David Plotz Quotes & Sayings

I'm so grateful to Hugo Lindgren, Jon Kelly, and the people who gave me the opportunity to write a weekly column. It's an amazing thing to do, and when I started they both said, you know, the problem with columns is they just exist forever. — David Plotz

I do think there will be winners and losers in the 21st century economy. — David Plotz

You're talking to investors - and investors, they look at you and they realize, you know, not every business they invest in are the founders or the people running it going to have every bit of skill - and I think they looked at me and realized, OK, this is a guy who's got a lot - I'm much older than the usual run of people they fund. — David Plotz

When you're writing for the New York Times someone reading it knows the topic better than you do and knows when you've messed up. — David Plotz

What is Atlas Obscura? So, it was a small digital media company. It's an atlas, it's literally like, an atlas of places, wonderful, unusual places. — David Plotz

Writing a column, a weekly column for the New York Times, is really tough, and I wasn't prepared for the demands that that involved. — David Plotz

I know I would have learned a huge amount had I read the Bible with my rabbi. But I also would have missed a huge amount, and I would have been guided down the narrow paths where the rabbi led me, not the paths that I chose for myself. — David Plotz

People found it unusual to leave a job where you're the boss. — David Plotz

That economics and finance are often covered as technical subjects, sort of boring subjects, and either you already know a lot about it and you follow it, or you don't know much about it and you don't want to know. — David Plotz

People who tend to invest are either going to invest in something where you're raising $5 million or they're going to invest in something where you're raising $1 million, but if you're trying to raise $2.5 million it's kind of a weird amount. — David Plotz

I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture. — David Plotz

The Christians think I am making a mistake by not trying the New Testament and meeting Jesus. The Jews tend to think I am making a mistake by reading without support from educated people. After all, there is 2,000 years of scholarship about the book, they say, so it's perverse of me to ignore it. — David Plotz

God is erratic, sometimes vindictive, sometimes merciful. The people I was taught were heroes - Jacob or Moses or David - were ambivalent figures, or worse. But that messiness was joyful, and challenging. I loved having a Bible that I could argue with. — David Plotz

Here was a period where I was particularly attacked, and in untrue ways, some people online said some things that were not true about me - but it was very hurtful. And there was like, a period of time that it was very panicky, I was very upset. And my son at the time was, I guess seven, eight months old, and I would wake up early with him and let my wife sleep. — David Plotz

The Bible is forbidding when you start to read it. The language is odd. The stories start and stop herkily-jerkily. The characters behave in inexplicable ways. It takes a little bit of time to get into the rhythm of the book. I found reading the first 15 chapters of Genesis very very difficult. Once I got past there, I loved reading, and found it very easy. When you get used to the Bible, it becomes thrilling to read (like any great book - I just had exactly the same experience with the Odyssey). — David Plotz

My mother is somebody who I think of as having just an intense close focus. She's somebody who really can pay very, very close attention to the thing she's focusing on for a very long period of time, and that has served her incredibly well in her professional career. She knows - the things she knows, she knows them just so deeply. — David Plotz

I'm very lucky to be able to work in print and radio. I'm very lucky to be able to work at a time when finance and economics are really important. And the number of people who tell finance and economic stories in a kind of accessible storytelling way, there's much more demand than there is supply. — David Plotz

I'm going to have a project-based life rather than a job-based life. — David Plotz

I seem to have three categories of readers. The first is nonbelievers who are glad that I am reading the Bible so they don't have to bother. The second group, which is quite large, is very Biblically literate Jews. And the third, which is also very large, is Christians, most of them evangelical. The evangelical readers and the Jewish readers have generally been very encouraging, because they appreciate someone taking the book they love so seriously, and actually reading it and grappling with it. — David Plotz

I feel like there's lot of people who know finance and economics better than I do. There are lots of people who are better storytellers than I am. But the space that I occupy of storytelling about finance and economics is - more people want it than can do it. — David Plotz

Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others. — David Plotz

On one project I was hanging out with Brad Pitt, and Ryan Gosling, and Steve Carrel, and Christian Bale, and trying to explain economics to them for a movie I'm an advisor on. — David Plotz

The process of just being in front of people, having to stand up for your ideas, and ask - and then ask people for money, which is a very hard thing to do. — David Plotz

Perhaps the most remarkable thing I found about the Bible was how flexible it is. Here we have a book written 3,000 years ago, with bizarre stories, peculiar laws, erratic deity, and yet we are able - through argument, selective reading, and desire - to find a powerful framework of laws and moral reasoning that have built a very successful society. So this Bible, for all its oddities and flaws, serves us beautifully after all these years. — David Plotz

I have blocks of time where I'm working intently on something. — David Plotz

I should say, the one thing you run into is, if you're trying to raise a round you have to decide, well, how much money are you trying to raise? And then you have to justify that to your investors, because they want to know why you [are] raising that much? Why aren't you raising either twice as much or half as much? — David Plotz

I sound like an evangelist or something. — David Plotz

When you have spent too much time with something, you may lose sight of what's marvelous about it. — David Plotz

And my wife is - you know my wife, Hanna Rosin - it's hard, there's no doubt. We have three kids, and it's a pain. I'm away a lot and it's hard on her, but she's been very generous about it and my kids have been very good about it, too. It also allows me when I'm Washington to be more intent with them. — David Plotz

In the early 1980s, Graham worked hard to turn the Repository into a respectable business, rather than a ludicrous one: Graham's wife didn't like keeping the sperm at the Escondido estate. Not only had the house been picketed, but a Japanese trespasser had once made a run at the sperm, only to be nipped by a family dog. — David Plotz

My mother - both my mother and father had very successful careers. My mother's an English professor and my father is a scientist and physician. They worked at the same jobs for their entire life, 50 years each — David Plotz

You live in a society that is shaped in every possible way by the Bible. The language you use, the laws you obey (and disobey), the founding principles of your nation, the disputes about abortion, homosexuality, adultery - these and so much else in your world are rooted in the Bible. You don't have to read it for its truth value. You should read it to understand how your world got the way it is, the way you would read the constitution or Shakespeare. — David Plotz

I think I did 97 pitch meetings, and even at the 97th meeting, there were questions I was getting that I hadn't had in the - you know, any of the 96 preceding ones. — David Plotz

My buddy Alex Blumberg learned - he was very public about his learning process, and I know for a fact because we sat next to each other for many years, that he knew nothing about venture capital or seed rounds or "A" rounds or whatever you call them, and he had to really learn, like, pitch by pitch. He just screwed pitches up. — David Plotz

Any suggestion that Mexicans are fundamentally different from Americans should be taken as racist on its face; America, after all, is a pluralistic society, and Mexico is hardly the alien civilization that some (really, just Samuel Huntington) would suggest. — David Plotz

The New York Times is the greatest media company around, arguably, and the people at the New York Times know a lot more about making a giant successful media company than I do. — David Plotz

Having good relations with lots of lots of different people helps a lot. — David Plotz

One problem with how we think about the Bible is that people tend to jam it into narrower categories, when in fact it is many things all at once. — David Plotz

I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts. — David Plotz

I think I developed a culture of healthy skepticism of claims of certainty on any side of the aisle. A sort of boldness in using economics no matter where it leads you in political circles, you know, rather than worrying about being left-wing or right-wing or biased or this or that. — David Plotz

Slate is not a political magazine but a lot of what it does is politics. — David Plotz

I want to have enough space to, I don't know, think thoughts. I mean, I just - I don't know that I'm capable of having an exciting, profound thought every week that's worth a column. — David Plotz

I made one choice, for example, which is I'm just going to confine work to working hours. I'm not going to work on the weekend. I'm not going to be working while I'm with my son in the morning and in the evening. — David Plotz

It's much easier to hire really great people like that in New York and in Brooklyn in particular, than it is in Washington. — David Plotz