On one project I was hanging out with Brad Pitt, and Ryan Gosling, and Steve Carrel, and Christian Bale, and trying to explain economics to them for a movie I'm an advisor on.

You're talking to investors - and investors, they look at you and they realize, you know, not every business they invest in are the founders or the people running it going to have every bit of skill - and I think they looked at me and realized, OK, this is a guy who's got a lot - I'm much older than the usual run of people they fund.

I want to have enough space to, I don't know, think thoughts. I mean, I just - I don't know that I'm capable of having an exciting, profound thought every week that's worth a column.

А weekly column is really tough.

I sound like an evangelist or something.

My mother is somebody who I think of as having just an intense close focus. She's somebody who really can pay very, very close attention to the thing she's focusing on for a very long period of time, and that has served her incredibly well in her professional career. She knows - the things she knows, she knows them just so deeply.

God is erratic, sometimes vindictive, sometimes merciful. The people I was taught were heroes - Jacob or Moses or David - were ambivalent figures, or worse. But that messiness was joyful, and challenging. I loved having a Bible that I could argue with.