The miracle of capitalism is that if you have a central government trying to solve something, it will come up with one averagely optimal solution for everybody. And capitalism will come up with 10 different solutions to the same problem.

If you want to have a great startup idea, don't try to think of a startup. If you focus on creating a startup, you'll be grounding yourself in the present, studying customers living in the present, their problems in the present, and their unmet needs in the present. You want to define a future market by living in the future.

It's quite remarkable that we, creatures who evolved dodging predators on the African savannah, have been able to develop quantum mechanics. I find this to be a splendid evolutionary offshoot.

The field of positive psychology, and people in general, would benefit from thinking harder about what a good life is. A lot of people think we're pleasure motivated hedonists, but it turns out we have many other goals. We want happiness, but that comes in many different forms. We want pleasure, we want to be good people, we want to make a difference in the world, we want meaningful pursuits.

Behind every free‑will decision there must be comprehension and intention—and that's where consciousness comes in: the capacity to understand the meaning of symbols. In science, 'information' refers only to the probability of symbols occurring, not to their meaning. Thus science's definition of information discards meaning from reality, but for conscious beings, meaning—not the symbol itself—is what truly matters.