't, then it's hard to know if you've gotten a bad deal, a fair deal, or a great deal! That's going to lead us to the negotiation pie, and with the negotiation pie comes the extra value that negotiators create by coming together.