Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) in Cambridge, MA. An MIT-trained physicist, Yaneer combines quantitative foundation in physics, computer science and mathematics with computer simulations and high dimensional data analysis to study collective behaviors and social challenges, with the aim of informing better policies. In the past year and a half, he has single-mindedly focused on COVID-19 with his initiative https://endcoronavirus.org. During this interview, he talks about the science of complex systems and how it can be applied to the current pandemic. He clarifies some very interesting concepts like "lockdown", which he claims was largely misunderstood, the relationship between big data and problem solving, and the variable that matters the most in defeating the pandemic: geography.