When I decided to climb Everest, the reason was simply to draw attention to what was happening with the glaciers but also, when I talked about sustainability, it was hard to keep people's attention. You start talking and 5 minutes later, it's an abstract topic. The audience start checking their emails or yawning, and this really frustrated me.

The way I prefer to think of perception is as a processor of active construction, a controlled hallucination. Everything we perceive is a kind of inference, a burst guess about what's out there.

…discrimination on the basis of sex, it has been said, is the last universally accepted form of discrimination, practiced without secrecy or pretence even in those liberal circles that have long prided themselves on their freedom from prejudice against racial minorities.

You can almost think of it like three sock puppets! You, this little chimp, and a computer, trying to run your life.

The brain can be thought of as a blank slate, yet it comes with certain built-in constraints and proclivities. Every culture recognizes the octave, because it's grounded in physics, a simple 2:1 frequency ratio. Every culture also uses the perfect fifth, 3:2. And every culture divides the octave into a discrete set of steps for their scale, usually between five and eight.

I came to the conclusion that clubs would be better of promoting strategies that induce home-advantage rather than fighting for higher ticket price because the incremental value of each point lost is higher than the value of those more expensive tickets. If you drive your home advantage, your revenues go up!

We are now living with a great deal of uncertainty, which will increase. As a society, though, we have to be prepared for threats we cannot conceive, we must build resilience not just in developed countries, but particularly in conflict areas.

When you gaze into your dog's eyes, your oxytocin level—the so-called 'love hormone'—rises, and the same thing happens in your dog. It's a powerful pair bond. More recently, though, researchers have found the same effect with cats.

Conditional on the emergence of the human brain, civilisation was inevitable for many reasons. We had a commendable population in Africa 300,000 years ago and given the fact that these individuals were equipped with the power of the modern brain, the emergence of civilisation was inevitable.

Society feels broken because society is broken. When the most powerful nations in the world are spending billions of dollars on ways to kill each-other, and a fraction of those resources on ways to heal each other, we're broken.

The more you're negotiating, the more you're staying at the table and engaging – the more information reveals itself. Value may be hidden initially because the other side doesn't know how to bring it up… how to share it with you without you taking advantage of it… as comfort builds, you gather information, and share it too, that becomes a critical part of the process.

We really overvalue work, and undervalue fun, play and life. We've made work our highest calling and made hours worked rather than output the key performance indicator.