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We need to shift our thinking about what government does, and what civil servants do, away from this relentless focus on policy and ideology and onto project management and problem solving.

— Beth Simone Noveck Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

We now have all the tools to do it. Computers are a billion times more powerful, the data is vastly better, our understanding of psychology is vastly better – we have all the elements we need now to do these things and to do them well.

One thing that really helped us was NOT following the IMF prescription, and hence I think the fact that we insisted on having growth (alongside stability) was something that made for a big change in Brazil.

Consider the adoption rates of various technologies: for telephone and electricity, it took approximately 15 years to jump from a 50% to 75% market share. With the advent of the internet and computers, that span dropped to 10 years. Television achieved this in only 5 years. But smartphones? They shattered all records with a mere 3-year period.

There's no question that Facebook could have done much, much more in the last few years to address the problem. I don't think we can inoculate people against crazy ideas, they will always have takers- but we can certainly improve the way that platforms like Facebook operate because they don't have any incentive at the moment to restrict the spread of harmful content.

Nature is not the backdrop to our lives — it is our lives. We are nature and nature is us. There is no separation. We invented the ideology that we're exempt from nature's rules, that we're masters over nature, and that ideology is incorrect.

The vast majority of fraudsters, and criminals get caught not because of good police work, but because they continue doing the same thing over and over again, until someone notices.

In my role, I assess new investments and innovations not just through financial lenses but also considering their societal and environmental impacts. This broader perspective is a key difference from the shareholder-centric approach. Another notable distinction is the focus in Silicon Valley on technological superiority, whereas in Japan, there's an intense emphasis on delivery quality and the customer and employee experience.

I would describe games as an art form centred around systems. Viewing the world as a system means perceiving it as a collection of interconnected elements. These elements interact in a way that both enables and restricts themselves and each other. Essentially, what is observed is the collective behaviour of these elements as they unfold over time, creating a range of possibilities.

The quest for happiness is a universal, scientific, fact. We can measure happiness, we can assess it, and we can devise strategies to make ourselves happy and fulfilled human beings.

I often discuss what I call 'double trauma,' where current stress triggers a deeper, unresolved issue from the past. This dual-layer perspective is crucial: first, we address the immediate stressors; this is where most people begin.

In this industry, whether you're learning to act or write, you often develop skills in isolation. It's easy to see your own discipline as encompassing the whole creative universe. However, once you're on set, the reality of the collaboration involved becomes apparent very quickly.

There are two key advantages of thinking of guns as a public health issue. First of all, it removes some of the emotion from the issue. Secondly it moves the debate to be about evidence; where we can empirically show what works, at what cost.

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