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Robert Ballard
Discoverer of the Titanic
I think everyone is unique. We know that. The only way you find out what you are is by trying everything, and then at some point you take what you are, which is unique. Don't ever try to mimic anybody, because you will only be second best. You can never outshine the thing you are trying to mimic, so don't ever do that. Don't idol worship. Finally, be yourself. Then you are going to be really unique and exciting. People are going to beat a path to your door if you polish your inner self.
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
We all get to decide how we're going to go about making our own living and so on and so on. That happens to also be a very effective way of deploying an economy so that you get an economy which mostly makes sense. You know, things mysteriously -- because of that invisible hand -- tend to work out. I remember there was a time -- I may have these statistics slightly wrong -- a few years ago there was a heat wave in the South that killed three percent of chickens, and I think egg prices doubled because there were three percent fewer chickens. Well, that means that the number of chickens is roughly right, even though there's nobody deciding how many chickens there should be. So, that is a very interesting fact, I think, that a free market economy -- which by necessity involves a lot of liberty -- just happens to work well in terms of allocating resources. But, imagine a different world. Imagine a world where some incredibly artificially intelligent computer could actually do a better job than the invisible hand of allocating resources, and were to say, "There shouldn't be this many chickens, there should be this many chickens," just a few more or a few less. Well, that might even lead to more aggregate wealth. So, it might be a society that if you give up liberty, everybody could be a little wealthier. Now, the question that I would pose is, if that turned out to be the world, "Is that a good trade?" Personally, I don't think so. Personally I think it would be a terrible trade. And, I sometimes worry about that, because I think it's a coincidence that liberty tends to do such a good job of creating an economy that functions well.
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Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
I just kind of knew that I wanted to come to the U.S. to do science, because I did feel that, also as a woman, and also the British sort of system was such that you had to be kind of much more into it, and in Australia I felt much more constrained. And so this was definitely -- the possibilities, both as a person, even apart from my personal life, fortunately it did coincide -- but it was very much a situation where I could see the U.S. would be the place to be doing science. So it was just a wonderful opportunity. I had the great good fortune of being able to do research at Yale first, as a postdoctoral fellow, and then to go to the University of California at Berkeley for 12 years. What a gift to be given a laboratory and to be told, "Look, you can do research!" What a wonderful thing to be having that opportunity.
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