From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You can't just roll out of bed and be the best in the world at something, you need to have great genes and put in the hard-work, get the breaks, and really have that balance of nature and nurture.
I think of creativity very broadly, for me it's about solving problems. A lot of people put creativity into the narrow bucket of artistic expression; including film-making, creative writing, music and so on- but there are many who understand that if you look at science and engineering, there are many very interesting problems that require creativity and you see a great outpouring of new ideas.
Within each of us is a deep, complex network of capillaries, veins and arteries which extend a distance equivalent to more than 3 times the circumference of the Earth, and because our body has lost its conditioning to nature, our hearts have to pump 20-30 times a minute more than if we regularly exposed our body to cold water.
The central premise of my book, the concept of the brain being 'rewired', essentially posits that any change in our behavior results in a change in our brain. This isn't mere conjecture; it's a neurobiological fact. Small behavioral changes trigger small changes in the brain, whereas significant behavioral shifts lead to substantial neural alterations.
At Axiom we've raised $64 million—we're a small startup—and we recently won the Putnam competition. We scored 90 out of 120, which would have placed us above all ~4,000 human contestants last year and at the level of a Putnam Fellow, meaning top five in the world. If you tried to achieve that purely through informal methods—where hallucination is a persistent risk—getting to the same level of consistent correctness would likely require a lot more resources.
I've known many individual monkeys and apes, and I'm struck by how much diversity and gender diversity there is which I have been ignoring. We always look for typical behaviours… a typical male does X… a typical female does Y. We overemphasise the typicality of men and women. If we start looking in primates, we'll almost certainly find the same sort of gender diversity we find in humans.
Cooking is about precision, but it's also about understanding the science behind why ingredients behave the way they do. You can't innovate without understanding the fundamentals.
Birds are not born with an innate genetically determined knowledge of constellations. What they do has been brilliantly shown in an experiment by Stephen Emlen.
Humans can be parasitized by actual brain worms, but also by idea pathogens that cause them to behave in profoundly maladaptive ways.
Our experience is very limited to the surface of this rock we call home. You cannot show-off in space, we must be humble. The only purpose for us to seek journeys into space is to learn about the unknown. That's a spiritual conquest. Leaving the solar system has no commercial benefits.
Most people assume a wound heals at its natural pace. But no—it healed according to perceived time. If the clock ran faster, the wound healed faster. If it ran slower, healing slowed.
To rephrase John F. Kennedy, we are choosing to go to the Moon, not because it's easy, but because it's a great business!