The idea that a big country is going to go out and send troops into some country to take their resources, and then the rest of the world is going to somehow trust us is just a ridiculous notion.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascinating figure.We say Nixonian about a lot of people. He really is Nixonian. He's brilliant. He's very isolated and insular.

What you hear in focus groups and conversations, people will give you 20 minutes of rage about how the borders are out of control. But then you start saying, practically, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about the 11 million here? What are we going to do to get some workers we need for the farms? Then people start having a normal conversation.

We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.

The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, 'The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.'

The crossroads where government meets enterprise can be an exciting crossroads. It can also be a corrupt crossroads. It requires moral rectitude to separate public service from private gain.

If you do have to look at polls, you should do it no more than once every few days, to get a general sense of the state of the race. I've seen the work on information overload, which makes people depressed, stressed and freezes their brains. I know that checking the polls constantly is a recipe for self-deception and anxiety.