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.

We make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same…

We crystallize and store knowledge in specialised sounds and language, and then play with it – build and forge and mould it and model with it – using it to grip hold of the past and to imagine and plan the future.

This crisis is rooted in the collective delusion that burnout is the necessary price we must pay for accomplishment and success. Recent scientific findings make it clear that this couldn't be less true. Performance is actually improved when our lives include time for renewal.

We're tackling serious subjects like life, death, and existential questions, but in a lighthearted way. This approach makes heavy topics more approachable. There's a cultural instinct to revere those who have passed, as if they know something we don't. Yet, in our show, we flip this idea on its head.

If someone can take our findings and draw out additional insights, we consider it a triumph. Our aim is to constantly enhance our understanding of the world, and contributions from others are invaluable in this pursuit.

Humankind has become a force in the biosphere as powerful as many natural forces of change, stronger than some, and sometimes as mindless as any.

In the spring, when we lose an hour of sleep, we observe a consequential 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. In the Autumn, when we gain an hour, we see a corresponding 21% reduction in heart attacks.

I grew up in Canada and have a lot of friends in Argentina. In the early part of the 20th Century, Argentina was wealthier and had a higher per-capita income than Canada. The country had severe governance issues which impacted economic and social development.

If you can rank oboists and there's one who's clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?

We have to live in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be, is something that we misunderstand. If we are realistic those ideals are usually out of reach, and in fact thinking about them and dreaming about them is a way to punish ourselves for the fact our lives are never going to match up to those ideals.

One of the undoubted triumphs of racism is how difficult it is to have an honest conversation about it.