The only reason we are the master of anything today is because of our intelligence. We're not the strongest species on the planet. Without our intelligence, we're quite irrelevant. When they are smarter than we are, it is wishful thinking that they will continue to be connected to us.

It was one of those typical examples of people combining different ideas from different fields and finding magic at that intersection.

You can't be in both lanes; you have to pick one. If you are making a film and you go to Warner Brothers, they'll give you $50 million and a whole stack of notes that will make your movie worse creatively, but more successful from their commercial perspective so it can get through gatekeepers and return the investment.

Consciousness is the most troubling because it's so hard to deny its existence. With all these other tricky, troubling phenomena, it's at least an option to say maybe it doesn't exist, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. But with consciousness, it seems hard to make sense of the idea that nobody's ever felt pain. Nobody's ever seen colour.

You're not going to be a warrior in battle unless you are a warrior in preparation. You have to be single-minded, you can't just show-up on the night.