The Internet is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies, it's becoming our typewriter and our printing press, our map and our clock, our calculator and our telephone, our post office and our library, our radio and our TV.

If people really want to do something, all they need to do is meet someone who's built something from scratch to show them that it can be done by someone just like them. That's how I started.

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.

Intelligence and self-deception appear to have co-evolved, with the belief that we are fully in control of our destinies serving as a mental safeguard, despite its inaccuracy.

You have this very activist sociology rather than a dispassionate or objective sociology informing a broadly humanist framework of caring about flourishing versus suffering. When your sociology has decided that the point of studying society is to change it, you've got a problem.