Most of us are familiar with Google’s moonshot projects that span everything from self-driving cars to AIs that can beat world champion GO players. Less well known are the ways that Google is re-inventing how it designs and optimizes its own internal operations.

I met Sean when we both in Tokyo speaking at an intimate summit for banking executives. As an information junkie myself, I was fascinated by his company, Quid, which offered analysts and decision makers a visual platform for seeing patterns in complex data. Not surprisingly, Sean’s background is also a nexus of complexity. He is a physicist, decathlete, political advisor, and a TED fellow. Sean studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he received a PhD for his research on the mathematical patterns that underlie modern war. In this episode of Between Worlds we talked about the power laws behind violence and insurgency, what Kasparov learnt from his infamous chess defeat by Big Blue, the merits of creative exploration through visualization and the art of defining the 21st century concept of manliness.