The Big Think Interview

“The idea is that we move from a place of wanting the world to conform to what we like [towards] not needing other people to be different from who they are.”

"We're living in an extraordinary moment in history. We are at a moment here in 2025 where we have world historic game-changing technologies now starting to scale."

“Deep down the natural endpoint of this whole goal of looking for planets is to answer the question: are we alone?”

“No matter what their gods were, what they did for a living, what they wore, the songs they sang, everything varies except love, and everybody loves.”

“The universe clicks along in perfect accord with the laws of physics forever.”

“It's certainly clear that the issues of boys and men haven't gone away in the last few years. If anything, they're getting even more attention, which is good when it's the right kind of attention.”

“As a reporter, you can look into the eyes of the people you're talking to and try to evaluate what they're thinking when they say what they say. But you are not really gonna get into their brain. There's only one artistic form that allows you to do that. “

“The way my mind works is just out of anxiety and catastrophization.”

"Could black holes be the key to a quantum theory of gravity, a deeper theory of how reality, of how space and time works? Well, I think so."

“This is a world in which we've essentially given ourselves the tools to stop the construction of the most important product in American lives in the places where Americans often most want to move.”

"If you're interested in human performance, what you want is something that's reliable and repeatable, and thus you want neurobiology because neurobiology gives you mechanism."

“We can have that fight for a 1,000 years, but we could have a shot at figuring out what we both need and noticing when there's opportunities to make that happen.”

“The sexual excitation system is the accelerator or the gas pedal, and it notices all the sex-related information in the environment.”

“Fraud is a trillion dollar problem, about $5 trillion today with that number increasingly rising annually.”

"We're stuck at type zero. But what would it take to move between universes? What would it take to enter a black hole? What would it take to break the light barrier?"

“If you ask a computer, it will say, most of the time you want to either be raising or folding, right? You want to take an aggressive action or quit. I think this is a great metaphor for lots of things in real life, too.”

“The idea of evolution by natural selection is, for me, probably the most beautiful idea in biology.”

“You can be aware of sadness from a point of view that is not merely sad, and you can be aware of fear from a point of view that's not merely afraid.”

“Because of the efficiency worship that we have developed in our industrial age, we are now seeing procrastination as a character flaw rather than what it is, a signal that is worth listening to.”

“All information technologies up to the 21st century were organic networks based on our organic brain.”