How much of the way we interact with the world around us is limited by our language and in turn our culture.

Twenty Propositions - A manifesto for a different world view. My work for many years has been focused on a specific bet: that the institutional infrastructure of the twenty-first century will not be a refinement of the twentieth, and that the locus of its construction will not be where the last one was built. What follows are twenty propositions about the world we are entering and the layer — cognitive infrastructure — on which it might run. 1. The unipolar moment is over. At

Current events looks like just an energy story. It isn't. It's a food story, a fertiliser story, and a logistics story. This piece traces how a single regional event sends pressure through the arteries of the global system, and why the countries least involved absorb the most.

In the month since I last wrote on this topic, the language around finance has continued to evolve — and it is converging on a point we have been making for years. A recent annual report from Stripe is a high profile voice noting this same shift. The emphasis is on rails, programmability, embedded compliance, and global interoperability — all framed as a app layer challenge. For years, financial innovation concentrated on the surface layer: checkout flows, onboarding journey

Economies in the Global South have an opportunity to reimagine how regional currencies can play a part in balance sheet liquidity

The economies of the Global South I would argue are persistently misread. Western observers project their own financial logic onto systems that operate in fundamentally different ways. When looking at an emerging economy, the instinctive conclusion is that it is “poor” or “capital-scarce.” But that judgment only makes sense inside a system where nearly all economic life is formally captured. In countries such as the UK, almost every adult exists inside the financial system. P

Not all advancement is progress, we’ve lived here unchanged for 300,000 years to think that in the last hundred we’ve somehow gained wisdom and knowledge of the human condition that overwrites all of that time is another symptom of our world losing its ability to think without ego or the self being first. We can and must do better.

Anyone that knows me will know that I’ve never been comfortable saying “I told you so,” but the conversations last week in Davos really do speak to a lot of my thinking and work for the past 10 years; 2025 marked a real change in the geopolitical — and by extension, financial — landscape of the world. Much of my work and many of my conversations over the last decade have been built on the premise that a shift toward a multipolar world was coming. Last year, it felt like that

AI today reflects a narrow Western worldview. This piece argues that true intelligence can only emerge when AI learns from the cultural architectures of the Global South — the majority of humanity that current models barely understand

Yesterday in London, the UK Chancellor stood at the despatch box and delivered what has been variously billed as a responsible budget. The numbers moved around predictably. A few incentives here, much sighing and restraint there. And whilst the media and much of the population are aghast at Rachel Reeves and the labour Government, this budget is little different to the Conservative budgets that preceded it — or those across Europe in recent years. The numbers when used as hea