you have got to be totally honest and give advice and analysis that you’re asked to give that’s based on evidence. And if the analysis that you come to comes to a conclusion that a president might not like to hear that, you can’t be afraid of saying, “Mr. President, with all due respect, this is the way I think the situation is.”

Proceed slowly and take care. […] To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.

The way I work is — I want to not have external stimulation. You can kind of see, on the walls are this light green. I'm told that at mental institutions they use that on the walls. It's like a calming color, it's not something that really stimulates you. What you can't see is the computer here, you only see the screen, but the main thing I worry about in my computer is — it doesn't have to be big and powerful, although I like that — it really has to be completely silent. I know people who work for Google and they have their own small data center at home, and I don't do that. My office is the most boring office you'll ever see. And I sit there alone in the quiet. If the cat comes up, it sits in my lap. And I want to hear the cat purring, not the sound of the fans in the computer.

I tend to shape my life through aesthetic principles rather than economic ones – I’ve never been very good at maths.

What we've done all of these years is very simple, is use the little tool, which is ask three whys in a row. Because the first why you always have a good answer for. The second why, it starts getting difficult. By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing.

My favorite documentary is one called Up. ... For your listeners, it’s a guy, Michael Apted who in 1964 decided to follow about a dozen or actually more kids from very different backgrounds and from the UK and some in orphanages, and some very well off to try and establish how much people are stuck to their context, to their social context. ... It’s quite an extraordinary way to look at humanity and see can people really escape their social constraints and their initial lay of life?