As a top manager, you have to not just reward truth-telling, you've got to beg for it, and you've got to demand that everyone around you gives you constructive criticism, constantly. You've got to get out of the bubble, so that you can get direct feedback from everybody who's being affected.

The Democratic Party is DEAD.

Now, inventiveness and empathy, those qualities, if they're together in the same person, you've got an entrepreneurial genius. But they do tend to be slightly separate.

I was there in Washington in the `90s. It was pretty bad then. It`s much worse now [in 2015]. And that vicious cycle is you`ve got again big corporations, executives, Wall Street, very wealthy individuals in both parties who are calling the shots.

If consumers don't have the wherewithal to spend because all the money's going to the top, and the people at the top only spend a very small fraction of what they earn, then the economy is almost inevitably destined to slow.

The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches - with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone - was once at the core of the American Dream.

You ask, "Could we have an honest discussion about earnings insurance?" I think we could, if people understood that the alternative was to build up a backlash against global capital, against free trade, against technological change.