I'm a guy who never wanted to hold a steady job, because I was worried about the monotony.

When I was in high school, I wrote a play that I sent off to a competition that took second place. I got a check for a hundred dollars. I never cashed it, because obviously it was worth way more than a hundred dollars.

I remember somebody asking me in an interview years ago if I would be interested in playing Jason Bourne. I laughed: I didn't think anybody would want to see me run around with a machine gun. It always stayed in the back of my head that I had reacted like that. It bothered me.

I'm a huge history buff. It was no hardship to read history textbooks for homework.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

I sort of feel that climate change will be solved by science. I just feel instinctively that we will find a way of saving ourselves. But I am less confident that we won't destroy ourselves in other ways.

Throughout history there have been many other examples, similar to that of Haeckel, Huxley and the cell, where a key piece of a particular scientific puzzle was beyond the understanding of the age.

It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it, creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.