Two things are going on at the same time with the flattening of the world: The relentless quest for efficiency is squeezing some of the fat out of life.

I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.

In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.

What is the most entrepreneurial country in the Middle East today? It's Lebanon. Which country has no oil or gas? Lebanon. The same was true of Israel, the same was of Bahrain. You could see a real gradation. Turkey, for instance: no oil and gas, very entrepreneurial. You can either dig your future out of the ground or you can unlock the potential of your people.

I think that competition will exist even if we discover more oil. We're never going to know how much we have, or how long will it last. You are always going to want to have diversity of supply. I think the Middle East will remain a region of competition, of global competition, fighting for a long time.

Oil is a tangible commodity, so there is a global market. The fact that we may need less may affect the global price because we're big consumers: we probably take about a quarter of global demand. But if suddenly, let's just use a crazy example, fighting in the Middle East led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and no oil could get out through the Strait of Hormuz, well that would affect China, India, Europe, it will affect the whole global economy. It will affect us, too, then.

I don't know what the average income of Muslim-Americans is, but Muslim-American immigrants of recent vintage, I bet they have a very above-average representation in professional and business occupations.