That economics and finance are often covered as technical subjects, sort of boring subjects, and either you already know a lot about it and you follow it, or you don't know much about it and you don't want to know.

People found it unusual to leave a job where you're the boss.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing I found about the Bible was how flexible it is. Here we have a book written 3,000 years ago, with bizarre stories, peculiar laws, erratic deity, and yet we are able - through argument, selective reading, and desire - to find a powerful framework of laws and moral reasoning that have built a very successful society. So this Bible, for all its oddities and flaws, serves us beautifully after all these years.

I should say, the one thing you run into is, if you're trying to raise a round you have to decide, well, how much money are you trying to raise? And then you have to justify that to your investors, because they want to know why you [are] raising that much? Why aren't you raising either twice as much or half as much?

I have blocks of time where I'm working intently on something.

Writing a column, a weekly column for the New York Times, is really tough, and I wasn't prepared for the demands that that involved.

Any suggestion that Mexicans are fundamentally different from Americans should be taken as racist on its face; America, after all, is a pluralistic society, and Mexico is hardly the alien civilization that some (really, just Samuel Huntington) would suggest.