Interesting thing in the Q&A afterwards about the tradeoff between resources and freedom. Sometimes, to solve a problem, what you don’t want is to give somebody more resources, what you want to give them more freedom. Don’t throw more money at crafting expensive health-care trials, let people experiment quickly and cheaply. You get a different kind of creativity with those different restraints.

He ends his Q&A with a nice rant about how seldom we are explicit about the tradeoffs we make, when we are always making tradeoffs. Like how we make tradeoffs on sound fidelity when we put our music into our pockets with iPods.

The main part of the speech is about some of these tradeoffs we don’t make explicit:

• Being first vs. being third
• Elite groups vs mass groups
• More resources vs limited resources