“A lot of people assume that I would choose not to have bipolar disorder; but I'm grateful for it. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, because I feel like all the ups and downs have formed who I am, and made be braver, tougher… more creative and more capable.”

— AJ Mendez

Professional wrestler and WWE performer, known as AJ Lee

The quote archive

Wisdom in fragments

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

Think about your water kettle. When you heat the water and you see the transition from water to gas, not all water molecules are converted at once. The same happened in the world economy. Since this transition was associated with such a fantastic increase in income per capita, those societies that took off first increased their gap from the rest of the world tremendously.

— Oded Galor

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

Over this 99.9% of human existence, when technology advances, population advances and counterbalances any potential increase in human prosperity. Suddenly once technological progress reaches a tipping point, families start to invest in education, they economise on the number of children, and technological progress is converted into richer people rather than into more people.

— Oded Galor

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

Consider for a moment residents of the city of Jerusalem in the Roman period and whisk these individuals in a time machine nearly 2000 years forward to Ottoman Jerusalem. Those individuals from the Roman period will be able to adapt nearly instantaneously. But if you whisk these individuals an additional 200 hundred years forward to present day Jerusalem, these individuals would be entirely shocked. Past knowledge will be largely obsolete. New technologies would appear as witchcraft.

— Oded Galor

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

There is a certain conventional wisdom about the way that humanity evolved over time. The puzzling element is that much of the gain that we made in the technological realm were converted into more people, rather than into richer people up until very, very recently. World income per capita has increased 14-fold in the past 200 years, whereas over 300,000 years of human existence, it hardly changed.

— Oded Galor

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

The politics of identity has gone very wrong in many cases. Politicians often forget that people are much more complex, and are a mix of many identities – and each of these identities can be of differing importance to the individual. A Muslim man from Somalia, who is a chess player, may have his chess-playing as his main source of identity, for example.

— Christer Sturmark

Magical thinking is a bi-product of cognitive process that were useful in our evolutionary survival. We're so good at pattern matching that we see patterns everywhere, even when they don't exist. It's better to believe the movement in the dark is a tiger, rather than the wind blowing thru a bush. Its better to be wrong on that, than the other way around.

— Christer Sturmark

We have to be aware of our cognitive fallacies to build some immunity to our cognitive traps. One simple thing we can all do is work on our own confirmation bias from time to time. I try to read things by people I disagree with for example, because I want to hear their best arguments and see whether my beliefs and values stand-up to them.

— Christer Sturmark

We are a product of evolution, and the mechanism of evolution is natural selection. Evolution is selecting for survival, and the qualities we have are evolved to help us survive as well as possible. Our cognitive capability to reason has not evolved to find truth, it evolved to help us survive and that means that we sometimes find it easier to stay with a group rather than believe the correct thing.

— Christer Sturmark

Truth is a quality of reality. It has nothing to do with what I believe. Truth, when it comes to empirical issues, is an objective thing. Whether something is true or not is independent of whether I think it is true or not, and a lot of people confuse this. People say that we cannot trust science because once-upon-a-time scientists held it true that the earth was flat; that's not correct. It was never true that the earth was flat, even if people believed it.

— Christer Sturmark

Focus is critical when you are building a business. The whole NFT industry is moving incredibly quickly. What happens in a month in the crypto-world, may take a couple of years in other industries.

— Devin Finzer