The internet has a natural pressure to bubble us up and vulcanise society, it makes it less comfortable for us to be around people who think differently, and more comfortable to be around people who think the same as us.

At Colossal, we are not going to work in humans or non-human primates because we felt like we're already going to have an uphill battle with transparency and education, and we don't want people to be like, if a hair-loss treatment comes out of Colossal, 'are they selling a gene from a woolly mammoth?'

There's a culture in Silicon Valley that believes that you should be obsessive and not be able to think about anything else other than your business. You shouldn't have kids… friends… just your company as a vehicle to make millions of dollars. That's the kind of founder that many investors want to back, but we need to kick those people out.

We waste 75% of the energy we produce, half the food we produce and half of our natural resources. So much of our waste is waste because people don't understand that it's a resource that can be used!

I came away from space flight realising that I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. Life is so amazing. Even the simplest organisms have millions of cells that have to randomly align in a perfect way, and those processes are infinitesimally less complex than emotions and consciousness. When you look at the universe and the forces of nature – science has to explain how it all works, but to my mind, there just has to be a creator.

In a peculiar way, failure can sometimes be simpler to grapple with. You can simply resist it, dismiss it with a defiant 'to hell with this, to hell with them', and return to square one. Conversely, success can be considerably more subtle and insidious.

Corruption is a collective mindset, anchored around a cultural mindset that shifts to become tolerant to corruption, and increased levels of corruption. When we talk about corruption it's easy to think of it as governments, but for corruption to work- and to be effective- it has to contaminate all the bodies of society.

It is natural that a society would want to keep what they think works, the status quo. We are also acutely aware that technological changes alters society in unpredictable ways. It is the uncertainty associated with change—especially the fear of losing what we value—that leads to resistance to change.

The easiest way to understand noise is by thinking about measurements. The variability of the error is noise – and that's important. In the mathematics of accuracy, the expression for total error is very simple and quite compelling. It is bias-squared plus noise-squared.

Water is the essence of life. On Earth it's used to grow plants and within industrial processes but in space it takes on a whole new form. We can use water as a radiation shield. One cubic metre of water gives the same protection as Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere. Water is a molecule made of hydrogen and oxygen- and that happens to be rocket fuel.

I don't think you can find any other organ in the body that has correlation with so many other organs than the mouth. Research has been widespread, and over the past 30 years, gum disease has been linked to heart disease, to colorectal cancer, to diabetes, to all sorts of issues within the body.

Most leaders are running human organisations, not financial organisations. This means they need to understand how to motivate, inspire and organise people first rather than capital first. This requires a set of skills that traditionally have not been taught in business schools.