Melissa, to have the opportunity in my life to serve my country for 10 years as Minister of Finance and Planning was the best gift that my life gave to me. I was born under the colonial period. I experienced the independence of my country.

I think I'm trying to be as normal as possible, as authentic as possible, and I always try to stay the same way for as long as possible,

Yes, it's one of the things that I'm most proud of is the Iberian lynx was extinct. It was declared under extinction and with a new project funded by the European Union, Portugal and Spain started the process of recovering the Iberian lynx. And it took maybe 15 years to recover with the lynx being incubated first in a facility. And then finally there was a day where we have to feel sufficiently comfortable to release the first lynx and then to have the normal reproductive path in the environment. And it worked. Can you imagine? Even a species can be recovered. So, if there is a will, there is the way.

Definitely [my best moment was] the 2016 World Cup, that semi-final game against India where I brought the team home, me and Lendl Simmons, and obviously the start that we got from the other batters,

Only Mies influenced me. Le Corbusier I met. He was a nasty man, but obviously a genius. You don’t have to like the people just because they’re geniuses. Mies and I got along better and we became pretty close. I worked with him on his greatest building here, the Seagram building, which was kind of fun, but again, you can’t be a hero-worshipper and be an uncommon architect; you’ve got to be your own man. So I split with Mies and did a different kind of work.

Then you have the clients. The care and feeding of clients is really one of the main obstacles, because you always have a client with some preconceived idea of what a house looks like, and all you want him to do is leave a check and go to Europe for a couple of years. Or leave two checks. But alas, life isn’t simple. If it were, more people would be better architects.