Within the United States, there is a real division between the PhDs given in science and math to the Asian community, to the traditional white community, and then to African-Americans and Hispanics.

New York City is a fascinating place because it's very good at using the energy in attracting some of the best and the brightest from everywhere.

There's always a question when you invest. Are you too early, are you too late, or are you just right? And there was a lot of hype about life sciences, around the sequencing of the human genome and a lot of people concluded that's not really there. But by the way, there was a lot of hype around the digital revolution just about the time of 2000 and the human genome, and it turns out that some of the world's biggest, most powerful companies are the survivors post that crash.

Real estate prices are way out of whack with what people earn.

The thing that's really important to understand is, the last thing an empire traditionally does is drive itself into bankruptcy. You've seen that with the great empires.

I've always been interested in why countries appear and disappear. And the curious thing is how often it happens.

It's important to begin to even consider whether countries can become something that looks very different because people tend to take their countries for granted.