Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.

In the decade ahead I can predict that we will provide over twice the productivity improvement that we provided in the '90s.

In energy, you have to plan and do research way in advance, sometimes decades in advance to get a new system that's safer, doesn't require us to go around the world to get all our oil.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.

Even when I wrote Basic myself the day before I burned it into a computer I wasn't making design changes. I didn't have a testing team. I did all the testing myself. And there was no project methodology or schedule that, there was the notion of coming to a close means testing a lot at the end and making very few changes.

It's pretty amazing to go from a world where computers were unheard of and very complex to where they're a tool of everyday life.

In my 20s, I worked very, very hard. I have a much more balanced life now.