My grandfather and his generation were told this was their finest hour, and it's strange isn't it… some of our finest hours are the most heartbreaking. In war, you watch your friends die, you are forced to take a life and protect life, and that reality is often played back to you as a soldier as being part of your finest hour.

Purpose and meaning are inextricably tied to suffering and difficulty. If you tell me a pursuit that you view as meaningful and important, I can guarantee it won't be easy. If it was easy, it wouldn't be meaningful or important. We reserve the notion of meaning for things that have difficulty.

After each strike the drone would be updated with information about the actual destruction caused. It would note any damage to nearby buildings and would subsequently receive information from other sources, such as soldiers in the area, fixed cameras on the ground and other aircraft. Using this information, it could compare the level of destruction it expected with what actually happened.

Writer's block was only invented 100 years ago; the term didn't exist before that. Writer's block is simply a fear of bad writing, not an inability to write. Nobody gets talkers' block! Everyone can talk! Instead of calling it writer's block, we should say, 'I haven't done enough writing yet, so I feel blocked.'

My favourite question when evaluating a startup idea is, 'Is this from the future?' I'm not interested in your ideas about the future; I want to understand why you are living in it today. Why are you living in a different future right now than other people are?

My fear has never been the machines waking up and deciding to do away with us, but rather that we- in our own bone headed way- deploy systems inappropriately, or without thinking through the unintended consequences that may occur.

Depression is depression. Despair is despair. Disappointment is disappointment, and I think it's important for us to have that emotional granularity. Because if I just walk around like the world is right now, 'I'm anxious, I'm anxious,' but I have a hard time believing that everyone is that anxious. I think it's because we don't have granularity in our understanding of emotions, and so we're not communicating our true experiences accurately.

There's an interesting over-representation of physicists within the existentialist community. Physicists, especially astronomers and cosmologists have had a glimpse of how vast the universe is, and the potential value of it, versus our planet.

I'm advocating for a right to cognitive liberty, a new international human right that would be the right to self-determination of our brains and mental experiences.

To me, a great leader should be empathetic, authentic, entrepreneurial, creative, ethical and lead from the front.

What happened was that people saw their place going down while London was booming. They started to blame each other. We retreat into polarised blame games, and that is very common.

This decade, their GDP will increase by about $12 trillion, i.e. they will create another one of themselves! More importantly, the share of consumption in this decade's growth will be bigger and this is where the big opportunity lies.