From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I'd been a patsy all my life, an easy mark for the appeals of fundraisers or sales operators who would come to my door. I'd end up with unwanted magazine subscriptions… There must be something other than the features of the offer that got me to say yes, because I don't want those features, it must be the way the offer was presented to me.
We're outnumbered by bacteria 1.3:1, we're slightly more bacteria than we are human. We're also stardust. We are also 60% water, and that water in our bodies is billions of years old; it's been the clouds, the bottom of the sea, waves, streams and everything in the cycle. At an atomic level, 98% of the hydrogen in our bodies came from the bigbang. We're incredibly ancient beings, perhaps we should see ourselves as aliens!
From a rather dispassionate, clinical perspective, and if you remove the awful consequences that people experience when something does go wrong, you can see conditions like synesthesia as nature's experiments. We can learn a lot about the underlying functioning of our nervous system.
From 20,000 miles away however, you couldn't see any civilisation- just the land mass and those three colours… the brown of the land, the white of the clouds and the ice, and the crystal blue of the ocean. Earth was just suspended in the blackness of space and it was an incredibly beautiful sight.
The only way for you to discover something new is to acknowledge the ocean of ignorance in which you are just an island. Experts have a problem with that – they want to get prizes, and get recognised by their colleagues and peers as being very smart.
Anyone worth following in peak performance will tell you that 90% of human performance is mental. The understanding of that mental aspect of the game is brand-new – perhaps 10-20 years old.
I don't know why I didn't just walk-away from Los Alamos...
I think that we must move to a model where we value nature differently and work by integrating with nature. And that's one of the things I'm very, very excited about—leveraging synthetic biology. Because if we can create excitement, wonder, and solutions to problems like loss of biodiversity, then I think that not only can we inspire the next generation, but we can give them hope.
Mobile phones can really revolutionize the study of human behavior.
All modern humans share a common ancestor. We all emerged from Africa, 200,000 years ago, as our species moved across the Earth, adapting to the differing climates and conditions of our planet. We are one big, beautiful, dysfunctional and incredible family, tearing itself apart over something as inconsequential as our hue.
The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.
I believe it's more fundamental: similar to the 'use it or lose it' principle that applies to muscles, our brains engage in a nightly routine that stimulates thoughts and ideas not typically relied upon during the day. This built-in process keeps our thinking adaptive and nimble, fostering divergent thoughts and offering an evolutionary advantage.