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 think Apple is preposterously undervalued. Apple has this mind-boggling margin structure, phenomenal consumer brand, and is accumulating mountains of cash. I joked on television that they should lever up and buy Greece! They have something like 7x cash-flow.
Brands work on the principle that if you break down people's confidence, they will be much more vulnerable to advertising, and much more likely to go out and consume… much more likely to buy things to fix problems they didn't even know they had if it weren't for brands breaking their confidence in the first place.
Honestly, I do not always feel hopeful. I am more worried for the future of my community now, eight years after the genocide began, than I was when I first escaped ISIS. But I also find hope and solidarity in those crises.
Existing platforms don't necessarily have the best business models for creators, nor do they enable creators to interact directly with their fans in a way that value can pass directly to the people who are producing the creative work.
It was visionaries with a quest for achievement who made Apollo happen, and it seems to me that now? Our sense and spirit of adventure boils down to what we can afford, and not what we can learn or achieve by doing something.
Just get in the goddam car and get driving. Things will go wrong… plans may go half-cocked… you're not an idiot, you're not going to burn money… just be smart and get driving.
It's not enough to lead yourself, you need to tune into the people you work with- the people that you know- your family. You need to pick up non-verbal cues, facial expressions, tone of voice.
You couldn't design a situation more hostile to human learning than a typical school. We learn not to be creative, because everything is about turning us into good factory workers. That's why these systems were created: to make us into factory workers who produce more stuff, more money, more stuff, more money.
We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles… we sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year… we're travelling to space.
Fear is healthy, fear is natural, and if anyone's ever told you they've been to combat and were never afraid… they're either lying or a sociopath. Fear is a very good reaction; it makes you think more clearly. The fine line is panic. Panic is contagious- if one person panics, everyone panics. Fear is healthy, but panic is contagious. As a leader, you also realise that calm is contagious.
This vulnerability we have is like a crack in the human psyche, a gateway through which madness seeps in. The human brain isn't primarily focused on discerning truth. Instead, it's preoccupied with understanding who to align with and what beliefs to adopt to secure connection and status within a given culture.
Intelligence and self-deception appear to have co-evolved, with the belief that we are fully in control of our destinies serving as a mental safeguard, despite its inaccuracy.