The closest to inspiration was my beloved fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Ponti, who I’m delighted lived long enough to get that book’s dedication. I exchanged Christmas cards with her for the rest of her life. She was a wonderful woman. I think the main way she inspired was by respecting students’ interests. She herself knew very little science. Science was not formally taught at all, as far as I can remember, at grade school level. She realized there were a group of us who were interested in science, so she would let us sit by ourselves in the back of the classroom once a week for a couple hours, and she got books for us and discussed science. So I suppose she was a very good model for good students.

Yes. I had a couple of great, great teachers. The teacher who changed my life was my journalism teacher, whose name was Charles Simms. I always tell this story. I love it. I had already decided that I was going to be a journalist. I didn’t know why exactly, except that I had seen a lot of Superman comics. Lois Lane and all of those major literary characters like that, but Mr. Simms got up the first day of class, and he went to the blackboard, and he wrote “Who, what, where, why, when, and how,” which are the six things that have to be in the lead of any newspaper story. Then he did what most journalism teachers do, which is that he dictated a set of facts to us, and then we were all meant to write the lead that was supposed to have “who, what, where, why, when, and how” in it. He dictated a set of facts that went something like, “The principal of Beverly Hills High School announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento, Thursday, for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, and two other people.” So we all sat down at our typewriters, and we all kind of inverted that and wrote, “Margaret Mead and X and Y will address the faculty in Sacramento, Thursday, at a colloquium on new teaching methods, the principal announced today.” Something like that. We were very proud of ourselves, and we gave it to Mr. Simms, and he just riffled through them and tore them into tiny bits and threw them in the trash, and he said, “The lead to this story is: There will be no school Thursday!” and it was this great epiphany moment for me. It was this, “Oh my God, it is about the point! It is about figuring out what the point is.” And I just fell in love with journalism at that moment. I just fell in love with the idea that underneath, if you sifted through enough facts, you could get to the point, and you had to get to the point. You could not miss the point. That would be bad. So he really kind of gave that little shift of mind a major push.

I had a teacher who was a great influence on me, when I was in boarding school at Loomis, Jim Wilson. He was my economics teacher and he was also my dorm head. I didn’t know what economics was before I took this course. I was really moved by the course. I was moved by him. That’s probably one of the reasons I chose the field of business.

I recall when I was about nine picking up a tattered copy of Ebony magazine and I think — I mean, maybe journalists ought to know just how much power they actually have because here I was 10,000 miles away from America with this copy of Ebony magazine and it was describing the exploits of Jackie Robinson and how he broke into major league baseball. Now I didn’t know baseball from ping pong but what was so important for me, what made me grow inches was to know that a black guy had triumphed over all of the obstacles that were placed in his way and there he was now playing for something called Brooklyn Dodgers. Now I didn’t know Brooklyn Dodgers. I didn’t know Jackie, but it helped to exorcise what is the most awful consequence of racial injustice and it is the sense — this demon of self-hate when you have a very low self-esteem.

Yes, and, I'll turn your comment around and say it's fairly close to the biological ratio of men and women. It's all the other fields that are aberrant. … This is the normal field, right? Because it is a much more even distribution between men and women, absolutely.