"People in their 30s and 40s have less leisure time than they did two decades ago. As Anne Helen Petersen has said, Americans have a tendency to spread out, and the built environment of the U.S. housing market forces many people to move away from friends and family, which means they ultimately buy a bit of loneliness with their money.

…

We come into this world craving the presence of others. But a few modern trends—a sprawling built environment, the decline of church, social mobility that moves people away from friends and family—spread us out as adults in a way that invites disconnection."

"I gave the Marshall lecture, was published in the general military history. And in it, I summarized my views on what the difference was between a continental and maritime power. And that's one of my big career takeaways. It's a fundamentally different way of looking at the world. So Putin honestly looks at the world, if I can call territory, as what makes him secure.

Maritime powers, start[ing] with Britain, [think] ‘mine's secure if I can maximize money from commerce, because then I can buy Navy and buy allies with armies and stuff.’

…

This is an international order that, when you join it, you get security, you have input on how it evolves, because it's a work in progress. Whereas this continental thing is negative sum.

And you can see it in Ukraine. So Putin wants more territory. Okay, he's got a zone. He took the eastern Ukraine and he took Crimea in 2014. But it's negative sum because he destroys whatever businesses have been being run in the Donbas [region]. And he absolutely killed the most of the tourist industry.

…

He is destroying wealth at a really rapid clip. It's really a stupid way to run to. And if you go up to Taiwan, so if PRC tries to take Taiwan, it's a continental view, more territory, sorry, somehow we think it's going to improve our security. Now they'll level it. And they'll hurt themselves. Whereas if they just ignore the Taiwan thing and say, oh, they're so annoying, let them run their own place who wants them anyway. And then trade with them. They'll both make money."

"Second is the gridlock that has been most visible in the electricity sector since loadshedding started in 2007. We tried to find another electricity crisis in the world that lasted this long, but we could not find any. Other countries, like Chile and Colombia, have had electricity crises, but once the political system realises that there’s a shortage of electricity, decisions and actions are taken, and three to five years down the road there is ample electricity again. In South Africa, it took until the summer of 2022 for the state to lift the prohibitions on the private sector investing in generation and allowing metros in good standing to procure electricity directly from the market.

When society has a problem, a decision must be made. But in this instance, some people are pro-coal, some are pro-green, some are pro-state, some are pro-market, resulting in gridlock and decisions not being made.

The reason why gridlock is overcome in other societies is that if you do not fix the problem, you lose the next election. Therefore, the fear of losing the next election forces the political parties in power to reach an agreement.

Democracies usually generate a sense of urgency around salient issues. But in South Africa, the hold of the ANC on power has meant that it is less responsive to this mechanism. Hence the lack of either urgency or the resolution of gridlock."