The Big Think Interview

"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.”

“So many things could have happened in a different way that we wouldn't be here at all, both individually, for sure, and certainly as a species.”

“What did you win? You won awkward silence. You won their contempt. You won the first to apologize. When you win an argument, you will lose their confidence, you will lose their respect, you will lose the connection.”

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“Anxiety is focused on things that are important to you in life. That is the key.”

"The sense that we are a solid entity, an unchanging entity that exists someplace in our body and takes ownership of our body, and even ownership of our brain rather than being identical to our brain, that is where the illusion lies."

“Invention matters, but implementation matters more.”

“By not focusing on the outcome and instead designing a tiny experiment, what you can do is letting go of any definition of success, letting go of that binary results that you're looking for, and instead focusing something that makes you feel curious and that you want to explore.”

"We've sent out one or two little messages, but we certainly aren't investing billions of dollars shouting out into the cosmos saying, "Hey, we are here. Come say hi.""

"It's a very, very beautiful calculation, but it's the best example I know of the relationship between these rather abstract quantities perhaps and something that you can look at in a telescope."

"You can't possibly exaggerate how much better it is to live in a peaceful, orderly society, and to be wealthy, and healthy, and surrounded by people who you love."

“CIA classifies their secrets according to different terminology. There's confidential secrets, there are secret level secrets, and then there are top secret secrets. And the way that they define each of these different levels actually has to do with the impact that would occur if the secret became public knowledge.”

“We know that as little as 10 minutes of walking can improve your mood, that is getting that bubble bath with the dopamine, serotonin, endorphins going, anybody can do that.”

"If we did create beings that were more like non-human animals, we ought to treat them much better than we now treat non-human animals."

“You might as well go for it. You might as well do the thing that you dream about doing for heaven's sake.”