Status hierarchies help us navigate choices which would otherwise be impossibly complex. It dramatically reduces the cognitive load we face in making decisions.

I have learnt that situations in themselves are not inherently stressful. Our perception of situations is what creates stress for us. Some players thrive in the biggest sporting occasions and others struggle to cope.

Web3 and blockchain are as big of a fundamental shift as the internet was in 1999-2000. Crypto and NFTs create open systems with distributed ownership that can be used to build a practically infinite number of applications. We're at day zero of a gigantic wave.

As a leader, you also realise that calm is contagious. It doesn't matter how you feel inside, if you can portray calm- your people will be calm.

Upon arriving in Germany, swimming became my sanctuary during a time when I had no other home. Being new to the country and unfamiliar with its swimming culture, the sport offered me solace and a sense of belonging. It provided a common language that allowed me to connect with others effortlessly, facilitating a smoother integration into German society.

Most of the venture backed businesses, and venture capital firms, are a mirror-tocracy not a meritocracy! Senior executives are disproportionately drawn from a narrow stratum of society – in the US, this means Ivy-League Schools such as Stanford. They tend to be overwhelmingly white (and increasingly now Asian) but certainly overwhelmingly male.

If you are a VC or into angel investing, you can come here and literally just set up a stand in a coffee shop with a sign saying 'looking for start-ups' and you would have a string of people coming in all day long... you could literally sit in that coffee shop from now until next year and you wouldn't get close to touching the sides.

The perspective of seeing the Earth from space has rewired our brain. We used to have a 2-dimensional view for hundreds of thousands of years. Now with space telescopes we have a 4-dimensional view of our universe.

Despite huge and on-going technological advances in electronic transactions technologies, it [paper currency] has remained surprisingly durable, even if its major uses seem to be buried in the world underground and illegal economy.

So much of silence is about perpetuating the status quo, reinforcing what someone or dominant groups within an entity or organization have deemed appropriate, good, polite. Being different inherently exposes you to vulnerability; you're pushing against everything that the forces of mimicry urge you to do, which is to conform. Yet, we also recognize that innovation is impossible without differing opinions.

Our psychology is open-ended: we can plug in variables, and are not just tied to constants. We can expand our circle of sympathy – we can employ the logic of impartiality, and the emotional prompts of human contact and vicarious experience, and expand our fellow-feeling from our family to our clan, our nation, tribe, and from there to all of humanity and even other sentient beings.

The media often diverts attention when parties need to be focussed on the actual process. It can often create expectations and momentum which forces parties to break from processes to deal with situations back home defending positions.