When people are in severe pain, there's an expression, you're a "pain person," and what that means is that nothing else matters.

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?

For all of us, it's very hard to think about money, and because of that, we need help. In the same way that for all of us, it is hard to eat well, and we need some help. The poor have a particular challenge, which is that their life is actually much more complex - and they're much more complex cognitively.

Marketing is all about providing information that will heighten someone's anticipated and real pleasure.

We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.