I've always been interested in why countries appear and disappear. And the curious thing is how often it happens.

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.

We are beginning to shift into life code. And in the process of shifting into life code, every life form on this planet is coded in a double helix with a sugar phosphate backbone. And that codes whether you become a bacteria, an orange, a lemon, a Lemur, a Cow, a sheep, a human being, a politician, any one of these things is all coded in this four-letter code.

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.

If I had a wand and could put statues in different places, one of the statues would go to a man who just died, called Norman Borlaug, who came up with the Green Revolution.

The definition of who's literate and who's not keeps changing. So, in Neanderthal times, if you painted on a cave wall, that was enough to transmit how you hunt, how you eat, how you cook, how you dress, and we can read about that.

The Americas has been a relatively stable continent. The last truly new border we have is Panama in 1903.