Our ethics are not static, they evolve over time and that gives me tremendous hope. If we had remained static, the progress we have made would have been impossible. The evolution of ethics is essential to our survival.

The idea that education can reduce resistance to innovation is often informed by the misguided view that people oppose new technologies because of ignorance. This is not the case.

Our envy of birds certainly helped drive our will to fly, however I think Leonardo was probably held back by trying to emulate the flapping of birds; that doesn't work with human muscles. We had to free ourselves of the perception that you need to flap your wings.

Most people do not realise what will happen when they cross the divide- they've already accepted a story about who's on the other side, and have already decided that the other is frightening, delusional and dangerous. In truth, we are all confused. This era is nothing if not confusing. We all see some things with clarity, we all see some things upside down, and we all have blind-spots.

The will to live together is the fundamental pillar that keeps society going- and that pillar is now under threat. This new messy form of fascism that we have been subjected to in several countries is damaging these fundaments. We are losing the will to live together… What will we do when we lose the will to live together? That's one of the fundamental questions of our time.

Human progress often comes at great cost to people who are willing to sacrifice for the sake of principles or in defense of the rights of others. It took hundreds of millions of people to die before we created a global security and human rights order and all of these are under stress. One would hate to think it would be another similar amount of deaths before we made more progress.

If you step back and zoom out, and ask yourself: why are video games so powerful in the first place? The answer is that they're a digital manifestation of play. Video games are simply a digital form of that. They're one of the most effective and, from an evolutionary perspective, one of the most fundamentally human ways of engaging the brain — of connecting with who we are as a species.

Your attention hasn't collapsed, it's been stolen from you by big forces. Once we understand those forces, we can begin to build meaningful solutions.

I don't think I ever would have had the confidence in myself to even pick up the pen. I would have continued to believe that this wasn't something that could ever be real for me. That one small bit of encouragement had such a huge impact on my life. It made me realize how sometimes it really is the little stuff that's most important, and we never know how significant our encouragement can be in someone else's life.

Most astronomers are surprised, but biologists look at the history of life on Earth. Many biologists I speak to would say it's almost incomprehensible that something as complex as us has even appeared at all—we might just be very lucky.

The greatest risk often lies in people's biased perceptions of risk itself. The challenge is: how do you debias risk when everyone's perception of it is inherently biased?

The greatest adventure that any of us can take is answering these questions for ourselves. This isn't deep, dark, conversation, it's normal conversation. The wisest, coolest prophets out there… people like the Dalai Lama… they're full of joy.