I think we are past the point where masks in schools make sense ... If you're a teacher and want to be protected from transmission, it's more important that you're wearing a mask than the kids are wearing masks. It does have a negative impact on kids' ability to learn and their social development. So, I think we should move beyond masks in schools.

If you actually really deeply poll people... healthcare turns out to be a bigger economic issue than their tax rate—than virtually anything else ... For just about half of Americans, a single medical expense and they are in bankruptcy. The number one phone call to the American Cancer Society hotline when people are newly diagnosed with cancer is 'I cannot afford to have cancer.'

There has always been some split between how Democrats and Republicans have perceived the economy, but that split has grown into a gulf—the biggest gulf ever recorded. Right now, Democrats who are asked about the economy say it's going great, and then Republicans are like, 'Oh, it's terrible.' There's a 49-point gap in this scale.

Economists project that 42% of the jobs that we are losing [amid COVID-19] are gone forever. So, if you take as a rough ballpark estimate 40 million jobs lost, 42% would be about 17 million jobs. The Great Recession cost us 8.8 million jobs at the peak or trough depending upon what graph you're looking at. So, we're looking at two times the job loss of the Great Recession in perpetuity.

We all need to do everything we can to get people out to vote [and] to fight for the candidates that we believe in because there's a lot at stake—a lot of things that we have grown to just believe as true about American life may be called into question if this election goes in a particular direction.

I'm very, very reluctant to categorize just about anyone as genuinely evil, because in my experience, there are very, very few evil people ... Vladimir Putin, now that's evil.

The problem that we're faced with, regardless of where you are politically, is that, at this point, we're descending into two camps that despise each other where 42% of people on both sides would characterize the other party as downright evil. And both our media and our social media environments are exacerbating the situation.

Everyone knows that what's happening in Ukraine and the US response will be something of an indicator of the response to an act of aggression on the part of China against Taiwan.

We're getting fed alternate versions of reality now that are so powerful that they actually have overridden any kind of day-to-day exposure to the economy in terms of your perception of how things are going.

I do not see any way out of this. I think we're going to end up with a very significant recession, and the adjustments are going to be deeply, deeply painful.

You can bank the world on blockchain in a way we've never been able to do before ... You're talking about tech that eliminates poverty—this is it. This is a close as we're going to get, probably, in our lifetime.

The core argument in my book is that people will do what their incentives demand. And if you are a political figure today, your incentives are to generally cater to the most polarized and extreme points of view and voters in your district because that's who's going to vote you back in.

Congress has a 28% approval rating nationwide right now ... Three out of four of us don't think things are well. The individual re-election rate for members of Congress is 92%. So, even though seven out of ten of us are really, really sad with how things are going, you're almost assured of re-election if you decide to run, which most of them do, since they like this job.

There is going to be a push and pull between humans and the coronavirus variants out into the foreseeable future—and I would measure that future in months and years.

I still feel like this should be a time for a re-inspection of both America's place in the world and whether one would accept that America, despite its failings, is a force for improving people's lives everywhere around the world ... There are massive opportunities for us to improve people's lives here and now...

I think that's one reason why the dissatisfaction among Democrats right now is pronounced—because it was framed as defeat Trump, and then all of these incredible things will happen.

Lobby3 is our effort to help explain web3 technologies and their potential to combat poverty to the folks in DC (the regulators, the lawmakers) to make sure that they don't do something that stifles this innovation before it can even really get going or reach its full potential.

On the national level, Kara, I think we're seeing that cash relief and basic income is the future and should be the present.

If you had ranked-choice voting, Trump might not have won the Republican primary in 2016.

Anyone looking at the effect of cash relief sees that it's working at a higher level than any other policy that's been enacted in terms of improving people's lives, improving children's ability to learn.

I will say, I have friends and family members who have had long COVID, And it is a beast ... It's terrible.

You imagine that two parties are at least, kind of, contesting various ideas as to how to drive the economy forward, how to make our lives better. But it turns out that, at this point, your opinion on how the economy is is contingent upon how you feel about the party in power.

The thing that people don't understand is that the First Amendment, freedom of speech, says that government shall not abridge people's freedom of speech. Newsflash, Twitter is not the US government.

We heard later from a producer, Ariana Pekary, who was at MSNBC during that time that she was given a list of candidates not to ever invite on the show or interview, and I was on that list.

I believe that universal basic income is the future and should be the present. I devoted years of my life to trying to bring that message to Americans. And I'm happy to say that, now, a majority of Americans agree with that, and we're seeing the positive effects of it very, very quickly.

There is a particular discourse and language in media; there's a particular discourse and language in politics. And they aren't the discussion of fact in the way that you'd hope.

Women deal with idleness better than men do .... Exhibit one: Out-of-work women, much more likely to go back to school than out of work men.