You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.

We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets - and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.

Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.

Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work - whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty - is the great task of our generation as a whole.

You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life.

We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.