Keeping my children’s feet on the ground. It’s challenging as you become wealthier and wealthier in life, and you see how money very often — third or fourth generation — destroys people. Their inability to appreciate it, understand it, not abuse it. I think I’ve equipped my children well.

Yes, I am proud of them all. Our main product at DNI is people who we teach and train to do research.

I’m the most proud when I get something from cities, or people. At first I was against awards, you know. I would always say, “This is so fake. The people who vote on this stuff, they never listen to the music.” But for me it’s when I received awards or something from the city. Just to go to somebody’s house and eat. Or people come and say, “We spent our anniversary checking you out,” or “We were making love to one of your records, and we had a child!” See that kind of stuff makes me feel good. Like you get a key to the city and the people are really into it. Not just, “Oh, let’s give him the key to the city because he got some publicity.” It will be some people you knew, and you were there at their school, and you worked in the community.

I’m most proud of the fact that we produced broad-based prosperity, where the incomes of the bottom 20% rose more percentage-wise than the incomes of the top 20%, about the same as the incomes of the top 5%. That was across all racial groups, all regional groups, and all income groups, and that we did it while eliminating 600 billion dollars in national debt. And I put America on a path to be debt free so that we’d be able to embrace the challenges of the 21st century, and I think that at a time of yawning inequality, having inclusive prosperity is very important to building support for inclusive societies.

They were the great architects who have gone before. So they were architects like Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright. Of course, they were alive at the time that I was studying. But there were also, for me, not just buildings.

I think it’s a combination of being a good listener, trying to understand what lies beneath the surface. And I mean that in the most literal sense.  It could be a cultural institution. It could be an enterprise. It could be a site. It could be the culture of feng shui in an Asian society. The things that you can measure and the things that you can’t measure. And it’s about drawing on the best of diverse skills, the reality that an architect cannot design and realize a building independent of engineers, skilled engineers, structural engineers, environmental engineers. So for me, it’s about harnessing the creative energies. It’s not about designing a building and handing it out and saying, “You make it stand up. You make it warm. You make it cool.” It’s about getting those skills in unison.  The analogy is perhaps a round table, which is non-hierarchical. That doesn’t mean to say that you don’t have strong leadership. Obviously, you have to have that; otherwise, it’s designed by committee. So it’s answering the material needs and providing an element of surprise, something that perhaps nobody believed might be possible to add. And it’s not about money. Quality is an attitude of mind. It’s not about how much you spend. It’s about how wisely you spend. You’ve really got three ingredients. You’ve got material resources, money; you’ve got time, and in many cases, time is money; and you’ve got creative energy. And it’s the creative energy that is going to make the difference in terms of those other ingredients.