Part of the reason I'm arguing the time is right is because unlike back in the 60s when these ideas about complexity economics were first floated by people like Herbert Simon, 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 know a lot more about how to program models like this.

When individual countries hit a crisis, they've got 2 options, they can either look after themselves (at the cost of their neighbours) or they can create rules which they (and everyone else) will abide by, which requires institutions.

One of the biggest myths in startup-land is this idea that the pinnacle of startups is building a venture-scale company, backed by venture capital, growing exceptionally fast and being OK with high failure rates as a result; in other words, returning a significant amount of capital to an investor rather than any other outcome.

Social synchrony is a big feature of human behaviour—it's a weird thing if you think about it, but we do things like marching in time and parading and singing in choirs in ways that are highly coordinated and synchronised. One of the psychological effects of that is it can blur the boundaries between self and group and create this feeling that you are the group, and the group is you.

No nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

Consciousness is the most troubling because it's so hard to deny its existence. With all these other tricky, troubling phenomena, it's at least an option to say maybe it doesn't exist, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. But with consciousness, it seems hard to make sense of the idea that nobody's ever felt pain. Nobody's ever seen colour.

Don't give away a majority shareholding the way I had to with HomeServe. I ended up giving away 52% of the shares with my partner for a £500,000 investment we took when we'd run out of money—a terrible time to raise capital.

There's a great quote that is 'political correctness is tyranny with manners'.

The greatest risk often lies in people's biased perceptions of risk itself. The challenge is: how do you debias risk when everyone's perception of it is inherently biased?

What's the business hip hop of this post pandemic world? Who's going to be the Rapper's Delight of the post pandemic world?

The greatest risk often lies in people's biased perceptions of risk itself. These biases, both psychological and political, tend to lead to a dangerous underestimation of risk. Our advice, backed by data and methodologies we've developed, is focused on debiasing risk.

The most corrupting idea about power is that it gives you a set of techniques to enable you to get more of what you want, no questions asked. If we think about power in that way, our soul will get eroded. We need to start thinking differently, the Ubuntu interpretation would be that parts of us are hidden in others – that we will only fully exist if we explore and encounter.