Our vision statement was about elevating the world from a place of mediocrity to greatness.

One of the ideas you hear often is that in America there is a culture where not only is it ok to fail, but it's almost expected – like a badge of honor. This is true to a point but that implies a cut-throat culture that is more legend than reality and is actually bad for innovation.

I found myself deeply entrenched in the political world because, as I've come to realize, decisions about our bodies aren't made in clinics or doctor's offices. They're made in Westminster.

Our technological distraction is a first order political problem, worldwide. If digital media has become the lens through which we understand and engage with others, we need to figure out how to make that the right kind of lens.

The tendency is to avoid the need for more options because anything that's unfamiliar, as human beings we tend to flee uncertainty. We naturally go towards what we already know because we know how to deal with something we have done before.

Backlash is sadly an intrinsic part of social progress. When oppressed people make their claim for justice, they trigger a response – a fightback by those who want to maintain the status-quo.

Photography has become the universal language. It doesn't matter what country you're from, what language you speak, we all understand images. That's what makes it so powerful and so dangerous.

Dubai offers a lot. We're currently at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). There's a separate jurisdictional regime in this area meaning that companies are treated under English common-law principles. It's a very safe environment for transactions to occur, and this gives us a big advantage of areas which simply do not have that framework.

You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will go to chimpanzee Heaven, and there receive countless bananas for his good deeds. No chimpanzee will ever believe that. Only humans believe such stories. This is why we rule the world, whereas the chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

The movements that sustain themselves the best over time are those that have culture at their core, that use art as a means of conveying a message, and use art-making as a means to mobilise a movement.

World leaders have promised everything to everyone. But they are failing. The UN's Sustainable Development Goals are supposed to be delivered by 2030. The goals literally promise everything, like eradicating poverty, hunger and disease; stopping war and climate change, ending corruption, fixing education along with countless other promises. This year, the world is at halftime for its promises, but nowhere near halfway.

We have layer upon layer of novelty, and today we are in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change of the novelty we face is so fast that it has outstripped our evolutionary capacity to keep up.