I fell in love with the stories by William Beebe, who was an ocean explorer. He discussed what it was like to go down inside a submersible, and peer out of a port hole and see beautiful, luminescent fish, with lights down the side like ocean liners. Bizarre creatures of the sort that you just don’t see walking down the street, or going into the forest, or even looking around in shallow water.

Oh, yeah. I spent a lot of time in the public library. When we moved I was seven years old, and I got a library card, and I used to go to the library all the time, and I loved all the, you know, standard children’s novels. I love those Biblical epics, but my favorite books when I was a child were books about Native Americans: tribal leaders; Osceola, who brought the alphabet to the Seminoles; Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce; and the standard ones that were heroes in all the Western movies. But I was fascinated. The Cherokee had moved across my state on the Trail of Tears when they were expelled from the East and then moved over to the reservation lands. I became fascinated with what happened to the Native Americans and the struggle that many were undertaking then — and they still try to preserve their traditions and their way of life, their ties to the land, and still provide education and participate in the life of the country. I was interested in it then. I’m interested in it now. The Native Americans in our country who don’t have casinos on their tribal lands still have the lowest per capita income of any ethnic group in America. It’s a disgrace, and when I became president I was the first president since James Monroe in the 1820s to invite all the tribal leaders to the White House, and it was fascinating. Some of the ones who came from lands that had casinos flew in on their private jets. A lot of the others had to pass the hat in the reservation to raise enough money to pay for a plane ticket, and they all came, and we began to meet, and I learned a lot from them.

I believe that I had something called epigenetic imprinting, which I actually read about in a book called The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine. Not to self-promote too much, but I loved it so much I wrote a movie with a brilliant comedian named Neil Brennan and made the move this year. That’s how profoundly it changed my life, because I believe that the more we know about our neural brain wiring, the more freedom we have and the more patience we have with ourselves.

It’s amazing. I just started looking at everything differently. I love that book. But a book is a kind of thing of magic. It contains a universe of information.

If you want to do something, one of the smartest things that you can do is go find someone that’s done it and to try to get them to show you how they did it, to show you where the potholes are. What are the right steps to get there? ... And not just in terms of where to go to school, but what are the things that are really tough that you have to overcome, and how did you overcome it.

I’ve done almost 4,000 operations for brain tumors. I’m thinking of what’s going to happen ten or 12 steps before. I’m anticipating what’s going to happen in the operation, and I’m comfortable with where we are.