Information is like oil, Marshall Brain says. It works best when it's refined.

Brain is one of the world's busiest refiners. His website, HowStuffWorks.com, explains everything you ever wanted to know about, well, everything. Autos? It's there. Autopsies? Yup. Sudoku? Voodoo? iPods? eBay? Check, check, check and check.

The explanations are simple and entertaining. That's why millions of people have visited and why Time magazine named HowStuffWorks.com one of the 50 best websites of 2002.

Brain has since sold the site (though he remains involved) and left his position as computer-science professor at North Carolina State University. But he's by no means retired. He's written three How Stuff Works books and The Teenager's Guide to the Real World. He blogs. He manages at least 15 websites. He's appeared on CNN, Oprah and Martha Stewart.

He's as busy as ever with his favorite topic: information.

Finish this sentence: Information is...
Power. If you have no information, your option is to get a job pushing a broom somewhere.

When did you first recognize the power of information?
My father died when I was 14. So my mother dragged me kicking and screaming down to Big Brothers and I got connected with an amazing guy. He was the CEO of a company that built apartment complexes. He made me read a book every week. He made me realize information is everywhere and I have the power to get it.

Finish this sentence: In the future information will be...
In, say, 20 years Google will have a central brain that's read everything that's on the Internet and assimilated it and can answer any question right away, bang.

What are your top three information resources?
Google, Google, and Google. [Laughs] Honestly. I'm Google-centric.

Who are your information heroes?
I don't remember detail. Who's the guy who won Jeopardy 100 times? People like that amaze me. Also anybody who does, say, talk radio, who can pull up information in real time and make points in conversation. Me, half a day later I think, oh, that would have been a good thing to mention.

You're a very busy guy. Do you ever feel overwhelmed?
I don't, except with e-mail. If 200 people want to write me today I can't stop them. And I can't write back. There isn't enough time. Hollywood stars build fan clubs and everyone who writes gets an 8-by-10 glossy. [Laughs] But I don't have an answer beyond that.

What bores you?
I don't get things like World of Warcraft. Millions of people spend hours a day playing it. If they were learning, there's a startling number of things they could do. Go explore something real.

So all information is not equal.
No. My kids—I have four, ages 4 to 9—they absorb information via video. It's much more palatable to them than books. Why? Because big groups of people have thrown millions of dollars at it. It's like an oil refinery. All the information that's not being created this way looks kind of boring by comparison.

What would you really like to know right now?
What differentiates, say, Dell from its thousands of competitors? When Michael Dell started he was a guy in his garage and there were 10,000 other guys in garages making PCs and trying to sell them. Some set of things happened that turned Dell into a Fortune 500 company while tens of thousands of other people stayed in their garages.

What's an intelligent person? Someone who has more information? Or someone who handles it better?
Someone who likes the process of finding answers. That person is going to have a growing knowledge base and is going to be growing it out of joy, so it's going to grow rapidly and spontaneously. That to me is an intelligent person.