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

Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan

• 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):
  • Book: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?
    • Marriage of cerebral and emotional sides
  • Passion that helped set your path: theater and his children
  • Making your heart sing now: glimmers of hope in the tragedies of this era’s events
  • Screwed up: education and career path (1:07:00)
• Enjoy the challenge to think differently
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ series
  • Guest’s list