I don't want to think about how many people have thought or still think that I'm crazy.
We cant live any more in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, were all doomed.
Nothing that has value, real value, has no cost. Not freedom, not food, not shelter, not healthcare.
Sometimes we crash and burn. It's better to do it in private.
Americans thinking that America will continue to lead the world in innovation and quality of life without some quick and serious educational improvements are dangerously delusional.
Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources, they're going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems.
Invention and entrepreneurship isn't about pure technology. Most people take whatever they see in front of them and relate it to something they understand. For at least ten years after Ford started building cars, people called them horseless carriages. It wasn't obvious to call it a car. They used to call the radio 'the wireless.' Innovation is much more about changing people and their perceptions and their attitudes and their willingness to accept change than it is about physics and engineering.
Clearly, there are many places where diesel is king or gas-turbine is king, or IC engines will win, but there are many places in the world where, as we've seen, they just won't do the job. The modern version of the Stirling engine has some very, very attractive characteristics, and we're trying to optimize it for some of those applications.
The word entrepreneur is associated with success and adventure. From my life, the only thing I can tell you that's consistently associated with entrepreneurship is failure, and the only thing consistently associated with invention is frustration. There is a long road between the idea and the reality.
There is just so much stuff in the world that, to me, is devoid of any real substance, value, and content that I just try to make sure that I am working on things that matter.
People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.
In some cases, inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.
I think our society is no longer properly valuing the intangible potential of innovation, even if we have to be a little uncomfortable with the risks associated with it, and a little bit willing to fail, pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. We don’t seem to want to do that as much as we used too.
Segway will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.
Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.
We live in a world where virtually everybody expects there's going to be some reasonable therapy for virtually any situation.
To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions
I think in our lifetime, that level of acceptance of "well, we couldn't do any better," won't be tolerated. We're going to start to see individual therapies customized for individual patients, and it's going to change the way people get healthcare.
I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb; rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care
I'm a human entropy producer.
I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.
I think we have a society which is spending more and more of its money on healthcare as a percent of GDP as a percent of a lot of things. I think that's a measure of success.
As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought
New ideas in technology are literally a dime-a-dozen, or cheaper than that
My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.
