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In college I started studying the stock market. I went down to the stock exchange, watched all the activity from the visitors' gallery, people running around, calling numbers, shouting, and all the paper flying and the bells ringing, and of course that was exciting, and it seemed to lend itself to my analytical skills.

I preferred to use mathematics in some practical fashion and thought that meteorology sounded promising.

I was convinced that the trading frequency measured a fundamental heartbeat of financial markets. Clearly it reflected the flow of information. It turns out also to be closely related to measures of liquidity.

Part of my advantage is that my strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people. That's how I started. I watched the stock market, how equities reacted to change in levels of economic activity, and I could understand how price signals worked and how to forecast them.

When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.

It's like simulating earthquakes: we can over and over study a bubble, crash, bubble, crash. Then we can see mathematically if there's some regular pattern and what's going on in people's brains when prices are going up and before the crash is happening.

Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let's love turbulence and use it for change.

It's kind of a funny way to put it, but if you want to study a dynamic economic system, what you'd like to be able to do is focus on the linkages, say, between asset markets and the macro economy without having to model everything at the same time.