A Conversation with Gregory Stock

The phenomenon returns! Originally published in 1987, The Book of Questions, a New York Times bestseller, has been completely revised and updated to incorporate the myriad cultural shifts and hot-button issues of the past twenty-five years, making it current and even more appealing. Join us for a Game changer conversation with Gregory Stock where we'll dive into the effects of the book in education as well as the studies that have been done showing how well it supports rapport and engagement through human connection. Hosted by Kapono Ciotti and Susannah Johnson!

About Gregory Stock

Gregory Stock is an entrepreneur, academic scientist, ethicist, best-selling author and public communicator. He has been an invited speaker to diverse academic, government and business conferences. He sits on the editorial boards of The Journal of Evolution and Technology, and Rejuvenation Research. He has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, MIT Tech Review and Lancet. He has had made more than 1,500 appearances on television and radio, including CNN, PBS, NPR, Bloomberg, and the BBC and has been in dozens of one-on-one policy debates with Francis Fukuyama, Jeremy Rifkin, Leon Kass, Daniel Callahan, Ray Kurzweil, Bill McKibben and other prominent figures. Stock’s book, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future won the Kistler Book Prize for Science books and was nominated for a Wired Rave Award. Among his other books are Engineering The Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children with Oxford University Press, Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism, and his best seller, The Book of Questions with Workman Press. The Book of Questions and its sequels The Book of Questions: Business, Politics, and Ethics, The Book of Questions: Love and Sex, The Kids’ Book of Questions, and The Book of Questions: Power, Principles, and Purpose have sold nearly 5 million copies and been translated into 24 languages. Stock co-founded and was the CEO of two biotech companies, Signum Biosciences and Ecoeos. He has a PhD in Biophysics from Johns Hopkins and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Stock is an adjunct professor at the Institute of Next Generation Healthcare at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

He is currently working with a talented multifaceted team to take these provocative, open-ended questions (and many more of this ilk) online — a hybrid between a Private Social Network and a mobile game. The questions are concrete, personal, and revealing. They are not judgmental. They have no wrong answers. They launch journeys of discovery in which we can show our vulnerabilities, let down our walls, express our hopes and fears. Not showing off but just showing, we can peel away our masks and see truths about who we are and what we care about. Decades of experience and multiple peer-reviewed studies on these questions have demonstrated that as we learn about ourselves and others together in this way our sense of connection and belonging deepens. The experience occurs in small, private group environments using mechanics that foster trust and authenticity and activate the social brain to deepen human connection through the release of oxytocin unlike the way current social media provides excessive dollops of dopamine.

About The Book of Questions

The phenomenon returns! Originally published in 1987, The Book of Questions, a New York Times bestseller, has been completely revised and updated to incorporate the myriad cultural shifts and hot-button issues of the past twenty-five years, making it current and even more appealing. This is a book for personal growth, a tool for deepening relationships, a lively conversation starter for the family dinner table, a fun way to pass the time in the car. It poses over 300 questions that invite people to explore the most fascinating of subjects: themselves and how they really feel about the world. There are no right and wrong answers.

The revised edition includes more than 100 all-new questions that delve into such topics as the disappearing border between man and machine―How would you react if you learned that a sad and beautiful poem that touched you deeply had been written by a computer? The challenges of being a parent―Would you completely rewrite your child’s college-application essays if it would help him get into a better school? The never-endingly interesting topic of sex―Would you be willing to give up sex for a year if you knew it would give you a much deeper sense of peace than you now have? And of course the meaning of it all―If you were handed an envelope with the date of your death inside, and you knew you could do nothing to alter your fate, would you look? The Book of Questions may be the only publication that challenges―and even changes―the way you view the world, without offering a single opinion of its own.