Get comfortable with the idea that you won’t know what’s good until it’s already happened.

You will find scientists who will tell you — and they deeply believe it — that we’re quantifiable. We are knowable. That if I can take a high enough resolution picture of all of you — not just your outsides, but your genes, your DNA, all the way down to your atoms — I can know everything about you and everything that you will be. There are people who believe this. And what this tells me is, no. No! All the way down, to the bottom of our thoughts, there’s just more mystery.

There's a grand-canyon sized gulf between explanation and experience.

Therein lies the rub of a place like Berkeley Bowl. You get seduced by an 11-pound apple that turns out to be a fake watermelon with an anus.

For some reason, that I can’t really explain, at the beginning of Radiolab, it always felt like life or death. Even though it was just a radio show. Even though no one was listening. And I am not quite sure why… but it may have to do with that radical uncertainty you feel when you are trying to work without a template.

I have a weird sense that people ten years younger than me don't own a radio, or maybe they own a radio, but they don't call it a radio.

Get comfortable with the idea that you won’t know what’s good until it’s already happened.