Highlights

Creating people who can build things starts and ends with education. Yet, our system is designed to take the one-in-a-million extraordinary people and make them mediocre before they’ve even had a chance to realise the scale of their potential.

What do JP McManus, John Magnier, Bill Gates and the British Royal family all have in common? Apart from being billionaires, they are all large landowners, quietly going under the radar to acquire massive amounts of global farmland.

We marginalized the people who dedicate their lives to understanding the complexity of our world. We chose to read 360 characters instead of 360 pages. We cancelled before we tried to understand. We made (and lost) a quick buck instead of investing in long-term change.

I chose not to invest in the tampon subscription service, but I do have an active public portfolio. Here are the current themes that I am doubling down on with a mid to long-term view.

I may not need a subscription box to buy tampons, but I do need food, energy, transportation and healthcare. It’s time we started to move capital in the direction of urgent global human needs at scale, rather than looking for a quick return.

Abandoned assets such as the cargo ships, or antiquated assets such as bridges, roads and aircraft, can be managed proactively instead of reactively. The cost savings of this switch is in the trillions of dollars. Investors take note.

Only 0.0000001% of people are Great People, and when you find that Great Person, they are nearly 100% likely to achieve greatness. To figure out who they are, you need to understand the traits of a rower, a singer and an astronaut.

Polarising, overpriced and ultimately boring: A view of the billionaire space race from someone immersed in space launches, satellites, space law, space venture capital, space financing, space ethics and general space shenanigans.

Sexual harassment. Public sector lawsuits. Investor litigation. Patagonia vests. A decadent excess of cars, dreams, ambitions. And money. The only thing it is missing is a profit, and to achieve that, Uber will have to disrupt the model it is built on.

By lionizing those solving cool, tweet-friendly problems like building rockets, we downplay people trying to fix more complex problems like homelessness, wealth distribution and social cohesion. It is now time to build the present, not the future.

The next time you come across cancel culture, think about the media organisations that are selling your attention, the advertising executives that are selling your emotion, and the brands making false promises to you.

The GDPR framework is fundamentally flawed. It is an extraordinarily expensive regulation, and I don’t just mean financially to the EU, but to every single person in the EU who has no choice but to access the open internet through it.