Do you have a big visionary master plan for how the world will work in twenty years? Do you have massive ambitions to revolutionize your industry? Don’t feel bad if you don’t. I never did. A year and a half after starting CD Baby, it was just me and John, my first employee, running it out of my house. One night, I decided I should think more about the long-term future of this thing. I sat with my diary for a few hours of introspection. Afterwards, I wrote John an email that went like this: “I think there’s a chance that this thing might be huge one day, so we better start preparing for that now. I mean some day, we might have a thousand artists. We might need a third employee! We’d need three computers, and need to figure out how to network them together. We might even need to start moving CDs into the garage, since eventually they might fill up the living room. Yes, I know it sounds grandiose, but I think things are headed that way.” Years later, after I had 100,000 artists and 85 employees, John would often get a good laugh out of this letter I sent him in 1999. Journalists would ask, “What’s your long-term goal?” I’d say, “I don’t have one. I surpassed my goals long ago. I’m just trying to help musicians with whatever they need today.” So please don’t think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today.

There are some things about being president that I still have difficulty doing. … For example, faking emotion. Because I feel it is an insult to the people I'm dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I'm not taking the American people seriously. I'm absolutely positive that I'm serving the American people better if I'm maintaining my authenticity. And that's an overused word. And these days people practice being authentic. But I'm at my best when I believe what I am saying.

Well, that’s the optimistic reading of it, which you are never able to apply when it happens. You can read it this way when it’s over. Rationally speaking, it’s a period that’s needed, because the danger for every poet, I think, is to write too much. So these are the blessed moments of silence, protecting you from writing too many poems, diluting you and what you have to say in a stream of banal poems. It’s necessary, but still very painful, because I just don’t know what to do if I don’t write poems. I still survive, but it is painful.

The way I work is — I want to not have external stimulation. You can kind of see, on the walls are this light green. I'm told that at mental institutions they use that on the walls. It's like a calming color, it's not something that really stimulates you. What you can't see is the computer here, you only see the screen, but the main thing I worry about in my computer is — it doesn't have to be big and powerful, although I like that — it really has to be completely silent. I know people who work for Google and they have their own small data center at home, and I don't do that. My office is the most boring office you'll ever see. And I sit there alone in the quiet. If the cat comes up, it sits in my lap. And I want to hear the cat purring, not the sound of the fans in the computer.

Sherry offered me a list of research options: the one project that intrigued me the most consisted of finding out the environmental fate of certain very inert industrial chemicals – the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) – which had been accumulating in the atmosphere and which at that time were thought to have no significant effects on the environment. This project offered me the opportunity to learn a new field – atmospheric chemistry – about which I knew very little; trying to solve a challenging problem appeared to be an excellent way to plunge into a new research area.

there are really very many. Again, as a child, it was obviously those scientists which had lived in the past that had made such an important mark in science history.

I then converted a bathroom, seldom used by the family, into a laboratory and spent hours playing with chemistry sets. With the help of an aunt, Esther Molina, who was a chemist, I continued with more challenging experiments along the lines of those carried out by freshman chemistry students in college.

The advice that I would give is try to find something that you like. Try to devote your energies to being very good at it. Try to achieve excellence. Don’t necessarily have as a goal success or getting prizes or whatever, but just doing very good work. And work hard. Keep working at it. Be patient. Realize that you don’t always see the benefits of what you’re doing, short-term. But in the end, the activities that I do, for example, scientific research, can be extremely rewarding. It’s really a very fascinating career.

Although my years at Irvine were very productive, I missed not doing experiments myself because of the many responsibilities associated with a faculty position: teaching courses, supervising graduate students, meetings, etc. After spending seven years at Irvine as Assistant and then Associate Professor, I decided to move to a non-academic position. I joined the Molecular Physics and Chemistry Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1982. I had a smaller group – only a few postdoctoral fellows – but I also had the luxury of conducting experiments with my own hands, which I enjoyed very much.

I did. As a kid, I liked music. I still like it a lot of course. I used to play the violin. I did contemplate, well, maybe that’s an option. I could become a musician. Somehow my parents got some advice that unless I was willing to spend eight or 10 hours a day just playing the violin that I should just give it up. To me, that was very bad advice because you could of course, get very involved in music without being a musician. Fortunately, even though I gave up eventually playing the violin myself, I never gave up my fondness for music. But if I had a chance again, I would not give it up. I would just do it as a hobby. I think that was just because I did not get the correct advice.