Decoding the World Quotes

“It’s not AI we have to fear. I’m aware there’s a vague sense of chaos in the world. But I don’t think AI created that. People did. Sowing chaos was just their game plan. AI is just good at finding hidden patterns. And it surfaced patterns we humans had kept hidden. AI is just a mirror. It showed in the mirror who we really were. It didn’t make people hate. It found the hate we were trying to hide. It didn’t manipulate people into being mean. Their mean streak was simmering all along.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“What it adds up to is stunning: Worker wages could have been 60 percent higher today, if we had kept health care costs in check. Another way to say it is: American workers will never see another pay raise if health care costs keep siphoning off the money.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Exactly why having more cognitive complexity makes a species live longer isn’t totally decided by science yet. But the simplest answer is probably the best answer: The species is using its intelligence to survive. Smart animals figure things out. They solve problems and learn to avoid predators.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Around the world, every week, 3 million people move from rural areas into cities. That’s a San Francisco every two days! That isn’t a future statistic. That’s a today statistic.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Rather than improving trust, crypto has tried to minimize the need for trust. To create a system that requires no trust. To build a world that will still function even when all trust is eroded.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Don’t buy clothes at department stores—just take the clothes into the dressing room, post a photo of yourself on Instagram wearing them, and leave as the likes start accumulating by the hundreds.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“The biggest lie of all is the notion that robots don’t take jobs, they create jobs. The robots don’t do that— the humans do.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“But replacing workers and making the remaining ones more productive are literally the same thing. If”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Breathing is key to accessing the unconscious neural code that controls us. “As the breath moves, so does the mind” is ancient Indian wisdom. We can add to that, “and the body.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“The insula is the heart of subjective emotional experience. It’s the brain region where our perception of what’s happening to us matters more than what’s really happening to us. The”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Another way to characterize it is that our chances of finding a habitable planet are roughly equal to the chances that Christopher Columbus, sailing east, would accidentally discover the Americas. It’s not a question of if. It’s only a question of when.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“The Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution are intertwined much like all chicken-and-egg problems. One couldn’t have happened without the other. Social change sometimes triggers technological change; sometimes it’s the other way around. But they always go hand in hand. No technological revolution fails to be directly connected to a social revolution, either just before or just after.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Nobody is in sales anymore; they’re in customer relationship management. Nobody is in marketing, they’re in customer engagement.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, black or white, healthy or ill. Across every cohort, controlling for all variables, if you had “a sense of purpose” you stayed healthy, and if you didn’t have a sense of purpose, you didn’t stay healthy. It was more powerful for your health than exercising every day. It was more important than smoking or drinking. It was pretty much the strongest determinator of your future health.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Saying that genetics could be dangerous is like saying fire is hot. Warning that soon everyone will be able to hack the genome is like predicting, back in early caveman days, that soon everyone will have fire.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“At IndieBio, I quickly learned there was no such master plan— but more than that, it was wrong to think this period we face could be planned out at all. It was fast, blind, and dense. Nobody is an expert in the unknown. Planning wasn’t the way to solve it. Experimenting was. There is no plan, just a way.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“When you act, you learn. That kind of wisdom beats the knowledge you read in a book, every time. To really seek answers, you need to act. To really develop your mind, run more experiments.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Practicing is greater than knowing.” Not better than knowing. Greater.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“So in most people, all these intelligence genes add and subtract against each other, to result in, on average, a single IQ point. The intelligence genes do not determine your IQ.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“intelligence is a human construct, not a biological thing),”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Rather than “Survival of the Fittest”—which wasn’t from Charles Darwin; it was a philosopher interpreting Darwin in 1864— we might have had the opposite, “Survival of the Most Cooperative.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Fish can pass memories between generations. But maybe the better way to say it is that fish can pass experience learning through generations.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Cancer is caused by mutations. Mutations that pile up until runaway cell division occurs. We have random DNA damage happening in our bodies all the time.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“The randomness of cancer is often very hard to accept.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Life, though, really means a cell membrane. In biology, what defines life is the ability to self-reproduce. And only things with cell membranes can reproduce on their own.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Stars don’t just shoot out energy and light. When they’re young, they shoot out amino acids and nucleotides— the raw material of DNA, RNA, and proteins. These are carried by the solar wind throughout the solar system. The building blocks of life come from suns. Earth wasn’t just extremely lucky to have these incredibly elegant Legos here. Early in the formation of a solar system, all the planets get showered with them, especially the rocky planets near the sun. Earth isn’t special.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“Bacteria don’t just make yogurt. They can bind carbon to silicon. They can make electricity. They can absorb gamma radiation. They can eat minerals and excrete acids, or eat acids and secrete minerals. They can emit light. They can make superglue. They can eat electrons and breathe out metals. They can align themselves like a compass to Earth’s magnetic field. They can process gold ores into tiny gold nuggets. They can turn sunlight into bioplastic. There’s even a bacteria that eats rock and poops out sand. Nice, coarse, gritty sand.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World

“They make the money cheap to borrow, and then that debt turns the borrower into a weapon against change. As long as the world doesn’t change, the bonds are paid off.”
― Po Bronson, Decoding the World