The ideal country in a flat world is the one with no natural resources, because countries with no natural resources tend to dig inside themselves. They try to tap the energy, entrepreneurship, creativity, and intelligence of their own people-men and women-rather than drill an oil well.

Why is it Muslims from Pakistan or from Egypt come to America and thrive, and they are frustrated back home? It's about clean government. It's about a rule of law. It's about intellectual property protection. They've got all the talent and energy of anybody else. As new immigrants they may have more of it, so you put them in our system and they become doctors, lawyers, and businessmen and entrepreneurs.

I am being very humble about the Arab Spring. There's kind of a competition out there, you might have noticed, of who can be the first to say the Arab Spring is going to fail. Everyone says, "I told you so, I told you so about the Muslim Brotherhood." I have no desire to tell anyone anything. I don't know. I'm just listening, watching. It may turn out all these people are right, they may be wrong. They may be right this year and wrong next year, by the way. I'm just trying to listen day to day, figure it out.

So what am I? I guess I would call myself a sober optimist...If you are not sober about the scale of the challenge, then you are not paying attention. But if you are not an optimist, you have no chance of generating the kind of mass movement needed to achieve the needed scale.

No matter what your profession – doctor, lawyer, architect, accountant – if you are an American, you better be good at the touchy-feely service stuff, because anything that can be digitized can be outsourced to either the smartest or the cheapest producer.

All one needs to do is just to go to any hospital in America and see the number of Pakistani or Indian or Lebanese, or Syrian, or Egyptian doctors, who are either first generation or themselves immigrants, to know, and I'm a big believer - brains are distributed evenly around the world. What aren't distributed evenly are opportunities, stable government, educational institutions, etc.

America is interested in change and reform in the Middle East but in a stable way.