I would say there are many challenges, and that's kind of what's hard about it. And my particular thesis, since leaving Google and doing my own company, is that building a quantum computer is a little bit harder than the scientists think about because of the system engineering. Building a powerful computer is hard. So what we're particularly working on is the manufacturing of qubits and doing that much better than what people are doing right now. I really enjoyed being in academia, and even at Google working on that. But I really enjoy right now trying to think very practically about what we have to do to get this to work. And what kind of people we have to collaborate with in order to put all the pieces together and build a quantum computer in a cost effective, economic way that makes business sense.

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

There were lots of times, especially in the early days, that were very, very difficult. I think the most difficult experience I had was in 1990 when Oracle had its only loss quarter in history. We’d been in business for 20 years, and after 20 years we lost money one quarter. We had a very difficult time. We had virtually doubled our sales every year for ten years. Nine out of ten years, ten out of eleven years. It was really quite an amazing run. We were the fastest growing company in history

What I’ve got doesn’t hurt. I’ve been lucky. The treatment has been benign. I don’t know if I could concentrate if I was in pain. I’ve never had to stop.

But look at what we can do at a place like Caltech, with scientists from the Middle East to Europe to Asia to America.

I’m hungry for knowledge…Knowledge, knowledge and I loved it.

But I had decided that science is really the thing…It is what I wanted. Exactly.

It is known about me that I’m serious and that when you write a paper I like, I will sometimes have you go up to ten or twelve versions of the paper.

He really was a major force in my life…So he was always supportive of my decisions vis-à-vis education. And very generous…He was in many ways.

I have had students and postdocs of the first class close to four hundred people.