I remember my mentor once said, "The low road is crowded. The high road is wide open. So let's try to take the high road." I think that people are hungry for content that enriches and expires. You can entertain people while still expanding their horizons. You don't have to have it be a race to the bottom with reality television.

I think one of the both liberating and terrifying prospects from synthetic biology for example is that you are going to have all of these do it yourself biosynthetic labs where people are going to be playing with the software of life. We are going to have a new generation of artists that are going to be playing with genomes the way that Blake and Byron used to play with poetry. And when genomes are the new canvas for the artist, we might be able to radically upgrade the human species and the software of the biology of the human species.

Once we realize the extraordinary power we have to compose our lives, well move from passive, conditioned thinking to being co-creators of our fate.

There is always this interesting relationship we have with technology. When we invented writing Socrates used to say it was going to rot our brains because we were going to write everything down and not have to remember anything, and so it would atrophy our brains. So there has always been this human drive on the one hand to create tools, to create technologies to overcome our boundaries, but then there is always this reservation, and this fear that say these technologies are somehow unnatural and it is against nature to partake in them.

Alistair Crowley used to define magic as anything in which you can exercise your will in the world through the use of your mind. So what's the magical way of opening or closing that door? Well, to will your body to stand up and close or open that door, that's magic. With the iPhone, it's like you put your intent into it, and it helps you exercise that intent in the world.

I think we defy entropy and impermanence with our films and our poems. We hold onto each other a little harder and say, 'I will not let go. I do not accept the ephemeral nature of this moment. I'm going to extend it...forever. Or at least I'm going to try.'

We are the Captains of Spaceship Earth...we have the capacity to overcome our limits.