Early reviewers of my upcoming book, The Code, often ask about the abundance of footnotes: 525 of them in my most recent release.
The point is to show I’m on solid ground. I make grand, sweeping claims about human nature, boiling everything about what we think, say, and do into five fundamental laws. If someone said something like that to me, my first thought would be, prove it.
Hence, footnotes. They’re a reminder that there are many minds in the pages besides mine. The great thinkers of science, history, and philosophy gather around and lift the work. The Code stands on a thousand sets of shoulders.