We should have more invention.

I'm one of the first invention capitalists.

Life has not been boring for me.

There’s no way I’m going to stand up for bad ingredients. We love seasonal ingredients. It’s a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique.

Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of ‘Star Trek’ or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men.

I have a very pragmatic approach to diets. Ones you can’t stick to don’t do you any good. Some people say, ‘Just eat half of what’s on your plate,’ but I can’t do that!

Why pay a fee for Internet content when a million free sites are just a click away? There’s no incentive until people are too addicted to the Net to turn off their computers, yet are bored with what’s available.

People who grow up in a region doubtless have a better cultural awareness of their own cuisine, but it’s also true that a lot of locals go to McDonald’s, Applebee’s and the like.

Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie ‘Contact,’ which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way.

No CEO ever says, ‘Damnit, we need to increase research!’ I want to encourage them to do that.