It's OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don't want them to catch up because we're slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.

Our current expectations for what our students should learn in school were set fifty years ago to meet the needs of an economy based on manufacturing and agriculture. We now have an economy based on knowledge and technology.

Kids are taking PCs and the Internet to new heights. They're the ones that are designing the cutting-edge web sites.

Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.

There's 20 companies that I have investments in - some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.

[AIDS ] is not a short-term emergency but it is something that, just like smallpox was many decades ago, we should aim for complete eradication.

Our work in global health is about things like cutting childhood deaths, and every year we continue to make progress there.