Jill Lepore: “By the artificial state, I mean a kind of state that is replacing the liberal democratic nation-state in the United States and around the world. It’s both a real thing, a construct, but it’s also an idea. And so, in this book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” I trace the rise of the idea that we should live under an artificial state or government by machines. I also trace the notion that this is an inevitable failure, that the artificial state cannot survive, and I trace that idea through science fiction.”
Mint: “Household debt ratios across emerging markets have largely plateaued post-covid. In India, however, they have kept climbing, reaching a record 48% of gross domestic product by December 2025, up from 38% before the pandemic. The Reserve Bank of India’s latest financial stability report underscores the nature of this expansion: Non-housing credit accounts for nearly three-fifths of total household borrowing, with half driven purely by consumption.”
Tim O’Reilly: “It may be a mistake to assume that the AI race is about who builds the best intelligence. It may turn out to be about who builds the electrical grid.”
Tarek Mansour: “The beauty of prediction markets is they take a debate that is subjective, emotional, partisan and put it in a place where it’s mathematical, objective and the incentive structure is very clear. If you do research, you analyze things, you’re smart and you put in the effort to truth-seek, you will probably get rewarded by making money. If you have an opinion that’s too biased, non-calibrated, too partisan or too polarized, you probably will lose money. There’s a certain elegance in markets where you know for sure why someone is having the opinion that they have. They’re truth-seeking because they are trying to make money.”
