When you walk into those situations that have a lot of conflict in them, the first thing to do is to be present enough to allow the other person to speak first. You're not giving power away; you're actually allowing them to feel seen and understood.

People judge you really quickly, at first just on your facial features. There are two dimensions - warmth and competence. You can think of them as trustworthiness and strength. They're first judging you on warmth; evaluating whether or not you are trustworthy. That's much more important to them than whether or not you're competent.

Being a comfortable public speaker, which involves easily being able to go off-script, strongly signals competence.

There are plenty of reasons to put our cellphones down now and then, not least the fact that incessantly checking them takes us out of the present moment and disrupts family dinners around the globe.

I teach a freshman seminar every year, and we delve very, very deeply into their mindsets. They read scientific articles, but we also focus on what their mindset is, and they learn to recognize when they are in more of a fixed mindset, because we're all a mixture.

Conflict between science and religion a dangerous foe.

I loved Stanford and symbolic systems. For me, I came to Stanford assuming I would be a doctor and got really deep into chemistry and biology, but I noticed everyone who was on the same track as me was taking the exact same classes. I wanted to do something more unique.

I don't put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction - looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That's a science fictional tool.