It's about catching that surge of emotion, be it offense or anger, usually incited by someone attempting to ignite your social identity or signal an outgroup threat, with a likely aim to shape your thoughts or actions. The antidote lies in introspection, a slowing down of reaction, coupled with a continuous questioning of the messenger's motivations and potential gains.

Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners.

Though I'm not a politician or involved in politics, I found myself deeply entrenched in the political world because decisions about our bodies aren't made in clinics or doctor's offices. They're made in Westminster. When you step into those corridors of power, it's astonishing to witness the detachment many decision-makers have from real-life issues.

Just because a decision doesn't work out doesn't mean it was the wrong decision. If it was based on the best available information at the time, it was still a sound choice.

We have a very strange relationship with empire, a combination of selective amnesia and nostalgia. The amnesia comes from the fact we mostly identify as the nation that won World War 2 not as the nation which had the greatest empire in human history. That helps us forget that there was at least a century where we were quite massively white supremacist and sometimes genocidal.

You cannot say you support a values based human rights agenda and have your defense industry dictate the terms of your relationships between states to the extent that you won't criticize states who you sell weapons to. People see this for what it is, they recognise the internal and external inconsistencies and are tired of it.

Postmodernists are intellectual terrorists who fly their planes of bullshit into the edifices of reason.

I used to keep a pair of lizards in an aquarium and fed them live crickets. At the time, I didn't think twice about it—I didn't believe crickets had any inner life at all. But now I wonder if I was actually creating the worst moments of their existence by feeding them to my lizards.

Philanthropy is very much like business, there's not such a huge difference. In business you have a mission statement, in philanthropy you have a vision. I believe in philanthropy we want to do things that give back as much as we give, otherwise it doesn't have permanence.

We have to be careful about just increasing start-up activity. If we are increasing the level of start-up activity of people who are more inclined to employ other people, fine… but I'm not convinced that is the case.

I always tell people to not risk their own money, and to get venture funding. You should fail fast and spend as little money as possible to get your ideas validated.

Instead of looking at hoarded cash as being a 'rainy day fund' we need to view these balances as stores of economic growth. This cash represents potential investments, new jobs, new innovations and the potential for significant wealth creation and diffusion.