Ask your friends how many stars will be in the U.S. flag in 50 years? And the reason why that's a reasonable question is because there has never been a President of the United States who's been buried under the same flag he was born under.

It's not going to surprise me if our kids end up running on the beach in Florida when they're 100 years old on regrown body parts with a much higher quality of life than we can begin to imagine.

As countries appear and disappear, then I began to ask, what makes countries successful? And it turns out, after a long slog through geographies and ethnicities and all kinds of variables, it's the ability to adapt and adopt, what Darwin talked about.

Three-quarters of the flags, borders and anthems sitting at the U.N. today were not there 60 some-odd years ago.

It's such an extraordinary time to be alive that you just don't want to miss it. I mean, it's a really neat historical period.

Cities are magical things. You know the energy in them. You have to walk the streets in any borough here and you can see between what was in this city in the 1970's and where it is today and how much more energy there is and how much more just sheer.

Until African-Americans and Hispanics can get serious, not just about area studies, which are important, but also about science and technology, they're not going to generate that wealth and that job within those communities. And that has absolutely devastating consequences for the places where people live, for the jobs and for the wealth.