Academics were not a challenge when I was fifteen in college. The challenge was figuring out how to fit in socially.

There is too large a divergence at the moment in the interests and values of the world's most powerful states.

Political scientists don't work at banks which is a problem. As political issues become more important for the markets, analysts at banks are asked all sorts of questions they don't have the ability to answer. And if you're getting paid to answer questions as analysts at banks are you never want to be in the position of saying you don't know.

Everything today is "transient." Technology and its ability to empower actors large and small evolve so quickly that we have to get used to living in a world that exists in a more or less constant state of flux.

I was fifteen in college at Tulane. I lied about my age in college so that I could be normal socially. So that girls would go out with me and stuff like that. I just said I was normal age.

International institutions like the Security Council, the General Assembly, the G20, the BRICs, the IMF, etc., continue to be little more than an extension of the (increasingly conflicting) values and interests of member states.

I think it's fantastically narcissistic to believe that in the entire universe, with all of the planetary systems that we've already discovered and the countless others that are out there, that we are the only forms of life.