New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.

We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.

If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.