Featured Quote

Our minds are not structured for the pace of rapid change that we're seeing and, increasingly, will experience. It's therefore natural that our reaction is fear and a foot on the brake, but the reality is that exponential change doesn't have a dial that you can slow down.

— Peter Diamandis Founder of X Prize Foundation & Singularity University

The crux of the matter is the internal liberation that comes from acknowledging that there will always be more to do than we can handle, and that certainty about the future is unattainable. It's a form of defeat, yet immensely productive, because as long as you believe mastering everything is just extremely challenging, you'll continue to struggle.

In some ways, emulating birds would have held us back – yes it would have given us the drive and motivation, but we had to forget about flapping to develop the combustion engine driven plane!

Imagine Martin Luther King walked into your foundation. Would he pass muster? He would not get a dime out of most contemporary foundations because he would say, 'honestly? This work will take years, people are going to die, I'm not sure how it will turn out.'

The most vivid character of our time has been the enslavement of society to this profiteering system.

We are held back by our deep, underlying fears. Fears of rejection, fears of being the imposter. We need to reframe these fears and work on regret minimisation. If you didn't take that action, spark up that conversation, or try that idea, would you regret it? if you would- then don't hesitate, do it.

True innovation requires vision and the courage to take risks. Incrementalism carries little risk, which is why it's so often the path of companies.

The market definitely recognised and endorsed the need for a new benchmark. WTI was certainly disconnected from the pricing and economic activity of the rest of the world. Further to this, Brent is great for the North Sea and European trade flows, but it does not impact or reflect the actual activity in the far east.

There's no real creativity in AI, since every path is governed by an algorithm. In other words, you can trace every step to see exactly why the computer produced a given output. It remains absolutely deterministic.

What investors want the most is a team committed to a cause for the right reasons (passion about solving a problem, not passion about financial game), who can go and get people to buy into the vision, and who can build and manage teams.

Right now, biological evolution is not the main engine of change in the human condition. Instead, social and technological development, which occur on shorter timescales, are the predominant change-makers.

Once the cancer of authoritarianism gets into the veins and organs of society, it's not easy to get-out – they have this very specific way of paralysing political mechanisms and dismantling the fundamental human logic.

I'm bad at grieving; perhaps that's why I keep going. Some call it resilience, but it's likely just escapism. When you keep moving, the wind moves behind you, and you leave behind who you once were and move towards something new.

1 345 346 347 348 349 407