From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If we treat the mind and body as one unit, then wherever we put the mind, we necessarily put the body—and that opens up enormous possibilities for control.
Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves.
Lack of sleep is like a broken water pipe in your home, it leaks water into every nook and cranny, and erodes the fabric of your DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative.
I used to be skeptical about whether I could live an additional 5 years. Now, I'm convinced that I could live 20 years beyond what I would have done. Drugs on our near horizon will give us easily another 20 years, and the drugs not far behind that, another 100. I've never been more excited about the prospect of human health than I am right now.
My greatest fear is that we have learnt nothing. Individually, we have learnt that the longer your population lives healthy, the better off your economy will be.
Our nation boasts an exceptional system for treating acute illnesses, leveraging technology in remarkable ways. However, where we fall short is in the areas of prediction and prevention of diseases. This is where our focus needs to shift, and AI offers numerous tools that can enhance our capabilities in these domains.
We have these floods of ideas when we allow ourselves to slow down – you get this pent-up energy that flows out of you.
What makes HIV so challenging is its ability to integrate into the host genome and establish latency. This is why we haven't been able to cure it yet - the virus literally becomes part of us.
During the day, we strive for efficiency. The brain forms habits to avoid wasting energy on unnecessary tasks, like finding a new route to work daily. It automates routes, like driving on autopilot, sometimes arriving home without recalling the journey. This efficiency undoubtedly has its benefits in a resource-limited environment shaped by evolutionary pressures.
The heart is a fascinating machine. It beats 3 billion times in a typical human lifetime, consumes so much energy, and does so much work that if you attached a heart to a typical swimming pool – the heart would empty the pool in about a week.
Depression is depression. Despair is despair. Disappointment is disappointment, and I think it's important for us to have that emotional granularity. Because if I just walk around like the world is right now, 'I'm anxious, I'm anxious,' but I have a hard time believing that everyone is that anxious. I think it's because we don't have granularity in our understanding of emotions, and so we're not communicating our true experiences accurately.
The only way you can experience the cosmic is by enhancing your perception. If your doors of perception are enhanced, everything becomes cosmic.