Our number one instinct is survival, followed by reproduction. People started to realise that if they took care of themselves, they would live longer, have better sex and have healthier children.

Once the cancer of authoritarianism gets into the veins and organs of society, it's not easy to get-out – they have this very specific way of paralysing political mechanisms and dismantling the fundamental human logic.

The act of humans making choices will become a mere memory. We'll be spectators in a novel arena. But is this the zenith of liberty or just a cage?

Sustainability is a state of mind – every day when my team are working, they must think about sustainability. We want to be 100% sustainable by 2030 – how can you talk about 2060 or 2080? The people making the promises will be dead by then. We must act now.

What makes SETI different today is that instead of the verb "to believe" we're trying to use the verb "to explore". We want to see what's actually out there instead of just believing what someone tells us is out there.

We wouldn't want to live in a world of full transparency. That is a world where I can see into your brain, and you into mine. Perhaps one day this will be possible… we will be able to plug into each other's brains, and I will experience the world as you, and you as me…. A hive-mind… I just hope I'm not around when that technology arrives.

Your brain has an agenda: to make you feel good about you. So if you're the CEO, and you decided to launch a product two weeks ago, your brain assumes, 'Well, that must have been the right decision.' It starts scanning the environment for proof — cherry-picking anything that confirms you were right.

The only value that government paper provides you at this point is, basically, the fact that if everything goes to 'hell in a handbasket' that you have some assets of value.

We cannot focus only on the material aspects of poverty- we must address the poverty of spirit that's present in every one of our broken institutions: health systems, economic systems, criminal justice systems, and food systems.

What motivates great entrepreneurs is fear of failure; and here's the thing – most entrepreneurs fail several times before they achieve success, and the more you fail, the more fear you have.

Magical thinking is a bi-product of cognitive process that were useful in our evolutionary survival. We're so good at pattern matching that we see patterns everywhere, even when they don't exist. It's better to believe the movement in the dark is a tiger, rather than the wind blowing thru a bush. Its better to be wrong on that, than the other way around.

Nothing happens by accident, everything is connected, and there are no coincidences: that is the essence of conspiratorial thinking.