I'd like to be clear that a number of people find me intolerable, and they don't hesitate to say so - which they and I cherish.

Principles are what allow you to live a life consistent with those values. Principles connect your values to your actions.

Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it's a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

I learned that everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them. I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it, i.e. a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future.

Unlike in school, in life you don't have to come up with all the right answers. You can ask the people around you for help - or even ask them to do the things you don't do well. In other words, there is almost no reason not to succeed if you take the attitude of 1) total flexibility - good answers can come from anyone or anywhere (and in fact, as I have mentioned, there are far more good answers 'out there' than there are in you) and 2) total accountability: regardless of where the good answers come from, it's your job to find them.

To have an idea meritocracy, one needs to do three things. First, they have to put their honest thoughts on the table, for everyone to look at and everyone to work through. Second, they need to have thoughtful disagreement, by which there are quality exchanges, in which there's open mindedness and the realization that no one has all the right answers. And you can work through that and get to better answers because good collective decision making is better than any individual decision making. And third, you have to have ways of getting past the disagreements if they remain.

I do think people need to recognize that a lot of journalists want to write a story a certain way because the story will be better or the portrayal will be better, or at least recognize that whenever you're looking at something, you're seeing it through somebody's eyes who may actually not be the person who is the most insightful.