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 BlattmanI genuinely don't care about scrutiny – it's a zero on a scale of 1 to 10 for me. If the table goes cold, I'll walk out of the casino. I'm good… I've got my nest-egg… I'm happy. I do this every day because I like it and want to accomplish my goals.
We will not employ capital unless we can find an opportunity that has a minimum of 50% upside to our intrinsic value over the term of our investment.
I think those pictures we took did jumpstart the modern environmental movement, but it wasn't a personal change for me at that point.
We all experience challenges. If you always make one thing your excuse or let other people drag you down because of something like your gender, it will become your prophecy. Whatever reason, you will never know for sure. You just have to keep fighting.
I think music is a way for God to speak to humans. We have a connection through music that we can't find anywhere else. I believe that's why music is so important for society- its connection- its healing.
No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you're not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing.
It really turns our economies away from risk-return (where they create profit without counting the huge damage they cause) to risk-return-impact (where impact is measured alongside profit and reflected in the value of companies).
You cannot genuinely connect with another human being through technology. You can only connect with other human beings through the mind, and through love, but technology can serve the process.
Without quantum mechanics, we wouldn't have the modern world… we wouldn't have electronics… we wouldn't have understood the semi-conductor, the computer chip…. All of our modern technology relies on this mathematical description of the world of the very small.
The laws of cause and effect which govern our universe don't care about our beliefs – so we'd better find out what those laws are and try and align our beliefs to them to eliminate guesswork.
It's only when you look back that you can connect the dots to where we are right now. Looking back, I learned that it was those red and yellow lights that revealed those solar-powered green lights.
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.