Wisdom in fragments

Music ties into memory in two ways. First, music itself can be tremendously impactful, so we remember it — and we also remember everything happening around us when we heard it.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

We tend to remember the things in life that deliver the biggest emotional wallop. The death of a family member, the birth of a child, a wedding, an accident, an injury, or a major global event.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

In real life, emotions rarely arrive in neat, isolated packages. They're layered, overlapping, constantly shifting. Pure happiness, for instance, is rare; most of the time it's tinged with something else. And music, more than words, captures that mixture.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

Music is often better than speech at conveying and understanding emotion, because music has a kind of openness and ambiguity to it. Words, on the other hand, tend to put things into boxes.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

The problem is you cannot achieve all three E's simultaneously. Early work in the subfield of market design shows it's very hard and very unlikely you'll get a hidden market that can successfully allocate things efficiently and equitably in a way that's also easy.

Any time you're in a situation where the price is 'too low'—and I put that in quotes because it might not feel low to you, sometimes things are very expensive, but there are more people who'd like to buy the thing than they have the ability to serve—that's when a hidden market will crop up.

It might feel—if you haven't yet learned the rules of these hidden markets—that the outcomes are based on luck, chance, or things beyond your control, but you actually have a lot more agency in them than you think.

Without understanding the rules of the game, you might assume that your outcomes are determined mostly by luck. People who end up unhappy about what they get conclude that they were unlucky or that the system was rigged against them. After enough of these experiences, they believe that's just how the world works.

The Trump phenomenon isn't just a blip—there's a genuine rupture across the Atlantic. So, what does that mean in practice? It means we need to protect some of our own sovereign infrastructure—our own sovereign cloud—especially for utilities, security, and intelligence.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

One of the great ironies of a company like Meta, where I worked, is that well over 90% of its users are outside the US, yet well over 90% of the bandwidth among decision-makers is focused on what's happening in America. In the end, that just doesn't make sense.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

We're not just over-reliant—we're wholly reliant—on American technology across the entire stack. Our data sits in American cloud infrastructure; our hardware is American designed; our software and operating systems are overwhelmingly American; most of the AI systems people interact with are American, and so on.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

Politicians, by and large, don't understand technology at all, and technologists don't understand politicians—and both tend to denigrate each other. The technologists in Silicon Valley see politicians as venal, short-term, and ignorant, while politicians view technologists as rapacious capitalists who will stop at nothing to beat their rivals and lack any ethical compass.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

We often talk about misinformation and disinformation, but the deeper issue is the speed and flow of trust, because we're responding to feeling rather than expertise and credibility.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Older generations give their trust to experts and influencers based on who and what: credibility, qualifications, and institutional affiliations. Younger generations, by contrast, trust based on how someone makes them feel.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

The number one thing is misread intentions. You assume someone has ill intent toward you and you don't check in on those intentions. Then a narrative forms in your head, and that's when you start spiralling.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Being able to trust is actually what makes us human. It's a very innate thing. And often, distrust and mistrust are learned behaviours that start to set in around the age of four.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption