I met Gemma my wife when she was 12. She had a schoolgirl crush on me and her dad had arranged for her to meet me. Later she started coming to my concerts but I only got to know her well after her mother died. I rang to see how she was and that's how it started.

It wasn't like I was self-motivated. My dad started me. It was his dream before it was mine.

We all started snowboarding in the beginning as a family just to be closer together go on trips. It was our soccer but instead of Dad yelling at me from the sideline he is there riding with me and hitting the jumps even before I am hitting them.

A father and two sons run Adelphia. It's a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people - three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do start their own space program? 'Let's send the monkey to Mars Dad!'

I want to be a young dad. By 25 or 26 I want to see myself like married or start looking for a family.

I mean I look at my dad. He was twenty when he started having a family and he was always the coolest dad. He did everything for his kids and he never made us feel like he was pressured. I know that it must be a great feeling to be a guy like that.

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful often urgent and essentially life-affirming but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

Let me start with Yahoo. As we meet today a Chinese citizen who had the courage to speak his mind on the Internet is in prison because Yahoo chose to share his name and address with the Chinese Government.

I think what I would say to my younger self and probably to younger just starting-out writers is that a lot of times you're just afraid to put yourself out there and it's uncomfortable because it's working up the courage to do something to push yourself to do those things.

We had every problems starting a big top could have. The tent fell down on the first day. We had problems getting people into the shows. It was only with the courage and arrogance of youth that we survived.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26 which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

A life lesson for me is how do you muster the courage to take on a new risk? Whether it's starting up a business or taking on a new project or expedition. I think the risks that we take are all relative to the risk-taker.

How many women have the courage to start properly with a cold cold bath early in the morning? I jump in throw the water cold as ice and after the first plunge I am happy.

But we got up there and decided to stick to this mix of power chords and funk and that's where it really started for us. In having the courage to take that decision. To take a gamble not just with our music but our lives.

I think there are four or five interesting pockets where a lot of cool technology companies are getting started. Chicago is one of them. New York is certainly another. Silicon Valley really dominates. And you're seeing some stuff out of Boston and Seattle and down South.

I like starting. It's pretty cool.

I used to skip out of high school and go flying. It was just one of those things I thought it was kind of a cool thing to do. I never thought about doing that as a profession but I started checking things out and I found out there was a flight school down in Daytona Beach called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.