So emotional intelligence says no, that's incorrect. We used to see emotions as weak because when we think about feelings, we don't think about joy and contentment; we think about anger, anxiety, and depression. Most people think of those as bad feelings that we want to ignore, suppress, or deny.

Consciousness lies beyond the framework of quantum mechanics. It must be regarded as a primitive of the universe itself, not merely of brains. If consciousness is a universal primitive, then the entire totality of what exists is conscious and desires self‑knowledge.

If we treat the mind and body as one unit, then wherever we put the mind, we necessarily put the body—and that opens up enormous possibilities for control.

When I decided to climb Everest, the reason was simply to draw attention to what was happening with the glaciers but also, when I talked about sustainability, it was hard to keep people's attention. You start talking and 5 minutes later, it's an abstract topic. The audience start checking their emails or yawning, and this really frustrated me.

At Axiom we've raised $64 million—we're a small startup—and we recently won the Putnam competition. We scored 90 out of 120, which would have placed us above all ~4,000 human contestants last year and at the level of a Putnam Fellow, meaning top five in the world. If you tried to achieve that purely through informal methods—where hallucination is a persistent risk—getting to the same level of consistent correctness would likely require a lot more resources.