About Us

What we share is a reflex: we see the thing that normalcy bias is hiding, and we can't leave it alone.

Miranda studied mathematics, worked in finance, and now teaches business English to senior professionals — in exactly the organisations and pressure environments that our decision work is designed for. Jonathan studied psychology and has ideas that arrive as if from elsewhere: fully formed, unlikely, and usually correct. We met at Royal Holloway, University of London, and have been arguing productively ever since.

We both believed that 2008 never ran its course — that quantitative easing papered over a structural problem rather than resolved one. The disagreement was in what followed. Miranda kept hoping the world would hold together. Jonathan kept waiting for it not to. That tension became a research programme.

Jonathan's original frame for LastPrompt was a survival game — preparation for what happens when systems fail catastrophically. Miranda flipped it: not preparation for the apocalypse, but preparation for the generation that will have to think through complexity without flinching. Better decisions as the response to systemic fragility, not just better gear.

That inversion — from “survive the collapse” to “think your way through it” — is probably the most honest account of how we work. He brings the idea, fully formed and slightly alarming. She brings the logic that makes it deployable. The economics and the teaching meet somewhere in the middle, and something neither of us could have built alone comes out the other side.

That's still how it works, most days. Last Prompt is mine in the way a piece of writing belongs to whoever writes the sentences — Jonathan hands me an idea fully formed and slightly alarming, and I build the architecture that makes it deployable. The Oil Watch sites are more his: he's the one watching the Strait of Hormuz and the UK's infrastructure creak in real time, in public. But neither of us works on just our own thing — we argue both of them through, constantly. They're not two projects that happen to rhyme. They're the same reflex, running at two different scales, with two different people holding the pen.