The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.
You know, it's not the people in Hollywood who go to see movies that will make a movie successful; it's the people all around the country; it's word-of-mouth.
Then I went through a whole bunch of crap with my lousy movies and pop records. I had people behind me kind of steering me in that direction, but it wasn't really my bag.
There used to be an old thing where every team had a heavy bag in their locker room for people to punch, but again, it was more about conditioning because if you hit a heavy bag for a minute, it feels like your arms are about to fall off.
Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.
My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.
I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation.
