In most of these things our foundation is a co-funder, so I can say that a polio or an HIV vaccine, that I'm putting our resources behind it in a very big way and the U.S. government would be the best partner for those efforts.

I've been studying how quickly we can get energy out to the poor countries - a lot of which are in Africa - and how little progress we've made there. There's no more electricity today in sub-Saharan Africa per person than there was 20 years ago.

I have a company that is not Microsoft, called Corbis. Corbis is the operation that merged with Bettman Archives. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. It was intentionally done outside of Microsoft because Microsoft isn't interested.

As for drugs - well, Gates was certainly not unusual there. Marijuana was the pharmaceutical of choice.

An important re-engineering principle is that companies should focus on their core competence and outsource everything else.

People want to watch whatever video they want to watch whenever they want to watch. If you provision your Internet infrastructure adequately, you can do that.

Today, we take the risk of nuclear war quite seriously, climate change not so much and epidemics least of all. But no single country, not even the United States, is well prepared. And even if one country is doing the right things to protect itself, it has to be a global thing.