All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.

If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Ideas come and go, stories stay.

Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks-when one fails, they all fall. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.

Remember that you are a Black Swan.