1. EachPod

Episode 21: Waleed Abdalati - NASA Chief Scientist and how to live a life led by your curiosity

Author
Ryan McGranaghan
Published
Tue 30 Jun 2020
Episode Link
None

  • Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) (06:00) 
  • One of ten people to be ’NASA Chief Scientist' 
  • Being led around by your curiosity 
    • ‘Pulls' from our earliest ages in life (07:30) 
  • The Arctic from space (10:00) 
    • The ’space-based perspective' 
  • ’No better compass than your emotions’ (11:30) 
    • Constructive emotions 
  • Opportunities to connect mind and body (14:00) 
  • Love of career and love of family (23:30) 
  • “It has to give you energy and not drain energy from you" (25:00) 
  • What he tells his students (28:00) 
    • Think about the act of learning 
  • The goal: learn, grow, have new experiences (30:00) 
  • Becoming comfortable with discomfort - not that hard if you believe in it and if you believe you can contribute meaningfully to it (34:00) 
  • Existing in little space (35:00) 
  • Antidisciplinary (36:00) 
  • NASA = ‘bureaucratic manifestation of all that makes us human’ (38:00) 
    • Study the far off places that only exist in our imagination 
    • Takes our humanity and our human spirit to the limit 
  • Communicating difficult things (44:00) 
  • It is our responsibility to understand why others feel and think the way that they do (50:45) 
  • Physics is better behaved than social science (58:00) 
  • Put yourself in a place of understanding why someone may feel differently than you (59:00) 
    • Put the energy into understanding a divergent perspective from yours 
  • Lightning Round (1:02:00): 
  • Enjoy the challenge to think differently 
  • 'Five-Cut Fridays’ series  


Share to: