#487: Dr. Martine Rothblatt — The Incredible Polymath of Polymaths

Albert Einstein said, 'You can't solve a problem on the same level that it was created; you have to solve it on a different level.' If we all think the exact same way, we will never get out of the ruts that we're in. The only way to get out of the problems that we face is to think differently, to go down the corridor of indifference, to question authority, to be diverse. Thinking different is the pathway to solving problems that exist today.

The nervous system touches every single cell in our body ... There's one nerve that is way, way larger than all the rest of them—it's the vagus nerve. It starts in our mind; it wraps around our heart, our lungs, our gut. It's an immense nerve. And by stimulating this vagus nerve, it's possible to have positive therapeutic effects in the body.

Ultimately, all science is about is just saying 'Why?' ... Every two, three, four-year-old kid knows how to do that, right? Why? Why? Why?

We have two types of nervous systems: We have a fight-or-flight nervous system, which is the sympathetic nervous system, and we have a rest and digest nervous system, which is called the parasympathetic nervous system. When diseases occur, it's because one of those two nervous systems—the sympathetic one, the fight-or-flight—takes more of a dominant position in the body and causes a state of inflammation or over-activation.

We're at a point now where like 8 out of 10 people have a smartphone with access to all the world's knowledge and information, with access to countless amounts of music and training through YouTube. There are many people in the world still in dire circumstances, but the vast majority of people are doing better than people have ever done before in history.

I really believe that there's nothing more exciting than having a realization about something, coming to an inspiration about something, which is why books and reading are so magical.

I would say that one of the greatest unmet medical needs today is an adequate supply of transplantable organs.

It's hard for me to think of any aspect of life that cannot be replicated if one had sufficiently advanced technology.

One of my favorite sayings from another role model, Arthur C. Clarke, is that magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology.

The odds of any molecule actually working in the human body are less than 1 in 100. The human body is so complicated. It's like a massive set of very precisely keyed locks, and every molecule is like a random key. The chance that you would have a molecule that opened the lock that fixed some dysfunction in the body, rather than causing some harm to the body, is less than 1 in 100.

To me, music is the foundational human technology because the first thing that we ever could become aware of would be the beat of our mother's hearts while we were still in utero, and that beat—that's a rhythm.

Sometime in this century for sure, and maybe in just like two or three decades, I think that there will be a digital copy of a person—and another word is like a digital doppelganger of a person—who will claim to be the original person, and they may make that claim before or after the person died.

I am totally a believer in this adage that futurists usually over-promise in the near-term and under-promise in the long-term.

A field that will, probably in the future, have almost as many people with this career as are web designers today is the field of technoethics. Everybody who wants to create a technology will need to wrap that technology in an ethical envelope of consent.

I think the people in the future may think we were pretty stupid to be so scared of nuclear energy, which has killed a few dozens of people, that we went ahead and just stopped all the nuclear plants and began pouring ungodly amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that will kill millions of people. That will seem ludicrous...