The Big Think Interview

"There's a long history of people claiming planets which look Earth-like, Earth 2.0, Earth twins."

"Being aware of your mindsets is the difference between living a conscious life, where you're making choices in accord with what you actually want and going where you actually wanna go, versus being on autopilot and having those mindsets subconsciously drive all of your decisions."

“I think the key point is that doesn't mean game over. That doesn't mean we're flipped into a world, and to a point of no return.”

"What would a totalitarian society that is not well disposed to our own do if it had God-like power? We don't wanna find out."

"These days, no national news network is trusted by more than half of American adults. And that's a problem."

"Quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement are becoming very real. We're beginning to be able to access this tremendously complicated configuration space to do useful things."

"Everything that we care about, everything we experience, everything we know, we know it through our conscious awareness of it."

"The truth is that the skills that go into both motivation and manipulation are almost the same skills. The same level of persuasion, the same level of influence, the same level of charisma and dynamic creative thinking drives us to both be manipulated and be motivated."

"Asking the question of, where did the entire universe come from, is no longer a question for poets and theologians and philosophers. This is a question for scientists, and we have some amazing scientific answers to this question that have defied even the wildest of our expectations."

Many of us wake up each morning with something Oliver Burkeman calls “productivity debt.” The bestselling author and journalist explains this term as “a sense that you’ve got to work […]

"There is so much more uncertainty and volatility in a world that is moving fast with big countries that are more at odds with each other and with fewer rules of the road that leaders, companies, and societies are adhering to."

“If we're to be happy at all, it has to be found outside of this notion of pleasure. We have to step beyond hedonia. But the problem is that we risk going too far.”

“Self-awareness, it's the least visible part of emotional intelligence, but we find in our research that people low in self-awareness are unable to develop strengths very well in other parts of emotional intelligence.”

"Understanding more about monetary policy and the economic regime that you're living under can help ease some of the fundamental uncertainties [that have been] prevalent since COVID, and help you make better decisions in your day-to-day life."

"Is it possible that consciousness is a much more basic phenomenon in nature and is essentially pervading everything?"

"I think we need a truly open-ended conversation with 8 billion strangers, and what makes that hard to do increasingly is a level of political fragmentation and extremism and partisanship born of our engagement with these new technologies."

“Why is it that the quality of our information did not improve over thousands of years? Why is it that very sophisticated societies have been as susceptible as stone age tribes to mass delusion and the rise of destructive ideologies?”

“When we face a problem, our natural tendency is to race ahead – but some friction is actually a good thing.”

“I'm often asked: “Are great strategic thinkers born, or are they made?” And my answer is always yes. Like so many human capabilities, it’s a mixture of nature, nurture and experience.”

“People will claim that something is rigorous because it's by an authority figure or it's written in a book. But anyone can write a book.”