If you want to boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor. I look at things, and I can come up with atypical solutions ... I can create a hundred such atypical solutions for something. 99 of them may not survive scrutiny, but 1 of those 100 is like, hmm, maybe there is maybe that might work, and then you can keep going from there.

Real invention, real lateral thinking, that requires wandering—and you have to give yourself permission to wander.

If you think about the good old days, they're mostly an illusion. In almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was, say, 50 years ago or 100 years. We live better lives, by and large, than our grandparents did and their grandparents did and so on.

We have to go out into the solar system. And really, you can argue about when you have to do that, but you can't credibly argue about whether you have to do that.

I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system.

I think the mathematical skill required today is so high—you have to be a world-class mathematician to be a successful theoretical physicist today ... Without just top-notch math skills, you're unlikely to be successful.