You had a tough 2014. In September, you left Pimco, the investment firm you founded in 1971, where you became known as “the bond king.” What was the hardest part about the past year for you? The fact that I was fired. That was hard — very hard — for me, because I’m sensitive. I’m just sensitive to negative criticism — which I think was unfair and unjust. You haven’t been divorced yet, have you?

Nope. I’m happily married. Sorry, the “yet” was not appropriate. Just to explain, it’s sort of like divorce. You don’t want to get up and get out of bed. It is depressing, and it was a hard period of time and sort of still is. But it gets better every day. Like when you’re divorced, you have to meet new people, and life goes on.

You have to deal with the market and your business and then your personal life. Are you good at compartmentalizing? I think I’ve been able to do that really well. I don’t know if that’s a positive, but I think I can separate it. I went through a nasty divorce years ago and powered through it while building a business and doing well in the market. Maybe that doesn’t speak to being a well-rounded human being. I don’t know.

As an undergraduate at Duke, you majored in psychology. Do you use what you learned there when you invest? You don’t need a degree in psychology to understand human nature. There was an old dude, Jesse Livermore, who wrote a great book that said the most important thing in investing was to know yourself — your weaknesses, your flaws and your strengths.