Wisdom in fragments

From day one, we said that we wanted to create value, create impact, and create inspiration. We're not going to build a business that just creates impact—we're not a nonprofit. We have to create value. As long as we're doing all three, we're never going to lose.

I think that we must move to a model where we value nature differently and work by integrating with nature. We just have to start innovating at a faster scale, and doing it in a way where we can then communicate those innovation wins to the next generation in a way that gets them excited and gives them hope.

Data is showing that the amount of information we're sending them without hope, and the ratio of hope versus negativity, is shutting down the next generation, which is terrifying. They're like, 'Oh my gosh, what's the point? The fire is too big.'

The power is amazingly concentrated in Whitehall with very clever technocrats who go into it as their first job. Then they're assigned, aged 24 or 25, things like planning bus routes for Manchester. At the moment, the basic principle in the Treasury is that whatever you do, don't give money to local governments because they will squander it.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

Manchester and Sheffield had to apply to Transport for London for money to allocate to their bus routes. This is so comically bizarre that if you put it in a novel it would seem too silly. But that's how it is.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

What happened was that people saw their place going down while London was booming. They started to blame each other. We retreat into polarised blame games, and that is very common.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

Milton Friedman had a postulate that capital would move into a region hit by an adverse shock. But as soon as you interrogate this postulate, it's manifestly rubbish. When Sheffield's steel industry collapsed, investment didn't flow in saying 'oh good, a depressed region.' It flowed out to the places which were booming and accentuated the divergence.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

If we want to build or maintain function, we need to apply a stimulus. And then, as much as we can, we need to provide the environment that allows us to best adapt to that stimulus.

We have a significant ability to change our cognitive trajectory. But first, we need to believe it's possible. And second, we need to engage in the things that allow it to happen.

What they found was that the majority of people — above 50% — maintained cognitive function from their 50s into their 80s. We knew this more than fifty years ago.

If dementia is preventable, it means we're changing the trajectory of cognitive decline — which means that trajectory isn't inevitable.

When those inputs are removed, it starts to prune function and structure, because those functions aren't needed anymore. It's still that same process — we just call it ageing. And it happens because we've removed physical activity, cognitive stimulus, and social connection. The brain responds accordingly.

Think about a rabbit sitting in a field. If that rabbit saw a hawk circling above and decided to wait for the back-propagation step before responding, it would be dead. The better you model the world, and the faster you can act on that model, the more likely your genes are to survive.

You cannot expend more energy than you can consume. That's a fundamental law of physics. If you do, you starve, you die, and you remove yourself from the gene pool. Biological systems have therefore been under enormous selective pressure to develop highly efficient intelligence.

The things that are trivially easy for humans turn out to be extraordinarily difficult for machines, and vice versa. I cannot do the square root of a large number in my head, but my pocket calculator can do that instantly. But my pocket calculator still cannot make me a cup of coffee.

The brain is definitely not doing computation in the purest sense. We are not crunching numbers in binary ones and zeros in our heads. A more important question is: what are your inputs, what output do you want, and how intelligently can the system get from one to the other?