Description: What are the puzzles that need solving?

Transcript: Well I guess, you know, it’s a very . . . it’s a very, very hard question. Some people think about things like that. Unfortunately I’m an engineer. I’m always thinking about, you know, what’s the task and how do I get it done? And some of my tasks are pretty broad, and pretty fuzzy, and pretty funky, but that’s the way I think. I guess the way I would think that through . . . Let me answer your question. I don’t have an answer, so let me think about how I would have an answer. It would be I would ask myself, “What are the real puzzles that I truly don’t understand and I think are really, really important?” So you know let’s just go back to those big issues that I described earlier. So I’m really puzzled by why people in societies find it difficult kind of to work collaboratively together with other people in societies. So I’m not sure I know who the right name is to pick to interview, but I think . . . I don’t know whether it’s religious leaders, or whether it’s some of the few political leaders that have risen above the kind of special interest politics. I mean I’m bad at coming up with names, but I think that would be . . . that would be one of the interviews. And you know I’m also fascinated by the sort of deep psychological roots of how a lot of these phenomenon that I’m interested actually play themselves out. So you know, I recently came across a body of work of a guy named Daniel _______, I think is his name, at Penn. And his work is labeled under the phrase “positive psychology”. And his whole body of work is how you can get people to kind of pursue their positive interests and work constructively. And so you know, there’s a great interview. What have you learned about how to get people . . . to bring out people’s positive side, and their better side, and their constructive side as opposed to their fearful side, or their jealous side or their . . . (whatever kind of) side? So those are just a couple of examples. One specific, the other more of a kind of generic category. But you know I gotta tell you. Even for somebody like me who is very broad in my interests, and I truly engage in many parts of the world, there’s so much to know these days that it’s hard to keep exposing yourself to these new bodies of thought and fields that are . . . But I think over time as my work develops, I suspect that to make the next set of breakthroughs, one’s gonna have to integrate some of these very human and psychological theories, and thinking, and understanding with some of the more, if you will, rational, and organizational, and economic in order to address some of the very vexing questions that I asked earlier . . . that we talked about earlier.

Recorded on: 6/11/07