Wisdom in fragments

Consciousness is any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. It's what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep or go into general anesthesia, and what comes back when you wake-up or come around.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

It's not enough to sit in our ivory towers or offices and think we have to go out and talk to people who are affected by a problem to understand what's going on, on the ground.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

Distrust in government is very dangerous – what follows is the ability for authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government to take control, and that doesn't do anybody, any good.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

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.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

The danger is that when we jump too quickly to the solution, not only is the floor littered with the inventions that never worked, but we risk designing solutions that never fit the problem.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

The process of problem definition is a discipline that we rarely teach or learn. It is one of the most important things that we can invest our time in. What are the true underlying causes of a problem? How are people really affected?

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

If your strategy is to do everything, you have no strategy at all.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

Incumbents are not doomed, and disruptors are not ordained.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

You can't stay in your lane anymore – you need to be good at multiple things, and understand interactions.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

In a world where everything is connected, there's bits and bytes moving, and leaders need to understand what happens when functions inside a company interact. What happens when your company is interacting with others inside of its ecosystem? There's a flow to business and leaders need to be able to see that flow.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

The physical world isn't going away. We are a physical species. While digitisation is enabling incredible things – the best companies seem to be combining the physical and digital; they seem to understand what it means when products and services are connected.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

Fundamentally, we must slow-down the process of change. We should recognise that most change is not progress- and therefore, it is in our interests to slow down without interfering too much with actual solution making.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

We are in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change of the novelty we face is so fast that it has outstripped our evolutionary capacity to keep up.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

We live downstream of a very high-quality tool for manipulating each other in a collaborative way, which has been augmented by the perverse incentives surrounding manipulating each other in a hostile way. The explosion in the number of people who are interacting with each other has- today- made the problem effectively unsolvable.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

At a point, we developed language sophisticated enough to transmit abstract ideas with precision from one mind to another. That enables high quality parallel processing of problems such that we literally have emergent cognition. When people gather, they talk about difficult puzzles they face, and the product of their thinking exceeds the sum of their individual capacity to reason through it.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

The thing that makes us so unique is that we, unlike most every other species, have no niche. A niche is an opportunity which a species exploits- and our niche is niche switching. We move from one niche to another, even without major changes to our physical biology.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary