Other components of liberal democracy—civil liberties, rule of law and free markets—may play a larger role as long-term deterrents than simply having free elections. If the country goes all the way to a more complete liberal democracy, then it is likely to significantly decrease terrorism and political violence.

A high-performance career usually demands your time, energy and focus within the often rigid structure of organisational life.... Your body and brain require sleep, exercise, efficient breathing and a vibrant diet in order to thrive. Everybody knows this and yet it can be extremely challenging to thrive amidst competing commitments, travel demands and expectations of your role.

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!

An example is when you catch a cricket ball your brain is doing the equivalent of solving differential equations, but you do it unconsciously.

Space also taught me that when you think you're at 100% of your physical or mental capacity, you're not. We have enormous reserves within us (which we don't tap into for good reason), but we are all capable of pushing ourselves a lot further than we think.

There are a high number of young people who want to set-up businesses, but there is a huge gap between their aspirations/intentions and the actual delivery of setting up a business…. More so with the young than any other age group.

One of the amazing things is how adaptable our brains our – and by day 2, I was feeling really good. NASA is pretty good at understanding how to keep you healthy in space; and so you go through sleep-shifts to help you stay rested, and to make sure you don't get a drop in performance from being tired.

There has never been a time at which Enlightenment values predominated in any culture. They have always faced pushback from forces that are embedded in human nature – tribalism, deference to authority, magical thinking, vulnerability to cognitive illusions and biases.

They have maternal instincts and look after each other as we do… it's not an intellectual thing when a mother protects her child; it's an instinctive behaviour. We value all those things in the human being because we are human beings! But that's pretty short sighted and narrow minded.

Being an entrepreneur, an inventor, is about having ideas and having the doggedness to see them through… As an inventor your ideas should be based on creating a solution to a problem – a solution which focuses on function over form. Solving problems has been my life's work.

We all have obstacles we think can't be overcome, but if our dream is great enough, and we work hard enough, the world is ours for the taking.

One of the great ironies of a company like Meta, where I worked, is that well over 90% of its users are outside the US, yet well over 90% of the bandwidth among decision-makers is focused on what's happening in America. In the end, that just doesn't make sense.