From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Modern society, specifically the modern economy, is very mobile. Our friendships and social networks become very quickly dispersed. At any one time, we build friendships and relationships with people and, for example, due to work, move on.
It's quite hard to effectively ban something in Europe that's available legally in California. Often bans that are porous put up barriers that primarily affect the poor more than the rich.
Systems change is slow because it requires consensus that there is a system failure to start with, as well as the presence of a viable alternative. This requires a combination of culture shift, behavioral change, and structural change to ultimately change the rules of the game.
Our mission is to expand the economic sphere of influence of humanity off the surface of the planet and into the solar system. Currently we have a vibrant economy in space that goes out to the geostationary belt- where the communication satellites are- and it stops.
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.
causality runs from the latter to the former: in more unequal societies, the return to committing a crime increases, since there is more wealth to be taken away at each crime
If somebody told me the US stock market returned 12% per annum over the last 50 years, I would simply ask them what the returns were over the last 150 years, 250 years, 10 years and so on. I could make up any return I want just by picking the appropriate time period.
We have enough water on this planet for everyone's needs, but not for everyone's greed. The crisis is fundamentally about distribution, access, and governance - not absolute scarcity.
What crises actually do is expose the underlying fragility and structural flaws within an economy and society. Some of this is endemic – financial markets are fragile because they are giant pools of sentiment and leverage at their heart.
When your business becomes a unicorn and heads for the stratosphere, there's a temptation to slide into the primary activity of the business being turning capital, and so customer focus can get lost. Once you stop putting customer first, the competition will destroy you.
One major overhead entrepreneurial business often grapple with is the exorbitant rent in cities. Moving to a smaller town offers a significant reduction in these costs and promotes regional economic balance.
Our philosophy has been about trying to control the entire customer experience. A lot of people, when they think about branding, they think about advertising and marketing. But we actually don't do any advertising or marketing. Instead, we invest all of that money into the customer experience, and then our customers do our marketing for us through word of mouth.