In this interview Jay Davis, retired after a long career as a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, discusses his life and career. Davis describes: his childhood in Austin, Texas and his early interests in science; undergraduate education at the University of Texas; graduate degree from the University of Wisconsin, where he had all the access to nuclear physics labs; studying under Heinz Barschall; his dissertation on neutron cross-sections, and how this research fed into his postdoctoral research at Argonne Laboratory; campus violence at Madison during the late 1960s, including the time his laboratory was blown up by antiwar protestors; opportunities leading to his career at Livermore, where he worked on the Rotating Target Neutron Source, the magnetic fusion program, and where he eventually became the Nuclear Physics Division Leader; circumstances leading to the United Nations asking him to join the Iraq weapons inspection program in 1991 as a result of his work for the Nuclear Emergency Search Team; technical and administrative aspects of his inspections work, and the importance of getting to know the Iraqis who served as gatekeepers to the inspections sites; UN Security Council Resolutions on Iraq as a blueprint for his mission; various ways the Iraqis were cooperating in good faith, and the ways they were not; his views of the impact of the inspections regime on Saddam Husseins long-range viability; his work as Director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and why he was not aware of Al Qaeda at this point, even so close to the 9/11 attacks; return to Livermore after his work in Washington, how he wound down his responsibilities in anticipation of retirement, and some of the long-term successes of the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) Laboratory there; the competitive relationship between Livermore and Los Alamos; value of his involvement with the Hertz Foundation.