There's quite a bit of evidence that even professionals don't show any ability to pick stocks or to predict market rollbacks. Most of the people we identify as skilled based on returns have probably just been lucky.

After costs, only the top 3% of managers produce a return that indicates they have sufficient skill to just cover their costs, which means that going forward, and despite extraordinary past returns, even the top performers are expected to be only as good as a low-cost passive index fund. The other 97% can be expected to do worse.

The investors who generate big returns over five years, the guys they write books about, are supposed to keep winning, right? Well, they don't.

Everybody wants the world to be a better place, and some think that government actions can bring that about. But they don't take into consideration that government actions can often do more harm than good.

When you work on big commercial movies, of course there's more money involved and you can still do some good work. But with an independent, you get films that are really close to the writers' and directors' heart. Somehow it becomes a little deeper. A little more meat and not as much flash.

That inefficiency is masked because growth and progress are measured in money, and money does not give us information about ecological systems, it only gives information about financial systems.

The religiosity of Americans I don't think has ever been determined by how much money they make.

Once you learn to 'speak' money - which is what I felt I did through the research that led me to write 'Whoops!' - you start to see it at work all around you. It's like a language, a code written on the surface of things; it's in flow all around us, all the time.