People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.

All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.

Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.

It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.

However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.