The thing that keeps me most awake is the desire and curiosity to learn more.
When you brought the Industrial Revolution in, all of a sudden India and China went from being the dominant global powers to being powers dominated by those who understood how to apply this new technology.
There's a creativity, a power, an energy, an ability to do things unlike any other period in history. It's a little bit like sitting in the Renaissance, but multiplied a thousand-fold.
Venture capital is about .02% of the U.S. economy invested, and it accounts for 11% of total U.S. jobs and 21% of U.S. economic output. And the reason why is because these companies can get very big, very quickly.
It's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories.
I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis: ... a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.
Those of us of a certain age grew up expecting that by now we would have Rosie the Robot from 'The Jetsons' in our house. And all we've got is a Roomba.
It's such an extraordinary time to be alive that you just don't want to miss it. I mean, it's a really neat historical period.
Ask your friends how many stars will be in the U.S. flag in 50 years? And the reason why that's a reasonable question is because there has never been a President of the United States who's been buried under the same flag he was born under.
After a lot of debate and a lot of work, what people decided is, it makes a great deal of sense to be open in the system and allow people to begin to build better flu vaccines. I mean, we're still making them in eggs that come out of chickens. And we can see the consequences of that with the current H1N1 lack of vaccines.
Since the 1940s, we've been saying there are no differences, we [humans] are all identical. We're going to know at year end if that is true.
There's always a question when you invest. Are you too early, are you too late, or are you just right? And there was a lot of hype about life sciences, around the sequencing of the human genome and a lot of people concluded that's not really there. But by the way, there was a lot of hype around the digital revolution just about the time of 2000 and the human genome, and it turns out that some of the world's biggest, most powerful companies are the survivors post that crash.
There is so much extraordinary opportunity if you're curious, if you're interested.
The difference between people who can read and write and those who can't is just absolutely astronomical.
There are few jobs in the world that are more fun than being the head of Urban Development for a great and thriving city.
When I grew up, I simply didn't have mentors that said, "Science is important. Science helps you build a country. Science makes a country powerful." And that's such a simple thought, but when you think about what's powered Taiwan and Korea and Silicon Valley and Cambridge.
New York City is a fascinating place because it's very good at using the energy in attracting some of the best and the brightest from everywhere.
Cities are magical things. You know the energy in them. You have to walk the streets in any borough here and you can see between what was in this city in the 1970's and where it is today and how much more energy there is and how much more just sheer.
One of the things that really worries me, in part about Mexico, in part about Latin America, and in part about the Hispanic population in the U.S. and Canada. It's the lack of awareness of this whole science world.
There is a massive ecosystem that has to get built that looks like a biosphere. And the various parts of that biosphere better be there.
China has, all of a sudden, found a way of putting the best of the best to work to build an economy that is growing at 10% to 12% per year, and now India is following. And those changes and how quickly they've come out of this mess, how little debt they have, is really important.
There are certain zip codes that generate a disproportionate share of patents, of startups, of wealth, of jobs. And it's really important if other parts of the country are going to want to create these tech centers.
We traditionally in this world didn't have enough calories to feed all of us and had huge famines, not just in Africa, but had them across India, across Southeast Asia, and across China. Because of Borlaug's work at Simit and because of this we have huge excess, until very recently, in agricultural produce and the prices went through the floor.
One of the lessons that I hope people will take out is the extreme dependence simply on the financial sector is really dangerous.
It is important that New York, in addition to its fashion, and finance, and tourism, and communications infrastructure, also begin developing venture infrastructure that's for real.
