TRANSCRIPT:

I'm always curious about how technology has changed the way that we behave, changed the way that we evolve and changed the way that we think. In a lot of ways, Twitter and Facebook expose me to being curious about things I might not have interfaced with. And I heard this great thing recently, that with every big breakthrough, somebody didn't say "Eureka." They said, "Isn't that interesting," which is really curiosity.

I think a lot of us feel like we're changing so much with all these tools and technologies. But I also find it really interesting the way my children look at things. It reminds me that we don't really have memories from earlier than 8 years old. My father used to say that when you have children you get to relive that curiosity through them. So I find being a parent very interesting, and I'm very curious about every stage in life. I mean, I just lost a parent so I'm very curious about death and life, and the short time we have on the planet. And usually you are wisest when you die.

TRANSCRIPT:

I've often wondered, "Where did it all come from?" At night, when you look at the stars, you say to yourself, "Wow, the universe is incredible. But where did it come from?" I first bumped up against this when I was a child.

A lot of people remember the instant when Princess Diana died. For me, it was the instant when I heard that Albert Einstein had just died. Everyone was talking about it. It was front-page news and they still carried a picture of his desk with a caption, "Unsolved manuscript of the greatest scientist of our age." I said to myself, "Why couldn't he finish it? What was so hard that he couldn't finish this problem? Why couldn't he ask his mother? It was just a homework assignment, right?" Wrong.

Years later, I found out it was to be the theory of everything. An equation one inch long that would allow us to "read the mind of God." I said to myself, "That's for me."

TRANSCRIPT:

What makes me curious is the very fact that I don't know things.  While that comment sounds self-referential, it’s more about my desire to learn and the stimulation and satisfaction that ensues.  Curiosity is my prime mover and motivation, as opposed to the result of my observations of what happens to me. I don't need love or money in order to be curious. Curiosity is what drives me to participate more fully in my personal and my business life.

TRANSCRIPT:

First of all, who I am I still don't know. But surely, what it is in the other that makes the other either a friend or an enemy?

TRANSCRIPT:

I get the biggest kick out of learning things. For instance, we moved to Washington three years ago and growing up in Massachusetts, I didn't know anything about the Civil War, so I got curious about it -- and the more I learned, the more interested I got in it.

TRANSCRIPT:

Oh, I'm curious about a lot of things, but I'm particularly curious about one question: Are we alone in the universe? Because I happen to live in the first generation of humans, after all the millennia of people asking the priests, the philosophers, the sages, "What should we believe about whether there's anyone else out there?" And what we got back was somebody else's belief system. But I'm alive at the first time in history where we can try and do an experiment to answer this question. It's a perfectly valid question to pose of the universe, and for the first time we can do a scientific exploration. So I'm curious to know what the answer is.

TRANSCRIPT:

I don't know what makes me curious. I'm curious because the antithesis is being bored, and I think being curious is a lot more fun. I'm always interested in understanding, really, the underlying cause of what causes things to happen. If there's anything that really ties all of my work together, it's that very simple question that I'm curious about, which is, "What is the cause?" There's usually a chain of causation: what causes this and that, and what's behind that, and what's behind that? Then, the questions get very interesting. If we don't treat the underlying cause of a problem -- any problem, whether it's a medical problem or a social or a health policy issue -- then the same problem tends to come back again.

Sometimes when I lecture, I'll show a slide of doctors busily mopping up the floor around a sink that's overflowing, but no one's turning off the faucet. That's how I got interested in doing this work -- when I was learning how to do bypass surgery with Michael DeBakey, the heart surgeon. We'd cut people open. We'd bypass their blocked arteries. You'd tell them they were cured. They'd go home and do the same things that caused the problem in the first place. They'd eat junk food and not manage stress. They'd smoke, not exercise and so on, and so more often than not, the bypasses would clog up again, and we'd just cut them open and bypass the bypass -- sometimes multiple times.

For me, that became a metaphor of an incomplete approach. If we can treat the cause, then what we're finding in our research is that our bodies have a remarkable capacity, in many cases, to begin healing themselves -- and much more quickly than we had once realized. And so we can use these very expensive, high-tech, state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful and how dynamic these simple and low-tech and low-cost interventions can be.

TRANSCRIPT:

I think it is being attracted to something in your experience that really captures your attention and invites explanation.

More information on Dr. Weil